Secondhand Shadow

by Elizabeth Belyeu

  “We considered naming him Simon,” Dr. DiNovi said, “in gratitude for the moments of peace he and Mr. Garfunkel bought us. But Helen had always wanted to name her son Gabriel.”

  “The angel who told Mary she would bear the Christ child,” Helen murmured. She had pulled a photograph from the book and was regarding it with a sad, distant smile. “‘Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come, from God who is our home.’”

  “Wordsworth,” I said, and was rewarded with an approving nod from my English professor. “What would have been his name if he’d been a girl?”

  I didn’t hear the answer, arrested by a glimpse of the picture Helen held. It was Helen herself, much younger, looking tired and frazzled but radiant, with a swaddled baby in her arms. The fine blur of the baby’s face might be mistaken, from any kind of distance, for a number of things: he had moved while the picture was taken, perhaps, or there was a smear on the lens. But I was close enough to recognize the peculiar undefined quality of Damon’s little nameless cousin. It looked much worse on film than in person; the baby hardly seemed to show up at all.

  “I’m guessing Shadow kids don’t get their picture taken very often,” I said, trying not to look unnerved.

  “I was considered peculiar for taking this one,” Dr. DiNovi confirmed.

  “Don’t, um… don’t take this the wrong way, Mrs. DiNovi — because you look fantastic now — but you look younger in this picture,” I said. “I thought Shadows didn’t age.”

  “Kathairna do not age,” Helen said. “Shadows do, if their Lumi wishes. I am so fortunate as to have befasted a man who truly desires a partner in life.” She and Dr. DiNovi exchanged a deep-eyed glance that made me consider leaving the room.

  “So… did Damon age? When he was with Claire?” I asked, when they had come back from Planet Lovey-Dovey.

  “Not noticeably,” Helen said. “But he probably wouldn’t, in only three years.”

  “He was only with Claire three years?”

  Helen and Dr. DiNovi exchanged glances of a warier sort, this time. “What has he told you?”

  “Nothing, basically. I had to drag her name out with forceps. In fact,” I realized horribly, “for all I know, she could still be alive.” I would be, after breach. Why not Claire?

  “No,” Helen said softly. “Claire is dead.”

  When nothing else seemed forthcoming, I took a deep breath and dived in. “I feel like, if I understood how he felt about her, if I understood what happened, that it would… change something. Help something. I don’t even know what. But something.”

  After a long pause, Helen said, “Our son was sixteen when Claire Henderson moved into our neighborhood. He saw her running to the bus stop from his bedroom window, on a rainy morning in September.” She shook her head. “We had hoped he would covant a Lumilia. It’s always so much easier. We had to explain to Claire that a whole world existed that she was raised to believe impossible. But it went well. She seemed utterly captivated by Gab — by her new Shadow. She was still in high school, which made things awkward — she said her parents would never understand, and so… Romeo… had to remain a secret. But the next year she went away to college. And our son went with her.”

  “Claire was…” Dr. DiNovi trailed off. “I’ve seen many students like her. Not unstable, but… unsteady. Trying out different paths. Claire went down paths that… led nowhere. And took our son with her.”

  “We heard from him less and less often,” Helen said, looking again at the baby picture. “And heard mostly lies, when he did call. ‘Of course I’m happy, Mother. Claire and I are very happy.’ He came here once, in the middle of the night… He didn’t seem to know where he was. There were bruises on his face.” She traced a hand, seemingly unaware, across one cheek, under one eye. “We didn’t know what to do.”

  “I tried to speak to Claire,” Dr. DiNovi said. “A few times. She always hung up on me. I should have tried harder.”

  Helen patted his hand. “It’s an unspoken rule in our world — sometimes not so very unspoken — that you do not interfere in the relationship between a Lumi and Shadow. What looks like abuse to one may be exactly what another needs, wants. There are too many… oddities among us to impose a unilateral standard of behavior.”

  “Near the end of Claire’s sophomore year,” Dr. DiNovi said, “Gabriel shaded into our bedroom in the middle of the night. Screaming. Incoherent. Blurry as a child. I don’t know how he even managed to get here without fading. I had to force-feed him — he wouldn’t take it at first — but I made him.” His voice hardened. “I was not going to let my son die. No matter what anyone else thought.”

  “Frank was in the hospital for days,” Helen said softly.

  “Tenebri bites don’t normally scar, but he really went to town,” Dr. DiNovi said lightly. “The beard helps cover it up, but you can still see a little, here.” He turned his head, and I could see the white lines of scars crosshatching his neck and jawline, some flat, others healed into grooves and puckers.

  “Gabriel wouldn’t talk about happened to Claire,” Helen said. “And he left town as soon as he knew Frank was going to be all right. We had to piece things together from news reports.”

  “Apparently Claire was in with a bad crowd,” Dr. DiNovi said. “And at least three of the crowd claimed to be her boyfriend.”

  Helen winced. She, of course, would know, or could surmise, the pain of watching her Lumi with someone else.

  “The night Claire died, she quarreled with one of these men. The worst of the bunch, a drug-pusher addicted to his own wares, with several previous arrests on his record, including domestic abuse. During the quarrel, Claire went through a sliding glass door. Maybe he pushed her, maybe he kicked her, but considering the force needed to break the glass, and the fact that her jaw bone was shattered, it seems most likely that he hit her with something. Perhaps a baseball bat. Cause of death was a toss-up between blunt force trauma and exsanguination. Some of the glass went right through her neck.”

  Silence for a full minute, while I tried to absorb what that night must have been like.

  “He blames himself, of course,” Helen said. “He could have prevented it. No human being could stand against a Shadow who was determined to evict him from the premises. I’m sure there’s an explanation for why he did not, but he has never shared it with us. And so we are unable to comfort him.”

  My anger at Damon was far away now, out of reach. It might come back, but for the moment, all his actions suddenly seemed clear and reasonable. No wonder being befasted was not an experience he wanted to repeat. Ever.

  Dinner wound down quick-like after that, and before I knew it I was being settled into Damon’s childhood bedroom, where I’d woken after Peter’s attack, a toy-cluttered place with blue walls that gave it a strange sea-grotto aura.

  “Sorry,” Dr. DiNovi said. “It really is the only other bed. Clean sheets, of course, and Helen’s digging you up a nightgown.”

  Damon hadn’t packed me pajamas. Or a toothbrush. Or underwear. Men.

  “I would apologize for causing you trouble,” I said, “except that this wasn’t exactly my idea.”

  “Ours either,” Dr. DiNovi sighed. “But you’ll be safe here. This,” he set an airhorn on the bedside table, “is my wake-up call. We’re just across the hall. You’ve got your own half-bath, through there. I know it’s not very late, you’re welcome to stay up as long as you like, I just thought you might be tired.”

  “Oh, I am. Pregnant women are always tired.” In addition, I realized belatedly, my feet were swollen to the size of melons and hurt abominably, as did my back. As soon as decently possible, I bowed the DiNovis out of the room, shimmied into the tent-like yellow nightgown — a complete Seventies reject, for Pete’s sake; had it been Helen’s when she was pregnant with Damon? — and sank onto the bed with a graceless whomp.

  And was completely unable to sleep.

  My mental to-do li
st apparently consisted of 1) attempt to tune out hyperactive Tummy Passenger, 2) worry about upcoming exams for which no studying had been done, not to mention Unnaturally Late Term Paper, 3) dread Carmen’s birthday party tomorrow night, and 4) if all else failed, obsess about Damon, his past, his first Lumi, his current whereabouts and mental state, his solid huggable wonderfulness, his “fine eyes,” and whether he’d care beans about me this time next week.

  I passed hours that way, interspersed with fitful dozing that left me feeling worse than before, hot and cross and groggy. Finally, disgusted with my own company, I padded out into the dark house, seeking the sweet comfort of a cookie.

  I didn’t make it far before a light caught my eye, spilling around a half-open door in the dark hallway. A muffled exclamation sounded from within.

  “Um… Dr. D? Are you okay?” I hesitantly peered through the door.

  Dr. DiNovi was not, as I had feared, trapped under a fallen bookcase or wounded by a letter-opener. He was only scowling down at a fresh, steaming coffee stain on his bathrobe, dabbing it with a Kleenex and pulling it away from the fan of papers and charts on his desk.

  “Naomi, hey,” he said, glancing up at me. “Thought you’d gone to bed. Come on in, I’ve just had a bit of a spill here. Can you hand me that thingy, the — thing — yeah, that.”

  I handed him the thingy — it was a rumpled cloth napkin — and gazed about at what was obviously Dr. DiNovi’s study. The small room was fenced in on all sides by overflowing bookcases, and one curio shelf crowded with photographs and what looked like a child’s artwork. The desk was an expansive, multi-level, horseshoe-shaped thing, cluttered with the usual — pens, lamps, a computer — was that a tiny Dalek next to his monitor? But what caught my eye most compellingly was my own name, winking at me upside down from one of the papers scattered across the desk.

  Dr. DiNovi saw me see it, and grimaced. “Yes, I’m afraid you’ve entered the Formyndari database. Congratulations. This is all from the Liberty casefile — which I shouldn’t have access to, so…” He put a finger over his lips.

  I nodded, making a zipping motion across my mouth, and stepped closer to the papers. The one with my name on it was a transcript of Damon’s most recent Formyndari interrogation. Though it ended with Lincoln’s departure to fetch me, I recalled what Priscilla had said when I arrived—”I can give you the courtesy of leaving the room. The cameras have to stay on, though” — and went a little queasy at the thought of what else was in their files. I didn’t particularly want Damon’s parents to see that part.

  “Why are they so determined that it’s him?” I asked. “It could just as easily be one of the others, or someone else entirely, couldn’t it?”

  Dr. DiNovi sighed. “Yes and no. It’s his signature phrase, recall. He’s the leader of this whole stand-up-to-your-Lumi movement. And the victims are all connected to his Orphanage. If he’s not behind it, they’re pretty sure he at least knows who is.”

  “He’s not that connected to any particular victim, though. Not like Darling, or Adonis, or even Westley—”

  “Well, exactly. Adonis had motive to kill Ray Jimenez, but none of the others. Darling had motive for Steve Stobar and Terry Fitzroy, maybe even Martin Iverson, but not Ray. I have to agree with the ‘Dari here; if it’s all one killer, he’s not doing it for personal vengeance, but for some kind of crusader justice. Damon’s in the perfect position for that.”

  “Maybe it isn’t the same person. Maybe Adonis is doing some, Darling others, or whomever.”

  “Maybe. But the handwriting on the wall seems to be the same in all cases. And before you ask, yes, the Formyndari have gotten handwriting samples from all the orphans. No conclusive matches. If Liberty is one of them, he or she is disguising their handwriting.”

  “What about fingerprints?”

  “Shadows don’t leave any.”

  I blinked. “They must drop things a lot.”

  “As kids, yeah. By the time they’re grown, they’ve generally learned to compensate.”

  I picked up a piece of posterboard bearing some manner of colorful chart. “What’s this?”

  “That’s something Damon made, actually. Tracking who has alibis for which murders. Red means they can’t confirm where they were, yellow means it can only be confirmed by other orphans — who might be lying to protect them — and green means their alibi is confirmed by some neutral party.”

  There were lots of yellow squares on the chart, but precious few green, and none of them were in Damon’s row — though there was one half-green, half-red. Paris had a matching one. “What’s with that?”

  “We have a four-hour window for Terry and Dolly Fitzroy’s time of death. For three and a half hours of that, Damon and Paris were hunting together, and there’s traffic-cam footage to prove it. But then there’s that other half hour. Damon was up on the roof, whittling, which no one can corroborate. Paris claims he was at Disney World.” Dr. D’s voice went wry on that sentence.

  “I think my head’s starting to spin,” I muttered, still gazing at the chart. “And of course what does an alibi mean for a Shadow, anyway?”

  “Which, with the lack of helpful physical evidence, leaves us with motive. An even murkier pond than alibi.”

  “Wait a sec. If Damon made this chart, why is he on it?”

  “Principle. If he leaves himself off, it means some people are above suspicion. It would look odd, then, that Westley was still on there. If he takes Westley off, then what about Galatea? What about Dove, who’s been there longer than anyone — well, anyone still living? But you can’t discount Dove without discounting Darling, and let’s face it, Darling’s a suspect.”

  “Is that why there’s a star by her name?”

  He nodded.

  A star by Darling, Adonis — and Galatea. “Teya? Really?”

  He opened a hand in a sort of helpless gesture. “Closest thing she has to an alibi for anything is being at a parade with Westley during the Fitzroy murder. We couldn’t find any firm third-party corroboration, and I can’t utterly discount the possibility of Westley lying for her. Roommates for over a decade, you know. Plus — this isn’t widely known, even among the orphans — but Galatea killed her Lumi when she breached, twenty years ago.”

  “Yikes.”

  “It’s not what it sounds like. Damon and I even bullied the Formyndari into issuing her a formal pardon, before all this started. It wasn’t her fault. Her Lumi had locked her in a basement — dark, so she couldn’t shade. She hurt herself trying to break out, and you know how that works. Non-stop bleeding. It was days before he came back for her, and by that time there wasn’t any Galatea in that basement, just a half-dead bloodthirsty monster.”

  I winced. “Why does that make her a suspect, then?”

  “Because — even though I happen to believe her — we only have her word on how that went down.”

  “Darling said Adonis killed his Lumi, too. Or… no, she said Ray said he did. That’s his motive — his alleged motive — for killing Ray Jimenez?”

  “Adonis’s Lumi was an out-of-control schizophrenic. From what little I know, being her Shadow was a special kind of hell. At the time she died, she didn’t even believe Adonis was real. Her death was ruled a suicide, but her brother, Ray — who never got along with Adonis — always maintained Adonis just wanted to be free of her.”

  “Did he have any proof?”

  “Not even a little. If he had finally come up with some, that might be a reason to kill him. Even the writing on the wall would still make a weird sort of sense — not Mia’s liberty, in this case, but Adonis’s.”

  “It does all come together, I guess, in a circumstantial, making-lots-of-assumptions way… but he still has no motive for any of the others. From what he told Darling, he didn’t even know her cousin.”

  “No, and only met Kitty in passing. But he and Audrey are very close — he had every reason to get rid of Martin Iverson.”

  “It’s almost like he and Darlin
g cancel each other out,” I muttered. I looked down at the chart again. One column, Steve & Kitty Stobar, and one row, Audrey, were mostly empty. Of course Audrey didn’t need — nor, after all this time, could she likely provide — alibis for the first three murders; she hadn’t even been around then. “I guess Audrey’s only a suspect for Martin?”

  “Unless she’s playing a really deep game, yeah, Audrey’s off the hook. Except we can’t discount the possibility that Martin is a copycat murder, Audrey trying to palm her work off on Liberty. That other empty place — Steve and Kitty’s column — is mostly blank because, at the time, everyone thought it was an isolated incident. The Formyndari took a good hard look at Westley and Darling — and you can see, both their squares are red there — but in the end, even their standards of proof went unmet, and it was written off as a murder-suicide.”

  “I take it Kitty and Darling were close?”

  “Yeah,” Dr. DiNovi said with a heavy sigh. “Darling had been where Kitty was — in the grip of an increasingly violent and possessive Lumi. She got involved in Westley’s efforts to convince her to breach. Her initial reaction, when she heard the news, was ‘Way to go, Kitty.’”

  “And then the third victim was her cousin?”

  “Yep, Dolly Fitzroy. Ironically, her Lumi was not that bad, as such things go. He slapped her around, yeah, which is never an okay thing. But he let her have a life — even a job — and he was in counseling for his anger problems. Darling was pretty vocal about her skepticism, but… to just up and kill the guy? Seems extreme, even for Darling.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “This case sounds like a nightmare. All maybes and kinda-sortas.”

  “My kingdom for an obvious fact,” he agreed. He picked up the alibi chart. “I need to add a column for Martin Iverson, now.”

  “You can fill that in already?”

  “Oh, yes. The Formyndari came to the Orphanage Sunday night, after Damon had taken you home, to question everybody. A whole column of yellows — reds for Teya and Paris, who say they were at the library and out clubbing, respectively. That boy… Audrey doesn’t even remember where she was when it happened, which isn’t unusual, and that means Adonis gets red as well, since he claims he was with her.”