Three Chords, One Song

by Beatrice M. Hogg

  “Shut up!” Soleil’s finger lightly pressed the trigger, but not enough for the small Beretta to discharge. She didn’t want to hear about her mother’s life. It was too late, way too late for that.

  Faith continued. “And Ricky, he was just like his father. When he was fucking me, he called out Lucy’s name.” Soleil tried to mask the look of surprise on her face. “Yes, I fucked the father and the son. I would have fucked the holy ghost if he had been around.” She laughed at her own blasphemy.

  “I gave Ricky the coke and heroin he planned to sell in San Francisco. He wanted to make enough money to run away with his little sister.” She laughed again and shrugged. “He didn’t quite make it.”

  Soleil’s head felt like it would explode. “You killed Mik. You kidnapped Lucy.”

  “Did I kill your father? Who knows?” She shrugged her shoulders. “After you left in a rage, he called me, asked me to fix him up for old times’ sake.” She crossed her legs. “So I did. I gave him some drugs and I left. I don’t know what happened after that. The next morning, I heard he was dead.”

  “You killed him, you lowlife piece of shit! You killed my father!”

  Faith ignored her outburst. “But you are lucky, Soleil Esparanza. You really do have hope. You have Mik’s talent, you are smart, and you are driven. You are beautiful, but, unlike me, you don’t need it to get ahead. I’m so proud of you. One day, you’ll make a wonderful mother.”

  “I’m sterile because of you, bitch!” Soleil pulled the trigger.

  The shot went wild. Faith ducked and the bullet shattered a vase resting on a table behind her. Soleil shot wildly again and the bullet buried itself in the sofa. Faith jumped up and ran into the bedroom.

  Someone jumped on her back. Eve tackled her, knocking her to the ground and causing Mariah’s gun to slip from her hand.

  “Soleil!” Mariah screamed as Soleil struggled against Eve.

  “Get off of me, you white bitch! You never cared what happened to me anyway!” She punched Eve on the side of her face. All of the hurt and anger she felt was pouring into her fists.

  Eve was putting up a good fight, blindly throwing punches as she tried to hold her down.

  Faith returned to the room with her .38 pointed towards Mariah’s head. Soleil looked up as Mariah froze. A band of tightness gripped her chest. Eve stopped moving and turned towards Faith.

  Olivia stood in the doorway behind Mariah. “Faith, don’t do it! Please don’t do it,” she pleaded. Tears were running down her face.

  Soleil pulled away from Eve. The pressure in her chest was getting worse. “Shit, Faith, leave Mariah out of it!”

  Eve sat up on the floor, staring at the surreal scene in front of her.

  Faith looked at Soleil. “Mariah will never be out of it.” She glared at Mariah, her nostrils flaring. “Will you, bitch?”

  Faith fired one shot towards Mariah, but missed. The bullet grazed Olivia in the shoulder and she collapsed on the floor and clutched her bleeding shoulder with a shaky hand. Blood seeped through her fingers. Her eyes were wide with fear and shock.

  Mariah turned and looked back at Olivia, but her body remained fixed in the same position. “Where is my daughter, Faith?” she asked quietly.

  Soleil’s heart was being squeezed out of her chest. She recovered Mariah’s gun and scrambled to a sitting position, the gun trained on Faith. She was going to explode.

  Faith looked once at Soleil, then turned her attention back to Mariah. “Fuck you and your daughter.” She kept the gun aimed at Mariah.

  Mariah slowly got up. “Go ahead, Faith. Finish what you tried to do nine years ago. Just let my daughter live. She doesn’t deserve what you have done to her, what you have tried to do to her.”

  Mariah looked from Faith to Soleil. “Soleil, put the gun down. Don’t kill your mother.”

  “No way!” she screamed. “No fuckin’ way! You have been more of a mother to me than this skanky whore has ever been!” Her hand was shaking violently, but she kept the gun trained on Faith.

  Mariah looked at Faith. “You can’t change the past, Faith. But you can change the present.” The words on Mik’s CD flashed through Soleil’s brain.

  “That’s what I plan to do.” Faith pointed the gun at her own temple. She pulled the trigger.

  The band around Soleil’s chest broke. The pain in her head exploded. The screaming started at the same moment the gunshot rang out in the room. She closed her eyes, but all she could see was red, red, red everywhere. She didn’t even realize that the screaming was coming from her own throat.

  Eve

  “No! No! No!” Eve couldn’t believe what was happening in front of her. “We still don’t know where Lucy is! What are we going to do?” She looked from Faith’s prone body to Olivia’s shaking form. Soleil was rocking back and forth. She alternated her screams with struggles for breath.

  The undulating screams filled the room, sucking out the oxygen. Soleil was going berserk. She started crawling towards her mother. Mariah ran to her side, trying to hold her back. “No, Soleil, no, baby, don’t do it!”

  Soleil’s face was a mask of raw grief. She pushed Mariah, causing Mariah to lose her balance and hit the floor with a dull thud. Now they were all on the floor. Someone was running up the steps.

  Eve ran her hands through her hair. There were specks of blood on her hands. She had no idea who it belonged to. Then she felt a drop roll off of her lip.

  “I know where Lucy is.”

  Eve turned around to see her ex-husband Brad. He looked at Soleil cradling her mother’s still-breathing body in her arms.

  There were tears in his eyes. “She needs an ambulance.”

  A police siren went off in the distance. Brad picked up a set of keys on the table, grabbed her hand, pulling her upright. He pushed her out of the door. “Come on, let’s get Lucy.”

  “What?” She was numb. She practically fell down the steps as he dragged her behind him. “What are you doing here?” She tripped as they crossed the threshold of the building’s front door.

  He stopped at Faith’s old Honda, parked a few doors away. “Let them deal with the police.” He opened the car door and pushed her inside.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked again. She couldn’t get the sight of Faith pulling the trigger out of her mind.

  Brad looked at her with anger in his eyes. “Shut up, Eve. We’ll talk later. Let’s get out of here.” Brad pulled out into traffic as the police car came into sight.

  Soleil

  “Freeze!” one cop shouted. “Put your hands up!” Soleil raised her blood-covered hands, but continued to scream uncontrollably. The gun was near Soleil’s foot.

  “Don’t shoot her!” Mariah screamed. “Her mother just shot herself! Please try to save her!” One cop grabbed Soleil and pulled her away from Faith. Another cop radioed for an ambulance.

  Mariah went over to Soleil and took her in her arms. Blood smeared over Mariah’s braids and face. “I killed her,” Soleil whispered to Mariah.

  “No, you didn’t, honey,” Mariah whispered back.

  Two ambulances and two more police cars arrived. Faith was carried in a stretcher to one of the ambulances, Olivia to the other. Mariah and Soleil got in the back of a police car, leaving the other police to investigate the crime scene.

  “What about Lucy?” she asked Mariah.

  Mariah kissed her and smoothed her hair. “Eve is going to get her.”

  She held on to Mariah. Mariah was the only one left. Everyone else was gone.

  Brad

  Brad didn’t look at Eve. He tried to ignore her barrage of questions. He didn’t want to be in the car with her, but he didn’t want to stay in that apartment a moment longer than he had to. He acted on impulse when he grabbed her and brought her with him. He wasn’t going to jail in Faith’s place.

  Faith. He knew that if she weren’t already dead, she would be soon. All that blood could only mean one thing. He planned to get away from Faith,
but he never dreamed it would end like this. In spite of everything, she didn’t deserve to die like that.

  He had come back only to get the car keys so that he could free Lucy. She didn’t deserve to die, either. When he reached the building, he saw Faith outlined in the apartment window. He heard the gun go off and saw the outline disappear.

  “What are you doing here? Why are you still out here? Why didn’t you go back to Pittsburgh?” Eve would not stop asking questions.

  He glanced over at her as he pressed on the accelerator. “I’ve been staying with Faith. I had planned on going back, but I decided to stay for a while, make a little money.”

  “You stayed with Faith?” He glanced at her again. She looked like she had just got a whiff of shit. Her nostrils flared and her eyes hardened. “Where did you meet Faith?”

  He turned back to the road. His hands gripped the steering wheel. “I met her in a bar. She told me who she was. She gave me a place to stay. I did odd jobs for her.”

  Eve ran her hand through her hair. “Odd jobs? Is that all that you did for her?”

  His hands tightened on the wheel. “What the hell do you care, Eve? We’re not married anymore, remember? What do you plan to do, shoot me like you shot up my shit back home?”

  “How could you be with that bitch? Was she planning this all along? Did she promise to share the money she got with you?”

  Her voice was rising, turning shrill. It reminded him of the day she had thrown him out. Only this time her tone was bordering on hysteria. He guessed that seeing someone blow their brains out in front of you could cause you to become hysterical. He didn’t answer her questions.

  She shook her head incredulously. “You kidnapped Lucy, didn’t you?”

  He glanced at her again. Both fear and anger were showing on her face. He wondered which one would win the battle. He hoped it was fear. He knew what she was like when she was angry.

  “I helped.”

  “What? You were so hungry for money that you put another person’s life in danger? You kidnapped my sister.” Eve was screaming now.

  Anger was winning out. “Yes,” he said quietly.

  “And now you just decided to let her go?” She lowered her voice.

  “I planned to try to find a way to let her go, once I realized Faith wasn’t planning to get any ransom money. She was planning to kill her. She had been planning to do so all along. All she wanted was to get back at Lucy’s mother.”

  Eve laughed bitterly. “So you are left with no money. And now you get to go to jail for kidnapping.”

  Brad turned the steering wheel sharply, causing the passenger side of the car to go off of the road. He turned the wheel again until all four wheels were back on the road. “I’m not going to jail for anything! I take you to your sister and you keep your mouth shut. Do you understand?” He was tired of Eve and her shit. “Do you understand me, Evelyn?”

  He remembered there was a shotgun in the trunk. He didn’t want to kill one sister to spare the other. He realized he had never loved Eve, had just used her like all of the rest of them. But he had met his match in Faith. Faith had used him as much as he had used her. He found himself missing that crazy bitch.

  “So what are you going to do?” Eve’s voice shook slightly.

  “Don’t you worry, I’ve got money,” he said smugly. Thanks to the widow DeSalle, his days of poverty were over.

  “From where? Who gave you money?”

  He decided to tell her. “Sally Fountaine won’t be contesting the will any more.”

  She looked at him with a mixture of emotions crossing her face. “How do you know?”

  “I just know, okay. Don’t push it.” He was glad that Faith had made him memorize the route to the warehouse. He pulled the car off of the highway and entered an area filled with abandoned warehouses. He pulled up to an old storage complex.

  He opened the car door and Eve got out of the passenger side. He took one last look at her. “I never did love you, you know.”

  Her eyes narrowed. He could see the venom turning her blue eyes to grey. “Yeah, you just wanted to be married to Mik DeSalle’s daughter. Lot of good it did you.”

  He opened the lock on the door, threw it on the ground and walked back to the car. Eve didn’t notice that the car keys never left his hand.

  Lucy

  Lucy was hoarse from yelling. Her knuckles were bleeding from pounding on the door. She had broken off the heels of both shoes from hitting them against the steel door.

  “Please, God, please help me,” she prayed. “Please help me this time.” Mik couldn’t help her now, and neither could Mariah. She prayed for a miracle.

  Lucy heard noise outside of the room. It was muffled, but it sounded like a car. She picked up the bucket. The next person entering the room would get a face full of piss.

  Her muscles tensed, ready to do battle. She heard the rattle of keys. Her knees shook as she stood behind the door. She heard talking. There was more than one person out there. She couldn’t tell if the voices were male or female.

  The lock was opened. The door opened a crack. “Lucy? Are you all right? It’s Eve. I’ve come to get you.”

  Lucy remained behind the door holding the bucket. Was she hallucinating? Or had Faith brought Eve here as a decoy?

  “How did you get here? Who is with you?” The bucket shook in her hands.

  “Brad is with me. He brought me here to get you out of here.” Eve had moved closer to the door, but she wasn’t trying to open it any wider.

  What was she talking about? “Brad who?” She put the bucket down but kept it next to her feet.

  “My ex-husband. He brought me here. We came to get you.”

  Now she remembered. The man that kidnapped her had a familiar accent. It was similar to Eve’s Pittsburgh accent. “He put me in here. He threatened to kill me.”

  Lucy heard Eve say something to Brad.

  “Lucy, he only did what Faith told him to do. He never meant to harm you.”

  Lucy could hear the desperation in her voice.

  “Where is Faith? Where is my mother?” Her voice was cracking.

  Eve inched the door open some more. “Faith is dead, Lucy. Mariah is at the hospital with Soleil and Olivia.”

  None of this made sense. How could Faith be dead? “Why are you here? Why isn’t my mother here?”

  “Mariah is with Soleil. She went into shock when her mother shot herself in the head. Brad brought me here. He won’t hurt you.”

  “Why are you here?” Lucy repeated.

  Eve’s head appeared at the door. “Because you are my sister. Because I love you.” There were tears rolling down her cheeks.

  Lucy moved from behind the door and put down the bucket. Eve ran to her and took her in her arms. “We were so worried about you, Lucy.”

  Lucy clung to Eve. She let herself be embraced. She didn’t know what to think. She was exhausted, frightened and in pain.

  Eve looked at her face. “My, God, Lucy, you’ve been hurt.” She pulled away from her, then gingerly touched Lucy’s nose.

  Lucy winced. Eve had cuts and bruises on her face. “So have you. Did Brad hit you?”

  Eve touched her upper lip, which was swelling. “No, he didn’t.”

  A car door slammed. Eve ran to the door and opened it wide. The car was speeding away from the complex. She turned back to Lucy and ran her fingers through her hair. “Shit. That bastard left us here.”

  Lucy limped outside of the room. She looked at the abandoned buildings surrounding the storage complex. She looked up at the blue cloudless sky. A beautiful day in Southern California. She was free, but they were stranded.

  Eve came out of the room. “Are you sure that you’re all right?”

  “One of Faith’s goons came in here and roughed me up.” Lucy started to shake.

  Eve put her arm around her. “We’ll get out of here. We’ll get to Mariah. Don’t worry. You are safe now.” She put Lucy’s arm over her shoulder to support her. />
  Lucy’s ankles ached. Her face hurt. She let Eve support her weight. They started walking slowly away from the storage room. Lucy prayed that a car would come along. She hoped she hadn’t exhausted her quota of miracles for the day.

  Soleil

  Soleil woke up to bright lights. She squinted at the intrusion. She tried to raise her hand, but it wouldn’t move. She looked down at them. She was in a hospital bed. Her hands were tied down in restraints. She tried to sit up, but the restraints left her immobile.

  “It’s okay, Soleil. I’m here.” She turned her head to see Mariah’s face. She looked like she had been in a war. Soleil knew she must look even worse. Mariah patted her hand gently. “Don’t worry, honey, I won’t leave you,” Mariah whispered.

  “Where am I? Why am I tied down?” The fog was starting to lift from her mind. Faith. The gun. The blood. All of that blood. She could still smell it. She felt like she was going to throw up, felt the bile rising in her throat. She started to gag.

  A nurse came into the room. She loosened the restraints. Soleil sat up in the bed and tried to throw up, but her stomach was empty. She hadn’t eaten since before the concert.

  Mariah rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m here for you, baby,” she said soothingly.

  Soleil looked up at Mariah. She couldn’t get the question to form in her mouth. “Faith?”

  She saw the answer in Mariah’s eyes. “She died on the way to the hospital. I’m sorry, Soleil.” Mariah’s eyes filled with tears.

  Soleil dropped back onto the bed. The nurse checked her vital signs. She looked at the room around her. It was a small private room with blue walls. Soleil had lived in a house with blue walls once. She had lived there with her mother. Now she had no mother. She had no father. She was alone.

  She tried to get up again.

  “Ms. DeSalle, we need to keep you overnight for observation.” The busty blonde nurse touched her arm, gently pushing her back down on the bed. “I’m sure that your aunt will stay here with you for as long as you need her.” The nurse wiped her mouth.