Ghosts & Echoes

by Lyn Benedict

  “Do you have to be anywhere today?” Sylvie said.

  Meredith shook her head. Sylvie’s first instinct was to shoot out the tires, but Meredith seemed the kind of woman who might be . . . upset with such black-and-white practicality, might react by calling the police. Sylvie had had enough of them for one day.

  Self-control, Sylvie remembered. Taking it easy. She’d forgotten how to interact with ordinary people, with people she wasn’t trying to intimidate or kill.

  “My suggestion? Park it elsewhere—your husband’s workplace—or if you’re feeling hard-core? Let the air out of the tires and call AAA when you need to get going. They’ll move on to easier marks, ’cause these kids—it’s all about easy.”

  “What good is it if it’s not ready the minute I need it?” Meredith scowled, unhappy with Sylvie’s solution, but she coded in the release for the garage door. It rose smoothly, letting in warm sunlight and the green scent of newly cut grass, all the more pleasant for having been in a space that smelled of oil, metal, and corruption.

  Sylvie shrugged as she stepped out. “Your decision, either way.”

  “I could get my husband to sit up, hire a security service. . . .”

  “I wouldn’t,” Sylvie said. “Best not to corner people you know nothing about. If you can divert their attention, that’s good. Confronting them? You won’t like where that ends up.”

  It might end with her husband or the security guard passed out on the garage floor. It might end with someone steering the SUV over their unconscious bodies. Sylvie didn’t know how deep the sleep was, whether its victim could wake, but given the way she and Wright had gone down, poleaxed into unconsciousness, she could easily imagine the worst, that this magical sleep was deep enough that there’d be no fighting back.

  She waved Meredith off, said, “I’m going to go talk to Bella Martinez now. Move the car. If you don’t, you’ve no one to blame but yourself if it goes wandering again.”

  Meredith turned with a huff. The garage door rolled down after her. Another person ignoring perfectly good advice.

  Sylvie rolled her shoulders, flapped the edges of her jacket, dispersing the heat trapped against her skin. A man, scraping grass clippings into the mower, froze, and Sylvie dropped the back of her jacket down over the gun. She waved at him and kept moving. Nothing to see here. Just a girl with a gun, common enough. Though maybe not in the Grove.

  Sylvie walked up the long drive to Bella’s house, scuffing her feet in the gravel, enjoying the shade, and dawdling. There wasn’t going to be any good news here. Even if she hadn’t been darkening the Martinezes’ door, hunting glory-seeking burglars, she’d still be bearing the bad news of Bella’s pharmaceutical forays.

  She climbed the limestone stairs to a shallow, tiled porch, framed by wrought-iron pillars wound about with jasmine, and rang the doorbell. She didn’t have to wait long; the Martinezes’ housekeeper opened the door, an old frown on a young face. She had always looked worried on the occasions Sylvie had seen her, so she tried not to feel responsible.

  “I’m Zoe’s sister,” Sylvie said. She tested names in her head. Surely she could remember one woman’s name—this was her job, to recall the details that others forgot. Something old-fashioned. Ethel, Edwina . . .

  “She’s not here.” Her voice carried a tinge of an accent, vaguely French, and Sylvie smiled. She remembered now. Eleanor. Haitian, working her way through med school at UM after her scholarship ran out. Eleanor’s dark fingers curled around the door, her arm a polite bar.

  “That’s all right,” Sylvie said. “I really just wanted to have a word or two with Bella.”

  “She’s sick.”

  “Hungover?”

  “Sick,” Eleanor repeated.

  Sylvie leaned against the doorjamb, wistfully thinking of the cooler air inside; if she could get past the door, Eleanor would have to offer her coffee, a seat, a chance to soak up the AC. “Eleanor, I really do need to talk to Bella.” She pulled the pill bottle out of her purse and shook it.

  Eleanor swore, a long ripple of Creole, snatched the bottle from Sylvie’s hand, and headed back into the house, trailing a plaintive cry, “They’re going to get me expelled.”

  Sylvie took inattention for invitation and followed, her sneakers soundless on the smooth Mexican tile. “Get you expelled?” she asked. Scuffling noises came from down the hall, so she headed that way, found Eleanor ransacking her own room, loosing her temper on the only things in the house that belonged to her. She finally threw a book across the room, sat down on the bed, and put her face in her hands.

  “You’re not dealing to her,” Sylvie said.

  “Does it matter where she’s getting the shit? There’s a poor med student in the house, and the daughter’s got pills enough to give away. Who will be blamed? Tell me.”

  “Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I still need to talk to Bella.”

  Eleanor waved her upstairs. “About the drugs? Always in trouble.” She speared Sylvie with a pissed-off expression. “But it’s Zoe who gets her there.”

  “Bullshit,” Sylvie said. “It’s Bella—”

  “Believe what you will. Why listen to the maid—”

  “Bella upstairs?” Enough of this. She’d come with a purpose. She wouldn’t be sidetracked.

  “You won’t listen; why will I tell you anything?” Eleanor shut the door in her face.

  Left on her own, Sylvie wandered the cool hallway, looking in on an immaculate kitchen, a living room that had been in Homes and Gardens. She followed the gentle curve of the house, running her hand along buttery yellow walls, as warmly colored as Florida sunshine, and took the tiled stairs upward. Where did a spoiled princess sleep? In the tower room, of course.

  The arched dome of the upper hallway had the hush of churches, and dried flowers in the vases only added to the impression. A shimmer of chlorine blue through the plate-glass windows sent dancing shards of sunlight cascading over her skin like spotlights.

  Sylvie opened the door to Bella’s room, found it dim and cool, the very thing for an invalid. The blinds were shuttered tight, blocking out the sun. Left to her own devices, Bella would probably sleep past two o’clock.

  A whimper reached her ears; the bundle of blankets on the bed thrashed for a moment.

  Maybe not. Maybe Bella was going to greet the world after all.

  As minutes passed, and all Bella did was groan and whimper, Sylvie lost patience. She leaned against the elaborate footboard, white, wrought-iron scrollwork, sharp and cold against her hands, and kicked the mattress. The bed billowed, startling Sylvie—water bed.

  “Wakey, wakeys,” she said.

  Bella jerked up, hands clenching tight on the edge of the mattress, panting. She focused on Sylvie with slow awareness—alarm, familiarity, recognition, relaxation. Irritation. Everyone always got to irritation.

  “Sylvie? What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Need to talk to you.”

  “Go away. I’m sick,” Bella said. She flopped back onto the mattress, tugged the blanket over her face.

  Sylvie hopped down from the footboard, flipped on the overhead light-and-fan combo. Bella groaned but only hunched deeper into the covers against the sudden brightness.

  In the moving air, Sylvie smelled Bella’s sour sweat, and sheets days past due for changing.

  “C’mon, Bell—”

  “No.”

  Sylvie busied herself in the room, snooping openly, certain that would get Bella’s attention. She opened dresser drawers, found a pill bottle in the jeans drawers, another in her closet, a third under her bed, all nearly empty, all with their labels stripped off. She set them on the bedside table, kicked the mattress again. “Bella!”

  The girl woke with a muffled shriek, a flailing hand, and Sylvie jerked back. She hadn’t really expected her to fall asleep again. They went through the whole panic-to-recognition cycle once more, then Bella scrubbed at her face with shaking hands. “Jesus,” she muttered. “I keep having the worst
nightmares.”

  “Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Prescription drugs’ll do that to you. Especially if you’re taking them just for fun.”

  Bella reached over, swept the bottles off the nightstand and into the Kleenex-riddled trash can with soft thumps and muffled rattles. “Happy now? Take ’em with you when you go.”

  The girl did look sick. Bella hung over the side of the bed as if it were too much effort to lie back again; the arm propped against the side of the mattress frame shook, and her skin was greased with milky sweat; her eyes were dilated, the sclera nearly yellow.

  Sylvie almost felt sorry for her, but the hand propping her up was capped by nails manicured in high-end silver gloss. The same shade Sylvie had found on the fingernail in the van. Another tick on the confirmation chart, another mark that moved Bella one step further from the “innocent” category.

  Sylvie said, “Nightmares, huh?” She hoped she could prompt the girl back into speech, that she hadn’t shut her down completely, but she couldn’t regret her first response, not if it took the drugs out of Bella’s hands.

  And Zoe’s.

  Still, there was a real likelihood that Sylvie had just found the decoy bottles, all close to empty, just there to make Bella’s mom feel like she was making progress. “Tell me about your nightmares.”

  “Going to shrink me?”

  “Might slap you,” Sylvie said. “You gave my sister drugs.”

  Bella eyed her sidelong and sly, calculating her odds. “Is that what she told you? Such a bitch—”

  Sylvie’s face must have done something really forbidding; Bella shut up all at once, then, when she decided to talk again, it was on the topic Sylvie had chosen.

  “My nightmares are all the same,” Bella said, and if she started off belligerent, she faded to plain scared. “I’m doing something . . . horrible.”

  Sylvie took a seat on the end of the bed. “Tell me?”

  Bella dragged her knees up to her chest with much billowing and shifting of the bed. Her legs stuck out of the bottom of her Victoria’s Secret pj’s, skinny even for a girl who took fashion cues from Barbie dolls. “I keep killing a boy. A little boy.” She glanced up at Sylvie, added hastily, “In my dreams. It’s not real.”

  “Didn’t think it was,” Sylvie said mildly. One of the regrettable truths of her job was that she met a lot of killers.

  Bella was a lot of things—spoiled, vain, grasping—but Sylvie didn’t get a whiff of killer from her. Not yet. Sylvie knew how slippery a slope it could be.

  “How does it happen? Always the same way?”

  It was just a dream. It shouldn’t be important. Except . . . magic had a cost. The benign magics, or what passed for benign, cost the user effort, concentration, energy, time, left them drained, ready to eat a gator, burp, and take a nap. The bad stuff corrupted, unless the user was very, very careful, and had a whipping boy to soak up the worst of it. It was the sole reason power junkies like the Maudits took apprentices—not to share knowledge but to protect their own skins.

  If Bella had screwed around with big, bad magic—and the fingernail argued that she had—she’d first feel the corruption in her soul, and one’s soul had its own way of making its complaints felt.

  “I’m sitting by a pool in my chair, and this toddler comes wandering up to me, smiling, and I just . . . shove him. He falls into the pool, starts kicking, but he’s too little, y’know? Like water wings little.” Bella buried her face in her knees, her words, muffled, distorted, kept on. “He gets to the edge anyway, hanging there, and I push him off with the net until he doesn’t come up anymore; he’s red-faced, and trying to scream, but his mouth’s full of water. And his mom’s just inside the house, and she doesn’t have a clue what I’ve done. I wake up when I hear her scream.”

  Ugly enough, Sylvie thought, for a one-time nightmare. As a recurrent theme? Yeah, that might make a girl . . . uncomfortable. Bella looked up at her expectantly, and Sylvie thought, Oh, analysis later. Comfort now. Bella wanted to be told it was all right, that she was all right, that everything was going to be fine.

  Thing was, Sylvie was crap at that, and not sure her sympathies should be wasted on Bella anyway. After all, she was one of the most likely suspects for leaving her and Wright dead to the world last night.

  Bella shifted, and her pillow shifted with her, giving Sylvie a quick glance at something in the bed with Bella. She pounced. Bella squeaked as Sylvie pushed her aside, yanked up the pillow, and recoiled.

  She did slap Bella then. “You little idiot!”

  Bella held her reddening cheek, gaining a hint of healthy color, and held her tongue, her eyes growing wary. As any girl might who was found sleeping with a severed hand beneath her pillow.

  Sylvie wasn’t surprised, even as she was repulsed. She’d been anticipating something of the kind ever since she’d found the fingernail. While there was a disagreeably large number of spells that used human ingredients, she could think of only a few that would apply to the thieves’ needs: enabling burglary and removing witnesses.

  The severed, withered hand on the white sheets, tucked neatly beneath Bella’s pillow like some horrifying offering to a fairy best not imagined, was missing a single fingernail.

  The worst part, Sylvie thought numbly, wasn’t that it was there in her bed, wasn’t that it was a dead hand, gruesomely preserved, used to appease a bored girl’s bad-girl dreams, but that it had been decorated like it was of no more import than a cell phone or iPod. Besides the silvery polish, there were Cracker Jack rings forced over the dried knuckles, and little fake tattoos of thorns and hearts peeling from the pallid skin.

  She seized Bella’s arm as the girl attempted to sidle around her, and the motion released the anchor on her voice. “Black magic and burglary not enough of a kick? You had to desecrate the dead?”

  7

  Evidence to Hand

  “I DIDN’T DO IT!” SUCH A REFLEXIVE LIE OUT OF A TEEN’S MOUTH. Sylvie had no patience for it.

  “What? It came that way? Don’t think I’m stupid, Bella. A Hand of Glory is black magic. Not something you treat like a toy.”

  Bella lunged for the Hand. Before Sylvie could decide if it was an offensive gesture—if she meant to use the Hand against Sylvie—or just a desire to hide it again, Bella’s movement fell short. She dropped to the floor, gasping for breath, her hands clawing against the cream-colored tiling, nails catching in the grout.

  Sylvie dropped beside her, got the girl untangled from her own legs, straightened out her breathing path, and held her up. “Bella, just breathe.”

  The girl wheezed and shuddered; Sylvie thought of yelling for Eleanor, but this wasn’t anything as common as an asthma attack.

  Sylvie rubbed the girl’s back, the thin cotton unpleasantly damp with sweat, and said, “Take it easy.”

  Bella sucked in a breath, a thin, thready gasp, but at least it was going the right direction. “Good,” Sylvie said. “Another.”

  Once Bella was breathing steadily, in and out, instead of that rasping one-way exhalation, Sylvie left her there on the floor. She turned out the trash can, scattering pill bottles and tissues, and used the pillow to push the Hand into the trash can. The thumb hooked briefly on the rim and had to be shaken down with a scrabbling thunk.

  “That’s mine,” Bella said weakly.

  “I count two hands on your body,” Sylvie said. “I’ll give it back when you’re missing one. Christ, no sense at all. Keeping it under your pillow! You’d be safer with a loaded gun with the safety off and a round in the chamber.” She snagged a magazine that was peeking out from beneath the bed, slapped it over the top of the trash can, sparing herself the sight of the Hand. Her churning gut thanked her.

  Bella slouched against the side of the bed, wrapped her arm around the iron footboard, and draped herself on it. “I’m supposed to keep it close. Keep it tuned to me. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise, it won’t let you open locked doors, bypass alarms, and steal shit that you don’t
want to save up your allowance for?” Sylvie hated magic in general; benign or not, it altered reality. And this . . . this was very far from benign. She might not have seen one before in the flesh, so to speak, but knew the gist of the legend, knew how dangerous it was.

  Bella was resting her head on it nightly, using it biweekly. It was the ease that had seduced her, no doubt. Bella would never have shifted gears from Grove princess to cat burglar except that magic made it . . . easy.

  Bella raised startled brown eyes, and Sylvie snapped, “I told you. Don’t think I’m stupid. I know what you and yours are up to. And I want names. Is it the whole princess pack? Jaz, Ari, your boyfriends du jour?”

  Bella took refuge in a long bout of coughing, hand shaking artistically over her mouth. Sylvie bent down before her, gripped the girl’s wrists, and said, “You were worried about keeping it tuned to you? Don’t worry. You’re tuned in good and tight. A Hand of Glory is the hand of a murderer. You dream of death? It’s not your dream. It’s her memory.”

  The girl shook her head, buried her face in the bedspread, which smelled like sour desperation and illness and decay. Sylvie yanked her back, gripped her shoulders tight enough that she was causing bruises. Distantly, she knew she could be in real trouble for this; manhandling this girl, sick as she was, was perilously close to assault, for all that it felt more like a particularly difficult intervention.

  Still, she regained enough control not to shake her as she wanted. “Bella. The Hand. Where’d you get it? How many of you have used it? You? Your friends? Zoe?”

  Bella gasped out, “It was a game, Sylvie, a game.”

  “Not a good one,” Sylvie said. “That Hand represents two dead people. You’re trafficking in human misery. And murder.”

  The girl had the poor taste to roll her eyes, and Sylvie bit her lip hard, clenched her fists tight against her own jeans, sucked air so that she didn’t offer to show the girl what human misery really meant. A moment later, she was glad she’d held back. The eye roll, contrary to teenage habit, was Bella passing out, not passing judgment on the inexplicable concerns of stick-in-the-mud adults.