by Jen Blood
“Whatever, as long as it’s verifiably true,” he said. “We’re not the Tribune-—Video Expo won’t pull their advertising if we step on a few toes.”
◊◊◊◊◊
Solomon and I were both still buzzing when we walked through the apartment door three hours later, ragged and aching but neither of us quite ready to quit.
“We should get some sleep,” I said. I followed Solomon into the kitchen, where she went straight to the cupboards.
“I’m too wired.” She found M&Ms, grabbed a can of Coke from the fridge, and hopped up on the counter. Still in her party dress, of course.
“How are you not three hundred pounds?” I asked as she popped a handful of candy in her mouth. She shrugged.
“Good genes.”
“Mmm.”
I went to her and took the Coke from her hand, setting it back on the counter before she’d opened it. “Nice dress, too.”
I’d already abandoned my jacket, tie, and cummerbund, but still had on the monkey pants and white shirt. My top button was unbuttoned; Solomon undid the next.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
She undid the next button.
I took a slender ankle in my hand. With the other, I pushed her dress a little farther up, until she could open her legs enough to fit me between them. She leaned up and kissed my neck, then my jawline.
“Let’s go to bed,” she said, low in my ear.
I pulled back, fractionally. “You’re not mad at me anymore?”
“I know why you did what you did. And that you won’t do it again. Right?”
It would have been easy enough to lie. Now wasn’t the time, though.
“If I’d let you come the other night, you could have been killed. I’m sorry I tricked you.” She started to protest. I moved in and stopped her words, my lips on hers. “I’m not sorry I tried to keep you safe. This won’t be the only time that happens.”
“Well, that’s a problem.”
I moved from her mouth to her ear, taking the lobe between my teeth. Her breath hitched. “I’ll always try to keep you safe,” I said. With anyone else, it would have been a line. Never with Solomon, though. I ran my hand along her side, up just beneath her breast, and she arched into my touch.
“Let’s go to bed,” she said again. Her voice breathier than it had been.
“You sure?” I asked.
She slipped her arms around my neck and found my mouth again—the kiss deeper, harder, more than she’d given before.
“Please,” she said softly.
We went to her room, wanting nothing to do with the indelible curse on my own wall. I closed the door behind us, and Solomon turned her back to me. She swept her hair aside so I could get to her zipper. I’d turned on no lights, but the glow of streetlamps outside was enough to illuminate the scene.
Her skin was softer than I’d expected when first imagining this moment—back in the days when I shouldn’t have been imagining such things at all. When she was unzipped, I slipped one strap off her shoulder and kissed the freckles there. She turned in my arms, moving against me now. I pushed the strap off her other shoulder...down her arm...watched as deep blue pooled at her feet, and she was left in only a pair of blue panties that matched the dress.
“No bra?” I said.
“Don’t really need one. And the back was too low—straps would have shown.”
She put her arm up over her breasts, suddenly awkward.
“We can stop,” I said.
“I don’t want to stop.” She sat down on the bed, arm still over her breasts, legs curled beneath her. I sat beside her. “But, um... You remember the thing Rose said the other day? The bullshit about the virgin and the rogue or whatever?”
I nodded. We weren’t touching now. She’d stopped looking at me.
“Anyway... She may have been a little closer to the truth than I let on.”
“So no football teams in your past?”
She met my eye. The vulnerability there, the way she laid herself bare to me, nearly blew me away. “Not even a football player.” She hesitated. “So, if you don’t want... I mean, I get it.”
“Do you want?”
She bit her lip. “Yeah, Diggs. I do.”
I pushed her arm away from her breasts. They were small—firm and rose-tipped, and fuller than I’d expected.
“Stop hiding from me, then,” I said. I kissed her collarbone. The freckle just under her clavicle. I felt her hands at the back of my head, the arch of her back, when I took her nipple in my mouth. Heard her whisper my name while the curtains blew at the windows and light shifted along the walls.
I took off my shirt. She leaned back on the pillows and watched, unabashed. Her eyes widened slightly when I moved to my pants.
When I returned to her, naked myself now, it felt like we’d both stepped out on a ledge. She lay back on the bed, hair splayed on the pillow, those green eyes biting through the darkness.
“You’re gorgeous, you know,” I said. I traced a finger down from her collarbone to her sternum to her rose-tipped breast. Then lower. She shifted her hips up. Her panties were still on.
“Yeah, right,” she said.
I laughed. It wasn’t sad that she didn’t know, it was absurd.
“You’ll believe me by the time summer’s out. I’ll make sure of that.” I moved in again, lower still, while she lay beneath me and seconds passed and shadows writhed on the walls around us. When she arched into me that first time, opened to me, her arms around me and her breath hot in my ear, I knew then...I was lost.
I hoped never to be found again.
◊◊◊◊◊
It was almost four by the time we fell asleep, tangled in the sheets, Solomon’s skin damp against mine.
All my ghosts visited in my dreams that early morning: Doug Philbrick, Charlene Dsengani, Jacob Deng. My mother. Rick Foster, no longer the politician—instead, a monster with sharpened fangs who watched me from the shadows. Elias. And my brother... In swim trunks again, his body whole once more.
“You’re on the right track, but you’ve got the wrong train,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He looked at me with old eyes—eyes he’d always had, even as a kid. As though he’d lived his life already, while I was busy jumping off cliffs and breaking rules.
“You’re not listening, Danny,” he said. “It’s right in front of you.”
The dream shifted, changing from ethereal white space to the woods outside Jacob Deng’s home. Deng long dead on the ground. I watched as his body healed, drawing the forest into him so that a rock became his kidney, flowers meshed to become his heart... He stood, whole once more, naked and massive. He picked up the statue that had been left behind.
“Why are you ignoring what is in front of you?” he asked me. “Why can you not see? The politician did not need our blood.”
Solomon stepped out of the forest then. She was naked in the dream. Whole, but distant. When she stepped closer, though, I saw that she was bleeding—just a small cut at the top of her sternum.
The cut grew as she approached me, as though invisible hands carved it, down between her breasts, through her belly. She stared at me—accusing me, pain registering in her eyes.
“Looks like you killed another one,” Doug Philbrick said. He appeared in a fog of mist, a blade in his hand. Somewhere far off, an alarm went off.
He cut Solomon again.
I jolted awake.
Beside me, Solomon was still asleep. It took me a moment to realize the alarm in my dream was still going off—but instead of an actual alarm, it was my cellphone.
I got up as quietly as possible, though I heard Solomon stir when I turned my back.
“Yeah?” I whispered when I answered.
“Mr. Diggins?” a man asked on the other end of the line. The accent was familiar, though the voice was only vaguely so. Like me, he whispered into the phone. “Mr. Diggins, it is Robert A
yaok Badawi. We met the other day. At Applewood Farms.”
I forced myself to a more coherent state, pulling on my boxers as I left the room. “I remember, of course. What’s up, Robert?”
“The girl,” he said. He was still whispering. There was a note of panic to his words that made my skin tighten. “They are looking for the girl. She is here.”
“Where? Why aren’t you calling the police—”
“They are here,” he said urgently. “The farm. I cannot talk to the police. I do not... I will not talk to them. But the girl is here. You must come.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just... I’ll be there, all right? Don’t do anything to put yourself in danger. Just hold tight.”
“Please hurry,” he said. He hung up before I could learn anything more.
When I turned around, already planning how I would sneak out of the apartment without waking Solomon, I found the woman in question watching me from the doorway of her bedroom. Eyes narrowed knowingly.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“There’s a...” I hesitated. The look in her eye conveyed clearly the consequences for lying to her again. I pulled out my phone one more time. “Get dressed. Maisie’s at Applewood Farms.”
I punched in Wolf’s number while Solomon went back into her room to get dressed. Lisette answered before the phone had completed its first ring.
“Yes?” she said, breathless.
“Lisette, it’s Diggs. Is Wolf there?”
“He’s still with the police. They won’t release him.” Shit. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “I just... I couldn’t sleep, and I was hoping to touch base with him. Still no word about Maisie?”
“No,” she said. Her voice was thick with the word, like tears were lodged in her throat. “Still no word.”
“Just hang tight,” I said. “There’s still time.”
She started to question me further, but I hung up before she could ask anything more. There wasn’t time, and the last thing I needed was an overwrought mother showing up at Applewood Farms when I had no clue of Davies’ state.
I was dialing the phone again when Solomon emerged from her bedroom in jeans and a sweater, her hair pulled back, one sock on and one sock off. Her lips were swollen, her eyes shadowed with fatigue. She pulled exhaustion off better than most, though.
I pulled her to me by the front of her sweater and kissed her soundly while I waited for Thibodeau to pick up his phone.
“Who are you calling?” she asked.
I held up my finger for her to wait when Thibodeau answered.
“What?” he said. He sounded hoarse, but not as groggy as someone should at four-thirty in the morning.
“I just got a call. I think I know where Maisie Dsengani is.”
I relayed my phone call with Robert Badawi to the detective. He listened wordlessly for the better part of five minutes, asking nothing until the story was finished.
“And he said Davies was there?” he asked. He lacked his usual confidence, but I chalked it up to the early hour and the exhausting case.
“He didn’t actually mention the councilman,” I said. “But when I was taking the tour the other day, they said Davies used to own the place. He still goes there and farms a lot, apparently, and he’s always tinkering with things in the basement. That must be where he’s got Maisie.”
“We’ll check it out,” Thibodeau said shortly. “You and the redhead stay put. I’ll let you know what we find.”
“No way,” I said. “I called this in in good faith. I’m coming out there whether you want me or not—”
“You do and I’ll have you arrested,” he said. There was an edge of violence to his voice that stopped me, something I hadn’t heard before. “Or I’ll just shoot you myself. Stay away from this. A little girl’s life is at risk. Just let me and my men handle this.”
He hung up on me.
Solomon stood by expectantly, eyebrows raised. “Well?”
I nodded to her feet—now with both socks but no shoes. “Get your shoes on. We’ll need to hurry if we want to get there before the whole thing’s over.”
She grinned. “You got it.”
Chapter 28
I expected lights and sirens, police barricades, maybe a chopper overhead, when I drove down the private drive to Applewood Farms at four-thirty that morning. What I got instead was...silence. And impenetrable dark, not a single light on in the estate or on the grounds.
“Where is everyone?” Solomon asked.
“Maybe we beat them here.”
“Or Thibodeau didn’t take you seriously.”
I thought of the edge in his voice, and shook my head. “No. He knew this was something.”
I parked at the edge of the lot and turned the Jeep off. An Applewood Farms van and a Chevy Nova were the only vehicles in the lot. We sat for a second in silence before the inactivity started to chafe.
“You wait here—” I began.
“Forget it,” Solomon cut me off. “Where you go, I go. That’s the deal.” I opened my mouth to argue, but she interrupted before I could get a word out. “You really think I’m safer out here alone? Give me a break. We go together.”
I nodded. Together it was.
“So no one lives here at all?” Solomon whispered to me as we made our way toward the house. The property was dark, but I could smell soil and moisture and the clean scent of growing vegetables around me.
“Not as far as I know,” I said.
“So why was Robert Badawi here in the middle of the night?” she pressed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Jesus, Solomon. Maybe he was working.”
“You don’t have to get pissy about it. This whole thing just seems a little...” She stopped. We were about fifteen yards from the house.
“A little...?” I prompted.
“Ssh.” Her hand slipped to my arm, holding me still. The air was cool and damp, wet on my skin. Fog hung low over the field.
“What?” I asked when I heard nothing.
“I don’t know. Nothing, maybe. I thought I heard a car.”
If the cops had finally arrived, there was a better-than-average chance Thibodeau would toss both of us in jail and throw away the key. If he didn’t just shoot us both.
“Maybe we should go back,” I said. I heard nothing in the distance, though, and had seen no headlights, certainly no sirens. If Maisie was in there.... I thought of Madame Rose’s warning. Maisie might not be dead yet, but every second she spent with Davies would be honest-to-god torture, and could well kill her before the councilman even meant to.
“Not yet,” Solomon said, echoing my own thoughts. “We should at least try and figure out if she’s here.”
As we got closer to the house, we both fell silent. When we reached the door, we stood there together for a minute or more in silence. Solomon was in front of me, my hand at her side. Inside the house, I thought I heard someone talking quietly, a tuneless whisper that was strangely ethereal, rising on the air around me like a physical presence.
“Should we go in?” Solomon asked. There was still no sign of the cops. Or Robert. Or...anyone.
“And how do you propose we get in?” I asked.
She reached for the doorknob. It creaked. Clicked. The door opened. “Voila.”
“Shit.”
We’d already been over the part where I suggested she stay behind, though, and it hadn’t gone well. We hovered in the doorway. Outside, I caught the shine of moonlight on chrome. It took my mind a second to process what I was seeing:
Another car, this one hidden in the shadows as close to the house as possible. I couldn’t tell make or model, only that it was big and chrome and parked far from where it should be.
“What now?” Solomon asked.
I only wished I knew. I took the first step past the threshold and hovered there, half in and half out of the house. There was no question now that I heard something coming from inside the house. A voice, definitel
y. But coming from below us.
The basement.
Outside, I heard movement. I stepped back out, knocking into Solomon in the process. I ignored her. Someone whispered behind us, at the edge of the trees—something that was as much the absence of sound as anything. I turned my head, already dreading what I would find.
Doug Philbrick grinned at me. I suppressed a shiver.
“What?” Solomon asked.
“Nothing.”
To my right, Eugene Elias stepped from the woods into the clearing. He stood directly beside the car I’d seen before, an inner light illuminating everything around him.
Including the car.
A big, old car.
For a second, Elias looked all too real. Then I caught sight of the bloody, ragged hole in his chest. I closed my eyes as he stepped closer.
“It’s trouble, Danny,” Josh said in my ear. I couldn’t see him, though. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and jumped. Solomon tried to steady me.
“Go in,” I said to Solomon, just as Elias and Philbrick closed in. I pushed her through the door.
I wasn’t fast enough, though.
I’d gotten no farther than a single step past the threshold before I felt a steel barrel press in above my kidneys.
Laura Edgecomb grabbed my arm with her other hand. “Stay where you are,” she said quietly.
“What are you doing—?” I asked.
“Just shut up,” she said. “Move.”
Solomon looked at me, her question clear even in the darkness. I heard the safety snick off on Laura’s gun.
“Now,” she said. There was no weakness, no hesitation, in her tone.
◊◊◊◊◊
Solomon used a penlight to light the path, Laura directing behind. We walked through the back door and down a dark hallway. She stopped us at a narrow door with an open padlock on the latch.
“Open it,” she said to Solomon, still quiet.
Solomon did.
There was a low ceiling, and a set of narrow stairs. Below, flickering candlelight filtered up, casting everything in hazy golden shadow. When I glanced back, Laura’s jaw was set, something manic that I hadn’t seen before in her eyes. I heard Rachel’s voice, murmuring an incantation in a language I’d never heard before. And then, the muffled protests of someone else; a scream that died before it ever reached open air.