No, she knew exactly what Tony would do when he found out. He would honor Peg’s wishes for a while. Then he would start to get nervous. The call to the police wouldn’t be far behind.
“Tony can’t know yet,” she said again quietly, this time emphasizing the word yet. She would tell him eventually. She would. Really.
“Okay Peg. Just… whatever this is going on, promise me you won’t do anything you regret later.”
Given the situation she knew she couldn’t promise that at all, but she knew what V meant. She was referring more to that liquor store just a half mile away from here. “Yeah, I think I can promise that.”
“Think? Peg, if you…”
“I promise, okay?” She put the car into drive and continued on to the sitter’s. “I’ll be over soon. Tony is supposed to get done at six, so come over a little after five and I’ll show you what’s going on, okay?”
V seemed satisfied with that, and they both hung up. Peg couldn’t help but be a little grateful that she was running so late though. Now that she’d started thinking about that liquor store she was having trouble stopping.
Chapter 6
As much as she knew she needed to get home immediately after dropping Brendan off at V’s, she still made one more stop at the grocery store. In all the chaos she still hadn’t had lunch, and she was willing to bet very good money that Zoey would be even worse. She grabbed two sandwiches in the deli then, even though she still believed her thoughts on the matter were going pretty far into crazy territory, she stopped in the meat department as well. There she stared at the raw hamburger for several minutes before buying some. She had hamburger in the freezer at home, but she wanted to try something and for that she needed some that wasn’t frozen.
The smell still lingered in the house as she walked in the door, but she thought now she might be able to cover up the worst of it now with copious amounts of air freshener. She put her groceries on the table.
“Zoey?” she called. “Zoey, I brought food. Zoey?”
She listened, but she didn’t hear anything. She went into the living room and found it empty, then went upstairs, calling for her all the while and experiencing a growing pain in her stomach at the thought that Zoey might be gone again. She couldn’t have that. Life might not have been fair, but that would simply be life kicking her down and grinding her face in the mud.
“Zoey?” she asked again as she came back downstairs, the growing panic evident in her voice. Then she went back to the basement door and found it ajar. She opened it all the way and called down. “Zoey?”
There was a grunt that might have been an attempt at an answer. Peg went back into the kitchen to grab the bags of food, then hurried downstairs, making note on the way down of all the places along the wall and railing that Zoey had touched with her filth-covered hands earlier and would need to be cleaned before Tony came home.
Peg had almost expected Zoey to be back in the hidden corner where she’d found her, but instead Zoey was over in Tony’s corner, sitting on the floor and staring at something in her lap. Peg didn’t recognize it until she got closer and saw it was the shoebox full of old snapshots that she kept in the upstairs closet. She’d always meant to put them in an album, but frankly a few of them were too hard for her to even look at, let alone organize. She didn’t have anything recent in there, not since she’d started taking most of her pictures digitally, but even those had been taken mostly by Tony. Peg had come to the conclusion that memories she couldn’t bring back without a visual reference were probably memories she didn’t want anyway.
“Zoey,” Peg said softly as she came closer. Zoey looked up with an expression of alarm until she saw it was only Peg, then she went back to pawing through the pictures. Peg sat down on the floor next to her, wincing at some of the aches and pains in her legs. She was only thirty-four but that wasn’t too young to have the beginnings of arthritis, according to her doctor. She tried not to let Zoey see that, however. She wanted Zoey to remember her more as the person she’d once been.
As though reading Peg’s mind, the first words out of Zoey’s mouth were “You changed your hair.”
Peg pulled a strand of her hair in front of her face so she could look at it. The last time she’d seen Zoey her hair had been short and dyed black with red streaks in it. It had long ago gone back to her more natural brownish-red, although she had to dye it now and then to get rid of the one or two grays that persisted in showing up. She also kept it longer now, although usually pulled back. She didn’t have time in her busy life to worry about her hair in the way she once had.
Zoey’s hair, Peg realized, was the exact same color and length it had been when she disappeared. Yeah, it was time to start addressing things like that.
“I brought food,” Peg said. “I figured you might be hungry.”
She pulled out the first bag and set it between them. She saw Zoey’s eyebrows perk up at the thought of food, but when Peg pulled out the sandwiches that interest seemed to wane. Peg had been afraid of that.
“Do you not want any?” Peg asked.
“Dry and dead for a while,” Zoey said.
“I’m not really sure what that means, but I think I have a clue.” Peg took a deep breath, hoping she was wrong, then set the other bag out as well. “I have this as well.”
She didn’t bother handing it to Zoey. Instead she just left it there, waiting to see what she would do. Zoey opened up the bag and looked inside, stared for a long time, then closed it back up. But she did not hand it back to Peg asking what that was about. Peg didn’t take that as a good sign.
“Zoey, we need to talk. Is that okay?”
Zoey didn’t stop flipping through the pictures, nor did she make eye contact with Peg when she said, “I haven’t talked in a long time.”
That, at least, sounded like it might be true and not just rambling. “I did as you asked. I didn’t tell the cops that you were here. Are you afraid of the cops? Is the person that took you maybe a cop?”
“The eyes are watching the cops. They watch everything. They don’t have anything else to do but watch.”
“Okay. I suppose I can accept that for now, but if I don’t tell the cops I’m still going to tell my best friend V.”
Zoey dropped the photos to spill out over the floor. “You can’t. The eyes are watching.”
“Okay. Okay, I get that, or at least as much as I can, but if I’m going to help you I can’t do it alone. I need help. V can do that.”
Zoey’s eyes narrowed, and it appeared to take a lot of concentration to say what she said next. “Do you… trust her?”
“With my life. She was there for me at times when no one else was. And as it is I’m already going to have to hide you from my husband, which I honestly don’t know how we’re going to accomplish that.”
“Husband.” Zoey’s fingers searched through the pile of photos on the floor and eventually came out with a picture from their wedding. To save money at the reception they’d put disposable cameras on each table and let the guests take the pictures. The picture in Zoey’s hand showed Peg and Tony dancing crazy to some song Peg couldn’t remember. “Him?”
“Yeah, that’s him. That’s Tony. And my son’s name is Brendan.”
Zoey looked at the picture for a long time. Peg didn’t say anything, just letting her process all this. When she spoke again her voice was soft. “What year is this?”
Peg took a deep breath, trying to ignore just how troubling a question that was. “2013.”
Zoey paused again to do the math in her head, a process that seemed difficult for her. That was worrying as well, as she’d always been the smarter of the two of them. “Eleven years.”
“Yes.”
“Eleven years,” she repeated. She put the photo back in the shoebox. She followed up with the others carefully stacking them all, putting all the years away neatly. “The fruit has been growing. Eleven years and now I’m ripe, Peggy.”
Peg almost said that she wasn’t so bad
now that she’d had her shower before it occurred to her that she wasn’t talking about her smell at all. “You said that before, Zoey. What is that supposed to mean?”
Zoey shook her head. “No. No no.”
“It’s okay. If you don’t want to say yet you don’t have to, but I’ll have to know everything soon. Do you understand? It’s the only way I can protect you from whoever’s after you.”
“The fruit is ripe,” she said softly, then, louder and with more determination, said, “I need a mirror.”
“I think…” Peg stood up and went over to Tony’s things on the desk. Underneath his acrylic paints she found the small mirror he’d bought when he’d gotten in his head that he should try doing self-portraits. “Here.” She went behind Zoey and held it in front of them. “I don’t know why you want it but…”
Her sentence stopped in a gasp. She took away the mirror, refusing to believe what she had seen. Zoey looked back at her with sad, wide eyes.
“Put it back. I want to see,” she said.
Peg took a step back from her sister before she realized what she was doing. This wasn’t right. She had to have been seeing things. Her mind was all worked up and playing tricks on her.
And yet…
The strength. The sun. The teeth.
And now the mirror.
“Peg,” Zoey said. “I want to see.”
Peg almost said there was nothing to see. She didn’t want to get close enough to Zoey again to put the mirror in front of her. As much as she wanted to believe there was some logical way to explain all this there was no way she could put it together that didn’t come across as insane.
She’s still your sister, she thought. She won’t harm you, even if she is…
Peg stepped closer again. Much slower this time she held the mirror up in front of Zoey at such an angle that she could see the reflection as well.
There was nothing wrong with the mirror. She’d hoped for a second that it had somehow gotten warped and that was the reason for what she’d seen. But when she angled it to look at herself there was no problem with the image. She changed the angle ever so slightly to look at Zoey.
All the stories and legends, it appeared, had some amount of fact to them but were not completely true. Zoey did indeed cast a reflection. But it was blurred beyond the point of recognition. It was as though some force was interfering with the light before it could reach either her or the mirror, resulting in a reflection that was warped and hazy, like a funhouse mirror seen through a thick fog.
“Zoey,” Peg whispered. “What happened to you?”
“It planted a seed,” Zoey, her voice solemn and quiet. “The seed grew. They were going to pick the fruit. I had to get away.” Zoey took the mirror out of Peg’s hand and turned it away, absently placing it in the shoebox with all of Peg’s memories. She put the rest of the pictures on top of it, closed the lid, set it aside, and then opened up the bag.
Peg turned away and refused to watch, but she could clearly hear every sound as Zoey ripped the plastic off the hamburger. Instead of the sounds of chewing, though, it was followed by gulps as Zoey held the raw meat over her mouth and drank the bloody juice.
Chapter Seven
Most of the signs of Zoey’s presence were gone by the time V arrived with Brendan. The shit was cleaned off the walls leading to the basement and Peg had aired out the house enough that she thought she could get away with claiming it was nothing more than a particularly noxious toilet overflow. The smell of pot also helped, as Peg had smoked a bowl to help calm her extremely frayed nerves. Zoey was still downstairs, although she was now back in her hidden corner. Peg had given her several blankets and pillows so she would at least be somewhat comfortable, and the girl had promptly fallen asleep. There was at least that. No matter what she was now, she was still human and alive enough that she needed rest.
There was a knock at the door, but Peg didn’t go to answer it. She sat on the couch, her hands folded in front of her, not wanting to move. The last several hours had been draining in ways she had never been able to imagine, and that was saying something considering how well she remembered the days following Zoey’s disappearance.
“Peg?” V called from outside. “Are you in there?”
“It’s unlocked,” Peg called back. V opened the door, having trouble considering one arm was full of Brendan’s bag and the other full of Brendan himself, squirming and fussy. V set him down and he ran across the room to leap in Peg’s lap.
“Mommy!”
Peg hugged him tight. “Hey there. How’s my little man, huh?”
“Sleepy, I hope,” V said. “He was running all over at my place and talking up a blue streak. I gave him a snack, so hopefully he’s about ready to calm down for the day.”
“I hope so, too,” Peg said.
“Jesus, Peg. You look like absolute sh… er, garbage. You even look worse than when you dropped him off, and that’s saying something.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Peg said.
“So are you going to tell me?”
“Give me a minute.” She looked down at Brendan. “Mommy has a lot of things she needs to talk about with Aunt V. You think you can play quietly in your room for a little bit?”
“Mommy, I need to go baffroom.”
“That’s fine. We’ll go to the bathroom first.”
Peg held his hand as he went up the stairs. She would have picked him up and taken him herself to make it faster, but it wasn’t that long ago where he hadn’t been able to take the stairs by himself. The fact that he could do it now filled him with an adorable childish pride and Peg, even in her current state, couldn’t deny him that. The strangely determined look on his face as he gripped the railing, stepped up a stair with one foot, then brought up the next made her forget some of the mind-numbing revelations of the day. The time wasn’t too far in the past where she would have been unable to hide her impatience with this kind of task, but now it gave her a strange kind of joy she’d never known earlier in her life. At the top of the stairs he was able to finally pick up the pace and run to the bathroom, then Peg made sure he was settled into his room and went back downstairs.
V was down in the living room examining Peg’s glass pot pipe with a bemused look. Marijuana was something V had given up herself when she’d turned her back on booze, and she’d never fully approved of the fact that Peg still did it. But she let it slide as long as Peg stayed away from the bottle.
“So tell me what’s going on,” V said. She said it in a way that somehow managed to sound forceful and commanding while still being compassionate. She’d been that sort of person for as long as Peg had known her, although admittedly when they’d first met Peg had not yet been a person that could appreciate it.
Peg had gone to her first AA meeting when she was twenty-seven, shortly after her attempt at suicide but long before she would stop cutting. Tony hadn’t been in her life yet, although that was in the near future. Peg had been very confused about the direction of her life, although she still hadn’t managed to hit what her fellow alcoholics called “rock bottom.” She hadn’t really believed yet that she had a problem, or so she told herself at the time. In retrospect she must have understood that on some level or else she wouldn’t have showed up at the stupid meeting at the Lake Area Club. She hadn’t even lived in Oconomowoc for very long and she hadn’t thought she was going to stay. In the last three years she’d had seven different addresses and lived in three cities, usually crashing on the floor of some casual acquaintance that she hadn’t yet managed to irrevocably burn. This just seemed like one more inconsequential stop on the road to… well, she didn’t know where she was going and she didn’t really care.
Yet something had drawn her to the Lake Area Club that day and she’d sat through a meeting. She hadn’t actually said anything, instead just sitting in the back of the room listening to everyone else tell their sob stories. She’d hated every moment of it except for one. One particular young man, he couldn’t h
ave even been old enough to drink legally, was going on about how he’d been ordered to show up at meetings and how he had to drink because he was such a sensitive artist type and it was the only way to calm his inner demons. Peg had desperately wanted to call bullshit on him, but she got the impression that would have been frowned upon. So that made it all the more surprising when someone else did it instead.
V was in her early forties at the time, although Peg didn’t yet know her as V. She’d introduced herself to the group at the beginning as Vivian, and from the way she presented herself it was evident that she had some standing around here. So when she spoke up to the kid about how he didn’t have the slightest fucking clue what it meant to have “inner demons,” everyone else sat up straight and listened. The kid, on the other hand, didn’t seem to take the hint.
“Don’t go telling me what I do and don’t know,” the kid said. It appeared as though he had almost added the word “bitch” at the end, although the look on V’s face had probably been what stopped him. “You don’t know about my home life or how overbearing my mother was. My dad was working all the time…”
Blood Harvest (Book 1): Blood Fruit Page 5
