by Amy Lane
If the zombie apocalypse that seemed so prevalent on Tucker’s selection of videos ever occurred, it would be on a ruined landscape like this one.
“Angel, would you stop obsessing over the grass?” Tucker scowled with impatience. “They water as often as they can.”
“It’s much browner this close to the valley,” Angel said mournfully. “I wonder if the cemetery would be less depressing if the grass were greener.”
“Probably,” Tucker conceded. “But seeing that even the people who mourned these people have passed on, I don’t know if they’re focusing on morale anymore.”
That struck Angel as desperately sad. “Then nobody remembers them?”
Tucker frowned. “I didn’t say that. Family stories persist. Look at these three graves—see?”
Angel drew nearer. “‘Morgan Peters, beloved husband of Sarah.’ So?”
“Now look at the graves on either side.”
“‘Elizabeth Peters. Beloved wife of Morgan.’ Wait—”
“Now the other one,” Tucker said with a wicked smile.
“‘Sarah Clayborn. Beloved wife of Oren.’ Wait—how do those dates…? I mean, how could they all…?”
“And over here,” Tucker said, taking a playful leap to the pinnacle stone sitting in the midst of a large family plot.
“‘Oren Clayborn, beloved companion of Clancy Matthews, and the children they protected in their home.’ Tucker, I am so confused!” Had all these people been married at the same time?
Tucker laughed, and the sound was as giddy as Tucker had been the morning he’d run out of Daisy Place, excited to buy a truck and get a kitten.
“So am I!” he cackled. “But you know what? I bet it’s a hell of a story.”
His grin was infectious, and Angel caught it.
“We tell stories,” he said, feeling a bit of wonder. “You and me. We tell stories.”
“We do indeed.” Tucker sobered. “Now, it’s time to go tell the stories of our friends the Beauforts, you think?” He went on without giving Angel time to respond. “I’m going to guess a big centerpiece headstone, like our buddy Oren here. Something weighty that dominates a family plot. The Beauforts had two sons, so it’s going to be big enough for six people. There’s not too many of those.”
“Will it have the women’s names on it?” Angel asked. Most of the centerpiece stones he’d seen so far had been erected by the women for the men.
“Probably not,” Tucker said sadly. “It seems like the headstone was for the one who died first, and that was usually the guy.”
“Men’s bodies are made to burn out more quickly,” Angel said. He looked down at his male body. “Maybe it’s because of all the testosterone.” He isolated it in his mind, could feel the hormone flooding his incorporeal being, attacking hair follicles, sending sex signals to his gonads. “It’s almost a toxic hormone.”
“You’ll have to tell me how estrogen feels sometime,” Tucker muttered. “I’m dying for your opinion on that. But now, let’s find our….”
He paused, scenting the air almost like Squishbeans did when Tucker was going to feed her bacon. With trancelike slowness, he turned his head and bowed.
And Angel saw them.
Only they were not as they had been at Daisy Place—young and full of fear and the suppressed excitement of whatever was to come.
They were older, but not gnarled and tough like the roots of crabgrass they trod upon. They were gently old—the wrinkles were deep, but not bitter because the women hadn’t fought aging. They’d let it have its way with them while they’d gone on with their lives.
Judging from the deep smile lines at the corners of their eyes, the gentle dimples of their mouths, their easy posture, hand in arm, as they strolled among the other ghosts of the cemetery, their own lives had been sweet enough to forgive the years their toll.
Tucker bowed deeply, and although the women were dressed in what appeared to be the favored rumpled sundresses of the forties, the two hearkened immediately back to the days of their youth and curtsied back. They were still regal. The bustle and corset of the turn of the century were gone, and so was the intricacy of the Gibson girl hairstyle. Sophie’s white hair was pulled tight in a flyaway knot on the back of her head, and Bridget’s shorn, careless curls blew back from her face in the breeze.
But the formality, the shyness of two girls who had fled across the continent to have freedom and love—that was still there, and Tucker responded to it with an innate nobility that Angel had missed at their first meeting.
He’d come to treasure it since.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” Tucker said, holding his unwieldy cardboard box to the side. “How are you this fine day?”
The women exchanged glances, and Sophie stepped forward. “We’re just fine, young man. What can I do for you? I haven’t seen a stranger here in quite some time.”
It was Tucker’s turn to look at Angel, his eyebrows arched. Angel shrugged one shoulder.
They could see him; they could speak to him. Was it the pentacle at work or just Tucker’s basic empathy? Probably Tucker’s empathy, Angel thought, remembering the ghosts of the city. Sometimes they’d seen him too.
“I’m not actually taking up residence,” Tucker said, biting his lip. “In fact, I’m probably breaking a bunch of rules showing up here at all. But the thing is….” He looked around. “Which one of these is yours, by the way?”
“The one back near the corner,” Bridget said, her Irish brogue still a playful lilt on her tongue. “See? A bit of shade there, so it doesn’t get too damned hot. A little rain—would it be too much to ask for?”
“We’ve had quite a drought,” Tucker apologized. “Here, may my friend and I escort you ladies to the shade?”
“Of course,” Bridget allowed. “Your friend there is looking a little bit more like our type. Are you sure he doesn’t belong here?”
“No, no, Bridget. Look at….” Sophie frowned and whispered in her companion’s ear.
Bridget raked Angel with eyes that were still Ireland green, even after eighty years in the afterlife. “Oh yes,” she said mildly. “I see them now. Well, aren’t we honored, then.”
“The honor is mine.” Angel took his cues from Tucker’s garden-party manners. “But let us venture near the shade. Perhaps we’ll see your brother there.”
Sophie’s eyes flickered, and her neck drooped. “James hasn’t had an easy time of it, settling in here,” she said softly. “So much of him is elsewhere. Bridget and I, we’ve tried to give him some peace, you know. His wife, Henri, has moved on already to be with their boys. I can’t think what he’s waiting for.” She bit her lip and looked at her mate.
“He’s been kind to us,” Bridget acknowledged. “In ways I didn’t know kin could be kind. Henri and James—they were lovely. And the thing… the thing James did for us….”
For a moment, the women flickered, transported, as it were, to a thicker, richer lawn in the shade of a great hotel.
Angel understood in that moment.
He imagined that back at Daisy Place, they would have seen the two women appear from nowhere and go traipsing by, arm in arm, lively with youth.
“Yes,” Tucker said, holding out his arm. “I think we have a pretty good idea of what your brother did for you. And we’re so very glad he did. My dear?”
Sophie laughed, becoming more solid in this cemetery, more in tune with this place where she’d gone happily to rest. She took Tucker’s arm, with Bridget still firmly attached to her other side, and Angel kept pace a few feet ahead.
“Are you truly?” Bridget asked, all suspicion. “Glad at what he did?”
Angel grunted because he knew that was a falsehood. Tucker wouldn’t gain their trust with lies.
“Did you live good lives?” Tucker asked wistfully. “Gentle lives? Did you have chickens?”
“And cats,” Sophie said, nodding. “How did you know?”
“Tell me.”
Angel caught his bre
ath.
They were going to tell Tucker a story.
“There’s not much to tell, really,” Bridget said, voice soft. “We… that night we got the letter from James. We knew he was coming, and Sophie was—”
“So happy,” Sophie supplied. “We didn’t know how he’d greet us, you see? I wanted a divorce. You just didn’t do that in those days.”
“I am aware.” Tucker dimpled at her, and Angel’s heart gave a little ping. “You were very brave.”
“We wanted to live.” Simplicity and courage rang in her voice, and Angel’s heart gave a big ping. “We wouldn’t have if I’d stayed with my husband. No cottage by the river, no chickens, no parade of kittens. We wanted to live, so we came here. And my brother—he missed our family so badly. He’d been violent as a boy, you know. So angry. His school years had been terrible for him. He was much smaller than the other boys. He grew up using his fists more than his chalk. He went west hoping to find a place where he could start over and become known neither for his temper, nor for being a scrawny, put-upon boy.”
“He did well?” Tucker prompted, although both Tucker and Angel knew the outcome of this endeavor.
“He did,” Sophie said simply. “He made a name for himself, became a foreman. He had a reputation—tough but fair. It was a reputation that followed him the rest of his life on the railroad, even when he stopped laying track.”
“Even after…?”
“Oh yes.” Both women nodded. “Especially after,” Sophie continued. “See, nobody knew about that night.” She grimaced, and while Angel was screaming, That’s your opening, use it, Tucker had apparently already jumped light-years ahead.
They came to the shade, and a low wooden fence offered a sort of bench. A grown man would crush it to slivers, but Tucker and Angel both bowed and the women settled on it, no heavier than a thought.
Tucker sat down on the brittle crabgrass, folding his legs and looking up at Sophie and Bridget like they were his favorite grade school teachers, the gentle ones who read stories and played music.
Angel made himself comfortable next to him, their knees touching, and the two of them leaned their chins on their fists in classic listening pose.
Sophie dimpled at them. “Aren’t you sweet. Such lovely young men.” She cocked her head slyly. “Are you a couple?”
Angel waited for the negative Tucker had given Margie. He was unprepared for Tucker’s nakedly wistful look in his direction. “There’s some yearning,” he said, turning back to the women, “and a few obstacles as well.”
“Oh, isn’t that always the way.” Bridget’s sympathy spoke of experience—and it gave Angel some heart. Of course, these women would know about yearning.
And obstacles.
“Your story gave me hope,” Tucker told them. “But we didn’t see all of it. And I’m worried about James. He spends too much time at the hotel—and it’s not healthy there.”
“No.” Sophie’s hand visibly tightened over Bridget’s. “We couldn’t feel it back then, of course. It was new and bustling. People thought the place would boom, become a metropolis. Silly thought, of course. You don’t build a metropolis in the mountains. You build a sanctuary—or a prison.”
They both shuddered.
“Tell us what happened.” Tucker reached into the box and pulled out the brush, the pin, the broach, and the letter. “Perhaps….” He looked at the things in his hand. “Perhaps, once the story is all told, these things will just be things again.”
“Oh!” Sophie reached out her hand, but Bridget snatched it back.
“Not yet, Sophie luv,” she said, lacing their fingers firmly. “The boys need to hear the story.”
“Yes. Indeed they do.” Sophie turned to Tucker and Angel. “Come, take our hands, boys,” she said. “And hold tight to each other. It was a terrible, terrible night, that, and if you weren’t holding tight to someone you loved, you could find a part of yourself lost at Daisy Place. Indeed, I believe you’re right, and that’s where my brother has been all these years.”
Tucker put the objects back in the box and stood, reaching for Sophie’s hand. Angel did the same for Bridget’s, and the touch of her skin, dry and papery, with a few calluses, sent a shiver of longing coursing through him. Not for sex, but for sensation, for a grandmother’s hug or a hand held during a walk or a lipstick kiss against his temple. He’d never had these things—would have once said he’d never imagined these things—but they were running like a current under Bridget’s skin.
“You had children?” he said, perplexed.
“Henri and James had two boys,” Bridget said, squeezing his hand. “And their wives had three apiece. Those children are buried in a different place and grew to live different lives, but their childhoods—those are still in us.” She and Sophie smiled fondly at each other, and Tucker breathed deeply through his nose.
Angel turned to him just as he wiped his eyes on his shoulder. “Oh, Tucker….”
He reached out, and Tucker grabbed his hand like a shipwrecked man clung to a spar of wood to stay alive.
The circuit of the dead and the living, and those suspended between, was made complete, and the memory of their last night at Daisy Place rippled through the four of them like shock waves from a bomb.
“SOPHIE! SOPHIE!” Bridget knew her way around a corset, and her first order of business was to rip open the buttons of Sophie’s blouse and tug at the knots that held the corset tight. The thing exploded outward, and Sophie pulled in a great gasp of air.
Her eyes fluttered open, and she whispered, “James. James is coming.”
The door flew back, rebounding against the wall, and Thomas Conklin burst in.
“Get your hands off her,” he snarled. “Trollop, stealing my son’s wife and spiriting her to this ungodly place.”
Bridget stood and turned, facing Conklin and protecting Sophie with her body. “Ye keep yer bloody fuckin’ hands off ’er,” she snarled. “Yer not ’er husband, and ’e don’ care enough ter chase ’er ’ere.”
“Speak English, you filthy peasant.” Conklin smiled, chilling in his arrogance, and reached into his pocket for his little snuff tin of courage.
His pupils were already tiny pinpoints of madness.
“Snort some more,” Bridget urged, feeling ugly and murderous. “Snort until yer brains run out yer nose. But leave ’er out of it.”
Behind her, Sophie struggled to her feet. “You need to leave now,” she said. “My brother is coming. He wants us. He’s a railroad man, and he won’t let you take us back. We won’t go back, you hear? You’ll have to kill me before I go back to your hateful house and let you use me at your will.”
Bridget wanted to weep for pride. Oh, her Sophie girl, so sure of her own weakness. She sounded like a warrior right then. No hands would touch her that she didn’t invite, and Bridget was the most blessed of women because Sophie only wanted her.
Conklin moved wicked fast, though, and when Bridget saw he was heading for Sophie like Bridget didn’t exist, she charged.
She didn’t feel the cruel backhand that sent her crashing across the room, but the wall—that she did feel.
She lay there, dazed, trying to push herself up through the ringing in her ears. Sophie started to scream, but Conklin punched her, and the next sound she made was a mewl of rage and pain.
And that was when Conklin lost himself, blind to all but his drugs and his madness.
The door was open; anyone could have seen. Bridget stared into the hall, praying for salvation, praying for help as Conklin ripped Sophie’s skirts from her body and drove himself into her, frothing and gibbering as he fucked.
Sophie sobbed, and Bridget put her hands under her one more time, and that’s when he arrived.
Bridget would spend the rest of her life thinking the only man she’d ever admire was James Beaufort.
He strode into the room and froze, but for just a moment. Just long enough to take in the scene.
Just long enough to see the pap
erweight.
The bronze base of the thing went rocketing across the room when it crashed down on Thomas Conklin’s head. He fell to the side and his baseless gibbering stopped.
The only sound left in the room was Sophie’s furious sobbing.
Bridget managed to find her feet as James sank to his knees. “Sophie?” And well might he have been confused. As she wriggled out from under the body of her attacker, his sister was a mess, half-clothed, blood dripping from her face, bruises on her chest, her breasts, her thighs.
“James?”
“Oh, baby sister. I’m so sorry—”
And then she fell upon him, weeping.
It was a fine tableau, and one Bridget would revisit many times in her long life—but they could not stay there any more than they could breathe life back into the monster leaking his brains out on the floor.
“We need to get rid of the body,” Bridget said, her voice echoing into the room. “We need to hide him and clean up and take him down the stairs tonight and bury him. There’s a small graveyard out back—they keep the earth there soft.”
“I’m sorry?” James asked, dazed and purposeless in the aftermath of murder.
Sophie struggled to her feet. “She’s right, James. We need to get rid of the body.”
James studied the blood on his hands. “But… but he was he was forcing himself on you, Sophie. Look at you. You’re—”
Sophie nodded and wiped her ruined dress over her bleeding mouth and nose. “Do you think he didn’t pay off the management?” she asked bitterly. “Do you see a soul here, James? We were making a ruckus fit to bring down God himself—but Conklin Senior, he’s got more money than God, you understand?” She flew to the door and slammed it shut and then returned to her brother’s side.
“James.” She hugged him tight, and he wrapped arms around her shoulders, clinging to her like she was a glimpse of sanity in a madhouse. She pulled back, though. “James, you must listen to me. We’ll leave tonight and bury Conklin in the cemetery. Who knows you’re here?”