I sprinted up to the open doorway—or was it a mouth?—and stepped inside.
My mother was beside the old potbellied stove, looking up at the loft where an old oil lamp swung from a hook on the ceiling. On the floor of the loft, Opal was laid out on her back, her hands bound by thick cord; another length of rope was looped around her pale neck. She had a handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. Her eyes were bulging with terror. And straddling her, holding the two ends of loose cord in his hands, was Zack.
18
November 17, 2002
OH, LOOK! COMPANY!” Zack said, turning away from Opal to study us, but still gripping the ends of the cord like a Boy Scout ready to show off his knot-tying skills.
“Jean, Jean, Jean. What on earth are you doing out in this weather?” He loosened his grip on the rope, giving it more slack. “And Kate, shame on you for letting your mother run around on a night like this in just a nightgown. The poor dear will catch her death.”
But she’s not my mother. She’s Del.
Little by little, I was putting things together, stringing clues like bits of junk on one of Lazy Elk’s old necklaces. Like the one I stole and gave to Del. The only gift I ever gave her.
A friend of Nicky’s gave Del the star. Someone special.
Zack was looking down at us ruefully, shaking his head like a disappointed—but not altogether surprised—mother. Opal seized the opportunity in his moment of inattention—she thrashed her legs fiercely, bucked with her whole body, trying to dislodge him. For an instant I thought she would free herself, roll off the edge of the loft, and fall the eight or ten feet to the floor below. We forgot the mattresses, I thought crazily. But Zack barely budged and simply readjusted himself, setting his knee down in the center of her chest to keep her still. She let out a quiet ooof on impact.
All that practice flying and falling; the jumps from the hayloft, the way she and her bike were airborne going over the ramps she built. Her obsession with stunts that defied gravity and the wing-walking women who hung from rope ladders and did target practice in the sky. And now there Opal was, pinned flat on her back with no tricks up her sleeve, no one to save her but me.
I touched the gun in my pocket, felt for the safety, and released it. The gun was unyielding cold metal. I closed my palm around it, placed my finger on the trigger. Deputy Desert Rose was back in town.
I’d never had the chance to save Del. Thirty years later, she was giving me the chance to save Opal from the same fate.
“Tell me one thing, Zack,” I said. “Why Opal?”
I thought maybe if I could get him talking, he’d let down his guard and I could make my move, though I wasn’t sure just what that move might be.
Zack gave me a greasy little smile and paused for a minute. Just when I was sure he wasn’t going to answer, he spoke.
“Little Miss Light-fingers here borrowed the wrong thing.”
Ah, it all made sense now. Here was the final missing piece. It had nothing to do with Opal’s being related to Del. It was all about Opal’s borrowing.
“Del’s star,” I guessed.
“Ding, ding, ding! Give that lady a prize,” Zack called down, looking truly gleeful. “Opal found it in my desk drawer the day she was waiting for me with the cookies. Not only did she take it, but she actually pinned it to her mother’s jacket and walked around wearing it! The little bitch was taunting me, playing games. It was just like Del all over again.”
“So you decided to kill her and get the star back before someone recognized it,” I said, filling in the rest of the all-too-familiar story. “But Tori was wearing the jacket and you got her by mistake. But at least you got the star.”
And poor Opal kept going back to the woods to search for it, never realizing it was such a crucial piece of the puzzle. She just wanted to get it back to your drawer before you noticed it was missing.
“They really did look alike, don’t you think?” Zack sighed a bit. “And that dreadful jacket; yes, I admit I was misled by it. But now there’s a little piece of Tori keeping Del’s M company. I’ve kept that little piece of Del next to my heart all these years.”
“Inside the Wheel of Life,” I said, sick at the thought of that tiny square of skin held prisoner inside the silver wheel by the God of Death himself.
I remembered the huge-eyed faces with long necks in the lower right quadrant of the Wheel of Life—the hungry ghosts. What could make you hungrier than to have some crucial piece of yourself missing, held hostage by the man who killed you? Then to have that same man threaten the life of your sister, who you’ve been watching over for twelve years. Del was hungry all right. Hungry enough to find a way back.
I looked over at my mother, her white bandages like boxing gloves at her sides, Del’s star gleaming in the lamplight. The talisman that I now understood helped bring her back and keep her here, in my mother’s borrowed body. It was an anchor to her old life, to the physical world.
The increasing amounts of medication we’d been giving my mother had been working all along. My mother had been tranquilized. It was just that the deeper she went, the more room she made for Del—the medication left her body flashing a bright red vacancy sign.
“How did you get my mother to cover for you?” I asked. “She told the police she was with you the afternoon Del was killed. Surely she didn’t know the truth.”
Zack smiled down at my mother. “I told her I’d been with Nicky. She knew enough about my relationship with him to understand why I would want to lie.”
Just then, as if on cue, Nicky tottered in on his crutches. He took in the scene with a narcotic haze in his eyes and said, “What is this? Zack? Kate? Would somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Hello, loverboy. We were just talking about you,” Zack called down.
“The professor here was just telling us how he used your relationship with him to convince my mother to give him an alibi,” I said.
“Alibi?” Nicky asked.
“He was also telling us how he’s kept a scrap of Del’s skin inside his Wheel of Life,” I said. “That M’s been right there around his neck the whole time. Now he’s got a piece of Tori, too.”
Nicky squinted up at Zack. “You? You killed Del? But me and you, we…I thought…Jesus…” His voice trailed off into a soft hiss, like the last air out of a deflating balloon.
“Poor Nick. You were just part of the package. The red ribbon on top. Your sister was the box of cherries.”
He tightened his grip on the cord in his hands and looked down at Opal the way he must have looked at Del. Maybe he was seeing Del.
“She was too good for you all,” Zack said. “I was going to take her away from her squalid little life: day after day of digging in those godforsaken fields, her fingers always cut open and bruised; listening to those stupid schoolyard Potato Girl rhymes; going to sleep at night only to wake up and find her daddy beside her with his pants down. I was going to save her. But she ruined it.”
“I understand, Zack,” I said. “You loved her. What you had was special—that’s why you gave her the star. But then she got that tattoo….” I shrugged. “You really had no choice. But Zack, that was Del. There’s no need to punish Opal. Drop the rope and let her go.”
“Oh, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said. “This little bitch is going to join her sister.”
Opal’s eyes widened as the truth was revealed at last. But she didn’t have much time for processing.
“No!” Nicky screamed and began crutching his way to the ladder as fast as he could.
Zack yanked on the cord, lifting Opal’s head off the floor. She kicked and thrashed as she struggled for air and I finally got a horrifying glimpse at what Del’s final moments were like.
I pulled the gun out of my pocket and lined up my target just as Nicky had taught me to do all those years ago.
I squeezed the trigger easily, naturally. There was not even a second of doubt—I was going to do the one thing I’ve wished for
all my life.
At last, I could save the girl.
I CLIMBED UP INTO THE LOFT in what felt like slow motion, thinking of all the times I’d gone up as a child, hurrying behind Del and Nicky. I thought I could still smell our cigarette smoke, hear the thunk of the knife hitting the target on the wall. The knife Del used to cut into our fingers, mixing our blood, making us bound not just in life, but even in death. Blood sisters.
I stepped around Zack, kneeled down, took the now slack cord from around Opal’s neck, and then untied her hands and feet. She let out several wracking gasps when I pulled the wadded-up handkerchief from her mouth.
“You’re okay,” I told her. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to get you out of here in just a minute.”
Then I turned to Zack, whose body was curled in the rough shape of a question mark. I didn’t need to check for a pulse to know he was gone, but my fingers felt for the carotid artery just the same and found only cool, damp skin. There was surprisingly little blood and the hole in his chest looked small, reminding me of the dove Del had shot all those years ago and the way she pulled back the feathers, covering the entrance wound with her finger.
This man was my mother’s lover, I thought. He used to make her laugh. Back in the tepee. Back when we all believed that utopia was something you could create.
I put my hand on the Wheel of Life pendant and coaxed it gently over the dead professor’s head. It was surprisingly light, considering its size and what it held. The God of Death grimaced; the hungry ghosts seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief.
I helped Opal down the ladder, holding the Wheel of Life in my right hand. I sat the trembling girl down on one of the moth-eaten cots and carried the pendant to my mother, who accepted it with a grin and pressed it to her chest, just over her heart.
There was so much I wanted to ask, so much I wanted to say, but it was Del who spoke.
“I reckon we’re even now,” Del’s voice said. I caught the moldering scent of damp places and rotting potatoes on her breath. “You’re still my deputy.”
“Always,” I promised. “Cross my heart.”
And to prove it, I unbuttoned my blouse and tore the gauze off. There it was: my own secret in black ink, red and puffy at the edges, right above my heart.
My mother smiled then closed her eyes, as Del whispered my name one final time: “Desert Rose.”
The Wheel of Life slipped from my mother’s fingers, hitting the old pine floor with a dull clunk.
A familiar look of confusion swept across my mother’s strangely placid face.
“Katydid?” she said, her eyes wide open.
And just like that, Del was gone.
PART 3
November 24, 2002
19
November 24, 2002
OPAL TUGGED AT THE TURTLENECK she wore to cover her colorful necklace of bruises—a literal choker—coming out in splotches of purple, yellow, and brown. Sometimes, since that night in the cabin, she felt panicked and short of breath, like an asthmatic, and the trick, her shrink had told her, was to count slowly in her head: breathe in, one, two, three, four; breathe out, one, two, three, four.
This is what she was doing as she sat across the table from Kate in the airport coffee shop. She picked at the cherry pie on her plate, the berries looking strangely limp and pale in their bright red syrup. Kate’s plane was boarding in twenty minutes and there was still so much Opal wanted to say, there were so many questions she thought Kate might know how to answer. Raven and Nicky had gone downstairs to the gift shop to get some maple syrup for Kate to bring home.
“I always wanted a sister,” Opal said.
“So did Del,” Kate told her.
Del’s sister. It was going to take Opal a while to get used to the idea, though in her heart, she knew it was true the second Zack said it. This little bitch is going to join her sister….
Opal went back to counting breaths, picking at the overly sweet cherry pie. She moved her right hand off the table, reached into the pocket of her coat, and felt for her latest prize: a small bottle of tea tree oil shampoo. Something Kate probably wouldn’t even miss, and if she did, she’d figure she just forgot it in the shower in the big barn.
The borrowing would stop. She knew she had to stop. Look at the trouble it had caused. If she hadn’t taken the star from the cigar box in Zack’s desk the day she dropped off the cookies, then Tori would still be alive.
There was the constricting feeling again. Coarse rope pressing into her neck. She tugged at the turtleneck, rubbed the painful bruises. Breathe in, one, two, three, four. Breathe out, one, two, three, four.
She thought about what they’d learned just that morning: there was a third piece of skin inside Zack’s necklace and the police were looking into unsolved murders of young girls in the Toronto area. It still didn’t seem real to her that her beloved uncle Zack was capable of such monstrosities. She couldn’t imagine the cold-hearted calculation; the planning and foresight; the skill involved in not leaving a trace of evidence behind.
She had been so sure there had to be some mistake when Kate first told her about Del’s star. She had gotten on her bike and ridden out to the college to ask Zack where he’d gotten it, positive there was a reasonable explanation. And he had seemed so genuinely surprised when she told him that the star she’d found in his drawer may have been Del’s. In fact, he had suggested that they go straight to the police that very minute. He’d said he’d tell her the whole story of where the star had come from on the way. They’d thrown her bike into the back of his Subaru, and he’d driven, waxen-faced, not to the state police barracks, but to the Griswolds’ old place, where he’d steered the car across the snow-covered fields and parked it in the woods. By the time she knew she was in trouble, it was too late.
Breathe in, one, two, three, four. Breathe out, one, two, three, four.
“I still don’t understand how your mother—Del, I mean—ended up with the star,” Opal said.
“She found it in my room. Zack took it from Tori and planted it in my purse. I don’t know if it was part of some strange, psychotic game or if he was hoping the police would find it on me. After all the trouble he went to to get the star back, you’d think he’d want to keep it. But maybe some tiny, still-rational part of his brain knew it wasn’t safe to hold on to something so incriminating. I’m guessing he took my Swiss Army knife at the same time.”
“So he was…what? Trying to frame you or something?”
“Yeah,” Kate said. “It was perfect, really—my showing up in town right when I did, with everyone knowing my connection to Del. I was a likely suspect. He went to a lot of trouble to set me up, even leaving the knife he used the night he…hurt Tori…on my mother’s kitchen table. I found my mother with it the next morning. Christ, he even had me suspecting her! She was out in the woods the night Tori was killed. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what she did or didn’t see. I’m guessing it was really Del using my mother to try to save you.”
“The ghost I saw when I went back for the jacket was really your mother?” Opal asked.
Kate nodded. “I think it must have been.”
“What about that night you and I met in the woods?” Opal asked.
“It’s funny,” Kate said. “I was trying to get rid of the very thing you were out looking for. I buried the star in the Griswolds’ old root cellar. Nicky convinced me to dig it up the next night—I stuck it under my pillow and my mother found it. I think finding the star was what gave Del the strength to come back all the way.”
Opal let out a long sigh. “I was so wrong about her,” she said quietly.
“We all were,” Kate said. “It’s sad really. She was as misunderstood in death as she was in life.”
“All those times I saw her, she was watching out for me, right? Checking on me, trying to warn me?”
“Yeah,” Kate said, staring down into the dregs of her coffee, turning the cup in her hands. “I think so, Opal, I really do.”
Raven and Nicky came up to the table, wielding a bag full of syrup, maple sugar candy, a moose T-shirt, and a copy of Vermont Life magazine.
“This should hold you over until you come back for Christmas,” Raven said.
“I feel like a true tourist now,” Kate told them, accepting the bag of treats.
Kate looked over the coffee shop bill and laid some money down on the table, then began gathering up her things.
“I can’t believe I’m leaving,” she said. “That tonight I’ll have dinner in my very own kitchen. God, I’ve missed my microwave—and my dishwasher! But it’s strange, after everything…”
“Kate,” Raven said. “Don’t worry about your mother. Meg says Spruce View is the best. And we’ll visit her all the time, won’t we, Opal?”
Opal nodded vigorously. They’d left Jean earlier that morning, sitting down to tea in a small dining room with cloth napkins. She’d picked up the jar of jam on the table, winked at Kate, and said, “Strawberry, Katydid. Our favorite. Mimi and I put up extra jars of preserves this year. It was a good crop.”
“It sure was, Ma,” Kate had said. “The best season ever.”
AFTER HUGS AND KISSES and promises to call, they watched Kate pass through the security gate and down the ramp to her flight. Opal touched the shampoo bottle as she watched Kate go. When she turned back, she saw that Nicky had tears in his eyes, which was a little weird, but then again, he’d been through a lot in the past few days.
“She’ll be back for Christmas,” Opal said to the man she’d just learned was her half brother. He smiled weakly, like a little boy who’s been promised dessert if he can just get his spinach down.
“Can we go up to the observation tower?” Opal asked.
“If you’re up for it,” Raven said.
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