Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “Jesus. Okay. Can I have her mobile number?”

  I programmed it into my phone, then called it while I was still on a high from talking to Berenbaum; otherwise I would have chickened out.

  “Hi there,” I said when she answered. “It’s Millie. David told me to call you.”

  “Millie who?”

  Oh right. She’d never gotten my name in Santa Barbara. Then I remembered why, and panicked. Could she do scary hoodoo with just a first name? I hoped not. It also occurred to me that connecting myself with the resort incident might not be to my advantage anyway.

  “I’m a protégée of David’s,” I said instead. “He told me there was some stuff about the studio he wanted you to explain to me, and that we should meet to talk about it.”

  “I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”

  “You can ask him if you like,” I said. “He just told me he wants me involved and that I have to meet with you.”

  Vivian let out a delicate snort. “If he thinks I’m going to bark on command like everyone else in his life, he can think again. I’m not interested in bringing in anyone else.” I could tell she was winding up to a curt good-bye, so I pulled out the stops.

  “I’m with the Arcadia Project. We’ve met, actually.”

  I held my breath, wondering if the silence on the end of the line indicated that she was taken aback, that she didn’t remember me, or that she’d hung up before I had the chance to blow her mind.

  “You were the one with Caryl at Regazo de Lujo,” she finally said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re right. David did mention you. I’m sorry; I’ve been a bit distracted lately.”

  An uncanny number of people in my life were saying that right now, and I was beginning to suspect that they were all distracted by the same thing.

  “So you’ll meet with me, then?”

  “How about tonight? Latish.”

  “First, promise you won’t cause me harm.”

  “David’s been coaching you, I see. I promise I won’t cause you harm tonight, but that’s all the commitment I’m ready for. Does nine o’clock work for you?”

  “So long as you promise you won’t keep me past midnight.”

  “Ugh! Fine. I promise I will end the meeting before midnight. Two promises in one phone call! I’m going soft. Meet me at nine o’clock at Gotham Hall.”

  “Goth— That weird bar on the Promenade? Didn’t it close ages ago?”

  “Did it?” she said with a smile I could hear through the phone. “You may want to check again. Really look hard, and think of me when you do, darling.”

  33

  When I told Caryl that I intended to meet with Vivian, Elliott turned a flip and fluttered blindly into the wall of Teo’s bedroom.

  Caryl had found me there snooping around on the computer, but I was pretty sure she hadn’t seen exactly what I was doing, which was for the best. You’d think that “Gloria Day murders” would have turned up something on Google even without adding in “dwarf” or “midget,” but no matter what combination of keywords I tried, I couldn’t dig up a speck of information on the alleged crime. How was this not plastered all over the Net?

  “No,” Caryl said calmly. “You are not going to meet with Vivian Chandler.”

  “David pretty much ordered me to,” I said, adjusting my fey glasses farther up the bridge of my nose. They weren’t a great fit.

  Caryl folded her arms and leaned back against the wall. “Why would he do that?”

  Oh. Right. Probably not a good idea to tell her that part.

  “Well, we’re pretty sure she was involved in getting Rivenholt out of the train station, right?”

  “Even if she was, it remains ambiguous whether she was helping him or whether she was part of the attack.”

  “That’s exactly what I’d like to find out.”

  “I will go with you,” she said as Elliott fluttered back to her shoulder.

  In my experience, it’s generally a bad idea to take your current boss along on a job interview, so I groped for an objection. “Vivian doesn’t like you.”

  “True, but you’ll be defenseless without my magic.”

  I started to tell her about Vivian’s promise but hesitated. She might wonder why Vivian would take the meeting seriously enough to offer that promise. “Why would she bother hurting me?” I said instead.

  “She owns a pest control company, Millie; she had a large fortune and chose to invest it in wholesale extermination.”

  “Killing me would harm Berenbaum, wouldn’t it?”

  “Negative emotions do not fall under the fey’s under­standing of ‘harm,’ since humans frequently and demonstrably seek them out.”

  “Vivian can’t lay a hand on me without destroying her own facade. What harm could she do?”

  “She doesn’t need to lay a hand on you. She can create metaspells.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Her wards can cast their own enchantments. Say Vivian is in Paris and you try to break into her warded house in Los Angeles. The ward casts an enchantment on you when you pass over the windowsill, and the enchantment causes your heart to explode. She has a perfect alibi.”

  “Wouldn’t my touch disable the ward, though?”

  “Not if she was still powering it.”

  “But it couldn’t work while I was touching it. Anyway, I’m not sure a curse on me would even stick.”

  Elliott spread his wings halfway out and bared his teeth, shifting from foot to foot. “She could cast a charm on an object,” Caryl said, “a charm that psychically compelled you to kill yourself. You’ve seen that you’re not immune to psychic spells.”

  I exhaled, defeated. “Look. I made her promise not to cause me harm.”

  “I find it hard to believe she would consent to that.”

  “Well, she promised not to cause me harm tonight, or to keep me past midnight.”

  “That sounds slightly more plausible.” She considered. “But I didn’t hear the conversation; there may be a loophole.”

  “This is like Russian roulette with six thousand chambers. I’m okay with that level of risk.”

  “If you find yourself on the end of the wrong chamber, it does not matter what your odds were.”

  “If I die, you can say ‘I told you so’ at my grave, and that would probably be more fun than working with me.”

  Caryl gave me one of her long, blank stares as Elliott tucked his head and closed up his wings. “Very well,” she said, “do as you like.” She turned for the door as Elliott gave me a tragic look over her shoulder.

  “Caryl . . . ,” I began. But she was already gone.

  • • •

  Gotham Hall, as best I remembered from my dance-club days, had been near the Broadway end of the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. It was a quarter till nine when I got there, so the Westside’s pedestrian shopping paradise was aglow with strings of lights and loud with the music of street performers. I paused by the vomiting-stegosaurus fountain to slip on my fey glasses.

  I still couldn’t see the entrance to Gotham Hall, but I could now see a suspicious dark webbing stretched across the narrow space between the clothing store and the mortgage broker on the corner. It reminded me of the glamour on the Seelie bar, but it was infinitely more intricate, a thing of mesmerizing fractal beauty.

  I wasn’t sure how literal Vivian had been when she said, Think of me, but I gave it a shot, holding her image in my mind. As I did so, the strands of the dark web began to snap, parting dramatically like a theater curtain to reveal the red maw of Gotham Hall. The doorway was narrow, oppressed by the two buildings on either side of it, and just inside the dimly glowing passage stood two gorgeous, bored-looking bouncers.

  “Ten dollars, please,” said the ebony idol on the left as I
approached.

  “Vivian told me to meet her here.”

  “Do you have an invitation?” said the bronze idol on the right. They were both human, according to my sunglasses, but damn.

  “If you mean a written invitation, then no.”

  “Ten dollars, please,” said the ebony idol.

  I grumbled and fished for my wallet.

  Inside, the narrow hallway was a dim Looking Glass nightmare of venous red walls, purple curtains, and chessboard tile. Just the sort of place a homesick vampire might find comforting. Soulless dance music pulsed in my ears as I tried vainly to adjust my eyes. Weirdly, the patrons seemed to be human. If any of them found it odd that I was wearing sunglasses in the dark, they neglected to say so.

  As I recalled, the downstairs consisted only of a dance floor and a billiards room, so I painstakingly climbed the surreal stairs—almost too narrow for two people to pass each other—up to the bar and eating area. The second story was elegant, though still moody: cinnamon wood floor, honey-gold wallpaper with the texture of crushed velvet, cloudy violet ceiling. There were a dozen or so people wandering about in various states of substance abuse.

  Vivian sat with her back to me at the bar, posed with casual grace, dark hair shining. She wore Elvira heels and sheer black stockings with a seam up the back. Despite her come-hither attire, three bar stools on either side of her were clear. Perhaps the patrons could sense what I saw through my glasses: the aura of bruised misery that hung over her like San Fernando smog.

  The sound of my cane caught her attention as I approached. She swiveled and held out her hand without getting up, speaking with that bubbly L.A. lilt that mismatched her appearance so disturbingly. “Millie. A pleasure to finally have a name to go with that unforgettable face.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t shake your hand,” I said, stopping just out of arm’s reach and taking off my sunglasses.

  “Oh my, my,” she said with a Cheshire smile. “What has ­little Caryl been telling you about me?”

  “More to the point, what has she told you about me?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Then first, you need to know I have so much steel holding my bones together I get hit on by robots. Second, I’m pretty sure you don’t want the good people here to see you without your makeup on.” It was the best I could do to warn her without mentioning the word “magic” around a bunch of human eavesdroppers I didn’t know.

  “I see,” said Vivian slowly, retracting her hand. “I see. Please have a seat. So Caryl has Ironbones on call now. Charming.”

  “People keep calling me that,” I said, leaving a stool between us so our legs didn’t accidentally touch. “Is that a thing?”

  She laughed. “Not really. It’s like, oh, what do parents say around here? The boogeyman.”

  “A monster with iron bones, I take it?”

  “Also claws. The comic book character Wolverine is loosely based on him, in fact, or so the rumors go. Len Wein’s Echo must have been very naughty as a child.”

  “I’m the fairy boogeyman,” I said dryly. “No wonder everyone in the Seelie bar panicked.”

  Vivian let out a musical laugh, even as she touched a finger to her lips to silence me. She leaned in a bit, lowering her voice to an almost seductive murmur. “I’d love to have been there to see that,” she said. “Seelie are so adorable when they’re frightened.”

  “So all these people,” I said quietly, “they’re just regular ­people? Not . . . in the know?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How did they even get in?”

  “They have invitations,” she said. “If you have an invitation, it’s a perfectly normal club. If not, it doesn’t appear. That makes the bouncers’ jobs boring, but it gives me exquisite ­control over my social life.”

  “Well, if we can’t talk business here at the bar, could we move somewhere else?”

  “Am I keeping you from a date? By all means then, let’s hurry things along.”

  She moved us to a small corner table in the next room that was removed from the general flow of traffic, but unfortunately, it was still not secluded enough to allow us to talk with perfect privacy. The chairs were spidery and misshapen in a way I couldn’t quite place.

  I declined a stoned-looking waitress’s offer of something to eat, but Vivian ordered a slice of chocolate cake before leaning back in her chair at ease. “Before we talk about the studio,” she said, “let’s talk about you a little.”

  “All right,” I said warily. “What would you like to know?”

  “What exactly happened between the time you slept with your screenwriting professor and the time you jumped from the roof of Hedrick Hall?”

  If I’d had a drink, I would have choked on it. I had a feeling she was dying for me to ask how she knew, so I didn’t.

  “It’s complicated,” I said, running my fingertips over the wood of the table. Its gleaming, raspberry-chocolate finish echoed Vivian’s hair. “And it’s really not relevant to our business here.”

  Vivian did nothing more than shift her gaze directly to mine, but I felt as though she had grabbed me by the collar and yanked me across the table. “I asked you,” she said in a tone that made my arm hair stand up. “That makes it relevant.”

  For maybe the length of two frames of film I saw her. I don’t know if she dropped her facade, or if I disrupted it in some way, or if I simply saw through it. But for that subliminal flash of a moment I was sitting across from a bat-winged creature of horrible grandeur, with spiderweb hair and mantis jaws and eyes like bleeding wounds. And then it was Vivian again, smiling sweetly.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time,” she said. “What exactly happened at UCLA?”

  34

  When I was able to locate some saliva and peel my tongue off the roof of my mouth, I did my best to answer Vivian’s question. “Like you said, I slept with my screenwriting professor,” I said. Treading this old ground turned my stomach into a lump of lead. “We’d gotten pretty close outside of class by then, but he was . . . cold to me afterward. I was confused, and I confided in a couple of people I considered friends. After that, somehow the whole campus knew.”

  I paused as the waitress approached the table with Vivian’s cake, setting it down in front of her. Both waitress and cake may as well have been invisible for all Vivian noticed them; her eyes were fixed on me. “So what happened next?” she prompted.

  I waited until the waitress was out of earshot. “He told everyone that I had made the whole thing up. He was highly thought of, and I’d shown just enough signs of crazy by then that people believed him. Rooms got quiet when I walked in. I was miserable, started flunking classes, so I confronted him about it. He accused me of sexual harassment and said that if I ever tried to talk to him alone again or continued with my ‘accusations,’ he would involve the authorities.”

  “Fascinating,” Vivian said, leaning forward slightly. “He lied even in private? How did you end up sleeping with him in the first place?”

  “I wish I knew. I went over to his place, and was trying to get him to talk to me about what was bothering him, and then suddenly we were—” I stopped and shook my head.

  “You were what?”

  My hands went cold. “Please don’t make me talk about this.”

  “I am not making you,” she said. “Though I can. Would you like me to?”

  I leaned over the table; the words spilled from my mouth like bile. “I was in his room, trying to get him to open up and—we kissed and he pushed me down on the bed and—we had sex.” I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of the details: his strange, bleak urgency, the scratchy afghan against my cheek.

  “Why were you alone with him at his place to begin with?” she asked, with the precision of someone locating a paralyzing nerve cluster.

  Dr. Davis’s voice said, Your guilt
is disproportionate. You were both consenting adults. He initiated sex; you were only there out of concern for him.

  Another voice answered: the same inner voice I’d tried to drown with expensive scotch. Then why did you shave your legs and put on lacy underwear? Why did you wear his favorite perfume to class? Why did you spend weeks finding all the cracks in his armor so that you could painstakingly pry it open? Even a year later the guilt was noxious, strangling.

  “It was just—” I faltered. “It was the end of a long process of— It was like the frog in the boiling water.”

  Vivian looked at me blankly.

  “I mean, our relationship escalated slowly. Got more and more inappropriate without our quite realizing it. He had some emotional problems too, though he was better at hiding them. I thought I could help him. I thought we were—” And then I couldn’t talk anymore.

  “Friends?” Vivian finished for me, with a slow smile.

  I nodded. This was not what I’d hoped for in a job interview.

  “Losing him made you want to end your life?”

  “It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of suicide. I guess it was just the first time I’d been drunk enough to do it.”

  “Fabulous,” she said brightly, and finally picked up a fork to address her slice of chocolate cake. “Next topic.”

  I felt light-headed. I wished I had ordered a drink, even a soda, so I’d have something to do besides stare at the table, feeling my hands going numb. “The next topic is?”

  “Why David wants to hire you.”

  I tried to find my footing in the conversation again. “He, uh, he seems to think I show—”

  “It wasn’t a question.”

  I sat back boneless in my chair while Vivian took a bite of cake. It was just like with Gloria. I should have fought. I would have, a year ago, or at least showed some spine. But I wasn’t that girl anymore. Nor did I have that exact spine, not to put too fine a point on it.

  Vivian slid the fork from her mouth, then studied the gory smear of red lipstick she’d left on it. “David’s a horrible romantic,” she said. “He can’t resist the lure of a broken-winged bird. I’m not sure if it’s about his immortal soul or about PR, but either way, you’re like a steak dinner to him. A talented director with a tragic past who just needs a bit of inspiration. . . .”