Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1)

by P. G. Lengsfelder

  “I figured I’d find ya hanging around a beauty event.” Atara glowed with anticipation. I was certain she’d spring at me in the next moment. “With your looks, I’ll always find you.” Her irresistible mouth opened, she bared teeth.

  I fingered my keys. “What do you want?”

  “I want my fucking comb, you pathetic excuse of a woman.”

  “You’ve come to the wrong place, I don’t have any comb.” It must have been worth a whole lot more than I’d realized.

  She jumped at me and laughed as I launched back against the car, crushing my wrist, shooting pain up my right arm. “You don’t want to mess with me,” I said. “You don’t really want the authorities to know what goes on in your apartment.”

  This pleased her. “You really are a hick. No one gives a shit what goes on in my ship. We’re all consenting adults . . . just like you, you beast. You got what you wanted, and I got you on tape. One look at you, and one at me, and the cops’ll see that you’re just a jealous bitch twisted by your own ugliness. Now give me the comb before you have an accident. It’s mine, just like Levi’s mine.”

  “Victor!” I called across the parking lot, maybe twenty-five yards. “Could you come over here for a moment?”

  She shook her head. “Oh really, like this’ll make a difference.”

  “Well, hello, who’s this?” Victor was already sizing her up.

  I guess I was glad to see him. What tape? “Someone I knew in New York. She and her husband.” The dare made it more inviting.

  “I’m Victor. Welcome to Bemidji.” He took both of her hands in his. “I’m the mayor.”

  She gave me one last look, cold like an executioner, and by the time she’d met Victor’s eyes, she was a different woman. Seductive, she’d changed skins in front of me. “Mr. Mayor, a pleasure.”

  “Vic, call me Vic.” There probably wasn’t a man alive who wouldn’t have flashed the same staggered, open-mouthed surrender. Probably many women too, and she knew it, a dose of her favored drug.

  “Vic,” she said.

  “Did you need something, Eunis?” He barely took his eyes off her.

  “Just wanted you to meet Atara. She’s just in for a short time.”

  “Is this the first visit to our town for you and your husband, or has Eunis already shown you around?”

  “My husband’s not here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “It could be.”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “Absolutely, if it’s okay with Eunis.”

  Atara answered for me. “Oh, it’s okay with Eunis. It will give her time to find a small item I lent her. In fact, Mayor—”

  “Vic.”

  “Vic. You’d be surprised how the two of us met. I’d bet you’d get a chuckle.”

  I opened the car door and dropped in, placed the key in the ignition.

  She knocked on my window. “Looking forward to the next time,” she said, her voice muted through the glass and her deep viridian pools awash in pleasure. “Really looking forward.”

  In those eyes, even in the late afternoon light, I couldn’t see to the bottom of her malice.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Rather than return to the farmhouse to grapple with Momma’s demands, the farmhouse rehabilitation project, or Lyle’s lethargy, I followed the last sweep of the sun west, a desolate strip of asphalt, toward the scattering of lakes and ponds that might be small and warm enough for a late afternoon dip. I needed something to cleanse me of the day and help still the colliding atoms set off by Victor and Atara, and what Atara had implied. Not just physical harm, but a tape.

  Just as I was about to pass Carver’s abandoned taxidermy shop, my phone pinged with a text message. I steered into the tall weeds under Carver’s weathered sign, his eyes shrouded by the years but still staring down on me. “Preserve beauty forever.”

  Reaching for the phone my first thought was Roddy. I was eager for his voice, a paradox that I registered with less opposition than usual. But I didn’t recognize the number. Just three words: “Try Johnny Ray.”

  I studied it for a minute, not understanding. Possibly a wrong number. To my right, the shuttered taxidermy shop sat heaped against itself. Almost a decade on and off I’d spent working for Carver, and it’d been almost ten years since I’d set foot in the place. It drew me out of the car and into the unusually warm, moist air, across the clearing to the sagging front steps, to plywood posted “Keep Out,” crisscrossed with two-by-two’s, riddled with nails barring entrance.

  I walked around back. Someone had hung brick-colored muslin over the windows. I wiped the perspiration from my forehead. The wood paneling was hoary and cupping and some had fallen off, leaving the tar underbelly exposed and tearing. Worse even than Momma’s house. Be thankful.

  The rear door was chained but someone or some thing had pried it partially open. A thin shaft of light fell in. I peeked. I tugged on the door and it flapped open, allowing me to step into the darkness.

  Inside, Mr. Carver’s precious workspace had been ransacked. By the doorway, puddles of water, I hoped, collected where the rain had overrun the roof’s defenses in an attempt to decontaminate the past. I hopped over rusted cans, a few oozing strange yellow or black mucous. A cream and coral mushroom the size of a basketball had sprouted from the foot of his long workbench, enveloping the leg and sending spores onto the surface. They appeared luminous in the dark.

  I picked my way to my old workbench, spotted a strainer, forceps, a headless hammer. Two skins of undetermined creatures still decomposed on hooks, quivering. Stillness everywhere, and yet a draft?

  Hairs separated from the skins, settling on my face and lips, fouling me before I swiped them away. Something scurried over my foot. I screamed. The room closed in, perhaps invading chemicals, and me immobilized. Stop breathing. I’d breathed here for ten years; my madness had an itinerary.

  Rushing water. Victor? Harold? Atoms jiggered then started colliding. Something imminent. And I was frozen. A car pulled up, idling. Be still. It pulled away.

  I turned abruptly, kicking glass and awakening the grieving dust, a choking particulate, then tipped through cobwebs and out, gasping for air in the twilight. I feasted on it till I was in the car, vibrating. I yanked the small bottle of hand purifier from the glove box, rubbed it liberally over my hands, arms, and face before sliding the key in the ignition and accelerating away.

  To really breathe, I rolled down the window. The deep rumble of an engine broke the silence. From behind a clump of ragged black spruce, a dark blue car jumped to the roadway and was upon me, surrounding me in dagger-piercing decibels. Trying to pass? Forcing me to the road’s far side, down the small embankment? I clenched the wheel. The car sped inches from me —if my elbow had been crooked out the window, it would have been ripped from my body. That’s how close. Then it was gone, its brattling muffler and blue hulk careening away into the sundown shadows.

  I rolled to a stop. My air, the air, was thin, my molecules still in motion. I opened the car door and leaned out for a full breath. Was that a threat or my galloping imagination?

  Standing by the car, not a branch moved. All moisture was gone. I was breathing deep but it was like inhaling fine sand, it was that still, suddenly that dry. With the feeling of a giant magnet pulling me away from the Mazda to the sky.

  I couldn’t see above the treetops but they’d stopped moving. Completely. Not a sound. No birds. Everywhere I looked. My hand went to my heart. I closed my eyes and listened.

  Then back into the car, I grabbed my phone and Gordon’s card. I punched in his number, clumsily, missing one — shit! — and starting over. It rang. I started driving. After a few rings: Gordon’s languorous voicemail.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” I yelled at the phone and searched the sky above my windshield. In the rearview mirror, the sky turned charcoal. Mean. Whatever reality I was living had me tethered, pulling me up, pulling me down. His voicemail bee
ped.

  “Gordon,” I shouted, “I’m northwest of Bemidji and Route 2, a little past Carver’s old place. It’s 7:15 or so. I think . . . I think I’m sensing a vortex.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  By the time I arrived at the farmhouse I was sure I’d made a fool of myself. I sat for a moment in the car, windows rolled down. If I stuck to science, really thought about it, there’d be an explanation for this without the drama. The sky was clear. No more than a punk driver, probably. There wasn’t an appreciable weather pattern that would cause anyone concern.

  “Someone drove you off the road?” Lyle was propped up on his bed, watching me march back and forth at the foot of it. “Some drunk?”

  “What do you know about Victor King?”

  “The pretty boy mayor?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “We both majored in women, but we didn’t exactly travel the same crowd. Plus, he was older.”

  “Ever see him in the Drink ‘n’ Dive? I heard he likes to party.”

  “Yeah, well, he used to come in. A lot. I’d see him. Every damn woman buzzin’ around him, but he stopped cold.”

  “When he started his political push?”

  “Nah, way before that. Maybe fifteen years ago, time you were workin’ for crazy Carver. Why?”

  “So he’s stopped drinking?”

  “Shit, no. He still drinks like a fish, just don’t like ‘em.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Word is he had a nightmare. Join the club, right? Anyways, really scared the bejesus out of him, and I’m glad somethin’ slowed the sonuvabitch down because —”

  “What kind of a nightmare?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. All’s I hear is that one day he doesn’t want to have nothin’ to do with the Drink ‘n’ Dive. Was roarin’ drunk one night at The Back Door, you know the place?”

  I nodded.

  “Friend of mine hears him whimperin’ to a couple buddies bout being freaked out by mermaids, ‘face the color of the moon, hair bright as the sun, eyes of a rabid wolf.’ Scary shit like that. So he ain’t goin’ back to the Dive, no matter how fine those fishy titties look.”

  Eyes of rabid wolf!

  “You think he tried to run you off the road?”

  I kind of snarled. “Don’t know.” A dark blue car.

  “Why’d he do that? He barely knows you.”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “Or,” said Lyle salaciously, “you and pretty boy been secretly doin’ the humpty? His wife would fuckin’ love that, take the kids and every last penny. I hear she’s got her own bad temper.” A modicum of glee surfaced in his tired eyes. “His royal reputation would go down the toilet, which would be kinda nice.”

  He tossed me a guilty glance. “I don’t mean nothin’ against you.”

  “Don’t know him. Just saw him today at the Miss USA interviews. He’s one of the judges.”

  “Figures. Got his hands in everything. How’d that go, the beauty thing?”

  “Weird. All pretty girls, of course.”

  “Any phone numbers for me?” The hackneyed line, delivered lifelessly, with no expectation of a response.

  I stopped pacing and gave him a small grin. “Why aren’t you out there making your own sales calls? It’s not like you not to be tailing some attractive woman.”

  He acted cool. “Not interested right now.”

  “You don’t seem interested in anything.”

  “Who was your favorite?” Lyle sat up, shifted his weight.

  “Favorite?”

  “Of the beauty queens?”

  “There was one, but you can’t say anything. It’s top secret until the swimsuit and evening gown competitions, and the judges’ vote. And even then . . .”

  He zipped his lips closed. Then slumped before he caught himself.

  “A young woman named Lindsay. Very bright, poised, thoughtful. Pretty but not classic. We’ll see if the judges pick someone close to the composite.”

  “No phone number?” He feigned a smile. He looked really tired.

  I shook my head, kept the charade going. “No phone number.”

  “How about you?” He moved to the edge of the bed and put his feet on the floor. “Roddy’s in New York and —”

  “Yes, about Roddy. You gave Anthony his phone number.”

  “Because you really like and trust him.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Didn’t need to. Besides you’re his barbecue sauce.”

  “You’re smoking weed again.”

  “Never stopped. Look, you can’t keep pinin’ over Harold. Not that it’s my business, but I never really understood that. He was what Momma called a tusser. He was dark, you’re not.”

  “I don’t know. Lately . . .”

  “Nah, I know dark.” He shifted his weight again then smiled, like my little brother.

  “She did call him that.”

  “What?”

  “A tusser.” I motioned Lyle over a few inches and sat next to him on the bed. It squeaked. “I saw Harold when he was his most incandescent, shining light over me. I seemed to be his ‘on’ switch. The rest was Poe and Dickens and the troubling world, and I understood it, still do, but I imagined Freyja — remember her? — golden hair, gliding through water.”

  “The beauty queen.”

  “Yes. I breathed better when I did, and it made him happy. Which made me happy. It’s not like I’ve had lots of choices. He was pretty good to me. But . . . ”

  “But what?”

  “Nothing.” I pressed my lips together. “There were times I didn’t like him.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “But he was my husband. I think I loved him.”

  “Right.” Lyle tossed it off his shoulders like it was obvious.

  “He made me angry. You even said I’ve got a temper.”

  “You do.”

  “A couple times I wanted to hit him.”

  “Wantin’ and doin’ are different. But yeah, I know that one.” Lyle was pretty much limp except flinching his shoulder like it was all normal. I was taxing him.

  I glanced at Lyle’s guitar stashed on a chair in the corner. “Anyhow . . . ” I pointed to it.

  “No. We’re finishin’ this conversation.” He gathered himself up a bit. “Did ya hit him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Then what’s the problem?

  “What if I hung him?”

  “I think you’d know, Sis, it’s not the kinda thing you’d forget.” He started to slide off the bed.

  “Maybe.” I reached out my arm and set him against the headboard. “You’re pretty tired.” I started to rise.

  “No, no. Stay.” He pulled me down.

  “Okay. Let’s talk about happier relationships. What or who besides that D-35 has made you happy?”

  He laughed, dove inward, then returned to me. “I don’t even know about the guitar anymore. There was a woman.”

  I leaned forward, pleasantly surprised, still trying to let go of Harold but knowing I couldn’t be finished with him.

  “She really wasn’t much to look at, but she knew how to sit next to me, not a word sometimes.” He looked across the room at the blank wall. “Spent half a day in the cabin once, spoke three words between us. Leaned on me is all and I knew she was . . . there. I mean really there, ya understand?”

  “Yes. What happened?”

  A deep breath and he stood, a little shaky. “I fucked it up: the guitar, bourbon. Just not sure how she’d travel, maybe drag me down. I’ve always been lookin’ over my shoulder, like somethin’s gonna weigh me down. I was so sure of the music.” His vest hung on the headboard and he slipped it on. “Stupid. I fucked everythin’ up.”

  “You’re not done with music.”

  “I’m done with everythin’, Sis.”

  “Seems a little drastic. You’re just down on your luck. It’ll pass.”

  His smile was small and
held no hope. “Mom will want dinner soon.” He moved to the door cutting off further conversation. He put his arm around my shoulders and walked me out.

  ***

  The next afternoon, I pulled off my boots, the bib overalls I’d found rolled up under the staircase, and my t-shirt, then took a shower and drove to the Miss USA swimsuit and evening gown competitions. Afterward the judges met privately to discuss our observations of the candidates and make our recommendations. A platter of fresh donuts sat untouched on the counter next to the burning coffee, which breathed life into the sterile room.

  “I think the best way,” Gordon said after getting everyone to circle their chairs and forcing me to sit directly to the right of Victor, “is for each of us to make a case for our top three candidates. Sisel, why don’t you begin.”

  Victor spread his legs into my space.

  Sisel was generous in her assessments, perhaps too generous, I thought, because one of her top candidates was a young woman wearing way too much makeup. But Sisel also ranked Lindsay high, which pleased me since — if I had to choose — Lindsay was my top choice.

  Gordon went round the circle and there was some consensus that Lindsay might be one of the top four or so candidates, along with Erin, a Hispanic girl named Emily, which seemed an inappropriate name for a Hispanic, and Ashley, a buxom young woman who stood out during both the swimsuit and evening gown competitions, despite mangling the interview portion with a steady stream of likes wedged between ums, and a lengthy dissertation on Theo James.

  I made a strong argument, I thought, for Lindsay: her poise, her natural beauty, her inquisitive mind. “Lindsay is a young woman that is truly beautiful inside and out,” I concluded, passing the discussion to Victor.

  “Well,” said Victor, “I’m afraid I could never vote for Lindsay. She stutters.”

  And that was that. Within minutes he had eviscerated her and reconfigured the discussion around lesser straw-women candidates before convincing the others that Ashley should wear the crown. She was very close to the composite except for her bust measurements, which put her well ahead of all but two previous winners.

  As I walked out with Gordon, the others seemed fine with the resolution, or perhaps just happy to be done with the infringement on their time. I craned my neck, looking to see which vehicle Victor was driving and worried that Atara might reappear.