"And that makes you guilty?"
"I didn't protect her. I never even thought about that horny bastard alone with a ten-year-old kid. Too full of myself, fourteen and just found out why boys and girls were different. He raped her. I flat-ass know he did. And I set it up."
All those years and the little twit never told! And then another memory surfaced--her and Maureen whispering in a corner of the yard, and Maureen promising never to tell anyone about Jo and Buddy . . . .
The tears dried up, lost in the static-crackly air and leaving a scratchy feeling around her eyes. Funny how finding a key to Maureen defused the tension between her and David. Her focus changed from sad to mad. It was time to sort things out, rant and rave and throw things around a bit. Try some confrontation therapy.
She grabbed David's hand and hauled him along, stumbling over frozen ruts and tracks. She was not going to lose him to the family's skeleton in the closet. It had happened too damn many times . . . .
She wanted David. She wanted him permanently.
"Jo . . ."
He pulled back. She just latched down harder.
"Jo, what the hell are you doing?"
"We're going to have a talk, you and me and little Mo. She's going into therapy again before she screws up my life any further. Either that, or I move out and leave her with the bills!"
"Uh . . . okay. Look, Jo, slack off on the wrist. I'd like to be able to play again tomorrow. You've got strong hands, woman!"
She stared down at her fingers clamped around his wrist. It felt like she was drawing power out of the ground and feeding it to a ball of fire on the end of her arm. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to relax. Her grip creaked loud enough to hear, and strength flowed out of the muscles, leaving them limp. David peeled her hand off and shook blood back into his fingers.
"Sorry."
"Jo, you looked like some kind of witch. Your hair stood up and your eyes glowed like a cat and the world kind of turned sideways. You like to crushed my wrist. You're not big enough for that!"
"Momma cat defending her kittens. Lover, if I have any magic, I'm going to spend it holding on to you. I've never felt like this about a man before, and I'm not about to let you go. Maureen can sleep in a snow-bank, grab a blanket down at The Shelter, or curl up in the back of her rusty Tonka Toy. She comes between you and me, she's history."
David bounced along in her wake as if he trailed on a leash. Jo blinked against the pounding in her temples and tried to ease whatever she was doing. She wanted him with everything intact.
She felt a psychic tug when he stopped. What the hell was this magic thing, anyway?
"Jo . . . that gun. I'm not joking around. Maureen with a gun scares the living shit out of me."
She turned back, suddenly aware they stood on her front steps. It seemed like they'd covered two blocks in two seconds.
Jo stabbed a finger down-slope, toward the river. "That gun's going for a swim, first chance I get. If she's asleep when we go in, we take it and heave it and tell her if she tries to get another, the police chief is going to get a call with some names and addresses he might want to contact. You're not the only one. My psycho sister ain't got no business owning a gun."
Jo turned and headed up the steps again. The ice looked like somebody had dumped coffee all over it, dark stains in the blue glow of the mercury vapor yard-light. She had to watch her step all winter, what with the dogs and all.
Her glove stuck to the doorknob, wet wool on cold metal. And then inside she peeled it off and got some kind of gunk on her fingers. It was red under the hall light.
David ran a finger over the railing of the stairs and held it up for her. Red, again.
Blood.
"Somebody got hurt," he said. "Fall on the ice, most likely. You get cold enough, you don't notice it. When I was working construction one winter, about twenty below, I smashed my thumb and didn't even know it until I took a break in the warming shed. Blood like you wouldn't believe. Ruined a pair of gloves."
"Construction? You, working construction?"
He grinned at her. "Hey, even guitar players will work if they get hungry enough."
"Be careful of those hands, lover. I've got uses for them."
She climbed stairs, thinking more about Maureen and David than about which of her neighbors caught his finger in a door. It wasn't her problem. Sorting out things with her sister, was.
"Jo . . ."
She looked closer. The smears by the doorbell button were red and sticky. She looked down. Dark drops glistened on the floor, leading to a puddle smeared towards the door and across the threshold. Her brain slowed down.
About a tea-cup's worth of puddle.
Blood.
Maureen. That man . . . Brian.
Who looked so much like Buddy Johnson. Who knew where Maureen lived, who'd walked her home last night. Who left The Cave within minutes of his fight with Maureen, who easily could have gotten here before she did, who could have waited outside for her or called her and tricked her back outside. Who could have been just a little pissed at the things she said, the things she did.
Jo shivered.
Brian, who looked so much like the older Buddy when the pro trainers pumped him full of steroids and he damned near went to prison for pounding the shit out of a guy in a bar . . . .
David stepped in front of her. "Jo, give me your keys."
The door stuck like it always did, jerky across the humped floor. Then Jo saw more blood--blood on the floor tile, blood on the white porcelain of the refrigerator, blood on paper towels wadded up on the table. She saw a man slumped in the corner between the refrigerator and the wall, head in his bloody hands, blood on his shirt, blood in his hair.
His curly blonde hair.
Jo froze. She knew she should scream. She knew she should rouse the neighbors, call the cops. Instead, she growled deep in her throat like a feral cat.
She remembered, with a sudden flash, that she'd ended up hating Buddy Johnson--that sex between them had become war rather than love. Cops weren't good enough, personal enough; cops wouldn't allow her to tear this scumbag apart with her bare hands.
"You bastard, you've killed her!"
She flung herself past David, raging to claw the man's eyes out, sink her teeth into his throat, stomp his head until it popped like an overripe tomato and spilled his brains all over the floor. Her mind and sight and hands focused on a single thing.
Vengeance for Maureen. Vengeance for her baby sister.
Something grabbed her arm and spun her. A fist flashed at her face, a fist backed by red hair and a snarl.
Chapter Eleven
Maureen's glare nailed David to the wall.
He felt like a frog that she planned to dissect, pinned to the wax bottom of the tray and spread out belly-up waiting for the scalpel. Alive.
Jo groaned and stirred, blood trickling from her lip, and David knew he should go to her, defend her, comfort her, help her up. The air smelled bitter with electricity. He couldn't move.
Insane.
Maureen was insane. It had just been a word, before. Here in the blood-spattered kitchen with a man's body slumped against the cabinets and a gun lying on the table, the words grew substance.
Psychotic. Demented. Deranged. Homicidal maniac.
Stone-ass crazy.
She had murdered that man. She was going to murder Jo.
And then the corpse moved. The corpse shoved itself up to sit against the wall and cradled its arm in its lap and groaned. The corpse wore undershorts and undershirt, not what a corpse should be wearing if it had forced its way into an apartment and gotten shot. Other clothing lay in a sodden heap in one corner, leaking a thin trail of red.
David's eyes finally passed details on to his brain. A long slash gouged across the man's left arm. Black thread ran up it in a ragged line of stitches. A bowl of red water sat on the floor. Little white boxes with red crosses on them lay scattered around. Gauze rolls and gauze pads and flesh-colored tape
mixed among bottles, peroxide and iodine.
The static died and he smelled a doctor's office, antiseptic and blood and freshly opened bandages. She hadn't killed him. She was patching him up. The poor bastard had gotten himself into a hell of a mess.
Maureen grabbed a lump of white and threw it at David. His fingers told him it was a roll of paper towels.
"Don't just stand there like a fucking idiot! Take some water and clean up that crap out in the stairwell."
Whatever pinned him against the wall vanished. David stumbled over to the sink, rattled a saucepan under the faucet, and splashed water in it. He still couldn't go to Jo. Maureen's aura forbade it.
He felt like he'd walked into a coven of witches. First Jo damn near pulped his wrist with her tiny hands, then Maureen knocked Jo clear across the kitchen with one off-balance punch. Neither woman weighed more than a hundred, in winter clothes and sopping wet. What the hell was with these Pierce women?
Maureen told him to clean up, he went to clean up. No choice. Maybe Jo would wake up enough to battle her sister for his soul.
Blood and water and sodden red paper towels--it seemed like he wiped up enough blood for a minor war. A puddle of blood affects the eyes differently than a puddle of water, connects to different nerves, works deep on the brain stem. And the damned stuff spreads around like thick paint. One drop will smear to cover a whole floor-tile.
It still was what Maureen or Jo would call a fucking mess, no doubt about it. Sometimes you could tell they were sisters from a typed transcript. Fucking this, goddamn that, assorted obscenities and blasphemies as add-on adjectives and adverbs at a rate of two per sentence.
His mother had always said that the casual use of profanity indicated a poverty of intellect. Someone with half a brain could come up with sharper and more compelling words that wouldn't blush a Baptist preacher. And besides, the way they used foul language, it lost all effect. It faded into background noise after the first ten minutes.
Speaking of brains . . . where was his? He stared down at the saucepan full of thin spaghetti sauce and the wad of crimson paper towels. He was mopping up blood on the stairs while Maureen played EMT.
What the hell was she doing? That man needed an emergency room. Knife wound in the arm, livid bruises on face and shoulder and leg, the spaced-out pupils of a concussion victim--the guy was seriously hurt.
He grabbed everything and legged up the stairway two steps at a time, into what felt like psychic molasses. The closer he got to Maureen, the less absurd everything seemed. He wrestled with his sense of outrage, holding on to an image of punching 9-1-1 on Jo's phone.
The voice of reason yammered on in the back of his head. Get professional help! Get some cops, some EMTs, anybody who can wade through this muck and bring some sanity to it!
David swam against the current, into the kitchen. Maureen wanted the door closed. He closed it. Maureen wanted the bloody water dumped, both pans. He dumped them. What Maureen wanted, Maureen got.
Maureen crouched, tense, like a leopard strung out on speed, swabbing a scrape on Brian's forehead. Jo sat on the corner of the kitchen table, holding a soaked towel to her lip and glaring at her sister. David felt a crackling energy between them, like two storm fronts full of thunderclouds pushing against each other.
Just a quiet evening at home.
David forced himself to pick up the phone, sweating with the effort. Maureen didn't want him doing this.
"No calls." Her voice cut his resolve like a whip.
"Got to get an ambulance." His hand trembled. The phone went back into its cradle.
"No," Brian muttered. "Can't go to the hospital, can't see a doctor. My visa's expired. They'll deport me."
"Man, you need blood, you need X-rays, you could have internal injuries or a cracked skull or anything! Maureen's just sewed up your arm with a darning needle and a length of binder twine. Tetanus shots, antibiotics--you name it, you need it. You got a death wish?"
"Be okay. Was a medic in the army. Told her what to do. Needle's clean, wound’s bled enough to wash any crap out of it."
David surrendered to the pressure. It was the easiest way out.
"What happened to you, man?"
"Car. Hit and run."
"Bullshit. That's a knife wound."
Maureen's stare froze his tongue. "Shut up," it said. "Obey." That glare had nothing but imperatives in its vocabulary.
Charisma. Beaucoup charisma, mon ami, the commanding aura of the truly insane. Like maybe Hitler. David found himself wondering if Jo could do that. The idea ran icicles down his spine. It was something to think about. Something to seriously think about.
This family was weird.
* * *
Maureen jerked her attention back to Jo. "Stay away from us," she warned. "Keep your hands where I can see them. Both of you stay where I can see you.
"Don't even think of trying to get to the bedroom phones," she added, half to herself.
The knuckles of her right hand still ached from the punch. Served her sister right, attacking an injured man. First she stole David, then she waltzed in and tried to kill Brian. Who was the crazy one here?
She dabbed iodine on Brian's forehead and then the slash on his arm, still keeping half an eye on Jo and David. Brian winced at the antiseptic bite around the stitch-holes. That was good. It proved he was still all there.
It was going to get a little involved here, wrapping gauze around that arm. She'd need both hands and some attention. She picked up the gun and set it on the floor, close to her knee, farther from Jo and David. No unnecessary risks.
Jo called her paranoid. Paranoid delusions didn't carve five-inch slices out of arms, didn't break ribs, didn't carry the rusty lengths of iron pipe she'd unstrapped from Brian's leg and tossed in the corner. God above, Maureen knew what paranoia looked like.
Her own fears had nearly pulled the trigger. He'd stood there filling the doorway, made some growling noise deep in his throat, and reached out for her. She'd cocked the .38 and was about an ounce shy of blasting five hollow-points into his chest when she'd realized he was already falling. When she'd seen the blood.
The next instant, she'd been dragging that Neandertal carcass into the kitchen and swearing a blue streak at the damage she found. It didn't make sense. Or maybe it did. She stopped and stared at his blood, sticky on her hands.
There's no way you ever could have met him half way. You had to have control. You had to feel safe.
But there'd still been that gap, when her instincts took control and overruled the terror. Dissociation: temporary but drastic modification of one's personality. Recognizing a symptom and naming didn't make it a bit less strange.
It still felt odd, touching a man, wiping his skin, moving his arms and legs around like lumps of putty wrapped around a frame of sticks. The smell of blood, the smell of man, they ought to scare her. They didn't. She glanced at his crotch, at the lump in his underpants. That thing ought to scare her. It didn't.
Brian grunted as she moved his arm. Must hurt. She ran her hands down the muscles to each side of the cut, flowing cool energy from her skin into his. Weird sensation.
"Maureen, I'd help if you let me."
Jo winced back as if Maureen's eyes were daggers. Good. Stay away from this man, she thought. You touch him, I'll kill you.
Her mental critic pounced. Sounds like the same thing you told him, two hours ago. A little paradox, girl? That glamour thing Fiona talked about? You call a man a rapist and then threaten to kill your sister to protect him? Why aren't you afraid of him?
He'd come to her for help. He was hurt, in danger, alone, and he came to her for help. Nobody had ever come to her for help before.
He was too weak to threaten her. Besides, if he tried to touch her emotions, fuck with her head, she'd know it. Certainty.
Voices again? Voices in your head, Maureen? No trees in here to tell you things. No trees to guard you. You're walking in the world of men.
She didn't need t
rees. She could feel it in her hands. Brian wasn't dangerous.
Meanwhile, her fingers played ER nurse without her command. Gauze pads covered the wounds. Gauze strips bound them in place--wrapped two handed, gently, only enough pressure to hold the bandage in place. It seemed her hands knew what to do. Her hands told her not to squeeze the wounds; it would be dangerous to slow down circulation.
"David, get away from that fucking phone!"
He jerked back as if he had touched a live wire.
The voices switched to strategy. She needed to ease up a little. Was she going to move this hunk of muscle into a bed all by herself? Going to cut the phone wires and hold them at gunpoint all night long?
She needed to try a bit of cunning here, soothe her bitch sister and that faithless fake-Irish guitar player. Maureen wasn't mad at them. Maureen was just protecting this poor man who came to her for help.
"Jo, why'd you attack him?"
Glare met glare. "Thought he'd killed you, dammit! You had that fight at The Cave. Then we came in and saw all the blood . . . ."
"David, get her some ice to hold on that lip. Wrap it in a dish towel."
Jo glanced over to the gun and back to Maureen's face. Suddenly, she was five again, and Jo had found her playing with Dad's pocketknife. Such a pretty thing, and it cut so clean into the soft yellow wood of the scrap of lumber, such smooth pine-smelling curls. Trouble was, she didn't know to cut away from her body, away from her other hand.
She rubbed the thin white scar running from the knuckle of her left thumb all the way across to the center of her wrist. Memories. Maureen dropped her gaze.
"Sorry I hit you. Had to stop you, fast."
Take a chance, she thought. Can't watch them all night, going to fall asleep sometime. Relax, people, it’s just your little helpless hopeless wallflower sister.
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