Fright Court

by Mindy Klasky

  Chris’s eyes brightened. “How about seven o’clock, then? At the Tabard Inn?”

  Wow. I may have raised the stakes, but he’d gone all in.

  The Tabard Inn was one of my favorite restaurants, even though I’d only eaten there a few times. It was located on a quiet side street, just a few blocks from my apartment. The restaurant prided itself on organic food and sophisticated recipes, all while maintaining a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere.

  Also, it was regularly listed as one of the most romantic restaurants in Washington.

  “I —” I started to say, but I had absolutely no idea how I wanted to complete that sentence.

  Chris flashed his gap-toothed grin, immediately defusing the situation. “We could go someplace else, if you’d rather.”

  “No!” I said, maybe a little too forcefully. “The Tabard would be wonderful.”

  And so, I had a date.

  No. I had an interview. A business-like, professional interview, designed to educate the reading public about the nature of a Court Clerk’s job. And to secure city council support for the Night Court, for years and years to come. Oh, and to keep anyone from getting too curious about the proceedings that took place behind the double oak doors that led to Judge DuBois’s domain. No problem. I could kill three birds with one stone.

  I immediately tried to figure out which clothes were hanging clean in my closet. I wondered if I’d have time to get out to Allison’s, to borrow something appropriate. I gritted my teeth. I didn’t need anything “appropriate.” I had an entire wardrobe full of work clothes. A skirt and a sweater set would be fine for dinner. Besides, I wouldn’t have time to linger over the meal. I’d have to get to work.

  “Sarah,” Chris said, “Is this all right?”

  “All right?” I asked, as if I wasn’t quite sure about how to use the English language.

  “I’m afraid I’ve made you uncomfortable,” he said. “I thought you’d cleared our talking with your boss, that Mr. Morton had given his okay.”

  Mr. Morton. James. I suddenly flashed on the last hold of our training, on his thighs wrapped around my waist, his legs pulling me close, his hands rock-solid against my arms.

  I licked my lips and reminded myself that the Old Library had nothing to do with the real world. The human world. Nothing to do with Chris Gardner or my interview for the Washington Banner. “He has,” I said with a smile that was probably a dozen shades too bright. “Everything is fine. James is completely on board with this.”

  “Wonderful,” Chris said, and if he noticed that I used my boss’s first name, he gave no indication. “Tonight, then.”

  “Tonight.” I barely swallowed another gaping yawn. As Chris sauntered out of the office, I wondered if I should clear the dinner with James.

  Why bother, though? He’d already approved my being interviewed. After spending half the night writhing around on blue mats with the man, I was loathe to give him any more control over my life than he already had.

  Besides, he’d been enthusiastic about the chance for me to direct the article from behind the scenes. He couldn’t have a problem with this now. Could he?

  CHAPTER 7

  FOURTEEN HOURS LATER, I stared at my menu at the Tabard Inn. Chris had somehow contrived to get us seated in a quiet dining room off to the side of the main one. We were the only people there, and it felt like we were on some super secret spy mission. Steady autumn rain fell outside, making our retreat seem even cozier. More isolated. More romantic.

  A tealight winked from a plain glass holder that was slightly off-center on the table. My palms itched to shift it to the right a couple of inches, but I forced myself to ignore the urge. Chris, though, reached out and slid the candle to the side, finding the perfect resting spot without hesitation. I flashed him a smile before reminding myself for the umpteenth time that this was a business function, a professional meeting of peers.

  I longed to order a cocktail. Alcohol would lubricate our conversation, buff away my jangling nerves. Not to mention the fact that I’d have something for my distracted fingers to fiddle with—a swizzle stick, an umbrella. Even the stem of a maraschino cherry. But I wasn’t about to show up to work with liquor on my breath. I could just imagine how thrilled James would be about that.

  I settled for raspberry iced tea and told myself that was festive enough for a work night.

  Chris and I dodged the real purpose of our meeting by discussing the menu. “Do you want to start by splitting the charcuterie?” he asked, flashing that disarming grin.

  I would love to. I could already picture the plate—meats and cheeses laid out in a seductive savory swirl. It would be like a breakfast platter at some incredibly upscale restaurant…. Strike that. It would be like waving a red flag in front of James, the next instant I saw him.

  I swallowed hard and said, “Sorry. I’m a vegetarian.” Glancing at the menu, I was pretty much destined to get the beet and goat cheese ravioli. Yay. Rah. (Not that I had anything against beets. Or goat cheese, either. But both should be served beside a nice, tender slab of meat. And for dinner, not breakfast.)

  Chris laughed easily, oblivious to my culinary self-pity. “I tried that once. I became a vegetarian when I decided it wasn’t ethical to eat anything I hadn’t personally killed.”

  “How long did that last?”

  “Well, after the first day, I changed the rules. I decided that I could eat things that I was willing to kill, even if I hadn’t actually brought the meat to the table. So I added back fish, because I’d gone on plenty of fishing trips with my dad. And after a week, I decided that I could kill a chicken. If, you know, I needed to.”

  “But no red meat?”

  He shook his head. “It just didn’t seem right. I stuck with it for about a year.”

  “What changed your mind then?”

  “I decided I would kill a cow for prime rib. So for another year or two, I’d eat prime rib, but I wouldn’t touch hamburger.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it—Chris looked so earnest, like a little boy confessing his confidential plan to conquer the universe. The waiter took our order while I was still chuckling. In place of the shared charcuterie, Chris indulged in braised goat belly. I tried to convince myself that my cheddar cauliflower soup would be every bit as good.

  “So, what’s your reasoning?” Chris asked when we were alone again. “I take it your ethical system is a little more stringent than mine?”

  Not exactly. I was sitting at this table, dining on the Washington Banner’s dime, trying to mislead a perfectly friendly reporter. Maybe not mislead, I reassured myself. Rather, direct along a specific course, a path away from all imperials. I shook my head and reminded myself to concentrate. “It’s more of a health thing for me.”

  Well, it was. I considered keeping my blood vessels intact and unattractive to fangs a very healthy thing to do.

  I sat up straight. It was long past time to steer the conversation away from my vampire-induced diet, away from anything remotely vampire-related, for that matter. I had a purpose here, and I was only harming myself by delaying. “So,” I said, bravely raising my chin. “How does this interview stuff work exactly?”

  Chris shifted in his seat and dug deep in his pocket to produce a tiny recorder, which he set on the corner of the table between us. I couldn’t help but notice that he lined it up precisely with the wooden edges of the table-top, as efficiently as if he’d spent a lifetime making things fit. “It’s easy,” he said. “If you agree, I turn this on. If you’d rather, I can take notes. After that, there’s nothing to it. I ask questions. You answer them. When we’re through, I write up my story, and all of Washington learns about you and the Night Court.”

  Right. Easy. Just like he said. Then why was my heart pounding so hard?

  I managed a weak smile. “Go ahead, then.” I nodded at the recorder. “Switch it on.”

  He nodded gravely, looking the most serious I’d seen him yet. “Thank you.”

  It seeme
d like I should be able to hear the recorder. It should hum, or whistle, or make some hideous grinding noise. Instead, it was treacherously silent. I couldn’t let myself forget that it was there, though. I couldn’t slip up and say anything that I didn’t want splashed all over the Banner.

  Chris said, “Why don’t we start with the obvious. What made you apply for your job at the court?”

  I sat up straight and spoke directly toward the recorder, enunciating every syllable so that Chris could review my response later. “I was rea-dy to make a ca-reer change, a com-mit-ment to a new pro-fe-ssion.”

  He grinned. “Don’t think about the recorder. It’ll pick up everything. I promise.”

  Easy for him to say. He was used to this whole routine.

  As if he were reading my mind, he said, “I know this feels strange. You’ll get used to it in a few minutes. So, did you train to become a clerk? Were there special classes or anything?”

  I consciously forbade myself to look at the recorder. Instead, I told myself to focus on other things—the sound of the rain outside, the low light glinting off the ice cubes in my tea, the sharp tang of the lemon slices beside my glass.

  Lemon… I realized that I’d had yet another one of those dreams during the day. As before, I couldn’t remember any specifics. I just had a sense of climbing the steep side of a now-familiar sand dune. The massive surface was carved by changing wind currents, rippling away toward an unseen horizon. Each step that I took, every grain of sand that I released, gave off a tiny breath of citrus perfume, as delicate as lemon blossoms.

  I curled my fingers into my palms, harnessing the bite of my nails to remind myself that I needed to pay attention. I couldn’t afford to get distracted by stray thoughts, by half-remembered dreams. Chris’s questions might sound like idle conversation, like the easy get-to-know-you babble of a first date. But this wasn’t a date. And there could be nothing casual about my responses.

  I took a deep breath and explained about Allison’s friend of a friend of a friend pointing me toward the court’s website. That led to Chris asking about my law school career. Faking a smile, I glossed over my academic credentials. I definitely didn’t want my dismal grades heralded from the newspaper page. Instead, I focused on my undergraduate work, my fascination with the American Gothic movement.

  Chris laughed. “I’m a big fan of horror movies, myself.”

  “Like what? Serial killer, slasher stuff?” I’d learned a long time ago that was what most people meant by “horror.”

  He shook his head. “No. Creature movies, mostly. The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, that kind of thing.”

  “High class cinema,” I said, laughing.

  His eyes were serious, though. “Those old movies were all about fear of the unknown, about science taking over our lives. Everyone was worried about the atomic bomb, and nuclear radiation, and how we were all going to die a million different ways. The monsters were sort of victims, themselves. I always felt terrible when they died.”

  A part of me wanted to agree with him. I could still remember sobbing when I watched King Kong succumb in the herky-jerky black-and-white original. But at the same time, I remembered Ernst Brauer’s fangs raking my throat. Some monsters deserved to die. I guess my perspective changed the instant that I became Fay Wray, in my very own real-life monster movie.

  I was spared formulating an interview-perfect answer because the waiter chose that moment to bring our appetizers. My soup was good, but a few chunks of braised goat belly would have made it stupendous. Or, really, just a scattering of regular, every-day bacon across the top. Of course, bacon would make just about every dish in the world better.

  I told myself to ignore the savory aroma of Chris’s food, and I concentrated on enjoying my own. I was so successful that I was absolutely unprepared for Chris’s next question. “The Night Court would be a perfect setting for a monster movie, wouldn’t it? Dark hallways… The rest of the world sleeping while evil lurks…”

  I choked on my soup.

  He’d struck so close to the truth, so near my very own thoughts. I barely managed to beat back a coughing fit, soothing my throat with a restorative gulp of iced tea. I forced myself to laugh as I put on my best breezy voice. “What is it they say about lawyers? They’re all greedy bloodsuckers?”

  He laughed. Thank God, he laughed. And then, he followed up by asking how my academic classes had prepared me for my current job.

  I focused on safe things, like how college taught me to multi-task, to meet tight deadlines, to organize information into neat, orderly systems. Mindful of James’s ulterior motive in approving my working with Chris, I did take the opportunity to mention how important it was for us to process criminal offenders promptly, to preserve their rights, to handle overflow so that the normal, day court could run smoothly. At one point, I shrugged and said, “A lot of people just don’t realize how much good we’re doing, how vital we are to the smooth functioning of all of the courts.”

  “A lot of people?” Chris asked, his interest clearly piqued.

  “Dan Feld, for one.”

  “The city councilman?”

  I nodded, as if I talked about local politics all the time. “His committee is considering shutting down the Night Court. Obviously, we’re opposed to that. Shutting down the Night Court would lead to absolute chaos.”

  Chris nodded, and his caramel-colored eyes grew distant for a moment. I suspected that he was thinking about Councilor Feld, about other stands the man had taken. For all I knew, Dan Feld was a common subject for Banner articles. I sipped from my iced tea and gathered my thoughts, carefully steering us back to topics I actually knew something about—the challenges of organizing all the court’s paperwork, my constant battles against our balky, ancient computers.

  My mundane babbling carried us through our appetizers, our main courses (I shouldn’t have maligned the ravioli—the balance of the beets and goat cheese was incredible), and coffee. Three cups of coffee. This was my breakfast, after all.

  We might have lingered over dessert, but I glanced across the table at Chris’s watch, automatically translating the upside-down hands to realize that I was due at the office in a mere twenty minutes. “I’m sorry!” I said. “I completely lost track of the time.”

  He shrugged and tucked the recorder into his pocket. Fortunately, he’d already taken care of the bill, so we were free to dash out of the restaurant, into the rainy night. Chris kept pace beside me easily as I speed-walked toward the subway. Our umbrellas bumped against each other as we just missed one crucial cross-walk before the light changed.

  I resisted the urge to curse; the recorder might still be on in his pocket. I shifted my umbrella to my right hand so that I could tap my thumb against my coral ring, trying to bleed off some of my frustration as I waited for the light to change. Chris’s quick eyes took in my nervous mannerism, and I ordered myself to stop. I was almost relieved when he said, “Sarah? Can I come with you tonight? Watch you in the clerk’s office and get an idea of how things work there?”

  I’d known he was going to tail me. That was what I’d agreed to, wasn’t it? What James had practically ordered me to do? “Sure,” I said. At the same time, I worried about keeping up my facade for several more hours, about pretending to be just an ordinary human girl, filing papers for ordinary human lawyers who pursued ordinary human cases.

  Oh well. No time like the present, to test my skills at dissembling.

  Chris flashed me a smile and raised his hand, trying to hail one of D.C.’s supposedly omnipresent cabs. “Courtesies of the Banner,” he said. The first taxi passed us by, though, and the second as well. Both were already ferrying passengers through the downpour. I debated dashing for the subway. We should still be able to catch a train and make it on time. Or close to, anyway. Close enough, if James wasn’t lurking outside the office door, policing my attendance with the same eagle eye he’d kept on me during our Old Library training.

  It made me nervous to be run
ning late. I was never late—even when I overslept, I got to the office on time. Running late made me more stressed than I felt facing a jumble of pens, a blizzard of unsorted papers.

  Chris swore fluently as two more taxis whipped by. At least if he had left the recorder on, he’d captured his own profanity, and nothing that would incriminate me. His fifth try at cab-hailing proved to be a charm, though. Chris shot his hand into the rain, waving sharply, and a car finally wheezed to the curb in front of us. The broken-down taxi was painted a dismal grey and brown. The driver’s name had once been posted on the door in peeling black letters, but now I could only make out a tangle of unpronounceable consonants.

  I folded my umbrella and slid across the back seat, snapping out the court’s address. The driver nodded vigorously as Chris wrestled his umbrella closed and slammed his door. “Courthouse!” the cabbie said expansively, as if he’d never had a more exciting destination. “You marry?”

  “Excuse me?” I said, surprised by the heat that flooded my cheeks.

  “Blushing bride, no?” The driver waggled his huge eyebrows at me. “License? Man and wife?” He made the last three words sound like the punchline to a dirty joke.

  I shook my head. “I work there,” I said. “And I’m going to be late. Can you hurry, please?”

  “No work,” the driver said emphatically. “Night-time. Marry.” I wasn’t sure why the guy was so set on getting a ring on my finger. I was about to point out his logical disconnect—if the courthouse was open to marry people at night, then clearly someone had to work there. Someone like me. He didn’t give me a chance to explain, though, because he turned to Chris and demanded, “You be good husband, yes?”

  Chris glanced at me, and I could just make out the amusement in his eyes, flashing beneath the rain-obscured street lights. He shrugged and said, “Sure. We’re very excited to get married. But the judge will only wait till nine, so could you please hurry?”