Bloodstone

by Gwen Hunter

  “Aunt Matilda? Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “No. I’m fine,” she said, her words almost lost beneath the ringing in my ears.

  “Jane isn’t. Something’s wrong.”

  Sirens gathered in the street outside, blue lights strobing. I pulled my niece onto my lap and rocked her. Aunt Matilda stood and slipped into her dress, which she had left draped over the couch. She bent over the bed and stroked Jane’s face. “All will be fine, dear. We will handle everything.” She dropped to the floor in a squat, then stood again and turned on a light. The sudden brightness was painful and tears gathered for a moment as I watched her. The older woman’s eyes roamed the loft, taking in Jane and me huddled on the trundle bed, spotting something at the fireplace, noting the door to the garden still hanging open.

  Isaac was suddenly there, bare chested, skin gleaming in the lamplight. His nut-brown body was poised in attack mode, eyes wide. He flowed into the apartment, moving with a predatory smoothness. The grace of the trained warrior, liquid death in white boxers. Jubal was behind him, dressed in a red kimono with a white bird in flight across the chest. He held a fireplace poker over his head. It gleamed golden brass in the lamplight. My avenging gladiators, armed for battle. Laughter tittered in the back of my throat.

  “He’s gone,” I said. “Over the back wall.”

  Isaac and Jubal ran to the rear, out of the glow of light. Downstairs, someone was banging on the doors. The glass rattled hard enough to hear through the intervening walls and floor. I picked up the cell phone from the linens and said to the woman, still calling out to me, “The police are here. Thank you.”

  Watching me, Aunt Matilda stuck something in her pocket and crossed the room to the loft door. Her expression held a curious mix of emotions as she disappeared down the stairs to let in the police. Anger, frustration, curiosity, and some nonspecific warning. Warning of what? And then I remembered the sequence of shots. Something was wrong with them, out of place. But what?

  I rocked Jane, hearing the approach of booted feet, rough male voices and Aunt Matilda’s soothing tones. The sound of bullets replayed over and over in my mind. Three shots? Or four? They had overlapped. And Aunt Matilda had something in her pocket. What had she done?

  I turned Jane over to Aunt Matilda to tend as Isaac, Evan and I dealt with the scientific types and the questions of the detective. My mind straying to the overlapped shots and what Aunt Matilda had in her pocket, I made the mistake of admitting that I thought that maybe, conceivably, the man who entered the loft was the brown man from the rock-and-gem show. Perhaps. By the way he moved. Yes. In the dark.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should have kept my big mouth closed. How could I have seen him, the nondescript, middlesized brown man, on the roof in the deep of night? I couldn’t have. No way. But I had. And he had seen me. Had there been something in his mind? Had I picked up on it? What was it? I pushed the worry to the back of my mind.

  Jack Madison was not a happy man. The wattled skin of the detective’s neck and jowls quivered each time I repeated that I hadn’t clearly seen the attacker, but that I still felt it was the brown man. Though I couldn’t say why I thought that. Madison grew a bit grayer each time I spoke, and I felt a lot more stupid. I watched as he went from actively taking notes to simply looking around. Bored. Why hadn’t I kept my big flapping mouth closed? What did Aunt Matilda have in her pocket?

  The cops gathered, tagged and confiscated the rock spheres I had thrown, all but the bloodstone sphere, which couldn’t be found. Not that they looked very hard. They generally acted like I was making it all up, as if it were an attempt to cast suspicion away from me.

  Uncharacteristically, Aunt Matilda said nothing at all, simply holding Jane, shushing her occasionally, and watching us all, that odd expression now more thoughtful, as if she were waiting for something to happen. And when the investigation moved to the rooftop garden her expression changed to one of expectation.

  The situation changed for the cops when Evan, who was alert and wired at five in the morning, discovered a splatter of blood in the garden, a trail that led over the wall and down into the snow. At that point, the disinterested, perfunctory investigation evolved quickly into a full-blown workup.

  Dawn came fast as a crime-scene cop dusted the door frame for fingerprints. Another found a small brass bullet casing where it had rolled under the sofa. A third tech dug a bullet out of the wall over the fireplace, where it had remained hidden in the dim light.

  One casing. One bullet. Three or four shots. I was sure of it. I looked at Aunt Matilda again. The warning on her face was penetrating. This time, I kept my mouth closed.

  Other cops in winter jackets, scarves and gloves followed the blood trail and tracks through the alley, from the spot the brown man had landed in the pile of snow and fought his way clear to a connecting alley and the street beyond where the trail disappeared and they lost him.

  At the appearance of blood, the surly law-enforcement techs, who had been pulled out of bed before sunup, had stopped grousing continuously. Now as they worked, they made careful notes in little notebooks and palm-sized electronic devices. They found a second casing on the floor near the door, where it had rolled under the fringe of a rug. More excited, they inspected every pane of glass in the French doors to the garden, dusted the top of the wall, which was a waste of time, and the ladder leaning against the wall to the rooftop garden. They got dozens of smudged prints off the ladder, but nothing from anywhere else. Nothing they seemed very hopeful about. Especially not the ladder. It had obviously been cadged from the pile of painter’s supplies exposed by the melting snow. They figured the man who entered my loft had worn gloves.

  Well, duh.

  Except for my brother’s kidnapping, the attempt to remove Jane from the school, and my assertion that I knew the invader, it looked like an attempted crime of opportunity. Attempted burglary. Yeah, right. The cops took samples of the blood splatters to prove an ID, saying they wanted to compare it to the DNA of the men who had waited in the alley and attacked Davie. I told them it was a waste of time, but they said it was procedure. What could I do about the waste of taxpayer money. Not a thing.

  And then, a tech, packing up his big orange-and-beige equipment box, knelt on something hard. I wasn’t watching, but I felt him tighten. I stepped around Jack Madison to watch. The tech was a little scrawny fellow, the kind with mountain-climber muscles and high metabolism wrapped around an anal-retentive mind.

  He moved his knee and pushed aside the rug, where it rested on the edge of a second rug. I hated cold floors. He picked up something that shone gold in the artificial light. Carefully, he placed it in a brown paper evidence bag. As he did, he paused as if thinking. Remembering. Comparing. I knew what he had found. This casing was different from the others, smaller or longer or something. He looked up, saw me watching him and schooled his expression to neutral. Giving me his back, he continued packing and stood to go. Before leaving the loft, he stopped and spoke quietly into Jack’s ear. The two shifted glances at me, then away.

  Madison ambled over, deceptively casual. “I understand you have a thirty-eight. Mind if I take a look at it?”

  “Sure.” I walked over to Mama’s trunk, squatted down and opened it. Of course the gun wasn’t there. I knew it wouldn’t be. I rocked back on my heels, looked at Madison, and lied with a straight face. “I don’t know where I put it.” Well, that was only sort of a lie. I didn’t remember where I had put it, but I had a good idea where it was at the moment. Anyway, Madison didn’t ask me that. “I was doing some target practice down at the KO range. It might be in my Tracker. You’re welcome to look. Keys are on the hook at the door.” I pointed. Jack followed my finger and left, my keys in hand. After his departure, the techs took off, too, back into the cold to the LEC. Shooting me a look rife with suspicion, Evan went with them.

  None the wiser, Isaac and Jubal went back to their apartment. As dawn grayed the sky, we three females were finally alone. With the lo
ft empty, Jane instantly fell into an exhausted slumber, Aunt Matilda’s hand on her shoulder.

  My apartment looked like a herd of buffalo had wandered through in the night. Everything was tossed around, dirty with red fingerprint dust, smudged and messy. Of course, there was no buffalo poop. I could be happy about that.

  I checked the locks on the doors and windows, walking like an automaton, watching my hands move as if they had a will of their own. Neither of us spoke.

  When we were secure, I dropped my hands and met Aunt Matilda’s eyes across the way, holding them. She had the grace to look abashed as she stood and straightened her wrinkled dress. As she moved, she pulled my small bloodstone sphere from a pocket and placed it on the bedside table near the clock. The sphere rolled slowly to the center where it stopped, rocking back and forth languidly.

  From another pocket, she pulled my little .38 Smith & Wesson Airweight and one brass casing, and laid them on my mother’s trunk. The brass casing was a dead ringer for the one taken by the tech. I sighed.

  That faint click I had heard before the firing started. Three or four shots, overlapping. I hadn’t injured the attacker with the rocks I’d thrown. He’d been injured by my gun. “Why didn’t you just say you shot him?” I asked.

  Aunt Matilda swept a tendril of hair from Jane’s face, resting one hand on the sleeping girl’s shoulder. When she met my eyes again, hers were fierce. “I didn’t shoot him.”

  I looked at my niece, half-buried in the deep drifts of my linens. “Spit and decay,” I whispered. I taught her how to fire the gun.

  “Indeed.”

  Because it was Saturday, I dressed with special care before going down to open the shop. Staring back from my reflection in the bathroom mirror was a stranger, pale skinned, frowsy haired. The lack of a full night’s sleep for days at a time was getting to me. I had dark rings beneath my eyes that makeup only pretended to hide, and my hair, always ready to curl into kinks, was rather more like a bird’s nest than usual. It resisted any attempts to smooth it down, and when I tugged and twisted the locks into a tight French braid, stiff tendrils crimped out like coiled splinters. I looked like a porcupine, so I smeared gel into the sides, sweeping the loose hair back against my head. Now my head looked like a porcupine after it had crawled through an oil slick.

  I dressed in a bright teal-and-coral ensemble that called attention to the multicolored, seven-strand, turquoise choker made with Arizona turquoise, Chinese turquoise, rough nugget turquoise and heishi turquoise, with tiny antique silver beads and a fabulous coral inlaid silver focal bead from Thailand. The necklace hadn’t sold last year, partly because the old silver appeared drab in the display. It needed to be worn to sell, and it looked perfectly lovely on me, even with the black eye rings and a new pimple that reddened my chin. The puckered scar near my collarbone looked irritated in the morning light, as if even it suffered from lack of sleep.

  My manicure was long gone, nails broken and chipped, so I removed the nail polish, filed down the tips and added a single coat of clear before clipping the choker’s matching bracelet to my wrist. I slid on three rings, hoping jewelry would draw the eye away from my hair and pallor. Except for tired eyes, frizzy head and the zit that threatened to rise like Mount St. Helen’s in the middle of my chin, I looked pretty good. I added my own turquoise hoops to each ear, and draped the ornate key on its thong around my neck under my shirt. I was still thinking about next year’s Valentine’s Day necklaces. I really liked the idea of a key as motif, and with good blood-stone becoming so hard to find, a silver key on a nugget strand might be just the thing. Key to my heart, and all that.

  As satisfied as I could be under the circumstances, I bent over Aunt Matilda and touched her shoulder. My eyes firmly on my niece, I softly asked, “Have you tried again to get a scan on Davie?”

  “Yes. I tried. I get nothing. And Jane is trying, too, far too hard. She wants so desperately—” she drew in a ragged breath “—so desperately to find her father.”

  I nodded. This couldn’t go on. It just couldn’t. I stood and looked at my aunt. “I’ll try a scan for Davie. Tonight. Will you help me?”

  Relief flooded her face. Tears gathered in her eyes. “Oh, yes. Yes, I’ll help.”

  I was wrapping the turquoise necklace, bracelet, and the set’s matching earrings in a bright pink Valentine’s Day box when Harry Boone came inside. He had on his cop face, stiff and cold and unyielding. But because I once had peeked inside his mind, I felt the underlying malice of his intent and the small-minded meanness of his heart. He was here to cause me trouble. And he was going to enjoy it.

  I smiled brightly and nodded the customer out of the shop. For the moment, Bloodstone Inc. was empty. Jubal put a foot on the rail behind the counter and leaned over it, resting on his elbows. Noe came from the back carrying fresh stock and stopped in the doorway, looking back and forth. I let my smile die a quick death and crossed my arms. “What?” I asked the cop. It sounded like an accusation.

  “Just thought we would let you know,” Boone said, his eyes boring into mine, watching, eager. When I didn’t speak, he went on. “We found Quinn Baker this morning, ’bout a half hour ago.”

  I still didn’t speak, but my heart rate shot up. I was glad my fingers were resting against my arms, because they trembled faintly.

  “He’s been shot.”

  Shock weakened my knees. Quinn? What…? My mind raced, drawing the obvious deductions. They thought Quinn was the one who had broken into the loft. They thought he’d either been shot by me, and I wasn’t telling, or he’d been shot by my accomplices and the break-in was staged to make it look like a justified shooting. I knew the man in the door this morning hadn’t been Quinn. My shoulders relaxed and I placed my hands on the display top. I smiled. “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll send flowers to him.”

  Boone’s face twisted in victory and my bowels turned to water. “I’m sure his mother will be tickled pink about that, Tyler. Have them delivered to MacDermit Funeral Home. Once the coroner releases the body.”

  Jubal caught me before I slid to the floor.

  Pleased with his announcement and my reaction, Boone walked out the door.

  Jubal made me sit and drink a mug of tea, while Noe wrapped an afghan around me. They hovered like worried mama and papa birds, until three customers came in and I shooed them back to work. Numb, I drank my tea and took my break, for once not worried that the clientele might see me sitting, doing nothing. The business of the store wound around me, passed across me, like shadows thrown by lace in the morning sun, not really touching me but dappling my thoughts, intruding in a slow wave of darkness and light.

  Quinn? Dead?

  A long shudder of fear I had repressed ran through me, freed by the cop’s words to thrash my soul. My body felt unsubstantial, ephemeral, my limbs deadened as if anesthetized, even the cup of hot tea not warming my fingers. The sounds in the shop seemed higher-pitched than usual. Everything was just a little not-quite-right.

  Jubal brought me back, pulling me out of my lethargy by bringing a customer over and using me for a mannequin as he slipped a silver chain and lovely, dangling, green-and-brown turquoise pendant around my neck. When he placed the back of his hand on my cheek for a moment, I knew my friend really just needed to touch me, to reassure himself I was all right, so I forced myself back from the shadowy place where I crouched, licking my wounds, and smiled up at them both. I let Jubal slide matching bangle bracelets over my hand, and displayed both with a practiced flip of my wrist that set them to clanking prettily, and held silver loops to my ears, next to my own turquoise ones.

  The customer, a late-traveling snowbird on his way south for what was left of winter, bought the entire set. I was on a roll, selling. Too bad I wasn’t having any luck with my personal life.

  The customer was a talker, introducing himself as Ken Green, and telling Jubal about his grandkids, his two sons and his life before he retired. Because Jubal was a good listener, and I was a great store
dummy, Mr. Green also purchased a sunset-toned coral and carnelian choker and matching bangle set and had them shipped back north. He filled us in on the two women who had set their sights on him, one in Boca and one in Maine. He was happily keeping company with both, one in summer, the other in winter. That was his term—keeping company. But, with a sly smile and a wink, he also mentioned Viagra, and we knew the company he was keeping was of an intimate sort. The salacious old coot.

  While I sat and tried to decide what to do about Quinn—Quinn? Dead?—Noe sold an overpriced but very dramatic twelve-strand, ocean jasper nugget and bronze pearl necklace and two really nice aquamarine chokers, and managed to find time to call Evan Bartlock between customers.

  Evan came in about the time my limbs were unfreezing, carrying white bags of Chinese takeout from the mom-and-pop place four doors down from Bloodstone. I stood, shakily, to meet him. He came over and put an arm around my waist. “I’m sorry I had to leave this morning,” he said. “I wanted to stay, but figured there might be things to learn at the LEC. Can you get free for lunch?”

  “Only if you brought enough for us when you’re done,” Noe said, unabashedly eavesdropping.

  “I didn’t know what you might like, so I got cashew chicken, sweet-and-sour shrimp and teriyaki chicken with vegetarian fried rice, steamed veggies and sides of spring rolls,” he said. Looking at Noe, he added, “And yes, there’s enough for everyone.”

  “Save me the veggies, a roll and some rice. I don’t eat meat.”

  “Since when?” I said, surprised my voice sounded almost normal.

  “Since my logger told me he’s a vegan. Can you believe it? I get the best sex in my life and all I have to give up is cows and birds for it. Who knew?” She flipped back the blue streak of hair and smiled widely. The tongue stud was missing today and she was wearing shrimp-toned lipstick, not her usual dark brown. I hadn’t noticed. If one didn’t search too closely, she looked almost…ordinary. Just like my life seemed almost ordinary, until I peered into the dark corners.