Wicked as They Come

by Delilah S. Dawson

  Had I given him any reason to?

  The wind sighed through the trees, and I thought I caught a whisper of berries on the breeze, a breath released in resignation.

  I was glad that I had told him I loved him before we went through the gate.

  I hoped he believed it.

  After the sun had set, we all returned to our places in the guest room, except that I wasn’t bound to the bed this time. Criminy was still tied to the chair, and he seemed even more miserable and sick than before. Mr. Goodwill smiled, smug and righteous, like a cat that had eaten the canary and spit out the wings. The Coppers stood, masked by their uniforms, inhuman as blank walls. At least Tabitha wasn’t there to gloat.

  I lay back, and Mr. Goodwill draped the locket over my neck. I sighed as it fell over my heart and cupped it with my hands. Relief coursed through me, and it was all I could do to prevent a smile of joy from transforming my face. I was supposed to appear worried and trapped.

  Criminy leaned forward in his chair, straining against the rope, his muffled voice choking behind the gag.

  “Shall I swat him, sir?” one of the Coppers offered, holding up his billy club.

  “No, thank you,” Goodwill said. “Let him watch. Let him suffer.”

  I snuggled down in the bed, and the old man pushed a button to turn off the lamp. We were bathed in near darkness, and the room felt small and pressing and airless. Only the candle at Goodwill’s side remained lit, casting a ghostly glow over his hungry eyes.

  “I love you, Criminy,” I whispered.

  And I turned my head away.

  35

  My eyes flew open as I hit the floor. Something loud clattered beside me and splashed warm liquid over my face.

  I saw the side of a bed and a great deal of shag carpet. There was my hand in a latex glove and, a few feet away, a metal bedpan. A yellow puddle spread out around me, soaking into the carpet, and I coughed.

  “Tish!” an old man called. “Miss Everett! Are you OK?”

  I pushed myself up to sitting and smiled at Mr. Rathbin. “I must have tripped. How silly of me. Let me clean this up.”

  As quickly as I could, I soaked up the urine with paper towels and sprayed the carpet as if nothing unusual had happened. Inside, though, I was ecstatic.

  Of course, I knew exactly where I was and exactly what had happened. I stroked the tarnished locket, putting the puzzle together finally. The whole time I’d been in Sang since Goodwill had stolen the locket, not a single second had passed in my world. It had to be the locket’s spell that made time there run differently for me. Time passed for Casper and Jonah Goodwill and everyone else who was brain-dead or under anesthesia or dreaming. But not me. When the locket was off, I didn’t lose a single second of my life on Earth. If not for Madam Burial stealing my years in Sang, if not for the locket aging me faster there, it would have been a perfect arrangement.

  I wasn’t brain-dead. Nana wasn’t killing herself with worry. And now I knew exactly how the locket worked. If I fell asleep wearing it, I would magically wake up in the other world, whichever one I wasn’t currently in. If I took it off in either world, no time passed in the other world. But every second I spent in Sang as a human with the locket intact meant that I aged faster and faster in both worlds, my time stolen by the witch.

  I could almost have it all, just by taking off the necklace at the right time. I could have Nana and Mr. Surly and hamburgers and pet harmless little bunnies on Earth. And then I could be a part-time fortune-telling gypsy queen in a traveling show with Criminy. I could still be human, be myself. At least for a little while. It all depended on how fast Madam Burial stole my years, how much faster I aged thanks to the locket.

  Criminy had said I would always be beautiful to him, but I was guessing neither one of us wanted me to get too old and wrinkly. Still, there was time.

  Now all I had to do was save him and his entire race before bedtime.

  I could do that.

  But first I had to take care of my next patient, Mrs. Henderson. With distinct thoughts of Criminy, I slyly pocketed a bottle from her medicine cabinet. She was sleeping, she was forgetful, and her son would happily run to the pharmacy for her tomorrow when her meds turned up missing for the umpteenth time. No problem.

  Then I called in sick, claiming to have a fever. Another nurse would cover my next three patients, including Mr. Sterling. I would have to be transferred off his case. Seeing him like that, knowing that it was within my power to bring him back and that I had chosen my own happiness instead . . . it was just too depressing.

  He would have to find his own future without me. My first glance of him had shown me that loss would be his salvation, and I hoped it came to pass. I had seen pain, but I had also seen adventure and joy and a destiny not unlike my own, far away in Sang. He would be changed, but for the better. The second glance had been a new possibility, a fork in the road, and part of me would always regret not taking it. But I was committed to my path, and there was no time to lose.

  When I got to Nana’s house, I was in a hurry. It was almost six, and I still had a long way to go.

  She caught me glancing at the clock and said, “Sugar, did someone light a fire under your tail?” Her mouth turned down at the corners, but I grinned. Part of me just loved it when she got her dander up—it meant that she was still fighting.

  “No, Nana,” I said. “I’ve got a date tonight, and I don’t want to be late.”

  “Ooh, honey,” she said, clapping her hands. “Tell me all about him.”

  “He’s really handsome,” I said with a coy smile. “He’s an entrepreneur and a magician. And he’s pretty much the complete opposite of Jeff.”

  “When do I get to meet him?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “He’s really busy. And I need to make sure he’s ‘The One’ before I go introducing him to your cooking.”

  “Just make sure he takes care of you,” she said. “A true gentleman is so rare these days.”

  “He does,” I said, but it weighed heavily on my mind that right now, I needed to be taking care of him, back in his world.

  I tucked her into bed and wrapped my arms around her. My heart tugged, as it always did, when I felt how frail she was getting, how narrow her shoulders seemed. She had always been solid, a rock of comfort and warmth who had eclipsed my distant mother and overly busy father in my heart. But I couldn’t escape the fact that she was losing her battle, and nothing in the world could help her.

  After I walked out her door, I was all business. I drove to the library and waited my turn for a free computer. I typed “helping hands homecare” into the search engine, and on the second page, I found it. The same logo from the van in my glance of Jonah Goodwill, two hands forming a heart. Luckily, they weren’t far enough away to get me on a plane, but the two-hundred-mile drive to Greenville was going to take much longer than I would have liked. I scribbled down the number.

  Alone in my car, I made the call. The night nurse said, “Helping Hands Homecare, we bring the care to you. This is Terry Ann.” She sounded bored. I could almost hear her doing a crossword with her TV on low volume in the background.

  “Hi there, Terry Ann,” I said with the kind of smile that travels through phone lines. “I’m so sorry to bother you tonight, but I’m a nurse at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, and I’ve got a patient named Louise Shepherd who’s on her last legs, and she’s trying to find a Mr. Grove somewhere near Greenville. She said that he’s on home care after a head injury, and he’s one of your clients. Is there any way you could help me find him?”

  “Ma’am, we don’t release the personal information of our patients,” she droned.

  “I understand that, and I’m so sorry to ask, but I promised her I’d try. I’ve been taking care of her for a few weeks, and her mind comes and goes, and Mr. Grove is all she ever talks about. She can’t even remember his first name, and she doesn’t seem to understand that he’s unresponsive. But she wanted to give him a keepsake, her husba
nd’s Purple Heart from the war. Maybe I could mail it to you, and you could give it to him?”

  There was a pause, and I could hear her reserve crumbling. That sounded like a lot of work, and she’d like to get rid of me, but as a nurse, I understood how these things worked. Nurses work in nursing because they like helping people, after all.

  “Honey, I ain’t supposed to do this,” she said, her voice low. “But my grandfather had a Purple Heart, too, and I know what a big deal that is to old folks. I believe you’re talking about Mr. Jonathan Grove of 1655 Sycamore Lane in Anderson. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Oh, thank you so much!” I gushed. “You have just made my night and her year. She’ll be able to go to her eternal rest now.”

  “Good luck, ma’am, and God bless,” she said before hanging up.

  I felt a little bad for heartlessly killing the fictitious Louise Shepherd, but it was for a good cause. And I was pretty sure she didn’t feel a thing.

  I programmed the address into my GPS and started driving. I listened to my favorite CDs and enjoyed the safety and silence of my world, my car a little fortress of solitude. I thought through the plan over and over again in my head, trying to work out every detail. For all of his own planning, Jonah Goodwill had missed a lot of details himself, and I wondered if his mind was slipping. He was a man of power and influence, but doctors didn’t seem to exist in Sang. Maybe he was suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s, something they would have caught in my world. Or maybe he’d just started out plumb crazy.

  It was pitch dark as I zoomed over the state line. I navigated past fields and strip malls and trailer parks until I turned onto Sycamore Lane. The country road was long and barely lit and lonely, but I eventually saw the brick wall from my glance, lit up by fancy yard lights. The matching brick house was needlessly huge, and I imagined that the lawn-care staff was even more extensive than the one at Eden House in Sang.

  All that trouble for a vegetable who’d never wake up. What a waste.

  I stopped in a dark spot a hundred yards away and straightened my scrubs. I put my ID badge into the glove compartment and tucked the locket under my shirt. I didn’t know who would be in the house, whether a nurse stayed around the clock or Mr. Goodwill had a housekeeper or a housesitter or an entire extended family. I just had to hope that whoever it was wasn’t very bright. Or nosy.

  For the tenth time, I checked to make sure that I had all the supplies I needed in my tote bag before I rolled the car into the driveway. No Helping Hands van, which was good. A layperson would be much easier to deal with. Before knocking on the door, I put on my brightest smile.

  Time to channel the talented and charismatic Lady Letitia Paisley.

  The first knock didn’t raise anybody, so I rang the doorbell. There was movement within, and the porch lights came on, nearly blinding me. And then I heard a click I’d heard only in movies, and the door opened, and I was staring into the barrel of a shotgun. After all, it was the middle of the night on a lonely road in the country.

  “Can I help you?” said a teenage boy in an open bathrobe and boxer shorts. His glasses were smudged, and there were Cheetos crumbs clinging sadly to a couple of hairs above his lip.

  I looked over the gun and smiled nervously.

  “Hi. Did Terry Ann at Helping Hands tell you I would be coming? I’m Carrie, and I have Mr. Grove’s medicine.”

  The shotgun dropped, and the boy sniffed. “Nobody called. Sorry ’bout the gun. It’s late.”

  “I know it is,” I said apologetically. I held my tote bag open and said, “I’m just filling in. His usual nurse forgot to switch out the IV bag, and they also wanted to start him on IV Zosyn. It’s an antibiotic. It’ll just take me a minute.”

  The sullen boy opened the door, and I stepped into a beautiful marble foyer with the sort of curving staircase that must come equipped with at least one debutante in a white dress.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Are you Mr. Grove’s grandson?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m Toby. We all take turns staying over here, because Grampa’s lawyer’s too cheap to hire somebody. At least he’s got good cable.”

  “You’re a good boy to take care of your grandfather,” I said.

  “I never even met him,” the boy said. He shuffled over to loaf on a long corner sofa in the next room and turned on the TV. “He’s been out for, like, twenty years.”

  He sat down with his back to me and started switching channels, adding, “He’s upstairs in the big room.”

  I walked up the curving staircase and padded down the deep carpet to the only door with a light shining inside. On the way, I didn’t pass a single family photograph or heirloom. The house reminded me of something set up for a magazine. Some obsessively neat aunt probably hired a decorator every five years or so to redo the whole place around the softly breathing man in the bedroom, who never even knew what the walls looked like.

  The door was ajar, and I slipped in. There he was, lying in the bed I’d seen in my glance. He was propped up with pillows, and his mustache and hair were carefully trimmed. Even his pajamas were crisp, although I thought it ironic that the top button was unbuttoned, which could never happen in Sang. The room was warm and stuffy, and there was nothing personal, not a single memento. In the background, the radio hummed old-fashioned hymns.

  No wonder the old man in Sang was crazy.

  I walked to the window, which was covered by thick, light-blocking draperies. Peeking out, I had déjà vu, even though it was nighttime. That glorious magnolia reigned over the walled-in garden, sister to the greenspace behind Eden House. The man simply could not let go of his old life. I opened the drapes all the way. The waxy white blooms glowed in the moonlight, and I wondered if Mr. Goodwill shivered in Sang, thinking that a goose had walked over his grave as he kept vigil over my body and Criminy’s fury.

  Back to my patient. He had a port in his chest for the IV, and I had to unbutton his pajama top to get to it. Luckily, the IV bag was nice and full, so I had plenty of time; his real nurse must have left recently. I leaned out through the doorway and heard Toby open a soft-drink can and collapse on the couch. Then I heard soft moans. Excellent—careless, hormonal grandson plugged into Cinemax. I closed the door gently and locked it, then turned on the overhead light.

  With loving precision, I laid out my supplies on the bed.

  36

  The timing had to be just right.

  Step One: Prepare the syringe, draw up 250 units of Mrs. Henderson’s pilfered insulin, and inject it into Mr. Grove’s IV line.

  Step Two: Use the baby butterfly needle to draw a tube of my own blood.

  Mr. Goodwill didn’t know that nothing translated from world to world except my body and the locket. I couldn’t bring over a syringe or a cup or a finger in a baggie, per his instructions.

  Step Three: Stuff everything back into the bag, lie down on my back on the floor, and pour the syringe of my own blood into my mouth.

  I really didn’t like Step Three.

  Step Four: Let my complete exhaustion overtake me in sleep.

  I’d considered taking meds to induce my rest, but I didn’t want to lie around on the floor, drugged up at his bedside, when I came back. Getting out of that house without real-world consequences was going to take my best acting performance yet.

  Excited as I was, I knew that sleep would claim me as quickly as ever.

  Step Five: Hope that my mouth stayed shut when I went unconscious.

  Step Six: Pray that my cockamamie plan worked.

  37

  My eyes flickered open, and I fought the urge to spew blood all over the place. Somehow I managed to keep my lips together and my cheeks puffed. I sat up and found Criminy across the dark room. The curtains were drawn closed, and brilliant sunlight burned around the edges. Jonah Goodwill slumped at my bedside, snoring through his mustache.

  Criminy’s eyes were wide and panicky, his mouth still stuffed with a handkerchief. When he saw that I was con
scious, I gave him an exaggerated wink and tried to ease myself silently off the bed. It creaked, and Goodwill startled awake. I sank back down and tried to look pained.

  “You’re back,” he said. “Have you got it?”

  I nodded my head and pointed to my bulging cheeks. Then I pointed to the door and held my hand up at chest height with a questioning “Hmm?”

  He didn’t get it, so I tried a pantomime of a slutty lady with fangs. Mr. Goodwill caught on and chuckled. He rang a bell, and when a servant appeared, he said, “Please ask Miss Scowl and Rodvey to join us.”

  My cheeks burned, and the blood began to seep down my throat a little. I tried not to gag.

  A few moments later, Tabitha Scowl swooped into the room, followed by my old, venomous friend Rodvey, who was obviously disgusted with the lot of us.

  “Rodvey, please hold Miss Scowl’s arms behind her back,” Goodwill said conversationally, and quick as a snake, Tabitha was caught painfully and fighting Rodvey’s grasp. The fake locket bounced off her chest as she struggled.

  “This wasn’t part of the bargain, Jonah!” she cried.

  “It’s just a test of your loyalty, my dear,” he said kindly. Then he took my gloved hand to help me up from the bed and ushered me over to the tiny, squirming Bludwoman.

  Just as I was about to spit the blood at her, Goodwill said, “And now, Tabitha, if you will, please remove the handkerchief from Mr. Stain’s mouth.”

  Rodvey let go of Tabitha, and she chuckled darkly as she sashayed to Criminy and slowly removed the gag. Then she stood back, arms crossed over her chest, to watch the show.

  Criminy took in a big breath and said, “Not to be too repetitive, but this wasn’t part of the bargain, Jonah.”

  “Like you’d ever be peaceable after this,” Goodwill snapped. “You’d be at my throat tomorrow, or starting a riot, or telling the newspapers. You’re far too dangerous to live.”