Shadows in the Water

by Kory M. Shrum

  From beneath an awning across the street, she watched Castle clamber to his feet and turn in all directions. He peered into the dark alley, searching for her. Some of his friends called from the club’s entrance, and he turned, wide-eyed and bewildered. He lifted his hat and ran a hand over his bare head.

  Lou smiled. She could go straight to this Konstantine. Murder him outright. But she’d had nights and nights with no Martinelli in the world. And it had been cold and dull playing without a target.

  Oh, he would die. Of course. But she would take her time with this.

  Draw it out.

  Enjoy every minute.

  Run rat run, she thought, watching Castle disappear into the throng of sweaty parasites feeding on the night. Take me to your leader.

  9

  Lucy stood in Lou’s dark apartment. One of the windows was open, and a light breeze blew through, rattling the blinds and mangling the slats. The moonlit sheets stirred, and a paperback opened face down, spine creased, ruffled in the breeze. Outside, a train whistled and huge iron wheels scraped against their rails. Horns blared even at this hour. God, how could she sleep with all this noise? Maybe she couldn’t. Lou’s bed was empty after all.

  The moonlight falling across the bed between the blinds brightened the white sheets to an ethereal glow. It was rumpled the way Lou’s bed was always rumpled, even as a child. Unlike Lucy and her brother Jack, God rest his soul, who made their beds first thing in the morning as their Nana had taught them, Lou could tumble in and out of a messy bed with little concern. If the sheets and blanket weren’t in perfect alignment, who cared?

  Lucy crossed the room and sat on the edge of the mattress, a hard, unforgiving foam pad resting on a box spring. She exhaled and ran a hand over the coverlet and sheets, smoothing it. No girl. No gun either.

  She was out hunting then. Did she do it every night? Every night that Lucy had dropped in unannounced, she’d found the bed empty, no matter the hour.

  She stuck her hands under the pillow, still expecting to find a gun, but it was bare underneath.

  Something like cardstock scraped the back of her hand. She frowned, her brows knitting together, and lifted the pillow. Nothing lay beneath. So she turned the pillow over in her lap and traced the fabric. Her fingers probed the pillow case and found it smooth until her nail snagged on a rectangle with soft edges.

  Lucy slipped her hand into the pillowcase and grasped the edge of the card. She pulled it out.

  Not a card. A photograph with a glossy image on one side and a cool white backing on the other, the kind developed in those one-hour photo labs found at most corner pharmacies.

  Lucy’s heart hitched. In the picture, Jack smiled up at her. His teeth were perfect, the product of braces he’d absolutely hated wearing for four years, but oh how they’d provided so much ammo for his tween sister. Metal mouth. Brace face. Or when she was feeling less imaginative, plain ol’ gummy dummy worked. In her mind, Lucy could still see the little rubber bands, so many small bands, and the way he would shoot them at her, once catching the corner of her eye and throwing their grandmother into hysterics.

  In the photo, Jack’s hair was wet and falling into his eyes, and he had one massive arm around Louie. She was Louie then, no more than seven or eight years old and grinning at the camera, tucked into the crook of her father’s big arm, one ear pressed to his chest. One of her front teeth was missing. But whether or not Jack would have submitted his own daughter to braces would never be known. He was dead four years later.

  Their last visit burned in Lucy’s mind.

  You have to help me. I don’t know what to do, Jack had said.

  He was in head-to-toe black. Muscle shirt to combat boots, standing in the Walmart parking lot off Exit 133.

  Help you? Lucy had said, spitting the words at him. The way you helped me?

  On a warm July night, she’d seethed like the boiling blacktop under their feet. Decades of anger crouched inside her, waiting to tear her treacherous brother apart.

  I’d never ask you to do this for me, Jack had pleaded. But Louie is scared out of her mind. She needs someone. And we both know I’m not that person.

  No, you’re not. The only thing you’re good at is abandoning the people who need you.

  Lucy wished she could take those words back. What if—as he lay dying he thought—she squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in a tight breath. When she opened them, Jack was still smiling at her.

  Louie’s hair wasn’t wet even though they were at the beach. Lucy understood why—she never goes into the water. Hadn’t Jack told her that? I try to put her in the bath, and she screams bloody murder. The therapist and Courtney are brushing it off as a phobia. There was even a word for it. Aquaphobia. But we both know it’s more than that.

  But when she’d first heard of her niece’s fear she didn’t make the connection. After all, Lucy herself had never been able to slip through water the way she did through shadow. She couldn’t imagine it was possible. Yet Lou did both, and the water didn’t even have to be dark water. But from what Lou told her, this mutation of their shared family trait did have its limitation.

  Lou could slip in water, but she only went to one place. Every slip took her to La Loon. Their name for a strange place with a purple sky, red lake, and two moons. Lou could travel by water but always washed up on the shore of Blood Lake. And when she used the lake to return it was also into water. Never water to darkness. They didn’t mix. If Lucy got into the car and drove north on I-80, she could only reach Chicago, not Paris. And it seemed the same was true for Lou’s watery roads. She couldn’t climb into her bathtub and pop up in the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps her bathtub to La Loon, and then to the Atlantic Ocean, but never without that first stop.

  Lucy worried about it. What was Lou’s connection to that strange place full of monsters? Worse still, Lucy suspected that Lou had come to use it as a sort of dumping ground for the men she killed—and that notion frightened her more.

  I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Lucy. I’m sorry I didn’t protect you.

  I didn’t need you to protect me, she’d argued. And it had been a bold-faced lie. I needed you there.

  There. When the darkness grew thin and swallowed her up. There. When one by one she lost her friends and jobs because of her “delusion.” When their own grandmother had called her a liar. A demon.

  Think whatever you want about me, but please help her. I don’t want her to feel alone.

  Like me, Lucy had said bitterly.

  Lucy frowned down at the photograph of her dead brother and rubbed her forehead. I’m sorry, Jack. I’m trying. I really am.

  All the old blame rose, flared its cobra head and hissed. A cold voice enumerated her sins.

  You blame Jack for abandoning you, for not being there when you needed him, and yet you weren’t there for him either, were you? You could have saved your brother from those men if you’d been paying attention instead of fucking his boss.

  She’d gone to Jack as soon as she knew something was wrong. She dumped King off at his sister’s, and a heartbeat later crawled out from under a sedan in the driveway across the street. But she was already too late. Cop cars and unmarked SUVs lined the curb outside Jack’s home. His two-story suburban house modeled after some quaint Tudor manor stood wide awake with all the lights in the house on. Dozens of officers passed behind the windows as they moved from room to room. Others clustered together behind the yellow tape.

  Then she was across the street, lifting the yellow tape up over her head.

  “Ma’am.” A woman in a uniform held up a hand. “You can’t come in here.”

  “Where’s Jack? Is he okay? Where is he? Where’s Louie?”

  “I can’t answer those questions,” the officer said.

  “What do you mean you can’t answer my questions? Are they dead? Is my family fucking dead or not? It’s a simple question!”

  Her voice boomed across the damp lawn in the early hours. Across the street, lookie-loos w
ere pulling back curtains, blue-red-white flashes dancing across their own homes. Several officers who’d been busy chatting with one another until that moment turned toward her. Lucy was about to storm away, slink around the side of the house, perhaps beneath the shade of a bush and slip into a closet. She had to get into the house. She had to see what was going on for herself.

  Before she could, a wall of a man was coming across the lawn, his big boots stepping right through Courtney’s begonias. He was calling her name.

  “Lucy?”

  Lucy didn’t recognize his face until he stepped into the light.

  “Detective Chaz,” Lucy said and then realized it wasn’t right. Chaz was his first name. But at that moment, she didn’t give two chickens or a pile of shit about remembering his last name. “Is Jack okay?”

  Brasso ran a pudgy hand across his brow. “I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this. Jack is dead. His wife is too. It looks like a break-in occurred and they were both shot.”

  Lucy’s guts cramped as if a massive fist had been slammed into it. “Louie—”

  “We can’t find her. We’re looking. High and low, we’re looking.”

  Tears streamed down her cheek for Jack, and surprisingly, for Courtney too, though the woman had never shown an ounce of kindness her—Jack’s insane sister. Sorrow swelled, then the wave of it crashed down on her and under the sorrow, a chord of terror. Oh god, where is Louie? Did she get out? She could have slipped through the dark when the gunshots started. Or god forbid, they took her. They took her and—

  Lucy whirled away from King’s partner. “I have to go.”

  Brasso started after her. “Are you sure you should drive? Hey, how did you know? Did someone call you?”

  “Yes,” she lied, saying anything to get him off her. “I came as soon as I could.”

  “That explains the lack of shoes.” Brasso pointed down at her feet. He wet his lips and shuffled on his feet. “Who called you?”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to go.” Lucy was already jogging across the dark street toward the parked car.

  “I don’t have your number!” he yelled after her. “Why don’t you give me your information so—” but whatever he intended to do with her information, she didn’t hear. She was going down on her belly and rolling under the sedan.

  He’ll get it from King, she thought. If he needs it.

  On her belly under the car, she heard a door open, heard someone say, “Where the hell did she go?”

  She didn’t wait to assure the owner she was no car thief. She slipped through the dark, desperate to find her niece.

  Despite her night-long efforts, she didn’t find Louie. She got a call from King the next day. Louie had come back to the house on her own, dripping wet. It would be months before Lucy learned why she couldn’t find Lou despite all her searching.

  Lou had been in La Loon, the one place where Lucy couldn’t go. That strange world wasn’t on Lucy’s map. It could be Europa or in the Andromeda galaxy for all she knew.

  And King. What a fuck up that had been. The first time she loved someone, and she threw him off the bridge like a discarded cigarette butt the moment life got hard. And what had been her excuse? Louie needs me. Bullshit. The truth, as she’d come to accept it after $5,000 in therapy and countless hours of self-reflection, was that she’d refused King out of guilt. She’d failed Jack. Failed his daughter. And she didn’t deserve to be happy. And no matter how many self-help workbooks she read, or positive affirmations she recited while looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, she couldn’t seem to make herself unbelieve this self-evident truth.

  Lucy kissed the photograph and slipped it back into the pillowcase.

  Think of all those years wasted, giving Jack the cold shoulder, and why? Because he hurt your feelings? Because he’d refused to blindly believe the wild stories you told him about your abilities? When Lou tried to tell you about La Loon, how did you react? How did it feel? To know you were as close-minded as you accused Jack of being? He died with your words in his ear, Lucy. He died thinking he’d abandoned Lou as you told him he would.

  Lucy tried to shake off this dark voice. The one which would have her drown in her own regrets and sorrows. Buddhism had taught her to embrace her sins. To forgive herself as a work in progress. To know she was perfect as she was, but there was also room for improvement.

  On most days, as long as she didn’t neglect her yoga, or chanting, or meditation, this personal mantra worked.

  She had only one way to honor the memory of her older brother and his legacy now. Only one way to prove to the universe and herself that she loved him and forgave him, in death if not in life. She would do more than show Lou she wasn’t alone. That she wasn’t abandoned.

  She had to keep her alive.

  She stood, and her lightheadedness spun the room. A wave of nausea bubbled up into her trachea. She put one hand on her stomach and one hand on her head until it passed.

  It was to be expected, she supposed, given her condition.

  This reminder of her body’s frailty was a warning, a nudge. She would have to move fast if she wanted to make good on her promise to her brother.

  She had to.

  She was running out of time.

  10

  Konstantine walked from the Duomo toward his apartment as the lively summer day danced around him.

  He loved Florence. With its cobblestoned town center and statues as old as civilization itself. Loved the stone walls, bridges, and ancient churches. Loved the river cutting through it as pigeons the color of sheet rock perched on buildings.

  It was an old city built on the blood and corpses of men. Countless bones lay in the earth beneath his feet. Kingdoms rose, flourished, and fell. And it would be the same with his own empire.

  Walking around the city made him think of his mother. While his mother had sold postcards from a squeaky cart she pushed around the city center, he would ask tourists if they wanted a tour for 5000 lire. He could get four or five takers a day during the low season and as many as twenty in high season, his sandaled feet wearing the cobblestones smooth before and after school.

  His mother made enough with her postcards, keychains, and umbrellas. She had a sweet smile and bright voice. People liked her. And she let Konstantine use his money to buy treats from the countless vendors lining the streets.

  When Konstantine did have money in his pockets, he spent it on koulouri and pide, Greek sweets that came from a shop by the Ponte Vecchio. He loved the koulouri and pide, but he also liked the immigrant shop owners’ little girl. A dark beauty with big black eyes like polished river stones and hair like raven feathers. He’d discovered the shop with his mother, who favored it, insisting a Greek shop was incredibly rare in Florence, and therefore, should be appreciated.

  Konstantine had loved the treats, but the girl was even better. He brought her little gifts. A two-scoop gelato, a frog made of blown glass. He’d buy his warm bread and then go down to the water with his treasures in his pockets, watching the gulls bob on the river Arno. Sometimes the Greeks, who were mostly amused by Konstantine’s affections, would let their girl, Dica, go with him.

  But when the lire were replaced with expensive euros, the Greeks closed shop and moved without warning. Konstantine did not even get to say goodbye. And not long after, his mother stopped pushing the postcard cart around the city center, and she accepted his tour money, more heartily than ever before. It would be much later before Konstantine understood what had actually chased his mother indoors.

  Konstantine checked the time and realized he would be late if he did not hurry. On the steps outside the Uffizi, Asians posed with rabbit ears in front of the grand wooden doors. Teenagers with their tight jackets and scooters swerved around pedestrians, and the beggars lay prostrated, face down with their open palms cupped. A lovely girl in a sundress, no more than sixteen, stood outside his favorite gelateria, gobbling limoncello sorbetto with a girlish smile. She wiped at her dripping chin with a paper
napkin as the breeze tousled her skirt.

  Konstantine stepped through a portico into an atrium and courtyard. He passed beneath the rounded archway and ascended the old stone steps to his attic apartment overlooking the lush courtyard and fountain. Water poured through a cherub’s mouth, his delicate stone fingers ready to play the lyre held up in his hands.

  This courtyard always made him think of his mother. Of the roses she tried to grow on the balcony of their apartment. When he was a good boy, his mother would let him watch the old black and white American movies in her bedroom.

  He’d been watching The Godfather the night he decided to join Padre Leo’s gang. It wasn’t the glorified life of a criminal portrayed in the movie that had sparked Konstantine’s interest. In fact, having watched the film about a hundred times, Konstantine was sure all gangsters died horribly, looking like bloody pincushions or with their brains sprayed all over everything.

  But that night itself had changed everything.

  Go into my room and watch your movie, amore di mamma. Let me talk to Francesca.

  He knew she disapproved of The Godfather, Konstantine being only eight years old. But he also knew she hated to raise her voice in front of others. If he kept the volume low, she might not even hear him. If she caught him anyway, the punishment would be light given Francesca’s presence. So he’d turned the movie on and pushed the volume all the way down until only one bar showed at the bottom of the screen. Oh, how thrilling childhood deviance had once seemed. Now Konstantine only felt such delicious panic when dumping a body into the Arno River.

  Fifteen minutes into the movie, Konstantine had wanted a drink. He went to the kitchen for water and caught a scrap of conversation between the two women. His mother sat at their bistro table with her head in her hands. Francesca was rubbing his mother’s shoulders.

  It doesn’t have to be so garish as all that. No street corners in broad daylight, Francesca said. Well, go on! He’s waiting. Try to relax.