Deja Blue

by Walker, Robert W.

  FOUR

  Some things never change, yet change is life and life is change. How often both her Buddhist father and her Wiccan mother had trumpeted this truth of life even coming as it did from two differing worldviews. Still it could be so paradoxical. Things you want to change but don’t change. Things you don’t want to ever see change, change. Bumper sticker alert: Change can be a painful reminder of itself.

  Nia changed from day to day, but then that’s what teenagers do, Rae told herself as she rushed into the old bed and breakfast, a crumbling Victorian in need of a great deal more TLC than she or the previous owners had been able to provide in either time or money of late.

  She rushed inside to find Nia, eyes closed, her breathing stuttered by heaving sobs. Nia, curled in the fetal position on the living room sofa, had broken down. Tearful, she hugged her stuffed animal, Lamb Chop, so tightly that the beady-eyed white face pleaded for help. Big, huge, heaving sobs indicated that Nia’s heartbeat was strong and healthy, but it appeared her mental and emotional state needed immediate attention from mom.

  Of late, Rae had decided that actions spoke louder than words, and in this spirit, she went to Nia, nestled in on the couch with her and hugged her and Lamb Chop together. Definitely, at such times, a genuine hug and a kiss meant more than all the words in the lexicon. For some time, the hug continued on as mother and daughter sat in silent understanding.

  Finally, Rae asked her now fifteen year old, “You wanna talk about it, kiddo?”

  “I don’t have one friend there; they all hate me.” Her sentences were punctuated with sobs. “They think I’m a freak.”

  “You just stop that right now!”

  “They-they all’ve heard about what happened in Phoenix, you know, about you nearly getting killed, and me nearly getting myself killed helping you in that freak house!”

  Rae considered this. The case had, after all, made CNN and all the other networks.

  Nia sniffed back more tears. “They’re calling me Super Ninja and crap like that.” More sobs. “How-how do you like that?”

  Seems there’re a lot worse things teens could call you, Rae thought but said, “Nia, you are better than that; you’ve never spread gossip and crap about others, so—”

  “How does that help, Ma?” “—so don’t listen to it; don’t buy into it. Don’t play their ga—”

  “It’s all over the school.”

  “Gossip, and-and peer pressure, and-and all that silliness and high school trash, Nia, you don’t buy into it. You stay above it.”

  “How does that help, Ma? How?” repeated Nia, more tears flooding in.

  “Come on, Nia. You’ve never bought into gossip before, so why now, Nia?”

  “I dunno…maybe ‘cause I’m the new kid, and I have no one to turn to, maybe?” Her voice dripped sarcasm.

  “If you know yourself, Nia, and if you take pride in yourself, no one can hurt you or kick you while you’re down unless—”

  “But they do, and it hurts!”

  “No one can make you feel inferior or odd unless you allow them, unless you sell them the shovel to bury you with.”

  “Oh, great. Now it’s my fault?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I don’t need bumper-sticker philosophy, Ma!”

  “That’s no bumper sticker! I’m paraphrasing Eleanor Roosevelt, Nia!”

  “Who is?”

  “Who is Eleanor Roosevelt? What’re they teaching in schools nowadays?”

  “Schools are lunatic asylums is what they are.”

  Nia wasn’t far from the truth on that score. Rae believed that far too many teachers these days had an inferior education and had never sat in a class with a master teacher; in fact, she felt the entire method of teaching teachers how to teach was as arcane and hideous as university buildings covered in Ivy. But this wasn’t the time or place to go into it. “Well for now you’ve got to learn to cope somewhere. Do we give the academy a chance, say another week before we start looking elsewhere?”

  Nia got up and stormed from the room, tearful yet. As she rushed upstairs to her bedroom, she shouted back, “I hate them all!”

  “Careful of that word!” Rae shouted back.

  “Hate, hate, hate!”

  Rae scratched behind her ear and propped her head in her hands. “Nia, negative feelings can only be destructive to you.”

  At the top of the stairs, looking down on her mother, Nia replied, “I’m sick of worrying about my Karma! What about those nasty girls at school? They’re the ones oughta be worrying about Karma!”

  Even from this distance, Rae could see her daughter’s two black eyes flaring with emotion. At least they weren’t emotionless and dead as they might be if she were in depression or in a drugged state. Ever vigilant of such, Rae found something hopeful in the moment even as the storm raged in her child. “I don’t want you sending angry thoughts out into the world, Nia! Not to anyone, Nia. Do you understand? For your own sake, Nia.”

  Nia’s bedroom door slammed in reply, a sure sign she was through talking. Rae gritted her teeth and shook her head. She lifted the stuffed lamb and spoke to it. “Shoulda just stayed with the hugs and kisses and kept my mouth shut.”

  Rae had the sensation that the lamb agreed, something in its goofy half grin.

  She turned to go for the kitchen where she might find a soft drink and a snack, maybe fix something for Nia as well, only to find the housekeeper, Enriquiana standing in the hallway and staring, having overheard the latest calamity. “Oh, hello, Enriqui. I thought you had a dental appointment?”

  “Oh no, tomorrow…Dr. Hiyakawa. Can I get you anything?”

  “Ahhh…sure, maybe a new life.”

  Enriqui only smiled and nodded.

  “Maybe wave a wand and make my fifteen-year-old twenty-one? Maybe by then she’d be over herself and become less the drama queen, and perhaps in the bargain realize I’m a little smarter than she thinks?”

  Enriqui nodded this time and then smiled.

  “All right, perhaps I’ll settle for a snack.”

  “Of course, yes!” The housekeeper, cook, and inhouse spy who kept her informed of any straying on Nia’s part, promptly turned and rushed for her kitchen, the place Enriquiana most liked to be.

  Rae followed after, saying, “Anything you can throw together, and maybe a small plate for Nia? That’d be lovely.”

  “Apple and nut salad is ready and cheese sticks.”

  “Ready? Already all ready?”

  “In the fridge, the salad, the oven, the cheese sticks, yes.”

  “That’s great. You’re a godsend, Enriqui. Know I’ve said so too often, and it’s old news, but it’s true.” “And I have lemonade for Nia,” continued Enriqui, “and a martini chilled for you.”

  “You’re an angel.” She knows me too well, Rae thought.

  Shortly, Rae retired to the rear of the big, lumbering old bed and breakfast, which she’d purchased with two hopes in mind—a great investment and a means for she and her daughter to find common ground. Her hope was that she and Nia would work side by side to fix up the place room by room. No such luck on either score.

  Rae continued on, making her way to the rear garden room, which offered an opportunity to sit among Enriquiana’s amazing creations from Azaleas to bougainvillea, where the windows were thrown open to the sound of birds and the rustle of squirrels chasing about, not to mention the soft thunder of overhead jets coming and going from the greater DC area. With her salad and martini served, she had carried a stack of murder books— Charleston, West Virginia area police casebooks covering the history of the psycho she was now responsible for locating and shutting down.

  Amid the splendor of the greenhouse and the sights and sounds of life in its myriad and noisy permutations, sitting at the white wicker table in a comfortably cushioned wicker chair, Rae enjoyed her snack and drink before daring to open the first compendium of murder.

  When she did peel back the cover on the first victim th
at law enforcement knew as Marci Cottrell, she learned a great deal about a young woman of twenty-six living in St. Albans, West Virginia, within minutes of the city limits of Charleston in a trailer home. Rae wanted to learn what if anything the victims had in common, aside from living alone. So far, she’d noticed they’d all had a similar appearance, that in fact, they might all pass for family members, and in a sense they constituted one truly unhappy family, as Rae had begun to feel them all gathering as if for a group photo and a group scream.

  Indeed, their souls screamed out as if from the green dark blackness of the outer limits for someone to champion them, for someone to acknowledge their ‘sisterhood’ as if on the other side they’d found one another and had banded together, and now they were coming for Rae Hiyakawa.

  FIVE

  Some hours later, after a sumptuous meal prepared by Enriquiana, a meal of a strange sort by some standard as it amounted to Mexican flavored German cuisine, a kind of tortilla and breaded veal or ‘taco wiennerschnitzel’ alongside noodles and sausage doused and cooked in olive oil. Rae had made the mistake of mentioning how wonderful a German meal she’d had at Berghoff’s downtown DC while meeting with some officials who held the purse strings on the PSI unit at Quantico. She’d especially doted on the wiennerschnitzel. She’d still to learn not to set Enriqui off this way, and she now paid the price, but it was not a price so bad after all, despite the confusion to her taste buds.

  In fact, having bitten into the tacky-looking taco wiennerschnitzel, Rae gasped aloud at how unusual and pleasant the flavor, in the end, tasted. Once again Enriqui proved herself a genius with food. The woman could even make collard greens work with her Mexican wiennerschnitzel if she tried. Delightful was the only way to describe it. Ironically, Enriquiana’s worst culinary experiment typically proved better than most people’s tried and true dishes prepared with strict adherence to a recipe out of Good Housekeeping.

  Nia had come down to dinner, and while she’d eaten heartily, her pouting continued. After a time, she said, “I’ll give it another week, but then I want to go back to my old school. I had friends there, and I was involved in some cool stuff there.”

  “Then why did you insist on the academy in the first place, Nia?”

  “Me insist? You did all the talking.”

  “I thought it was a good move, but I didn’t bring it up; it was your idea from the start, Nia.”

  “Then you shoulda stopped me.”

  Rae laughed at this. “I’ll try harder next time.”

  That had been hours ago now, and when Nia had opted to return to her room to ostensibly ‘do homework’ at her computer, Rae had returned to the murder files. Now looking at her watch, she realized it’d become extremely late, two in the morning. All round her lay the darkness of the outside world held back by mere glass windows and screens here in the garden room. She felt the world encroaching with the bleak light of the garden room alone to hold it back; she felt like the only person on earth sitting about her ‘campfire’, and all that lay beyond the light of this fragile glass room must make one unwilling to act without first weighing the risks…must make one suspicious and fearful. In the distance, she heard the wail of an animal in distress.

  She needed to lock up and find her bed.

  As she picked up the disparate murder books and stacked them to carry them inside the house proper, she heard a familiar voice, that of her deceased father, Hiro Hiyakwa. The words were soothing in tone, a mere whisper. “Take care of yourself, child, and beware of green monsters.”

  She wheeled to catch a glimpse of his form, vaguely outlined in the mesh of the screen at the far end of the garden room window. Hiro’s apparition seemed a hologram caught in the screen. “Father, I love you always,” she quietly said.

  His specter smiled even as it disappeared, but not without a final word sent through the coils of her inner ear. “Be firm but fair with Nia.”

  Just what I need, she thought, advice on raising Nia from her dead grandfather. And what’d he mean by green monster? Had he meant the proverbial green-eyed monster of jealousy? Was he saying that Nia was jealous of her? Ashley Phillips maybe. Nia, ridiculous.

  You need all the help you can get, countered the voice now in her head.

  “Say hello to my mother for me, will you?” Rae shot back. “Now go ‘way.” She added, knowing and sensing that he’d already gone.

  “Who’re you talking to now?” asked Nia, who’d come down to check on her.

  “Your grandfather.” “He was here?”

  “He was.”

  “Why doesn’t he come to me? I don’t understand it. Why just you?”

  “In time, I’m sure he will; I suspect it is like that old saying—”

  “Oh, please, not another old Oriental proverb.” She ignored this. “When the student is ready, the master will appear.”

  “What’s that got to do with—”

  “Everything. Think of it. Why don’t your grandparents appear to you as often as to me?”

  “Often? I only saw them the once…over the Grand Canyon…and even then they didn’t speak to me…and I couldn’t even be sure it was them, not like you.”

  “In time, I’m sure…” Had this to do with her father’s remark about jealousy?

  “I’ve missed them.” Nia’s voice croaked with the admission.

  “I suspect you have too much turmoil going on around you, kiddo.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “They can’t get through all the static and backscatter of your busy life and busier mind, Nia. Only when you decide to be at peace, will you see them routinely.”

  “Routinely, I can’t imagine that.”

  “So much that it’ll be a pain in the ass,” Rae halfjoked, trying to lighten things up.

  “Is that how you feel about them?” “Not really, no, yes, no, I mean…only when they butt in and contradict.”

  “You mean regarding me?”

  “Exactly.” Rae put her arm around Nia, and together they took a tentative step to leave the kitchen area for the upstairs when Rae reached absently for her files, and too late, she saw the folders drop to the tiles. The hefty murder files that she’d placed atop the chopping block now littered the floor. Forensic and police photos of the deceased in before and after poses stared back at mother and daughter. Some of these shots proved quite gory and bloody, pulling a gasp from Nia.

  Rae immediately went to her knees, using her body to conceal the shots. She scooped everything into a stack and worked to return the photos and papers back to their correct files.

  Nia certainly didn’t need to see that some maniac her mother proposed to psychically chase had made pincushions of people’s heads with 3-Penny nails.

  “Garrr-rose-garose, Mom! Par for the course.”

  “I’m sorry, Nia, so sorry.” The apology felt and sounded weak. “Turn your eyes away! You don’t need to see this,” she sounded the litany while on hands and knees, attempting to recover the files, but when Rae looked up at the silent space where her daughter had been, she realized that Nia had rushed off to the sanctuary of her room.

  “Damm…damn it,” Rae muttered over her clumsiness. She slammed the murder books back onto the chopping block, an island at the center of the kitchen. She next locked up the door to the garden room, and looking through the glass, she sought a final glimpse of her father, imagining he’d been right again on the subject of Nia. But she instead saw the plants and roots out there turning into a bevy of plant-like snakes. The vision caused her to gasp, and she wondered what the image could mean even as it faded. “Snakes,” she muttered to herself, “why’d it have to be snakes?” She had an extreme aversion to snakes, lizards, iguanas—pretty much anything that crawled along on its belly. And no amount of Discovery Channel TV would ever put a dent in dislike of reptiles. Just touching one filled her mind with the notion of having once been overrun by snakes in a past life.

  She shook off the vision as coming out of extreme fatigue, turned and li
fted the murder books. She mustn’t leave them down here, not with Nia in the house, and not with their current guests, the nicey-nice Milan family, Jimmy and Amanda and their two feisty, well-fed, pinkcheeked, freckled children. The Milan family, resting comfortably the other side of the bed and breakfast, had come in from North Carolina on their way to the sights and sounds of the nation’s capitol, the museums and government houses. They were the picture perfect family; models for a portrait of pleasant. Norman Rockwell models for current day. And indeed they were damn pleasant. Pleasant to the tenth power. Pleasant and whole and happy and healthy and together, and all those outward characteristics others see and admire and resent at once as they can’t, for whatever reason, achieve. A perfectly typical father and mother, well dressed in yuppie attire down to their khakis, their children perfectly coffered and groomed and dressed as well, all four of them in some magical bubble Rae could not hope to ever achieve for Nia. Tonight’s flub proved a perfect example of this. How to fathom the way of an unhappy teen. How to fathom the way of things in this strange, odd, mysterious world.