Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1)

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Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1) Page 41

by Justine Sebastian


  “There!” she said, shoving it back with one hand and holding it there as the wind moaned across the asphalt.

  Finally noticing Tobias and his feathered hitchhiker, she raised her free hand in a wave, keys dangling from her index finger, jangling and catching the light. The crow watched the bright sparks thrown off the keys with great interest.

  “You could just cut it off,” Tobias suggested for what, by that point in their friendship, was likely the millionth time.

  “These luscious locks? You’re shitting me, Toby,” Dawn Marie said. “Cut off my hair, you cut off my strength.”

  “Aren’t you more Delilah than Samson?” he asked.

  “This is the twenty-first century,” Dawn Marie said. “I can be whoever the hell I want to be.”

  Her keys jangled in her hand as she swiped at her hair again. The crow gave the keys one last, longing gaze before it gave up its post and flew away with a disgruntled squawk.

  “I will never get you and the birds,” Dawn Marie said as she reached him.

  “I’m not overwhelmed with understanding myself,” Tobias said.

  She nodded, dark brown eyes sparkling as she plucked a feather off his coat and twirled it. Tobias thought of it as a trade: a feather for his strand of hair.

  “You know what’s really weird about it?” she said as she played with the feather.

  “What’s that?”

  “They never shit on you.”

  “That’s what’s weird about it to you?” he asked.

  “All of it’s weird,” she said. “It’s that that’s the weirdest part.”

  “Ah, clarification,” he said.

  “I am helpful that way,” Dawn Marie said as she fished her cigarettes out her jeans pocket. She lit one and blew smoke away from Tobias’s face. “Anyway, Hylas wants you to call him. He rang me up on my way over here, said you’re not answering your phone and he needs to talk to you.”

  Tobias rolled his eyes. “I’m not answering my phone anymore,” he corrected. “Because I turned it off. He’s annoyed because I won’t let him take pictures of the corpse.”

  “Because you always let him do that,” Dawn Marie said with a little smile and matching eye roll. “I thought that’s what it was a about. He can’t even run pictures like that, so why’s he always trying?”

  “My brother has hidden depths of dogged journalistic determination,” Tobias said. “I don’t know if he would run the pictures even if he could, he’s not that callous. Between you and me, I think he might be planning a book on our dear killer one of these days.”

  “Between Hylas’s understandable fascination with the local psychopathic serial killer and Wes out there digging up all the other skeletons in this town, we’re going to have a library of fucked up shit to read about on the subject of Sparrow Falls,” Dawn Marie said.

  “Mmm… Yes,” Tobias said. “If they don’t get shut down before they ever get started.”

  “I dunno, Toby, I saw Wes’s manuscript,” Dawn Marie said. “It’s big enough to kill someone with and he’s still not done with it. That doesn’t say ‘shut down’ to me.”

  “True,” Tobias said. “Perhaps Wes’s little excursion won’t be curtailed, but Hylas’s, I am sad to say, probably would be.”

  “Good point,” Dawn Marie said. “Poor Hylas though.”

  “Well, a town that lives on secrets would not take kindly to someone exposing them to the light of day,” Tobias said.

  “You make it sound dire,” Dawn Marie said.

  “The secrets here are meant to stay here according to most residents, whether they say that aloud or not. So, yes, I worry that it could become dire.”

  Tobias frowned at nothing, gaze far away across the street. He would not take something bad happening to his much-beloved twin brother well. It was why he tried to discourage Hylas from probing too much, from asking too many questions. He made every attempt to rein him in when his exuberance for his job began to overshadow his common sense.

  “Shit, Toby,” Dawn Marie said.

  “Precisely,” Tobias said. He closed his eyes against the westering rays of the sun then said, “We need to get to work. Madeleine Haik will not prepare herself.”

  “How do you remember their names like that?” Dawn Marie asked.

  “Someone needs to,” Tobias said.

  Madeleine Haik was a new name, a new body and for a long time she would be remembered, but eventually she would be no more than her cause of death. Another victim of the local serial killer. In the nineteen years he had been working at Greene’s Funeral Home—Dawn Marie working alongside him for twelve of them—Tobias had not forgotten a single name. Every person he prepared for burial was filed away in his mind because people came and people went, but most of all, people forgot. He felt that someone needed to remember the dead because they had once been more than moldering corpses in oblong boxes. It was important not to let that fact escape into nothing.

  “That’s sweet in a sad way,” Dawn Marie said. She tossed her cigarette to the ground and stomped it out. “All right, let’s get this show on the road.”

  “After you,” Tobias said as he pulled open the heavy door that led into the back room of the funeral home.

  “Always the gentleman,” Dawn Marie said, clomping by him in her heavy army surplus combat boots.

  Madeleine was laid out on a table already, awaiting their attention. Her burial clothes hung from a coat hook nearby; black jeans, black HexRx t-shirt, a bra and panties lay folded on the little ledge beneath and on the floor was a pair of black boots with stacked heels, a sock trailing from each one. Tobias pulled back the sheet covering her body and Dawn Marie gasped.

  “God,” she breathed. “Poor girl. This never gets easier.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Tobias said.

  He stood beside Dawn Marie and gazed down at Madeleine Haik’s body, death-white, the livid lines of her tattoos bright against her pallid skin. The stainless steel of her piercings winked and glittered in the overhead light, a Mexican fire opal flashed from the ring on her right middle finger. Tobias had begun the work on her earlier, re-adorning her, per her family’s request. Madeleine had gone to Lafayette for a concert at a local bar and had not come home. Two days later a realtor found her tied to the porch rails of an abandoned house in Sparrow Falls; naked and drained of all her blood.

  Her family’s grief and shocked horror had rocked the parlor the day they came in to choose her coffin, a shiny black number with highly polished silver chrome accents. Madeleine had been born and raised in Sparrow Falls, but had moved to New Orleans years ago, first for college and after college, she had stayed to work. Her family could not understand her vicious homecoming or how the area madman had found her; she hadn’t been to visit her parents in over a month. She had been gloriously alive then, of course. Alive, her mother had bawled on Mr. Greene’s shoulder while Tobias stood respectfully in the back, feeling like a ghoul.

  In a sense, it was Tobias’s job, with Dawn Marie’s help, to bring Madeleine back to life for a little while. Long enough her family could see her one last time and not be more brokenhearted than they already were by the sight of her. They wanted a last image of her lying in her coffin looking peaceful, like she was only sleeping.

  Secondary rigor had set in and Madeleine was about as easy to handle as a block of ice, but they massaged suppleness and flexibility back into her body. They dressed her when they were done with their grisly work.

  Tobias took the beaded choker from the little rolling table beside him and gestured for Dawn Marie to lift her head so he could put it on her. When he was done, the ugly, toothless mouth that had been sliced into her throat was well and truly hidden. The seam of the closed wound had been sickly pink against her milky neck before he covered it with make-up. He straightened the choker to make sure it was even then began to apply her make-up, using a photograph of Madeleine when she still moved and breathed and lived as a guide. Dawn Marie combed out her long, black-dyed hair, str
eaks of bright pink and blue shot through it like electric cotton candy. The barest hint of her roots showed strawberry blonde; she had a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  Little Strawberry Shortcake goth girl.

  As he bent to apply her lipstick, Tobias frowned and leaned closer for a better look. The awful sweet scent of embalming fluid emanated from her, graveyard perfume that he tried not to breathe in because always and forever he would hate the smell. A scrap of something clung to Madeleine’s bloodless, bluish lower lip like the remnant of some membrane. Tobias frowned as he reached over on his table and picked up a pair of long tweezers to pluck the offending object free. It was thin, translucent white turning to weak tea brown at the edges.

  “What’s that?” Dawn Marie asked, leaning closer for a better look.

  “The remains of a flower petal,” Tobias said, turning the little scrap this way and that. “The M.E. missed a piece.”

  “Ugh,” Dawn Marie said. She glanced down at Madeleine’s face, the heavy make-up Tobias used on the corpses had already covered the stipple marks where stitches once held her mouth closed, flower petals poking from them like her throat had begun to bloom. “Why does he do that?”

  “I have no idea,” Tobias said as he set the tweezers aside to go back to work.

  “It’s fucking sick,” she said.

  “He is sick,” Tobias said. “You can’t reason out the actions of madmen.”

  “But you can try,” Dawn Marie said.

  “Yes,” Tobias said, beginning to apply the deep red lipstick to Madeleine’s lips with short, careful strokes. “If you want to go mad, too.”

  Dawn Marie grunted something unintelligible then went back to work on Madeleine’s hair. Tobias carried on with his task, turning that scrap of flower petal over and over in his mind.

  Finished with her, they carried her to her final bed, the great black coffin on its wheeled cart. Dawn Marie arranged her hair, Tobias folded her fingers a little neater, made sure the ring on her middle finger caught the light and flared. They stood back to take in their handiwork. Dawn Marie leaned against Tobias’s side and he nodded, he understood.

  They were good at their job and by the time they were done with a body, unless they were far too decayed or otherwise ruined, the recently deceased looked as alive as they once had been. Lying in their coffins, it was easy to picture them sitting up, bewildered and afraid, wanting to know what had happened, asking why they were in a coffin and doing it all with awful groaning, screaming sounds that came from their chests, not their mouths because their lips had been glued shut. They would try to open their eyes, but would find they could not do that either because they, too, had been sealed.

  The thought of accidentally laying out a body that was not quite dead yet still gave Tobias the occasional nightmare. Mr. Greene assured him it was one of the fears all undertakers had, especially with those people who did not want to be embalmed or emptied of their blood and organs to be so much fleshy melon rind. Madeleine Haik did not worry Tobias in that way; she had been embalmed and was already more than dead before even that had been done. No one could survive losing all of their blood the way she had.

  Yet in her coffin the very dead young woman looked very much alive. When Tobias could look at her no longer, he closed the lid over her face with a silent apology.

  2

  The white butterfly had wings made of lace, delicately scalloped edges folding out onto the midnight blue velvet background. It was a monstrous bug made of fabric, held in place by ropes of silver thread that gleamed brightly, restraining the delicate insect to keep it from flying right off the edge of the art quilt square it was displayed on. Jeremy Harris had been working on the square for the last four days; it was a custom job requested by a visitor to his website. It would pay well and though he did not need the money he enjoyed the work. The woman had been vague in her request, giving him only the basic color scheme she was looking for and saying she wanted something with a butterfly on it. They’re just so beautiful!

  Jeremy had found the last bit of her request unnecessary and a bit annoying, but he had responded enthusiastically. He had been friendly. Jeremy was always friendly, it was bad for business if he was not. If he told the people who purchased his art quilts or placed custom orders that he found them all to be fantastic bores, which was the polite version of his opinion, then that would reflect badly on him. In a way, he supposed he did like them; they kept him busy and provided him with an outlet to showcase his compulsion. Art quilting was not a thing he would have ever thought he’d enjoy, but he did. His aunt had introduced him to the craft when he was fourteen, had given him a new medium to work with. He sold sketches and paintings, too, but his real passion had been found in quilting. It led to mockery and bullying during his school years and even still, some people would laugh when they found out what he did. Jeremy did not look like the type to quilt or sew or really do much of anything creative.

  The mockery had never stopped pissing him off though he had learned not to show it. Mostly.

  He completed a stitch of silver, another line of thread to tether the ethereal butterfly to its backing. The hand-stitching was the most time-consuming part, but he found it meditative and liked it the best. Jeremy kept one foot in the present, his obsession, his grieving need, pushing him on into the future. The other foot dangled in a deep well of many pasts where sometimes things in the dark water threatened to seize him and pull him under.

  Life upon life was stacked inside of Jeremy’s head, each face and name, each curl of hair or flick of tail, all bricks in the fractured house that was his internal world. It was the place he truly lived, growing, becoming. Knowing. It was overwhelming, a tentacle on the thing that threatened to yank him down into that well completely. So many missed opportunities, countless dead dreams, endless broken hearts. Eternal waiting. It made him dizzy and irritable; the only times the gyre inside his mind fell still was when he was quilting or when he was high. He never did both at the same time, to ruin one of his artworks could leave him in a horrible temper for days afterward and he had long since figured that out.

  He made another stitch, working the heavy silver thread through the velvet, leading it from the edge of the square to the butterfly. It would jag across its left wing at an angle and pierce its head. Trephination on fabric. What a beautiful thing.

  “Hey.”

  Jeremy looked up from his work to gaze at the tall, willowy, achingly beautiful man standing beside the sofa. He had eyes the color of tanzanite, startling in their blueness, unreal in the hinted illusion of violet lurking in them. His lashes were long and black, his cheek bones almost painfully high and finely razored. His lips were pink, shaped into fine arches that created the bow of his upper lip and a gentle curve rounded the lower lip. When he moved it was like a piece of art come to life.

  Jeremy reached out, laid his hand on his bare arm and stroked over the black lines of the tattoos there. The man smiled and sat down on the arm of the sofa, looking down at him, lashes lowered, brilliant eyes a glare and a promise peeking from the shadows. There was a fading bruise around his left eye, still purple, but a more delicate shade now, not the rich overripe plum it had been. The darkness of the bruise against his pale skin only made his eyes brighter, more beautiful.

  “Hello, yourself,” Jeremy smiled. He touched the man’s lower lip. “Mooncricket.”

  Mooncricket smiled, shy, a little skittish as Jeremy stroked his hand down his throat.

  “Do you wanna maybe go into town or… something?” Mooncricket asked.

  “Not today, no,” Jeremy said.

  “Then um… Well… Can I borrow your car?”

  “Do you have a valid driver’s license?”

  “No,” Mooncricket said. “I didn’t get it renewed last year. I mean I… I couldn’t really… You know…” He trailed off and looked uncomfortable.

  Jeremy smiled and twined a lock of Mooncricket’s long black hair around his fingers. He tugged p
layfully.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”

  “Can I borrow it then? I won’t wreck it or nothing,” Mooncricket said. He looked so hopeful sitting there.

  “No, you cannot,” Jeremy said, letting go of his hair. “Are you tired of me already? Want me to take you back where I found you?”

  “It’s cool, I’m fine,” Mooncricket said.

  His voice was calm though the words came too quickly and he couldn’t hide his look of alarm at the prospect of being taken back across Lake Ponchartrain, of Jeremy leaving him outside the bar where they had first met. He had been practically homeless, dividing his time between crashing on friends’ couches, sleeping in shelters or bedding down in the abandoned buildings that littered that haunted city like the skulls of refugees. Jeremy had brought him home, given him warm food and good drugs, not the dirty black shit Mooncricket could only seldom afford for himself. He gave him a bed to sleep in, warm hands to touch him and arms that would hold him while he nodded. Mooncricket was grateful to Jeremy and he knew it very well; Mooncricket wanted to keep him as happy as he could.

  “But…?” Jeremy prompted. Mooncricket hadn’t said the word, but he heard it clear as a bell.

  Mooncricket shifted on the arm of the sofa, looked down at his lap, the hole in the thigh of his faded black jeans revealing pale skin lightly furred with fine hairs. He plucked at those hairs, an unconscious, self-conscious habit.

  “But I am kinda bored,” Mooncricket ventured at last. He hastened to add, “I’m not tired of you though, no. You’re great and all, but… I’ve been here almost two weeks and the only time I ever even saw more than your house and the yard was when we drove through.”

  “I see,” Jeremy said. “Like I told you, maybe tomorrow. I’ll take you into town, give you the grand tour of our little burg.”

  “Yeah, all right.” Mooncricket sounded disappointed, but he did not argue.

  Jeremy went back to his work, but could feel the boredom coming off of Mooncricket in waves. He sat quietly and watched Jeremy work and he tried not to fidget, though when Jeremy cut his eyes to the side, he could see his anxious fingers plucking at his leg hairs. A few shone in the light from the table lamp, stuck to the whorls of Mooncricket’s fingerprints.

 

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