by Rachel Caine
Olida’s eyes fixed on the cheery country wallpaper over the breakfast table, and her breath stopped.
There was no mistaking the fragments clinging to the wall. They were gray and gelatinous, filmed with red. They’d dried to look like bits of salted slug. Olida looked at them for a long time, then hitched her weight from her right hip to her left, easing a slight cramp along her calf.
"Gonna be a bitch scraping her off the wallpaper," Zenobia observed unhappily.
"Has to come down. We’re gonna have to move that damn refrigerator, too, probably bits of her under there, too," Olida said, and let herself look at the rest of the kitchen. It was small and, where the blood and brains hadn’t spattered, incredibly scrubbed. The woman had collected little salt and pepper shakers. They were neatly arranged on the windowsill, tiny windmills, a pair shaped like sunflowers, two in the back of kneeling angels, their hands folded in prayer, their yellow wings outstretched. There was one long string of blood jagged along the salt angel. The pepper angel was untouched.
Olida collected spoons. All kinds of spoons. She had them displayed in a handmade rack and polished them every other day to keep the silver shiny.
The burners on the stove were free of burnt residue. They were lined with clean foil. Olida swung open the oven door and saw what she knew she’d see, a crystal-clean inside that could have done for an oven cleaner commercial. There wasn’t even any dirt at the corners of the baseboards.
"Neat," she murmured with a frown. For some reason, it made her deeply uneasy to be standing in the woman’s kitchen, seeing her brains on the wall, when the woman herself had been so neat. It hadn’t mattered so much in the house on Jackson Street, where she and Rita-Mae had worn masks to keep out the stench and Zenobia had worked with two of her sons to haul out about six months worth of garbage rotting in various rooms in that pig-wallow of a place. Murder in a place like that didn’t bother her near as much as it did here in this painfully clean house.
"Mop," Zenobia said, and shoved the stick into Olida’s hand without expression. "I’ll work on the goddamn wall."
Olida dipped the mop into the bucket of steaming water and Pine Sol Zenobia had filled. The first drops of hot water gave the old blood new life. She dragged the sponge through a patch of rust and left bitter red smeared behind.
"Gonna take forever," Olida murmured. Zenobia sighed and snapped her rubber gloves into place. She paid no attention to the blood sticking to the soles of her running shoes; she had Olida had stood in worse. Her sponge made the blood spatters drip dark red, as if they were freshly wounded.
"Rita-Mae!" Olida yelled, leaning into the mop. She rinsed it in the hot water and scrubbed harder; it was hard as hell to get the stuff out of the cracks in the floor, and if she knew Miz Grainger she’d be checking every nook once the smell was gone. "Rita-Mae, get your cracker ass in here, or -- "
But the woman who stepped into the kitchen wasn’t Rita-Mae. She was small, shorter than even Zenobia, and as slight as a willow. She’d worn a plain faded smock over her blue jeans and tied her dark hair back with a matching scarf. Like Zenobia and Olida, she wore tennis shoes.
"What -- " Zenobia started. Olida held up her hand.
"You Carmen?" Olida demanded. The younger woman nodded, eyes taking in the carnage of the kitchen. "You’re late. Supposed to be here at ten o’clock sharp. Ever done this work before?"
"No," Carmen said softly, her voice nearly a whisper. "No, but I done plenty of cleaning. Used to work at a nursing home."
"Well, then, you’ve cleaned plenty of shit," Olida nodded, satisfied. "Here, you grab a mop and help me here. Don’t be too fancy right now, just try to get the worst of it up. We’ll do fine work later."
Carmen took the mop leaning in the corner. Olida blinked.
"Not that one, that was -- " Olida’s voice faded. Hers. Why the hell not? "Never mind, that’s fine. Just get to work."
Carmen dipped her mop and started up. Zenobia cursed under her breath in Spanish, a running litany that Olida only slightly understood. When most of the stain was mopped away, Olida took a large sponge and rubber gloves and got down on her knees to clean under the cabinet edges.
Carmen joined her. With strong, competent swipes she erased streamers of blood. Where it had soaked into the raw edges of wood she paused to scrub hard, ruining one sponge and using another almost to rags. Olida, cleaning the cracks with a damp toothbrush, smiled at her.
"You’re doin’ good," she encouraged. Carmen’s dark eyes flashed at her.
"She died hard, didn’t she?" Carmen asked so softly even Zenobia cursing a few feet away couldn’t have heard her. "Don’t you think?"
"I think," Olida said very slowly, "that it ain’t good to think about it. You get crazy thinkin’."
Carmen stared at her a minute, then looked away at the wallpaper. She had no expression on her face at all, just the blankness of someone who looked for a memory she couldn’t quite find. Olida sighed and bent back to her work. Her spine gave a warning twinge, reminding her she wasn’t twenty any more, and she kept working anyway. Old age only wins when you let it, her momma used to say, gap-toothed and grinning. Olida wasn’t ready to lose.
She looked up finally to see Carmen standing at the country-papered wall, sponge in hand. With the slowness of a dreamer, the woman wiped. Dried gray pieces sounded like dried macaroni when they hit the breakfast table.
Olida flinched.
"Isn’t this supposed to be done?" Carmen asked without turning around, just like she could feel Olida’s stare. "We got to wet down the wallpaper, right?"
"Right," Zenobia said firmly, and shrugged. "Might as well do it now, let you and Rita-Mae pull it down."
But there was a glitter of fear in Zenobia’s eyes, too. She wouldn’t have been the first to touch the wall. That would have been Olida’s responsibility, when Olida was ready.
"Rita-Mae!" Olida yelled, and it felt good. There was a muffled thud from the living room. "You better be working, girl!"
"I’m working, I’m working, there ain’t room for all of us in there!" Rita-Mae shouted back. "Gettin’ the dust off in here, then I’ll do the bathroom. Okay, boss?"
"Okay," she answered, scrubbed at a bloodstain until her gloved fingers ached.
Carmen, dreamlike, continued to wet down the brain-smeared wallpaper until it wrinkled like drowned skin.
"Watch it! Watch it!" Zenobia yelped, and moved her feet out of the way. The refrigerator slid with a linoleum-scratching shriek the last few inches. "Look at that, Lid. Clean under there, ‘cept for the blood."
"Yeah," Olida said, and puffed a breaths in and out to ease the tightness in her lungs. The woman had cleaned under her refrigerator.
Jesus God, so did Olida.
The three of them knelt in silence on the floor, mopping up the last of the blood. The remains of the wallpaper lay in neatly tied plastic sacks, and there was no trace of blood on the walls, windows, floor or cabinets. Olida had even wiped off the salt angel.
The room smelled of afternoon sun and Pine-Sol and the sweat of three women. Rita-Mae was off cussing in some other room, her voice muffled by walls but echoing through doors. Carmen had worked harder than Zenobia, harder than Olida. Harder, Olida thought, than anybody she’d ever had before.
The thought, strangely, made her nervous.
"Who was he, you think?" Zenobia asked, a nervous blurt that wasn’t like her at all. "The guy, I mean? Some crazy guy, to bust the door open and come in here and beat her all to hell like that. Shit, he splashed her brains all over the wall, he must have been crazy, you know? The cops ever get him? Lid?"
"Don’t matter," Olida said steadily. "He ain’t comin’ back here. He got what he wanted."
Carmen’s hands had stopped moving. For the first time Olida noticed that she wasn’t wearing gloves, that the blood flecks were clinging to her smooth brown skin and making dark half-moons under her fingernails.
"He was her husband," Carmen said. Olida’s hands stopped
, too, sweating inside their rubber prisons. "Supposed to be in jail. Got out."
Her daughter's husband Rupert was in jail, god damn his soul. Olida felt a chill slide down her aching back along with a drop of sweat. She’d sworn to him she’d chop him into fillets if he ever touched her girl again, and she remembered the murderous hate in his eyes. If he got out --
"Fucking courts," Zenobia said, voice shaking. She blinked hard and wiped at her face with her forearm. "Can’t count on nothing’ no more. Not even the jail. Shit, they stuck Mano in the pen for not paying his taxes, you believe that shit? And they let this crazy out. Ain’t safe. We ain’t safe."
The words hung over all of them, like the smell of Pine-Sol and sweat. Carmen finally wrung out her sponge and continued wiping, though the floor was long since cleaned. Olida gave up and threw her sponge in the pail. When she stripped off her gloves the touch of cool air on her hands was enough to make her shiver with relief.
Rita-Mae appeared in the door, red-cheeked and shiny with sweat.
"Hey, I’m done, what about -- " She paused, staring. "Who’s that?"
She was staring at Carmen.
Olida pushed past Rita-Mae to the neat little living room. China dools, gleaming. Books neatly ordered. Carpet showing the footprints that had passed.
On a shelf by the window was a photograph. Olida stared at it for a second, then turned to Rita-Mae. Her eyes felt hot and painful, as if she’d been crying.
"Go on out, Rita." She felt Zenobia’s bulk behind her, hot with nervousness. "You too, Zen. I’ll be out directly. You go get your money from Miz Grainger."
The two of them bustled out, banging pails and mop-handles in their haste. Olida shut the door behind them and turned around.
Carmen stood in the shadow of the doorway, afternoon sun lighting her from behind. She reached up and pulled the scarf off of her head, and dark hair fell forward over her shoulders.
"Don’t come in here," Olida said very quietly. "I don’t want to see."
"Why?" Carmen asked just as softly. There was a long pause, and the air conditioner clicked on with a hum. Olida shivered as the cool air passed over her damp skin.
"Rita-Mae didn’t see you come in."
"No."
"She was out there on the steps, smokin’. She would’ve seen you."
"Yes," Carmen agreed. There was something wrong with her head. It looked mashed. Olida closed her eyes and mouthed silently, Oh Jesus, Oh Jesus.
"We didn’t mean no disrespect," Olida said finally, tears burning the inside of her eyelids. She felt Carmen move, flinched when she heard the shuffled of feet over shag carpet. Her eyes flew open. Better to know than not.
Carmen walked past her, whole and alive, and touched the picture frame by the window. Her fingernails were still dark with blood.
"She was pretty, wasn’t she?" Carmen asked wistfully. Olida’s heart lurched.
"She?"
"My mother." Carmen sighed, and for the first time Olida saw the tears glittering in her dark eyes, running down her smooth brown cheeks. "I came in the back door. I had a key."
"You -- " You ain’t a ghost, Olida almost blurted, and felt herself warm up with embarassment. "My God, girl, you didn’t have to be here, to see that. We would’ve cleaned it up. You didn’t have to -- "
She remembered Carmen’s sponge gliding down the wall, knocking bits of her mother’s brain loose. Her mouth just dried up with sorrow and shock, and Carmen blinked back tears and smiled.
"It was my duty," she said.
Olida tried to speak, couldn’t. She picked up her pail with a shaking hand and opened the front door. There, with the sun warm on her face and clean outside air in her lungs, she looked back at the other woman. Carmen was touching the picture again, fingertips trembling on the perfectly duplicated face there.
"You can come with us," Olida offered awkwardly. "We’re gonna go get somethin’ to drink. Come."
Carmen shook her head, and turned her back. As Olida swung the door shut, she saw the girl had gone away, somewhere else, somewhere sad and quiet.
Somewhere Olida couldn’t follow.
Miz Grainger wasn’t pleased to be waiting in the hot sun. She fanned her face with a fat magazine while Olida came down the steps and squinted at the sun.
"Lord, what kept you?" she asked crossly, and held out an envelope. "There’s a bonus there, too, for doing it so quick."
"Shouldn’t take it," Olida grunted and shoved it in her pocket without counting. "That girl did a lot of it."
"Girl?" Miz Grainger asked, and reached up to pat her shellacked hair. The whole beehive shook when she touched it. "What girl?"
"Carmen -- you know, the daughter."
Miz Grainger’s magazine hit the ground in a puff of dust and a blizzard of fluttering pages. Her mouth worked in its shell of peach-colored lipstick, and her face went gray-green. Olida took a step backward.
"Carmen didn’t have no daughter," Miz Grainger said weakly.
Olida turned slowly to face the house. A curtain stirred, and fell, with the breath of the air conditioner.
Miz Grainger joined them for a drink.
Witchgrave
An original short story by Rachel Caine
Welcome to you, friend!" the innkeep cried, and banged the door shut behind the newcomer with a grunting effort to shut out the howling wind and rain. "The devil's own storm, sir, eh? Black as a witch's heart, and not fit for man nor beast!"
The newcomer shrugged off his oiled cloak, and the innkeep took the cold leather and hung it on a peg over a trough of dirty water. "You shan't be sorry you chose us, sir, the Brass Bell may not have the lordliest rooms in the town, but we have the finest food. Roast lamb, sir, tender and fresh. And savory stew. Smooth, creamy ale if you -- "
He stopped, open-mouthed as he caught full sight of his new custom. Well-bred ladies always dressed in full skirts, with layers of kirtles and petticoats to disguise any hint of their shape from lustful eyes. This -- creature -- wore leather trews, a thick cotton shirt of a mannish cut. It clung to the swell of her bosom, slid in to define a waist no decent woman would dare show, flared over hips and stopped indecently short to flaunt the shape of her leather-clad lower limbs.
The female was armed with two matched daggers, a boot knife, and an ivory-handled sword of Caldish workmanship. She had no outriders, and no attendants for virtue's sake. She was, in short, the most immodest hoyden he had ever seen, and for a fateful second his outraged sensibilities insisted that he send her on her way, storm or no.
"Lady -- " he began, a thing which he could plainly see she was not. "The Women's Lodging House is at the end of the way, to the north. Perhaps you could--"
"No," she said flatly. "Perhaps I couldn't." She was a mannish thing, from her hair cropped and dripping at her shoulders to the bold look in her dark eyes. More muscled than any woman he'd ever seen. "How much for a bed?"
A bed? As if he'd accept such as her in his honest rooms. "None available," he said shortly.
She had the temerity to smile, as if he had amused her. "I saw the size of your inn, friend, and the number of horses stabled. You have more than one bed going vacant this evening, save for the lice and fleas, which I think you will agree do not pay good coin for the privilege."
He swept her with another disbelieving look. "And you can."
Insolent, that smile. Dangerously so. "Perhaps," she said. "And perhaps you might find it wise before the evening ends to make a friend of me."
He gave her a disgusted look and went to the door as it flew open yet again, admitting the roar of thunder and a silver curtain of rain. The woman moved to the huge roaring hearth, where the spit-dog slowly turned a roasting chunk of meat that sizzled deliciously. She wrapped her shoulder-length black hair into a knot and twisted out a drizzle to the rush-strewn floor, then shook the damp waving strands back in place around her face.
Across the room, two men watched her every move. She had marked them upon entering, as she'd marked
everyone in the small, overheated room, as well as the exits from it. Those two were of interest to her, as they did not seem to fit the mold of broken farmers into which the others had been poured. Too young, too fine, too neatly dressed. They sat close together, and as she watched them, the taller one with longish white-blond hair nodded deliberately in acknowledgment. He was pale, almost albino, and when he raised a hand to summon the serving girl his hands were long and graceful. He mimed another round, and pointed across the room to include the swordswoman in his order as well.
She set a hand on the hilt of her sword and joined them, settling lightly on the rough wooden bench opposite the two young men. Seen close, the blond was a startlingly lovely creature, with blue eyes like jewels and an angel's face.
The other man was dark-haired, the devil to his companion's angelic countenance, but comely in his own right. He smiled at her, too.
"Would you have the name of Tatya, then?" he asked. He had a low, pleasant voice, with the burred, lilting accent of the far north.
"Would there be two swordswomen traveling to this godforsaken place tonight?" she asked, and sat back as the serving wench slapped down a mug of spiced wine before her. "You'd be the ones looking to hire me."
"Aye," the dark one said. The light one continued to smile silently. "My name is Silk. My companion here is called Silence."
She laughed -- not a lady's polite titter, but a man's full-bellied explosion of amusement. "Silk and Silence? Are you whores?"
They continued to smile. "No," said Silk. "Our names are a part of the tale we have to tell, my lady. If you will ...?"
Tatya shrugged, mail jingling, and took a long pull of hot wine. "The coin you already spent guarantees you at least my ear, if not necessarily my sword," she said. "Tell away."