Dark & Disorderly

by Bernita Harris

  From the swelling pressure against my thighs that wasn’t all he wanted. And from the answering sweet hungry ache between mine, my body wanted the same. Wanted the weight of him over me. Wanted bare skin and the slide of hands on breast and hips and hard thrusting manhood. Wanted to open to him, close around him. And he would be big and bold.

  My head was more cautious. Barely.

  Helped no doubt by a stab of pain when his searching hand smoothed past the bruise on my ribs to my breast. I stiffened, whimpered and tore my mouth away.

  Sweet Jesus, what was I doing? He was almost a bloody stranger. I didn’t even know if he were married or in a committed relationship, but here I had been wiggling and moaning against him like a bitch in heat. And Nathan, poor excuse for a man and a husband that he was, barely cold in the ground. I corrected myself. Not even in the ground. Besides, you don’t use a man for posthumous revenge.

  Johnny loosened his hold. “Don’t be afraid of me, Lillie. I won’t hurt you,” he said.

  I took refuge in literalism.

  “You just did,” I gasped, wrenching myself free of the mind sex fantasy and pulling out of his arms. I came up against the car and stood there with both hands pressed against my side. I wanted to run away and hide. Johnny followed and planted himself in front of me. Too close. They had been long, hot, plunging kisses, very unchaste. In my limited experience thwarted men turn nasty. I turned away, anticipating a spew of abuse. I figured I deserved it.

  It didn’t come. Instead, a large and gentle hand cupped my cheek.

  “Lillie, I’m sorry. I was out of order. I apologize.” His voice sounded diffident, as if he wasn’t used to apologizing. Not to women anyway.

  “Sergeant. Turned on by the bikini?”

  He braced both hands on the car frame on either side of me, blocking any escape by any means other than an undignified knee to the balls, duck and run. Nothing he’d done warranted that kind of drastic fight and flight. Not yet anyway. I stayed very still. The formality hadn’t worked. Neither had the insult. He shook his head slowly.

  “No, Lillie. You. You draw me. The way you smell, the way you move.”

  Physicals, just physicals. I was just a body. “Just satisfying your infinite curiosity—about needy widows?”

  His eyes went dark again. “Not at all. My infinite curiosity isn’t satisfied in the slightest. After that nuclear experience, lady, let me tell you I now possess an infinite jealousy of your late husband.”

  “Nathan didn’t like to kiss,” I mumbled. “He didn’t like face-to-face…” Why had I said that?

  “Selfish, stupid bastard,” said Johnny, pressing my fist against his chest, moving my hand in slow circles against the sleek fabric of his sweater, then sliding my fingers slowly lower, toward his belt. “I like it very much. I like to watch a woman’s face when I make love to her. Lillie, let me take you home.”

  Home? The house where memories gathered, still harsh and fresh and bitter as a curse? With Nathan’s possessions, his taint still crowding the atmosphere? I didn’t think so. The idea destroyed desire. I watched a white petal fall off the sleeve of his suit.

  Sex and death. Was that where the attraction lay for both of us? Casual, indiscriminate lust to hold back and defy the darkness? I was back in control now and didn’t think I was ready to find out. But it was reassuring that months of marriage to Nathan hadn’t murdered my natural instincts and destroyed my libido, after all.

  Spring peepers beginning their chorus reminded me the day was waning. If I wanted to visit Cemetery Hill in full daylight, and I preferred cemeteries in full daylight, I couldn’t stand here to dally with danger.

  “No,” I said, with deliberate misdirection, tugging my hand free. “I have to visit Nathan’s grave.” His face slammed shut like a door.

  20.

  I don’t know what he might have said to that bald statement, for just then his cell phone buzzed. When he moved a few steps to answer it, I took the opportunity to climb into my car. I backed, did a U-turn that pranged the discarded television cabinet, nearly put me in the opposite ditch and got the hell away from him. A tall, dark man, long legs spread, standing in the middle of the highway watching me flee.

  I didn’t take the turn into the dark winding lane that led down to Willowbank, where they would be digging Bobby’s grave. Instead, I drove straight through town, crossed the bridge and followed the road along the river to Cemetery Hill, watching my rearview mirror the entire time. Which was stupid. According to him, he could find me at any time. Goddamned car.

  Late as it was, some sort of graveside ceremony was in progress. A hearse and two limousines blocked the drive and a whole long string of vehicles edged the highway, like a row of big shiny plastic beads. A crowd of about forty-five to fifty people clustered in the lower section of the cemetery near the road.

  I parked my car sedately behind the last vehicle and took time to smooth and pin up my disordered hair. I could still feel Johnny’s fingers moving through it. Then I lifted a pot from the back and got out to walk along the pavement.

  About the time I reached the entrance, the mourners struck up “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a little ragged, but with bounce. Someone in the throng possessed a good strong bass and used it.

  Old Time Religion adherents, then. Most of them wore street clothes with few hats and almost no formal dress in evidence. That surprised me, but meant my casual clothes wouldn’t be considered remarkable, if I were noticed at all. My pot of lilies implied my purpose, provided protective coloration. After yesterday’s events I wanted to remain innocuous more than ever. A funeral home attendant sneaking a smoke behind the hearse focused on the plant, dismissing me with a nod as I crunched past.

  My feet weren’t exactly jubilant but the verse of the hymn that included lilies lifted me in rhythm up the curving path to the grave of Lily St. Claire.

  Her grave had been refilled, raked smooth, made tidy and straight and the lichen scraped from her headstone. I dumped the lily shoots out of the green plastic pot and planted their golden roots in the low raw mound close to the base of her marker, taking care to press them firmly in the drying, crumbly earth.

  Then I went hunting for a bullaun stone.

  Working on the premise that cemetery groundskeepers liked to make things easy for themselves for grass cutting and might have rolled the stone away, considering it of no significance other than a crude foot marker, I went downhill.

  I found it on top of a terrace line, half-buried in last year’s leaves and small branches, among other rocks that had formed the loose stone retaining wall. It must have been there a long time, for decades, because the hollow sockets for the curse stones were mere mossy indentations.

  The folklorist, if he were the original collector, would have had to have taken the curse stones when the mother stone was in situ, for how else could he have recognized them for what they were. The curator described them as ordinary stones. The pictures I’d found on the Internet had confirmed it. Those stones appeared to be common quartz, tumbled smooth and round like many stones from a riverbed. I used the trowel to dig away the debris and peel off the plush of dark green moss. I counted eight sockets, smooth and cold under my fingers.

  The curator at the museum had mentioned five.

  Sitting back on my heels, I contemplated my discovery and wondered if he had taken the stones as curios of academic interest only and made record of them solely as a minor historical curiosity.

  Or had he, bearing the name O’Dea, known precisely what he was doing—bringing some form of guardianship to an end? Perhaps he, and not a groundskeeper, had been the one to lever the bullaun from its place on a St. Claire grave and heave it tumbling down the hillside. Had he reversed or reinforced those curses by turning the stones one last time before he took them away? Was it really my problem?

  I looked back up the slope, past the pale clutter of gravestones. The late-afternoon sun glittered on the name St. Claire.

  Maybe it was my p
roblem, but it would have to wait.

  Maybe I pursued this minor mystery to avoid the big ones staring me in the face.

  The riddle of whom or what wished me harm, who wanted me dead. Before I left I replaced the moss and winter litter over the stone.

  The funeral party had gone. I walked down the empty road to my car, thinking of Johnny. Distance allowed me cold assessment. Maybe he was just another horny male interested in exploiting an apparently vulnerable and willing woman. Willing. At the touch of his hands, his mouth, his body, I had been very willing. That scared me.

  I couldn’t help wonder if that inviting news frame of me almost naked had something to do with it. Being wanted for one’s body is flattering, for me especially. But I wasn’t the innocent now that I was before I married Nathan. I corrected that, I wasn’t as ignorant. When a girl can see thirty in the distance, no matter how chaste, the term innocent shouldn’t apply.

  Thinking of Johnny, I thought to look around and under my car. A dark patch stained the gravel underneath, a rather big stain; but I couldn’t know if I had parked over someone’s oil leak or if it came from my car. I sniffed but didn’t smell gasoline, which must mean the fuel line and the gas tank were all right.

  Maybe I’d broken an oil pan or something when I took out that TV cabinet at the side of the road while making my U-turn. Maybe not. In any event, I had best take the car to the nearest mechanic and do it real slow.

  Which is why I was crawling along at about twenty-five miles per hour on a curve and a downgrade to the bridge over Molloy’s Creek when both the steering and brakes went and I plowed off the road.

  We bounced down an embankment, shot through a stand of bushes and sailed across the creek. My car ended up nosed into the opposite bank like a satisfied blue rhinoceros in search of a mud wallow. The air bag deployed and slowly deflated.

  Flung back against the headrest like a crash-test dummy, blind, stunned and semi-smothered, I listened to ticks and shorts and sizzles and the surge and slosh of water against the car door. A bog island of cattails lifted from some swale upstream bumped the car, scraped along the side and sailed majestically onward. The creek was running high from yesterday’s rain. When the rear of the car tilted and swung sideways in the current, I realized it might be a good thing to get my lucky ass out of this trap and up on dry land.

  I unbuckled, slung the strap of my shoulder bag around my neck and levered myself over the console. Water seeped in across the carpet. I twisted to stretch my arm between the seats. Nathan’s lilies spewed across the floor in a muck of potting soil. They could stay there, but I wanted the mint roots from the old graveyard. I grabbed a muddy handful, shoved them awkwardly into my jacket pocket and hauled myself back.

  I rolled across to the passenger’s door, kicking at the air bag. If I could get the door open in the lee of the fast current, it would get me close to the bank. The car wobbled and swung a little farther downstream. I yanked the door handle and shoved with both feet.

  The car tilted with the change in weight as I slid down into breast-deep water—cold feral water that tugged and ballooned my clothes, battered and dragged at my balance. Holding on to the top of the door and praying hard the car would not swing farther inshore and pin me under it, I trod water and floated and sloshed, hand over hand along the bobbing door frame. When my feet found minimum purchase I dove for the high bank, then dug and clawed my way up.

  Just in time.

  The car broke loose from the bank with a dreadful sucking sound, floated a few feet, swung into the current, settled and sank. I could barely see its shape under the heavy roiling water. Water that seemed filled with flowing, brown, sinuous bodies, like a school of selkies, separate when sunlight glinted on a rippling flank and lifted arm, then merging as one in a headlong onward tide.

  I let go of the young tree I was hugging for dear life and checked to make sure I still had both my bracelets. Maybe there’d be a house not too far away. I didn’t remember one, but no matter.

  From the angle of the sun it must be close to quitting time and five o’clock traffic. All I had to do was reach the highway. Soon someone would come along and I could flag them down and get a lift, or they would have a phone and would call me a taxi. Or the police. Or someone. Even if I must look like the Swamp Thing, and certainly smelled like it.

  Meanwhile, I had best start moving if I wanted to fight off hypothermia. I squelched west along the bank toward the road. It seemed farther than it looked. I think I fell several times. When I finally reached it, the graded embankment to the highway seemed impossibly high and impossibly steep.

  I made it, barely. On my hands and knees.

  I rolled into a sitting position and sat there for long minutes, picking up pieces of gravel and gravely examining each stone before tossing it away down the slope. Some of them were quite pretty, I thought, especially after I dripped on them. The colors brightened when wet. I wondered if I should take some home. After a while, I decided I should take off my boots to dump out the water. But it seemed of vital importance to pick the proper foot to do first.

  A red car swooshed past as I wrung out my socks. I flapped them graciously at its departing rear end.

  Eventually, I staggered to my feet and began a slow trudge toward town, listening for the sounds of a motor, listening to the chafe of my wet jeans, feeling cold to the marrow, dizzy and very frightened.

  Cars, vans, pickups whizzed past, mostly in the other lane. A few slowed at my waves, gawked and sped up. A couple blew their horns but kept going. Maybe they thought I was a vagrant, a drunk. I had never been drunk. I wished I were. I heard of being stone-cold sober, but I never heard of a cold drunk. I was very cold, therefore I was not drunk. If I were drunk maybe I wouldn’t be so cold.

  No one wants to stop and help me, I thought sorrowfully, because I’m a Freak. Or maybe they thought I was a ghost. A phantom hitchhiker.

  Walking backward on the shoulder of the road and waving my arms when a car approached required a special coordination that seemed beyond me. Once I tripped over my own feet and sprawled heavily on my behind. That particular car, another red one, just blasted past. Didn’t even slow. Finally, I gave it up, tucked my hands in my armpits, bent my head and slogged on, muttering “freak-freak-freak” at every step.

  Eventually, I switched tunes and found myself breathing shivering snatches of verse from the hymn they’d sung in the cemetery. Over and over. Marching along to rhythm of the song, lifting my feet high like I was tramping out grapes of wrath. Crushing serpents all dewy and damp. I thought that was all right if I did that, even if I wasn’t truth and certainly not God.

  I giggled. Johnny couldn’t find me now. Nobody could. The GPS tracker thingy was under a couple of feet of water. I tried to calculate. I didn’t know where they put those things. Somewhere in the dash? Maybe four feet, even five. Glory hallelujah.

  A minivan, a white one, I was inordinately relieved to notice, eased to a stop beside me. The passenger window hummed partway down and a young woman with a nice clean steady aura leaned across.

  “Miss, are you in trouble? Do you need help?”

  “Yes,” I said, swaying. My legs didn’t want to stop their forward march. “Please.”

  “What happened? Like, you look like you’ve been swimming with your clothes on!”

  I wanted to claw at the door handle. Didn’t. For fear she might take fright and drive off.

  “Almost. Swimming. My car. Went off. The creek. Back there.”

  The door lock snicked up. The most beautiful sound.

  “My God! Get in,” she said.

  I got the door open, waited while she hoisted a diaper bag over into the backseat to make room. I crawled in, managed to pull the door closed.

  “I’m taking the baby to stay with her grandmother. Are you banged up? Do you need to go to the hospital? Like, you look awfully shivery and cold.”

  She punched the heater on high. I fumbled with the seat belt, couldn’t get it to latch. She p
ushed it in place for me. I leaned forward against the restraint gratefully, relishing the fan of warm air, the sense of shelter. All right? I thought so. A few scratches, maybe. Sore ribs where that bruise got another wallop. Nothing vital.

  “No. No hospital. Just shock, I think. Need to get home. Need hot bath. Be all right then.”

  “If you say so. Glad you’re not hurt since I’m, like, in a hurry, really.” She patted her curly blond hair, checked her rearview mirror and pulled back on the highway.

  “I’m on my way to Mum’s. She’s taking the baby so hubby and me can have a dirty weekend. We’re flying to Vegas. Where can I drop you off?”

  My wandering wits came home and brought my manners with them.

  “Highfield Road, if that’s not too far out of your way. End of the street will do. My house isn’t far from the intersection. I can make it from there. I really appreciate you picking me up—I was afraid no one was going to stop.”

  “No problem. Not out of my way at all. You know, I was stranded once myself three years ago. Reminded me as soon as I saw you walking along. At night though. Bad date. Funny thing, it was out this way too. Thought I’d never get home—and me in three-inch heels and a skimpy dress, and in a holy terror he’d follow me and run me over or something. Like, it was right about the time they found that dead girl in town. Scared me off men until I met my Rob. Like, some men are real bastards, you know, and he was a strange one. Funny thing, that was his name, ‘Strange.’ I should of known. Names mean something, you know.”

  I agreed, emphatically, that names can mean a lot. So maybe it wasn’t just me who brought out the perverse in Nathan, after all. It had to be him. Nathan and his uncle Raymond had been the only ones in town with that surname, and Nathan’s uncle was not a candidate. He’d been well past chasing skirt and lifting same for some years.