He gunned the engine and drove right through us. I got twisted in a kind of sucking whirlpool of Ricky Luhrmann. Boppit was more collected, more quickly, than I was. He stood there breathing pretty normally but I was staggering, choking in the middle of the street.
“You scared him, that’s for sure,” Boppit said soberly.
“How could that happen? How could he see me?”
“I have no idea,” Boppit said.
“I know the man and I think I know where he’s going to go with this. He’ll try to get his head around the idea that he hadn’t seen me at all. But he’s going to fail. Then he’s going to look for something to hurt because he’s going to feel scared and he needs some relief.”
“Why wasn’t he that clear to you when you were alive?” Bop huffed. Then, “Something’s shifted, Lilly. Something’s going to get settled.” Boppit lifted his hand to show me the peep-toe swing-strap sandal he’d carried off from the Dumpster. “I’m going back to get this one’s mate. Look at this shortened vamp.” He held the shoe in silhouette so I could appreciate it. “Slim lines, beautiful wax finish on the leather. Not pigmented or veneered in any way.”
“Boppit, what can we do? Are you saying that what we’re doing isn’t working anymore?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? Is that secret code for ‘yes’?”
“Maybe.”
“Boppit, how long are we going to be here, with Neave, as well as Where We Are Now?”
“Oh, we don’t control that.” He lifted the shoe. “Isn’t this color brilliant! How could a woman just toss these away? What is wrong with the world?”
“I don’t know, Bop,” I said. “It’s a mystery.”
It was a dark moment for me, truly.
BOPPIT
Snyder Gives Her Away
It was Snyder who undid all the layers of protection we’d put around her, Snyder who led him to her. Days, Neave was surrounded with colleagues. Nights, she had managed to evade him by sometimes using buses instead of her car, by keeping an erratic schedule, discovering different routes every night. Night after night he had arrived at the warehouse apartment hoping to follow her wherever she went. Night after night she was already gone when he got there.
All he wanted was to find her alone, no little niece or brother or hulking brother-in-law. No witnesses whatsoever. Could the sister be bullied into telling him where she was? Maybe. But there was that husband, that Todd guy. Todd was large. Ricky considered the boyfriend, that Helbrun guy, and dismissed that idea too. Touch a guy like Helbrun and you’d fall into a nest of lawyers.
But the brother, comic-book boy. There we go. The brother was a weak link. Kick a few grains of sand in his face and he’d do whatever you told him to do. And the brother was alone quite a bit in that studio of his. Very easy to find.
By this point Snyder’s studio had three telephone lines and a part-time assistant who answered the phone and mounted and framed posters. The Snyder Terhune Fantasy Art Company didn’t have a sign over the door because most of its sales were done at gallery shows and through the mail, but a person just had to call the number in the phone book to get directions and that’s what Ricky did. He lingered outside the door until the assistant was gone for the day and the brother was alone. Ricky knew a little about Snyder. He knew Snyder was nervous, that he ran to his sisters when he got scared. Ricky was confident that he could pull off the scaring part. Then the brother would run to Neave. Ricky congratulated himself, very pleased with the plan. He climbed the stairs to the studio, swinging open the door that the last assistant had left unlocked. Snyder froze into a block the instant he saw Luhrmann.
“What’s wrong, little man?” Luhrmann asked, crossing the room and positioning himself within a few inches of Snyder’s face. “No cause for concern. I’m not here to cause trouble. I’m here to find out where my wife is.”
“Lilly? I have no idea, Ricky. We’ve been trying to find you, to ask you.” Snyder took a firm grip on the glass cutting table so Luhrmann wouldn’t see his hands shake.
“I’ll bet you did,” Ricky said quietly. “But I’ll bet your sister Neave convinced my wife to disappear on me. I’d like to talk to that sister of yours.”
“She’s at work every day. She’s not hard to find.”
“She’s hard to find if a person wants a more intimate conversation. Some privacy. Tell your sister that I think she’s hiding my wife. Tell her that’s not a smart thing to do.”
“She doesn’t have any explaining to do to anybody. And we don’t know where Lilly is. You’re the one with explaining to do!”
“I don’t think so, Superboy. You just tell Neave that me and her need to have a chat. In private. Tell her that for me.” He smiled.
“I can’t help you, Ricky,” Snyder said. “I don’t think Neave has anything to say to you.”
Snyder stood as tall as he could and held on to the table. He kept hanging on to it while Ricky Luhrmann sneered, said he could bide his time, and walked slowly out of the studio, closing the door quietly behind him. Then Snyder rushed to the window and watched the man step out of the building, go to his car, and drive off.
But then poor Snyder made the mistake that Ricky had hoped he would make. He’d watched the car pull out, reach the corner, and turn. He stood there another ten minutes to assure himself that Ricky was gone and then he scrambled down the stairs so fast he kept himself from plunging headfirst to the first floor only by hanging on to the banister. All he could think was that he had to tell Neave what had happened. He was too distracted, too frightened, to consider that Ricky might have simply circled the block and parked someplace where he could have a view of Snyder’s departure, which is just what Ricky had done. Despite decades of exposure to advertisements for spy-mirror tubes and gadgets that made it possible to see around corners, Snyder had no idea how to spot someone following him. It was easy for Ricky Luhrmann to trail him all the way to the Charlestown docks and pull into a parking place that gave him a narrow but clear view of the boats. There he sat, watching while Snyder ran down the quay, calling her name, watching Neave open the cabin door and calm him, watching her usher him into the cabin quickly so he wouldn’t attract attention.
Then he drove away, satisfied that when the time was right, he knew exactly where to find an isolated Neave Terhune.
THE PIRATE LOVER
Attack
Closing, closing, coming up into the wind with the enemy schooner directly in her path, the Cat made quick work of the chase. They were driving directly into Henri Le Cherche’s path, apparently intending to board his last intact ship, the Terrible.
“Sir!” cried Basil Le Cherche’s lookout. “There are women aboard the Terrible—I see them being pushed belowdecks … some very strangely dressed women!”
“His little flock of custom whoremaster pleasers,” Basil answered. “His slaves. Aim above the waterline—I intend to kill him but not sink a ship crammed to the gunwales with helpless prisoners. Arm the boarding party! Top yardsmen first and behind them lower deckhands—snipers into the rigging! Gun crews continue ongoing fire—sweep their quarterdeck until the moment we cross. Mr. Hortense,” he said, turning to his lieutenant. “I leave you in charge until my return.” With that, Basil Le Cherche drew his sword and positioned himself at the rail with his eager hands poised at his back, ready for the leap onto the enemy’s deck.
As they came within yards of the Terrible a lucky shot smashed through her mizzen topgallant. It swept downward, pulling the Terrible’s spanker and mainsail along with it and coming to rest at last on the deck of the Cat—a bridge to the enemy ship. “Now!” Basil Le Cherche cried as he sprang up and over, onto the deck of the Terrible. His slashing drive took the hand off his first attacker and in the pressing chaos he struggled to break free of the crush of men—to hunt madly amid the blistering confrontations all around him, to find his enemy, his nemesis, his brother.
The collision of the fallen mast onto the Cat and the feral cries of t
he boarding party all pulled Electra Gates up from the sick bay and onto the deck. She had ignored the angry, protesting surgeon, plaited her hair into a sailor’s pigtail, jammed a hat on her head, and pulled a heavy cotton middy over herself to make her figure more square. Now on the deck itself she bent before the guns and blacked her face with their powder, the better to move unrecognized. Holding fast to a dagger, determined to find and free the women she knew were battened down belowdecks on the Terrible, she stepped to the rail of the Cat, balanced there above the pitching black water for an instant like an otherworldly creature about to fly. And then she sprang.
Her landing was hard, much harder than she had imagined it would be, and as an enemy ran toward her with a sword raised, Trotter lunged forward and delivered a blow to him, saving her life. He yanked her to her feet. “Get onto your bleeding feet, you fucking swab, or they’ll slice you to ribbons! Watch your fucking back, boy!” he cried, pushing her behind him and facing yet another attacker. She whirled, then pushed herself toward where she hoped to find the main hatch. Just as she reached it another attacker lunged toward her, bludgeon in hand, and without engaging her mind at all, she slipped under the man’s line of attack and thrust her dagger upward into his rib cage, directly to the heart. When he collapsed on the hatch she rolled the body to the side, pried the hatch open, and dropped down into the black depths of the enemy ship.
There she found exactly what she’d expected to find—a dozen figures, all young, some too young to have yet entered into womanhood, all clustered around a single guttering taper. They gaped at her, she gaped in return, so strange did their costumes seem as they stood with the sound of battle just above their heads. Flounces and bows, boys’ trousers and wigs, pants and bodices of many descriptions made of many materials. All against the bulkhead, bottles were lined up—each one corked and sealed with wax, each one holding a scrap of cloth or paper. She pulled the cap from her head and released a flood of shining hair. They saw her stare.
“Bottles, miss,” one said at last. “For messages. We put them under our clothes and drop them in the sea when we’re allowed to go to the head. It’s all we could think to do. All we had the power to do, for we’re helpless, miss. Helpless.”
“What do the messages say?”
“Each and every one the same, though it might be in different words: ‘Save us!’”
Electra looked at the girls and smiled. “Well, saving is a sport that is open to all, is it not? And the game is afoot, my loves. Rip the skirts away from yourselves so your movement is free, for if you ever hope to see freedom yourself, you will need to be quick and willing to swing a club! Are you willing to fight for your own liberty?”
A guttural group cry answered her. All but one of them rose up and ripped clothing from their bodies, wigs from their heads. This last creature, a youngster dressed as a boy, purple and green bruises covering half her swelling face, fell to her knees and began to pray. Electra fell to her own knees before the terrified girl. “What is your name, child?”
“Polly,” the child whispered.
“Polly, you will not be used as you were before—ever again,” Electra promised.
“Will I die?” the girl murmured.
“Perhaps. But you will never be used again.”
This promise, along with Electra’s own commanding presence, was enough to bring the tiny creature to her feet. She stepped forward and joined the group of former captives. Electra turned, raised her dagger, and cried out for them to follow. They flowed behind her in a stream that broke into waves when they reached the deck. Once there they separated, stripping weapons from the fallen and turning on the crew of the Terrible with an energy that matched the slave ship’s name. And Electra led them.
Into the bloody chaos they moved, and their presence stunned both the men of the Terrible and the Cat. The shock the girls and women generated worked entirely to their advantage—a man falling away in surprise is an easier man to kill than one who stands ready, and the women’s momentum had an almost manic force. Men who towered above them by more than a foot, who outweighed them by as much as fifty pounds, found themselves falling away before this awful assault. Within moments a concerted rush led by the first mate and a gunner from the Cat pressed the men of the Terrible toward the hatch, driving them beneath where once the women had been held prisoner. Electra herself locked the hatch.
Her eyes swept over the blood running through the scuppers and the bodies of those who had fallen. When her searching eyes at last found their object, he was giving orders to secure the prisoners and take the Terrible to London as a prize to be condemned by the Crown. As she approached her lover she saw him reach out to grasp a railing, begin to stagger, lose his balance. Blood streamed from a cut over his left eye. A pike thrust had opened a thigh. She reached him, ripped his shirt from his back, and tore it into strips, binding the thigh and head.
“You cannot be here,” he said, his voice full of wonder. “You are a spirit.”
“I am flesh and blood,” she answered him, taking his hand and pressing it against her. “Feel the beat of my heart and the warmth of my flesh. Know that both belong entirely to you.” Basil did not answer but continued to regard her with wonder. “Basil,” she said. “Your brother? Does he live?”
“You are safe, little witch. He no longer lives, though the memory of his last moments will be forever engraved on my body.” Basil touched first his temple and then his thigh. “Remembrances of him,” he said softly.
“The rest of his convoy?”
“Without him to lead and protect them with his connections, they will sink back into the dark places from whence they came.”
All around them Basil’s men were ordering the deck, pushing the dead over the side, fishing the broken mast and readying the Terrible to sail. Electra’s eyes were drawn to a body so small it looked like a bundle of clothes. She stood and approached it, knelt over it. Polly lay quietly, her expression as calm as if she were merely sleeping. Not a mark was visible on her body, and only when Electra touched her and the body fell to its side did she see the crushed back of the skull.
“No one will ever use you again, Polly,” she said softly. She drew a sailcloth gently over the corpse’s face. “I promise you.”
NEAVE
It’s Done
The police officially stopped looking for Lilly Terhune. There was no body so there could not be a murder charge. No address or telephone had ever been found for the husband, who officially remained un-interviewed. I don’t mean to upset you, ma’am, a young officer had offered at the end of his last meeting with us, but missing people tend to end up being missing people.
Charles Helbrun III had called me every day through the entire month to give me yet another chance to reconsider my error and agree to marry him. I thought he called more in shock and irritation than disappointment. I felt sorry to lose the things that had come with him: the way he looked so in charge of things that I could just lean into him and relax, the respect that radiated toward him wherever he went, the beautiful dining rooms and powerful people he moved among, the way he looked when something caught his interest. But I wasn’t sorry enough to marry him. I knew I didn’t desire him, because I now knew what desire was, and I wasn’t willing—not anymore—to choose what Charles Helbrun III had to give.
The conference success rippled outward. AP wires ran photos of salesgirls on trapezes. Be Your Best got profiled in five major city newspaper business pages. Within three months the sales force grew by 20 percent. I’d never been busier in my life. Meanwhile Lilly’s old office stayed just the way it was when she walked out the door for the last time expecting to come back soon. People stopped looking over my shoulder for her, stopped hesitating about coming to me for answers to what used to be her questions.
Oddly, the people I felt most comfortable with were Mr. Boppit and Dead Lilly. In her first weeks here in my world, Dead Lilly had left Boppit and me sometimes to go to Janey’s. That’s where Annie’s new life was, a
nd Lilly needed to see it. No one in that household saw her stand by her sleeping child at night. No one could touch or smell or hear her as she leaned against a doorjamb in their kitchen at dinnertime.
“Lilly’ll be all right,” Boppit said to me. “She just needs to get the idea of Annie being there and being happy in her head.” Boppit was right. Eventually Lilly spent less time there, more with me and Bop.
“Maybe,” my dead sister said to me when she rejoined us after a visit to Annie, “maybe how this is all happening is what’s best. I was a C-plus mother. Janey’s an A. A-plus, maybe.” This was true, but even a dead person can have her feelings hurt, so I didn’t agree out loud.
In the last couple of days I’d noticed that Boppit and Dead Lilly were unusually restless. They couldn’t sleep, which kept me awake. If it was moonless, we’d wander onto the Rubber Duck’s deck for a while before returning to the cabin to toast bread. Bop and Dead Lilly would lean on the minuscule counters or sit on the tiny table, getting in my way and offering opinions while we buttered toast and looked into the black-mirror middle-of-the-night windowpanes. I loved the phosphory snap of a match as Dead Lilly started another cigarette. We’d make our way through pots of coffee and entire loaves of bread. We talked about love. They thought I’d done the right thing, turning Charles down.
“You didn’t love him,” Boppit said.
“And he didn’t love her.” Lilly nodded.
“He thought he did.” This from Boppit. “But what did he know?”
Lilly sighed. “So handsome. And all that money. You know, he would have been happy spending the rest of his life with you.”
“But she wouldn’t have been happy giving the rest of her life to him,” Boppit said. “He would have bored you sooner or later, Neave.”
The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Page 27