by Anna Roberts
Lehman frowned.
“What?” said Ramon. “I’m hypoglycemic. I can’t think straight when I’m hungry.” God, what was taking that girl? “Forget the slice. Just bring me the whole thing.”
“The whole pie?”
“Yes, the whole pie.” He thumped the table with the flat of his hand, thinking he’d start chewing off random people’s limbs if he didn’t eat something soon.
The waitress approached nervously and set the pie on the table. He wanted to say sorry to her, that he hadn’t meant to scare her, but the spoon was already in his hand and then his mouth was full of sugar and citrus and crumbling pastry. It was good pie. Probably the best lemon meringue he’d ever tasted.
“He’s been on a diet,” said Lehman.
Ramon swallowed his mouthful and barely managed to take a breath. The sweetness was almost overwhelming but his hand kept working that spoon, digging for the next mouthful. People were staring.
“Look,” he said, pushing the file across the table. “In here. You know I had that hunch –”
“– going back to previous disappearances. Right. Dude, are you sure you’re okay?”
He swallowed again, almost choking in his hurry to empty his mouth so that he could talk before his hand – which now seemed to be working independently of his body – could shovel in the next spoonful of lemon meringue. “The old lady,” he said. “Gloria. She’d been questioned about disappearances before. Like fifteen years ago.”
The steak was here. Thank God. The sugar was making his head spin. Something solid. Protein. That would straighten him out.
Lehman stared at him. “Look, Fernando...”
“What? What’s the matter? You never seen a man eat a steak before? Read it, Lehman.”
His partner frowned and hesitantly glanced at the file. “You’re shitting me,” he said. “They questioned her in connection with the Keys Cannibal? That little old eighty pound lady?”
Told you there was something weird, Ramon thought, but this time he couldn’t speak. His mouth was too full and his jaws were working so hard that they ached at their hinges, but he couldn’t stop. The steak was even better than the pie, chewy and juicy and just the right kind of bloody. It felt like his head was about to explode from the sheer pleasure of tasting it, but he was shaking now, and more than a little scared. All that sugar had made his heart feel like a hummingbird and he could feel sweat on his forehead and upper lip, but there was no way of wiping it off. His hands went on sawing, sawing, cutting off another bite, another lump, and they were big chunks, too, making every breath a game of Russian Roulette with his gag reflex. That cute little Fuck-The-Diet devil was a full-grown snarling demon now, Linda Blair with a vicious case of the munchies.
He thought of pea soup splattering all over a cassock and realized he could just about go for some soup right now. Chicken, pea, tomato with a grilled cheese on the side. Oh God, yeah. Order up. More.
He might have said that last out loud, but he didn’t know. It was getting hard to hear over the sound of his own teeth and the pain in his jaw.
“Maybe you wanna slow down there, buddy?” said Lehman, but that only poked the starving bear inside Ramon.
Ramon chewed fiercely, unable to speak, but he could feel the holster pressing into his back against the banquette. And the devil was saying ‘Do it, do it, they won’t mess with you if you have a gun in your hand.’
Was this what happened before you went full-on Florida? Before you stripped stark naked and ran down the freeway in search of a transient’s face to snack on? But his hands seemed to have nothing more to do with him. He could no more keep that hand from crawling to his gun than he could keep the other from shoveling chunks of meat into his face.
The waitress screamed. Lehman held up his hands. Ramon heard the devil laughing.
Maybe they’ll let you eat for free. Hey, did she say there was Key lime pie?
*
Even someone as far off the grid at Gloria couldn’t help leaving a few basic landmarks to her life. Three marriage licenses – the last one to a Ralph Baldwin in 1987, then before him one Lorenzo Tessio, and then furthest back was Maurice Lafayette Blanchard, almost exactly twenty years before Ralph. Finding Maurice had been surprisingly easy. The next part, Blue suspected, was going to be hard.
The old folks’ home was just outside of St. Augustine. The outside was a cheery sun-bleached yellow stucco, with arches and deep set windows like an old style hacienda, but inside it smelled just like all nursing homes – a queasy haze of artificial air freshener sprayed over the smells of lotion and dentures left out on the coffee tables. And something else, something not perceptible to most noses but there all the same, a sort of stale sadness, hanging at nose height like cigarette smoke in a room. The smell of forgetfulness.
“There’s a young lady here to see you, Maury,” said the nurse. She bent facing Blue, her hand on the shoulder of a figure obscured by the high back of an old-fashioned plaid armchair. “Give him a moment,” she said. “It takes him a while to come round from a nap. Can I get you some coffee? Tea?”
“Coffee,” said Blue. “Black. Thank you.”
“No problem. Be right back.”
She left Blue standing in the doorway, staring at the back of the chair. On the wall was a framed cross-stitch saying TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, with cheerful cartoon bluebirds holding out their wings like game show hostesses. Gloria would have tossed it on a bonfire.
On the dresser at Blue’s elbow was a nebulizer, a hearing aid and a comb with a couple of barely-there white hairs clinging to the teeth. She thought of Gabe, who she’d asked to wait in the car – this was personal, after all – and how simple everything was in his world. DNA would do it, but as she reached for the plastic bag in her pocket she remembered all those stories about how a witch could work her will on you if she had your hair or your nail clippings, something that had once been part of your body.
“I said no more girls,” said the old man, his voice so unexpectedly loud that Blue startled, crackling the plastic bag in her fingers. “Not after that last one. Fuckin’ bitch gave me a seizure.”
She quickly sealed the hairs in the zip lock bag and walked to the front of the chair. Maurice Blanchard was tiny, his bald, freckled head barely halfway above the high back of his armchair. At first she thought she’d screwed up, but then she saw that he still had some hair. Not much – just a stripe over each ear – but enough to assure her that she’d found something useful in the comb.
“Which bitch, Mr. Blanchard?” she said.
Maurice Blanchard raised transparent white eyebrows. “Mr. Blanchard. Huh. Some nice manners for once. Everyone here calls me Maury like they knew me their whole life, even when they’re strangers. And me their elder and all. Rude, don’t you think?”
“Very,” said Blue, glancing at the cross-stitch again.
He saw the direction of her gaze and laughed, a mean gassy, gap-toothed laugh that was all too much like Gloria. “That thing,” he said. “Did you ever see such an insult? The big nurse makes ‘em. I told them to take it down, like the other one. That one said ‘Give me the grace to accept the things I can’t change...’ You know. The alky’s prayer.” He reached into a plastic container filled with several pairs of glasses, found the ones he wanted and squinted at her through the thick lenses. “Well, sit down, girl. I guess at least you ain’t white trash like the last one. Scribbles all over, like Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”
Blue perched on a plastic chair beneath the window. “Ruby?” she said. “Was her name Ruby?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I told you – she did something to my head. Got inside it. Gave me some kind of episode, and I’ve never had nothing like that before.”
Great. Definitely Ruby. “Do you remember when she came to see you, Mr. Blanchard?”
“Nah. One day blurs into the next for me. Mighta been a Wednesday. We have scrambled eggs on Wednesday. Don’t you getting old, chickie-girl. It sucks
balls.” He narrowed an eye, so milky with cataracts that the original blue was almost obscured. “So what is it you want from me?”
“It’s about Gloria,” said Blue.
“She dead?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
Maurice Blanchard shrugged. “When you get to my age that’s about the only reason people come to see you – to tell you someone’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged again. “Don’t be. Can’t say I’m sorry to see the back of her.”
Blue pressed her lips together, sat poker straight in the hard chair and told herself sternly that how he felt about his ex wife was none of her business.
“You’re shocked,” he said. “Even I can see that, even through these old Coke bottles.” He tapped the frame of his glasses. “She was a rotten wife. A worse mother. Cost me my family’s blessing – they all told me she was poor Irish trash and that the kid coulda been anyone’s – but Gloria was just one of those women who makes men stupid, what with all that blonde hair. And legs up to here. When I married her she was five months along and just about busting the seams of a second-hand white lace dress, but damned if she didn’t look like Grace Kelly from the chest upwards.”
He paused, but Blue held her tongue, afraid that if she spoke she’d derail his train of thought, and she couldn’t afford to; this was the most she had ever heard about Gloria from anyone, including Gloria herself.
“She dropped that baby and went straight back to catting around like she did before I put the ring on her finger,” said Maurice Blanchard. “This was back in Miami. I came home one day to find the kid crying in his crib, sitting in a piss soaked diaper. And do you know where she was? His mother?”
“No.”
“In our bed. Playing the role of the filling in a sailor sandwich. Not one – two men. That was her all over. Greedy. Wanted everything two or more at a time.”
“That’s terrible,” said Blue, although she hardly cared. “But the child? She had a boy?”
Maurice Blanchard frowned. “What’s with you and the kid? The other one – the little trashy thing that made my brain itch – she kept asking about him, too.”
Time for the truth. “I think,” said Blue. “That I might be Gloria’s granddaughter.” She left the rest unsaid, but it was hard not to look at him and search for something familiar, even though toothlessness had reshaped his lips and time had leeched the color from his eyes.
“Didn’t know she had one,” he said, pressing a button beside his chair. “Least of all one your color.”
Well, grandpa’s a racist. But she was out of time. She heard footsteps in the corridor. “West Lafayette,” she said. “Your son. I think he was my father.”
The old man stiffened in his chair, his expression slamming shut like a door. “You’d be better off not thinking about things like that, chickie-girl,” he said.
The footsteps were close now, urgent. He’d obviously pressed some kind of panic button. “Why?” she asked, desperate for something, anything. Those crumbs of information had made her greedy for more; maybe it was another trait she was cursed with.
He looked her straight in the eye, as if what he had to say was so important that it somehow allowed him to focus through cataracts and thick lenses, like the superhuman strength that lets a mother lift a car off her child. “Because West Lafayette was the motherfuckin’ devil.”
“Is everything okay with you, Maury?”
A voice at the door. It was the ‘big nurse’ – it had to be. She was tall and solid, with broad shoulders and hands that looked like they had no business embroidering Disneyfied bluebirds, but her voice was that of a girl, a little Midwestern warble. “Is there anything I can do here?”
“I’m done,” said Maurice Blanchard. “Get her out.”
“I’m sorry,” said the nurse, her pink painted lips turned down in a little moue that said simply what can you do? Blue knew at once that he’d abused this woman time and time again, and she wasn’t bad. She was just – like poor, defeated Renee back home – one of those chronically good people who were sadly too dumb to realize they weren’t helping. “He’s a little...well...you know.”
“I understand.”
“Perhaps it’s better if you...”
“...yes. I’m leaving...”
“...I’m sorry if he said anything...it’s just...”
“I know, yes,” said Blue, suddenly desperate to escape from this flurry of apologies.
“Thank you for understanding.”
“It’s okay.” As she turned to leave she spoke once more to the old man. “Goodbye, Mr. Blanchard. It was nice to meet you.”
He huffed and turned his head away, and as he did so she had a flash of deja vu. Blue sky, Lucky Strikes, Charlie turning his head to check the coast was clear before lighting up behind the boat shed. They had the same ears.
When she reached the outside she sucked in her breath in a gulp, unaware until now that she’d been holding it. But the fresh air brought no comfort, replacing the conditioned, freshened air in her lungs with the sultriness of a Florida afternoon before rain. Dead space, she thought, remembering Gabe telling her to breathe out through her nose underwater.
Dead space, dead people. Some indefinable tang on the wind opened up the spaces between her bones, set her thumbs pricking and tuned her ears once more to the sound of the ghosts. So many of them, muttering about wills, lost in long ago memories, praying for the end that they hadn’t realized had already come.
Gabe came hurrying across the parking lot. “Hey. You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, although she couldn’t remember a time when she’d been less okay. She could hear ghosts in her head, her grandfather had said her father was the devil and deep down she knew why he’d said that because what if (say it, just say it, only to yourself) West Lafayette had been possessed?
“You don’t look okay,” he said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Not seen,” she said. (And what did that mean if Yael was in him all those years, when he met Mom, when he got her pregnant...)
There was a dull roar in her ears and she thought for a moment she was going to faceplant onto the asphalt, but then the ghosts started to wail and screech and she realized that whatever was happening here was more than what was going on in her own overbrimming head.
She heard it before she felt it, a demon wind as monstrous as Katrina, roaring across the parking lot. Gabe was speaking, but she couldn’t hear him over the noise, nor could she understand how he was even still standing upright because by rights that thing should have picked him up like a leaf and blown him away the way it was scooping up and scattering those poor old ghosts.
Blue screamed and the wind filled her mouth with a dirty black taste like radioactive rain. For a split second she wondered if someone had dropped a nuclear bomb nearby and for some reason Gabe hadn’t remembered he should be vaporizing right about now, but then it hit her.
Set the fucker off at a safe distance, like a nuke at Los Alamos.
Yael.
4
Nobody understood women, least of all Charlie. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure women understood women, especially not Ruby, who was full of hormones and cranky as all hell. She crashed and clattered around the kitchen like a pissed off poltergeist, and Charlie was in no mood to figure out what it was that he’d done this time. He just wanted to sit out on the balcony, read the newspaper and quietly smoke himself to death.
I’m the King of Nothing, he thought, the words blurring in front of his eyes. Impossible to concentrate with the missus going at it in there. Here he was in Eli’s nice apartment, above Eli’s business, which - let’s face it - had been damn lucrative right up to the point where Eli had got hauled in on suspicion of attempted murder, courtesy of Lyle fucking Raines. Nothing put pretty girls off coming to a bar like the rumor that the owner was a killer of women.
“There were some still came,” Eli had said. “But they were mo
stly nuts. I mean, really nuts. Like those women who get their jollies writing letters to murderers and multiple rapists.”
“Hybristophilia,” Charlie had said, sitting right here where he was now, only it had been nighttime then, and they’d both been half drunk.
“Hybrowhat?”
“Means ‘love of monsters’ or something. Seriously, it’s like a legit condition. Look it up. Some women can’t get wet for a guy unless he’s killed a bunch of people. Look at Charlie Manson - psycho little fuck was swimming in tail. Or that sicko kid who blew up the Boston Marathon; girls send him love letters. It’s a thing, like bad-boy syndrome gone insane.”
“It was insane,” said Eli, and right then Charlie could see him sitting opposite, the marina lights twinkling and an empty swinging between his fingertips. “One of them asked me to choke her. You know...during.”
“Man, you should have thrown some my way. You know what they say ‘Crazy in the head, crazy in the bed.’”
He was laughing in his memory, but then Ruby let out a sort of stifled whine indoors, snapping him back to the present. The sun was shining but the clouds were moving fast and some of them had that gunmetal tinge that meant it was time to batten down the hatches and worry. It was only when the wind streaked the tears back to the edges of his ears that he realized he’d been sitting here crying the whole time.
Charlie wiped his eyes and lit a fresh cigarette, cupping his hands around the flame of the lighter. He picked up the newspaper and set to reading it; maybe if he focused on the words his eyes would stop fucking watering all over the place. God, he and Ruby made a miserable pair, emotionally incontinent and all but drooling all over themselves. And she wanted to be a fucking parent?
He read the front page. Ah, Florida. Where else in the world could you go and find the front page given over to a man who pulled a gun in a diner and proceeded to eat until his stomach literally burst? The story continued on page two and he flipped it over, cigarette between his teeth, only to find himself frowning at the face that looked back at him.