by Lyn Benedict
Sylvie drew her truck to the curb and walked over, belatedly glad she was wearing Zoe’s overpriced gift jacket. In this neighborhood, it gave her that much more time to ask questions. She wouldn’t be dismissed as just another laborer looking for work.
Pity she hadn’t had time to get her nails done. A good manicure was better than a secret handshake for a quick test of who was exactly who, and whether she was someone worth knowing.
As it was, the woman barely looked up when Sylvie’s shadow crossed onto her lawn.
Foolish, the little dark voice said. The wolf comes in many guises.
Including a woman wearing a heavy leather jacket on a warm day. Sometimes Sylvie thought wearing a jacket was more blatant than strapping a gun to her thigh.
But Meredith Alvarez—according to Alex’s file, the second wife to Andreas Alvarez, homemaker, and personal shopper for a certain subset of other homemakers—was obviously more concerned with her car.
“Mrs. Alvarez,” Sylvie said, “may I ask you a few questions? It won’t take long.” Always the awkward part, asking for information from someone who had no need to give it to her. But Sylvie could be—catastrophically pushy, Alex said—determined.
“I already talked to the police,” Meredith said. “It wasn’t my car. My car’s been here all night.” She sounded fierce; either the uniforms had given her a hard time, or she wasn’t sure she had told them the truth.
From the hesitation with which she viewed the car, the remote slipping through her fingers, Sylvie knew which way she leaned. Given a hard time, Meredith should be spitting mad, storming down to her husband’s law office.
Staring at the car . . .
Sylvie took a couple of steps closer, stopped in the shade of a bright poinciana, watched a corn snake slip away through pine-bark mulch. She glanced at the Navigator, at the fine beach-sand grit dusting the wheel well and sifting onto the garage floor, sand and pulverized shell.
“I’m not with the police,” Sylvie said. “I don’t report to anyone.” The woman’s gaze dropped from hers, studied the smooth concrete as if judging whether the tree shade was an oil shadow. Sylvie bit back frustration. There was always a password in the computer that was the human brain. Hit it right, and all the information you could want came pouring out. But it took trial and error, and the risk of potential lock-outs.
“But you work for someone, right? Or do you just follow the police around, looking for trouble?”
“Wrong way round,” Sylvie muttered. When she had Meredith’s attention again, she said, “The people I work for don’t need details. They only care about results.”
Still nothing, though Meredith bit at her lip, gnawed at it as if she could swallow the words that wanted to erupt back.
Sylvie said, “I was there, last night.”
Sometimes all she needed was to poke people in their curiosity. Meredith knew something was wrong; she just didn’t know what.
“What happened?” Meredith asked. A weight of desperation laced her voice, all her fears surfacing at once. The remote dropped to the driveway with a click that she ignored, stepping over it to take Sylvie’s arm, shaking it. “It wasn’t a hit-and-run; it couldn’t have been a hit-and-run. There’s no damage. There’s never any damage.”
Sylvie latched onto the interesting word in the babble. “Never?”
Meredith pulled back, her face a giant billboard for “oh crap.”
Sylvie let her breath out, slowed the urgent voice that wanted her to shake the information out of the woman. This was a mostly nothing case. Theft, a little property damage, and a sleeping spell or two did not make for strong-arm tactics.
Easy does it, she reminded herself. Self-control. And smile. The woman smiled back, but it was tentative.
Reassurance wouldn’t go amiss here, but only a little. Too much, and the woman might stop talking. Just because the case wasn’t life-and-death didn’t mean Sylvie wanted to waste man-hours, especially since she had a bitch of a case on hold in her apartment.
“It wasn’t a hit-and-run,” she said, patting the woman’s forearm. “No one got hurt.”
Meredith started to relax, then her back stiffened, her jaw came up. Sylvie short-circuited the woman’s dawning indignation with a steely, “This time.” She firmed her grip on the woman’s arm, and said, “Whatever’s going on has nothing to do with you—” A gamble, but the woman just didn’t seem the sort, didn’t twig any of Sylvie’s very well-tuned senses. “That doesn’t mean you can’t help.”
Meredith took a breath, and said, “I didn’t say anything to the police because I knew they wouldn’t believe me. My husband doesn’t believe me. Why would a set of strangers?”
“Sometimes a stranger is the only one who has the luxury of being able to,” Sylvie said.
Meredith fumbled through her purse for a cigarette. “You have a light?”
Sylvie reached into her pockets to show willing and was surprised to have her search pay off. She passed the pale pink lighter over, and remembered, Oh yeah, Zoe smoked.
Meredith looked at the lighter, and her tense brow relaxed. She handed it back to Sylvie, and Sylvie added Chanel lighters to the list of “items to soothe suspicious Grove women.”
Meredith smoked her cigarette halfway, then pinched it out, the automatic habit of a woman who’d spent most of her adult life in financial difficulties. Then she hesitated and dropped the rest of it, and Sylvie thought, Yeah, she married up but is having a hard time adapting.
“I don’t understand it,” Meredith said, turning and drifting toward the open garage. She paused on the lip, visibly waiting for Sylvie to catch up.
Once inside the dim garage, Meredith hit the door button, sealing herself and Sylvie in. Sylvie rested her hand on her gun. She didn’t think that Meredith was a part of the burglary ring, but caution rarely hurt.
Meredith shrugged. “The neighbors are curious enough about the police coming here. I don’t want to give them any more gossip.” She opened the driver’s-side door, climbed up, and gestured for Sylvie to come closer, until she was practically on top of the woman, could smell scented shampoo and the faint line of sweat at her hairline. The woman was honestly afraid. Of her car. Or of what it was being used to do.
“I noticed it when I kept needing to get gas, nearly twice as often as usual. Andreas thought someone might be si-phoning it off, so I started keeping it locked in the garage at night.”
“But nothing changed,” Sylvie said.
“What was I supposed to tell the police? That someone’s breaking into our locked, alarm-protected garage and borrowing the car on a regular basis without my knowledge? My husband doesn’t believe it. But right here!” She tapped the odometer with an agitated fingernail. “Forty miles just last night while we slept!”
Sylvie dropped back out of the car, took in the clean lines of the garage, the gap where the second vehicle should be, and said, “Your husband, Andreas? He’s not borrowing it?” It didn’t seem likely, not when he was making suggestions on how to stop it, but people played mind games for all sorts of reasons.
Meredith shook her head, confident in that at least. Sylvie said, “Pop the doors.”
When the side door opened, Sylvie grabbed a flashlight off the wall hook, crawled into the car, and began an inch-by-inch search. “Anyone overly interested in your daily routine? Who’d know when they could borrow the car at times you wouldn’t notice?”
“My husband has enemies; he’s a criminal lawyer—”
“No,” Sylvie said. “They’ve made hash of your alarm code. If they wanted in your house, wanted to harm you or him, they’d have done so already.”
A new quality of silence reached her, and she glanced up. Meredith had blanched. Sylvie mentally reran her last words, judged them too blunt. Too scary. Too pragmatic.
Her little dark voice chimed in. Too bad. Truth is brutal.
“Look,” Sylvie said, “this isn’t about you or your husband. This is about your car being convenient.” I
t had to be the burglars, the glory-seeking teens. It was one thing to sleep through your car being stolen when it was parked on the street, when the engine sound could be mistaken for a neighbor leaving—most of them had upper-range SUVs also. It was another thing to sleep through a locked garage door rising, a car being backed out and driven away. Homeowners had twitchy nerves for out-of-place sounds.
Either the Alvarezes were heavy nighttime drinkers, Ambien poppers, or they’d fallen prey to Sylvie’s sleep-spreading burglars. Sylvie bent her head back to the search, pleased. It was always nice when she was on the right trail.
“So—” she prompted. “Any nosey parkers, gawkers?”
Meredith said, “I don’t know what you want to know.”
“Who pays attention to you? Have you seen anyone lurking?”
“We have the neighborhood watch,” she said.
Sylvie let out a frustrated breath. “Work with me, Meredith. You’d call the cops if strangers were nosing around. What about locals? They keep taking your car. It’s not ’cause of the spiffy paint job. People are lazy by nature. They want easy. They want close.”
Meredith fiddled with the strap of her purse, ran her fingers up and down the snakeskin. “Isabella asked me once if it was a stick or an automatic, and her boyfriend asked me if the rear seats came out.”
“Isabella?” Sylvie asked, dropping flat to her belly and worming forward for a better look. Something glittered from beneath the third row of seats. She scrabbled for it, collecting carpet fluff beneath her short nails, and the ever-present limestone sand.
“Martinez, the neighbor’s girl. She said she was going to be car shopping.”
“Yeah, like her mother’d buy her a car with her grades—” Sylvie jerked her head up, her brain catching up with what her mouth knew. “Bella Martinez. High-school girl? Ittybitty bleached blonde, a fondness for shiny clothes and cheap cigarettes?”
“Yeah,” Meredith said. She gnawed her lip, her brow furrowing. Really thinking for the first time; even upside down, Sylvie could see the gears clicking slowly away in the woman’s mind. “That was . . . before the trouble started.”
“Great,” Sylvie muttered. “Just great.” Zoe was mad at her already; wait until she questioned her friends. A disturbing idea took tentative root: If Bella was involved in these burglaries, did Zoe know? When Sylvie had mentioned the burglaries, Zoe had looked sick; Sylvie had chalked it up to worry and distaste, but it could have been more personal for Zoe.
Her fingers finally closed on the bright spark beneath the seat, and all the hairs on her body rose in defensive spikes. Cold washed over her in a painful wave. Sylvie’s mouth dried; nausea roiled; she jerked her hand back and dropped the item on the carpet before her face, setting off a broken duet between her own thoughts and the shrieking of the little dark voice, woken to full alert with a single touch.
A fingernail—
Bad—
Not a fake, a—
Bad magic—
—real human fingernail, ridged and furrowed keratin, an old woman’s fingernail, a shred of flesh still clinging to the base, as sere as a mummy’s. The nail was painted, a gloss of silver, a layer of rainbow sparkle, and a tiny ornament dangling from the curled tip—a diamante heart. Sylvie somehow doubted the—
Dead—
—woman had chosen the colors. Decorated after death was . . . worrying. Decorated after death was The Silence of the Lambs.
Belatedly, she heard Meredith holding forth, really getting into it, the indignation that had been stifled by fear erupting now that she had someone to blame.
“. . . Isabella and her delinquent friends. I don’t care that they’re in designer clothes. They’re more than spoiled; they’re . . .”
Sylvie dragged her head out of the SUV, delicately dropping the fingernail into her pocket with a shudder. She interrupted, “You ever find anything unusual in the SUV . . . ? Oh, you did.” Meredith’s face told her as much; her rant broke off, and her eyes angled away, over, anywhere she didn’t have to meet Sylvie head-on.
“No,” she said, and Sylvie sighed.
“C’mon, Meredith, I’m on your side, remember? I believe you. Just tell me what you found, and I’ll get out of your hair. As a bonus? Your car won’t take road trips without you anymore.”
Originally, she had planned to find the vehicle and follow it to see if she could catch the people behind the burglaries. But with that little bit of dead flesh in her pocket, her plan had changed. High-schoolers or not—and Sylvie was inclined to believe the connection, tenuous as it was—they needed to be stopped immediately if they were messing around with magic like this.
Meredith fidgeted, and Sylvie said, “What was it?”
“A piece of jewelry.”
“Show me,” Sylvie said.
Meredith shook her head. “I gave it away. It was just some ticky-tacky skinny dog pin. It wasn’t even gold.”
Sylvie sighed. The brooch was on the list that Conrad had given Alex: one antique art deco silver greyhound. Gone faster than a real one round a track. Still, confirmation was confirmation. “Let me out. I’ve got things to do.”
“You said you’d stop them from stealing my car,” Meredith said.
“Do you have to be anywhere today?” Sylvie said.
Meredith shook her head. Sylvie’s first instinct was to shoot out the tires, but Meredith seemed the kind of woman who might be . . . upset with such black-and-white practicality, might react by calling the police. Sylvie had had enough of them for one day.
Self-control, Sylvie remembered. Taking it easy. She’d forgotten how to interact with ordinary people, with people she wasn’t trying to intimidate or kill.
“My suggestion? Park it elsewhere—your husband’s workplace—or if you’re feeling hard-core? Let the air out of the tires and call AAA when you need to get going. They’ll move on to easier marks, ’cause these kids—it’s all about easy.”
“What good is it if it’s not ready the minute I need it?” Meredith scowled, unhappy with Sylvie’s solution, but she coded in the release for the garage door. It rose smoothly, letting in warm sunlight and the green scent of newly cut grass, all the more pleasant for having been in a space that smelled of oil, metal, and corruption.
Sylvie shrugged as she stepped out. “Your decision, either way.”
“I could get my husband to sit up, hire a security service. . . .”
“I wouldn’t,” Sylvie said. “Best not to corner people you know nothing about. If you can divert their attention, that’s good. Confronting them? You won’t like where that ends up.”
It might end with her husband or the security guard passed out on the garage floor. It might end with someone steering the SUV over their unconscious bodies. Sylvie didn’t know how deep the sleep was, whether its victim could wake, but given the way she and Wright had gone down, poleaxed into unconsciousness, she could easily imagine the worst, that this magical sleep was deep enough that there’d be no fighting back.
She waved Meredith off, said, “I’m going to go talk to Bella Martinez now. Move the car. If you don’t, you’ve no one to blame but yourself if it goes wandering again.”
Meredith turned with a huff. The garage door rolled down after her. Another person ignoring perfectly good advice.
Sylvie rolled her shoulders, flapped the edges of her jacket, dispersing the heat trapped against her skin. A man, scraping grass clippings into the mower, froze, and Sylvie dropped the back of her jacket down over the gun. She waved at him and kept moving. Nothing to see here. Just a girl with a gun, common enough. Though maybe not in the Grove.
Sylvie walked up the long drive to Bella’s house, scuffing her feet in the gravel, enjoying the shade, and dawdling. There wasn’t going to be any good news here. Even if she hadn’t been darkening the Martinezes’ door, hunting glory-seeking burglars, she’d still be bearing the bad news of Bella’s pharmaceutical forays.
She climbed the limestone stairs to a shallow, tiled porch,
framed by wrought-iron pillars wound about with jasmine, and rang the doorbell. She didn’t have to wait long; the Martinezes’ housekeeper opened the door, an old frown on a young face. She had always looked worried on the occasions Sylvie had seen her, so she tried not to feel responsible.
“I’m Zoe’s sister,” Sylvie said. She tested names in her head. Surely she could remember one woman’s name—this was her job, to recall the details that others forgot. Something old-fashioned. Ethel, Edwina . . .
“She’s not here.” Her voice carried a tinge of an accent, vaguely French, and Sylvie smiled. She remembered now. Eleanor. Haitian, working her way through med school at UM after her scholarship ran out. Eleanor’s dark fingers curled around the door, her arm a polite bar.
“That’s all right,” Sylvie said. “I really just wanted to have a word or two with Bella.”
“She’s sick.”
“Hungover?”
“Sick,” Eleanor repeated.
Sylvie leaned against the doorjamb, wistfully thinking of the cooler air inside; if she could get past the door, Eleanor would have to offer her coffee, a seat, a chance to soak up the AC. “Eleanor, I really do need to talk to Bella.” She pulled the pill bottle out of her purse and shook it.
Eleanor swore, a long ripple of Creole, snatched the bottle from Sylvie’s hand, and headed back into the house, trailing a plaintive cry, “They’re going to get me expelled.”
Sylvie took inattention for invitation and followed, her sneakers soundless on the smooth Mexican tile. “Get you expelled?” she asked. Scuffling noises came from down the hall, so she headed that way, found Eleanor ransacking her own room, loosing her temper on the only things in the house that belonged to her. She finally threw a book across the room, sat down on the bed, and put her face in her hands.
“You’re not dealing to her,” Sylvie said.
“Does it matter where she’s getting the shit? There’s a poor med student in the house, and the daughter’s got pills enough to give away. Who will be blamed? Tell me.”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “I still need to talk to Bella.”