The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Hello?” Dom calls, stepping into Grace Abounding.

  No answer, so he ventures deeper in. Down the nave, through the door, down the hallway—

  “Officer Morrison,” Pastor Thirza says, rising to hug him, when he arrives at the door to her office. “What can I do for you?”

  “Please, call me Dominick.”

  She smells like his mother, rose perfume and Pink curl moisturizer. But she is much shorter. The wig she wears today is also short—Joan of Arc short, he thinks.

  “Dominick, then. What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to follow up about Ossie,” Dom says, real smooth like, but still, she stiffens. He’s spent a long time thinking about how best to broach this and still has no idea. So he just does. “I want to put this as gently as possible, and to be clear that nothing I’m about to say is intended to be accusatory or to imply any kind of law enforcement action around you. But in speaking with one of Ossie’s colleagues, I’ve learned that she was supplying you with unprescribed opioids.”

  Pastor Thirza smiles, and for the first time it occurs to Dom to be afraid. This woman is formidable. “Who told you that?”

  “That’s not important, but I give you my word that I have no intention of telling anyone about this or doing anything further. My only concern is with figuring out whether Ossie was dealing with any possible intimidation or pressure that could have been a factor in her decision to take her own life. Her sister believes she was being threatened. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Thirza nods, skeptically.

  “How many people know you’re addicted to painkillers?”

  The pastor winces. “I wouldn’t characterize . . .” but there’s no sense finishing the sentence.

  “Again, I don’t care and I’m not judging. I just need to know.”

  “Hazel,” she says, after a second.

  Dom doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it sure as hell wasn’t that. “Hazel as in my mother-in-law?”

  Thirza nods. “She was kind of a mentor to me. We’ve always been close. But we’re on opposite sides of this Pequod Arms project. Anyway, she came over, like she normally does, and my fool self had left all my pill bottles in the medicine cabinet, where she found them. None of the names on them were mine. She was going to . . . use that information.”

  Dom blinks. “If you two were friends, I can’t believe she would have exposed you to so much shame and reproach.”

  “Same here,” Thirza says. “But that’s how much she loved her town. She knew I was facing significant opposition from my board. She could have gone to them, and they’d have given me the option to resign quietly, which I would have done. If she hadn’t had that stroke when she had it, I’d already be out of a job and the Pequod Arms would have lost another big chunk.”

  An eerie shiver slides up Dom’s spine.

  What is it you’re imagining? That they—whoever the fuck this they is—gave your mother-in-law a stroke, right before they killed Ossie with salt water and made it look like a suicide?

  But the shiver does not subside, no matter how much ridicule he holds his fears up to.

  Something’s still missing. Something I’m not seeing.

  Something

  (supernatural)

  unexplainable.

  “Did you tell anyone that Hazel knew? That she was a threat?”

  Pastor Thirza looks at him. “No one.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I’m sure.” She flips through her daybook, then shuts it. Dom knows it’s performative. His time here is up.

  “I appreciate your time,” he says. “I really do.”

  “She was a troubled woman, Officer Morrison. I wonder why you’re so eager to believe that there’s more to it than that.”

  Dom fully intends to answer but finds he can’t. “Your sermon,” he says, turning to go. “I saw it on the sign outside: Love is harder than hate. That’s this Sunday?”

  “Services start at nine.”

  “I’m going to try to make it.”

  “Please do,” she says, and smiles—and he thinks, She’s furious—and he shivers all the way out to State Street.

  * * *

  ATTALAH WIPES THE WORK PRINTER. Deletes its entire memory, after she’s printed up five hundred address labels and five hundred copies of the flyer she designed.

  Huddled homeless people, shivering on a sidewalk. Jark’s face, stolen from his campaign poster but with blood-dripping vampire fangs added in, looming over Warren Street.

  * * *

  WANT HUDSON TO LOOK LIKE NEW YORK CITY?

  A VOTE FOR JARK TROWSE IS A VOTE FOR HOMELESSNESS

  For too long we’ve let outsiders take our city away from us, piece by piece. This election is our last chance to stop them in their tracks.

  * * *

  She and Ronan and Zelda split it up, keyboarding all the contact info on the eviction forms she got from Rick Edgley. Of course she’s pretty sure most of the people on it aren’t registered to vote, or don’t plan to vote even if they are, but this is just the initial salvo in a broader election strategy.

  Anyway that’s what Attalah tells herself.

  * * *

  DOM WAKES UP WET, from dreams of the sea, but the water persists across the wall of sleep—salt sweat fine as ocean spray across his body.

  Blue light shows beneath his bedroom door. Attalah is awake, hard at work in her insomnia, down the hall with the computer on to keep from disturbing him. Her side of the bed is in shambles, from her tossing and turning before getting up and going back to work. He pulls her pillow close to suck in the scent of it.

  With reality firmly reestablished, he can afford to reflect on his dreams. The sea at night—a storm, a ship, waves so tall they crashed across its high bow.

  Ronan in danger. Dom standing over him, unable to help. Watching in horror as something . . . clawed its way out of him.

  Shivers run through him, remembering.

  The temple bell tolls. It’s Ronan. The spooky coincidence of it doubles the shivers, then triples them. The ringtone’s turned down far enough that Attalah probably didn’t hear it, and anyway she usually works with headphones on and disco blasting. He keeps his voice low anyway.

  “Bad dreams?”

  “Yeah,” Ronan says, after gasping. “How’d you know?”

  “Me, too.”

  “You’re not helping, Dom. I called for you to tell me I’m being ridiculous, not to reinforce my insane delusions.”

  “If it helps, you probably are being ridiculous. What’s up?”

  “I had a dream. A nightmare. And I think I might be going crazy. So I wanted you to help ground me.”

  “How can I, when I’m not grounded myself?” Dom asks.

  “You and me,” Ronan says, his voice small, rattled. “We used to have conversations in dreams, and then continue those conversations in the middle school cafeteria. Like it was nothing. Do you remember that?”

  “Sort of,” Dom says, and he sort of does.

  “I convinced myself those memories couldn’t have been real. My father and I, having the same dream on the same night. The vivid dreams I had in Hudson, and the fact that I’d never—not once—had a dream outside of Hudson. Not that I remembered in the morning, anyway.”

  All of this rings true for Dom. Has he ever discussed it with Attalah? His dad? He’d never needed to. It was just something everyone took for granted. Something best not spoken of. If he’d bothered to think about it at all, he’d probably have assumed it was normal. Something that happened everywhere.

  “Get some sleep, Ronan. That’s the best grounding I can give you right now.”

  He wants to ask what the dream was. Whether something was ripping Ronan open from the inside, killing him to come out. He decides not to. Because if Ronan had been having the same dream, he wouldn’t want it validated. Given extra weight. Neither does Dom.

  “Good night, Dom. Thanks.
And I’m sorry for bothering you.”

  “Good night.”

  He watches the blue light beneath the door, hoping it will switch off and Attalah will come back to bed, and afraid that if she did come it would be because she’d heard his conversation. Heard something in his voice that shouldn’t have been there.

  Chapter Twenty

  RONAN

  My magnificent Frankenstein sex bot was taking shape. Tom Minniq. Where the name came from, how it ended up in the filthy daydreams that had been plaguing me since my return to Hudson, I couldn’t say. Just echoed into my head and demanded to be let out. But I liked it; the faint exotic whiff of the Other. A good guiding principle, as I stitched photo features together to make him. The man I assembled could have been Sicilian or Syrian, South American or some Southern California melting pot product. Half Asian; half Black; straight outta Ukraine. Whatever you were looking for—other than straight-up Aryan—you would see it when you saw Tom.

  The work felt good. Safe; familiar. A thoroughly rational task to pour my energy into, while the world became completely irrational all around me.

  I had so much material. Thousands of photos: the naked edgy stuff that was my stock and trade, the wholesome outdoorsy men’s fashion shoots I’d shot. Grinning men in suits at weddings; leering men brandishing impressive erections. Men fishing. Mock-selfies of men on Ferris wheels.

  Nor was I limited to photos that I’d taken myself. On Instagram, on Flickr, on a million sites there were scenes I could stick Tom into. Flop the settings, stretch them slightly, color-shift, and crop and pretty soon you had something no image search would be able to backtrack to. In a dozen different outfits, in a bright assortment of scenic situations, I assembled Tom’s profile. Perfect for sex apps and online dating alike.

  Dense, short, thick, black curly hair. Approachably average height. Lithe, catlike. Devastating.

  “Meat is the universal language,” one of the men on the television said, and I swear my father grunted. “Everywhere you go, people eat meat.”

  A montage showed a hundred men in a hundred countries, smiling, holding up pink flesh cupped in bloody hands.

  I watched my father’s face. He was one of them, part of the international brotherhood of butchers . . . but his back and his business had been broken by the inexorable unbeatable decline of small-town America.

  Fifteen years, now, since the butcher shop went belly up. Bad enough spending his whole life watching his hometown die. The factories shutting down. His hardworking friends forced onto welfare. But everybody needed to eat (and meat is the universal language) and he’d held out for far longer than most of the other small businesses that lined Warren Street, but eventually even Szepessy’s Meats couldn’t stay in the black (without his son to help him) (or even take his calls).

  “Dad?” I asked, and he blinked. “Did you ever—”

  I didn’t know what I wanted to ask, and he wouldn’t have been able to answer me even if I did.

  “You did your best,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

  His eyes stayed on Meat Men. But was it just my imagination, or did he turn his head the tiniest bit toward me?

  “And I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry I stayed away so long.”

  Easy to say it now, when he probably couldn’t even hear me. And that made it worse. Made me sicker. My cheeks burned; my mouth was full of sand. I stayed there stewing in the full knowledge of what a wretched man I was until the next commercial break.

  Fifteen minutes later, my phone rang. An unknown number—the Ronan of a week before would have ignored it, but the Ronan of right now was Up To Something.

  “Hello?”

  “Ronan! Jark Trowse,” he said, his voice effusive and chummy and enthusiastic.

  “Hey,” I said, looking over at my dad. Had he heard the man’s loud, happy bark? Did he know I was chatting with The Enemy? “How are you?”

  “I’m great, since Treenie said you wanted to meet. That sounds fantastic. Although I must admit I was surprised. I thought I’d be the last person you want to talk to.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, mentally rolling up my sleeves.

  “I figured if your father hated me, so would you.”

  I got up swiftly, went out into the backyard. “My father hates you?”

  “I can’t think of another reason he’d turn down what I offered him.”

  “Really?” I asked. “You can’t?”

  “Enlighten me, Ronan.”

  Really? I thought. You want to do this on the phone? But, no. He wasn’t challenging me. He was prodding. And his smug voice had come close to pushing me into saying something stupid, like, How about he loves his city and he won’t let you destroy it. But I was better than that.

  “My father’s mind is mostly gone,” I said. “I couldn’t say what he’s thinking. Or why he did what he did. I can’t even ask him.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “Well,” I said. “You might have an opportunity now.”

  “Really,” he said.

  Oh well, I thought. Here goes nothing. I had hoped to wine and woo him, but I could adapt. “It’d be pretty easy for me to get power of attorney over my father. And then I’d be in a position to take that offer he turned down. Or another one.”

  “Another one,” he said. “You want more than the very large amount of money I offered your father?”

  “Not more money,” I said. “In fact, I might be willing to negotiate a lower dollar figure, in exchange for some other nonfinancial things.”

  I could practically hear him grin, shark-wide. He was a businessman first and foremost, however much he and his Wikipedia page went on about being an artist committed to creating a community of artists. “What were you thinking of?”

  “To start with, I want full transparency. I want all the information you have. Who’s behind the Pequod Arms project. The property owners. The architects you hired.”

  “Much of this is public record,” he demurred.

  “Much of it is not,” I said. “And what is on the public record doesn’t quite add up. I want to know the local union leaders you’ve bought off. Your contacts in New York State government who are helping facilitate this project, and what they’re getting. Everything. This isn’t just about money, for me. Not just about this project. I’m thinking of the future of my city. I want a say in what it looks like.”

  A train whistle wailed.

  “Done,” Jark said. “Is that all?”

  “For now,” I said.

  He laughed. “I like you, Ronan.” Of course he did. People always like people they can purchase. “You love this town as much as I do, I can tell. And you want the best possible future for it. We should meet, get drinks. Something.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, and hung up, and went back inside. My father still stared into space.

  “I’m going to make them sorry they ever set foot in this fucking city,” I said to him, and swiftly finished putting up Tom Minniq’s sex app profile.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ronan is carrying on twenty-four conversations at once. He has been for days. Sometimes it gets as high as fifty. Mostly men, on Grindr, but plenty of women on Tinder, too.

  Tom Minniq is a busy boy. Telling bottoms how hard he’ll fuck them; telling tops all the things they can do to him. Telling women about his kids and his job and his therapist. Ronan recognizes he’s falling into probably-problematic stereotypes about what women want to hear, but he has nothing else to base his heterosexual romance upon. It seems to be effective, mostly, although he suspects the photos do most of the work.

  Tom is so busy, in fact, that he is never able to actually meet up. Sorry, working late. Got friends over. Stuck at Mom’s. Feeling under the weather. Which, in New York City, usually means venereal disease. He wonders if it’s the same thing here.

  Tom has acquired a staggering stock of information. What won’t people tell a beautiful man? Especially if he follows What’s
your rent like— or How much do they pay you over there— or Why Hudson, of all the shitty towns in all the world— with jk it’s cool, I know that’s an inappropriate question. They answer every time.

  Something is happening, when he’s working on Tom. He feels it like electricity, and wonders if this is what Katch meant when he said there was power flowing through Ronan.

  He’s amassing a staggering dossier of intel, for Attalah. A giant folder of blackmail material.

  Because they all send nudes, eventually. Nudes, and sometimes more. It’s startling, actually, the alacrity with which boys and girls—but mostly boys—send pictures and videos of themselves performing the most indelicate of acts. Of course they can relock or un-send the photos anytime they want, and there’s a degree of comfort in that, the illusion of control, but only because they don’t expect the person they’re speaking with to be taking screencaps and saving video files just as fast as they can.

  Or that he’s also looking them up on Facebook. Which—by the way—it proved super-easy to fake a Facebook profile for Tom, complete with posts going back to 2008. They let you edit the date, after all, so you can post wedding photos a week later or upload those sixth-grade slumber party photos you just found and fit them into the right spot on your timeline. Most of his catfish targets he doesn’t send friend requests to. That would be weird. But there’s an awful lot of information Tom can access, even without being actual friends.

  * * *

  LILLY IS ON THE LOOKOUT. Penelope’s Quilt’s director of community engagement and community building has visited every antique store on Warren Street, an undertaking that has swallowed up most of her day. And turned up nothing. Few of the shop owners she spoke with have heard of this Jerremy photographer. A local pastor mentioned him, in an interview for the oral history project Lilly is trying to get off the ground, but even the internet turned up nothing. Apparently only a handful of local old-timers remember him.

  But that was what was wonderful about it, what made it so vital and exciting. That’s what makes Lilly rub her hands together, stalking up Warren Street for a fifty-years-gone studio photographer who just might be a missing titan of twentieth-century art. The few images she’s seen of his were excellent, yes, but quality isn’t what compels her. It was the lore of it. People knew things about him that weren’t on the internet. He existed only in people’s minds—and the photographs she knew were out there. What a novel and intriguing concept . . .