Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  She’d shown him her secret world. And he liked it. But why, of all people, had she turned her candlepower on him? How long could a mortal man cling to a goddess?

  “Kevin?” she giggled. “Hello in there. Let’s go work on your saint.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The dense snowfall, driven by a cold wind, swirled over the city for a second day of stung cheeks and school closings.

  Cornelia wound her arm into his and rested her head on his good shoulder. Like explorers or penguins, they helped each other navigate the icy streets, crossing half the West Side on their way downtown to the New York Institute of Art and Technology.

  As they tramped through the street slush, Kevin noticed that it hadn’t had time to turn gray. New waves of powder kept falling to bleach the old. They kept their heads down and hugged the buildings, just in case some hawk-eyed Debwatch reader might recognize Cornelia Lord.

  As they crossed by the rent-controlled tenements between West 42nd Street and Chelsea, Kevin noticed that Cornelia Lord never looked wrong anywhere. Her creamy skin belonged to the world of Fifth Avenue. But she seemed right at home among the hangdog buildings on Tenth Avenue. At street level, she seemed enchanted by the flower shops run by broad-faced Koreans, and happily sniffed pungent smells from the Greek luncheonettes. On the second floors of the old tenements, she pointed out the young mothers with kids and elderly Medicare patients crammed into tiny rooms waiting for doctors and dentists.

  They were walking just like a couple through his New York, not hers. And she was having fun. He nudged her. “That’s where I used to go to church, when I was a kid.”

  On the corner, even the arched roof of St. Agatha’s Church had been covered with a layer of snow. The gray stone, dusted white, made the stained glass shine brighter than a fire in an oven. This sprawling urban church, where Kevin had taken his Communion and they’d held his mother’s funeral, never looked less oppressive. Today he saw grandeur in the twin spires instead of boredom and authority, maybe the way a peasant like Giotto was inspired by the medieval churches.

  The two big oak doors to the church opened suddenly. Children in white angel gowns with gold-braided necks roared out, shoving and yelling at one another, carrying white candles.

  “That’s the Christmas pageant,” Kevin said. “I was in it when I was eight. I still don’t see Round John Virgin.”

  “Who?”

  “From the Christmas carole, ‘Round John Virgin, mother and child.’ I got the words wrong, looking for some fat kid.”

  She laughed, then pulled away from Kevin, stretching her arms out to each side in the oversized leather coat.

  “Snow angels!” she yelled.

  She fell backward, thumping into a pile of snow, and waved her arms back and forth. She leapt to her feet.

  “Look!” She showed Kevin the outline she made. “Come on!”

  Her angel looked more like a melanic snow moth in its patch of city grime. His arm and shoulder still throbbed, and he hesitated. But she’d already got him into the spirit. He closed his eyes, stretched his arms, and fell backward too. He worried, falling like a toppled tree, that he might get hurt when he hit the ground.

  “Oooof.” He blinked, looking up at the sky. He felt fine. The fresh layer of snow he had landed on cushioned him like a velvety mattress.

  “See?” she squealed. “Nothing hurts as much as you think it will.”

  Then without warning, she ran off into the alleyway beside the church, gray coat flapping, and disappearing around the corner. Kevin ran after her. He puffed through the alleyway onto the crosstown street looking both ways, but didn’t see her. He ran in the direction of the Hudson River. He couldn’t find her.

  “Cornelia!” he yelled.

  He ran a long city block in the other direction and looked up and down Ninth Avenue, then all the way back to Tenth Avenue until he couldn’t run anymore. He stood bent over, hands on his knees.

  Whatever kept him from getting too attached to her failed him now.

  Then he felt cold hands over his eyes.

  “Gotcha.”

  He turned around and saw the red tip of her nose. She laughed, catching her breath. Then she slipped on the ice with a gleeful whoop, and he leaned over to help her up.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think I twisted my ankle,” she said.

  He bundled her up in the pewter-colored coat and carried her the last ten blocks to his school building, as carefully as he’d held Sebastian. The throbbing in his shoulder didn’t bother him at all now. Finally he got the door to the school building open with his foot and it closed behind him.

  Neither of them saw the two New York City police officers who spotted them from their car.

  They had followed the young subjects discreetly in their white and blue cruiser for the past few blocks. Now they pulled to the curb across the street from the school.

  The officer in the driver’s seat, an antsy male sergeant named Cantwell with gray-flecked hair and a painfully inflamed prostate, took the duty clipboard and flipped it over. He stared at the photo on the faxed and photocopied handout, a muddy blotch of lines and smudges. He squirmed uncomfortably. His black leather jacket squeaked against the car seat. The car’s blasting heat made their close space feel like the inside of a tank.

  “I can’t tell.” He shook his head. “Lemme see that Globe.”

  He scrunched his forehead, analyzing the picture on the second page under the headline, “Where’s Corny?”

  “It’s her,” said his partner, Officer Diaz, a compact woman with muscles like pistons and very long hair pulled up under her cap so the visor sat slightly high on her head.

  “Better call it in as a possible abduction,” Sergeant Cantwell instructed his partner.

  “You sure about that?” Officer Diaz said. While Sergeant Cantwell possessed many useful police skills, she believed that his prostate condition made him overly eager to find something physical to do to take his mind off the burning gland.

  Cantwell gave her a sidelong look. He was a sergeant and she wasn’t. She took the radio and checked their clipboard again for the special code name they’d been given at their shift briefing.

  “1348,” Diaz spoke softly into the radio, so she wouldn’t break the dispatcher’s eardrum. “We’ve got subject Charlie Oscar Romeo, corner of 14th and Ninth. Possible, I repeat, possible 802. Requesting instructions.”

  “Copy 1348,” the short crackle came back.

  They watched the old loft building, then watched some more. They sat in dead silence, as only partners on surveillance can, except for Cantwell’s leather jacket squeaking on the seat. Each had started to wonder what the hell was going on when the dispatcher’s voice squawked out of the dashboard.

  “1348, secure the location. Blue Dog is responding.”

  “The captain. Do you believe this?” Cantwell said, rolling his eyes.

  Officer Diaz turned the rearview mirror her way to check out her uniform. “This debutante’s supposed to be a mental subject.”

  “Maybe she’s dangerous,” Sergeant Cantwell said.

  Officer Diaz could tell that her partner had taken a personal dislike to the girl for bringing their captain into the picture. Now she’d have to make sure Sergeant Cantwell, prisoner of his angry prostate, didn’t accidentally shoot some debutante for running at them with a lipstick tube.

  “That sly old Max,” Cornelia chuckled. “Watch.”

  In the institute’s vast blackened loft floor, she lit up Sebastian’s halo again with the freestanding fiber optics.

  “So how many do you use?”

  “Less is more,” she said. “The light has to be subtle, just barely luminous. There. You try his face, Kevin.”

  He struggled to slip the tiny coils carefully into the thin, brittle tubes.

  Freestanding fiber optics.

  In a way that he admitted to himself was stupid, he hated the little glowworms. Max, the sneaky bastard, had kept this technolo
gy from him.

  But they were hard to work with, thin little threads that slipped away from his fingers like silverfish. Then she guided him just slightly and he implanted two of them in Sebastian’s face. The glass-tube profile sputtered into life, shimmering. He didn’t even have to plug the transformer in.

  “See?” She clapped her hands. “All Max can make is little circles and squares. You’re a genius, Kevin. You should start working on something new.”

  “Like what?” He asked her, staring at Sebastian’s face. The fiber optics gave off an amazing light.

  “I don’t know. A heart. A dance of light.”

  “What about you, Corny?” He used her nickname for the first time. He realized that little slip broke through the last thin membrane of his resolve to not get involved, so he might as well go on.

  “What about me?”

  “I mean, your Tesla Museum’s done. What happens next?”

  “I go to South America.”

  A very bad feeling. “Why South America?”

  “Because it’s possible that Tesla did some work there.”

  “Okay. But what are you going to do after the whole Tesla project gets finished?”

  She looked startled, and sounded slightly defensive. “Why, nothing. That’s what I do.”

  “What I used to do,” Kevin reminded her, “was make a saint that looked like a Bud Light sign. You showed me something better. Now maybe I’ll move on. Don’t you ever want to move on?”

  She bit her lip. “Answer me honestly. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  He took her chin and drew it up close to him, gently touched her lip with his.

  “I think you have this thing my mom called the spark of the divine. But nobody around you knows what to do with it.”

  Officer Diaz, watching Sergeant Cantwell’s back, poked around the first floor of the industrial building on reconnaissance. It was a dump, old and badly maintained.

  She peered at the tenant registry. So many different typefaces, it looked like a ransom note. The six-story building housed a nest of marginal businesses, and she took no special notice of the New York Institute of Art and Technology. She determined that the building could be accessed through one front door, one back door, and a door on the roof.

  “We just got backup,” Sergeant Cantwell said in his low business voice.

  She looked outside to see another cruiser from her precinct running without lights or siren. It turned next to the building and crunched down an alley in the snow to block off the building’s back door. A third unit skidded to a stop at the curb. Two officers got out and hustled into the lobby to join them. They huddled.

  “Nobody in the super’s office. I think we ought to check the roof,” Officer Diaz said. “The staircase is locked up and so’s the elevator.”

  So the four officers went outside, stayed close to the building to be invisible to anybody upstairs, and entered the lobby of the building next door. They found a superintendent’s office where a young man tried to run from them. They caught him by the back of his jeans. He explained in Spanish that his name was Carlos from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and he had a family here. And no Green Card, Officer Diaz finished for him, also in Spanish. But they would develop amnesia about his being an undocumented alien if he quietly helped them check out the building next door. Carlos from Tegucigalpa took the four officers to his building’s roof where they could just look down a few feet and see the rooftop of the subject building. Officer Diaz immediately spotted the broken knob on the door to the staircase.

  “Burglary,” she pointed out to Sergeant Cantwell, who grunted as if he’d told her so.

  “Hey, Diaz, you make the report,” one of the officers standing by the wall told her, pointing down at the street.

  Officer Diaz leaned over the wall and saw a gray sedan with red and blue lights on its front grille pull to the curb below. A big dark-skinned man in a captain’s uniform got out wearing a blue greatcoat with stripes on the sleeve and white gloves. Captain Washburn, a hard-ass. He had obviously been plucked from some formal big deal to bail out this flaky debutante with connections.

  Washburn’s scowling face looked up at the grimy, cast-iron subject building. Then he caught Officer Diaz looking down at him from the adjoining roof.

  This better be important, he told her by moving his lips clearly enough to read from six stories up.

  They stood in the dark looking at Sebastian glow. Kevin realized they were studying it the way people contemplate real art in a museum. It made him feel giddy.

  “How’s your ankle?” He touched it, a little black-and-blue.

  “Watch,” Cornelia said. She hopped up on her feet and jumped up and down.

  Then she grabbed a glowing fiber optic coil in each hand and began to dance.

  She started spinning in circles. Kevin saw that she could really dance. She’s probably taken courses like ballet or modern dance, because she sure knew how to be delicate on her feet, even with a twisted ankle. She executed the same little leaps dancers did on PBS, skipping around him, twirling around to make spinning circles of light with the fiber optics, having fun putting on a show for him. The little dancer with the perfect, sculpted calves still wore her hospital scrubs and slippers.

  But she looked like a heavenly dance of light.

  Officer Diaz joined Captain Washburn on the street.

  “Sir, the rooftop door’s got a hole in it and the doorknob’s gone. Minimum we got a break-in.”

  “Secure the lobby,” the captain ordered.

  This was shaping up as more than she expected. Maybe Captain Washburn was seeing it as a kidnapping now. She started thinking about extra Christmas gifts she would buy with her overtime before the FBI took over.

  Then she remembered her glimpse of the debutante’s face in the male subject’s arms. No, This didn’t feel right. She avoided Sergeant Cantwell and spoke directly to Captain Washburn.

  “Captain, I got to tell you, this girl didn’t look like any kind of victim to me.”

  Cornelia’s limbs felt the rapture. The blond hairs on her arms stood up. She was a child again, twirling toward the window.

  She loved her dance in the falling darkness with only Kevin for an audience and the fiber optics she spun for light. Then, as she started her turn right in front of the window, her eyes suddenly locked on to the street below.

  She saw, in that microsecond, police cars with black numbers on their hoods. They were stopped right in front of their formerly deserted building. A gaggle of police officers stood on the street, pointing up. Not exactly toward where she spun by the window, but close enough.

  Without breaking her turn, she twirled back to Kevin and dropped into his lap.

  “I’m famished.” She gave his cheek a kiss. “I think I’ll go out to get us something to eat. I can cook on Max’s sculpting fire.”

  A look of concern passed over Kevin’s face. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Oh, no. You stay here. Do Sebastian’s torso. I’ll just be a minute.”

  She threw her arms around his neck and squeezed his mouth to hers. She recorded the memory of the gorgeous blue corona that surrounded his hair.

  “Are you sure?” His look was heartbreaking.

  “Look, Kevin, you have to trust me sometime,” she told him as she opened the elevator and stepped in.

  It groaned all the way down. Before she reached the bottom, she took off the stiff new leather coat that belonged to Philip Grace and folded it neatly, leaving it on the floor of the elevator car so Kevin could return it. When the elevator stopped, she opened the door and crossed the shabby foyer in measured steps. Then she walked out into the cold.

  A stocky gray-haired police officer in a black leather jacket stood outside with his back to her, scratching the seat of his pants.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  He spun around like a madman, pulling his gun out of his holster and leveling it a few inches from her nose. His eyes looked wild over the black hole o
f the gun.

  “Freeze,” he yelled at her.

  “I’m frozen already.” She held her hands up and out, unsure of what to do with them.

  “Hey,” a serious-looking woman officer with a cap that sat very high on her head moved beside him. “Cool it.”

  “I’m very cool,” Cornelia trembled.

  A giant officer in a long blue coat like an admiral stepped up to her. Even as she stood shivering in the flimsy hospital scrubs with her bare arms stretched out, she felt protected by the man’s authority. His coat sported gold stripes on the sleeve. He scowled, then put his hands in the white gloves behind his back and inspected her.

  “Ms. Lord, I’m Captain Washburn,” his voice rumbled. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “We had a report that you might have been abducted.”

  “Well, I haven’t.”

  “If that’s so,” he said, “why don’t you just let me escort you home.”

  Then he held his arm out with the white glove, as though asking her to waltz. She folded her own arms and kept her distance.

  “Do you promise to leave that building alone?” she asked.

  “Ms. Lord,” the captain sounded a little bemused. “I don’t have any orders concerning that building. If you swear to me there was no criminal activity going on in there, we’ll just leave quietly before anybody notices you’re gone.”

  He held the door of the gray sedan open for her.

  And from above, Kevin watched the straw-blond head duck into the back of the car and vanish in silent waves of white and blue.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chester, listen to me,” Cornelia told the lapel of his charcoal suit, as he hugged her close to him in the study.

  Chester pulled back. She observed from his sad eyes that his melancholy had joined with something new. A sharp glint of resolve.

  “No, darling, this time I have to insist that you listen to me. You need to confront these Tesla issues.”