by Gwen Hunter
A mechanical voice said, “You have something of ours. We want it back or he’ll die.”
I stared at the message machine, red lights twinkling.
Evan was suddenly at my side. “Play it again.”
Numb, I punched the play button and the voice said, “You have something of ours. We want it back or he’ll die.”
“Again.”
I played the message again, fear quivering in my belly.
“What time did that come in?”
I looked at the readout and said, “Eight twenty-two this evening.” Beside the time of the call should have been the caller’s number. Instead I saw only a series of x’s. “Caller ID got nothing.”
“I’ll need that tape.” When I removed a computer disc from the back of the machine, Evan’s brows went up. “I don’t think the local cops can access anything that sophisticated. I don’t guess you could make a tape of it for me? And I’ll still need the disc for evidence.”
I popped the digital disc into the phone and found an old microcassette recorder in my electronics cabinet. I made two tapes of all the messages, gave Evan one tape and the disc, and popped a replacement disc back into the phone, saving one copy of the messages for myself, for later.
Evan placed his copy and the disc in a paper envelope, which he labeled with my name, the date and the model number of my answering machine. As he sealed the envelope, he said, “Pretty fancy electronics.”
I shrugged. “Davie likes toys. He keeps me up-to-date electronically. Changes my hardware systems annually. He also writes computer programs and installs them on my systems. It can be a pain, but he likes to tinker.” My brother was hurt.
“Now we have a ransom notice. Local cops will be around. And they’ll likely want you to come to the station for an interview.”
I jerked at the word ransom. I had what they wanted. I had…something and they took Davie to get it back. What?
“What do you have of David’s?” Evan asked, echoing my thoughts.
“I don’t….” A shiver shook me. This was real. I turned away from the phone, staring at the apartment as if it could tell me what they wanted, these hidden, amorphous people who had my brother. The apartment was one huge space, the roof held up by three pillars painted to look like green marble. The bathroom was in one corner shielded from the windows, the toilet concealed in its own little cubicle. No closets, just a row of mix-and-match art deco armoires along one wall, chests and trunks here and there. There was no place to hide anything. I had nothing of Davie’s. Nothing at all. I shook my head.
“What about gifts he’s given you? Letters? Notes? E-mails? Photographs—”
I held up a hand to stop him and went to the cedar-lined maple chest at the foot of the bed. It had been my mother’s and her initials were carved into the front on a raised panel of darker wood. Lifting the lid, I fished out a thin packet of Christmas and birthday cards tied with twine. I handed them to the cop as the scent of cedar wafted into the room. “You can make copies, but I want the originals back as soon as possible.”
I pushed aside old wedding notices and invitations and the personalized stationery I had designed for Stan and me when we were first married. Moved a tin box that held my mother’s well-read Bible, her crucifix and her little-used Tarot cards. The Aquarius deck was still sealed in its cellophane, the Waite deck and the Minchiate deck favored by most St. Claires showed only faint wear. Mama had eschewed the tools of the family trade, as I had. Her journal was beneath the Tarot card tin, the pages curled and often read.
To the side, I found an old three-ring notebook filled with photographs and Mama’s little notations describing each scene and person. The St. Claire album. Childhood photos of Mama and Davie and me at the mountain cabin where we’d lived after leaving the Low Country. Happy. Then, later photographs of Mama and Dumont Lowe, the only father I ever remembered. The four of us had made a family for a few years until Mama was killed.
I glanced up at the Tarot prints hanging over the tub. They had been my mother’s prints. She had kept them even after fleeing the St. Claires and their way of life. The gold foil that gilded the Ace of Swords caught the light. My father’s card. Beside it, my mother’s card was in shadow. The Tarot touched everything tonight. A tremor of premonition raced through me, and I shoved it aside and away, deep into the dark.
I returned to Mama’s album, flipped through and saw Christmas photos, Thanksgiving photos. Photos of us all at the beach. Then, the year I was ten, they stopped. There were no more childhood photographs in the book. Life with Dumont after Mama died hadn’t been hard. He hadn’t beaten us or let us go hungry. He’d simply not loved us. And had never taken a photograph of us at all.
Two blank pages separated my early life from my adult life. I pulled a photo of Davie and gave it to Bartlock. Evan took the old album, too, flipping through its pages, not commenting on the scarcity of childhood contents. He closed it and handed it back to me. “What’s that?” he asked.
I glanced into the chest and saw the .38. “It’s a gun.” Duh. “Davie says a woman living alone needs protection.” With two fingers, I lifted the gun to the cop. “I have registration papers here, too.” I offered the papers, but Evan barely glanced at them.
He broke open the little gun and rotated the cylinder. “Smith and Wesson Airweight. It’s not loaded. What good is a gun without bullets?”
“You sound like Davie. I don’t like guns.”
“You know how to use this one?”
“I could hit the broadside of a barn if I practiced for a week or two.”
Evan laughed. The sound was breathy, a stuttering exhalation. He handed back the gun. “It’s a good weapon, but it’s pretty worthless at more than fifteen feet and it kicks like a son of a gun. So to speak. If you don’t practice regularly and you don’t keep it loaded, why do you keep it around?”
“Sisterly submission?”
Bartlock looked as if he thought submission wasn’t a likely character trait for me but he let it go. “This is all you have of David’s?”
“Yes.” I looked at the cards in Evan Bartlock’s hands. “You’ll take care of them?”
“I will.” It sounded like a promise. Maybe not a sacred promise, but a truthful one. He looked at the top card and a smile threatened. “He calls you Brat?” When I simply nodded, he said, “I’m sure I’ll have more questions later. And the local cops will want to talk to you. You plan to stay in town?”
“Yes.” I replaced the photo album and closed the lid. The reality of Davie being in trouble—real trouble—was settling into me like an illness, the flu or leukemia, stealing my strength, my ability to think, to plan. I traced Mama’s initials on the chest with a finger. The grain felt unreal, plastic, false. I was numb.
Evan set his mug on the chest and moved across the open space to the door. Not knowing what else to do, I rose and followed him down the stairs. I figured his walking away meant we were done. I was too drained to think about manners. For once, I wasn’t thinking about anything.
At the door to the shop, Evan stepped back and waited while I once again turned off the security system and keyed the lock. Outside, he turned to me, his face a silhouette in the moonlight, and handed me a business card. “You should put bullets in that gun. It would be a lot more effective as a defensive weapon than that rock you carry around. Call me if you think of anything or need anything. Aunt Matilda told me to take care of you.”
I was pretty sure I saw amusement in his eyes. I realized I hadn’t made him explain the family relationship, but at the moment I didn’t care. And I wasn’t putting bullets in a gun as long as Jane came to visit. No way. But I wasn’t going to argue with him, either. I shrugged.
“’Night.” Evan Bartlock, cop, bearer of bad news, long-lost family member, walked down the ice-crusted walk with a careful gait. I watched him go, a lump in my throat.
Across the way something flitted. I caught it in the periphery of my vision, a shadow in the shadows, but it didn�
��t reappear. Unsettled, worried, I closed the shop door and reset both lock and alarm system. Heart heavy, I climbed the stairs to call Jane.
Though it was late, she answered on the first ring, her voice muffled, terrified, hopeful. “Daddy?”
“No, Jane. It’s me.”
She sobbed, the sound broken. Across the phone lines I felt the jagged edges of her shattered hope. “They said someone took my daddy.”
“I know. I know. But the police are working on it right now.” My heart wrenched, twisted through with fear, a faint thread of anger, and an overriding worry for my brother and his child.
“Somebody has to help him.” Her voice was hoarse from crying, and I knew she had pulled the covers over her head, huddling into the center of her mattress, her stuffed animals gathered around her, her cat sleeping under her chin. “Somebody has to bring him back.”
“The police will get him back.” It was a promise I couldn’t prove or guarantee. A promise that was more hope than reality. “The police will get him back,” I repeated more firmly, as if to convince myself as well as Jane. “Tell me all about it,” I said, as I curled into my cold sheets and pulled the down comforter over me. With the lights still blazing, keeping away the shadows, I set myself to comforting and being comforted.
3
Monday, 4:20 a.m.
Mist swirled around me. Cold. White and crimson. Blood on snow. Steaming and hot with life and with dying. I struggled to wake. I knew what this was. The dream. The vision. But I was caught in it. Ensnared, as always. “No!” I shouted, struggling to turn away. Pain gripped me. A cold so intense it felt like burning. And I didn’t know if this was part of the vision, the nightmare that trapped me, or if I fought something more real than illusion. Thunder sounded. Always the thunder.
My arms were bound in front of me. My hands below the rope were blue, dead. Useless. Fists like a club, I crawled up the drift, the cold spearing me, my flesh so frozen it shattered and fell from my hands.
In a hole on the ground was a body. The first body. Davie, face pale and blue, empty of blood, the blood that soaked into the snow all around me. The blood I knelt in. Beside him was Jane. A tiny bundle. Jane, the day I first saw her, dead. Blood. So much blood.
“No!” I woke. Ripped myself free of the vision, the ugly thing that chased me and sat up fast. I was in my bed. In the dark. My sheets were sweat soaked, my breath a bellows. Fists that still ached gripped the pillows and pulled them to me in the cold loft. It was fading, slipping away. The awful nightmare that wasn’t a nightmare, never had been, not exactly.
I opened my eyes at the sound of the alarm—talk radio. Some right-wing pinko fascist blaring at me. Or maybe it was a left-wing pinko commie. They both sounded alike at eight in the morning. I was annoyed enough to want to throw the clock through the window, but I’d just have to buy another one and it would be equally irritating. One of these days I was going to get an alarm I could program myself so I could wake up to the sound of applause or a classical sonata or the sound of birds in the trees rather than a buzzer or radio voice.
The memory of the night before roared back into my mind. A rush of heat swept through me and froze instantly into glacial rivers of fear. I swiped off the strident voice of the DJ and rolled out of bed, reaching for the remote and clicking to local news.
I raced through a shower, keeping an eye on the TV for news of Davie. The program seemed much more interested in the snowstorm that had blown in last night than in human beings in trouble. Twice an announcer read a teaser about a local man kidnapped, but it seemed they were saving the good stuff for the last part of the show. Uncaring fiends. I shot a fierce glance at the faces on the screen with each teaser.
I could almost hear my calmer brother murmur, “Temper, temper.” But I was entitled to some hostility. I had gotten too little sleep between too many bad dreams, leaving me feeling as if I were insulated in misery. Davie was missing, not here to see me throw things. Missing. And someone thought I had something that would get him back.
I didn’t know how to do fear, but I could put a hurting on anger. I slammed down my soap so hard it bounced off the shower wall and skittered around the ceramic floor. I dried off fast and slathered up with moisturizer.
Naked, swathed in shea butter cream, I looked in the mirror. I had dark circles under my eyes, making me look sick or grieving. The only part of me that looked like a professional jewelry designer was the hair. I’d fallen asleep talking on the phone with Jane and my hair was still in an upsweep of shining red-gold curls. Good hair-day. Bad brother-day. I’d trade good hair for Davie in a heartbeat.
When the announcers turned to each other with somber faces, I hit the volume button.
“We have a missing citizen, Georgia.”
“Sounds serious, Michael. What can you tell us about it?”
“Tom is in the field and he has an on-the-spot update for us. But first, this video has been released by the police department. It shows local businessman David St. Claire being attacked in a service alley. It’s pretty horrific stuff, so we’re warning our viewing audience, especially our young viewers, to beware.”
Yeah, that was calculated to make a hormone-driven, adrenaline-pumped preteenager turn off the set.
The screen changed to a drab black-and-white film of a service alley, at an intersection of another alley, a grayed-out Dumpster to one side, piles of garbage and boxes visible. A man with a knapsack on his shoulder walked along, his motion the jerky result of poor-quality, slow-feed video. Davie. I tensed all over, cold chills running down my arms and legs. “Spit and decay,” I whispered.
From the side, two forms moved in fast. My heart seized and stuttered. The icy chills scraped my flesh into peaks so tight they ached.
Two men, both in jeans and hiking boots, flannel shirts, one in a dark, bulky vest, approached my brother at a run. They didn’t pause or appear to speak to Davie. They rushed him, cupped hands flying, feet kicking. Davie went down fast beneath the hail of blows. His pack fell and opened, unidentified things scattering. When he lay still, the men pulled him off, one carrying his backpack and gathering the fallen items. It took only seconds.
Acid boiled up my throat.
They never once faced the camera. All I could tell was that they were white and medium build. Your average Caucasian American males, mountain-living, outdoorsy type guys. As innocuous as the medium brown man who had attacked me at the rock-and-gem show. There were a blue-million of them.
A dull pain started below my ribs and spread outward. Nausea sloshed in my belly. I raced to the toilet and reached it just as I heaved, but my stomach was empty. Dry heaves caught me, doubling me over until the horror passed. Afterward, my legs gave way and I slumped to the floor, a sour taste in my mouth. I could hear the news announcer’s vapid comments about the attack and could tell they were running the video again. In other circumstances, I might call them buzzards for using the video to boost ratings. Now I just wanted them to play it all day. Maybe someone would recognize the men.
When I could stand, I washed out my mouth with orange-flavored mouthwash and turned off the television. The loft swam around me. I breathed in and it hurt my lungs to take in air. I shivered hard. I didn’t do fear, I reminded myself. I didn’t. But Davie was in trouble. “Ashes and spit.” The words were bitter, the sound a roar in my ears. But there was nothing I could do. Not a blasted thing.
I looked across the narrow rooftop garden to Jubal and Isaac’s loft. Their large apartment spanned two shops below, and for a moment I wanted to rush over and bang on the French doors, fall into the comfort my friends would offer. But the drapes were closed tight against the early hour and the cold, and no light leaked from the edges. They were still asleep.
Shaking, I finished dressing. I had laid out tan tones for today, to show off a turquoise set I would wear in the shop as display, but I had to stop and think about which shoes I should wear. Had to concentrate to make the choice between navy and tan boots. Had to work hard to
think about makeup. Davie was hurt. Davie was missing. And once more, just as when I was a teenager, I couldn’t help, and I didn’t know where he was.
Unable to stop myself, I turned on the television again and caught the tail end of a local interview. At first I thought it was a man-in-the-street interview about the attack, but when I looked closely, I recognized Gail Speeler, a girl Davie had dated. She was distraught, her face chapped and red from weather and tears, her lustrous black hair falling forward over her face. She looked into the camera and grabbed the reporter at the same time. “Please bring him back!” she said. “Please don’t hurt him. Please don’t hurt him.”
A vision slammed into me. Someone was hurting Davie. Right now. Someone was beating my brother. I knew it. The world tilted and went still. I felt the blows fall. Heard Davie scream. And the image vanished.
I could hear an arrhythmic wheeze of sound, a soft moan. The rooster clock ticked steadily. Light coruscated against my slit eyelids. Slowly I opened my eyes.
I was on the floor, curled in a tight ball. I uncurled gradually, stretching on the rug. Blinked. Tried to breathe in. Some wounded part of me expected to feel the shocking pain of fresh blows, but I felt only the bruises from the rock-and-gem show. The family gift, as usual, offering only enough to drive me crazy. Not enough to help.
And this…this vision was so like my recurring dream. The one I first had when I came into my gift, alone and frightened. The vision that still haunted me from time to time, coming in the dark of night, a mocking enemy to prick my mind and flesh, to draw blood. The ancient scene of violence and death and the sound of thunder. Of the sight of Davie and Jane dead, their life force bled out on the snow, minds forever dark and empty.
Anger started a slow surge deep inside. Fierce tears gathered in my eyes. My breathing sped up. I could feel my neck splotching with furious red welts. “No!” I shouted to the rafters. “No-no-no-no-no-NO!”
They were hurting Davie. And I had what they wanted. If I knew what it was, I’d shove it down their throats and hope they choked on it.