Blood Harvest (Book 1): Blood Fruit

by Goodman, D. J.

  Tony almost choked on his wonton. Apparently he thought that was as bad an idea as she did. “Why?”

  Because V was right. As much as she didn’t want that vicious creature shrieking in her ear, Anita might know a few things about the investigation that Peg would need. She was just really uncomfortable about what she thought she might need to do to get through the conversation.

  “She wasn’t in much condition to talk. I told her I’d call her back and we’d finish.”

  “That doesn’t mean you actually have to do it.”

  “Maybe she’s changed a little after all these years.”

  Tony raised an eyebrow at her. Zoey sighed and shrugged.

  “Or maybe I can make millions by shitting into an ice cube tray and selling it as Pudding Pops,” she said.

  “Jesus Christ, honey, I’m trying to eat here. Look, if that’s really what you feel you need to do then do it. Calling her, I mean, not the Pudding Pops. But don’t go thinking you owe her something. You don’t. Not after everything she did to you.”

  Peg resisted the urge to say that she’d actually done all that to herself, but they’d had that conversation too often to count and he tended to win. While Peg may have been the one who’d nearly driven her life off a cliff, Anita had been the one to give it a good hard push in that direction.

  “I’ve got to do it,” Peg said. “It’s just… anything to get a few answers, you know? No matter how little.”

  Tony nodded. He stared at his plate for several seconds then looked into the living room. Brendan had turned on Adventure Time, which Peg wasn’t sure he was ready for at this age, but his understanding of it seemed to begin and end with how funny it was when Jake’s arms went all noodly. He was laughing his sweet little boy laugh, a strange counterpoint to the solemn look on Tony’s face. He stood up, walked over to her seat, and then took a knee next to her like he was about to propose marriage again. Peg already had an idea, though, about what he was going to say and there was decidedly nothing romantic about it.

  “Peg, I need you to be honest with me,” he said quietly, looking in the direction of the living room to make sure that little ears couldn’t hear. “I know what happens to you when you talk to her. I even knew about it the last time you talked to her, even though you thought I didn’t.”

  Peg wanted to look him in the eye. She really did. But she couldn’t.

  “So tell me the absolute truth. When you talked to her earlier, did you… did you do anything?”

  “No. You know I have better control over it now.”

  “And when you call her later?”

  She couldn’t answer that.

  “Peg, do I need to hide the knives and razors tonight?”

  “No. Its fine, Tony. I’ll be okay.”

  She hugged him before he could say anything else. He hugged back, but she hadn’t done it because she needed to feel him against her. She’d hugged him because she didn’t want him to see her face and know that she was lying.

  Chapter Nine

  She went into the living room and played with her son for a while, but she knew she couldn’t procrastinate too long or else she would lose her nerve. She also wanted the call to Anita to be over tonight. Anything she could pick from that woman’s brain might help Zoey, so it was better to do this sooner rather than later. She desperately wanted a bottle of Jack next to her when she made the call, but she liked to think she was strong enough now to resist such temptations.

  Other temptations, on the other hand…

  Peg told Tony she was going in the basement to make the call because she wanted privacy. She expected him to ask why she didn’t just go upstairs to their bedroom while he stayed down with Brendan, to which Peg knew she would have to come up with another lie. He didn’t, however, and Peg was spared.

  She tried to tell herself that the reason she was really going to the basement was to check on Zoey, but she knew perfectly well that would be a lie as well.

  Peg closed the door at the top of the basement steps behind her, making sure to lock it. They’d installed the lock on the door when Tony had been down here working on one of his projects and a two-year old Brendan had somehow managed to reach the door knob and almost tumbled down the stairs. It was useful now, since she didn’t want anyone, not even Tony, walking in on any of this.

  She did check on Zoey first. She was still sleeping and looked decidedly more peaceful than she had earlier. Given how traumatized she’d seemed by whatever had happened to her, Peg had expected her to jerk and twitch in her sleep, maybe whimper, like troubled people always did in the movies. She didn’t though. She looked calm and tranquil, like a little pixie that had gotten drunk on honey or something and crashed from a sugar coma. She even made tiny whistling sounds through her nostrils that, dare Peg say it, were actually cute.

  She didn’t look like a blood-sucking monster, nor did she look like someone who had spent the last eleven years in some sort of unbelievable hell.

  Peg didn’t realize she was staring until she looked at her phone and realized half an hour had passed. There was really no way she could put this off any longer.

  She felt weak as she went back to Tony’s side of the room. There were only two ways she could possibly call her mother, and booze was right out. She wasn’t strong enough to make this call without some help. Under Tony’s table, behind an old metal toolbox that was rusted shut and practically forgotten in the corner, Peg had long ago pulled away a small piece of the drywall. If Tony ever found the hole he’d probably think the toolbox had punched it at some point, or maybe that a mouse had chewed it open. She pushed the toolbox aside and reached into the hole, feeling around the corner until she found the black case she’d stashed there. After she pulled it out she set it on the table next to her phone she stared at them both.

  She shouldn’t do this. She understood what the black case really was to her. It was really no different than alcohol. As strange as it would sound to anyone who had never done it, the things she could do with that case were more seductive than drugs. She’d even tried cocaine on a couple of occasions, but coke hadn’t done anything to calm the demons in her brain. This was different. This was better. And yet, this was almost more frowned upon.

  Tony would know. It would be impossible to hide this. She would crawl into bed with him later and he would see. He would get upset. He might even scream at her, although knowing him she thought it more likely that he would cry. He wouldn’t be able to trust her with herself again, just like in the old days before they’d been married. She didn’t want that. But wants had nothing to do with this. It was all about a need that no one else understood. And if she had to call her mother, then that need had to be fulfilled.

  Peg took out her Bluetooth headset, put it on her ear, and then went into the contacts on her phone. Anita Sellnow’s number was filed under “B.” Every so often she would get it in her head that she would finally delete the woman’s number. She didn’t have it written anywhere else, partially in the hope that something might happen to her phone and the number would be lost forever. But she could never make herself get rid of the number completely. She didn’t know why. It would have been a sweet relief. Maybe Peg didn’t think she actually deserved that relief.

  After too many more seconds of hesitation she finally hit the call button. The phone began to ring.

  Please don’t pick up. Please don’t pick up. See that it’s me and don’t pick up. Please please please.

  One ring. Two rings. Three.

  Go to voicemail. If it goes to voicemail I’ll hang up before I have to speak and then I’ll just say I tried. I won’t have to try again.

  Fourth ring. Click.

  Silence from the other end.

  Hang up, Peg, she thought. It was a pocket dial. You didn’t mean to call her. It was an accident. Hang up.

  Another moment of silence. And then-

  “Peggy?”

  “Hi mom,” Peg said. She closed her eyes. Blindly she groped for the black
case on the table. It was a faux leather travelling case for toiletries, something she’d picked up for cheap at Walmart. She hadn’t opened it in years, but she’d stowed it because she knew the day would come again when she had to have it. She undid the zipper.

  Don’t make me pull anything out of it, mommy. Please don’t.

  “Peg,” she said again. Peg wanted to pretend that she heard some kind of pleasant surprise in her voice, but she didn’t. “What do you want?”

  Peg opened her eyes, reached into the case, and pulled out a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

  “Maybe I just wanted to call to talk.”

  “You never call me and I never call you, so just tell me what you want.”

  She could tell her mother that Zoey was alive. She’d want to know. She’d be ecstatic. The woman might even physically leap for joy, or break down crying, or scream to God above that she was so happy and grateful.

  Peg didn’t feel inclined to give her mother that. Instead she pulled a lighter and some gauze from the case.

  “I called because…” She almost said that she had called because she wanted to say she was sorry. It was always her first instinct every time she heard Anita’s voice. But she’d apologized over and over again in the past, sometimes for things that had actually been her fault and sometimes for things that had not. Anita never gave her anything for her apologies other than a grunt or a cold stare. “…I’ve been thinking about Zoey a lot lately.”

  “Well praise the Lord and pass the ketchup. What a wonderful day this is. Peggy Sellnow has been thinking about someone other than herself for a change.”

  Uttech, she thought. It’s Peg Uttech, mom.

  She reached in and grabbed the last item in the case: a small box of single edge razor blades. She’d opened and used them once. Otherwise they had been sitting in the hidey hole for years.

  “Mom, I was hoping we could have a civil conversation. Can we do that?”

  “Well, if we never have a civil conversation that sure isn’t my fault. You’re the one that always pushes me.”

  Peg had spent the last several years of therapy and AA meetings and quiet middle-of-the-night conversations with Tony being told that she wasn’t the one that pushed. It was all her mother. Nothing her mother had done or said to her was Peg’s fault. But Peg, despite every kind and understanding word from the people who knew and loved her, knew on some deep level that her mother had to be right.

  She’d tried numerous times to explain to her therapist what talking to her mother, or even thinking about what had happened to Zoey—since the first often resulted in the second—felt like. Any description was inadequate and she never believed that the person she was talking to truly understood. The best she could do was call it a kind of pressure. She would say to imagine a brick balanced on top of her head. It hurt, yes, but even more there was the sensation of something relatively small but still strangely substantial trying to push her down into the ground. Except this was a purely mental feeling. At first it might be a sensation that she thought she could live with, but as the brick stayed there it only began to feel heavier. Pushing down and deeper, deeper and down, until it was finally too much and she had to quit balancing and let the brick fall.

  But that was where the metaphor failed to translate into real life, because there was no way to simply grab the brick or let it fall. It would stay. And the pressure became less about her head and more about her entire body. The heaviness coursed through her veins, poisoning her heart, destroying her organs.

  Peg pulled a razor from the box. It had a thin cardboard sleeve to keep it both sharp and from accidentally slicing anyone. She removed the cardboard.

  “I… I just had some questions. Can I just ask a few of them? It won’t take long.”

  “Of course it won’t. You never spend any longer talking about your sister than you absolutely have to.”

  Zoey held the blade up, watching the way the polished metal twinkled in the light. She didn’t know anyone else who could take a look at one and see pure beauty. She was also aware that she couldn’t be a normal, good person if she had such views. Others tried to tell her otherwise, but she knew better.

  “There were just some things I was hoping you could tell me about the investigation.”

  “You should already know these things, Peggy. You were there when we met with the agents in charge.”

  I was? Peg supposed she had a vague memory of that, but she couldn’t be sure why her remembrances were so hazy. The likely answer was that she was drunk or stoned at the time, or maybe she’d been too lost in her own head to pay attention.

  “I know, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  A snort from the other end of the line. Peg felt that pressure building up in her body. It was behind her eyes, in her chest, deep in her stomach. There was no physical pain, which was part of the problem. A feeling so horrible, so dark, should have been accompanied by real-world agony. That was the only way the pain could make sense. In the end that was all she really wanted, all she had wanted for the last eleven years. She wanted the world to finally make sense.

  She set down the razor long enough to roll up the sleeve on her left arm. Her eyes felt watery, but she wiped them away and did her best to keep her voice cool and neutral.

  “Can you please just tell me what they said?” Peg asked. She wanted to add that she hoped to hear it without any more biting comments, but Peg knew she deserved them.

  “Why are you making me rehash this, Peggy? You think I enjoy reliving this? Every time we talk you force me into that dark place again. Didn’t you already do enough?”

  “I’m sorry,” Peg said. The brick didn’t just feel like it was on her head now. It was on her chest, her shoulders, even her lap. It was everywhere holding her down, everywhere except her right hand, with which she picked up the razor again.

  “Whatever. So what then? What do you want to know?”

  “Just… did they say anything specific about the investigation? Where they were looking? A profile of who had taken her?”

  “We still don’t know that anyone took her, you know that.”

  “I know.”

  “She just disappeared.”

  “I know.”

  “Gone when you weren’t looking.”

  Peg didn’t respond.

  Anita waited a couple seconds. Her next words sounded strangely smug, like she knew her words had had the desired effect and now she could start giving Peg the information she wanted. “If someone really took her, they said it was probably a man, but they had a few other disappearances they thought might be related and it wasn’t like on those cop shows.”

  Peg forced herself to lower the razor back to the table, but she didn’t let go. This might be something she could work with. “What do you mean?”

  “I had to really work them to get them to tell me anything, but they finally said that there wasn’t a lot that the… victims… had in common. Men, women, black, white, Asian. Mostly straights, a few gays.”

  “Nothing in common at all.”

  “Are you even listening? That’s not what I said. I said there wasn’t a lot. They did have one thing. All of them were young. The oldest was twenty, the youngest was fourteen.”

  “I don’t understand. If they had so little in common, how did the feds connect them all in the first place?”

  “Why are you doing this to me, Peg? You didn’t say.”

  “I’m not doing anything to you, Mom. Please. Can’t we just talk about this without you getting paranoid?”

  “Don’t you call me paranoid. Don’t you dare call me paranoid. I have a God-damned right to think that you want to hurt me. That’s all you ever do.”

  Peg lifted the razor blade again. She knew she had to fight this. She couldn’t slip back into these ways. Tony would get angry. V would be upset. And Peg would be the person who had let everyone down again, the same thing she seemed fated to do over and over and over. That was all she was good for. She had no other purpose, no
other reason for existence than to be a disappointment and she couldn’t stand it.

  She flicked the lighter and ran the flame under the blade. A new blade would probably be clean, as close to sterile as she probably needed, but she’d learned after a few bad infections in the past that it was safer to be sure.

  “If you don’t want to talk I can go,” Peg said. She hoped desperately that Anita would say yes. If she did maybe Peg could stop before she hurt herself. She could go up to Tony and he would hold her and say that her mother was a bitch and that she was not a bad person. She knew her mother, though. Anita wouldn’t be finished yet.

  “Now you’re going to get all huffy on me,” Anita said. “Fine. What was your fucking question again?”

  “What did all the disappearances have in common that made police think they were the work of the same person?”

  “You know, they wouldn’t tell me that at first,” Anita said. “They said they couldn’t share sensitive information while we still had a suspect for Zoey’s killer in the house.”

  That was a blatant, bald-faced lie and Peg knew it. The suspect in question was Peg herself, but some time much later, when she had finally been able to look at the events of the days and weeks following the disappearance with some measure of detachment, she realized that the police had never actually done anything that implied they believed Peg was a serious suspect. They’d kept her at the station late into the night the day after the disappearance, but that was because she had been the last one to ever see Zoey. Only one person had ever actually accused Peg of doing anything to Zoey, and Peg was speaking to that person right now.

  Peg let the lighter grow hot in her hand, the metal thumbwheel causing a searing pain in her thumb. She kept it that way for as long as she could stand then finally let it go.

  “But they told you eventually,” Peg said.

  “Yes, they did.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “It was the clothes that were found. They kept that detail out of the paper. Sometimes they were dumped in water or other times in dumpsters, but when they were found the clothes were always intact. No damage to them like they had been ripped off.”