Heartless

by Alison Gaylin

  And what did Paul mean by Warren will teach you?

  Robin looked up at Zoe, smiled. “Penny for your thoughts.”

  “What did Paul mean . . . ,” she started, but something in Robin’s face stopped her. She cleared her throat. “What did he mean when he said I have a pure white aura?”

  Robin smiled. “It’s very rare. It means your soul is pure, and you’re spiritually open. Adults usually don’t have white auras. It means you’re . . . young inside.”

  We don’t get many young people.

  Zoe shuddered. As if she was reading her mind, Robin said, barely moving her lips, “What did you think of Dave?”

  “Well . . .”

  “That’s everybody’s reaction. I’m telling you, though, once you get past the social awkwardness, he’s really a good guy.”

  “He acted sort of . . . strange with me.”

  Robin sighed. “Sometimes Dave forgets that people aren’t lab animals. He’s always studying.”

  “Yes, exactly!”

  “Used to give me the creeps, but he’s totally harmless,” she said. “Ask Warren. He’s known me and Dave since he moved here, and he comes here for his checkups—not New York, and . . . Something wrong?”

  “Robin?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How well did you know Warren when he first moved here?”

  “It’s not like we dated or anything.”

  “No . . . No, I’m not asking that. Do you happen to remember him having a visitor from the U.S.? A guy?”

  The brown eyes lost some of their softness; the lips went thin. Robin swallowed, her pale throat moving up and down, as if she hated to betray even the mildest confidence. “Did . . . Warren say that to you?”

  Zoe thought for a moment. Telling her it was Guadalupe who had said it didn’t feel like a good idea. “Yes,” she said. “I mean, he mentioned it in passing—that I’m the first visitor he’s had in ten years.”

  Robin smiled—a small, sad smile. “Good for Warren,” she said. “Yeah . . . I remember the visitor.” Her gaze went to the painting across the room, and for a few moments, it was as if she’d escaped herself and melted into the dark green leaves. “Nicholas Denby,” she said softly. “He was . . . He was special.”

  “Was?” said Zoe.

  But then Dr. Dave’s door was opening and he was ushering Naomi out, and Robin was tapping away at her keyboard, as if Zoe had never asked her anything at all.

  Naomi had passed out, Dr. Dave said, because of dehydration. “The sun is very strong and you’re still recovering from last week. Get lots of rest. Stay out of direct sunlight. Do not forget to drink water.” He also sent her out with a prescription for a low dose of Xanax, to be filled for her by her aunt Vanessa.

  Interesting. When he mentioned Vanessa’s name, the doctor’s tiny black olive eyes lit up a little. Zoe had noticed the same response in Reiki Master Paul—a thrill, just at the thought of her. She mentioned it to Naomi when they got outside.

  “Yeah. All the older guys here are in lust with my aunt,” she said flatly. “Vanessa laughs about it. She says it’s a generational thing—they just want to go where the Allman Brothers have been.”

  Zoe chuckled. Naomi didn’t.

  They walked back to the jardín, and Zoe bought them two bottles from the stands—spring water for Naomi, bubbly limonáda for herself. They sat on a wrought-iron bench, shaded by jacarandas, facing away from La Cruz.

  It was siesta time—something the people of San Esteban obviously took seriously. During the time they had been in Dr. Dave’s office, the bustling village had become a ghost town—no people, no traffic, all the stores and restaurants closed. Nothing around but the sound of birds, the bells of that great, Gothic church announcing it was three p.m. Naomi, too, seemed to have shut down for siesta. Ever since the Allman Brothers comment, she’d barely said a word. Zoe figured she was probably still light-headed, so she didn’t want to press her.

  Zoe put the bottle to her lips and held the sour bubbles in her mouth and enjoyed the lovely natural light, the lack of groaning fluorescents and medicine smell and Dr. Dave. She breathed in the sweet, flowery air and felt a cool breeze on the back of her neck, and just for a moment, she let herself think of that name. Nicholas Denby. The first actual friend of Warren’s she’d ever heard mentioned, and yet, at the thought of him, Robin’s face had lost all its brightness.

  He was special.

  Naomi said, “I didn’t pass out because of dehydration.”

  Zoe looked at her. “You didn’t?”

  The girl stared straight ahead. Her lips were very pale. “Uh-uh. It was . . . that picture.”

  “The one of the plant?”

  Naomi nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Dr. Dave painted it,” she said. “He takes classes with Rafael, the artist next door? Vanessa does, too. Vanessa just takes the class to flirt with Rafael, but Dave actually paints stuff. There’s something new on his wall every week. Whenever I come in, I always look to see what the class has been working on.”

  “Uh-huh.” Zoe wondered where she was going with this.

  “This painting . . .” Naomi closed her eyes. “It was a spine from a maguey—they’re also called century plants.”

  “Okay . . .”

  Suddenly, Naomi turned and faced her. “Before I say any more, can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure.”

  “How close are you and Warren?”

  She opened her mouth to say, Very close, but reconsidered. “In some ways, very close,” she said slowly. “In others . . . not at all.”

  “If I were to ask you something . . . something about him . . . you don’t have to answer. But could you promise not to tell him I asked?”

  “What does a maguey plant have to do with—”

  “You have to promise.”

  “Okay, Naomi. I promise.”

  “Has . . . has Warren ever mentioned someone to you named Grace?”

  Zoe frowned. “No, he hasn’t,” she said. “But, to be honest, we don’t talk much about . . . other people.” She stared at her. “Can you please explain to me, Naomi, what exactly you’re talking about?”

  Naomi cleared her throat. “You know what was done to Jordan, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Besides . . . that, someone had laid his hands flat, and put a century plant spine in each of his palms.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “When my aunt saw that—the plant in his hands—she freaked out. I heard her talking to Mrs. Woods last night. . . . There was someone named Grace, a long time ago. I think she was killed in that same way. And century plant spines were put in her palms.”

  “So that drug dealer—”

  “No. No, I think maybe someone else killed Grace. I think that same person killed Jordan and it scares me so much because . . .”

  “Because . . .”

  “I think he’s still out there.” Naomi moved a little closer, a look in her eyes that made Zoe’s breath catch. “He killed them because they were young.”

  We don’t get many young people.

  Zoe’s pulse sped up. Keep it together. She is just a kid, a kid suffering from post-traumatic stress and who knows how long peyote stays in someone’s system . . . ?

  “Why don’t you think Carlos Royas did it? He confessed.”

  “Mrs. Woods doesn’t think he did it.”

  “She’s Jordan’s great-aunt.”

  “So?”

  “She’s grieving. She’s trying to make sense of things, and a drug dealer killing her nephew doesn’t make any sense to her.”

  “Maybe it shouldn’t.”

  “He confessed, Naomi. You don’t confess to a crime like that unless you did it.”

  “That’s what my aunt says . . . but the century plant spines. Grace . . .”

  “Maybe Carlos Royas killed Grace, too.”

  “No . . . No, listen. There’s some group. A group Mrs. Woods was talking about, and the
y stopped meeting after Grace, but she thinks they’re meeting again.”

  “What kind of group?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. . . .”

  “Naomi.”

  “Jordan said there was something weird going on in this town, and I thought he was just wasted, but now I’m thinking he—”

  “Naomi. Take a deep breath.”

  “I’m tired of taking deep breaths.”

  “You saw an awful picture and it made you remember. Close your eyes. Breathe in and out. Slowly.”

  She did. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, okay . . .”

  “Now listen to me. I know how you feel.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s a long story, but I was . . . deeply affected by some murders in New York that I was covering for a newspaper. I had nightmares, flashbacks. . . . That feeling of silence roaring in your ears . . .”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s right.”

  “I saw photos of victims. Police photos. Every time I closed my eyes I would see those images. I would hear his voice. . . .”

  “Whose voice?”

  “The killer’s.”

  “Oh, my God. You talked to—”

  “Interviewed him, yeah. You come that close to evil, Naomi—you get right up against it like I did . . . like you did—it’s going to rub off and work its way under your skin and mess with your head. Really badly.”

  Naomi stared straight ahead. “He was watching me.”

  “Who?”

  “Jordan’s murderer. When I was talking to Jordan by the fire that night, I could . . . feel it. . . .”

  “I understand.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I feel it still.”

  Zoe caught a chill, but she ignored it. “I get that, too. My phone rings sometimes, I get this sense . . . like I’m going to pick it up and hear the killer’s voice. He’s been on death row for four years. I moved. I changed my last name so he couldn’t write me or call me, even if he tried, but still, five years later . . .”

  Naomi looked at her. Her eyes were wet. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Live with it,” she said. “It’s all you can do.”

  Naomi started to cry. Zoe put both arms around her and held her as if she were a child—this young woman, at least eight inches taller than she was—and let her cry until her tank top was wet with Naomi’s tears. She said, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” even though it wasn’t and never would be. It was what Naomi needed to hear, and so Zoe said it, again and again, until finally, Naomi caught her breath. “That . . . that was the first time I’ve cried since it happened.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I screamed when I found him and all, but since then . . . I guess I kind of kept it in.”

  “You can’t keep it in, Naomi—that only makes it worse.”

  “Did you cry after . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But in all truthfulness not very often because once I would start it would be very hard to stop.”

  Naomi nodded. “Maybe I just misheard what Mrs. Woods was saying,” she said. “Carlos wouldn’t confess if he didn’t do it.”

  “Why would he?”

  Naomi exhaled heavily. “I mean . . . there might not even be a group. I could’ve heard that wrong, too. I . . . can’t trust my own ears half the time. I . . . hear noises, lines from dreams . . .”

  “Give it time.”

  “It’s just . . . Mrs. Woods mentioned a cross in Vanessa’s closet and so I looked and—”

  Zoe stopped breathing. “What?”

  “It was probably just some bad art she did. Or one of her boyfriends did. Or someth—”

  “What did it look like?”

  “It was this awful black cross with a human heart painted on it.”

  “The heart had a crown of thorns.”

  Naomi’s eyes got huge. “Yes,” she breathed. “Oh, my God. Did you . . . does Warren?”

  “In his dressing room closet. Yes.”

  The two of them stared at each other, saying absolutely nothing.

  “I’m sure,” Zoe finally said, “there’s a logical reason why they would both have them.” But Zoe wasn’t sure of that. Right now, she wasn’t sure of anything. “The most important thing is that you stay calm, that you get some rest. . . .”

  Behind them, a voice hissed Naomi’s name. They turned toward the voice, and Zoe saw a woman of about sixty with haunted green eyes and a deep slash across her cheek.

  “Mrs. Woods,” Naomi said.

  “I’m leaving San Esteban tomorrow,” she said. “I’m going home.”

  Zoe looked closer. It was two slashes, in the shape of a cross.

  Naomi said, “I’m sor—”

  “Please tell your aunt goodbye. I’ll miss her friendship.”

  “All right.”

  “And also,” she said, “tell her she ought to be ashamed of herself.”

  The color drained from Naomi’s face. She started to say something, but the woman swept past her and crossed the empty street. They both watched Mrs. Woods stalk away in her gauzy blue dress—a furious ghost of a woman getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

  TEN

  Without considering why, Naomi took the long way home. She walked back up Calle Murillo, the street where she and Zoe had just been. She walked past Rafael’s studio and Reiki Master Paul’s and Dr. Dave’s, and it was like one of those horror movies, where the girl has a bad dream and then she wakes up and she’s in the exact same place where the bad dream took place, and then she goes through the whole dream, all over again.

  Naomi wished she could wake up.

  She looked at Mrs. Woods’s house across the street. For about half a second, she considered knocking on the door and demanding to know what she’d been talking about in the jardín. Exactly why should my aunt be ashamed? she wanted to ask. And while we’re at it, how did you know about the cross in Vanessa’s closet?

  But Naomi knew she’d just get, “Ask your aunt.” And there was something else, too. The look in Mrs.Woods’s eyes. Zoe had almost seemed relieved by it. She’d said Mrs. Woods had gone crazy with grief and wasn’t to be believed. And, though Naomi wasn’t sure about that, she did know this: Mrs. Woods scared her now. It was like what Corinne had said about Carlos Royas’s bad luck. That look of Mrs. Woods’s—and she’d had it only since today—it was more than grief. It was as if someone had taken a vacuum cleaner to her insides and sucked the life out of her. Naomi didn’t want to be around that. It might be catching.

  As she passed the house, Naomi felt that sea-glass gaze, even from across the street, even through the bars on Mrs. Woods’s windows. It chilled her. Naomi remembered the cut on Mrs. Woods’s face. Had she done that to herself? On purpose? Or had someone done it to her?

  Tell her she ought to be ashamed.

  Naomi continued down the road—past a restaurant called El Borracho that was hung with tiny, twinkling Christmas lights all year-round; past El Infierno, a rotisserie place that Vanessa called Hell Is for Chickens because roasted chicken bodies were stacked in the windows in a very unappetizing, massacre-like way. . . . She thought of that, of Vanessa singing, “Because hell, hell is for chickens,” to the tune of some old song by Pat Benatar . . . and for some reason, it sparked a memory.

  She’d seen cuts just like that on Vanessa—not on her face, but on her arms, the backs of her wrists—long, straight scratches that almost looked cosmetic. “Must’ve happened when I was gardening,” Vanessa would say. She would laugh about it, shrug her shoulders, and Naomi would think, Even her injuries are perfect. But Vanessa would never look Naomi in the eye.

  Sometimes, the cuts were in the shape of a cross.

  Vanessa had a black cross in her closet, painted with a bloody human heart. She had weird cuts and Mrs. Woods had a weird cut. Warren had a cross just like Vanessa’s, and even if Mrs. Woods didn’t have one, too, she’d known enough to ask about it.

  Yes, Naomi had been through a lot. She
was suffering from post-traumatic stress, and she was still grieving for her mom, and even before the night of the bonfire, she’d been more aware of life’s darkness than other kids her age. But still . . . that didn’t change the facts.

  There was a group. There was a secret group, and there had been a Grace in that secret group who had died, and, while Naomi didn’t know whether either Grace or the group had anything to do with what had happened to Jordan, she was frightened. And she was alone in her fear.

  There’s got to be a logical explanation for the crosses, Zoe had said. Like three times.

  Finally, Naomi had replied, The only logical explanation is that Warren and Vanessa are in the same club. A club they don’t want us to know about.

  Zoe had looked at her, and Naomi had seen a change in her face, as if someone had just flipped on the lights. There was this intensity—a curiosity that made her glow. But there was also fear. The fear must have won out, too, because seconds later the switch went off and Zoe’s face went calm again. You know what? she had said. I think we could both use a nice, long siesta.

  Naomi had rolled her eyes at the time, and she rolled them again now, just remembering. Zoe was a nice woman, but her problem was this: She was on vacation. It had nothing to do with taking a plane to Mexico, either. She’d been on vacation ever since those murders in New York. Her job at the soap opera magazine had been a vacation and she’d quit that job to go on vacation and her whole relationship with Warren was one big, stupid vacation. What had she said? We don’t talk about other people? Hello?

  Naomi had never had a real, serious boyfriend. She had lost her virginity to a boy named Joaquin she’d met two hours earlier, at her first party in San Esteban. It had happened on a scratchy old blanket in the desert, and it had lasted about three seconds and after he took her home, he’d never spoken to her again. But come on. Even Naomi and Joaquin—during their two hours of couple-hood—had talked about other people.

  Naomi passed a line of Mexican artisans’ shops, their doors clustered with marionettes and musical instruments and Day of the Dead masks and tile-bordered mirrors.