Dark & Disorderly

by Bernita Harris

  Stone is cold and so was I. Stone is hard but I was jelly. Thresher had ordered me back to his car. I hadn’t been able to make it that far. All I could do was keep out of the way. I wondered if Nathan-zombie had gotten away from his animator. I wondered if or how Bob had encountered Nathan-zombie. I wondered what possible reason there could be to all this. I wondered if I would ever be warm again.

  Eventually, they took the body past. The wheels of the gurney crunched and bounced over the gravel. The gloved hands guiding the gurney and its black-bagged cargo gleamed pallid and unnatural. Ghoulish. I turned my head away and curled my arms over my head.

  After the ambulance jockeyed its way past the equipment van and the cruisers and drove through the gates, I realized my behind was numb. I stood up. Maybe I could make it back to the unmarked now. Maybe not. For an instant, the sky tilted and tunneled. I had risen to my feet too fast.

  “I thought I told you…” His deep voice drew me back from the swirling dark like a cord and my world steadied and solidified. For such a big man Thresher walked very quietly.

  “You did,” I said. “I didn’t think I’d make it.” I swiped at my wet cheeks with both palms and swallowed a sudden sob. Once, I’d been a woman of easy tears. I’d hoped I’d gone beyond that unattractive reaction. Tears misled people. People tend to associate tears with a non-functioning mind. Besides, I get blotchy and ugly when I cry.

  My eyes were level with his chest. The kind of broad chest maidens were wont to fling themselves upon. I wasn’t a maiden but I yearned to attach myself to his big body like a limpet. Warmth. Human touch. To be enveloped in that molten blue and amber aura I’d encountered at the door of the coffee shop. To be cradled and protected. Simply, I wanted to be held.

  I refrained, doubting he would care to have me snuffing and snotting down his shirtfront, especially after just having messed about with a dead body. A remote part of my mind labeled my urge to throw myself at him as partly sexual—a natural if inappropriate response to danger and death, particularly in these circumstances. The major part of my mind stood appalled that I’d entertained the thought for a single moment. I stepped back, embarrassed, and blinked up at the sky. Big men must put up with a lot. Size matters in many ways

  “Were you sick?” His tone sounded more cynical than sympathetic. At the moment I represented a nuisance.

  “No. The wind is from the west.” For which I was profoundly glad. It’s the raw, mortal smells of blood and body fluids as much as the sight that empties the stomach. I felt quite wretched enough.

  Thresher seemed unsure just what to do with me. I was necessary but not immediately so. Happy first day on a new case in a strange place, Officer. Swiping at my cheeks again, I fumbled in my pocket for another tissue, turned my back on the desecration and began walking toward the entrance and the unmarked car.

  He said, after a few steps, “Let me repeat that I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. St. Claire. This must be very distressing for you. Death of a loved one is traumatic enough, but…”

  Maybe he took my tears for grief, for anguish, in spite of what I’d told him earlier. Such a convenient, conventional, easy role. Such a lie. I was distressed, yes, but not for those reasons, not for love but for principle, and a lot of guilt. Instead of sorrow, I felt rage spread warmth from my belly up, like a slow-release capsule. Had in a way, ever since last night. Anger can get one through a lot of things.

  So I said, “Just so you know, Sergeant Thresher, my husband was a bastard. A charming, manipulative, sociopathic bastard. Nathan married me for status of a sort, or for some other twisted reason, not for love. It took me a while after we were married to realize that. More fool me. But that’s not the point. The point is he didn’t deserve that. No one does.”

  I gestured behind at the yawning hole and the obscene disarray. “For all his petty meanness, for all his faults, he didn’t deserve to be dug up and used like that. And poor old Mr. Pearson…” I choked and couldn’t go on.

  Mr. Pearson, in a black suit above his scarred and stubby safety boots. Mr. Pearson, who, realizing I had no family, stood by my side in the bitter March wind at the internment, who escorted me back to the undertaker’s limousine with silent courtesy and inarticulate care. Mr. Pearson, who respected both the quiet and the unquiet dead. I hoped he had been unconscious when his killer used the knife.

  Thresher raised the fluttering Do Not Cross tape for me to duck under. When we reached his car, he opened the passenger door and gestured me in. “I’ll see you home. A further interview can wait a few hours. You’re as pale as a ghost…” He stopped, thankfully, or I’d have been tempted to hit him for that comparison. And if I ever did that, I figured I should be prepared to run very fast.

  “One thing I do want as soon as possible is a list of names of all necromancers of your acquaintance.”

  About to climb into the passenger seat, I straightened and turned.

  “You can have that right now. None. I’m not acquainted with any. As I told you, I hope I told you, I don’t do zombies. I restrict myself to ghost busting. Besides, we’ve never had a zombie case here. There’s a court-accredited roster, a very short one, but I don’t know any of them and I don’t hang out with the psychic crowd or at their psychic fairs. If any of them have true animating skills, they keep it—if you’ll pardon the phrase—underground.”

  “I see. Do you have any reason to think it’s personal?”

  “Personal? Just my husband’s grave. I’d call that personal. Just the zombie of my husband sent to attack me. I’d consider that very personal. And he sure as hell didn’t dig himself up.” Over the car’s roof, I watched a robin carry wisps of grass to a branch of one of the rowan trees guarding the gateway. More police tape fluttered in front of Mr. Pearson’s little house. I hoped they’d informed the local funeral homes in case any graveside services were scheduled for today.

  I wasn’t sure just how he meant his question, just what he hoped to elicit, but my answer remained the same in any event. I turned my head and stared into the dark blue eyes. “Yes,” I repeated. “It’s personal.”

  And someone would pay.

  6.

  It’s all very well to make a silent vow of vengeance, but at present I hadn’t a clue how to achieve it, nor the energy to act on it if I did. And I had to stay alive long enough to do it.

  This time I kept my cowardly eyes shut until we reached the highway.

  Other than directions, Thresher asked few questions during the short drive. “Are you from around here, Ms. St. Claire?”

  “No. In the local manner of speaking, Sergeant, I’m ‘from away.’” I would always be “from away,” I thought with a bitter twist.

  “And where is ‘away?’”

  “Other side of Metro, a bedroom community much like this one, but nowhere in particular, really. We moved a lot when I was a child,” I said, and waited to see if he could interpret that fact correctly. He did.

  “The early panic caused considerable backlash against known psychics and some serious witch hunts, I’ve been told.”

  At first people blamed psychics in general—and an allegedly powerful, unknown, black cabal of them in particular—for the increase in ghosts and hauntings, and claimed that psychics continued to manifest and manipulate the immaterial world for money, influence and power. Since ghosts were almost as profitable as zombies for entrepreneurial psychics, considerably safer and without the more messy ethical and legal problems, this had remained a popular and persistent theory even today and accounted in part to the suspicion with which we were viewed.

  “Anyway,” I continued after a long pause, “it’s considered an advantage in my type of employment if one doesn’t know the local people that well, the familiar ghosts. No bias, you see. No conflict of interest.”

  He slowed for the intersection. “Conflict of interest?”

  “A right at this light,” I said. “My house is the little white one beyond the old cemetery you’ll see on your left shortly. The ce
metery is a case in point, and conflict certainly is an appropriate word. My husband’s church is responsible for its upkeep. No burials there for something like seventy years, maybe longer. The church board wants to sell it to developers for housing. Some members, who have family buried there, oppose the de-sanctification plan and Nathan… Oh, good!”

  A telephone van filled my driveway. While Sergeant Thresher called in his ten-twenty and mileage, I jumped out and hurried up the walk, digging for my keys. The telephone guy stood by the front door. He smiled and poked up the brim of his baseball cap with one finger when I reached him.

  “Thought no one was home,” he said. “I just have to check your phone and you’ll be in business.”

  I unlocked the door, pushed it open and pointed. “There, on the desk behind the sofa.”

  Two minutes later he was back. “All set and copasetic. You should get a dog, miss. Smart-ass kids. The line was snipped clean, cut right through.” He hitched his utility belt, gave me a cheery grin and was off, dodging Thresher coming up the walk.

  I watched Dumbarton hoist a ghostly leg at the van’s front right wheel, do the same to the sergeant’s car and then amble around the side of the house. I wondered if the spray would fluoresce come night.

  “Since I’m here,” Thresher said. He examined the loops of filament tied to the porch posts, then visually measured me for height.

  “Quite a booby trap,” he observed.

  “I was not wearing boots last evening,” I said stiffly. He ignored my glare. Perhaps his crack hadn’t been intentional.

  “You should change your locks. May I see the location of the attack?” His gaze went past the open door to the stairs at the left of the entry. “Upstairs, I take it?”

  “At the end of the hall,” I called as he took the steps two at a time. Abrupt bastard. He was right about the locks though. I should have thought of that. Maybe I should change my will too, since Nathan had been my sole legatee. And I should insert a non-animation clause in it and order cremation.

  I slung my raincoat over the banister, hauled off my scarf and let my hair down. An incipient headache pinched at my temples. In the kitchen, I plugged in the kettle for instant coffee, took a pair of mugs from the cupboard and wondered if I should offer him a cup.

  Mr. Pearson sacrificed obscenely. Bobby badly injured. A zombie-thing invading my house. Why?

  I was still standing there stupidly, clutching the bottle of instant, staring at the steam rising from the kettle, when he came through. He took it from me.

  “Sit down, Lillie,” he said, swinging out one of the pressed-back kitchen chairs from the round table, “before you fall down.” He dealt with both mugs, adding cold water from the kitchen tap before he poured in hot. His head just cleared the bottom of the hurricane lamp light fixture that hung from the figured tin ceiling.

  “Sugar?” I pointed. He dumped at least a tablespoon in each and put a mug in front of me. “Drink. It’s not too hot.” I drank. It helped the cold inside.

  He leaned back against the worn white Arborite counter and measured me over his coffee mug.

  “I saw the baseball bat,” he said finally.

  I blinked at him, and then remembered. I’d left it on the bed. Next to a pile of dirty lingerie. I must get to the laundromat soon. He must have toured the entire house.

  Ah, well, I was sure he’d seen women’s undersilkies before. Lots of them. On and off. Men don’t have to be handsome to be sexy. Especially not men built the way he was, just this side of muscle-bound. Again, the direction of my thoughts appalled me. Made me feel a little dirty, actually.

  He seemed to have concluded the bat validated my story somehow. His logic sucked. He continued to survey me over the rim of his coffee mug.

  “So you’re one of the true Natural Born? With silver hair, platinum blond, I guess it’s called, as a Talent marker.”

  I hadn’t heard the term Natural Born in years. Some enthusiastic pundit had assigned that ridiculous designation to children like me in the early days. Fortunately, it had been replaced by a simpler and less silly word: Talent.

  After the initial consternation about the ghostly pandemic settled down and the world continued to rotate as usual and the sun continued to come up each morning as it always did, observers noted that certain, non-albino children—born with luminous silver hair and, moreover, whose hair color did not change or darken as they grew—possessed a high degree and broad range of psychic abilities. Plus, they could banish most specters by simple touch. Hospitals were requested to inform the authorities of such births forthwith. Schools were ordered to monitor the progress of students identified by this Talent marker and provide yearly reports on their progress. Post-secondary opportunities were made available and an Institute for Parapsychological Studies granted fervent official approval. Grade school had still been hell though. Always the new kid—the strange one with the funny hair.

  “Yes, I’ve always looked like a Freak.” I grabbed a swatch and looked at it. “Warns people away. Sometimes I think I should dye it.”

  Platinum silver hair was the primary identifier, but really wasn’t that much a clear marker. Too easily imitated. Some people had their hair bleached and tinted so they could swank about and pretend to be Talents. Pointless role-playing. Gave them a feeling of ersatz power, I suppose, without the responsibility.

  “No. Don’t ever do that. It’s beautiful,” he said, surprising me so I gawked at him.

  Beautiful? For one brief instant I felt flattered—glad my hair was clean. Then common sense reasserted itself.

  Nathan had called it beautiful—at first. Exotic. That soon changed. Nathan wanted me to get nipple rings too. That had been the first hint, though I had been slow to realize it, that Nathan planned to groom his inexperienced bride into a submissive. I gave the sergeant a delicate sneer to indicate I noted the personal gambit. Standard technique to put the suspect at ease.

  Freaks like me learn to be wary, eventually, when Normals pay compliments.

  His next question switched back to the matter at hand. “What time yesterday did you speak to the custodian at the cemetery?”

  “Middle of the afternoon, I think. I’d had a call from the monument company.” I reached past my mug and fiddled with the red-handled wire snips, opening and closing them, trying to remember. Death duties. A seemingly endless list of notifications and arrangements, calls and paperwork. All the dreary protocols associated with death. That time was about right. Around two-thirty, three o’clock. I’d quit after that call.

  “Did you make or receive any other calls after that?” His voice changed. Oh. Shit. I didn’t have to look at him to know why. Snips. Cut telephone line. I dropped the tool beside the box of baggies, the scissors and the dull knife I’d used to try to haggle the fishing line free and neglected to put away.

  “Look,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, level, reasonable, “you can believe me. Or not. If it’s not, you can take your suspicious ass out of my house. Thank you for the lift home. Now, bugger off, if that’s your mind-set.”

  He put his hand out in stop-wait gesture and opened his mouth when his pager buzzed at his belt. I got up, circled around him and drew the bolt on the back door. “The phone’s in the living room on the desk,” I said, “if you need a landline,” and flounced out on the veranda. If his pager or cell phone fritzed, he’d blame that on me too.

  Dumbarton’s tail thumped somewhere in the dirt below. “Good dog,” I said. “Do the driver’s door, will you, if there’s a next time?” There would be, very likely. Sergeant Thresher clearly had doubts about my veracity. And he struck me as the persistent type of investigator.

  I twitched around the garden for several minutes. The tulips were up about five inches and showing wands tinged with color at their heads. The lily beds sprouted pale green ears among the tangle of last year’s dead leaves. Buried things coming to light. Past time to take the winter cover off them all and hunt out the weeds. Another neglected chore.


  The herb garden too. My sage, thyme and lavender survived the winter, as did the serpent garlic and quite a few others. I brushed maple keys off the brass plate of the sundial. My house gift. Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be. A tacky, romantic sentiment, I suppose. I remembered Nathan smiling as he watched the men install the plinth. I now realized it was a smile of contempt. I was where I had always been, alone, with no one to watch my back.

  The straight stem of a black walnut seedling periscoped beside a rosebush. My gardening books claimed they poisoned the ground around them. It came out reluctantly when I jerked on it, the split nut still attached like a wizened heart. The manuals said a zombie’s heart should be burned and the ashes cast in flowing water. Morbid thoughts. Maybe I should have just dumped those ashes down the flush. That would have done it, satisfy the protocols just as well. Lacked the drama, of course, of the purifying water in its natural element, the idea, the reassurance, of spreading the evil dust beyond coalescence.

  I went back and sat on the steps in the sun, leaned my head against the railing. All I wanted to do was throw myself on my bed and bawl. No, not the bed, that was next to the bathroom. I didn’t think I’d be sleeping upstairs for a while. Besides, a crying fit would accomplish nothing but a red nose and swollen sinuses and I was miserable enough.

  The kitchen door rattled open, so I hauled myself to my feet, brushed off my behind and turned to face Sergeant Thresher.

  “Nice property,” he said, leaning his elbows on the veranda railing and gazing around the yard, taking in the flower beds, the flagstone walk, the old apple trees, the herb garden and the sundial. “Nice place for a dog,” he added, his voice bland.

  Uh-huh. Like this morning at the station, he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Maybe he felt the drawing, this peculiar, unreasonable tug of attraction, and it made him curious. I didn’t know. My skill at reading people had already proved to be dangerously deficient. I just wished he’d go, before I either passed out or embarrassed myself. He was the sort of man that made one acutely aware of being a woman. Usually such men were total assholes.