Fright Court

by Mindy Klasky

  I could see his fingernails distinctly in the dawn light that suffused my bedroom; I could make out the hairs that dusted his knuckles.

  He sucked in his breath in sudden surprise.

  Not surprise, I realized. Pain. His hand was turning red before my eyes, the color blooming like sunburn across his pale flesh. “James!” I gasped, and I pushed him back to the safety of the bathroom. He complied awkwardly, cradling his injured hand against his chest.

  “Lie down,” I said, guiding him to the tub. He leaned on me heavily as he stepped over the porcelain edge. The pillows yielded unevenly beneath his stocking feet; I eased him down until his head rested against the stack of towels. Helpless, he curled onto his side, his knees bent so that he had a prayer of fitting in the awkward bed.

  “Sarah,” he said, reaching for me with his burned hand.

  I shook my head, gathering up my comforter and settling it over him. “Rest, James.” I hauled myself to my feet. Now it was light enough in the bathroom that I could make out the individual strands of his hair, the shadow of his cheekbone as he struggled to sit up. He murmured something but I couldn’t make out the words. “Hush,” I said, and then I backed out of the room, pulling the door closed behind me with all the decisiveness of a Director of Security policing my territory.

  I stuffed hand towels from the kitchen beneath the door, filling the scant gap between wood and tile. Pulling the curtains closed in my bedroom, I shook my head as I thought about how many times I’d bemoaned the scant light in my basement apartment, how often I had wished to have French doors or at least some full-size windows.

  I was lucky. James was lucky. If I’d ever been granted my architectural fantasy, he might be burned beyond healing now.

  I put my ear to the bathroom door, listening for … something. I knew I wouldn’t hear him breathing in his sleep. And if he were restless, if he were crying out, that could only be a bad sign. Silence was for the best, I reminded myself. Silence was exactly what he needed. Silence and sleep and healing.

  I closed my eyes, trying to reassure myself that the immediate danger was past. In the darkness behind my eyelids, I could see James’s hand, stark against the white porcelain of my tub. The image was clearer than it should have been—the light was even brighter than the impinging dawn had been. For just a moment, it seemed as if the white background was cloth, not glazed clay, and I could imagine a midnight-black box lurking beneath the linen folds.

  That was ridiculous. My brain was on overload, spinning out ominous pictures to distract me from the disaster we’d narrowly escaped. I needed to get some sleep myself.

  But not yet. It was already Tuesday morning, and I had promised to meet Chris at the public library, to review the last of his notes for his story.

  I dragged myself over to the kitchen sink and splashed cold water on my face, doing my best to wake up. James would be furious if he knew what I was about to do.

  As bright rays of morning sunshine tumbled through the window, I told myself that I was only doing what was necessary. What I thought was best. If I suddenly refused to see Chris, he would be certain that something was wrong. He would investigate the Night Court with a vigor the imperials could never withstand.

  Still undecided, I glanced out the kitchen window, and saw a patrol car, parked right at the curb, in front of the fire hydrant. A policeman was watching my door; he nodded as he met my eyes. I let the curtain fall back into place.

  Squaring my shoulders, I picked up my purse. James wouldn’t see things my way. But he was safe in my apartment. For now. And whether James Morton approved or not, I had a job to do. I had to meet Chris and do my best to see that the Banner article helped keep the Night Court in existence. That was the only way I could be sure that Maurice Richardson would eventually be caught, eventually be put on trial, eventually be locked away so that the imperials I knew would be safe forever.

  My cell phone rang before I got out the door. “Hey, Al!” I said, keeping my voice low.

  “Why are we whispering?” Allison asked, unnecessarily matching her volume to mine.

  I started to answer without thinking. “James is sleeping in … the other room.” There. Thought kicked in half-way through that sentence. I couldn’t exactly tell my best friend that I had a vampire sleeping in my bathtub. Not when I’d been instrumental in that same vampire permanently erasing any memory that Allison had of his supernatural existence.

  “You mean Chris,” Allison said.

  For one fleeting instant, I thought about taking her up on the misunderstanding. That would only cause trouble down the road, though. Knowing my luck, Allison would somehow manage to raise the issue when Chris and James were both standing right in front of me. I gritted my teeth together and said, “Um, no. I meant James. But it’s not what you’re thinking.”

  “It’s not that you’re sleeping with your boss?”

  “Allison!” I’d said that a little too loudly. I lowered my voice to a stage whisper as I let myself out the front door. “It’s complicated.” I tucked my phone against my shoulder so that I could fight with the lock. It took three tries, but I finally got the key to turn.

  I nodded at the policeman in his patrol car, half-expecting him to stop me as I reached the sidewalk. He merely raised two fingers to his brow in a half-hearted salute. Apparently, I wasn’t under house arrest. James’s orders only extended to protecting my home, not my person. I hurried toward the library before I had something else to explain to Allison.

  As if on cue, Al reminded me, “I’m waiting.”

  I tried to come up with something that sounded remotely plausible, but I had nothing. “I don’t have time to explain it all now,” I said. “I’ll send you an email tonight. Fill you in on everything.”

  I wasn’t lying, not completely. I’d send her the email. But it sure wasn’t going to tell her everything. Not by a long shot.

  “I’m holding you to that,” she said. “Look, I know you’re tired, I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry about losing my temper with Steve at Nora’s party.”

  “You didn’t lose your temper!”

  I knew her well enough that I could picture the way her mouth was twisting into a frown. I was certain that she was chewing her lip before she said, “Well, tempers were lost. And you shouldn’t have gotten caught in the middle of it.”

  “I think we’ve known each other for long enough that I can take it. Seriously, though. Are you and Steve all right?”

  “We’re fine!”

  Okay. Those two words were way too bright. “Allison.” I couldn’t keep the warning tone from my voice. Not that I knew what I was warning her about… It was just that something was wrong, and I wanted her to protect herself before she got any more hurt than she already was. I heard her breath catch, and I realized she was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, before I could think of something brilliant and witty to say, the type of comfort that a good best friend would have ready at the drop of a hat. “I’m just really emotional lately. Stress, I guess. Work and everything.”

  Yeah. Work. Sure. Steve—and his endless trips to New York—didn’t have anything to do with Allison’s stress.

  “Al, you’ve got to talk to him.”

  She sniffed. “I know.”

  “You can’t go on like this. It’s not fair to either of you.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Or to Nora.”

  Allison took a deep breath. “I’ll do it. Just as soon as I figure out what I want to say. What I need to say.”

  I nodded. That was beginning to sound more like the Allison I knew, the woman who understood what she wanted out of life and who always had a plan for getting it. I let her backtrack into casual conversation, about some major lobbying project she’d taken on, on Capitol Hill.

  Before I knew it, I was reaching the library’s heavy glass doors. “Oh,” I said, looking into the lobby. “There’s Chris!”

  “You mean James.”

  I winced. �
�Nope,” I said. “I really mean Chris. We’re meeting at the library, to go over his notes for the article.”

  “But you’ve got James at home in your bed.”

  “I do not! Not like that. Look, I’ve got to go.”

  “Forget about email,” Allison said. “Come over for dinner tonight. I mean, dinner for Steve and me. Breakfast for you.”

  The thought of setting my alarm to wake up a minute earlier than necessary almost made me physically ill. “I can’t. Not tonight.”

  “Tomorrow, then. I won’t take no for an answer. Steve won’t be home; he’s going back to New York for the Langerhans case.”

  The Langerhans case. Allison’s sudden return to a brittle tone made me certain that she was becoming as suspicious of that so-called litigation as I was. “I’ll be there, then,” I said immediately. Because that’s what friends do. “Five o’clock?”

  “Is that too early for you?”

  “Not at all,” I assured her. “I want to have time to talk to you!”

  “Five o’clock, then,” she confirmed. I ended the call and walked through the library doors.

  Chris wore his by-now-familiar uniform of immaculate shirt and well-pressed khakis. His curly hair had refused to submit to a comb, but he’d made up for that insubordination by settling his messenger bag across his chest like a precisely-tailored bandolier. The familiar gap between his front teeth made me match his grin, and I felt myself shedding my fatigue like a coat I didn’t need.

  I had worried that it would be awkward to see him again, that I’d feel unbalanced after everything that we’d said—and not said, and not done—on Sunday night. As if to allay my concern, he handed me a small paper bag. “I brought you a present.”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t get you anything!”

  He laughed. “You weren’t supposed to. Open it.”

  Inside the bag was a white pasteboard box, sealed with a yellow bow. It sat easily on the palm of my hand. Curious, I worked the ribbon off first one corner, then another, opening the box to find a glistening pile of chocolate-covered coffee beans. “These are perfect!” I said.

  “I thought they might be. Thanks for agreeing to see me after a busy night’s work.”

  He had no idea.

  Chris led the way to the reading room, and we quickly colonized a table. He wasted no time organizing his paperwork. I smiled at the neat stack of color-coded index cards that he set out beside an immaculate legal pad. He lined up three highlighters with military precision: yellow, pink, and blue, all set along an invisible straight edge. He produced a sheaf of white paper, half the pages fringed with carefully-placed sticky notes. His handwriting was tiny and precise, almost like typewritten text.

  When everything was set up, I glanced over my shoulder, making sure no librarian was in sight. After confirming that the coast was clear, I popped a couple of coffee beans into my mouth. Crunching down on the caffeine-infused goodness, I said to Chris, “Want some?”

  “They’d send me bouncing off the walls in about thirty seconds flat.”

  Not me. If we were going to work through all the notes he’d left for himself, I was going to need every last one of the coffee beans, and possibly more. “Why don’t we get started?” I said. “I’m not sure how long I’m going to last.”

  He turned to the first sticky note, glanced at his reminder to himself and nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “I wanted to get a little more information about your jobs since law school. Where did the nanny position fit in?” I closed my eyes, working out the timeline in my head before I replied. Chris wrote down my response eagerly, and he flipped to his next marker.

  An hour and a half later, we had miraculously made our way through the entire pile of pages. I’d had answers for every one of Chris’s questions. He was tucking away his last highlighter when he said, “Oh, there’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to watch a full night of cases in Judge DuBois’s courtroom. I think it’s important for me to get the feeling for how the mood changes the later it gets, the closer everyone gets to morning. It’s open to the public, right? Like any other courtroom?”

  The coffee beans turned to sludge in my belly. I wished that I’d set them aside after tasting the first one. “It’s public,” I heard myself say, my voice falsely sunny. “But it’s also really boring. I wouldn’t bother wasting a full night of sleep to see what goes on in there.”

  “I’m a completist,” he said with a shrug. “What’s one night, anyway? You do it all the time.”

  He certainly had me there. I swallowed a giant yawn before I said, “Look. Do me a favor. Don’t come tonight. I’m really tired, and I’ve got a huge backlog of new cases to process. In fact this whole week is crazy. Maybe next week? Thursday? Or maybe Friday?”

  Ten days, I quickly calculated. That would give everyone a chance to calm down after the Level Five alert from the night before. Who knew? Maybe Schmidt’s case would even be done by then. Maybe the imperial court would be in recess.

  Fat chance. Chris shook his head. “I can’t possibly wait that long. I want to finish this article by the weekend. Don’t worry, though. I don’t need to take you away from your job. I mean, I appreciate your offer to show me the ropes and everything, but I can observe the cases on my own.”

  I forced myself to laugh. “I know that you don’t need me there. I want to be. Who knows? Maybe you’ll see something that ties into all of this.” I waved at his notebook, now bare of fringed notes. “Something you’ll want me to explain on the spot.”

  He looked far too serious as he said, “I can skip tonight, but I really need to do this tomorrow.”

  I pasted a smile across my lips. “Um, great. We’ll make that work.”

  Damn. Twenty-four hours to warn James, to prepare the Night Court. Well, it was better than nothing.

  As Chris and I reached the tall library doors, awkwardness bloomed between us. I had been lulled by our easy camaraderie as we worked through his notes, and I stepped forward for a quick hug without thinking. I remembered just in time that proper journalists didn’t hug their interview subjects. I’d already shifted my weight, though, and I had to do something, so I tried to recall how many times breezy European girls kissed people on the cheek. Was it once? Twice? I thought I’d seen some of them do it three times.

  Chris saved me from myself. He held out his hand, ready to shake, as if we’d just completed a business meeting.

  Which, of course, we had. This was Chris. No need for me to feel awkward.

  I clasped his fingers firmly. “I’ll see you on Wednesday,” I said. “And thank you for the candy.”

  He smiled before I could even stop to think about the vampire ban on thank yous, the otherworldly fear of twining together gratitude and debt and obligation. Of course, Chris wasn’t a vampire. We were standing in front of the library in broad daylight. “My pleasure,” he said.

  I said good-bye and headed down the street, trying to ignore the fatigued dizziness that swirled through my head. It was no big deal to owe something to Chris. No big deal to have accepted his candy. I was only reacting this way because I was exhausted, coming down from consuming too much caffeine after too many hours of wakefulness. The combined adrenaline jolt of the Level Five alert and James’s near-miss with sunrise had depleted my reserves, emptied a store of energy that was already at rock-bottom because of the constant low-level stress of my living a double life.

  I made my way home without being fully conscious of the traffic around me. Somehow, I successfully crossed every street without being hit by a car. Somehow, I caught the eye of the waiting patrolman, nodding as if I always had a police guard in front of my house. Somehow, I worked my recalcitrant lock, tumbled inside, glanced at my bathroom door to confirm that my jury-rigged kitchen towels still sealed the door.

  And somehow I stripped off my work clothes, tugged on my sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt, and collapsed onto my bed. I was asleep before I could even register
the annoyance of missing my pillows.

  CHAPTER 12

  MY FAMILIAR COMFORTER comforter was settled around my shoulders; I’d clutched it close as I tossed and turned through a lemon-scented dream of endless sand dunes. I buried my head beneath my pillow, determined to squeeze out a last few minutes of sleep.

  Comforter.

  Pillow.

  I sat up in bed, astonished to find that my bedroom was pitch black. I could just make out the darker square of the entrance to the bathroom; the door was open.

  “James?” I called out, half-afraid that he would answer, half-afraid he would not.

  Well, half-fear definitely won—that I was alone. I scrambled to find my cell phone on my night stand. Ten o’clock. I’d slept through my alarm, through the first full hour that I was supposed to be on the job. Despite several close calls, I’d never actually been late before. I was embarrassed by my irresponsibility, especially when I realized that James must have risen at sunset, returned my bedding to me, and let himself out the front door.

  “James?” I called again, just to make sure. I scrambled out of bed. My bare feet were cold as I padded into the front of the apartment. No James. Not in the living room, not in the kitchen.

  I peeked out the window. The police car was still there, but the cop was a different guy. I wondered if they worked in twelve hour shifts. I hoped that I wasn’t going to stay under surveillance long enough to find out.

  I circled back to the bathroom, blinking as my eyes adjusted after I flicked on the light. A sticky note was planted at an angle in the middle of the mirror, one of the bright pink ones that I kept by the telephone in the kitchen. James must have found the Sharpie pens that I kept out there as well; his three-word message was crushed into the paper so firmly that I was certain the letters had bled through to the back. “OLD LIBRARY,” he’d written, virtually shouting with all capital letters. “NOW.” The last word was underscored three times.