Sweet Cherry Pie

by J. D. Monroe

  “Really?”

  Charity shrugs. “Sorry. And no hunter has nails that nice.”

  Georgia glances at her neatly manicured nails and frowns. “Anyway, I was there at the Blue Penguin one night when Fox and Rocky…do you know Rocky?”

  “Oh, I know Rocky,” Charity says. “Everyone knows Rocky. He’s a moron.”

  “Agreed. Anyway, they came in, yelling for help. Something had bitten a chunk out of Fox’s ass, and the bartender couldn’t get a hold of a doctor. He was bleeding bad, only about half conscious,” she says. “So I patched him up.”

  “I hate to say it, but what a waste of an ass,” Charity sighs. “Did it get the cherry?”

  “The tattoo? Wait…that’s for you?” Her green eyes widen, like she just spotted a celebrity.

  Charity smiles beatifically. “So why would he trust you to sew him up over Jace or one of his other boys?”

  Georgia shrugs. “Before I went to Colton, I was an emergency room nurse.”

  “Nice,” Charity says. That’s a handy skillset. “So you were their medic?”

  “More or less,” Georgia says. “That was about a year ago.”

  “And what were you doing before that?”

  “Worked in Jacksonville, and before that, I was in college,” Georgia says. She shakes her head a little, and Charity can practically see the brick wall rising again. “You find anything online?”

  Charity hates that she’s so damn curious about Georgia. Something happened, and not just getting bored with mundane life as a nurse. Maybe it was a ghoul attack, or a mysterious hunter boyfriend who ditched her for the life.

  It’s impossible to be sure what, but something definitely happened to Georgia. Her porcelain surface is thin and laced with cracks, like the old, almost translucent china on Mama Bee’s shelves. From a distance, she looks solid and whole. Up close, it’s unmistakable how fragile her surface is.

  “Very smooth subject change,” Charity replies. She scrolls down the local news page. “Nothing new today. So I’m thinking, we focus on finding our center.”

  “Our center?”

  Charity nods. “Ghosts, ghouls, anything undead rising…it doesn’t happen randomly. It starts somewhere.” She makes a blooming gesture with her hand. “It’s like dropping a pebble in a pond. There was something in that theater. That’s the only explanation for Tommy coming back that fast and that angry.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  “Well, when we first got there, my instinct was cursed ground, but only certain spots in the theater seemed to react.”

  “The prop table,” Georgia says.

  “Yeah,” Charity says. “Could have been anything on the table. Jewelry, a book, maybe even something Tommy wore. The crown, maybe?”

  “Maybe one of the knives,” Georgia says. “You said that weapons were a prime candidate.”

  “Look at you. A-plus,” Charity says. “So I’m thinking we go over to the school, see what we can dig up by daylight.”

  Georgia smiles. “Already on it. I emailed Professor Calloway yesterday, and he just responded. We’ve got an appointment at three-thirty.”

  16. REDUNDANCY PLAN

  BY THE TIME CHARITY is sufficiently caffeinated and presentable, it’s nearly noon. Their late appointment with Calloway is the perfect excuse for a big lunch. They visit Teresita’s, where the tacos are mediocre at best. She decides that the two-dollar margarita special isn’t worth a disapproving lecture from her new partner, even if it is five o’clock somewhere. Georgia picks at her food and makes flow charts, which makes her the actual worst lunch date Charity’s ever had, and Charity once ate lunch with two drunk prostitutes while on a twenty-four-hour hold for trespassing in New Orleans. Life is full of disappointments.

  After lunch, they return to the university and park in the lot near the library. Georgia digs a blue file folder out of her backpack. A few colored paper flags stick out of it. She is by far the most organized person Charity has ever seen. She walks with a purpose onto campus, like she’s been here a thousand times before.

  The Marianne Campbell-Lafferty Library is a three-storied brick building at the center of campus. It overlooks an enormous fountain that sparkles in the afternoon sun. A coffee cart labeled Veni, Vidi, Venti sits in the overhang by the front doors, where a line of students on smartphones stretches out to the grass. A hand-drawn chalkboard advertises their daily caramel latte special.

  “Where are you going?” Charity asks. “Pretty sure this place isn’t going to have our kind of books.”

  “I’m going to try to contact some of the kids on the cast list. Maybe a few of them will meet me here,” Georgia says. She opens the folder and takes out a printout. It’s a map with a big circle of pink highlighter on it. “You’re going to check out the prop shop.”

  Charity takes the map without looking at it. “When did you do this?”

  “Before I went running.” Georgia shrugs. “I’m productive.”

  “You’re a robot,” Charity replies. “Do you ever sleep?”

  “Occasionally.” Georgia hesitates. “So what’s your usual cover? Cop, FBI, private investigator?”

  “My cover?”

  “Yeah. How do you get people to talk to you?”

  “People like me,” Charity says. Georgia’s face slips into an expression of surprise for a split second before she can smooth it back into a neutral expression. Thanks a lot. “I’m told I have a certain charm. Then again, some people like pickled pig’s feet. So you can’t really trust public opinion, can you?”

  “And for the ones who don’t immediately love you?”

  She shrugs. “Honestly, most of the time, you ask someone what they think and seem interested, they’ll tell you,” Charity says. “Patience always wanted to try telling people we had a reality show, but cameras are expensive.”

  “A reality show. Seriously?”

  “She has—had a thing for those shows,” Charity says with a shrug. She was serious about it, too. Didn’t seem to matter whether it was small-town or big-city folks, some people will air every bit of their dirty, skid-marked laundry for fifteen seconds in the spotlight. It was rarely flattering, but that didn’t seem to bother folks. “Not me. I steer clear of law enforcement. If you get caught, that’s a serious charge, and even my charm has its limits. Newspaper reporter, blogger, things like that seem to work well enough for me.”

  “Not the worst idea I ever heard.” Georgia checks her watch. “Okay, meet me at the humanities building at three-fifteen for our meeting.”

  “Where—”

  “It’s marked on your map with a star,” Georgia says. “You’re welcome.”

  Charity rolls her eyes and looks at the map. “There’s a sticker.”

  “I thought it might help.”

  “One, I find it troubling that at some point, you had star stickers on your shopping list for the RV,” Charity says. “Two, I’m not a dumbass. I’ve been on the road for almost eight years, and I can read a damned map.”

  Georgia recoils and jams the folder under her arm. “I was just trying to help. Sorry.”

  There’s an awkward pause, which makes her feel itchy and tense. Talking to Georgia is like trying to ballroom dance when all she knows is the chicken dance. She can’t follow the moves, can’t anticipate what Georgia’s going to do or how she’ll react. One second, Georgia agrees and goes along, and the next, she looks like a three-legged puppy who got kicked. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds a certain kind of comfort. She knew what to expect out of Patience, even if all she could expect was a complete pain in the ass. “Okay, so three-fifteen.”

  Georgia nods and turns to walk into the library.

  Charity consults the map and orients herself by the front entrance to the library. The theater shop is near the southeast corner of campus. She tucks the map into her bag and snugs it up against her body.

  It’s a beautiful early fall afternoon. She doesn’t often get to enjoy a leisurely w
alk when the sun is still out. It’s just warm enough, with a breeze that stirs the trees in way that’s calming, not sinister. This is a foreign world to her, students walking by with textbooks and chatting about Shakespeare and statistics. And yet, at least on the outside, she can pass for one of them in her casual clothes and bag over one shoulder. For all they know, she’s carrying an algebra book and a laptop instead of holy water and a notebook full of scribbles about folklore.

  For a split second, she can see her life in an alternate universe. Maybe there, her daddy doesn’t die so badly his daughter has nightmares for years. Maybe she actually finishes high school and heads off to community college, settles down, and—

  “When pigs fly,” she mutters.

  Even if things didn’t go the way they did, she’d probably still be hunting. Daddy would have tried to tell her no, and she’d have done it anyway. He’d probably give her that wry smile, the way he had when he took her out target shooting for the first time. “I know you’re going to find a way whether I like it or not, so you might as well learn proper,” he said, a tinge of sadness in his deep baritone. Those lessons steadied her hands well enough to put her mother down. Daddy probably wouldn’t have appreciated the serendipity of it, but it seems just about right.

  The theater workshop looks like a toy house back behind the older brick buildings. The outside is bright yellow, and one entire wall is a retractable door rolled halfway up like a garage door. Loud rock music blares from inside as Charity walks up the paint-streaked sidewalk. The grass surrounding the shop is stiff and crunchy, spotted in muddy blotches of paint with sharp, masked-off outlines. She peeks around the door into the open shop, where three men are crouched on the floor over a big wooden frame. Two are stretching thick white fabric over it, while the other goes around the perimeter with a staple gun.

  The shop smells of sawdust and paint, and it makes her think of her father and uncle John working out in the garage when she was a kid. The memories hit her so hard that she has to take a deep breath as she waits for the stinging in her eyes to subside.

  “Help you?”

  She jumps a little and turns to see a fourth man wiping his hands on a towel hooked to his belt loop. His black T-shirt is streaked and splattered in a hundred colors of paint, and there’s a dab of red paint in his neat brown goatee that makes him look a bit like a vampire.

  “Honestly, yeah, I was wondering if someone could answer some questions for me.”

  “You a reporter?”

  “Nope,” she says.

  “You a cop?”

  She just snorts a laugh. “Do I look like a cop?”

  “Then what exactly are you?”

  “Real cute and real curious. You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to.” She extends her hand to him and waits patiently as he looks her up and down. There’s a little twitch to his eyebrows that says he likes what he sees. Finally, he encloses her hand in his, rough and callused and strangely familiar. “Charity Pierson. Friends call me Cherry.”

  “Joel,” he says. His front teeth are slightly crooked, but it gives his face personality. She likes them a little rough around the edges. Joel digs a pack of cigarettes out of the back pocket of his faded cargo shorts. “You mind?”

  “Your house, your rules, friend,” she says. He steps out of the doorway and leans against the outside wall of the workshop as he lights up. He holds the pack out to her. Universal smoker’s law. “Not my vice, but thanks.”

  “Good for you. It’s a terrible habit,” he says. His face relaxes, lines around his eyes smoothing out as he takes the first drag. “This whole thing with Tommy was fucked up—uh, messed up.”

  “You don’t have to clean it up on my account,” she says. “What happened?”

  “Bunch of folks are saying it was a prop malfunction,” Joel says. He scowls and violently flicks a nub of ash to the ground.

  “No offense, but it seems a likely story,” Charity says. “Not saying it’s your fault, but—”

  “No,” Joel says emphatically. “Not a chance.”

  She’s not the best judge of people, but he seems honest. Still, she imagines she’d react the same way, even if she knew it was perfectly possible.

  It’s gotten quiet suddenly, and Charity realizes that both the rock music and the snick-snick-snick of the staple gun have stopped. She peeks around the wall to see the other three men trying to listen. “Y’all are welcome to come and chat if you want.”

  Two of them snap back to work on the wooden frame. The third, a skinny guy with a smooth-shaved head, jumps up and jogs over to them. His shirt says One Tequila Two Tequila Three Tequila Floor. She likes him right away.

  “Sorry about them. It’s been a crazy week around here,” Joel says. “Look, Steve can vouch for it. We tested the damn things for hours to make sure they wouldn’t jam up.”

  “So you built the knives yourself,” Charity says. “You didn’t buy something?”

  “Nah, the director wanted period-accurate,” Steve says. “We couldn’t find anything retractable that looked right. So we built our own.”

  “Could I see one?”

  Steve shakes his head. “The cops took them all for evidence.”

  “They’re not dangerous,” Joel says. “Just wood, with a spring-loaded blade that retracts into the handle. The blades aren’t even sharp. We planed ‘em enough to look sharp, but they wouldn’t do that kind of damage.”

  She’s got a wickedly sharp wooden stake that would disprove Joel’s claim that his knives aren’t dangerous. It’s not worth mentioning, or he’ll shut down tighter than a liquor store on Sunday.

  Steve nods vigorously. “And even if one of them had jammed up—which it didn’t—Sue rigged Caesar a pad after tech.”

  Charity stares at him blankly. “I have no idea what you just said.”

  Joel waves his hand and says, “Go show her.”

  The skinny guy runs off in a tangle of limbs, then returns with an inch-thick piece of gray flexible foam, like what Christina used to kneel on to weed her front flower beds. It’s got some shallow indentations in the surface. In his other hand is an unpainted wooden knife with a cracked hilt.

  “This one cracked when we tried to Dremel it down. Bad piece of wood,” Steve says. “Here, hold this.” He pushes the pad up against the small of her back and presses his other hand to her stomach. His fingers brush the underside of her breast, and his face goes bright red. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Buy me dinner first,” she says with a smile. “Just stay south of the border, you know what I mean?”

  Steve nods, then pushes hard against the pad. There’s a scraping sound and a firm pressure against the small of her back. “See?”

  “I’m still not following you,” she says.

  “Let me translate Steve-ese for you,” Joel says. “His train of thought misses the station sometimes. Before the show goes up, we have what’s called a technical rehearsal. Tech. That’s when we figure out all the issues with the lights and sets and shit. During the assassination scene, the Senators were bruising Tommy up pretty good even with the retracting knives. The costume mistress, Sue, rigged one of these up under his toga to cover his whole back. He was better protected than an NFL quarterback.” He takes the pad and the knife from Steve. “It definitely ain’t bulletproof, but even if the knife had jammed up, it sure wouldn’t have killed him.” He holds the knife by the blade so it can’t retract, then jabs it violently into the foam pad. Even with him forcing it, it doesn’t puncture.

  “I see what you’re puttin’ in front of me, but the fact remains that somehow, Tommy Crane got stabbed to death on stage,” Charity says. Joel wrinkles his nose and stamps out his cigarette. “You got an idea how?”

  “Duh,” Steve says. “Someone had another knife.”

  Joel nods. “Tina’s our stage manager. She swears that when the guys went out for the death scene, one of the prop knives was still on the table.”

  “Are they assigned to specific
people?”

  Steve shakes his head. “We tried numbering, but they never stayed with it,” he says. “They just grab one on their way out.”

  Of course. That would have made things way too easy.

  “By the time Tina noticed, the lights were already up, so she couldn’t do anything about it. Show must go on,” Joel says. “Once everything went pear-shaped and the police got there, all the knives were off the table.”

  “You tell the police that?”

  “Of course,” Joel says. “But they’d rather blame me and my guys for screwing up the props. That’s easier than actually figuring out what happened.”

  “But you think someone traded it out and purposely killed Tommy? Why?”

  Joel shrugs. That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? “Why does anyone kill anyone? They’re fuckin’ nuts.”

  “So here’s the obvious question. Who had the blood on their hands?”

  “Everyone,” Steve says. “I was there. They were still hitting him for a few seconds before they realized what had happened. Then they were trying to help him. Between all the stage blood and the real thing, it looked like a slaughterhouse.”

  “Jesus,” Charity says. “How did people like Tommy?”

  “He was a theater guy,” Joel says with a shrug. “Had an ego on him but he was okay.”

  “Was anyone acting strange the last week or so?”

  “If I had to say someone, I’d say Adam Keller,” Steve says. “Kind of a squirrelly guy, played Casca. He’s into all kinds of weird shit.”

  Sounds promising. “Weird shit like…occult? Witchcraft? What are we talking?”

  “I dunno,” Steve says. “He was always carrying around this book about serial killers. Wears this shirt sometimes that says ‘Charles Manson is my Homeboy.’ Shit like that.”

  Well, not exactly the home run she hoped for. Still, one name is better than she had before.

  Joel nods in agreement. “Just seems off when you talk to him, you know.”

  “Did the police question him?” Charity asks.

  “Yep,” Steve says. “Cops didn’t have any evidence so they had to let all the guys off. But apparently they all got the same speech. You know, don’t leave town, answer if we call.”