Skinner Luce

by Patricia Ward

  Lucy stares into the dark, her palm sweaty and hot against her chest, imagining the impossible, what it’d be like to tell Sean it was all true, she’s from outer space after all. How he’d roll his eyes and laugh.

  How she’d have no way to prove it, other than to make the cut.

  LUCY’S DREAMING. SHE’S AT the edge of a vast, undulating ocean. Her feet are in the sand. The water’s coming closer. There’s a terrible dread about being here, but she can’t remember what it is. She’s worried it’s the Before. It’s strange that she’s frightened of the Before, but she is. She tries to run away but slips and falls backwards into the sand. Now she’s looking up at the sky, and she can’t see the ocean, but she knows it’s coming closer, the mass of water heaving towards her paralyzed body. Her terror grows. She squirms in the sand. Now there is a boulder on her chest. The boulder’s weight is crushing. She has never felt such agony. It starts in her center and then sprays out like fireworks through every part of her flesh. Aah, she cries. Aah, aah.

  Her eyes fly open.

  In the same instant that the room emerges from the dark, she becomes aware of the figure in the hallway and the Source’s subsiding response.

  It takes ages. What feels like ages. Then her body jolts into motion, she sits up, fumbling for the lamp. Her hand crashes into it, causing it to topple, and she scrambles to keep it upright. “Who’s there?” she whispers, groping the lamp, unable to find the switch.

  He pauses, turns. He moves towards her room. The door stands open to the hallway, a blue glow emanating from the nightlight Lucy installed so Eva wouldn’t trip on her way to the bathroom. The light gives shape to him, and she recognizes the dome of his head, the thick neck and shoulders.

  “No,” she whimpers, scrambling backwards on her bed.

  “Shut up so you don’t wake up your darling ma,” Joe Brynn hisses. “She was supposed to go first. Up to you if you want her to watch.”

  She goes dead still, her breath caught tight and high in her throat.

  “I always told J,” he shakes his head disapprovingly, “she’s gonna be a fucking problem, I said. You need to unload her now. But no, he was all starry eyed and optimistic. You can’t turn black to white, I told him. You can’t turn a cat into a dog.”

  Lucy’s mind is hurtling around her bedroom: books, lamp, clothes, stuffed animals. Nothing she can use. There’s nothing. Despair floods her, turns her weak. Keep him talking. “But why, Joe? What did I do?” she whispers, all earnestness. “Can you at least tell me why?”

  “She asks why,” he addresses an invisible audience, arms lifted. He approaches as he talks, step by step. She’s got nowhere to go, pressed up against the headboard. “Because you’re a loose end. Loose Lucy,” he adds jauntily, impressed with his pun. “I always told J, she’s not like us. She’s weak. She’ll cause problems. Who’d you talk to, Loose Lips Lucy? Did you tell your ma? I bet you told her.”

  “Joe, I swear,” Lucy stammers, “I swear on my life, I did not tell her. She does not know.”

  “Yeah, O.K. Sure, Loose Lips Lucy. What about anyone else? I bet you told this whole armpit of a town. Yappety-yap.”

  “I swear,” she blubbers. “I really swear.”

  “But you told the cop. You told him everything.”

  “No,” she whimpers.

  “Don’t you lie to me, you rotten little skinner.”

  Her hands grip the blanket. She could fling it around his head, duck by, run like hell. It’s her only chance. An utterly pathetic one that will never work. And how will she save Eva.

  Eva! a voice weeps inside her head, a child’s voice.

  “Does Julian know?” she asks, in the same tiny voice.

  “Does he know,” he chuckles, as if her question is a punch line. “Yes, he knows. Or I should say, he knew. Theo doesn’t like naysayers. No, he does not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. I told Theo, you better watch him, he’s got a weak link and it starts with an L. And now I end up in bum-fuck nowhere doing his work.” He reaches into his jacket and withdraws a knife, which he balances on his palm for her to see. “Murder-suicide. Crazy girl finally does it. It’ll be a real tragedy. Now, hush. I was told your ma is deaf as a doornail, but you’re getting a little too noisy.”

  She realizes she’s wheezing. She can’t breathe. I’m hyperventilating. The noise fills the room, a high keen. She fights to bring it under control, but it only seems to get louder, and now her whole chest heaves with every breath, a pinprick of air each time, not enough.

  Julian said no, she understands, as if from an impossible distance. Julian.

  “Like I need this shit,” Joe says, and leans in and slaps her once, hard, so that she almost falls off the bed. The breath getting knocked out of her interrupts the panic, and she gulps air. “This kind of weather, I have to drive the Explorer, and then I have to park a mile away and hike, and you know what, it’s not my thing. I hate snow. Us true servs, true in our hearts,” he pats his chest, patriotic, upright, “we hate snow, Lucy. How about you? Do you hate it? Or do you not hate it enough? Because, you know, I told Theo, I told him a thousand times, she’s gonna be trouble. She’s not one of us. And sure enough, as usual, I was right.”

  “No,” Lucy pleads. “No.” Her body thrashes to life, tumbling off the other side of the bed. She scrambles on all fours, desperate to get to her feet and run. She hears the heavy tread of his boots, then they are in her face and there’s a wrenching pain as he hauls her upright by the hair. He slaps her hard. And again. The slaps explode through her head, paralyzing her. She dangles there, stunned.

  His face is inches from her own, the expression flat and purposeful, eyes just off-center from hers. “Don’t fight.”

  “No,” she utters. “No!”

  She pushes at his face, his neck. Her legs resume their flailing dance. In a distant part of her head she’s aware of how pitiful her efforts are, but she can’t stop.

  Motion, muffled noises. Bare legs, the scalloped lace hem—

  It’s Eva, tottering in her bedroom doorway, her face a mask of shock.

  Lucy spasms violently, then twists, sinks her teeth into Joe’s arm.

  “Jesus!” he yells, and throws her off. Her head snaps back against the bed rail, crumpling her, the blow an explosion of sparks in her skull. “Stop fighting, you little bitch, or I swear I’ll make her suffer, you hear me?”

  “Run!” Lucy screams at Eva, and launches herself at Joe’s legs. She’s wild with rage, infused with a strength she thought had drained entirely away. She comes into him with such force that he almost falls. The knife clatters to the floor. She clambers up his body, onto his back, wraps her legs in a vise around his waist. He spins around, slams her into the wall. Lucy glimpses Eva’s horrified stare, she’s backed away, clutching the landing railing with both hands. She’s only gone about three feet. She can’t reach the staircase, Lucy calculates in some distant part of her brain, not before Lucy loses this fight, which is sure to happen.

  She screams, and claps the heels of her hands against Joe Brynn’s ears, as hard as she can, as if she’s going to crush his skull. She saw a Nafikh do that once and the serv went down like a stone, but Joe just teeters, then his hands reach up, groping for her. She slams again, and again. His hands drop, and he sways a little.

  “Go!” she screams at Eva.

  Eva totters along the rail, barely able to stand. She’s not going to make it, Lucy realizes. Joe Brynn is recovering, she can feel the bunching in his body, the muscles heaving to while her own strength dissolves. She clamps her legs tighter, but their grip is too weak.

  “Run,” she begs Eva, who totters one more step, then stops again, clinging to the railing just to keep herself upright.

  “Stay there,” a voice warns. “Let her go now.”

  Lucy feels Joe go still and hard as rock. Then he swings her off his back, locks her to his body, forearm across her throat.

  “Let her go, as
shole!”

  Recognition is slow, fumbling.

  It is Bedrosian, coming up the stairs, both hands on a gun pointed right at Joe.

  “Let her go!” he yells again, and in the instant before Joe’s arm tightens, Lucy feels a kind of pity for his assumption that he’ll be obeyed.

  She claws at the concrete block of his arm: I’m going to die! A darkness presses into her eyes, compressing her brain, her chest. Scenes pop into her fading vision in fits and jerks as her body lurches: Bedrosian advancing one step at a time, gun eye-level, the demonic rage on his face; Eva sinking down the railing to the floor, her hands to her mouth. I’m sorry, Ma, Lucy begs. I’m sorry.

  She feels herself drop, then there’s a sudden upward rush, and her body gets tugged forward, held tight.

  Bedrosian’s holding her up. His other arm is still outstretched, the gun fixed on Joe.

  There was a shot, she realizes. Joe. He’s down, slumped against the wall. For a confused moment, she can’t figure why. Then she registers the tracks down his face, the shattered cheek. His eye is gone. Blood, a lot of it.

  “You O.K.?” Bedrosian demands. “Lucy, hey. Stay on your feet. Look at me.”

  “Source,” she whispers.

  He releases her, and she fumbles her way along his outstretched arm that brings her a few feet from Eva. She takes a few steps on her own, drops to her knees. “Ma,” she whispers. “It’s O.K. It’s O.K.”

  Eva nods, white with shock.

  “Come here,” Lucy says, and pulls Eva to her chest, maneuvering to block as much as possible what is happening with Joe Brynn’s corpse. The Source is just now being released. It snakes out from deep within, through bone and muscle and skin, seeping through his shirt. Lucy looks over her shoulder, shifts her position, frantic Eva might see. Bedrosian moves into Eva’s line of sight, his sizeable bulk providing more of a buffer. To Lucy’s relief, Eva remains huddled into Lucy’s chest, mumbling about how she felt the vibrations, she thought Lucy was up and about, she was worried Lucy was sick, and then she came out. “I know, Ma,” Lucy whispers, “it’s over now. It’s O.K.”

  The Source thickens to silvery white, floats lazily up behind Bedrosian’s shoulders. Eva starts to lift her head, but Lucy says, “No, don’t look, Ma,” and Eva slackens, willing to obey. Even across the hallway, the heat of the Source seeps into Lucy’s back. She glances up as it wends its way ceilingward, loosening, scattering, until the last glinting wisps vanish.

  “Get a blanket,” she tells Bedrosian, indicating her bedroom with her chin. Source aside, Joe Brynn is a gruesome sight that Eva shouldn’t have to endure. Bedrosian hurries into Lucy’s bedroom and returns with the bedspread, tosses it over the body.

  There is the sound of all of them breathing, and a clock ticking somewhere in the house.

  “O.K.,” Lucy says. “Ma, let’s get up.”

  Bedrosian helps Eva to her feet. She stares at each of them, her face drained of color. “We have to call the police,” she says.

  “Mrs. Hennessey,” Bedrosian says gently, still cradling her forearm in his palm, “I am the police, all right? I’m going to handle this. You don’t need to call anyone.”

  “But—”

  “Ma, you need to trust him. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “If you say,” Eva says uncertainly.

  Lucy meets Bedrosian’s eyes over Eva’s head, urgently mouthing, What do we do? He makes a mollifying gesture.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” he suggests.

  Eva makes no protest, clinging to his arm, taking the stairs at the cautious pace he sets. He speaks comfortingly in her ear as they go, exuding a calm authority that starts to ease Lucy’s concern, because there’s no way Eva won’t defer to him. Downstairs at last, Lucy sinks onto the window seat while Bedrosian settles Eva in her wingback chair and arranges the afghan over her knees, as if he’s always caring for shaken old women.

  He says, “The important thing to remember, Mrs. Hennessey, is it’s over. It’s all over. Everyone’s safe.”

  Eva trembles as she adjusts the afghan. Lucy touches her knee, squeezes. Eva lifts her watery eyes to meet Lucy’s. “But—why did he come here? Why did he want to kill you?”

  “Now, you listen,” Bedrosian says, sinking into a crouch next to the chair. He covers both her hands with one of his own, jostles them a little, as if to shore her up. “That man was after Lucy because she was ratting on him. You understand? She was doing the right thing, and helping me out.”

  “Ratting about what?”

  Bedrosian shoots Lucy a glance. “The investigation is ongoing, Mrs. Hennessey. All I can say is it’s about drugs. This guy is part of a much bigger organization, all right? Lucy’s helping to bring them down.”

  “You were involved with drugs?” Eva asks Lucy in despair.

  “I—I needed money. I just—it was a stupid mistake.”

  “She’s made up for it in spades, Mrs. Hennessey. Trust me,” Bedrosian insists. “But it’s imperative that we keep what happened here quiet for now. We need to buy ourselves some time. It’s for Lucy,” he adds gravely. “It’s to keep her safe.”

  “Please, Ma,” Lucy begs.

  After a moment, Eva reaches for Lucy’s hand. “All right, then,” she says, exhaustion in her voice. “If it’s for Lucy.”

  EVA’S IN HER WINGBACK chair, Lucy’s on the window seat, cold seeping through the glass against her back. The cats mewl, huddled together under Eva’s legs, staring out wide-eyed. Lucy can see through to the kitchen, the tablecloth with its checkered pattern, the twin cherries set in merry squares. The pot whistles, then is set aside. Bedrosian moves back and forth, pouring tea. He brings it to them. He says he needs a tarp. Lucy directs him to the basement. They listen to him move about downstairs.

  Joe Brynn, sent after her, now lying there upstairs. And Julian. Theo let it happen. It’s unreal. Herself, she can buy, but Julian—maybe it was a lie. Joe Brynn just said it, to break her down.

  Her scattered thoughts are swamped by grief anew. It was no lie. Julian is dead.

  She’d never have guessed she’d feel so bad. It’s the gift he made, at the end, of refusing to come after her. Her mouth turns down, tight effort not to cry. He couldn’t have imagined what would happen. He just assumed he could say no to Theo. You idiot.

  Lucy stares hard at the floor: golden oak, the finish worn to bare wood in places. A memory swoops in: her da so many years ago, sweating and grumbling, his undershirt stained with dirt and sweat from the labor of sanding this same floor.

  Eva says, “I knew something was wrong. A mother knows. But there was nothing I could do. You never tell anyone what’s going on.”

  “I didn’t want you to be upset, Ma.”

  “Well,” Eva tries for a shaky laugh.

  Lucy draws her knees closer to her chest, hugging them. She’s so angry she could pick up that fireplace poker and ram it right through Bedrosian’s head. This is his fault. He did this.

  “Why couldn’t you tell me you were in so much trouble?” Eva asks, despairing.

  She looks so frail and old, Lucy feels a lurch of fear. “You don’t have to worry, Ma,” she says. “I swear, it’s all over.”

  Bedrosian emerges from the basement, carrying a badly folded blue tarp that obscures his upper body and head. He rounds the door, kicks it shut, heads up the stairs.

  “Are you O.K. alone for a minute?” Lucy asks.

  Eva nods, picking up one of the cats and placing it on her lap. It arches, hisses at Lucy. She touches Eva’s shoulder, then goes up the stairs after Bedrosian.

  He’s on the floor, rolling Joe Brynn up. The plastic crackles harshly in the quiet. Thuds and thumps.

  “How the fuck did this happen?” Lucy hisses. “This is your fault, you know that?”

  He pauses, speaks around his shoulder. “This is not my fault.”

  “In what universe?”

  He gets back to his work. “No tags for the higher-ups, as you know, so the rest of the
list you gave me, those were the only leads. But every one of them was up in thin air, or turning up dead, and Aaron said they were throwing in the towel. In their view, the network was broken up, Elander would take his business elsewhere, the story was over.”

  Bedrosian sits back on his knees, wiping his forehead. Lucy averts her eyes from the big blue package. He can’t carry Joe Brynn alone. Which means she’ll have to help. An image comes of the two of them maneuvering down the stairs, visible from the parlor. “So what happened?”

  “I didn’t like how Elander was closing up shop, and what he might have in mind for you,” Bedrosian says, “so I went to Bernie Poor. Sentries had already worked him over, but I figured no harm trying. I was too late. I found a hysterical girl, blabbering on about how she was behind the couch when it happened.”

  Alicia, Lucy guesses.

  “He was finished,” Bedrosian mimes a slit throat. “It was chaos. He didn’t go down without a fight. Girl was behind the couch, she said, the whole time. She said it was Joe Brynn, and he made Bernie log on and say where you were, before he ended it. So I came as fast as I could. Wasn’t easy with the snow. I was almost too late.”

  He seems to be fishing for a thank-you, but Lucy’s not ready to give it. If he had just left her alone from the start. She’s gagging on the dark splatter all over the wallpaper, the sweet, thick smell of all that blood. She’s seen such things a thousand times, but it’s different here, at home. Eva downstairs in her chair, still shaking. Lucy can’t ever make up for this.

  Something in what he said comes back to her.

  “When you say the whole list,” she says, “do you mean—Ernesto, too?”

  He makes his way up to standing, the floorboards creaking under his weight. He nods.