Play Dead

by Anne Frasier

  "I don't want to go to the police station." Audrey looked up at her father with pleading eyes. "Do I have to?"

  "Audrey—"

  "Dad." She twisted her feet to stand on the sides of her shoes. "Please?"

  She stared at him, as if trying to communicate telepathically. When that failed to get any response, she was forced to say the words aloud, whispered through gritted teeth. "Remember what you told me at the house?"

  It was suddenly embarrassingly obvious that the child hadn't wanted to visit her mother in the first place. That she'd come only because her father had made her.

  David stood just behind Elise and to her right. He couldn't see her face, but he could feel her stillness.

  He put a hand to her shoulder. Thomas followed the movement with his eyes and stared. David dropped his hand.

  "Another time would be better," Thomas said. "When things are slower."

  Audrey's body relaxed, and her face lit up. She shot her father a look of gratitude.

  "You're probably right," Elise said woodenly. "When things are slower."

  "I'll call you." Thomas reached for Audrey. "Let's go, honey. So your mom can get to work."

  Audrey spun around and began to walk away, her panda bear backpack bobbing. They were halfway up the sidewalk when Thomas bent his head toward her and said something. Audrey turned and gave a big wave. "Bye, Mom." And then to David, "Bye, Mr. Gould!"

  She turned and caught up with her dad, then passed him, galloping to the white SUV parked at the curb.

  Elise stared at the vehicle as it pulled away. "A stay of execution."

  "She probably wanted to do something with friends," David said, searching for a fragment of truth that might make her feel better. "Friends are more important than family at her age. Family doesn't even count."

  Elise didn't answer. Instead, she turned and locked the door behind them.

  He hoped she wasn't going to cry.

  He hated it when women cried. It made him feel useless. And it hurt. He didn't like to hurt.

  "Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck!" he shouted as soon as he reached the street and saw his car.

  The driver's window was broken.

  He looked inside.

  The CD player was gone.

  "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

  He stomped around in a circle, finally coming back to the car.

  Nope. He hadn't just imagined the broken window.

  "What the hell is it with the burglaries in this town? Thomas was right. You people have a problem. A real problem. And right in front of a cop's house. How blatant is that?"

  "Do what I do," Elise said calmly, as if this kind of thing happened every morning. Maybe it did.

  "What's that?" he asked.

  "Don't get the CD player replaced, and quit locking your car. It keeps them from breaking the window."

  "So you adjust your life to accommodate criminals? That's insane."

  "Insane but effective."

  "I'm calling my insurance company today. I'm getting a new window and CD player. And a car alarm."

  She looked at him with skepticism.

  "Oh, I suppose the sound of a car alarm is like a lullaby around here."

  "I was going to say like the chirping of crickets."

  He dug a towel from the trunk, took a few swipes at the crumbled glass, then tossed the towel over the front seat. Two minutes later, they were heading for his apartment. David reached for the radio, then clenched his fist at the black hole staring at him from the dash. He liked to listen to the local station on the way to work in order to keep up on the hysteria level of the city.

  "You had to get married, didn't you?" David asked, giving Elise's profile a quick glance as he fought morning traffic.

  "Had to get married? What time period did you transport here from? Nobody has to get married anymore."

  "You know what I mean."

  "Do you find that amusing?"

  "I'm surprised, not amused. You come across as someone who knows exactly what she wants, who doesn't make mistakes."

  "Audrey wasn't a mistake."

  "I'm not talking about Audrey. I'm talking about Thomas."

  "Don't trivialize my life."

  "I'm not."

  "You are."

  He stopped at a red light. "How long were you married?"

  "A year."

  "Did you ever love him? Or was it just a teenager crush kind of thing?"

  "That's none of your business."

  "I think it is. You're my partner."

  "When did that finally occur to you?" she asked, secretly glad he'd finally noticed. This was good. Things were progressing. He'd spilled his guts last night; she was more than ready to share. "I thought I loved him," she admitted. "I was confused."

  "You were a kid yourself."

  "Seventeen."

  "A confusing age."

  Not that life was any less confusing now.

  The light turned green. He checked for traffic and pulled through the intersection. "I've heard some interesting things about you," he said casually. Too casually.

  "Like what?"

  "That you're some kind of voodoo priestess or something."

  She let out a strangled laugh. "Who told you that?'

  "People talk."

  "Well, they talk shit. What you should know is that the Savannah Police Department is like an eccentric aunt with a multitude of stories to tell, most of them lies."

  "That's just a romantic way of saying the place is infested with gossips," David said.

  "You Yankees are so blunt. What would Savannah be without romanticism? Just another port city."

  "Do you know that some people are actually a little afraid of you?" he asked.

  "Are you afraid of me?"

  "No."

  "Were you? At the beginning?"

  "Of course not."

  Time to tell all. "I'm surprised you haven't heard the whole story." She suspected he had by now, or at least some variation of it. But with any departmental gossip, it was always best to go to the subject.

  "I heard you were abandoned as a baby. In a cemetery. That you're the daughter of some famous witch doctor."

  "Root doctor is the accurate term, but most people say conjurer or witch doctor. No one really knows exactly where I was found. In a cemetery? Yes. On a grave? Maybe. Whose grave? Nobody knows."

  "That's very cool."

  "Cool? I've never had anybody say that before. Weird. Creepy. Scary. That's what I usually get."

  "So then you were adopted?" he asked, prodding for more information.

  "The story quickly grows boring," she confessed. "I was adopted by a nice religious family and raised in a traditional household. My father worked as an accountant until he retired, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom."

  What she didn't tell David was that people were freaked out by her. Her family had adopted her because nobody else would take her and they'd thought it was the Christian thing to do, not because they'd wanted another child. And even though her parents were kind and tolerant, she was still a charity case, never a real part of the family.

  "Brothers? Sisters?" He hit Whitaker and took a left.

  "Two sisters, and a much older brother. All of them are married now and have moved out of the area. My parents retired, sold their home, and moved to Tucson." They stayed in contact. Christmas cards. The occasional phone call. "But we're not extremely close."

  Another left and he was circling Forsyth Park. "Never felt like you fit in?"

  "Exactly. My adoption wasn't a secret, but I never knew the details. When I was seven, my sister Maddie and I had a fight and she told me I'd been found in a cemetery, on a grave. At first I didn't believe her, but she didn't have much imagination and it was a pretty wild story, so eventually I asked my mother and she said it was true."

  He turned into the lot next to Mary of the Angels, slid into a spot near Elise's car, and shut off the engine. "And the conjurer?"

  "His name was Jackson Sweet. When I heard
that he might be my father, I became obsessed with finding out everything I could about him. I suddenly had a history, and a damn interesting one. By the time I was in high school, I'd learned a lot of incantations from an old woman who lived down the street."

  While her sisters occupied themselves with after-school projects, Elise pursued what at the time she'd decided was her life calling. The old woman didn't have any living relatives, so she was glad to teach Elise everything she knew. In bad health, she'd been looking for an apprentice in order to pass the mantle.

  She lived in a shanty with the doors and window trim painted blue to repel evil spirits. Elise had never known the woman's real name. Everybody just called her Peppermint, because of the peppermint sticks she always had in her mouth.

  The ability to perform spells, whether they worked or not, became Elise's best line of defense when it came to her siblings. All she had to do was gather a few ingredients together, and they became loving and well behaved.

  "I used a Barbie—well actually Skipper, Barbie's little sister—to cast my first real spell."

  He laughed.

  "Spells are a serious thing. Spells are real. Or at least some are."

  He turned to face her, his left arm draped over the steering wheel. "How can you say that? You're a cop. A detective. Your daily performance is based on logic."

  "Not everything in the world makes sense. Not everything can be explained. Our eyes and our memories constantly deceive us. A good detective knows that."

  "Did you ever cast a spell that worked?" he asked, still smiling. Still a nonbeliever. That was the big difference between a Northerner and a Southerner. A Southerner would believe.

  Elise had been a seventeen-year-old lovesick girl just playing around. Thomas had passed her again and again with unseeing eyes. But once she cast the spell, he had looked her way ... and kept looking, as if unable to help himself, as if his eyes were locked on her.

  After entrapping Thomas and getting them both tangled up in a disastrous marriage that should never have happened, Elise got rid of every notebook, every herb, every scrap of paper that spoke of any kind of conjuring, no matter how innocent. At the time, she tried to convince herself that there wasn't such a thing as root doctoring and spell casting. Thomas had noticed her because she'd been staring at him with the fever and intensity of a passionate crush.

  "I'm not talking about something vague, like making someone's headache go away," David said. "Come on. You can't honestly tell me that you ever cast a spell that actually worked. Something you could be a hundred percent sure of."

  "Oh, but I did. On a person."

  "Who?"

  "Thomas."

  "What'd you do to the poor guy?"

  "Made him fall in love with me."

  Chapter 28

  David stared out the office window that overlooked Colonial Park Cemetery.

  An interesting place. A sign near the entrance told of the yellow fever epidemic that accounted for a high percentage of the graves. Probably occupied by some of the same people who'd been hospitalized at Mary of the Angels.

  He spotted Elise and a photographer from the Savannah Morning News. Of course they'd wanted a photo in the cemetery to go along with the TTX article.

  "This is Savannah," Elise had said with a smile when she'd tried to talk him into joining her for the photo. "Where else would they take the picture?"

  Not far away, a group of children were jumping rope. He couldn't hear what they were saying, but he could easily imagine the content of the chant.

  Lady in a black veil

  Babies in the bed

  Kissed them on the forehead

  Now they're both dead.

  The office door opened and closed. He turned to see Elise tossing a stack of papers down on her desk. "Hot today," she said.

  He looked back out the window, to the cemetery, half expecting to see her there too.

  Was he losing it? Sometimes it felt like it. Like his mind just seemed to slip.

  "How did that go?" he asked, regarding a cluster of ancient, mildew-covered tombstones.

  "Okay, I suppose. You know how those newspaper things are. I gave her the information. All she has to do is copy it, but tomorrow I'm sure I'll read some nonsense I never said."

  "They can't get it right. I don't think they're supposed to. Part of the job description."

  She dug in her bag, pulled out a Polaroid, and handed it to him.

  "Test shot."

  Elise stood in front of a tombstone. Seeming to float somewhere off her shoulder was the name Christian.

  Too much reality. The cemetery. The name. Following on the heels of his coming clean to Elise.

  Christian had been buried in a little Ohio cemetery in a special section for children. Playland, or some such horror. It had all happened so fucking fast that David hadn't known what to do. His mother had suggested another place, but nothing seemed right.

  David had wanted him close, even though he hadn't been able to make himself visit the grave. But Playland was all wrong. He could see that now. So frivolous. Naive.

  He tacked the Polaroid to the bulletin board, next to the photo that had been taken of him and Elise on his first day.

  So he had some unresolved issues. There were sometimes events in a person's life that could never be accepted.

  He would never get over the death and murder of his son. He didn't want to get over it, but he knew he had to find a way to allow his painful past to dwell within his present life, to bring it out of hiding so his child, alive or dead, could be a part of who he was now.

  So far his way of dealing had been to slam the door, but in so doing, he'd been unable to experience emotions in life as they unfolded. He'd also set himself up for a hard fall, because whenever he was forced to relive what had happened, or whenever his mind wandered unsupervised and took him back there, the shock was intense.

  A surprise attack. That's what it was. And surprise attacks were never good.

  He dealt with death on a daily basis, but couldn't deal with the death of his own child.

  "You feeling okay?" Elise asked.

  "Headache."

  "Probably the heat. Want a couple of Advil?"

  "Thanks. I have some."

  Shortly after the funeral, while he was out of the house, his sister and mother had packed up all of his son's belongings. Toys. Clothes. Books.

  All just gone.

  Where were Christian's things now? On a shelf in a secondhand shop? In a landfill? The thought made him feel physically ill.

  The floor slanted.

  He felt bad about so many things.

  Black began to creep into the edges of his vision. He ignored it, caught up in the sudden sweep of misery.

  "David?"

  Elise's voice came from the end of a long tunnel.

  He suddenly realized he was falling, but couldn't seem to do anything about it. He heard Elise's shout of alarm, and was distantly aware of her running for him.

  Then he was on the floor, looking up at the ceiling.

  The handcuffs he kept on his belt were biting into his spine. His gun and holster were jammed against his rib cage.

  "Should I call an ambulance?"

  She sounded scared. Cool, calm Elise. She was a cop, a detective; she shouldn't sound so scared.

  Everything's going to be okay. Everything is going to be fine. Fine and dandy.

  When he didn't answer, she made the decision for him. "I'm calling an ambulance."

  "No!" He grabbed her by the arm, maybe a little too firmly. He released his grip. "No. I'm okay."

  "Does your mouth feel weird and tingly?" she asked, her voice breathless. "Are you having trouble breathing?"

  No wonder she was in such a panic. She thought it was tetrodotoxin—when in fact he'd apparently fainted.

  "It's not TTX," he said slowly. "It's nothing like that."

  "What is it, then? Do you have any pain anywhere? In your arm? Your chest?"

  "Actually, I bel
ieve I—" Could he make himself say fainted! "I got dizzy, and my vision got blurry...."

  She leaned back on her heels. "Gould, are you telling me you fainted?"

  "Let's just call it blacked out, shall we?" he whispered weakly.

  One of his nemeses, this one happening to be Hutch, showed up in the open doorway. "Hey, that was one filthy place you sent us to." He was all revved up. "That LaRue guy's supposed to be some fancy-ass scientist who graduated from Harvard, and here he's living out there like an animal."

  David closed his eyes.

  The detective finally spotted him on the floor. "For chrissake, Gould. Are you taking a nap?"

  Chapter 29

  He walked toward me.

  A shadow among the shadows.

  He always came to me at night.

  Sweet boy. Sweet, sweet boy. Such a pretty face.

  He couldn't see me, because I was hiding.

  Nobody could ever see me. I was invisible.

  It had been easy to lure Enrique to the fountain. He was used to these assignations, and suspected nothing.

  He always did what I told him to do.

  When he was close, I stepped from the shadows, frightening him.

  "Those two detectives," he fretted. "I'm afraid they might start asking questions I won't know how to answer."

  "You worry too much."

  "You didn't kill them, did you? Gary Turello and Jordan Kemp?"

  "Of course not. How could you think such a thing?"

  "I'm sorry."

  "I'm not mad at you. I should be, but I'm not."

  He smiled. Enrique of the pretty face. The pretty teeth. He always did what he was told, but Enrique was weak. If the police brought him in for questioning, he would talk. In the end, his loyalty would be to no one but himself.

  "I'll never ask you to do anything you don't want to do ever again," I said.

  I used to pretend that something had come over me. That a spell, a curse, had turned me into something else, a new species. But then I realized. This is what it's like to be human. What it's like to be alive.