by Nevada Barr
Putting her hand between the cartoon boobs, Anna gently eased open the door and slid into the fog.
FIFTEEN
The happy lapping up of brains convulsed Clare's stomach one more time before she found the wherewithal to grab the little dog. Always willing to reassure his people, Mackie turned in her arms to lick her face. Blood discolored the white mustache and chin whiskers. Clare retched again but rose regardless, the dog clamped under one arm, and headed toward the small door that had to be either closet or lavatory. It was the lavatory. For this lack of delay in washing the vomit from her chin--and the blood from that of her dog--she actually felt lucky. After a night of ongoing misery, and a day promising more of the same, even this tiny easement was noted.
Mackie was dumped unceremoniously into the tub and the sink tap turned on as high as it would go. Water exploded out in a brown rush, splattering the front of her coat and the floor. The dog made a dash for the door and the irresistible delights that lay beyond.
"No!" Clare cried as she kicked the flimsy wooden panel, slamming the door almost on Mack's nose. The thought of him doing what he'd been doing even when she was not looking was intolerable.
The bathroom of the apartment was sufficiently cramped that one tub, one stool, one sink, a woman, and a small dog filled it to capacity. Mack sat between her feet as she washed her face. She could feel the cold trail of his bloodied whiskers on the insides of her calves as he licked her with a tongue that might still have the children's babysitter's brains on it. For a moment Clare thought she was crying--or perhaps vomiting again--but she was laughing. The confluence of events had come together with such stunning wretchedness that she couldn't contain the horror. It was cartoonlike, surreal, funny.
Damn funny. Too funny.
She was becoming hysterical or going insane. Neither was acceptable. Mackie began to whine. Clare raised her head and stared at herself in the mirror over the sink. The glass was old, the silver backing gone along the bottom edge, and the light over the bowl wasn't very bright. Even with this help, she looked a fright, frightening. Like a woman who could murder her own children. Abruptly she stopped laughing.
She had seen the small bodies. Against that, all she had was the knowledge--unratified by any living creature, including the dog--that Vee and Dana were not in the house when she came home. That, and the disparate facts of two dogs, one stuffed, one live, that were outside the house when by rights, if the children were within, the dogs should have been as well.
Staring at the face in the glass, the face of a woman much older than Clare's forty-two years, she said, "If they were dead, I would know it, I would feel it." Against the recommendations of those still in love with the Method, Clare had practiced the lines to more than a hundred plays watching herself in the mirror. This line sounded trite. Maybe she'd said it before onstage, read it in a book, heard another actor trying to make it fresh on a Lifetime Movie of the Week. Proof that simply because something was believed, or was true, that didn't make it good theater.
"I would feel it," she said again, putting the emphasis on the auxiliary verb. It had to be right. A mother was a mother, for God's sake. She would feel it if her children were dead.
When a child was taken, snatched from the sidewalk or school or the playground and spirited away, was this how the mothers felt? Like a great gaping maw of pain with only a microscopic flicker of hope to light their way back to life as it had once been? Did they, long after their daughters and sons were rotting in a shallow grave in some freak's backyard, still feel the life of that child like the whisper of a half-heard secret borne on the wind?
Sorrow so deep the only sensations were those of cold and dizziness enveloped her, and she grabbed the edge of the sink to keep from falling. Clearly her mind was not a place she could afford to go alone anymore. Moving to keep moving, she bent and snatched up the dog. Mackie, sensing he had transgressed grievously without knowing how, didn't fight her as she sluiced off his jaws.
She was sitting on the toilet seat toweling him off with an unadorned white Turkish towel when she heard the apartment door open. Or thought she did. In apartment buildings it was easy to believe homey sounds coming through the thin walls were actually occurring in one's own abode. "Shhh," she said, though the dog on her lap wasn't making a sound.
Jalila. No. Jalila was dead. Whoever had made Jalila dead? David? Her short list of suspects--one of whom had the perfect alibi and the other probably the same--exhausted, Clare began to feel afraid.
It wasn't lost on her that, not too many hours past, she'd wanted nothing more than to kill herself. Now she was afraid for her life. A common enemy seemed to be a cohesive force even when one battled only with one's self. "Shh," she whispered again. This time Mackie needed the reminder. His hearing more acute than hers, he'd begun to growl, a thread of sound deep in his chest. Not the sort of noise that would strike terror into people's souls or make them hesitate to kick down the bathroom door.
Door.
Clare reached over and turned the old-fashioned bolt. The metal was sturdy, but the wood of the door wouldn't withstand a strong breeze, let alone a determined foot. She unlocked it, turned the knob, and opened it a foot or so. From a dramatist's point of view, an unlocked door was less interesting than a locked door, a closed door more interesting than one left slightly ajar. Secrets built tension. The unseen was more powerful than the seen.
Hoping she hadn't waited too long, she switched off the light. The bathroom was small enough that she didn't even have to disturb the dog. Bending over Mackie in her lap, Clare closed her eyes as if that would hide her or make her hearing more acute.
The front room's door banged back. Whoever opened it was not pleased or didn't know his own strength. Carpet swallowed the sounds of feet entering.
"Right where I left it." The voice was young, cheery, and, in some indefinable way, uneducated. There was a trace of an accent. Southern, but Clare couldn't tell from where. There were as many drawls as there were counties in the South, each a little different, depending on local culture and caste.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?"
Clare recognized this voice: the dark man on the cell phone who'd had the little girl by the hand. The man who'd said odd words: "Bourbon Street nursery," "magician," and something else she couldn't recall. There on the commode, his accent came to Clare. Cajun, the man was Cajun. There wasn't much call for that in the theater, but zydeco had been used as curtain music for A Streetcar Named Desire. Deemed too old for either Blanche or Stella, Clare'd had to sit that one out, but she remembered the accent from several of the cuts on the CD they'd used.
"I'm just gonna look."
"You think she put her head back together and moved? Come on. Get away from there."
"I gotta take a leak." The young voice, the lighter of the two, had come closer. Clare guessed he was in the bedroom where Jalila lay--or at least standing in the doorway. She didn't dare look.
A long silence wound out. Clare felt her nerves winding out with it. A scream sang along the distance, and she feared it would come out of her mouth if something didn't break soon. These were the men who had murdered Jalila. Probably the men who set fire to the house. These men knew what had happened to her children.
She didn't know if the scream was because she might be found, and her corpse and that of her dog added to the carnage, or because she knew she could not step from the bathroom and pull the information she craved out of these men along with their fingernails, entrails, and any other part of their anatomies that might cause extreme pain.
Silence dragged on.
Clare wondered whether the younger man was using the carpet beside Jalila's body as a urinal or waiting for the Cajun to give him permission to go to the bathroom.
With a jolt her tired, shocky brain realized she was in the bathroom, she and Mackie, in a space too small to hide even a rubber ducky, much less a woman and a dog. Years of ballet classes and fencing lessons allowed her to stand, dog in arms,
and step over the edge of the claw-foot tub without making a sound. The shower curtain, white Egyptian cotton, hung from a metal ring suspended from the ceiling. The showerhead was an add-on, a long silver snake of pipe with a sprinkler set into a hook on the wall. The curtain was partially drawn. Clare eased back behind it.
David was a stickler for cleanliness and natural fibers. Much of the clothing he put together in the factory was made of polyester, rayon, and acrylic--the sort of thing one would expect to find in Target or Walmart for the most part. He himself would let nothing that had not once been living touch his skin. Till this night she'd thought it was because it was "natural"--whatever that meant anymore. Now, as she eased the 100 percent white cotton curtain along the track as quietly as she could with one hand, she wondered if it wasn't that he just enjoyed the sensation of something once living dead against his skin.
As with the bathroom door, she left the curtain open slightly. It would seem emptier that way.
"Let's get out of here," the Cajun hollered. He, at least, was still in the front room. Clare turned her back on the commode and closed her eyes. She knew there was little to the idea that people could feel eyes on them, feel themselves being watched. Over the years she'd watched hundreds of people, studying them for mannerisms, tics, postures, and walks she wanted to emulate for one role or another, listening in on conversations at neighboring tables, in the row behind her at the movies, on buses and planes and trains. People didn't feel her eyes upon them. Ninety-nine percent of the human race seemed to move through life in capsules, neither seeing nor hearing nor noticing other capsules unless they inadvertently crashed into them. Still, she turned away.
Mackie, already restless with fatigue and the anxiety boiling off of his mistress, began to squirm. Clare tried holding him more tightly, but that brought the beginnings of a whine, and she had to settle for juggling a writhing dog. Having raised two daughters, she had experience in the exercise.
"I gotta go. Pleeeeeease." The man sounded younger even than before, like a kid no more than nine or ten. In her mind Clare saw him standing in the doorway near the murdered girl, his legs crossed, and his hand in the air with one finger extended. This time the layering of the absurd and the macabre didn't make her want to laugh.
"Make it fast." This from the Cajun.
She heard the bedroom door close and waited for the sound of the man's steps to leave the carpet and move onto the tile of her small prison.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
"Hey, Dougie, you fall in?" The Cajun again, shouting from the living room.
From nearer Clare heard a low-voiced mantra. "Unh, unh, uh." Bile rose in her throat. The man wasn't taking a leak; he was beating off over Jalila. Maybe he was beating off. Maybe he was a necrophiliac. She bit down on her lower lip and buried her face in Mackie's fur so she would not see with her mind's eye.
A crash jerked her like a fish on a line. She may even have squeaked, but the racket from the other room drowned it out.
Something hard hitting flesh. "You sick fuck!" A thud as if a body hit the wall. "You sick son of a bitch." Another thump and a high injured cry. "Serves you right. God damn, you're a piece of work."
"Blackie, I didn't--" Slam.
A moment of quiet followed. Clare hoped the Cajun, whom she was warming up to simply because he exhibited a shred of human decency, had killed the other man.
There was a long silence. Then, "Somebody's been here." It was the Cajun again, but all anger had gone from his voice. It was as hard and packed as January snow.
Clare no longer trusted in his human decency.
SIXTEEN
The smoke was so thick it made Anna's eyes sting. Breathing in, she remembered the pot she'd smoked in college. At the tender age of twenty she'd taken a single hit of windowpane acid and hit the wall. After that her drugs had been limited to wine and, if it was hot enough and there was Mexican food in the offing, a beer now and then.
Stepping into the narcotic cloud, Anna closed the door behind her. Since Live Girls Live wasn't an establishment that catered to women clientele--Betty and Anna notwithstanding--little time or money had been allotted for the women's restroom. The tawdry space served double duty as public toilet and dressing room for the entertainers.
The pregnant, mentally retarded schoolgirl and an older stripper, so gaunt in her abbreviated costume of tap pants and matching bra that Anna could count each rib and see where it connected to the sternum, sat on folding chairs in front of a one-by-six piece of pine cantilevered out from the wall on metal shelf holders and littered with lipsticks, eye shadows, brushes, curlers, ashtrays, half-eaten bags of chips, and various other substances. Screwed to the wall above the narrow shelf was a cheap framed mirror. The only light in the LGL's rendition of a makeup area was an overhead bulb. A third woman, college age, thin, with augmented breasts and a plain face, leaned against a pedestal sink. The three of them crowded the room nearly to overflowing.
A single toilet stall with a black plywood door of the same tone and vintage as the bar and stage took up the remainder of the space. Anna stood with her back against the door because there was nowhere else for her to be.
The women looked up at her disinterestedly. The gaunt woman took a hit off the joint and passed it to the pregnant girl. In the odd voice of those trying to keep the good smoke trapped in their lungs while speaking, she said to Anna, "You want to use the toilet, knock yourself out."
"Thanks," Anna said. She bumped and apologized her way past knees and elbows and shut herself behind the stall door. Once there, she figured she might as well make good on her excuse for barging in and use the facilities.
Sitting in her partitioned box, listening to the desultory chat of the strippers, Anna wondered how she was going to pry her way into this group to ask her questions about Jordan. Information from the employees was the only thing Betty could have thought a trip to the loo would provide. As she dawdled, trying to stretch out an acceptable amount of time to be on the toilet, it occurred to her there was no way to finesse this one.
Having made herself once again presentable, she eeled out of the stall and leaned back against the plywood door. It creaked and moved a tad but held. "My name's Anna," she said. "I've got a proposition to make you."
"We're together," the gaunt woman said, indicating the artificially endowed woman by the sink.
"I don't go with girls," the schoolgirl whispered timidly as if Anna would take a belt to her for the rebuff.
"You ought not go with nobody," the gaunt woman said. "That's why you're getting fatter and fatter." To Anna she said, "I'm Star. This is Delilah," she nodded to her partner. "And this baby here is Candy."
"I'm not a baby," Candy said.
"Tanya might be interested, but I doubt it," Delilah said.
"Not sex," Anna said. "Information."
"Sex is cheaper," Star said. The three of them laughed, though Anna wasn't sure Candy knew what she was laughing at. In such close proximity, she looked younger than she did under the harsh lights of the stage. If she was of legal age, Anna would have been surprised. The skin of her face and breasts was flawless, the flesh around her eyes plump like that of a child, and her hair was baby-fine. At a guess, Anna put her at no more than fourteen, maybe as young as eleven.
Delilah offered Anna the joint. She took a hit to prove she wasn't a narc, but the smoke exploded in her chest and she went into a paroxysm of coughing, much to the amusement of the strippers.
"Sorry," she gasped when she could catch her breath. "Out of practice."
"When were you in practice?" Star asked.
"When they came in lids and were fifteen dollars apiece," Anna said.
"Historical," Delilah said. "Hold on to your head. This isn't your grandma's weed, Grandma."
"You got that right," Anna admitted. The drug was already hitting her, and she wondered if she would remember anything she learned here. If she learned anything here.
Taking th
e joint from Anna, Star passed it to Candy, who pinched it expertly between thumb and forefinger and, narrowing her eyes against the smoke, took a hit.
Star watched Anna watching Candy suck marijuana smoke into her--and thus the fetus's--lungs. Anna returned her stare and shrugged infinitesimally. Candy's baby had so much going against it, Anna's ruining one toke wasn't going to get the poor little bugger into Harvard.
Evidently that giving over of judgment was what Star was looking for.
"Tell us what you want to know and we'll tell you what it'll cost," she said. "What we don't know, we'll make up."
"What if she's a cop and starts asking about . . . things?" Delilah asked. Anna's one choking drag from the joint had not impressed her overmuch.
"Then we lie," Star said easily. "So, what do you want to know?"
Breathing in the confines of the smoking-room-cum-toilet was getting Anna high. The feeling wasn't one she particularly relished. Too close to crazy, too close to out of control. Claustrophobia was licking at its heels, and Anna had to force herself to concentrate.
Why had she come? What was it she was so all-fired desperate to know that she'd put on a cat mask, then paid twenty bucks to a pole dancer and twenty more for a lukewarm Pepsi? In the john of a shabby strip club, filled with a brand of courage and a flavor of despair she couldn't quite come to terms with, one creepy little bartender putting pigeons in garbage cans and freaking out over her catching his terrier didn't seem to matter much in the scheme of evil.
Before she could talk herself into saving her lungs and what was left of her cash, Anna remembered Laura and the look Jordan had burned through the window of the voodoo shop when he'd seen her playing with her prince and princess dolls.
"What do you know about the guy tending bar tonight?" Anna asked.
"Oooh, you're interested in that little pissant motherfucker," Star said scornfully.