Tension and shock leaked out of her as tears. She heard noises in the distance, the crash of the door flung open and then screams and then the more precise shouts of professionals who saw crisis and death on a weekly basis and knew what to do about them. Someone tucked Jo's head down between her knees and wrapped a blanket around her. Someone lifted her into a chair and then it moved, rolling, turning, rolling, bumping and scraping along a wall as it skirted something on the floor. Warm comfort held her hand, rested on her arm, spoke quiet words of care and safety and love. The warmth smelled of mothballs and wool and old woman, not starch and medicine.
"But you weren't there," Jo whispered. "You can't have heard the curse."
"Planting Woman told me, child. She heard you call the powers of the earth and sky. That was her voice that spoke, not mine."
"He shot you," she whispered.
Breath touched her cheek, warm, slightly spicy of chewed spruce gum. "Lordy, no, child. Your magic wouldn't let him. You think I was being brave?"
It was quiet and warm and safe and dark, like talking to Mother Mary under the protection of her blankets. "I let him shoot Momma."
Arms enfolded her again, soft arms with hard old muscles underneath a padding of old fat. "Your momma let him shoot your momma, child. She wanted to die. I could feel it, come midnights. I felt her spirit beating at the walls like a trapped bird. Now she's free."
Free at last.
Sirens whined and homed in on the nursing home. Feet squeaked by at a run and then returned at a walking pace when they found . . . what they found. Hands touched her, medical hands smelling of medical care. She didn't need them and shook them off. More feet arrived, black shoes instead of white, attached to blue legs. She followed the legs up to uniforms and badges.
"I killed him."
Dark bulk pushed between her and the uniforms. "You leave her be. Child just saw her daddy kill her mommy. You got questions, you ask Mary. I was there."
"I killed him."
"Hush, child. How could she kill him, from the far side of the bed? Look for the bullet holes, po-lice man. Child has plaster dust all over her, from the bullet hole by the bathroom door. Mary can't see good, but I sure can hear. I can feel the dust. Mary heard where she was, where he was. He shot his wife, tried to shoot both of us, shot himself. Four shots. Man gone crazy, grief."
Jo stood, shaky, leaning on one arm of the wheelchair and then inching around it to take the pusher grips and force herself upright, letting the blanket's protection fall to the floor. "She's blind. I could have stopped him from shooting Mom. I let him do it, and then I took the gun and killed him. He deserved to die."
The old Indian kept her bulk between Jo and the uniforms. "The child's off her head. Look at the room, look at the bullet holes, check the fingerprints on the gun, figure out the spaces and the angles. Old Mary knows what you cops do. Ask little Bobby Getchell. Ask him about his old Aunt Mary. He'll tell you Mary's not as crazy as she looks."
"Sergeant Getchell? You're his aunt?" Jo's ears finally started to work again, pick up the softer words, recovering from the roar of that gun.
The hall was crawling with uniforms. White nurses, light gray EMTs, blue cops, dark gray suits that might as well have been uniforms. Strobe flashes reflected down the walls, splashing out through an open door. Crime scene investigators, taking photographs. A gray suit strode past, hauling one of those aluminum-sided cases on wheels. Jo wondered how long she had been sitting in the chair.
Two metal frames waited in the lobby, tall wheeled shiny folding frames with white padded tops with dark gray plastic bags draped across them, empty, waiting. Stretchers. Body bags. Waiting to swallow Mom and Dad, waiting to hide two shattered heads behind closed zippers.
Jo felt unnaturally calm. She knew it was unnatural, but that calm settled over her and brought her heartbeat back to normal and cleared her eyes and laid the script out in glowing words in the air in front of her. She'd tell the police what happened, exactly what happened, and then they'd arrest her and put her on trial and punish her. Lock her up in the mental hospital with the rest of the crazy people.
She gathered strength, drawing it from the air and up from the floor beneath her, and let go of the wheelchair. She walked around Mary Thomas, around that protective bulk that seemed to have shrunk back into a short round blind old woman instead of the force of nature she'd been in the room. Jo walked up to the highest-ranking uniform she could spot and laid a hand on his arm. Her hand wasn't even shaking.
"I killed him."
"This is a crime scene, ma'am. Please stay clear." Then the officer looked up and blinked. "I'm sorry. You're the daughter, aren't you?"
"I killed him. You have to arrest me."
His brow creased into a frown. He turned to another passing uniform. "Hey, Bill. Put out another call for Dr. Schofield. We need her like ten minutes ago."
Then the officer turned back to Jo. He took her arm and gently guided her through a door, into someone's office. He left the door half-open behind them. He set her in a chair and put himself leaning against a desk where he could watch the corridor through the gap of the door but no one in the corridor could see her. He shook his head.
"We've got a psychiatrist on call, ma'am, a trauma specialist. She'll be here in a few minutes. She's had a lot of training in helping victims through the shock and grief. You've had a terrible experience. Please just sit quietly and wait for a few minutes."
Jo blinked and sat up straighter. "You don't understand. I killed him. I took the gun and shot him. He hurt my mother. He hit her. He put her in that bed. Then he shot her. He had to die. Now you have to arrest me."
She felt perfectly calm and normal. That was part of the problem, part of what she'd inherited from Daddy. Casual brutality, and something more. She remembered a puppy they'd had for a week or so, she must have been six or seven. Maureen had been out of diapers, anyway.
Baby dog had messed the rug, still being paper trained, Dad went to rub the puppy's nose in it. He put his drink down on the floor, and the dog knocked it over with his wagging tail. Dad picked up the puppy and broke its neck with two hands. Tossed the dying body in a corner. Walked off to replace the drink he'd spilled. Acted as if nothing had happened. And Jo had learned not to scream or cry by then.
No conscience. Nothing outside him mattered.
That's what she was doing. She had to be crazy. Incongruity and blunting of affect, just like Maureen. Jo had learned the jargon, dealing with her psycho sister.
"Ma'am, I saw the room. Saw the evidence. I know you didn't do any such thing. Your father shot your mother and then shot himself. Murder and suicide. You saw them die, nearly died yourself. Now you're in shock. You need professional help, and the doctor is on her way. Please just sit here and wait."
He was very polite, very sympathetic, very much the well-trained police professional. Very wrong.
He didn't believe her. She could make him believe her, but she didn't dare. Using her power had caused this crap in the first place.
The policeman glanced at the door. "Please wait. She's here." Then he slipped out through the door and pulled it nearly shut behind him. She heard mumbles, low-pitched and high-pitched voices whispering in consultation.
". . . sedative . . ."
Selective hearing. She could have heard it all, made the walls amplify the sound for her, but she'd heard the important part. They thought she was just hysterical.
Jo didn't have to stay. She stood up, formed a picture in her head, and stepped into the damp darkness of the world under the hill. The black cold coffin air laughed at her, mocking. It knew her. It knew her mind, knew where she belonged.
Chapter Fourteen
Where the hell was Jo?
David paced the floor of their apartment, glancing at the clock, glancing out the window at the gloom of late winter clouds over April's bleak streets, glancing at the scrap of paper lying on the kitchen counter. The scrap of green paper with the squiggly writing and those
zeros in front of the decimal point. Advance payment for the right to turn his poems into songs.
That had happened so fast it made his head spin. A check. A contract that even a musician could understand. A simple, straightforward percentage on the printed retail price of each and every CD sold, nothing about net or gross or production costs or promotion, none of that back-room accounting smoke and mirrors act. It was a flaming fairy tale in itself.
Time to celebrate, but no Jo to celebrate it with.
Last time she went missing, he'd ended up staring at a snack's-eye view of a lot of dragon teeth. Extremely sharp dragon's teeth. Bad precedent. They had an agreement that she'd call if she was going to be late . . . .
What would he do if he lost her again? Would he have the courage -- hell, the simple straightforward Anglo Saxon guts -- to follow her, knowing what he did now?
She'd gone storming out without lunch, thin as that might be with the bare refrigerator. Mustard sandwiches, probably, on stale rolls from the bakery thrift store. Might have gone back to the nursing home, that shouldn't take more than an hour. After all, there wasn't a damn thing she could do beyond watering the flowers and letting the nurses know that somebody was looking over their shoulders.
She'd left about eleven. He'd called Adam right after. That contract and check had knocked on the door by two. He glanced at the clock again, wondering whether he wanted the hands to move faster or slower. Four thirty.
He couldn't help remembering that checking on Maureen at the Quick Shop that February night shouldn't have taken more than an hour, either. And Jo hadn't come back.
He shook himself. No reason to expect that to happen again. Besides, he had work to do.
Adam's letter had asked about new work, dangling another carrot in front of his nose. David had been gnawing at a poem, something that turned the epics on their heads. Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf, Chanson de Roland, they all spoke of Heroes and Great Deeds. The good guys either won or fought their way home and kicked ass or died heroic deaths.
He'd been haunted by a memory of the sidewalk outside a grungy side-street bar, this gray-stubbled mumbling shell of a man huddled against slush-flecked bricks and begging the coins for another drink. The man had been wearing an army jacket, torn and stained but still carrying a nametag and the Combat Infantryman Badge, unit flash on the shoulder, the whole nine yards. He'd looked the right age for Vietnam.
Probably got the jacket in a thrift store or gift from the Salvation Army, but the image burned in David's memory. That was the hero of the modern world's wars, home again. Or maybe the flavor of Jeffers, At the Birth of an Age, the Volsungs meet Attila the Hun and everybody dies.
No, Jeffers drew the right images, vivid and apocalyptic, but his verse-forms wouldn't fit to music. David's image needed something formal like a chant.
Hiawatha?
God, that one would never make it into print these days -- plot development glacial, no "hook," cardboard hero and villain.
But the form could work. Toss in a rhyme scheme for the music audience . . .
"By the flowing Naskeag River,
"In the alleys deep with grime,
"Came the warrior fearless asking,
"'Buddy can you spare a dime?'"
This would be a song for Adam, the disabled vet, chanting with that dry sandy Desert Storm voice of his, maybe even a cappella. Or work the background with a bodhrán at a slow march, muffled and mournful, if they really wanted to pile it on heavy.
David set his back-brain loose on the project, giving words the time to ferment and age before putting ink on paper. Maybe with that check they could even get a computer, join the twentieth century now that it had rolled over into the twenty-first.
Pay the phone bill with it, numb-nuts. Then we can still connect to the nineteenth century.
He glanced at the clock, at the dusk gathering outside, paced the floor. Where was Jo? Why hadn't she called?
And what would he do if she didn't come back? That was the deeper, nastier question.
Maybe he should try a summoning spell. The aroma of coffee would pull Jo in from a block away, drag her out of the deepest sleep, smooth all but the nastiest of her morning moods. She was addicted to the stuff. He liked it well enough, but didn't need to mainline it.
The phone rang while he was measuring out grounds and water. Finally!
He picked it up. Silence. Not Jo. Again.
"Look, dude, we've got caller ID on this line. One more harassing call and we notify the police."
Click.
That was the sixth or seventh call of the day, none of them Jo, nobody speaking. David felt that itchy crawly question again, whether the perp was checking for empty apartments to burgle or was waiting for Jo to answer. Caller ID? Pure bluff -- they were lucky to have a line on their line. Those letters from Verizon were getting rude.
"In the forest, by the meadows,
"Came the warrior and the bard,
"Seeking heart-songs, seeking valiant
"Lovers, stolen past the guard."
Shit. His back-brain had other fixations. It didn't want to work on the anti-epic of a homeless vet abandoned by the country that had drafted him.
It wanted to work on dragons.
Horrible enough, but beautiful too. The gleaming eyes, opalescent black scales, flowing body sinuous like a modern dancer, the mind-speech almost like poetry itself -- hell, even the teeth and claws had the stark simple perfection of Danish stainless steel cutlery. If they weren't right in front of you.
The coffee machine started glugging away on the counter, spreading Jo-bait through the air. Spell of summoning, specific to one particular red-haired witch.
"Hair of fire and temper matching,"
"Passion and clear eyes well wed,"
"Witch blood drawing ever onward"
"Past the opal-armored head."
Well, that got the opals in, never waste an image once you've laid hands on it. Sometimes parts of a poem fell into place like pre-cut lumber. David had worked as a carpenter a few times, driving nails instead of playing gigs when the groceries ran short. One job had been a "panelized" house, with joists already sawn to length and wall panels studded and sheathed up in a shop. Trussed roof, the whole nine yards. They'd framed and closed in the entire house in one morning. Some poems went together like that. Others, well, others fought him.
No. "Past obsidian-armored head." Have to move the black opals back to where they started. The scales had been more like obsidian, sharp as hell.
Parts of this poem ran icy fingers down his back. He remembered Jo with her hair standing up on end when the magic took her, like static on a mountaintop in a thunderstorm. These words woke the same feeling. His palms turned slippery and his heart started racing, fear dumping an overdose of adrenaline into his blood. Words carried power -- power enough that a second-hand vision of their images could pull you across the borders for a moment and form a new world in your eyes and ears.
When David worked on the images of their battle in the forest, he started to smell the torn earth and raw sap of broken trees. He started to feel the rank sweat of fear down his back. His right arm ached where he'd dislocated his elbow when the dying dragon's tail knocked him damn near into tomorrow. It seemed like something far stronger than memory, as if he could take another step, chant another stanza, and he'd be there.
He shivered. He stared at the coffee machine, at the hot aromatic brown liquid spilling down into the carafe underneath it so real and bitter and mundane. The boundaries of reality couldn't be so fragile.
Jo had teased him that a man named Marx had no business playing on an Irish band. He loved the music, but he didn't have a drop of any Celtic blood in his veins, much less the magical "Old Blood." His family traced back to the Hanseatic League and what was now Gdansk, Danzig it was when his great-grandfather had fled the Nazis with his family. No Sidhe there. He might sneak in some Old Blood genes through whatever lurked in the shadowed forests and hidden valleys and dan
k mine-shafts of Poland, but he'd never even learned the names.
No, it was the magic of words. People talked about how a good book could transport the reader to another land, how disoriented you could feel when something pulled you out of the story into mundane life. This just threatened him with that next step beyond.
He could tell that the Summer Country fascinated Jo. She belonged there, for all the horror she'd found in their brief visit. She wasn't out of work and digging for lost change under the sofa cushions there, she didn't keep having her nose rubbed in a mother lying brain-dead in a nursing home and a father boozing and whoring the rounds of Harlot Street to keep her awake at nights.
And she didn't have to settle for a yellow-ass coward of a poet and erstwhile guitar-player for a lover. She could find somebody like Brian, tough and competent and with the power of the Old Blood in his veins. He'd seen that measuring squint in her eyes when she'd looked at the guy. Wondering how he was in bed, whether Maureen had landed the better fish.
David shook himself. He poured a cup of coffee and hauled himself over to the window, staring out at the bleak scene that Jo could leave anytime she wanted. Raining again. The thaw had uncovered a whole stack of garbage bags across the street, buried in some January storm when the snowplow came by before the trash trucks did. Now the dogs or coyotes had gotten at the well-aged windfall. Fast-food wrappers and gnawed chicken bones and brown curled grapefruit rinds and empty chili cans all over the place. Lovely, against the infamous yellow snow.
Sirens warbled in the distance, bad omen. But he could discount that. They lived about a half mile from the hospital, had ambulances howling around day and night like banshees heralding their cargoes of woe. Had the medivac helicopters whomping over at all hours, fetching and carrying the wreckage of most of eastern Maine.
He swallowed coffee, absent-mindedly wincing at the heat of it. It hadn't worked. Jo hadn't come bounding up the stairs and scratched her key into the door and homed in on the aroma like a wolf smelling fresh moose blood.
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