“OK, then.” Edie rose gracefully to her feet. “I’ll go get my big sketchbook. This one’s too small. Cramps my style.”
“So you, um, need the sketchbook?” Lily asked. “To see things?”
“Not exactly,” Edie said. “Before our adventures, the episodes only occurred when I was drawing. Afterward, it was coming at me all the time.” She smiled a secret smile. “Kev helped me, though. We found ways to tamp it down. But I still find having a pencil helps me focus better.” She gave Lily a wink. “Want to be my latest experiment?”
“I’m game,” Lily said.
Tam looked at her with renewed respect as Edie left the room. “You’re a braver woman than I,” she said.
“You?” Lily let out a crack of laughter. “Who’s braver than you? Get real. You’re an ass-kicking bombshell commando. Please.”
“But I’ve never let Edie draw for me,” Tam said softly. “I don’t want to monsters of my past. I prefer that they stay buried.”
Lily shivered again. The sun had sunk behind the haze of clouds on the horizon and leached the room of color but for the firelight. “Anything,” she said, her voice tight. “I’ll look under any rock I can think of to help me beat this.”
“Don’t scare her,” Sveti chided Tam. “I think it is good thing.”
“Me, too,” Liv said, snuggling her baby closer.
Tam nodded slowly, and a small smile softened her marble perfection. “I didn’t mean to dissuade you. It was a compliment.”
“Oh. Great. Well, thanks,” Lily muttered.
The damage was done, though. She had full-fledged heebiejeebies by the time Edie came back with charcoal and a large sketchbook. She flipped on a lamp and sat down on the floor a few feet in front of Lily, leafing through the pages until she found a blank one. She bent her leg to prop the sketchbook. “Sure about this?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah.” Lily fidgeted. “Do I need to, um, do anything?”
“No,” Edie said absently. “Just relax.”
“Hah,” Lily mouthed. “Right.”
“Look out at the ocean,” Liv suggested. “Think of something else.”
Lily was so nervous, as if bracing for something painful. But the ocean gave her something to focus on. Vast, evocative, and calming.
No one said a word. Edie’s charcoal scribbled, scratched, whirred. At one point, Lily gave in to curiosity and peeked at Edie’s face.
She looked away, unnerved, although Edie had not seen her. The woman’s eyes were lit by an iridescent glow. A trick of the light, shining on her silver-gray eyes. The pencil jerked and scribbled as if it had a life of its own. Lily composed herself with effort, looked back at the ocean.
Time passed. An agonizing amount. And finally, the pencil scratching slowed and stopped.
Lily looked. Edie was gazing at what she’d drawn, looking perplexed. Tam, Sveti, and Liv peered over her shoulder, fascinated.
“So?” Lily’s voice was sharp. “What is it?”
Edie chewed on her lip, frowning for a moment. “I have no idea,” she said. “I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe you will.”
Lily rose to her feet and realized, to her embarrassment, that her knees were too rubbery to bear her weight. She covered the defect by plopping onto her knees and then her butt next to Edie on the floor. Her teeth were chattering. “Let me see.” She held out her hand.
Edie passed her the sketchbook. Lily took a deep breath. Looked.
Throbbing hot-cold darkness rose up and blotted out everything.
She was lying on her side. They were yelling her name from far away. Hands shaking her. Patting her face. Bit by bit, she came back. Edie and the rest were crouching over her, their faces anxious.
“I’m OK,” she croaked, trying to push herself up. “Sorry.”
“Rest,” Tam said sharply. “Lie down. Just rest and breathe.”
“Let me look at it again.” Lily kept struggling.
Tam shoved her down. “No,” she snapped. “I said to rest.”
“And I said to let . . . me . . . look!” Lily sat upright, shoved the woman’s hands away, and grabbed the sketchbook from Sveti’s hands/span>
It set her heart thudding, but she didn’t faint this time. Same image. Still there. She rubbed her eyes, still not trusting them.
A woman’s face, in her sixties. Beautiful in a subtle way. Strong bones, well-cut mouth. Smiling. And her eyes. Oh, God, her eyes. They stared up out of the paper, straight at Lily. Soft with tenderness. With love. Lily covered her mouth with her hand as tears streamed down.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, rocking. “Oh, my God.”
The other women waited patiently, and finally Tam’s patience snapped. “For the love of God, Lily!” she burst out. “Who is it?”
“My mother,” Lily whispered.
The others exchanged rapid, questioning looks. “Your mother. We never talked about your mother,” Tam said, delicately. “Is she, ah . . .”
“Dead? Yes. Twenty-nine years ago, almost. The day I was born.” Lily couldn’t tear her eyes from the drawing. “She looks about the age she’d have been now. If she’d lived.”
There was a dumbfounded silence.
“You’re sure?” Liv asked.
Lily nodded. “There were pictures of her all over the house. My father was an amateur photographer. She was his favorite subject. I stared at those pictures for hours when I was a kid. But I never saw one where she looked like she was looking at me. Seeing me. Oh, God.” She sniffed, almost angrily. “What is she doing here?” she burst out. “What does she have to do with anything? She never even knew me!”
Tears came down. Lily shoved the sketchbook away. She didn’t want to risk splashing it with tears and smudging such a precious, astonishing thing. She buried her face in her hands. It roared through her, a flash flood of feeling, through a desert that had forgotten what flooding felt like. Grieving for a mother she’d never known seemed senseless, but there was no arguing with feelings that literally knocked her to the floor. The other women gathered around her in a protective cluster of warm bodies, stroking hands on her back, her hair.
“She did, too, know you,” Tam said fiercely.
Lily peered up at her, sniffling. “Huh?”
“Your mother. She knew you perfectly well. And she still does.” Tam grabbed Lily’s hand and laid it on her belly just as the baby inside rolled and flopped. “You think I don’t know this little girl? I know her, and she knows me. But the knowledge is on those other frequencies. The ones we think we can’t tune into, but we can. You just did. You know your mother. Or why would you be crying?”
Lily laughed, soggily. “Oh, stress? Abandonment issues?”
“Stop being a smart-ass,” Edie scolded and gave her a hug that set Lily off again. Then Sveti lunged in. The girl felt as delicate as a baby bird, but her grip was strong. “She wants you to know she’s watching over you. That she loves you,” Sveti whispered. “I am so happy for you.”
Then it was Liv’s turn, with Eamon squirming in between them, grabbing Lily’s hair and trying to climb it, ouch. More hugs. More tears.
It was a long time before Lily could wipe her face and look at the drawing again. With wonder, fear. Something approaching holy awe.
For some reason, it made her heart lighter. Reminded her of a feeling she hadn’t felt since she was young. Breathless wonder.
Tam tilted her chin up and smiled into her eyes. “I’m glad it turned out well for you,” she said. She pated her belly. “Time to feed the fetus. Val said something about osso buco, right? And something tells me that you nonpregnant ladies could all use a glass of red wine.”
Lily let out a watery giggle. “I can’t think about food right now.”
“You will when you smell it, trust me,” Liv informed her.
Edie draped her arm over Lily’s shoulders. They trooped out into the corridor, Lily clutching Edie’s sketchbook. “I feel like I’ve just seen pink and purple for the first time,” Li
ly told her. “Can I keep it?”
“Oh, God, yes,” Edie said. “It’s yours. Just let me spray some fixative on it so it won’t smear. We’ll get it framed for you, if you like.”
“I would like,” she said, tears welling. “I’ll treasure it forever.”
The other women exchanged delighted glances.
“Well, now,” Liv said softly. “Listen to that. Excellent.”
“To what?” Lily glanced around at them, bewildered.
“Talking about forever,” Edie said. “That’s a very good sign.”
“Forever is a long time,” Tam said, smiling. “Long enough for children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.”
“They’ll pass that picture down through the generations,” Liv said. “They’ll tell the story of their ancestress, contacting her mother across the void between life and death, and invoking her protection.”
Fanciful, but she liked the sound of it. The feeling inside her was so strange. It took a while to pin a name to it. She couldn’t be sure.
But maybe it was hope.
24
The coffee was stone cold, and so was he. Bruno spat out the bitter liquid, wiped his mouth. He could hear it on the airwaves, the other men si
lently wondering how to break it to him about the point of diminishing returns. He took a bite of the peanut butter and chocolate–flavored energy bar, but the lump of soy protein and corn syrup just sat there in his mouth, dry and inert. He was too damn tired to chew.
He stared down at the unbeautiful fruits of their labors. Three skeletons, laid on a tarp, their bones more or less in order, since Kev of course knew the position of every bone in the human skeleton, of which there were hundreds. Kev also had some sixth sense that allowed him to distinguish a muddy, rodent-gnawed metatarsal from a twig or a rock. The fingers on the corpses’ right hands, of course, were not there. Tony had chopped them off, sent them to the Ranieris. Clothes had long since rotted away. They’d searched the earth around each torso, combing through every pebble, every grain of sand. No locket.
He’d gone over so much dirt, particularly the dirt packed around Rudy’s bones. First with the metal detector. Then sifting each individual handful. He’d gone over it and over it. His fingertips were sore.
The skeletons seemed so small. He remembered huge ogres. Now they were a fragile bundle of dirty sticks. Beaten with the rain.
Grim and sad. And ominous.
Bruno crouched and studied Rudy’s mocking grin, or the top half of it, as if it could tell him something. The other men had been shot in the back of the head, execution style. Not Rudy. Tony had wanted to look the guy in the eyes as he pulled the trigger.
Kev appeared over t rise and approached the fallen tree upon which Bruno was sitting. He sat next to him. His silence said it all. The sun was down. The clouds were rolling in. Fog wreathed the trees. Night would fall soon. They’d been at it for fourteen hours. This was nuts.
He got that. But it made him so frustrated he wanted to kill.
“So,” Kev began.
“Don’t,” Bruno snarled. “Don’t start. I know.”
Kev’s eyebrow quirked. “What did you think I was going to say?”
Bruno dropped his head into his hands. “Don’t want to hear it.”
Kev sat there and didn’t say it. “I just went up onto the bluff,” he remarked, after a while. “Called Edie.”
“Yeah? So?”
“They were eating dinner,” Kev said.
“Oh. Well. Bully for them.”
“Osso buco,” Kev said dreamily. “Rosemary potatoes, insalata Calabrese, with hothouse tomatoes and sweet red onion. Herbed asiago biscuits. And a nice, fruity primitivo di Manduria to wash it all down.”
Bruno looked at the energy bar and spat the gluey, unchewed lump out. “You fucking sadist,” he said. “What did I do to deserve that?”
“It was just for fun. Did I mention the chocolate cream pie?”
“You can’t treat me like this,” Bruno complained. “You said I saved your ass, right? Remember? You owe me.”
Kev’s grin flashed. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“No worries. Nothing’s more humbling than digging up corpses.”
They let that happy thought hang in the air for a while. Kev spoke again. “Edie did a drawing.” His voice was elaborately casual. “For Lily.”
Bruno sat bolt upright. “One of her special ones? No shit?”
“Absolutely none,” Kev said.
Bruno practically bounced with eagerness. After the zombie masters adventure, he was a big believer in Edie’s supernatural abilities. “And? So? What did she see? What did she draw?”
Kev’s mouth twitched. “Your mother-in-law.”
Bruno gaped at him stupidly. “Eh?”
“You heard me,” Kev said. “She drew a portrait of Lily’s mom.”
“But . . . but . . .” Bruno trailed off, baffled. “But the woman’s been dead ever since Lily was—”
“Yeah, I know. Weird, isn’t it? Edie was blown away. Lily, too. She couldn’t stop crying, Edie said. It was super intense.”
Bruno stared down at the skeletons. Steam backed up between his ears. He got up, paced to blow some of it off before his head exploded. “Super intense,” he said. “Yay for dear old Mom. And completely and totally fucking useless, for all practical purposes. Why couldn’t she have drawn a picture of the bastard who’s doing this to us? Holding up his business card? With a Google map?”
Kev looked away to hide his smile, but Bruno sensed it from the shape of the crinkles at his temples. “Sorry,” he said meekly. “The mysterious powers of my magic lady friend cannot be commanded.”
“Great!” Bruno yelled it toward the sky. “Just great! The spirits from beyond rouse themselves to contact us, and what do I get? A picture of my late future mother-in-law! I need a fucking break!”
He punctuated the statement with a violent kick aimed at a chunk of rotten log that had been lying on some of the bones. They’d been forced to excavate it, hoist the thing out. It split into two pieces, rotten as a sponge, but the blow still sent a jarring thwang-g-g-g of pain shuddering up his leg. He shook the sore foot, feeling stupid.
Kev, being a genius and all, was smart enough to grasp that now was not the time for more bullshit. He picked up a metal detector and went back to his piece of dirt. God, how Bruno loved the guy for that.
Sean, too, soldiered grimly on. Raking the mud they had displaced so they could search it again. The men’s movements were heavy with exhaustion. Davy and Con were out circling. Nobody said a word. He realized, with a heavy feeling in his guts, that he, Bruno Ranieri, had to be the one to call it quits. It was his life at stake, his locket, his dead mamma, his skeletal ogres, his girlfriend in danger. They were deferring to him. Nobody wanted to let him down.
The weight of the responsibility made him feel vaguely sick.
He checked his watch. Two minutes left of the ten-minute break he was allowing himself. He closed his eyes, saw mudstained skeletons dancing, leering. An elusive glint of gold. He forced himself to think it through again. It could have fallen out of Rudy’s pocket at any point in his rough journey here. It could have been dug up by an animal, carried off by a magpie or a squirrel who mistook it for a new kind of nut.
And after eighteen years, whatever could possibly be in it would be degraded beyond recognition. Anything on paper would be a blackened crust of mold. And what else could it be in such a small space?
This whole effort was probably a stupid waste of time.
Even so. He wanted it, damnit. He wanted to shine up Mamma’s locket and put it on, so he could touch it. A tangible link to her. The thought of recovering it had taken hold in his mind. He couldn’t let go.
He sank down on the log and stared at the bones. Unfair of him to get in a snit with Lily and Edie for taking the time out to have a tender extrasensory moment with her own mom. He shouldn’t begrudge her that. At least he had some memories of Mam
ma in life.
Still. Jesus wept. A little practical help would have been so nice. If an entity was going to go to the trouble of crossing the great chasm between life and death, one would think it might try to multitask a little.
Whatever. Dead folks. Who the fuck knew what their agenda was, out there beyond the veil. Speculating about it made his head ache.
He rubbed his eyes, got grit in them. They started watering, and suddenly, oh, shit. He was hunched over, silently sobbing.
Oh, please. Those guys had already pegged him as a coddled baby punk. Sniveling when he didn’t get the prize out of the cereal box. But he kept thinking about that hug from Mamma in the bus station at midnight. The locket, burning against his chest from her vital heat.
Mamma, where’s the fucking locket, already?
Watch your language, you little punk.
He dashed tears away. First thing he saw was a beetle, trundling in the mud. He was brown, with a broad carapace and humongous waving pincers that meant business.
Tears turned to shaky laughter. Behold, the respectable country relative to the skanky urban cockroach. His appointed job to shred stuff and turn it into dirt. He wondered if this little dude’s ancestors had provided that very personal service for Rudy and his thugs.
Mamma had loathed the cockroaches that had infested their tenement apartment. She’d waged a constant war with them, poison, traps. It was useless, but she never gave up. She didn’t know how. That was Mamma for you. No off switch.
And it was time to move his ass, since the others were still moving theirs. Still, his eyes followed the bug as it bustled around the obstacles in its path. It climbed onto the rotten log that he had split, stopping at the top, at the sharp angle where the porous wood had been freshly broken. The wood was muddy on the outside, a reddish color inside.
What a fine-looking bug. Shiny and tough looking. He watched it, almost affectionately. He was punch-drunk. Admiring insects. Fourteen hours of digging for bones did that to a guy. At least the bug was alive.
He was tempted to pick the little guy up, go ask Kev what kind of beetle he was, but that would be dumb and irrelevant, and they would be justified in slamming him hard. He’d had enough of that today.
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