Cursed

by J. R. Rain

  Tabitha let a small bit of laughter escape from her mouth. “No, you’re right. I always had to stick up for her. I got into so many fights because people would pick on her. I was really a bully when it came to people treating Amanda wrong. That is why....”

  “Why what?”

  A vein appeared on her temple. I watched it beat like the throbbing stereo speakers that were pumping out AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Tattoo Boy stood up and pumped his fist, growling in an off-key falsetto.

  Tabitha raised her voice, almost shouting in anger. “That is why I would very much like to know who...fucking killed her. I would like very much to have a few minutes alone with the bitch that murdered my sister.”

  She trembled with rage, shook and gritted her teeth, and I thought the vein in her head was going to explode.

  She bent the fork that her hand had seemingly grasped on its own accord. The fork now looked like a piece of surreal art. Dali, perhaps. I figured we’d better get out of there before “Hell’s Bells” started.

  The waitress dodged past Tattoo Boy and his screaming, drunken back-up band and asked if we needed anything else. I told her no and she dropped off the new and improved bill, then left before I could change my mind.

  “Roll?” I suggested to Tabby.

  She nodded, tight-lipped.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “My place?” I said, once we were outside under the skein of smog that veiled the dim stars.

  I hoped it didn’t sound like a corny come-on line. They say death did weird things to the emotions, and I wouldn’t put it past me to try and seduce my dead lover’s beautiful sister before we’d even had a chance to plan the funeral.

  But Tabby was all business, and her business was solving crimes. She glossed right over any innuendo, and I am ashamed to say I was a little disappointed.

  “We have to find out where Gerda is now, and if there’s any evidence linking her to Amanda. You’ve been separated for, what, nearly eleven months?”

  “Ten, but who’s counting?”

  “So within a few weeks you went from two women to none? Poor lonely boy.”

  Sarcasm wasn’t cute in a grown woman. It probably wasn’t cute in anybody. But I deserved it and worse.

  The faster I could shift the subject from my questionable morals, the better. And I had plenty of material for that.

  “There’s got to be a link between Nana and Gerda’s father,” I said, trying to remember where I’d left off the bar story. “It was three years ago that Gerda started recovering those memories, with the help of her therapist. But she also had a medical emergency, some lumps that showed up during a gynecological exam. The scans showed some mysterious shadows and the doctors didn’t want to take any chances, so they spooked her into having an apparently unnecessary hysterectomy.”

  “Unnecessary?”

  “Well, they couldn’t find any sign of abnormal cellular growth. And a uterus is not something where you can say ‘Oopsie’ and just put it back in. We started a malpractice suit but it will probably stay tied up in court for years.”

  “Great, I can just see you guys in court, trying to look like the grieving couple.”

  “Hey, that was back before she was a murder suspect and I was being cursed. Her hormones were going nuts because of the hysterectomy and she was also unable to bear children. She slipped into a deep, at-times-suicidal depression. She took drugs to raise and then lower her hormonal intake, and drugs for her mood, and then all those memories started purging themselves from the buried vaults of her childhood.”

  “Damn, Al, you’re almost making me feel sorry for her. Don’t.”

  “No, I’m just trying to explain—”

  Movement in the scraggly shrubs outside the bar stopped me. Would mice get me out here? Or had Nana put another curse on me, maybe something bigger? Rats, raccoons, maybe coyotes?

  Tabby didn’t seem to notice, busy trying different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. “If she couldn’t have a child of her own, that might make her flip when she found out you went off and made a baby with someone else.”

  “She was already flipped. That’s what I’m trying to tell you here. She found out she was the child of a serial cult killer. There wasn’t a whole lot of hope for ‘normal life’ after that. It was a miracle she’d been able to bury it all those years.”

  Whatever had been moving in the shrubs must have gone about its business, because everything seemed normal again: a little traffic, an occasional couple passing on the sidewalk, music and laughter spilling out the bar door every time it opened.

  “Once she came after me with a knife,” I said. “And we got her some help—”

  “That wasn’t in the police report. Did you not file charges?”

  “Of course not. I loved her. You know how hard it is for mentally ill prisoners.”

  “Yeah,” Tabby said, and I could tell she was getting impatient. But we couldn’t talk on the bike, and I wanted this out before we made it to my place and I had to start rummaging through bad memories of my own.

  “It was only with the help of an independent psychologist working for a Catholic research center that Gerda was able to delve into the real heart of her depression. The psychologist was able to detect massive gaps in her childhood and an unnatural fear of hostile men. And then the memories came with a vengeance, and our marriage went to hell on a roller coaster. She remembered murder after murder committed by her father, remembered them with amazingly accurate detail, remembered the victims’ names. She even remembered where her father buried some of the bodies.”

  Tabitha was simply staring, her eyes wide in disbelief. “And you didn’t tell the cops? Don’t you think those families deserve closure? Whose decision was that?”

  “The counselor’s,” I said, defensively. True, it had been the counselor’s idea to protect Gerda from further exposure and harm, but secretly I didn’t want to damage my career. I figured if we could keep a lid on it, the medicine would eventually help, and we’d get back to some semblance of a normal marriage. I’ve always been a dreamer like that, or maybe I live in a California-sized state of denial.

  “Well, if she was a kid when all this happened, she probably wouldn’t have been able to identify the locations again,” Tabitha said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, a little too quickly. “Kids usually don’t pay attention to road names and that kind of thing.”

  In truth, the counselor told me Gerda’s memories were crystal clear. Under the phenomenon of her repression, the memories that emerged were as if she had just experienced them, vivid, painful, and full of details. It’s like hitting the “pause” button on a tape recording. All the information’s there; you just have to hit the button to access it. Her therapist insisted that she had never fully matured, that she was still a scared ten-year-old with a madman for a father. The counselor even said, in fact, that Gerda often spoke to him in a child-like voice, even though she was never hypnotized, as she relayed the events of her childhood to him.

  The bar door banged open and boisterous shouts erupted, the kind of drunken chaos that hopefully scared away every furball and restless spirit for ten square miles. Tattoo Boy and his horde spilled onto the sidewalk, and it was hard not to compare them to the pack of mice that had assaulted me at my home.

  “Prince Charming and his band of Merry Men,” Tabby said, mixing her folklore. Tattoo Boy had his arm around a scrawny young redhead with stringy hair, and she looked more scared than charmed. They were heading our way. I handed Tabby her helmet.

  “Nice ride,” Tattoo Boy yelled, and it was obvious he had noticed us and was in the mood to show off a little. He strode up to me, dragging the scrawny woman by her wrist. His bald dome gleamed orange in the streetlights. “But you look like the rice-burner type. Not man enough for a Harley.”

  He glanced at Tabby, sizing her up and leering a little. “Unless this is her bike, and you’re her bitch.”

  I bit back my temper. The dwindling vestiges of alc
ohol screamed at me to punch the clown in the face, but we didn’t have time for a scene. Plus, the cops might show up and want to question us about the strange man who’d visited Nana, as well as all those strange books and cult regalia in the old woman’s room. Anytime cops could scare the public and politicians with “Satanism” and the like, it was sure to increase funding for law enforcement. It worked even better than the “War on Drugs,” “Gang Activity,” and other popular scare tactics.

  Still, my fist itched to give Tattoo Boy some pretty red ink on his puffy cheeks.

  “It’s mine,” I said, as cool as the night air. “Come on, Tabby.”

  I started to throw my leg over the bike, but Tattoo Boy scooted over beside it, blocking my way. “A ride like this deserves a real man on the throttle. Give me the keys and let me take it around the block.”

  I’m an affable guy in general, and under other circumstances, meeting a jolly stranger in the bar, I might have let him test it out, even with the risk of somebody driving my bike straight to a chop shop or upping my insurance rates. It’s only a possession, after all, and men who love their things too much end up being ruled by them. Me, I prefer to be ruled by Venus, the Goddess of Love. Or maybe that’s what all cheaters say.

  “I believe you’ve had a little too much to drink,” I said, an understatement that caused his pack of weasels to twitter. They had gathered around eager for a show, obviously used to Tattoo Boy’s reality TV act.

  “Nah, come on, man,” Tattoo Boy said, with false charm. He looked at Tabby again and actually licked his chapped lips. “Your lady friend deserves a real ride for a change. What do you say, babe? Climb aboard.”

  Tabby didn’t flinch and I doubt Tattoo Boy could see her jaw clench just a little as she stepped up to him. “Sir, we’d like to leave now and I’m sure you and your friends have other places to be,” she said, as if she were lecturing a motorist who’d failed to use a turn signal.

  “Ooh,” Tattoo Boy said in mock fear. “Blondie really is the top dog in this couple.”

  Count down from ten, I told myself, trying all those calming visualization techniques Gerda’s counselors had taught me. Butterflies over a meadow, a babbling brook in the mountains, a snow-covered landscape. But all I saw were my fingers gouging out the goon’s bloodshot eyes.

  Maybe, when you got right down to it, I wasn’t that much saner than Gerda after all. And that scared me almost as much as the mice did.

  “Step away from the bike,” Tabby ordered, before I had a chance to react. Tattoo Boy’s crowd went quiet, sensing the ticking time bomb.

  Tabby was so stern that I stepped away from the bike myself.

  “I usually don’t hit a woman unless she needs it,” Tattoo Boy said. “And you’re sounding like you need it.”

  When he made a move toward her, my resolve faded and I made for him. But before I got there, Tabby swept the helmet up and around, clocking him on the skull. The thwunk sounded like someone had dropped a watermelon on the sidewalk. He took a wobbly step toward her, his eyes glazed.

  She went into a squat and flicked out one leg, driving her foot into his kneecap. He squealed like a female ferret and rolled to the concrete. Some of his rat pack rushed forward, and she reached into her jacket. I hadn’t considered that she might be packing, and I wondered how many of these drunken people also had firearms. But Tabby instead came out with a shield, flashing it so it caught the lights.

  “Easy does it, unless all of you want to spend the night in jail,” she said.

  I took the cue to strap on my helmet and mount the bike, gunning it to life.

  “Your place,” Tabby yelled over the engine, stepping on Tattoo Boy’s injured leg as she slid onto the seat behind me.

  As we rocketed away, I braced for bullets, but I guess the rat pack was a little lost without their leader to cow them into acts of stupidity.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The roads were relatively clear and I stayed only five miles over the speed limit, so we hit my place in twenty minutes.

  Home is where the heart is, the old saying goes. I didn’t have a heart, and Gerda had probably left her heart in San Francisco where her dad had carved up a bunch of women. Maybe this house never had a chance, just like our marriage never had a chance.

  And now the place was infested with demonic mice. I couldn’t imagine ever watching television there again, or taking a shower, or slipping between the sheets with a good novel.

  “Ready?” Tabby said.

  “That guy’s knee....”

  “Oh, he’ll be okay. A week or so on crutches will give him time to think about his behavior.”

  “That sounds like old-school law and order.”

  “Sometimes you don’t have time for proper channels. Like now. There’s no telling who is channeling who, and what sort of dead folks might be walking around out there with a mission.”

  I swallowed hard. I’d accepted black magic as a force in the universe, but I wasn’t ready to embrace it as a foundation of all the life and society around me. How many other people were out there living under a curse at that moment? How many of those tragedies that flitted across the evening news were actually the calculated cruelty of someone out for revenge?

  “You know what’s weird?” I said, grasping for that comforting, ordinary weirdness to give me an anchor on this new ocean of the unknown. “I would go out on walks at night and just think about all this shit. Our lives were in an uproar, Gerda was constantly being interviewed by police and psychologists. Gerda was still almost constantly high on medication, mostly Valium to steady her nerves, for her suicidal tendencies had passed when the memories surfaced. I would go out on these walks and ask myself if I wanted to continue to live with this woman. I mean, our relationship was hardly the same anymore, and she was a vastly different woman because of the memories. In a way I’d say she did grow up, for there was indeed a calmness in all her actions, in her choice of words; and according to the doctors, the release of the memories from their bondage was very healing to her mind.

  “But those are the benefits. She was different in other ways, too, and I was beginning to get worried—I still am, in fact.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “True, I did notice a maturity in her that previously wasn’t there. Now when I say ‘maturity,’ I’m not saying someone who now pays her bills and can take care of herself. I’m talking about a maturity in personality, as if she had tapped into some deep wisdom of the ages. Gerda and I had gotten along fine in the past, and it was because of her innocent personality, her childlike wonder at new things. You should have seen her when she went to Las Vegas for the first time, for example. I had the greatest time just showing her all the wonderful casinos and shows and hotels. Maybe that’s why I was attracted to her to start with: I was able to be her guide through the world. It was very appealing and fun and I never got tired of showing her new things.

  “And with the coming of the lost memories, that childlike wonder disappeared. She would ridicule me now for expressing interest in a coming movie, especially if it was a movie meant for younger audiences, an adventure or comedy. She was cold, removed. None of her old hobbies interested her anymore, and no longer did she express a desire to travel, which had proved in the past to be the most fun we would have together.

  “Now she read voraciously. Not fiction. Books of religion and philosophy and metaphysics. And the occult, but as far as I could tell, nothing overtly Satanic, though some of the crap in my opinion was just as bad.”

  “She was studying,” Tabby said. “Maybe she had the calling in her just because of her bloodline.”

  “Well, you apparently grew up around witchcraft and you haven’t gone the way of toadskins and eye of newt.”

  “Not yet,” Tabby said, and I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

  “Gerda was growing dark and moody, and I knew that I wanted the divorce, but I just hated abandoning her in light of all that had happened to her. And then I met Amanda in the
midst of all of this. Amanda was so wonderful and full of the life I’d been missing out on for the past couple of years. Needless to say, we hit it right off, and you probably know most of the story anyway.”

  Tabby nodded, and then she asked out of the blue. “Did it bother Gerda that she was unable to bear children?”

  “Dear God, did it ever! That’s what originally brought her to the brink of suicide.”

  “What about now?”

  “She’d mentioned adoption, but by then things had gone too far and, when Amanda dropped me, I went a little dark and moody myself. Gerda left me two weeks later and was gone.”

  Tabby nodded toward my house. “Maybe we can find clues about where she might have taken Petey. Would there be evidence of your affair with Amanda at your home?”

  I thought of all the celebrities who’d gotten in marital trouble because of cell-phone texts that they were too dumb to erase, and I’d always chuckled at their stupidity. I thought I’d run a smooth game. After all, the best cheaters are the ones nobody finds out about. But maybe I hadn’t been as smooth as I thought.

  “I saved a few notes and letters and ticket stubs to a few of the plays we attended,” I said, annoyed at having to raise the issue of my morality again. “I loved your sister so much, I wanted every piece of her I could get.”

  Tabby’s eyes went wide and I realized I’d made a poor choice of words. “I kept the letters hidden, of course. I never wanted to hurt Gerda or cause drama for Amanda.”

  “Al, you’re almost actually convincing. But cops take all these psychology classes, see? And they teach us all about pathological liars. And what I’m thinking is you didn’t want any drama for yourself, and you wanted to play both sides as long as you could. You wanted to eat the cake and never brush your teeth.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t a saint, but I sure as hell never put a goddamned curse on anyone, Officer Mead.”

  “Plenty of people kill without leaving fingerprints. Amanda’s soul died a little when she had to break up with you, and it tore her up that she couldn’t tell you about Petey. And now it looks like you helped Gerda finish the job.”