Vicious Grace bsd-3

by M. L. N. Hanover

“I’m not. He stage-managed all of it. My job interview. The research projects. All of it.”

  “He couldn’t have known you’d be leaving Denver,” Aubrey said. “We weren’t even having trouble back then.”

  I closed my eyes. This wasn’t how he should find out. I should have told him a year ago, just so that it wouldn’t happen this way and now. I forced myself to breathe, to look. Kim had gone gray. Less than gray. Colorless. Her shoulders slumped forward, her body turning in on itself like she was bracing for a blow.

  “Eric was the trouble between us. After him, it was impossible for me to stay there. In Denver. In my life. He ruined us.”

  “Kim—”

  “I was sleeping with Eric, Aubrey. Before I left. Almost before we were having trouble. I didn’t even really know why until . . .”

  She lifted the papers in her hand. I watched Aubrey understand, like I was seeing something delicate fall just too far away for me to catch it. Ex and Chogyi Jake and I weren’t even in the room with him.

  “I thought there was something wrong with me,” Kim said. “Even after he died, I knew I couldn’t come back to you because whatever was broken in me would still be just as broken. Do you see?”

  Ex looked between Kim and Aubrey, his face a mask of confusion and distress. Chogyi Jake leaned close to him and murmured something that made Ex’s eyes go wide. Tears were finally starting to gather in Kim’s eyes. I didn’t want to watch this. Carefully, Kim put the file down on the coffee table, half covering the blueprints of Grace. She walked down the hallway, into the secret bedroom, coming out a moment later with her purse in her hand. No one moved as she walked out the door. The sound of the latch clicking home was deep and final. Ex cleared his throat.

  “Shouldn’t someone go after—”

  “Leave her alone,” Aubrey said, and that closed the issue. He leaned forward and picked up the file. His face was empty. “I need to look at this.”

  “Aubrey,” I said, but he didn’t look at me. He put the file in his lap, smoothed the pages, licked the tip of his index finger, and opened to the first page. Ex, Chogyi Jake, and I sat in silence for a few seconds. Aubrey turned the page. The hiss of the paper seemed unnaturally loud. I stood up quietly and walked to the kitchen like Aubrey was my father in a foul mood, and anything might set him off. Chogyi Jake and Ex followed me a few seconds later. Chogyi Jake brewed tea, and Ex stared out at the moon and the stars, the lights of the city and the darkness of the lake, with blank amazement.

  “He didn’t do it,” I said. “Whatever Kim thinks she saw, she’s wrong. Eric was a good man.”

  “I always thought so too,” Chogyi Jake said, and I wanted to yell at him for being so diplomatic. It wouldn’t have killed him to just say yes, that Kim was wrong.

  “Still,” Ex said softly, “I would like a look at that file.”

  “Hey,” Eric said from my bedroom. “You’ve got a call.”

  With a thin, whispered string of obscenities, I walked to the bedroom, scooped up the cell phone, and turned off the ringer. It was David’s number, and I couldn’t talk to him right now. I let it roll to voice mail, promising myself I’d call him back if the message sounded too freaky. When I took the chance of peeking around the door frame and looking at Aubrey, he hadn’t moved from his high-backed chair. He turned another page. The air felt thick as a thunderstorm. I stepped back into the kitchen just as the voice mail icon appeared on the phone.

  “Jayné,” David’s recorded voice said. “I wanted to see how things were going. You know, if you’d found something. If there’s anything I can do. I know you said I shouldn’t go to the hospital, but I really think we should talk about that some more. So if you could give me a call back. Anytime. Don’t worry about waking me up. Okay. Thanks.”

  I deleted the message. If he wasn’t on the highway south to Chicago at that moment, he wasn’t my top priority. Chogyi Jake passed me a cup of green tea still hot enough to scald my tongue. The steam smelled like cut grass. I stopped drinking it. Out on the lake, a huge yacht made its slow way across the water, its hull outlined in white and yellow lights brighter than stars.

  “I can’t stand this,” I said, and went back into the front room.

  Aubrey didn’t look up until I took the pile of papers he’d already read out of the left side of the file. Rage bubbled just under the surface of his expression, but I kept myself from looking away. For a heartbeat, a breath, we were like two wolves fighting for dominance. I didn’t like the feeling. Aubrey looked away. I sat.

  The first five pages were a background report on Kim, but not the one I knew. It was who she had been when Eric met her. Born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Moved to Reno when she was four, and then to Oakland when she was eight. Her parents were divorced. Her mother died of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers the year Kim went to college. Her father and sister lived in Houston, but didn’t appear to be close. There was a reported sexual assault during her second year as an undergraduate, but no charges had been filed, and whoever had put the file together hadn’t been able to get a copy of the original campus police report. Her medical records showed evidence of a broken arm in childhood, a slightly enlarged left ovary, and extensive adolescent orthodontic work, but no major health conditions. The report did note that Kim had admitted to occasional bouts of bulimia when she was a graduate student, but there was no other mention of eating disorders. It outlined her work at the Medical Center, listed Aubrey as her husband, and gave both their salaries as a joint household income. The section ended with a blank page.

  It wasn’t the first of its kind I’d ever seen. I’d had my lawyer build things like it several times before. On Randolph Coin, the head of the Invisible College, shortly before I killed him. On Karen Black, when I first started working with her. Never on someone I knew. Never on someone I liked. Knowing that Karen Black had been treated for chlamydia or that Coin suffered gastric reflux hadn’t made me uncomfortable. Now, in five pages, I knew about Kim’s mother, a possible rape, eating disorders. I knew about her ovaries. This time felt different. This time I felt like I was violating something, and it made me wonder a little about all the times before when it hadn’t troubled me at all.

  After the skipped page, the notes became Eric’s. They were typed, but I didn’t need handwriting to recognize his almost telegraphic style.

  Smart. Skeptical, but not dismissive. Dedicated to Aubrey. I wonder how needy she is underneath it all.

  A sketch and description of the apartment Kim and Aubrey had been living in. I’d never seen it. Aubrey was living in a one-bedroom apartment by the time we’d met, but I imagined how it would have felt for Aubrey to revisit that part of his life this way. Eric’s notes on the place were tactical—exits, lines of sight, defensibility. Nothing in it reflected a nefarious plan. Or the entanglement I knew was coming. Instead, there were entries for each time they had met, copies of the e-mails they’d exchanged about the life cycles of parasites, about the logic of host-parasite interactions, about the idea of nonphysical intelligence. Eric annotated these with his own thoughts afterward. And then, slowly, I saw hints of the collapse.

  Eric’s notes started mentioning Grace Memorial and whether Kim would fit there. A second report detailed Kim’s research work in much more detail, including the names of her collaborators and their allies within the academic community, a sort of six-degrees-of-Grace-Memorial taking shape like the first few strands of a web. There was more speculation about Kim’s character, her relationship with Aubrey. A few pages before the end of my stack, I saw the first reference to a wendigo. Kim had told me that the first time she and Eric had slept together, they’d been trapped in a cabin waiting for a wendigo to dissipate. There was a short description of something called the Mark of Naxos that, from the context, looked like some kind of love spell. I remembered what Kim had said the first time she’d told me about the affair. How she’d found herself driving to Eric’s place without knowing she meant to. A love spell.

>   Three pages before the end of my stack, I found a two-word entry that made my chest ache and my mouth tighten.

  Fucked her.

  In my life to date, I’d had sex with three men. I’d kissed four. I knew I wasn’t the world’s most experienced woman when it came to love or sex, but I also knew cold when I saw it. No hint of guilt about the betrayal of Aubrey. No regret. And what was almost worse, no pleasure. Some part of me had expected the affair to have been the kind of thing I’d seen in movies. Two people drawn to each other, even though they knew it was wrong. Good intentions washed away by passion. I’d never expected that he’d be singing her praises and beating his breast like in some kind of Gothic romance, but I hadn’t been prepared for the clinical chill of those two words.

  He hadn’t even been bragging.

  I took another pile of papers from Aubrey. He was almost finished. He looked sick.

  Eric cataloged the death of Kim’s marriage, the fights she’d had with Eric, the reports he’d heard from Aubrey of the fights they’d had. The times she’d told Eric that she would never come to him again, and then later the times that she did. Twice he noted that Aubrey seemed suspicious, but nothing more. And then Eric’s notes went back to the web of relationships and Grace Memorial. An entry noted that the assistant to a personnel director at UIC had an unsupportable credit card debt. Eric listed the man’s contact information. A study touching on the cystic extent of T. gondii infections lost its funding at UCLA and found a place to continue crunching its numbers at Grace Memorial. A few coincidences reminded a Chicago-based friend of Kim’s of her. They got back in touch. Things in Denver got worse. And then the break. Kim hadn’t talked to Eric, so all the entries were reports from Aubrey. Kim had moved out. She’d asked for a divorce. She’d put in for work elsewhere.

  Aubrey handed me the last pages and walked back toward the bedroom without speaking.

  A flurry of fresh entries, tracking each of Kim’s applications, and one by one, sinking them. The money for the NIH study went to AIDS research instead. The interviewer at LSU heard a rumor through the grapevine that Kim had an alcohol problem. The promising young researcher stopped his fieldwork in Panama a few months early, edging her out for a position in England.

  And so, Kim came to live in Chicago and work at Grace.

  The record ended, I assumed, when the hidden rooms were sealed. There might have been more. There could have been moments through the years when Kim had thought of leaving Chicago and Grace. If there were, Eric hadn’t listed them here. I took all of the pages, squaring the edges neatly on the coffee table just to give my hands something to do.

  My head felt like someone had blown a wind through it, my thoughts scattered and powerless as sparrows in a storm. And underneath the confusion and emptiness, a raw, red anger started to grow. None of it—none of it—had anything to do with me. I’d been trying to read all the way through The Grapes of Wrath for my high school English class when all that had been going on, and how dare Kim and Aubrey leave me feeling like I was supposed to apologize for something?

  I was drowning, grasping at anything that floated through my head. I was totally out of line, and what was worse I knew it. I just couldn’t stop.

  Aubrey was sitting on the bed, his hands laced on one knee.

  “So,” he said. “Just one question.”

  I stood in the doorway, arms crossed.

  “You knew,” he said. “About Kim and Eric. You knew, right?”

  “She told me,” I said.

  “You didn’t tell me,” he said.

  “I asked if you’d want to know whether she’d been sleeping with someone, and you said it didn’t matter now. That you didn’t want to know. That’s what you said.”

  I was whining. I was starting to cry. I felt the crushing weight of having done something unforgivable and also the monstrous injustice of not even knowing exactly what it was.

  “I came to help you do Eric’s work,” Aubrey said. His voice was calm and soft and implacable as the sea. “Kim aside, Eric’s betrayal would have been germane.”

  “You wouldn’t have come?” I said. It came out as a challenge. Tell me that you wouldn’t have stayed with me.

  “If you’d given me all the information and let me make my choice,” he said softly, “probably I would have joined up. But I can’t know now, can I? You told me as much as you saw fit, and I did what you wanted. Worked out fine.”

  His gentleness was a mask. It was a fake. I could feel the pain coming off him like heat from a fire. I could feel his need to hurt something. Someone. Me.

  “You’re like him,” he said, looking at his hands. “You’re a lot like Eric.”

  I coughed out a breath, something between a laugh and a gut-punch gasp. He had picked his words well. They stung.

  “Yesterday that would have been a compliment,” I said.

  “It isn’t yesterday,” he said. And then, a long moment later, “I can’t do this.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “I should leave now.”

  “What can’t you do? Where are you going?” I said as he walked past me. “Aubrey, where are you going? Aubrey!”

  He didn’t look back at me. The front door closed behind him.

  FIFTEEN

  When I woke up on Sunday morning, it took a few glorious, floating seconds to remember why Aubrey wasn’t in the bed beside me. Then, like someone pressing a hand on my sternum, it all came back. I rolled over, pressing the pillows over my head. I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to go out. I wanted to sleep my way backward in time to when the worst thing I had to face was a rider buried alive under its own prison. It seemed vaguely monstrous that my wounds from David’s house hadn’t healed yet. It was only two days ago. It was forever.

  Eventually my bladder forced me out of bed, and by the time I was done in the bathroom I was too awake to even pretend sleep. Instead, I sat in bed and checked my e-mail. Curtis, my younger brother, reported that my older brother, Jay, had indeed gotten his girlfriend pregnant and had set the wedding date for before she started showing. Our mother was “hip deep in wedding magazines.” My lawyer had sent a financial report with a note that I shouldn’t panic, the downturn was temporary and my holdings safely diversified. I checked my former friends’ blogs. I cruised a few of the paranormal sites; I Googled haugsvarmr and leyiathan and got all the same links I’d found before; I wasted time. It would have felt like goofing off except for the dread that seemed to hang in the air like dust motes. Aubrey’s bags were still in the room. I tried to take comfort in that.

  When I couldn’t put it off any longer, I closed the laptop, steeled myself, and went out to the living room. A scrim of thin clouds stretched to the horizon, turning the blue to white. The green-gray lake stuttered and trembled, tiny whitecaps stippling it. Chogyi Jake sat at the table.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He turned to me, smiling the same as always. It was just my imagination that put the weariness around his eyes and the gray cast to his skin. I pulled myself up to sit on the countertop.

  “Bad night,” I said.

  “Difficult,” he agreed.

  “You read the thing?”

  “Ex and I both. It wasn’t pleasant.”

  “Yeah, no,” I said. “Ex around?”

  “Out at the store. We’re low on toothpaste and toilet paper.”

  “And Aubrey . . . ?”

  “Came in just before dawn and slept in the new bedroom for a little while,” Chogyi Jake said. “He went out an hour ago.”

  I nodded, caught between relief that he’d come back at all and a twisting rage that he’d left again without at least the courtesy of speaking to me. Of course if I hadn’t been sulking in my room, he would have had to. The thought didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No, but he didn’t take the car keys.”

  “Okay,” I said. That meant he was nearby. Or using taxis and public transport. Or K
im was driving. I hated how much I didn’t like that last option. “All right.”

  “He’s hurting,” Chogyi Jake said. “The information in that file is causing him a lot of pain.”

  “That’s deeply stupid,” I said, knowing as I said it that I was out of line. I couldn’t help it.

  “You’re hurting too. We all are.”

  “Then we’re all stupid,” I said. “We don’t have any idea what the context of that file was. Okay, it looks lousy, but we don’t know what would have happened if Eric had done something else, right? I mean, maybe he knew that Kim would get killed if she stayed in Denver. Or with Aubrey. Magic does that sometimes, right? Tells you what’s going to happen.”

  “It can,” Chogyi Jake said.

  “So how is Aubrey so sure that wasn’t how it started? How do we even know for sure that it’s not a fake that someone snuck in here to mess with our heads? I’m just amazed, you know? We find one thing that looks weird, and he just loses faith in Eric. He’s just . . . folding.”

  Chogyi Jake looked at me in silence for what seemed like an hour and probably took fewer than ten seconds. He lifted his eyebrows and looked down at the floor. Back me up on this, I thought. I already knew that he wouldn’t.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Chogyi Jake said, picking his way through the syllables like they might explode. “And I understand what Aubrey is thinking too.”

  The refrigerator hum dominated the room. My mouth tasted like ashes. A flock of pigeons wheeled past the window, gray wings skimming so close to the glass I could have reached out a hand and plucked them out of the sky.

  “But you can’t be sure, right? We don’t know why he decided to do that. And even if Eric did break Aubrey and Kim up and put her here, he might have had a reason.”

  “You can never prove a negative,” Chogyi Jake said. “There always might be some letter or notebook or simple fact that changes everything. Makes it not what it appears to be. Always. Even if we go through every drawer and box in every property Eric owned, we can’t know that something new won’t show up. Only that it hasn’t yet.”