Wisdom's Grave 01 - Sworn to the Night

by Craig Schaefer

  She changed buses at the next stop.

  Kashkaval was over in Hell’s Kitchen, on a street lined with rainbow flags, tattoo parlors, and psychic readers who catered to a hipster crowd. The restaurant was a cozy nook with a half dozen tables up front and a long oak bar running the length of the room. The faint scent of mingled spices hanging in the warm air gave Marie thoughts of the ocean. Nessa waited for her at a table for two, a thick hardcover book with a worn-away cover resting beside her water glass.

  “You’ve had a long day,” Nessa said.

  Marie had to smile. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Your true face is showing.”

  “True face?” Marie pulled out the chair across from her, settling in. A waitress swooped by and planted a glass of water on her left.

  Nessa waved an idle hand. “Never mind. Tell me about your day.”

  As she sipped her water, ice cubes bumping her lip, Marie quietly marveled at the comfortable familiarity. She barely knew this woman. Tell me about your day was something you asked of a friend, a housemate, maybe a lover. But the question didn’t seem strange at all. It fit like a favorite old sweater. It was strange for its lack of strangeness.

  “Just…police business. I can’t really talk about it.”

  “Really? But you’re on leave.”

  Marie was reaching for the menu. She froze, her fingertips brushing the laminated surface.

  “How do you know about that?”

  Nessa cocked a lopsided smile. “Please. You came and questioned my husband. You think I wouldn’t want to know why? The gunfight in Monticello made the news. Your name wasn’t mentioned, but it didn’t have to be. You were too…invested to simply be asking follow-up questions. So I made some phone calls. Discreet ones, I promise.”

  The mention of Richard Roth felt like a wedge; a curtain suddenly draped across the table, cutting a line between them. Marie’s suspicions were a slow, swirling simmer. If Richard was involved in the killings—every bit of proof said otherwise, but she still couldn’t shake her intuition—there was no telling what Nessa knew, what she’d done, where her loyalties lay. Dinner was a minefield. Marie wanted to kick herself. What was she doing, getting this close to a suspect’s family? It was stupid, reckless. Dangerous.

  But she was doing it anyway.

  “I hope you don’t play poker,” Nessa mused, reading Marie’s face over the top of her menu. “I’d clean you out.”

  “Thank you. For being discreet.”

  “Your secrets are safe with me. So. Why the badge?”

  Marie picked up her menu. She ran her fingers down the list of choices. So many unfamiliar possibilities. She felt water closing in over her head again.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You’re intelligent. Driven. I’m sure you’d be suited to any number of careers that don’t involve people shooting at you. So why did you become a police officer?”

  Marie gestured at the menu. “I’m lost here.”

  “I’ll throw you a lifeline.” Nessa turned her head, looking to the waitress. “We’ll share the tapas. Just bring out a little of everything, hmm?”

  “Tapas?” Marie asked.

  “Small plates. Sure to be something you’ll like. All of it, I suspect—this place is quite good. Hummus, baba ghanoush, tzatziki. I’m a firm believer in living deliciously. And you haven’t answered my question.”

  Marie had a list of stock answers whenever her job came up. Those platitudes were a litany of bland and forgettable half-truths. None of them rose to her lips. Instead, she shook her head. “You’ll laugh.”

  Nessa’s smile vanished.

  “Two rules,” she said.

  “You’re making rules now?” Marie replied.

  “My dinner invitation, my rules. One, I will never laugh at you. Two, you will never lie to me. Do you accept?”

  “You know,” Marie said, “most people don’t establish rules for social events.”

  “Most people aren’t me. And if I’m reading you right, I suspect you might take comfort in knowing they’re there. Like a handrail on a speeding train. The only rules that matter, after all, are the ones you consciously choose to obey.”

  “That’s not true,” Marie said. “What about the law?”

  Nessa smirked. “What about the law? You’ve been suspended, and you’re still investigating a case. I’m fairly certain that’s not allowed.”

  “On administrative leave. Not the same thing as a suspension.”

  “You’re a cop,” Nessa said, “not a lawyer. Don’t forget it. Two rules: I will never laugh at you; you will never lie to me. Will you accept?”

  “That’s a rule for each of us. Don’t we both have to accept?”

  The light caught Nessa’s owlish glasses, glinting.

  “No,” she said. “Because I’m the one making the rules. You are free to accept, or not accept. But you have to choose.”

  The room slowly spun. Marie drank her ice water. It didn’t help. As strange as the conversation had turned, random and half-mad, she wanted to see just how far down the rabbit hole went. Maybe she was half-mad herself.

  “I accept your rules,” Marie told her. Nessa clapped her hands, once, as if sealing her words in the air.

  “Very good. Now, with the safety of knowing you will not, in fact, be laughed at…tell me the truth.”

  Marie leaned back in her chair. Her gaze went distant, drifting to one side.

  “I grew up in foster care. The first home they put me in…it wasn’t a great place. They weren’t bad people; they just had too many kids and too little time for any of us. So I spent most of my time alone, in my own head. One day I found a box of beat-up paperbacks in the basement. And there was a copy of Le Morte d’Arthur.”

  “The Knights of the Round Table,” Nessa said.

  Marie chuckled at the memory. “I read the hell out of that book. Over and over, until the cover fell off. Then I discovered fantasy. Robert Jordan, Carolyn Saunders, Glen Cook. I’d read anything I could get my hands on, really, but what I loved most were stories about knights. I loved the idea of being a crusader, a…a force for cosmic justice. Having a liege lord and a cause, something I could devote myself to, swear my life to.”

  “I bet you were a terror on the schoolyard,” Nessa mused.

  “Let’s just say bullies learned to run very fast when I was around.” Marie smiled and recited, “‘Thou shalt respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them.’”

  Nessa tilted her head. “The Code of Chivalry.”

  Marie nodded. “Bottom line, the strong have the duty to protect the weak. The funny thing is, Gautier’s code is kind of a crock. He wrote it in 1883.”

  “Not many knights around in 1883,” Nessa said.

  “No. Real, historical knights…well, some might have lived up to the myth, but not many. I guess that’s why I drifted to fantasy.”

  “And when you found yourself seeking employment,” Nessa said, “the closest thing you could find to a worthy liege was the law itself.”

  Marie lifted her glass. “You got it.”

  The waitress came over with a basket of flatbread, the fresh-baked aroma filling the air between them as she laid out a cluster of round white plates. A medley of purees garnished with olives, shavings of eggplant, a small feast for the sharing. Nessa tore a chunk of bread in half and dipped one piece into a puddle of hummus.

  “That raises another question,” she said.

  “Which is?”

  Nessa chewed on her flatbread, giving Marie a critical eye.

  “Why on earth would you think I’d laugh at you for that?”

  “Because it’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s your dream.”

  “Doesn’t mean it isn’t ridiculous.” Marie shifted awkwardly in her chair. “Knights aren’t real. Storybook knights never were.”

  Nessa gestured at her with a chunk of bread. “Not a dream born in a vacuum. No. You were looking to
fix something, weren’t you? You mentioned cosmic justice. Something was set wrong in your world, from a very early age. Something grievous, something you longed to correct.”

  “Are you an anthropologist or a psychologist?”

  “My minor was in psychology. What was it, Marie?”

  Marie’s gaze dropped to the table. She set down her flatbread. Her appetite withered and died.

  “I don’t…I don’t talk about that. Ever.”

  “Maybe you’d feel better if you did.”

  “I can’t,” Marie said.

  “I propose a new rule.” Nessa set her phone on the table and tapped open a stopwatch app. “For the next five minutes, once I start the clock, you have no secrets from me.”

  Marie looked at her now. Her brow furrowed.

  “That’s…that’s not a rule you can make.”

  “I just did. Your only choice is to accept it, or refuse it. If you accept, then for the next five minutes, you will answer any question I put to you with absolute candor and without hesitation.”

  “What,” Marie said, “then…it’s your turn?”

  “No. Only you.”

  “That’s not very equal,” Marie replied.

  Nessa smiled. “When did I say we were equals? Nobody in this world is equal, Marie. We all have our niches, our natures, our unique roles to play.”

  “And why would I say yes to this?”

  “Because you spend all day, every day, making decisions. Many of them life-or-death, I imagine. It must be exhausting. Protecting everyone around you, taking care of everyone, probably never being thanked for it.”

  “It’s my job,” Marie said.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice, for just five minutes, to let me make the decisions for you?”

  “This…sounds like a dare.”

  “Oh, it is.” Nessa pushed her glasses up on her nose, pretending to be grave. “I’m daring you to try something new. Careful, now. You might like it.”

  “Five minutes?”

  “Five minutes. Any question I ask. No secrets.”

  Marie stared at the phone. The glowing green timer, five minutes on the clock, waiting for the countdown. She imagined she was standing on the edge of a cliff and thinking about jumping, just to see what it would feel like.

  “I accept,” she said.

  Nessa’s finger tapped the start button. The numbers began to move.

  “Tell me what happened to your parents.”

  Twenty

  It was three days before Christmas.

  Marie remembered the season in flashes and glimmers. The wood paneling in her family’s den, the snow lightly falling on her father’s powder-blue Buick out in the driveway. Strings of lights and sleepless nights, the giddy anticipation of presents to come. Decades later, after she’d spent a couple of years on the beat as a newly minted patrol officer, she knew all about the utter fallibility of memory. She’d seen firsthand how a witness could watch a fleeing man in a bright green sweater and swear—with absolute honesty and one hand on the Bible—that he’d been wearing black. The world was full of liars, but memory was the most insidious of them all, the only liar that lived in your head.

  So she wondered, now and then, how much she really recalled. That half-glimpsed flash of presents under the tree, wrapped in glossy paper with images of Christmas bells, each parcel snuggled in ocean-blue twine—real, or something she’d seen on television? Did she really remember the way the doorbell chimed that night, a strident, sharp bell, or had time and distance made it louder than it was? Did the men even ring the bell, or did they knock on the door? Sometimes she could remember it both ways. One of her memories had to be wrong. Maybe both.

  Her father’s shout, that much she remembered.

  It was a strange, high-pitched thing. Her father was big, with broad shoulders and a merry, rumbling voice. She would never have expected a sound like that to come from his mouth. In the movies, on television, men made deep, manly sounds when they were attacked. Grunts and curses and growls to show their strength. Real violence was messier. Real violence sounded like surprise and shrill outrage and unexpected, undeserved pain.

  Violence wasn’t supposed to come to your house three days before Christmas, in the middle of the nightly news.

  Marie had been up in her room, coloring. That was one of the memories she’d lost. She knew she was coloring, but every time she tried to recall the page, she remembered something different. Sometimes she was coloring a car. Sometimes it was a clown. Sometimes she was holding a brick-red crayon when her father cried out, sometimes chocolate brown. She remembered the feeling and the place, just not the things attached.

  She was sure she scampered to the second-floor landing, though. Staying low, dressed in her pajamas (sometimes she remembered them being white with flowers, sometimes solid blue), staring through the slats and down into the living room. Her father was on the floor, clutching his gut, writhing. Her mother was pressed to the wall, and the knife at her throat gleamed electric in the glow from the Christmas tree lights.

  Sometimes she remembered her mother looking up, making eye contact, mouthing the word hide. Sometimes she remembered hiding on her own, trying to be as quiet as a mouse. She was almost certain the first one was the real memory, though. She remembered feeling that her mother would have done anything to protect her, if she could.

  Marie was sure she ended up under her bed, belly pressed to the thin gray (sometimes beige) carpet, listening to the three men in ski masks.

  She was sure there were three men. Not one detail ever changed when she thought of them.

  “Where the fuck is it?” shouted one of the men.

  A rib-shattering thud. Her father’s groan.

  “I don’t know what you want,” her father gasped. “I don’t know who you think we are—”

  “Do you want us to start cutting on this bitch? Is that what you want?”

  Her mother screamed. In fear, at first.

  Then there wasn’t anything but screaming.

  It went on, and on, until the only thing louder was the sound of the police siren outside the house. There were pounding footsteps, and shouts, and the bray of a gunshot. More shots, muffled, out on the lawn. A window broke.

  Then silence.

  When she earned her detective shield, Marie pulled a copy of the police report. She had one question, just one, that needed answering. Sometimes she remembered that it felt like five minutes passing between the first scream and the last. Sometimes it felt like hours. She just wanted to know (how long they suffered) how long she had been hiding under that bed. The report wasn’t much help. Neighbors called in about the noise at 8:10 p.m., but they’d been out at dinner and just returned home. Neighbor on the other side was deaf as a post and never heard anything, or that’s what he claimed.

  The first patrol unit arrived at 8:22 p.m., the second one five minutes later. The sole surviving perpetrator was taken into custody at 9 p.m. or thereabouts. In the adrenaline aftermath of a gunfight, facts and figures got muddled.

  Marie remembered the man in the uniform scooping her up in his arms, his strong hands holding her tight as he walked her down the stairs. He turned her face to his chest, her forehead pressed to his cold metal badge. Don’t look, honey, he’d told her. Still, she’d caught a glimpse of the two bodies on the living room floor, sprawled around the Christmas tree, covered in white sheets. At least she remembered it that way.

  The report included the coroner’s summary. The wounds on her parents’ bodies. She didn’t know how long she had sat there, locked in a silent argument with herself. Eventually, she turned the page.

  —apparently inflicted by a straight razor, it read. Multiple cigarette burns (7), to the victim’s—

  She shut the folder.

  She didn’t need the clinically detailed catalog of atrocities. It wouldn’t give the memory any finer definition, wouldn’t lend any clarity or closure. All it would do was make her angrier.

  Marie was already angry, eve
ry waking hour of her life. She didn’t need any more fuel for that fire.

  * * *

  Marie sat across from Nessa, her hands resting limp in her lap.

  “At the trial, it turned out the men had gotten a tip about a drug dealer. They wanted to rob him. Except…the dealer lived at 821 Fairmont Road. Our house was at 821 Fairfield Road. The other side of town.” Marie cracked a humorless smile, her eyes like frozen coal. “That was the punch line. They invaded the wrong house. Everything that happened…it was for nothing. No meaning. No purpose. Just this howling void where a family used to be.”

  “But if there’d been someone to help,” Nessa replied. “A knight in shining armor, perhaps…”

  Marie met Nessa’s steady gaze.

  “I couldn’t do anything to fix my own fucked-up life. Damned if I was going to let it happen to anyone else. Only way I can tend my scars is to make sure nobody else has to wear them.”

  “Thank you,” Nessa said.

  Marie didn’t know what to say to that.

  “For sharing. How do you feel, letting that out?”

  She wasn’t sure. A little lighter. A little freer, maybe.

  “All right,” Marie said. “I feel…all right. Any other questions?”

  Nessa gestured to the phone. The stopwatch read 0:00.

  “The timer ran out four minutes ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll guard your secrets,” Nessa said. “Would you like one of mine, in trade?”

  Marie nodded a little, curious. “Yes.”

  Nessa glanced over her shoulder. She leaned in, shifting to one side, eyeing the other diners.

  “My husband and I have been married for five years. We fell out of love four years ago.”

  “Why do you stay?”

  Nessa shrugged and tore a piece of flatbread down the middle.

  “For him, it’s appearances. Divorces make for bad press. The Roth family is all about appearances. It’s a political dynasty—Alton Roth is his father.”

  Marie tried to place the name. “I don’t know him.”

  “He’s a senator out in Nevada. Senator for life, most likely, like his father was before him. Scruples and civic duty aren’t really a thing in the Roth family, beyond their value as lip service. I’m fairly certain that if Mephistopheles appeared before him and offered more power in trade for his soul, Alton would jump to sign on the dotted line. Richard isn’t much better. It’s all about things with them. Acquiring them. Having them. Keeping other people from having them. And I used to be one of Richard’s favorite things.”