Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  “They worked for Sig,” Petra said. “Look, I know you’ve got to be afraid. I want you to know that we’re not going to abandon you.”

  She looked up and met Petra’s eyes, but didn’t say anything.

  “There’s someone I want for you to meet.” She glanced at the door. “This is Maria Yellowrose.”

  Maria came in, smiling reassuringly. “Hi. I’m a friend of Petra’s. And Gabe’s.”

  “And Sig’s?”

  “And also Sig. He likes my cooking.” Maria grinned. “The hospital will be releasing you, and I wanted to see if you might want to come home with me.”

  Nine looked at her, then back at Petra.

  “Maria is the most wonderful person I know,” Petra said. “I trust her with my life. And more than that, I trust her with Sig. He’s currently taking a nap with Maria’s cat.”

  Nine looked down at her toes. “I appreciate it. Really, I do. But this is all very . . . confusing.”

  “I can’t say that I understand everything about your situation. Or anything, really,” Maria admitted. “But I understand the need to have a safe place to gather one’s thoughts. I can offer that.”

  It was a long time before Nine spoke again. “Thank you.”

  But there was a distant look in her eyes. And Petra had no idea how long she would stay.

  Not that there were any guarantees about how long anyone would stay.

  Maria had brought Petra a change of clothes, and Petra stubbornly remained at the hospital. She watched television in the floor lobby, paced, and slept in a chair. She received word from Mike that Owen had been taken to another facility. Mike had used air quotes when he said the word “facility.” Perhaps Owen’d had enough of unreality, had lost his grip and was refocusing on what was real. In any event, deputies had not come to take her away to jail. So he was honoring his bargain, if only to keep what remained of his own sanity.

  She stared down at the golden ring on her finger. She knew that the other ring was sitting in a plastic bag stapled to the foot of Gabe’s bed, with the rest of his personal effects. She spun the ring around in her fingers, a loop without beginning and end. Gabe would have something deeply philosophical to say about the nature of the ring’s symbolism and the chemical wedding, no doubt. And she looked forward to hearing that.

  When he woke up. Not if. When.

  After many hours, a man in blue scrubs with a surgeon’s mask draped over his neck came to the waiting area.

  “Mrs. Manget?”

  She didn’t correct him. “Yes?”

  “Your husband pulled through surgery quite well. We were able to drain the blood that was causing pressure on the brain, and the clot that’s sitting on his temple is breaking up.”

  She pressed her hand over her mouth. “Thank you.”

  The surgeon held up his hand. “He’s not out of the woods yet. That clot was pressing pretty hard on the optic nerve of his left eye. We won’t know if it’s affected his vision until he wakes up and the swelling goes down.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Sure. He’s back in his room now.”

  The surgeon led Petra back to the ICU. He left her to go find some paperwork, and she slipped to Gabe’s bedside.

  He looked like hell. His head had been shaved and the bruises stood out in sharp relief over his skull. She saw no trace of stitches on his temple, just a bandage, and wondered if they had been able to drain off the fluid with a syringe. She gingerly pressed the back of her hand to his cheek.

  “Hello, love.”

  He didn’t speak. But she knew, deep down, that he was in there. She glanced at the bandages covering his chest and the plastic tubing coming out of his nose and mouth, when something flickered at the edge of her vision.

  The bruise on his chest. It had taken on an odd pattern. She tipped her head to look at it more closely. Something moved beneath his skin. It seemed to seethe softly, with the outline of a feather.

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. Her heart soared.

  Chapter 21

  Snow Madness

  Snow madness.

  That’s what they said, anyway, murmured behind hands and closed doors.

  Owen was certain there was something more official-sounding on his chart. “Transient dissociative state.” “PTSD.” “Trauma-induced psychosis.” Likely something like that.

  But it was extremely unhelpful that they put him in a white room to recover. It was so white that he could see white behind his eyelids. He was stuck facing a white popcorn ceiling that looked an awful lot like snow, especially when he focused on one spot and let his vision get sparkly around the edges. Maybe nobody quite thought this through, from a treatment standpoint.

  It wasn’t like Owen was in much of a position to argue, anyway. They’d parked him in a restraint chair that was identical to the ones in his jail, where they were known as “Hannibal Lector chairs.” It was an orange plastic chair covered in seat-belt straps, but the gimmick was that the seat and back were tipped back at an angle. It was nearly impossible to climb out of the chair, and an orderly or deputy could hold a person in it with one hand.

  Aside from being immobilized in the chair, he was getting a whole lot of meds. Some of them, he guessed, were painkillers. He’d lost two fingers on his right hand. The hospital hadn’t been able to do much about that. The fingers were long gone. They just sewed the skin over, like sealing an envelope, with black stitches. He could see it if he lifted his hand up at the wrist and craned his neck down. He had frostbite. His ears burned, which could have been a good sign. His feet were covered in thick socks. He hadn’t seen those yet. But if they looked anything like his fingertips, they were likely mottled and blistered. He was lucky he hadn’t lost more digits.

  There were other meds, too, that they gave him. Someone came by with a paper cup twice a day with pills and checked his mouth to make sure he’d swallowed them. The pills made him fuzzy-headed. But he noticed that Anna didn’t come around at all after he started taking them. She’d been very indistinct the first day, and then faded away, like an image on a shaken Etch-A-Sketch.

  He suspected that he was on video camera. He didn’t call out after her. He didn’t take any more swings at the staff. A psychiatrist came by once a day to peer in on him and scribble notes. The shrink asked very easy questions, the same ones every day after they moved him around, dressed him, fed him, and cleaned him up:

  “What’s your name?”

  “What year is it?”

  “Are you and I alone in this room?”

  “Do you remember anything about what happened to you?”

  He answered the first two truthfully, and told them what they wanted to hear for the third. They were alone. No voices. No one was out to get him. He remembered little of what happened in the backcountry, just following up on a current investigation. He just remembered that it was cold and he’d gotten into it with a bear. He liked the story about the bear. People could perceive crazy as weakness. But if he survived a fight with a bear, well, hell. That was building a legend of crazy.

  Owen knew how this worked. Eventually they’d have to let him up. They’d give him a bed, let him walk around. If he behaved himself, he’d be out soon with a referral to a shrink and a bottle full of pills.

  After a while his mother came to see him. She walked stiffly through the metal door. Her platinum hair was an impeccable helmet, and she wore heels that clicked on the tile. Her long leather coat looked like it had just gotten back from the dry cleaners, and he smelled a puff of Dior when she got close.

  Owen was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, when she arrived. Someone had given him a pad of paper and a fat crayon to draw with. He knew that was a test, to see if he’d scribble pictures of angry monsters. He drew benign pictures of deer on a mountain, grazing, beneath a smiling sun. All the deer had antlers.

  “Mother.”

  “Owen.” She bent down to squint at him. She took his chin in her hand and turned his head
right and left, assessing God-knew-what in his eyes. She didn’t sit on the floor or let any bit of her clothing touch the inside of the cell. Finally, she released him and straightened, apparently satisfied. “Are you ready to go home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Get yourself together. You have work to do.”

  She checked him out. They gave him back his clothes in a paper bag, just like how the jail stored inmates’ clothes. Unlike jail, he got three bottles of pills and a list of instructions. He shoved them into his coat pocket and followed his mother to her spotlessly black BMW SUV. He never knew how she managed that, with winter slush. Dirt never stuck to it.

  Once ensconced in the silence of the car and settled in the heated leather seats, Owen spoke. “Thanks for picking me up.”

  “Of course.” She punched the engine and pulled out onto the highway. The radio was on, a low volume, playing something atmospheric and soothing. Space music.

  “You don’t have to do that on my account.” He nodded at the radio. “I’m not crazy.”

  She turned it off. “Whatever happened on the mountain . . .”

  “Let’s not talk about it, okay?” He looked out the window, at the miles flashing by. He changed the subject. “Did you have Sal’s funeral?”

  “Not yet. It’s Thursday. I thought it was important for you to be there. It is, in some respects, the end of an era in Temperance. It would be good for you to be seen there, in control.”

  Owen smirked. “In control?”

  “Of the Rutherford estate.” She sighed, and he could tell she wasn’t happy about it.

  He had to agree. They discussed the arrangements she’d made with the funeral parlor. “We’ll do a processional through town to the graveyard. You’ll be in the lead, in a marked car. The ground’s too frozen to put him in; they’ll just keep him in the vault until we get a good thaw.”

  “All right.” He glanced down at his hand.

  “Do you want gloves?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Good thought. It would make more of an impression on folks. Also . . .” She stared straight ahead, at the road unfurling before them. “The other bodies your deputies found. Do you have any idea what you want to do with them?”

  “Hm.” He hadn’t given any thought to that. “I suppose . . . we could just rebury them at the ranch, if no one comes forward to claim them. No pomp and circumstance. That would make the most sense.”

  “I agree. The sooner we’re done with this unpleasant business, the better.”

  He expected her to bring him to his house at the county seat. Instead, she dropped him off at Sal’s house. It took him three tries to work the key on the door. Missing a good chunk of his right hand was going to really screw with his life. He had no idea how he could shoot with it. He guessed he’d have to train himself to use his left hand.

  His mother had been here. He could tell. Paperwork about disability payments from work was stacked neatly on the coffee table, with fluorescent plastic tabs where he needed to sign and stamped envelopes ready to go. There were clean towels in the bathroom and a freshly stocked refrigerator with vegetables and fruit. And she’d even stripped the bed and had it redressed in new, crisp-white linens that smelled exactly like summer sunshine. There were candles placed throughout the house, and a half-burned bundle of sage. She’d been here, doing odd things. He saw that over the windowsills and on top of the door lintels, lines of salt were drawn. The whole space smelled like rosemary. Curtains had been hung, now drawn back to let the light in. And a small mirror had been placed at every window facing the back field.

  He was touched, even if she’d gone overboard on the Feng Shui. His mother rarely interfered with his life. She must have been really worried . . . worried enough to do his laundry for him. He showered, mindful to keep his right hand out of the stinging water. His frostbitten hands and feet looked better than he expected—a rosy shade of lavender. He clumsily dressed in fresh clothes, grumbling at his socks and his belt.

  He wanted nothing more than to take a handful of painkillers, fall into that luxurious bed, and sleep for a week. But there was something he had to do first.

  He put on his coat and boots. He couldn’t fit his swollen right hand in his gloves, so he made do with the oversized pink rubber dish gloves from under the kitchen sink that Sal’s maid must have used. They were lined with flannel, and he figured they’d keep the worst of the muck out of his fresh stitches. He found his flashlight, grabbed some extra batteries, and headed for the garage. He chucked a ladder into the back of Sal’s pickup. He found a box of signal flares, a bag of salt, and a crowbar, and threw those in the back.

  He drove the truck down to the tree, leaving thick tracks in the snow. Afternoon sun had begun to beat down, and old tracks in the area from the crime scene investigation had frozen to ice. He stopped just before where he knew the door in the ground was.

  God damn it. This place had a hold on him. His throat burned with thirst to know what this place was about. He needed to know.

  He clumsily hauled the bag of salt out of the truck and sprinkled salt on the turf. The salt crackled through the snow and ice, and he was able to lift the door in the ground easily with the crowbar. His hand ached as he lowered the ladder into the darkness, working it until he was certain he’d placed it on a solid footing. He dropped the box of signal flares down, and the cardboard box exploded, flares scattering in every direction.

  With his flashlight tucked into his pocket, he climbed down. The going was slow; he couldn’t feel his feet in some places, and he didn’t want to fall. There would be some irony if he fell from the ladder and froze to death in the exact same spot Sal’s body had found. But he made his way to the floor of the chamber, and shone his light around.

  It was exactly as he’d left it: the dark branches and the smell of fresh sawdust, from where the bodies had been cut. There was no smell of death lingering here. With his flashlight to guide him, he picked up the flares and stuffed them in his pockets, up his sleeves, in the neck of his shirt and the tops of his boots. He would not be left without light again.

  His flashlight easily picked out the chalk marks he’d left on the walls in his last venture down here. He wound his way back to the underground river, lighting and dropping sizzling flares as he went. To what Gabriel had called the Mermaid’s domain.

  The river stretched out before him, black and whispering, churning around the skeletons of old bones. Cool rain wrapped over his face in a veil. His flashlight beam swept over the water, bouncing up off the opaque surface and glancing off the stone walls.

  “I have something that belongs to you,” he said into the dark water.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the giant milky pearl with his clumsy rubber glove. He cast it into the water, where it landed with a soft plink.

  Mist swirled above the surface. Owen instinctively took a step back and reached for his gun. But his aching hand only snagged air. They hadn’t given him his gun back.

  The mist closed and cleared around an image: a birdcage. It seemed to be a large cage, as big as a washing machine. Behind the bars paced a white bird—an eagle, he realized.

  He didn’t know what it meant, but he felt that it was something profound.

  “Thank you,” he whispered, feeling as if he’d been forgiven.

  And he retreated.

  His knew not to push his luck. The mysteries of this place would reveal themselves to him. He just had to be patient.

  “Good job, Owen,” a voice reassured him, whispering in his ear.

  Anna’s voice.

  “You’re back,” he said, unsurprised. He was a bit disappointed, if he was honest with himself. Part of him wanted to believe that he was just batshit, that the meds would erase all the magic and ghosts and otherworldly presences on the ranch. Maybe he could sell the land and go back to his desk and run a fiefdom like a proper sheriff.

  But he couldn’t unsee what he’d seen. Through the fuzz in the
back of his brain, he remembered these things. And he wanted more. He wanted to know the full depth and breadth of this world that had been revealed to him.

  “I never left.” She sounded accusing. “You just stopped listening.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She huffed. “You made up with the Mermaid.”

  “I hope so?”

  “You know what you need to do, now.”

  His brow wrinkled. “I’m not sure what she . . .”

  Anna leaned close to his ear and whispered.

  And he understood now, what the Mermaid asked of him. He would deliver.

  “I want to show you something.”

  Nine sat on a bed in a warm bedroom, wrapped in quilts. She had explored it relentlessly, pawing through the glass bottles under the bed, the collection of feathers stuck in the frame of the mirror, the polished river rocks and bits of obsidian lined up on the windowsill. Pages of old books had been framed and placed on the walls. They were torn from a catalog of birds, Maria had said. They were meticulously inked and painted, and seemed almost real. Nine recognized herons and sparrows and blackbirds, perched in blooming branches.

  She had spent hours in front of the mirror, peering at her reflection. She couldn’t remember much of what she had looked like as a child—she’d only seen glimpses of her reflection in water. The body she wore now was shorter than Maria, muscular, with copper skin and curiously grey hair. Her eyes were dark and reminded her of her mother’s, and her long-fingered hands reminded her of her father. Since she’d come indoors, her coarse hair had smoothed and the angles of her face seemed to soften more every day.

  There was a dresser and a closet full of clothes here. Nine had found an old pair of jeans with wide legs that fit her and a poncho with fringe that was irresistible to play with. Maria had seen her wearing them and choked up. Nine was afraid she’d done something wrong, but Maria had given her a hug and told her that she just hadn’t seen those clothes worn in a very long time.