Copyright 2016 Crystal Lake Publishing
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-1-944785-88-8
Edited by Monique Snyman
Cover Design:
George Cotronis—www.cotronis.com
Interior artwork:
Orion Zangara
Interior Layout:
Lori Michelle—www.theauthorsalley.com
Proofread by:
Joe Mynhardt and Joshua L. Hood
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
To the Simply Tims, Rikki-Tikkis, Detective Bridgers, and other beautiful warriors of the world. Link arms and stand up for all of us.
CHAPTER ONE
A Body is Found
Bryony Adams was the type of girl who got murdered.
This was always so, and it was apparent from the way men looked at her as she adjusted her knee socks, to the way women shook their heads in pity when she rode by on her bicycle.
“I made you a present, Mrs. Lopez,” she said, dragging her backpack over to the desk. A vivid orange poster hung on the wall, demonstrating how to tie shoes. Bryony was well versed in tying her shoes, and could even double knot, but that was because she and her father worked very, very hard on it at home. Now she was working on counting to one hundred and was almost there, although sometimes she got lost while wandering around in the ever elusive eighties.
“Oh, did you? What a sweet girl you are. What did you make?”
Bryony pulled the gift out of the backpack, and set it on the desk. A bookmark, made of bright construction paper with cheap sequins glued to it. A cockeyed Mrs. Lopez was painstakingly drawn in crayon, her smile extending beyond the circle of her face. She had purple hair and a star sitting on one shoulder. Mrs. Lopez’s eyes stung. She clutched the girl to her, and as she felt the thin bones and coltish knees, she thought, Run away, little girl. Run from everything that is going to befall you. Just run, Bryony. Run.
What she said out loud was, “It’s very beautiful, Bryony. I have a special fondness for purple sequins, too.”
Kindergarten did not kill her.
Mrs. Lopez cried as Bryony pranced across the school’s tiny stage to receive her diploma. She hugged her teacher and gravely shook the hand of the principal, and then waved wildly to her father who sat in the second row.
“She’s yours now,” Mrs. Lopez whispered to Mr. Egan, the first grade teacher. “Watch over her, Larry. Keep her safe.”
“Oh heavens, that little girl is going to die in my care,” Mr. Egan muttered back.
As soon as the kindergarten graduation ended, he went directly home to pour himself a drink, and then several drinks. When he awoke the following morning, with a pounding head and heavy tongue, he decided then and there that he wouldn’t drink again. He needed his wits about him if he was going to help the Star Girl live.
And live she did, all through the first grade.
She painted ceramic ducks for a class project and watched baby chicks hatch for Easter, and lost her first tooth without mishap.
“Thank you for being my teacher,” Bryony said to Mr. Egan on the last day of school. “I enjoyed this class so very much.”
“It was a pleasure,” he answered honestly, and breathed a sigh of relief and trepidation. Although she had not been murdered nor even really threatened that year, not once, it only meant she was prolonging the inevitable. Surely the time was nearing.
When Bryony was in the second grade, a tiny body was found half buried under the desert sand. The coyotes had gotten to her, but not too badly, thanks to Patty Farlan. Patty, the high school druggie ringleader, was out partying with his friends nearby, and the bonfire scared the animals off. Patty and his flavor-of-the-week girlfriend, whose name nobody cared about or would remember, least of all Patty, stumbled across her.
“Patty,” said Flavor, “will you love me forever? Really, true?”
“Sure, sure,” said Patty, and then, “Oh my (these words shall be forever censored) what the (censor censor) is that?! It looks like a (censor) body out in the (censored for the sake of children) desert!”
It took a while for everybody at the party to sober up and come down, and after they did, Patty gave the police a call.
“Hey, man. There’s a body out in the desert. I found it when I was, uh, studying the desert nightlife, man. I think . . . I think it’s a little girl.”
Immediately the receptionist thought of Bryony. Poor girl, it had happened. It was time. She snuffled a little and pressed the magic red button on the station’s telephone.
“What?” said the voice on the receiver.
“Tim,” she said. Not Mr. Tim or Captain Tim or any of the other formal titles that he had garnished in his illustrious career. No, they were small town born and small town raised, and Tim was Tim. Thirty years from now when Tim would become President of the United States, he would shirk at being called President Lowry, but he would do it for the good of the country, dragging his feet all the while. But for here and now, he is Tim, and Tim is who he is, and being Simply Tim is good enough for everybody.
“Tim,” she said, “Patty is on the line.”
“Is he seeing dragons at the grocery store again?”
“No, he said that he was out in the desert looking at the animals,” (there was a barely audible snort from Tim, but his restraint can only be admired) “and he came across . . . well, Tim, Patty says that he found a body.”
“A body?” Tim snapped to full attention.
The receptionist took a deep breath. “A . . . little girl, he says.”
There was silence, and then Tim said, “Has anybody contacted Bryony’s father yet?”
“Of course not. The call just barely came in.”
Simply Tim was already pulling his jacket over his stooped shoulders. They were not stooped a moment ago, but suddenly the air above them weighed more than he could bear. “Get the crew. I’ll check in on Stop Adams when we know more. Heaven knows that man has been dreading this visit all of his life. Poor Stop. Poor Bryony, rest her pretty little soul.”
The Sergeant and his crew somberly made the drive out to the desert.
The coyotes howled in sorrow over their loss.
Heavy boots crunched over frozen sand, now thawing in the tentative light of morning.
There she was, tiny fingers curled, slightly bloodied at the tips. Her left arm, shoulder, and head stuck out of the ground, while the rest lay quietly beneath. They took pictures, carefully brushing the sand free.
The girl was much too big to be Bryony. The areas behind her knees were pillowy, and she had dimples at her elbows. The bruises across her face darkened her eyes like drugstore shadow, making her look years older.
“Samantha Collins,” the deputy said to Tim. The shock had straightened his voice out, erasing the freewheeling cadence that he usually exhibited. The deputy’s oldest girl often babysat for the Collins family. Stocked fridge, cable, well-behaved kids, she said. They paid well but not exorbitantly. Nice, middle class people.
“Huh. Who would have thought?” said Tim, rubbing his face. “She doesn’t seem to be the type.”
He wasn’t quite sure if the deput
y would understand what he meant, but the deputy nodded earnestly. “I know what you mean, Tim. Who would have thought that somebody would kill Samantha?” After all, Bryony lived just around the corner.
Samantha was buried in a simple pink casket with very little ceremony. A sweet girl, a quiet girl. A devastatingly average and unmemorable girl. The town came out and sat through the mundane, unimaginative funeral.
“That was . . . inspiring,” a woman in black commented halfheartedly. This, of course, made her a liar, but it was a gentle lie with sweet intentions, and she was forgiven, nay, raised in the general esteem because of it.
“Yes,” said her sister. “It was very . . . appropriate.”
Indeed, it was. Appropriate and perfectly suitable. In the best of taste; a quiet, humdrum type of funeral for an obedient daughter. No scandal at all except for the shocking fact of her murder. The “Who?” and “Why?” of it didn’t even come close to the real question that was on everybody’s mind: “Why not Bryony?”
In fact, the only emotion that anybody really felt at the funeral was a quick, deviously delicious thrill that occurred beforehand as family and friends filed past to look at the body. Samantha was quite lovely, as luck would have it, painted and powdered and hardly looking murdered at all. Her limbs had snapped back into place wonderfully, the punctures and black bruising covered artfully with clothes and makeup.
Bryony paused by the small casket longer than was custom, and the people behind her began to feel ill at ease for her, this strange, almost mystical girl who dared throw off the flow of the viewing line. Bryony studied Samantha carefully, delicately moving away the ruffled collar to see the thin wound that ran all the way around her throat.
Bryony leaned with her face uncomfortably close to that of the corpse, who was not a corpse at all to Bryony, but her dear friend Samantha. And then she said what ears pricked to hear her say, the words that coursed like wildfire through the funeral crowd and down phone lines mere seconds after she uttered them.
“Sam, I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. It should have been me.”
Nobody, not one person, soothed the bitter tears of that guilty child. Not a word was spoken, not a hand ran down her pale hair or patted her bony back comfortingly.
Because she was right. They knew it and now she knew it, and nobody else understood what had happened, either. Somebody made a mistake. Somebody had taken the wrong child.
CHAPTER TWO
Bryony’s First Kiss
So Bryony lived.
She lived past second grade and third and fourth. In fifth there was a bit of nastiness when a car swerved onto the sidewalk and nearly hit her while she was roller skating, but a thirteen year old boy zipped by on his skateboard and pushed her into the neighbor’s roses. It saved her life, but scratched her up terribly, and Bryony refused to talk to him for the next three years. When he was sixteen and she was thirteen, she realized with starry eyes that he had been her hero. When he was seventeen and she was fourteen, she wrote biting notes to his girlfriend that she never sent. When he was eighteen and she was fifteen, he joined the military and was killed that very year. Bryony once again felt the fangs of death striking at her ankles, pricking her skin but not wounding her directly. It was a warning, like everything else was a warning. She knew that she would die in high school.
How does this knowledge affect a young girl? How does it change her existence, knowing that the cruel universe is hovering ever at hand, waiting to snuff out her life?
Something inside of her tender heart gave up and died, even while something else struggled to survive. Relationships and memories passively floated past her like flotsam in the tide pool while a part of her grabbed at everything desperately, pulling it to her bosom while she still had time.
Take Teddy Baker.
While her Skateboard Hero was busy not focusing his attention on her, Bryony became enamored with a rather pretty boy who was in her Music Theory class. Large brown eyes, black hair, and a somewhat melancholy countenance convinced her that he needed bounteous amounts of love to be happy, more than any one person could give, but if everybody just dropped tiny drops of love into his empty bucket of a heart, then surely one day it would fill up. Love is sometimes a collaborative effort, you see.
Bryony and Teddy both stayed after class one day, this momentous occasion marked by the ringing of the school bell. The other students and the teacher quickly abandoned the room, and Bryony twirled her light hair self-consciously around her finger while Teddy talked about his family. His woes. The struggles that he went through, the way that he was misunderstood.
“I think that people don’t love you enough,” Bryony said simply. Teddy blinked his rather vacant eyes, and quickly agreed.
“You’re so right, Bry,” he said. “Nobody loves me. Nobody really gets me at all. It’s lonely sometimes, you know?”
He eyed her, gauging her reaction. Her skin was soft and she had that otherworldly ambiance that clung to her. She slid through school as if her death had come and she was a ghost, one foot tethered on earth and the other already off in the stars. Teddy dug that. It made everything easier. It made it not quite so bad, this thing that he was about to do.
“Well, I love you,” she said. Her cheeks pinked. “I mean, not like that, of course. I don’t know you that well yet. But I have this theory, right? We all have a bucket. This big, empty bucket that’s just waiting for somebody to fill it, and . . . ”
Teddy didn’t care much about big, empty buckets. He took her head in his hands, zeroed in, and pushed his mouth against hers. She kept talking for a few seconds, and finally fell silent. Teddy moved his lips a little bit like his sister instructed him to do, and he felt Bryony tentatively do something similar. Teddy pulled away and looked at her, trying to read the unusual expression on her face.
Part of her brain said, “Stop, Bryony! You are a dead girl, and you cannot get attached to anybody. One day you are going to leave suddenly and without warning, and how cruel would that be? To all of you?” That part shook its fist angrily.
The other part of her brain said, “Listen up, you, this may very well be the night. The night that has always been coming, the night when you finally sigh and your ribs still. Don’t you dare miss this momentary chance at happiness!”
“Wh-what are you thinking about?” Teddy asked nervously. He hadn’t had many kisses, but never in all of the movies he had watched had the kissee stared at the kisser with such concentration afterwards. It unnerved him, and rightfully so, for being judged harshly after sharing a first kiss with somebody is a horrid, horrid thing indeed.
Bryony came to a decision. “Teddy, I think that you are very sweet. If tonight is the night that I am murdered, I want to think about your eyes and the way that your hair is falling into them. I want to think about this kiss right now, because it is the first one that I have ever had. And I would like to try it again so that it is a little bit better, if that’s okay with you. I wasn’t really prepared.”
For a second, Teddy caught a glimpse of Bryony as a little girl, when she would stare at the sky, and the clouds would pass over her eyes. She stood as tall as she could, but something was already breaking inside, and Teddy could almost hear it. The gears of her soul grinding to a halt. The bright metal filings of it struck sparks and shone like stars.
She watched him carefully, and Teddy only nodded. He pressed his lips to hers more gently this time, and it was as a first kiss should be—gentle and hopeful and full of nervous delight. He didn’t invite her out as he had first planned. He didn’t take her to the mesa where their headlights would sweep over the desert, where the night would reflect back eyes that couldn’t be seen otherwise. He only told his friends that she refused to come, that she wanted nothing to do with him, and they would have no use for their rope and lighters and eagerly sharpened knives that night. They would have to find somebody else to practice on, somebody else to assuage their burgeoning hunger, because Bryony was on to th
em, he said, and would never come. Never, so don’t even try.
They said hateful words about her, that devil girl who mysteriously knew so much. Teddy agreed with them, and told them that he would never talk to her again. When her gray eyes searched him out, he avoided them. Eventually they dropped to the ground whenever she saw him, and he felt her spirit crushing underneath his sneakers as he walked by. It was easy to ignore her, to even tease her when he was with his friends. But when he was by himself, it was different.
He treasured that kiss up in his heart, taking it out to test it from time to time. It always held up. It always shone.
CHAPTER THREE
It Comes
It is time.
It is time.
She always knew this day would come.
CHAPTER FOUR
Defy the Desert
Bryony gave her father a kiss on his withered cheek.
“I can’t live here anymore, daddy. The desert is calling out for my bones. Do you understand that?”
Of course Stop Adams understood it. He’d known it for years, ever since she was a baby, practically. His wife had tried to tell him since the day Bryony was born, but he never listened. Finally she had packed up.
“I can’t stand here waiting for my little girl to die, Stop. I can’t take it one more minute. One more second. I will always love you, and her.” She kissed them both on the cheek, just as Bryony kissed him now.
They both said the same words.
“I can’t live here anymore.”
“I understand, baby girl,” Stop said.
His heart quietly broke in half, but he knew that he would shuffle home and sew it back together again. Old men break and break and break into smaller pieces, going on until there is nothing left. He always had something left, as long as he had his daughter. He knew that on the day she died, he would disappear, as well, and they would rejoice together wherever it was they would rejoice. But until then, he stayed. He didn’t mind it a bit.
“Sergio across the street will send his daughter to make dinner every night. I know you’ll get by for lunch. And I’ll call at least twice a week. Just so you know.”
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