St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  “I’ll call nine-one-one,” I volunteered.

  “No need,” Sandra was behind me, speaking with what I thought was remarkable calm under the circumstances. “Look!”

  I risked a glance at her wound and, in the time it takes to burst a bubble, saw the last of the charred and blackened hole close and smooth over like cake batter. Soon her skin surface was pure and cool as milk.

  “Hey,” she said, newly enthused. “You hear that?”

  I listened. No sound of Diane. She must have been dead asleep. Even the wind had died down.

  “I don’t hear a thing,” I said.

  “Exactamundo,” Sandra nodded brightly. “The voices. They’re gone. Gone for good.” She laughed wildly, holding up both middle fingers in midair like apostrophes.

  “You see that?” she yelled. “It takes more than a few fireworks to scare this chick! Here’s what you can do with your fucking medallion and your fucking brand of Lucifer!” She let loose with another whooping laugh.

  “Sandra,” I cautioned, “Diane’s asleep.”

  “Let’s you and me stay up all night and talk, like a slumber party for two. I feel like nobody can possibly hurt me ever again. I’m empowered, for once. What else you wanna know? We’ll play twenty questions.”

  “Okay, here’s one. What happened to Lilith, the way you get the story?”

  “What happens to a saint when nobody believes in her anymore?”

  “Somebody names a grade school after her, I guess.”

  “She goes off into the wilderness,” she said, answering her own question.

  “What wilderness is that?”

  “How should I know? One wilderness is the same as another. And the thing about a wilderness is that it either kills you or makes you stronger.”

  “And your point?”

  She sprang up from the table like a child. “Here, let me show you a magic trick. Got a pocket mirror?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll get one from my purse, then. Let’s reconnoiter outside the downstairs bathroom.”

  I followed in after her. She posed full-face before the bathroom mirror and held the rectangular mirror vertically, perpendicular to the bridge of her nose. “Come over here and see,” she said.

  When I stood at the proper angle the small mirror obscured the right half of Sandra’s face, yet the reflection made up that other half in perfect symmetry. “So?” I asked.

  She stepped aside and said, “Now you try it.”

  I took Sandra’s place and lined the mirror up to my nose just as she had done, dividing my face in half. But try as I might, I could not get the two halves to line up and match, even when I flipped the mirror over and tried it on the left side. Every attempt resulted in a gross distortion of my features no better than a clumsy police sketch or an inept sculptor’s failed effort.

  “What gives?” I said, laying the mirror down on the sink in frustration.

  “No one born of woman has a perfectly symmetrical face.”

  “That pretty much leaves everybody out, then, doesn’t it, Sandra?”

  “I said no one born of woman. Woman was taken from man’s rib, dissected out of him as a poor substitute after his original mate had already split from the Garden.”

  My breath caught. “Lilith.”

  “Yup. Lilith started her own bloodline that continues to this day. You can tell us by our faces. The purebloods wear the face God originally intended before Eve even entered the picture—the perfectly symmetrical paradise face. Eve is swinging from the branches of your family tree. That’s why your face looks cockeyed when you do the mirror test. It was Lilith who was man’s perfect mate, his equal—at least until she became the Demon Mother.”

  “I could tell you a few things about Demon Mothers myself.”

  She studied me thoughtfully. “I’ll bet you could at that, Dick. Been to Salem to visit your mom’s grave yet?”

  “Everybody wants to send me on a pilgrimage to the cemetery lately,” I said. “You have been talking to Father Seraphim.”

  “Make fun of it if you want, but let me ask you one thing. Who gets more out of a pilgrimage, the dead saint who gets venerated or the live pilgrim doing the venerating?”

  “What do you know that you’re not telling me, Sandra?”

  She turned off the fluorescent light over the bathroom mirror, as though she believed the darkness might hide her from some unseen danger. “They would kill me if I ever told you that,” she whispered.

  I reached to stroke her face, exploring its perfect symmetry like a blind man. “Tell me as your lawyer then. Who else is perched up my family tree?”

  She drew nearer to me. The strands of her synthetic hair brushed my cheek and collar as she murmured in my ear. “Shake it and you’ll find out. I’ll give you only one hint: its roots are buried in Salem. The rest you’ll have to learn for yourself.”

  I leaned to kiss her, but she pulled away in firm, unmistakable denial.

  “Let’s go finish our tea,” she whispered.

  We sat across from each other at the kitchen table. I stirred my cooling tea. “You’re the first person I ever met who puts swizzle sticks in tea mugs,” I said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “And why only in mine?”

  “Take a look at it,” she said. “It’s kind of a conversation piece.”

  I withdrew the stick from the amber liquid to study it. The tip had a tiny round indicator recessed well into it; its color was blue. The realization of what my “swizzle stick” really was convulsed me with shock.

  “See? Blue. It’s a boy!” Sandra said with a thousand-watt grin. “You’re going to be a daddy again! Congratulations, Pop!”

  “You were telling me the truth? You really did quit taking your pill? Why?”

  “Call me crazy. I’m a woman in love with a man. And you’re the man.”

  The phrase you’re the man reverberated inside my brain. It was the expression Mark Kane always used when he had some particularly disagreeable task to delegate to me. It was what he had said before dispatching me to Kokker’s mansion for that inauspicious house call.

  “Of course I’m still in the real early stages, but the thing about us Sisterhood girls, we have a real short what you call gesticulation period.”

  “You mean ‘gestation.’”

  “That thing with hamsters. Or I guess minks would be a better example.”

  Fortunately Diane had cleared all the dishes from the kitchen sink. I hawked up the tea with heaves so violent I feared my entrails might follow.

  “Hey, you,” Sandra called out happily. “I already told you once: I’m the one should be having the morning sickness around here.” My answer was an unintelligible mumble. I raised my head. The night sky had transformed the warped glass of the old kitchen window into a funhouse mirror. If Sandra’s was the paradise face, mine was one of the damned.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Pantsing in the Moonlight

  It was almost noon Monday when I looked up to focus on my potential oblivion. Diaz was standing at the door to my office staring at me.

  Sandra and I had stayed up all night talking, quitting only when Diane came down to fix breakfast. The women had gone somewhere together on Sunday without me, so I spent my day playing handyman and watching the kids, doing anything that did not require deep thought. I should have been exhausted but sat up most of the night as usual, but this time keeping an anxiety- and guilt-imposed vigil over Sandra’s revelation.

  By Monday morning all I could think about were the remnants of Artie’s trial offer lying in my desk drawer. I hurried in to the office before anyone else arrived and disposed of the evidence by snorting it up my nostrils. Now, not even hungry for lunch, I was speed-reading through a potential medical malpractice file when Diaz came in.

  “You look like a fucking crankhead,” Diaz said. I was glad he couldn’t run a blood tox screen on the spot. Lucky for me, it had never occurred to Mark Kane to call for a urine drop from his employees to c
heck for controlled substances. Instead, Diaz walked around at what I thought was an ominously slow pace, studying me with his cop’s eyes. “Wanna take a break?” he said at last. “Got something you might be interested in.”

  We ran a couple of associates out of the library.

  “Lock the door,” Diaz told me. I complied while he pulled the blinds and fooled with the DVD player. “How do you work this thing?”

  I set it up and inserted the disc for him. We stood and watched what appeared to be black and white footage from a bird’s-eye view security camera inside a supermarket. I thought Diane and I bought groceries from the same store.

  “Turn up the sound,” he said. I punched the button a few times until I heard the FM easy listening music and the occasional interruption of flat, bored voices over the PA system. The camera focused on the canned-goods aisle. A woman wearing a cloth coat swatted a small child and dragged him away from a cardboard display by his collar. Pensioners clotted the aisle in both directions, triple-parking their carts while they stopped to inspect the soup cans for dents. I had no more patience watching them than if I had been trying to hurry down that aisle myself.

  “Thanks for sharing this Andy Warhol moment, John, but I have lawyer work to do.”

  “Keep your pasties on,” he grunted. “Fast-forward. Okay... now. Right here.”

  With the push of a button, the customers slowed from frenetic, insect-like activity to normal human action. The soup aisle had cleared except for one old woman who hobbled slowly into view from the top of the screen using her shopping cart as a walker. When she reached the foreground she stopped, shifted her big black purse for ballast, and, with a rolling walk that brought to mind a slow-motion Henry Armetta impression, maneuvered hand-over-hand around the cart to the nearest shelf.

  “Here’s where it gets good,” Diaz chortled. A gangly, straggly-haired gargoyle of a man wearing a black t-shirt and black drawstring pants—like a latter-day ninja—appeared behind the old woman. The harsh fluorescent lights of the store reflected off his balding pate. At his side a tall, thin young woman also clad head to toe in black carried nothing but an empty shopping basket.

  There was no mistaking Mad and Artie doing their marketing. Artie smirked and whispered something in her ear.

  “Keep watching.” Diaz’s tone held a secret glee. Madeleine barely suppressed a giggle as Artie assumed a mockingly exaggerated track starting position, touching his knuckles to the floor and twitching his ass at her.

  “It’s Artie Tremayne,” I remarked.

  “It was Artie Tremayne,” Diaz said quietly.

  Artie sprang into motion from his sprinter’s stance. Madeline yelped and screamed with laughter. Knees pumping, Artie passed the old woman like a jumped-up grim reaper doing the hundred-yard dash. He reached out and grabbed the elastic waistband of her stretch pants and yanked down with both drywaller’s thumbs, shouting, “Twat inspector.”

  Without slowing, Artie vaulted over the pharmacy counter and raked boxes off the shelves with both hands, stuffing some down his pants and passing the rest back over the counter to Mad, who loaded them into her shopping basket.

  “Sixty-seven boxes, all told. Looked like a fucking manufacturer’s recall. Guess he wanted to get a jump on the cold and flu season. Now watch this.”

  The painful glare of the lights made the varicose veins in the old woman’s legs look like nightcrawlers on the sidewalk after a heavy rain. Without even pausing to pull up her pants, the old battleaxe fumbled around in her purse and came up with a hog-leg forty-five revolver that might have seen action in the Spanish-American War. Balancing her elbows on the handle of her shopping cart, she leveled her aim at Artie.

  “Get a haircut,” she screamed. Then she let go a shot that sounded like an underwater explosion, transforming Mad’s spacey laughter into a wail of terror.

  My pulse and blood pressure must have been redlining.

  “Did she kill him?” I gasped. “Did she kill both of them?”

  Diaz shut off the player. The white noise of the TV filled the room. “No,” he said at last, “she didn’t kill them.”

  “What, then?”

  He slouched down in one of the library chairs and spun the DVD on the end of his right index finger. “First you have to promise me one thing. You have to promise not to tell Janis.”

  It was then I knew Madeleine was dead. I gave him my promise.

  “What’s on this disc happened day before yesterday. Store security brought it to me because whenever a shoplifter cleans out all the Sudafed, it spells only one thing: crank lab. Those generally operate in county’s jurisdiction, out in the country—away from nosy neighbors. Literally nosy. The chemical process stinks to high heaven. When I saw Artie Tremayne’s weaselly face and Madeleine with him, without any apparent coercion, I knew what to look for. I coordinated with the drug squad about any ongoing meth lab investigations. One of the sites that came up as highly suspicious was a run-down little trailer park north of Marissa called Mar-a-Lago.”

  “Mar-a-Lago?”

  “You know it?”

  “No.”

  “Consider yourself lucky. Place should have been named Shangri-Shit. Last stop before homeless.”

  “Artie and Madeleine were staying there?”

  He nodded. “It was centrally located and ideal for Artie’s purposes. Close to the Metro East, but still only about an hour or so away from Carbondale. Truckers didn’t name that town Beaver City for nothing. Home of Southern Illinois University and acres of coeds. Party school. Artie was like a kid who never grew up. It figured to be high on a short list of places he’d light on after he jumped bail.”

  “So Artie set up a crystal meth lab there?”

  “God damn, get with the program, Counselor. Nobody calls it that anymore. The Hoosiers and bikers call it ice or crank. It’s their drug of choice, but it also appeals to the college kids pulling all-nighters before finals. Yeah, Artie set up a lab, right there in the trailer where he and Madeleine were living.

  “At Mar-a-Lago the trailers all have that plastic weatherproofing instead of windows, and no insulation. The place is a pesthole of crank abusers and various other burnouts. Perfect for a guy like Artie: a double Y hiding out in a doublewide.

  “So one day Artie pulls up in his converted hearse—the one with the illegal u-v running lights under it that he uses to impress the little underage Goth princesses—and he sets up his makeshift crank lab. He’s good—real good—and before long, he’s cranking it out, you know? I understand from his PSI Artie was no dumb guy—he had two college degrees—but he must have had no common sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The chemical process to make methamphetamine produces potentially explosive fumes. That’s another reason it’s better to cook it out in the boonies to avoid the risk of a spark, or arouse suspicion because a guy has to go forty yards outside the house—day or night—whenever he wants to smoke a cigarette. State Fire Marshall thinks our boy genius probably lit a match. The blast nearly flattened the whole trailer park, not that that would be any great loss. I’m sorry to break it to you, but he and Madeleine both died in the explosion. Happened about five o’clock this morning. I just got back after positively IDing the bodies for the coroner.”

  “Why you?”

  “Why not? I was familiar with both individuals, and I was probably within a day or so of finding them anyway when the place went up. Seemed like a natural choice. And now it falls to me to tell Janis. Let me do that in my own way, in my own good time.”

  “Was it...difficult for you? I mean, you know, confirming the identities?”

  “They were both barbecued pretty well-done, if that’s what you’re driving at. Not even pink on the inside. But it was obviously them. You can take a look yourself if you want. Lester’s got the two of them laid out side-by-side down at the morgue by this time, pretty as a picture.”

  “No,” I said too quickly. I never had the stomach for viewing the dead u
nder ideal circumstances, let alone when they were on a slab, burned almost beyond recognition. But I couldn’t help thinking about one thing: the missing dagger.

  “Find any weapons on either of them?”

  “You mean like a firearm?”