Silver Zombie dspi-4

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Spiderweb leading supported the door’s frosted glass round window. It was too high off the ground for me to see into, even on tiptoes. And I so wanted to peek. I felt like a kid again, with an actual neighborhood to explore besides suburbia.

  The door opened to showcase a petite woman who only came up to my shoulder.

  I searched her forever-forty features and found the symmetrical bone structure she shared with her aged twin sister. Her hair was a vibrant, almost statically fluffed ginger color, neither red nor brown. No wonder Eddie had called her “foxy.” It wasn’t just for her perfect figure in miniature. Caressa must have been a knockout in her day. How could she have let herself wrinkle and whiten when she could be preserved in vibrant, living amber, like her sister Lili?

  I pictured Lilith and me doing the “portrait of Dorian Gray” thing, with her image in the mirror puckering and melting and me not knowing if she was my reflection or a fading life force.

  “I hope you’re not selling anything door-to-door, young lady,” the resident warned. Her voice was sharp and scratchy, the only thing “old” about her. “That’s not allowed here and the penalties are severe.”

  Her raw, suspicious tone startled my undercover reporter instincts into coming up with a plausible story for just being curious.

  “No. Of course not. I’m … writing a web piece on your sister Caressa’s film career. My name is Delilah Street.”

  Her amber-brown eyes blinked alert at mention of her sister. “You may know your name, but my sister apparently still doesn’t know hers. It’s Lilah West. I won’t talk about ‘Caressa Teagarden’ and that stupid so-called film career of hers, but I will discuss Lilah. Will that do?”

  “Of course.”

  I sensed odors of potpourri and perfume swirling inside and heard tinkling chimes. The furnishings emitted metallic and glassy winks from the room behind her. I was dying for a house tour.

  “Then come in,” she invited, sweeping the huge door wide as if it weighed as little as a feather.

  I studied her as I passed through a tiny entry hall into a huge main room anchored by a carved gray stone fireplace tall enough for Frankenstein’s monster to reach for the sky in.

  This was the dramatic ambiance I’d expected for a vintage movie queen like Caressa, not the cottage she inhabited in the Las Vegas Sunset City.

  Lili spun to face me on her dainty red high-heeled mules. Louboutins, I’d bet. I didn’t surf the discount designer websites in vain. She was wearing an aqua micro-fiber top and genie-styled capris, tight at the ankle but swagged at the hips.

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “WTCH did a recent feature on you.”

  “Film at ten. A minute-thirty. Hardly a feature, my dear. I hope you’re going to deal with my poor sister in greater detail.”

  “The Web allows for unlimited content.”

  “Yes, doesn’t it? Pity. Brevity is the soul of substance. Sit.”

  Quicksilver wouldn’t have bowed to that spat command, but I was a reporter in search of facts that could affect my personal future. I sat.

  Goodness. What was at the back of my knees was a large blue ottoman brocaded in an Asian cloud pattern. Every piece here was an exotic rarity, including the lady of the house. Her ego was as large as her body was trim. It was time to go gaga girl reporter, an easy role to slip into.

  “I can’t believe I’m still in Kansas,” I bubbled, quite honestly. “Your house is so fascinating and so are you.”

  Lili’s complacent smile as she sat on a giant brown leather wing chair confirmed my instincts.

  “Actually,” Lili said, “I was far more able to express myself wherever I was than Lilah. She needed the medium of film. I thrived on the direct effect.”

  “So she became a film actress and you became—?”

  “A performance artist. Surely you can sense the temperament in my house alone?”

  Invited to ogle the interior, I did. High against the coffered ceiling, I finally spotted Plexiglas fan blades slowly turning, turning, turning. That’s what made the scene swirl around and cooled the interior.

  Now that my eyes were adapting to the dimness, I spotted lots of museum-style pedestals holding rare artifacts.

  Like the gold and black head of Anubis. That’s when my spine decided to do the paso doble.

  And … a rare green geode bristling with rectilinear green-glass towers.

  One of those freaky glass globes holding lightning in a jar that Sharper Image used to sell when it was solvent and we were still the champions of the world.

  A severed tattooed arm floating in what appeared to be lime green Jell-O.

  And … a pair of silver tap shoes from a nineteen-thirties chorus line.

  “I have quite a collection,” Lili said. “Perhaps I could interest a sharp young lady like you in working as my assistant. I plan a biography as well.”

  “Really. You’d have a lot to tell. I mean, I can tell you’ve lived a fascinating life.”

  “Unlike Lilah. She withered. Literally and figuratively. She was booted out of this Sunset City, you know.”

  “Booted?”

  “We can’t have the wrong sort of people ruining our ambiance.”

  “Your own sister?”

  “Sisters are overrated, my dear. Live longer and you’ll see that. Not trustworthy.”

  I nodded.

  “She gave up and got old,” Lili said. “I remain active. In fact, I have my own lucrative business going.”

  “Wonderful. What is it?”

  “Ecology,” she said. “Going green is quite the thing these days, and right up my alley. I was always interested in formulas and scientific effects on our world. The wind, the weather, the warming globe. I’m particularly fond of globes. You may notice that many, many decorate my home.”

  I’d spotted the spherical glimmer of glass everywhere.

  “Snow globes,” I said.

  “Some. I do not limit my horizons, dear girl. Ah. I’ve forgotten to offer you tea and sympathy or at least scones.”

  “Thank you. I’m not hungry.”

  “Growing girls are always hungry,” she growled at me.

  I was beginning to feel like Alice at a mad tea party with the Red Queen.

  “Just a nibble, perhaps.”

  “Fine. I’ll go toss something tasty together.”

  She clipped off on her petite red spikes.

  While she was gone, I got up to do a polite but thorough inspection of her main room.

  I smiled and shook up a globe of downtown Wichita. Over there was Manhattan, of course. Wait. Manhattan, Kansas. Letdown.

  And … Augusta, not in Georgia, but the nearby community with the old downtown and its restored movie palace.

  They were really up-to-date … in Kansas City and environs, and there weren’t just snow globes, but rain globes and fog globes and sleet globes. And so fanciful. One even had the Emerald City of Oz inside it, with a tiny broom-riding witch shooting fog across the sky reading: Surrender Dorothy.

  “Oh, you’ve found my specialty globes,” Lili said, clicking back into the room with a tray.

  “Can you duplicate The Wizard of Oz scenes without permission?”

  “Oh, my land, girl! Of course I got permission. I told you I headed a big corporation. Now sit down and drink this lovely, local tallgrass tea and have some homemade gingerbread scones.”

  Ah … no.

  But I’d be willing to sit in front of them and ask some questions. I didn’t have to. Lili was pleased to chatter about her sister.

  “Kansas wasn’t good enough for Lilah. I told her the center of the country was best for us West girls, but she had Hollywood dreams. She blew off the family business and went”—she rolled her eyes—“really west. And what did she have to show for it? A few minor roles in third-rate films. At least she changed her name so as not to embarrass us.”

  “What was … is … the family business?”

  “Nothing glamorous like mo
tion pictures. Heating, plumbing, air-conditioning.”

  “That was … available when you two were young?”

  “Gracious, child! Of course. In fact, it was air-conditioning that seduced Lilah from Wichita to the Wild West.”

  I sipped a little tallgrass tea, and tried not to spit it out. It was chili-flavored!

  “You’re right,” I said when I could speak again. “Air-conditioning doesn’t sound very seductive.”

  “It’s a fascinating field, with unlimited growth potential.”

  “Didn’t the early movie theaters have it?”

  “Exactly right. Those Roaring Twenties were also purring with Willis Carrier’s rival air conditioner. He was a city slicker who sold the idea to the Rivoli movie house on Broadway in 1925. Our father, Weatherbee West, leaped into the business at the new Augusta film palace near Wichita and captured the central U.S. market. Alas, Lilah fell in love with the movie palaces and the silent films inside them, instead of the mammoth pulsing machinery cooling them. She made the oddest remark when she took the train to California against all our family’s wishes, when she left the heating and air-conditioning factory for the film factory.”

  “What was that?” I asked, sniffing a terrific quote. Not that an investigator needed one like a reporter did. Great quotes, and recognizing them when you heard them, was a reporter’s lifeblood.

  She said, “The heart lies between the hand and the head.”

  “That is a great quote.” I’d heard it before, but where or when I couldn’t say.

  “I didn’t say it was great,” Lili snapped. “I said it was odd.”

  I studied her petite curvaceous figure and momentarily frowning face.

  Caressa Teagarden was a funky old lady, but at least she looked her age, unlike her so-called twin. What was really odd was how different they had become.

  “Really, I must go,” I said, standing. “You’ve given me so much insight into your sister. Thank you.”

  “I haven’t said more than a couple paragraphs about the bitch, all you’d get in a mediocre obituary for a mediocre film career.”

  “So much insight,” I repeated, backing toward the door. “I can’t wait to do a double profile on you two, kind of like the John and Yoko famous fetal-twin photo.”

  The reference so confused Lili that she stopped stalking after me on my hasty exit.

  By the time I got down the sidewalk to the curb, Dolly’s engine was already running. I’d been so taken by the charming house exterior, I’d left the keys in the car.

  So now Dolly was taking matters into her own … gears? Talk about initiative; she had ignition.

  Right on, sister, Irma chortled.

  Chapter Twelve

  WITHIN TWENTY MINUTES, Dolly and I were gliding into an old familiar setting, and a much more naturally scenic one.

  Why does returning to your Catholic girls’ high school campus make hot sessions with your road-trip lover rerun obsessively through your head as if you needed to make an accurate count of every little mortal sin for Saturday confession?

  Maybe because my familiar had morphed into a hidden but taunting rainfall necklace of tiny silver beads shimmying over my breasts. Instead of wafting the scent of the motel’s no-name soap, I feared I reeked with the aroma of fresh guilt.

  Why should I? The co-star of my mental blue movie collection was off bonding in the boonies with Leonard Tallgrass and Quicksilver. The trio was becoming such a steady partnership I was almost jealous. …

  Actually, I relished being on my own, since Our Lady of the Lake had sole custody of a four-year chunk of my sketchy history. Today’s expedition was just Dolly and me, with Irma on standby, the way I’d left Wichita two months ago.

  Dolly had never seen Our Lady of the Lake, but her whitewall tires spun up and down the gently rolling, landscaped hills. The glint of the man-made lake at the campus’s heart sparkled like a blue diamond through the lush shrubbery and trees. I also glimpsed campus buildings constructed of what we students had called “mellow yellow,” the native limestone mined from the state’s Flint Hills scenic area.

  In a few hours, I’d moved from the ugly scene at WTCH to meeting Caressa’s weird sister to cruising the only natural scenery I’d ever recalled reacting to with a … sentimental glow.

  Please. So not us, Irma commented. I’m happy you are going to get the goods on the reason for our inner angst and that annoying supine phobia of yours—not mine, I assure you—but let’s move on here.

  I’d thought I was.

  Were you with me here too, way back when, Irma? I wondered.

  I didn’t have many vivid memories of this place, just a blur of classrooms and talking nuns in Flying Nun head-dresses, and of myself bundled up to the frowning black eyebrows, wallowing across the snow-piled campus in deep winter, shivering. With tiny icicles forming on my eyelashes.

  My graphic memories bestirred Irma again.

  Brrr. Toss the Nanook of the North reminiscences. You and me were on and off here, depending on which clique you ticked off and your nondating life. I mean, all girls. Duh. I gave up on you totally at that dorky state college, and then you hit the big time at WTCH. But I will agree that this place looked cool, at least. Too cool for half the year! Snow, I’m talking, and not our seriously sexy Vegas empire builder. I mean winter, and the falling white stuff that freezes your nose and toes. Not mine, of course, but I do suffer along with you, on the inside.

  Snorting, I tuned out Irma after her mention of my confounding rock-star … “nemesis” was not too strong a word.

  Dolly slipped into a small lot carved out for gawkers as I stopped for a look-see. My conservative pump heels moved like clodhoppers over the sloping grassy hill to the lake.

  Birds were shrieking.

  Well, not really. I realized then that you don’t hear birds chirping on the Las Vegas Strip, unless a few are bopping around the greenery in the Paris’s Le Cafe Ile St. Louis restaurant.

  As I neared the teardrop-shaped lake, I spotted a single tree-thick island in its center, reached by a wooden footbridge. I felt a creeping sensation at my neck. The silver familiar was off sex patrol and changing into an innocuous chain with a long, freshly cold pendant. The familiar ran hot and cold, depending on my whereabouts, the air temperature, and my personal emotional tenor. Now it was less “Fever” and more The Waltons.

  Saints preserve me from so-square John-Boy, Irma wailed.

  I lifted the pendant. Maybe the ambiance was more … Camelot. The familiar had morphed into a miniature sword with an aurora borealis crystal on its pommel.

  I told you, Irma said. Cool.

  The smile in her voice brought one to my lips. This had been a calm retreat after the group homes. Here, I had apparently ditched real memories of any trauma or abuse for occasional nightmares too unbelievable to bother anybody else with.

  I studied the sun-dappled lake and tested a wetted finger to the light wind, as evening prepared to don her best gown and thought about dimming the sky. Soon the sun’s rays would be slanting through the trees, and then, hours later, maybe moonlight. I searched the gentle ripples for signs of an immortal woman’s naked arm.

  Nope. Still no lady in the lake.

  Smiling again, I climbed the hill to reclaim Dolly’s driver’s seat, and I didn’t stop until we parked at the limestone administration building. Maybe even an orphan can go home again.

  The Young Thing at the reception desk had matching “Edward” tattoos inside her wrists and wore her long uniform sleeves rolled up to her elbow like a workman’s shirt, the better to flaunt her workout muscles.

  Golly. They were allowing visible self-expression here now?

  “Is the mother superior still Sister Regina Caeli?” I asked, pronouncing the Latin properly as “Chay-lee.”

  “She goes by Sister Ermangarde Wallace now. Yeah. You got it the first time. Ermangarde. You can kinda see the vocation coming there, from the baptismal certificate. Who wouldn’t want to exchange that bumme
r name for something like Queen of Heaven? Not many new nuns now. Maybe the first names got better. You’re a grad, right? I recognize the navy. Never lost the uniform, huh? The campus is crawling with all these, like, older women, coming back. Like this was fun.”

  “It’s a beautiful campus.”

  “Try getting a date for the St. Lancelot’s military ball on that one.”

  “St. Lancelot’s boys’ high school is still a going concern?”

  “Do punks have pimples? We mostly date the guys from State College, unless there’s a big St. Lancelot’s formal ‘do,’ where we can put on the bustiers and the black lipstick shtick. Of course the nuns forbid cleavage, but they don’t go to the dances. You don’t look like a drag hag. I mean, like you haven’t been gone that long.”

  “One piece of advice I’ll give you—?”

  “Carnaby. Horrible first name, I know. My grandparents used to be counterculture. Still not worth going into the convent over.”

  “Okay, Carnaby. You are going to be uncool so soon. Enjoy the hip now.”

  “If you say so. That is a sweet pendant you’re wearing. You should have called for an appointment, but what the heck. Gimme your name? Mother Superior Ermangarde is still here. She never leaves.”

  “Delilah Street,” I said, trying out the truth.

  “Ooh. Delilah. Biblical bad girl. I’d kill for that name. Major cool. You ever done any black lipstick? With your white skin that would wring the Goth boys out and throw them away for the duration.”

  “I’ve done some radical lip gloss in my day,” I purred. “What are you complaining about? Carnaby is a cute name.”

  “I know, dammit. ‘Cute’ is so lame today. Hold on. I’ll ring the olde dame.”

  Somehow, the way she said “olde dame” had a Chaucer-like, uh, ring. I bet English Literature was still a required course here. Particularly the Arthurian Cycle.

  Had it only been seven years? Felt like seven centuries. I hesitated before knocking at the head nun’s age-darkened wooden door. It had an opaque pebbled-glass window like a noir private detective’s.