Carnival

by Kory M. Shrum

  A voice cracked through the speaker. “Hello?”

  Piper leaned toward the com. “It’s me.”

  The door buzzed, and Piper was allowed to pass through the locked inner door. Dani stepped out into the hall, motioning her forward.

  God, she’s beautiful.

  In a wine-colored turtleneck and tight jeans, her dark complexion seemed to glow.

  “Hi.” She chewed her lower lip. “Come on in.”

  Something about Dani reminded Piper of the night before, of the woman in the peacock outfit who’d been a bit handsy with Konstantine. She’d been curious about the beautiful, busty blonde, especially since all the eyes in the room seemed to track her and Konstantine. But Piper had admittedly been distracted by the pretty drunk girl in a cat mask who kept whispering super-sexy Italian in her ear.

  Piper stepped inside the apartment and slipped her shoes off, leaving them by the door. She just assumed since Dani was in socks herself that this was the protocol.

  But Dani shook her head. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s okay.” The shoes were already off. Piper wasn’t going to put them back on.

  One quick visual inspection of the apartment told Piper she wouldn’t have been comfortable wearing the shoes anyway. It was immaculate, with twelve-foot ceilings and the rounded French windows that Piper had admired from the outside. It was an open floor plan, so the dining area, kitchen, and living room were all laid bare. There were two doors off a short hallway, but they were open too. The walls were a cheerful yellow. The ceilings and trim were creamy white.

  Something rubbed against her leg, and Piper looked down to find a fluffy Russian Blue cat blinking large gold eyes up at her.

  “That’s Octavia,” Dani said, stepping forward with a bottle of wine and two glasses. “I call her Tavi. You’re not allergic, are you?”

  “A bit, but she’s fine.” Piper frowned at the wine. “I don’t want to drink tonight. I had a bit too much last night, if you know what I mean.”

  Dani put the wine glasses down on the counter and smiled. But the smile was tight. “Did you go out for Carnival?”

  “In Venice,” Piper couldn’t help but say it. “I didn’t even need a passport. We were only there for like an hour, but still. Being friends with Lou has its benefits.”

  Dani was nodding, but Piper had the distinct feeling that she wasn’t hearing what Piper was saying.

  Dani filled her glass of wine to the top. “She was here this morning. She was the one who told me I’d better call you. I was in the shower and she just opened the door and—” A small, nervous laugh escaped her. “She scared the hell out of me.”

  “Wait, what? Lou got in your shower?”

  Payback is coming—is that what she’d meant by that? That she was going to force me to talk to Dani because I forced her to talk to Konstantine? Vicious!

  Piper pouted. “If you only called me because Lou made you—”

  “No.” Dani brought the wine to her lips but didn’t drink it. She still held the bottle in the other hand. “No, I wanted to talk to you. She just gave me the little push I needed. I’m just saying that yes, Lou is a good friend to you.”

  By popping into your shower and making demands?

  Piper rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache blooming behind her skull again. She tried to remember the last time she’d taken a dose of aspirin. “I hope she sees it that way.”

  Dani’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Uh, I offered some love advice to her beau that wasn’t really mine to give.”

  Hopefully it won’t backfire on my ass.

  Konstantine had promised not to say a word, and Piper had suggested that Lou’s reluctance to accept Konstantine’s devotion was probably because Lou had lost the only man she ever loved when she was a child. Even if he hadn’t been Paolo Konstantine, brother to the man who pulled the trigger, even if she hadn’t been Louie Thorne, executioner to hundreds of men just like him—there was that simple fact. It was true that Lou only felt in control when she had a gun in her hand and that she didn’t attach to people because she understood how easy it was for them to disappear. Especially men like Konstantine.

  Didn’t you almost die just, like, a year ago? she’d asked. Do you think she’s forgotten that?

  Konstantine had conceded the point.

  More than once during their text session, Piper had thought, I’m texting one of the world’s most dangerous men. Ruler of the underground. This guy probably tortures people on a Saturday. Life is so weird.

  Dani smirked.

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Dani drank half her wine in one go. Then she said, “I wanted to apologize. Again.”

  Piper refrained from tapping her fingers on the glass tabletop. “For?”

  “When we had dinner the other night, I know I gave you the impression that I wouldn’t disappear again, and then I did just that. I ghosted you again. I’m sorry.”

  Dani searched her face, and Piper realized she was waiting for a reaction. But Piper, perhaps from having such an exciting night before, then a long day at the shop, felt mostly tired.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  Dani grimaced. “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t just forgive me like that.”

  Piper laughed. “It’s easy when you don’t really care.”

  Dani flinched.

  “I didn’t mean I don’t care about you. I’m just tired and I have a headache and I’m worried about”—Mel mostly, but also Lou—“my people. I’m sure that if you ghosted me you had a good reason, right?”

  There. Piper had left it wide open for Dani to explain herself. She waited.

  It was clear by the way Dani wrung the wine glass in her hand, the way she put the bottle down on the table, the way she chewed her lower lip, staring at her hands. All of it signaled that she was working up to it—whatever it was—and Piper knew well enough to hold the space.

  I wish I had three more aspirin though. Italian booze was no joke. Her head was killing her.

  “I didn’t call you back because I was in the hospital.”

  “So you’re sick?” Oh god, cancer? Something worse? Piper’s mind raced.

  “Not that kind of hospital.” Dani chewed her lip. “I was at the Crescent City Psych Hospital.”

  So I did trigger an episode, like you thought I would.

  “I’ve checked myself in a few times this year, just a few days here and there—when the episodes get really bad.” She licked her lips again, then pulled on her ear. “It’s a good thing the hospital has Wi-Fi, right? Otherwise, I probably would’ve lost my job by now.”

  The nervous laugh that escaped Dani set Piper’s teeth on edge.

  Once she dared a glance up, finally meeting Piper’s eyes, Dani grimaced harder. “Don’t look at me that way. That’s exactly why I didn’t call you. I didn’t want you to see me as this pathetic, broken little doll.”

  “I don’t see—” Piper began, but she didn’t get very far.

  The words fell from Dani’s lips hot and fast. “I wake up in the middle of the night screaming because I think someone is in my bedroom. I couldn’t even stay one night in my old apartment because all I could see is Oh, this is where he tortured me. Oh, here is where they tied me to a chair and punched me in the stomach a million times. Here is where he pulled out a fistful of my hair. Here is where they—”

  She covered her face and began to cry.

  Piper stood and slid her arms around Dani’s waist.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered into her ear. She placed a kiss on the top of her ear, then her temple. “It’s okay.”

  “Terrible things happen to people all the time. I don’t know why I can’t get past this.”

  “Maybe because you were almost beaten to death for information you didn’t even have and then the psychopath cut off your finger? I don’t think anyone could just get past that. You’re putt
ing too much pressure on yourself.”

  Dani didn’t seem to hear her. “I didn’t want you to see me this way. But I also didn’t want you to think I don’t care about you. I’m so weak. I thought adversity made you stronger.”

  “Hey. Don’t say that.” Piper pulled back, cupping Dani’s cheeks in her hands. “Listen, I think it’s important to point out that you were strong before all this bullshit happened. Shit like this doesn’t make women stronger. It makes everything harder. You don’t have anything to prove to me. Or the world.”

  Dani’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. Her lip trembled. “You must think—”

  “I think you’re an amazing, smart, courageous woman who had a really fucked-up experience. And you survived and it’s going to take some time to heal. Maybe you’ll never heal completely, and that’s okay.”

  “But you’re surrounded by strong women. Lou—”

  Piper laughed, a tight, bewildered sound. “We can’t compare ourselves to Lou.” And it isn’t like that girl hasn’t got her own problems. “And I’ve never been through something like what you’ve been through.”

  Dani cried softly into Piper’s shoulder, and Piper held her. There was nothing else to be done. After the sobs died to a quiet mewling, Piper spoke. “What happened to you happened. Period. You don’t have to justify your pain to anyone, okay? Not me or anyone else. I’m going to say this a million times until you believe me.”

  Dani pulled back and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m sorry. I stayed away so you wouldn’t see me fall apart, and I’m falling apart anyway.”

  Piper pushed the hair back from Dani’s face. “I’d rather see you fall apart than not see you at all.”

  Dani laughed, a sad, desperate little sound that could be interpreted in a hundred different ways. “You don’t mean that.”

  Piper grabbed both sides of her face, forcing Dani to look her in the eyes. “I mean it. Okay? I mean it.”

  Dani looked around her apartment as if seeing it for the first time. “Are you hungry? Will you stay the night?”

  Piper smiled, unwilling to point out that these two questions were entirely unrelated. “Yes.”

  24

  As Melandra’s spoon stirred cream into her coffee, her eyes fixed on some point in the distant past. Her bare kitchen wall served as the screen for the theater of her mind. The table creaked under the press of her elbows as she adjusted herself, unable to get comfortable.

  The apartment, she realized, was the antithesis of the trailer she’d shared with Terry all those years ago. It had been narrow, stuffed with furniture that had come from the Salvation Army, mostly browns and yellows with tears at their seams. And no matter how hard she’d cleaned its windows, it seemed not enough light had ever filled those small rooms.

  She’d spent nearly six years working first shift in a small manufacturing plant to pay for it. On the weekends, she wandered the rooms of that old trailer, doing her best to keep the little place clean. She scrubbed the toilet and the shower and packed up all their clothes to be taken down to the coin-operated laundromat at the other end of the trailer park.

  On most days, Grandmamie’s voice had haunted her.

  Us Durand women are both blessed and cursed, Melandra. You hear me? Blessed with the sight but also blind in the heart. We’re destined for bad men, every one of us, and if you fool enough to go an’ have a girl child of your own, she gonna be as blind as the rest of us.

  Now, decades later, in her beautiful, airy apartment full of light, Mel still remembered feeding quarters into the slot, adding the powdered soap to the machine, and thinking that Grandmamie had been right. Mel had been blinded. By Terry’s easy smile. By the way he’d lower his voice and whisper directly into her ear all the things she needed to hear. How he’d lean his hip into her hip and her whole body would soften.

  A damn fool, Mel thought, bringing her coffee to her lips. But at least I didn’t have a baby girl.

  When Terry was arrested, and his body was slammed onto the floor of their little trailer so hard the whole place shook, she’d been ashamed of how relieved she felt. How could she be relieved to see her husband cuffed and dragged from the room?

  She looked over the rim of her coffee mug at the three replacement cards spread before her on her kitchen table. They echoed the long ago spread laid out by her dead grandmother’s crooked fingers.

  Then it had been The Devil, Justice, Death.

  Now it was The Devil, The Wheel of Fortune, and Death.

  It was The Wheel of Fortune she fixed her eyes on, a card she’d laid off to one side. The problem with the wheel was that she couldn’t be sure if it was turning for or against her. Change for the better, change for the worse. It could go either way.

  If it was turning for the worst—what of it? Didn’t Mel know, in her heart, that she had it coming? However this shook out, with her dead or in prison, she had it coming.

  She had it coming because of what happened in November 1982.

  It had been flurrying on and off all day, in that way it did sometimes in Louisiana. No real snow would come of it, but it was enough to make the roads slick and the face and knuckles cold.

  By the time they’d left the bar at two in the morning, it had given over from snow to rain. Terry had been in a good mood. He’d won the pool games he’d played, and hadn’t gotten caught cheating. Then he’d drunk away half his winnings to celebrate.

  “You drive,” he’d told her as they stumbled down the steps into the gravel lot.

  Mel hadn’t wanted to. She’d had two beers herself, and though she wasn’t drunk, she was tipsy enough to know it was a bad idea.

  He threw her the keys to the Firebird and missed. They hit the gravel at her feet.

  “We should call a cab.”

  “I ain’t leaving my car here.” He unzipped his pants and began pissing on a bush beside the bar door. “Drive, or I will.”

  She bent and fished the keys out of the gravel despite the sense of pending dread filling her.

  I’d known, she thought. I’d known something was going to happen and I drove anyway.

  She’d put the key in the ignition, turned it, and pulled out of the lot onto the dark country road. She’d driven slowly, but it hadn’t mattered. She’d gotten tired, as she always did with a few drinks in her. The soft sound of rain splashing against the windshield hadn’t helped.

  Her eyes had closed only for a moment. Then the car hit something, hard. She slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop in the middle of the road. Each swipe of the wiper blades revealed the rain falling in her headlights and the bend in the road ahead.

  Her first thought—If I’d slept for even ten seconds longer, we would’ve slammed right into those trees.

  Her second thought—What did I hit?

  Terry came awake beside her, jolting up in his seat. “What the hell happened?”

  “I hit something.”

  Mel craned her neck, looking behind her. A lump lay in the middle of the dark road. The red taillights gave it a demonic glow. But it had the unmistakable shape of a human body. A small woman? A child?

  “Oh god,” she whispered. “Oh my god, I hit somebody.”

  He turned in his seat, looking back over his shoulder into the dark. “Stay here.”

  He pushed open the passenger side door.

  Mel had begun opening her door when Terry grabbed her arm hard, yanking her back into the seat. “Stay here, I said.”

  First he went to the front of the car, stood in the headlights and inspected the damage while rain pelted his face. He rubbed something with his hand and swore. Then he walked to the back of the car and bent down over the unmoving form.

  That’s when Mel put her face in her hands and began to cry.

  Terry got back in the car, dragging a hand down his face. “Drive.”

  She looked around, searching the darkness for help, or a witness. She’d seen a light through the trees.

  “We can go to that house and call for help.”


  He grabbed the back of her hair and pulled hard enough to bring startled tears to her eyes. “Drive, or I’ll pull you out and I’ll drive.”

  And God forgive her, she had driven away from the scene without having to be told twice.

  “It was an animal,” he’d whispered. “You hear me. It was an animal.”

  “It wasn’t! It—”

  He’d slapped her, and that was the end of it.

  The next day he took five hundred dollars from her account and the car went into the shop. That was the last they ever spoke of it until he went to prison.

  “If I pay him off, he’ll just come back. If I go to the police, he’ll run. Or he might tell them what happened.”

  Or maybe he won’t give me a chance to confess at all, Mel thought. He’s never liked not getting his way.

  She reached past the three cards and lifted the revolver resting there. She noted its weight in her hand, the finality of it.

  Lady placed her head on Mel’s leg. A long, mournful whine escaped the dog. Mel cupped one ear with her hand, but her eyes remained fixed on the gun.

  “There, now. Everything’s gonna be all right.”

  25

  Konstantine woke the moment he felt the weight beside him. He instinctually reached for his gun before the familiar scent washed over him. He relaxed. Turning only his head, he saw the outline of her body.

  Lou lay on her back, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted. Her dark lashes rested on her cheeks. For a long while he only looked at her, watching her chest rise and fall. She was dreaming, and he longed to know what she dreamed of. Killers prowling the night? Drug dealers? His dead brother Angelo with his gun? Her father or mother? Her aunt?

  Him?

  The familiar stab of rejection shot through him. He ached to reach out and touch her, but to do so would break the spell. Maybe he would never see her again.

  Maybe the girl, Piper, had been wrong.

  She comes to see you. She’s not doing that with anybody else, man.

  No. She hadn’t joined another man’s bed. His constant canvassing of the internet for photos, video clips, or any other trace of her existence was in the name of protecting her anonymity, but he did look for other men.