by E. C. Bell
“Please, just tell me,” I said. Begged, really. “Please.”
“The killer is Raymond Dunning.”
I actually started to write the name, then stopped and stared at the gloating woman. A spatter of applause started somewhere in the back of the room, but I yelled over it.
“Who is Raymond Dunning?”
Bea smiled so patronizingly I felt a sudden urge to slap it off her face. “Didn’t do your homework, now did you?”
“What?” I gasped. Eddie started to say something, but Queen Bea rumbled over his words.
“Raymond Dunning deals drugs—among other things.” Bea’s mouth turned down in a moue of disapproval, and I heard a couple of the other women tsk.
“Thank you for that information,” I said, writing the name beside the address on the pad of paper and putting down the pen hopefully. “I’ll let you know if you were right. And now—”
“Oh no,” Bea said, shaking her head. “You are going to hear all about how we figured this out. Fascinating information, really fascinating.”
“I wish I could, but—”
“But nothing!” Bea said sharply. “You will sit and listen. We’ve put in some long hard hours here, missy. We deserve to be heard.”
“We gotta go,” Eddie said. “Get ’em out.”
“Just give us an hour,” Bea said, leaning forward eagerly. “And if you find us that projector, the PowerPoint presentation takes—”
“No!” I bellowed, and they all, finally, shut up. Shock electrified the air, but I steadfastly ignored it. “Look ladies, I’m sure it’s all fascinating, but I do not have time for this.” I pointed to the door. “You have to leave. Now.”
“But—”
“No.” I spoke as firmly as I could and kept pointing at the door. “It’s time for you to leave.”
“But—”
“No.”
Bea pushed the chair away from the desk and pulled her considerable bulk from it.
“Fine,” she said, dropping an old-fashioned computer disc that evidently held the PowerPoint presentation she so wanted me to see into her purse and snapping it shut. “We’ll leave. But if and when you finally do realize that Raymond is the real culprit, you owe us one hour for the presentation, plus a question and answer period after.”
“And snacks,” another woman said as she stood, clutching her purse to her chest and looking just as peeved as Bea. “Don’t forget the snacks.”
I said nothing, afraid that if I said a word, they’d take it as a sign I was weakening, and settle back in. More than likely so they could negotiate what snacks should be served.
“Do we have a deal?” Bea asked.
I nodded, but kept my finger pointing at the door.
“Fine,” she said again, and walked to it, her entourage following. “Expect to hear from us. Soon.”
Finally, they left.
“Get James on the phone,” Eddie said. “And tell him where we’ll be. We can’t waste any time.”
I picked up the phone and quickly dialed James’s cell number.
“James?” I said, when he answered. “She’s at the Holy Trinity Church. Sitting on the front steps.”
“How do you know that?” he asked, but before I could think of anything, he said, “Forget it. Doesn’t matter. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“I’ll meet you.” I hung up the phone and turned to Eddie. “Sorry. You’ll have to wait a little while longer.”
“No problem,” Eddie said. “Just go get her somewhere safe.”
I stopped, surprised. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I’d rather not,” he said, prissily. “I hate that place—and I don’t much like her.”
“Join the club,” I muttered, and grabbed my purse.
“Do you want me to come?” he asked.
“If you want.” I was surprised. He’d never seemed to care whether I wanted him around or not before.
“Well, maybe I will,” he said. Then suddenly light swirled around him and for a brief second before he disappeared, he looked distraught.
I wondered, briefly, where he’d gone. Suspected his disappearance might have had something to do with him talking about the churchyard. But I didn’t have time to think about him anymore. I had to find Honoria.
I HEARD EDDIE before I got to the churchyard. It almost sounded like his voice was in my head as much as it was in the air.
“They got her!” he cried, over and over. “They got her!”
“Who got her?” I muttered, hoping against hope he could hear me, too. He didn’t respond, but I could see him at the far end of the block, standing in front of the tree where his life had ended.
I ran to him, hoping to get there before James did. But James slewed up in his car at exactly that moment, so it was the three of us standing in front of the tree. Just the three of us. Honoria was nowhere to be seen.
“Where is she?” James asked.
“I—I don’t know.” I looked around, uselessly. “She was here—”
Wasn’t she? Eddie had been the one to tell me she was at this spot, and he had no reason to lie to me. I glanced at him, but he was standing, still as stone, staring at the church steps. So I looked in that direction, too. Hoping against hope that Honoria would somehow appear in a poof of pixie dust or something.
“I saw them. They took her,” he muttered. “And that’s all that’s left.”
“Who took her?” I wanted to scream. But I couldn’t. James was there, staring at me. And Eddie wouldn’t look in my direction. Just kept muttering, “They took her,” over and over again, until I wanted to shake him. Hard.
Then I saw something on the church steps and walked closer. It was a sheaf of papers, scattered over the top two stairs.
“Where is she?” James asked again. “I thought you said—”
“I did,” I said, and walked to the steps. Picked up one of the pieces of paper and stared at it. It was one of Honoria’s sketches. I was certain of it. “But she’s gone.”
I held out the sketch to James, but spoke to Eddie. “Do you know this place? Do you recognize it at all?”
James looked down at the sketch, gasped, and looked up at me. “Is that Honoria?”
She’d drawn herself this time. Black slashes across the white paper showed her being held. Being tortured.
I picked up another sketch. More of the same. But one sketch, near the bottom, showed the front of a house, two-story and old. And the address. She’d put the address on the bottom of the sketch.
“She’s there,” I said, pointing with shaking fingers. “They’ve taken her there.”
“Who has?” James asked, grabbing the sketch with a hand that was shaking as badly as my own. “Where is this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. My mouth felt like dust and I swallowed, hard.
“I do,” Eddie whispered. “Ambrose Welch uses this place. Crank and R were the ones who grabbed her. We gotta hurry.”
I glanced at Eddie and felt a sudden thrill of horror. His light was almost gone. As though his aura was being extinguished from within.
Eddie, I thought. Don’t go this way. Don’t go.
He didn’t answer me. Didn’t even look at me. Just stared at the tree and darkened, one lumen at a time.
“We need to go to this house,” I said frantically to James. “Ambrose Welch is involved. We need to go right now.”
I was expecting him to say something like, “How do you know Ambrose Welch is involved,” but he didn’t. All he said was, “No,” and pulled a business card from his jacket pocket. “We need to call the cops.” He held out the card, and I recognized it as the one that Stewart had given him. “These cops.”
He pulled out his cell phone, and I grabbed at it. “Don’t do that,” I said. “Call Sergeant Worth if you have to call one of them. Not him, though.”
“We can’t do this ourselves,” James said, matter-of-factly. “And we don’t have time to bring Worth up to speed. Stewart knows these guys,
knows this area. If there is any reality to this sketch at all, this has gone way past Honoria not wanting to be accused of Edward Hansen’s murder. You get that, don’t you?”
“I understand,” I said. “But not him, James. He’s evil. He really is.”
“He might be, but he has more firepower at his disposal than we do. If she’s at this house, and she’s being—”
“Tortured,” Eddie whispered. “She’s being tortured. They think she knows something.”
“Tortured,” I said, almost at the same time, hating the way the word felt in my mouth. “They’re torturing her.”
“We need the police,” he said. And he made the call.
At that moment, my cell beeped and I answered it, shortly. I didn’t need to deal with anything else right now. James was bringing one of the bad guys down on us—on Honoria—and I couldn’t stop him.
“What?” I barked.
“This is Bea.”
Good grief. She and her entourage had just left the office. What could she possibly want?
“I don’t have time for this right now,” I started, but she ran over my words like a German Panzer.
“Since you weren’t willing to listen to our complete presentation,” she snapped, “we’ve decided to do something about it ourselves.”
“What?” God, I had to get off the phone. James was about to talk to the nastiest cop I’d ever met, and Eddie looked like he was about to extinguish right in front of me. “What are you talking about?”
“We have the address of a house that Raymond Dunning owns, and we are going there to confront him. You might not care, but Naomi needs closure.”
What?
“What’s the address?” I asked.
Bea told me, and my blood ran cold. It was the address of Ambrose Welch’s drug house, where Honoria was being held. How had they found it?
“Bea, don’t do this,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Girl,” Bea snapped, “someone has to.”
And then she was gone.
Good God, those women were walking into quite possibly the most dangerous house in all of Edmonton.
I looked at James and his ferocious frown as he spoke quickly into his phone and then disconnected.
“Voicemail,” he said tersely.
“We gotta go there,” I said. “Right now.”
“Why?” he asked.
So I finally told him about the book club.
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, he took the information quite well. But Eddie didn’t. He looked horrified, absolutely horrified, and darkened until he was barely a smudge of grey.
“Is my mom with them?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Ambrose will kill them,” he said. “He’ll kill them all if he even suspects they know anything.” He sobbed and covered his face with his ripped-up hands. “This is my fault, too.”
I finally understood why he was losing his light so quickly. He thought Honoria—and now, his mother—were in danger because of him. More people about to be hurt, because of him.
“James, we have to go there and stop them,” I said. “They’re going to get hurt if they go anywhere near that house.”
James stared down at the phone in his hand, as if hoping it would ring and a miracle would spew from it. No such luck, James.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Please.”
“All right.” He glanced at his cell one last time, then tucked it into his pocket. “Let’s go.”
Eddie:
Dying All Over Again
ALL I COULD think was, “Hurry up hurry up hurry up,” as the car slowly—and I mean slowly; James was driving like an old woman!—wound its way north to Ambrose Welch’s drug house. I felt like I was barely hanging on. I kept thinking of Honoria’s drawing of the basement torture room, and that made me think of the tree where I’d been crucified. Left a taste of copper in my mouth, which surprised me, because I hadn’t actually tasted anything since I died.
I saw Honoria’s screaming face in my mind’s eye, and then, overlaying it, was my face. My scream jumped an octave every time the hammer came down on the spike that pierced my palm.
I felt sick and looked out the side window, hoping the image would leave. It faded a bit, but didn’t disappear completely.
“Open the window,” I said.
Marie didn’t even argue. Just cracked the window and let some air whistle in.
“More,” I said. “I feel sick.”
She glanced back at me, as though gauging whether or not I was telling the truth. However I looked, I could tell by her reaction it wasn’t good. She gasped and rolled the window down completely, then tucked her hair into the collar of her jacket so it didn’t turn into a riot of snarls.
“Can’t you close that?” James said. “It’s cold.”
“No, sorry,” she said. She snuck another glance in my direction, and her face whitened. “Lie down,” she mouthed.
I did so, but felt even worse. Like I was sucking all the bad visions in, like I was drowning in the sight and sound of me being killed.
“Oh my God!” I gasped, and sat up. I felt like I was drowning. Drowning in death. “Help me.”
Sparks pushed out through my skin. Could feel them, like small gnat bites all over. Didn’t take long before they filled the back seat. None of them were white, like I’d seen with Noreen. None of them. They were yellow and red and black. Lots and lots of black sparks, and through it all, I kept seeing my death, feeling my death as the spikes hammered into my palms and then my feet, and the Donald Duck wielding the hammer grunted with every hammer stroke, and through the mask I could see the face of my father, and then my mother, and then my first grade teacher, and then my girlfriend, the one from ninth grade who dumped me in front of homeroom, and then Santa, and Grandma Jenkins, and on and on. Like I was seeing the faces of everyone who had ever hurt me, had ever given me a push down the bad road, and I started to scream, because the gnat bites were suddenly larger, more painful, and the light popping out of my skin was larger and whirling around me in a cacophony of light and sound, now the sound; moans and screeches and whispered words: “You were never any good,” “You don’t wear the right kind of clothes,” “They call you Brown Eddie because you shit yourself in third grade,” “What can you expect? He’s got the bad Hansen genes—I warned you. Nothing good ever comes from a Hansen.”
And then I heard my mother crying, “Please! Come back!”
“I gotta get out,” I grunted, pushing myself through the door of the moving car, feeling like I was drowning in the emotion and the light. “I gotta get out!”
I heard Marie scream as I hit the pavement and rolled, spewing black and red and yellow curds of light around me as I hit the sidewalk, then up onto a scrabbly bit of grass by an apartment building. The curds of light kept vomiting out through my skin, and the horrible feelings rampaged through me and I guess I screamed a couple of times, setting a dog who was walking with his master into a seething, frothing panic attack. It was one of those pit bulls, so it was really something to see.
Then Marie was beside me. I could see blood oozing from a hole in one knee of her jeans.
That pulled me back from the edge. “You’re bleeding.”
“You have to stay with me, Eddie!” she cried, kneeling beside me with her hands mostly covering her face as though she was fighting through a snowstorm. “You can’t go like this!”
“It’s all my fault,” I whispered. “Honoria. And now, my mom.” I shuddered. “I’m so afraid.”
Truer fucking words were never spoken.
“I want you to focus on me,” Marie said. “Please, Eddie. Look at me. Focus on my voice and my face. You’re not ready to do this. You have to come back.”
I heard whimpering, and thought for a second it was the dog, but it was me. “Help me.”
“Look at me!” Marie’s voice was strong. Pulled me away from the edge and to her. I stared at her face and felt a tiny bit of calm in the maelstrom that was m
e.
“Listen to me!” she cried, and I took in a deep breath, then let it out, trying not to cry when I saw a huge gout of red and black sparks fly out with it. “You need to focus on the here and now. Focus on what’s in front of you. Right now.”
I coughed up more sparks. The here and now? What the fuck was she talking about?
“What is happening around us now?” she asked.
“Dog’s going crazy,” I muttered. I could still hear the dog fighting with his master, his high hysterical yips mixing chaotically with the storm of light around me.
“Yes,” she answered. “Yes, he is. What else?”
“What else what?”
“Do you hear? See? You need to focus on this moment, Eddie. Focus hard.”
“But all the sparks,” I said. “I can’t see past them.”
She flung herself even closer to me, her face right in front of mine. “Can you see me?” she asked. “See my face?”
Through the blizzard, I could see her. She looked scared, but she also looked real. More real than the sparks. “Yes.”
“Keep looking at me until the light clears,” she said. “Think of nothing but my face and this moment in time. Let the rest of it clear away. Hang on to me.”
“It’s hell, isn’t it?” I whispered, feeling more afraid than I ever had. “I’m supposed to go to—”
“Don’t even say that!” she cried, shaking her head. “You don’t need to go there. Just focus on me. I’ll help you come back.”
“Promise?” I reached out a hand, wailing when it went through her arm and her chest. I briefly felt her heart pounding until my hand fell through to the concrete.
“I promise,” she said.
So I did as she asked. I stared at her face and thought of nothing but that moment in time. Heard the dog being dragged away, snarling and snapping and definitely destined for more training, by his hysterical owner. Heard James run up and throw himself on the pavement beside Marie, asking over and over if she was all right. Saw the sun on the side of the broken-down old apartment building, and heard a couple more people venture up to the spot where I was. They were there for Marie, I knew that, and only had the courage to come over now that someone was in charge. That would be James.
