All the Rules of Heaven

by Amy Lane

  “Henrietta,” he said, sounding puzzled.

  “Anyone you work with? Did you talk to anybody when you came to town?”

  James shook his head slowly. “Cover yourself, darling.”

  Sophie grimaced at Bridget and went to grab a bath sheet from the pile crumpled in the corner. She wrapped it around herself.

  “Now, James, think. Conklin was coming to find me—we don’t know how many people he told or who knows where he is now. But he’s not well liked. If he disappears, I’m not sure who will search for him. And nobody knows about you or Henri. I never told Tommy about you.”

  “Why not?” James asked, frowning.

  Sophie shrugged and looked at Bridget sorrowfully. “He wouldn’t have been interested, Jimmy. Nobody in Maryland cared who I was.” She gave a surprisingly vicious kick at the cooling body at their feet. “This one wanted to use me—wanted to own me. I ran away because I wouldn’t be owned. You don’t deserve to be tried for this, James, but they’ll do you. If we bury him and disappear, nobody will come looking for us. If we tell them we killed Thomas Conklin Senior because he was abusing his property, they’ll hang you before you’re done speaking.”

  She looked at Bridget for confirmation, and Bridget had trouble nodding. She was brilliant, Sophie was. Bridget would have followed her into hell—she was just as glad to be following her into a better future than that.

  The rest of the night was sort of a cloudy nightmare. They didn’t want to use the lovely quilt on the bed, so Bridget snuck downstairs to the linen closet for a clean sheet while Sophie cleaned up and packed. They used Sophie’s ruined blouse and skirt to scrub the blood from the floor, and from the walls and the damaged paperweight. They rolled the tattered clothing into a ball and shoved it with Conklin’s body into the tight linen wrapping of the sheet.

  They were interrupted once by a knock at the door asking if they wanted to attend dinner with their one guest. Bridget answered in discreet tones and said her mistress was overwhelmed with her father-in-law’s visit and was resting.

  That was their only visitor.

  Sophie’s face was swollen and bruised—there was no hiding it—but since James had ridden his wagon in and left it down at the stables, nobody would see Sophie up close once they got on the road. All they had to do was bury the body before sunup and make sure their bill was paid.

  They left Sophie in the room to finish the cleaning, although Bridget knew she had no talent for it. Bridget was left to help James heft the body, long after all the occupants of Daisy Place were safely tucked into their beds.

  Bridget never forgot that strange journey in the horse and wagon, under a moon stained the color of Conklin’s blood. James muttered to himself about witches and bad luck the whole way there, and Bridget couldn’t find the words to reassure him. As they got to know each other in later years, Bridget would realize the enormity of the murder, and how it sat on his shoulders like the dead weight of a corpse. But on this night, she only hoped Sophie’s brother could move a bit faster and not break under the strain of their bitter work.

  He stayed steadfast, though. Bridget was no stranger to hard work, and they took turns using James’s camp spade to dig the grave. The graveyard had seemed alive that night, watching—even breathing—in the chilly autumn dark. James would not shut up about how lucky they were to escape the snows that year, and all Bridget could remember thinking was how lucky they’d be to escape the law.

  But eventually, about an hour before the skies tinged gray, they finished their grim task and rode back to the house.

  “You stay here,” Bridget told him. “I’ll get Sophie and our bags.” They hadn’t brought much.

  “I can come—”

  “No! Because if someone catches us, that will be us alone. Nobody will believe two women killed an old man by themselves. But you—you’re sturdy as a tree. They’ll know. Just stay here. I’ll be back before the sky’s more than a minute lighter.”

  She clutched her skirts up to her ankles and pattered through the great entryway and up the stairs.

  Sophie was asleep on the bed, fully clothed, her hat lying next to her. Asleep she looked delicate, ethereal, even with a swollen nose and mouth. She’d packed as well as could be expected, but Bridget had a feeling she’d left more than one thing behind. She saw the lump in the wallpaper, where Sophie had hid James’s correspondence, and she tsked.

  “Sophie girl—what did you do that for?” With more tenderness than Bridget thought she’d ever possessed, she smoothed the loose tendrils of butter-yellow hair from Sophie’s forehead.

  Sophie stirred on the bed and smiled sleepily. “Do what?”

  “The letter, love. Behind the wallpaper.”

  Sophie’s grin was so proud. “I wanted to hide proof that James was here.” She yawned. “I would have burned it, but there’s no fire or grate in this room.”

  No indeed. Daisy Place had a radiator, slow to turn on even in the frost-laden autumn mornings.

  “Well, let me hide it just a bit better,” Bridget said practically. “We can at least shove the bed a little closer there, and no one will see it.”

  “No. You wash off your hands, Bridge. You’re a mess. I’ll tuck them in farther.”

  Sophie stood and adjusted her clean skirt and smoothed a strand of blond hair back into the bun she would soon hide under her bonnet.

  At that moment they heard a rumble and froze. It was the same moan they heard every morning—that of the pipes being used before the boiler had quite heated enough water.

  “We’d best just leave,” Bridget whispered.

  Sophie nodded, and they seized their bags and fled.

  They saw not a soul as they tripped down the halls and exited the foyer. As they were leaving, Sophie turned around and stared at the place that had given them sanctuary for the most glorious of autumns.

  She gasped and held her hand to her mouth, and Bridget turned back to see what had spooked her.

  “Oh God,” she muttered.

  They both saw it, pressed against the window of the front room. The bulbous nose, the drooping and bushy mustache. The eyes with more than a touch of madness corrupting all that lay behind them.

  “Sophie,” Bridget whispered, her voice not carrying under the rumble and jouncing of the horse’s hooves and the buckboard.

  “That’s him,” Sophie whispered back, her voice taking on a vicious pleasure. “And if that’s where he stays, then good for him. May he lord his madness over that house for as long as God lets him.”

  “I’d prefer God kicked him right in the teeth,” Bridget prayed in a fit of fear.

  “Well, I’d prefer God not know about anything that transpired tonight,” James said glumly.

  Both the women startled, and Sophie said clearly, “James, you have nothing to hide from God. Do you understand me?”

  James couldn’t meet his sister’s eyes. “Oh, such brave words. I’ll try to believe them, Sophie my dear. For your sake, I shall try.”

  “HE DID,” Sophie said sadly, her voice breaking the spell the memory had woven over the four of them “He tried. I know he tried desperately for Henrietta—he loved the two of us, loved that we kept her company when he traveled.” She used the apron tied around her waist to wipe her eyes. “But he would fall into black moods in the autumn, and even after he confessed to Henri what we’d done, he still had trouble forgiving himself. He lived a good life, mostly, but a part of him died in that room that night. That’s what happens when a good man murders, even for the best of reasons, you understand?”

  Tucker nodded, and Angel squeezed his hand. He gave a bare hint of a smile and turned back to the women.

  “Sophie?”

  She looked at him expectantly.

  “Can you think of anything in that room that might have been James’s?” He showed her the rest of what was in the box. “Are any of these things his? A button? The letter opener? The hole punch?”

  Sophie shook her head.

  “
No, my dear. What is it you’re looking for?”

  Tucker sighed. “I’m looking for a memento. Something solid that will pull his spirit away from Daisy Place and bring it back here where it belongs.”

  Bridget suddenly popped up, releasing Angel’s hand without thought. Angel’s other hand slid through Tucker’s like mist, and Angel suppressed a sigh.

  It had been a lovely interlude, but now it was over.

  “Sophie! Sophie!”

  Sophie grinned like a girl. “Oh, I know what you’re excited about.” The two of them began walking slow circles around the pinnacle stone. “Come on, boys,” Sophie cried. “It’s a treasure hunt for sure!”

  Tucker and Angel looked at each other and then began to follow in the women’s footsteps.

  “What are we looking for?” Tucker asked.

  “Oh, it’s too wonderful,” Sophie exclaimed, clapping. “Tucker, right there, can you feel it?”

  Tucker paused then and dropped to his knees in the corner of the family plot. His face lit up, and he began to dig. The crabgrass was horrible—Angel could see that—but Tucker kept going in spite of the cuts the tougher-than-fishing-line roots left in the corners of his knuckles. Soon he had a four-inch by four-inch hole, and he rooted delicately with his fingers.

  “Yes!” he cried after what seemed a breathless hour. “Angel, come here. Can you feel the story?”

  Angel came toward him, and in his head….

  LITTLE JIMMY, James’s namesake, whose father had died in the war, had stood there. His coat, a solid red wool, was many sizes too large and worn through in places. But it had belonged to his grandfather, and Poppy Beaufort had sat Jimmy on his knees and played clapping games with him for hours at a time.

  Jimmy’s mother told him sadly that his poppy was gone to the same place his father had gone, and Jimmy had asked, in all innocence, “Iwo Jima?”

  His mother had laughed, sputtering tears, and Jimmy was left in the same confusion as before.

  So now, when all the grownups were wearing black on this dreary rainy day, Jimmy was making plans to visit Iwo Jima someday, to see his father and his poppy. Maybe his poppy would recognize him in this old wool coat.

  He was holding so tightly to Aunty Bridget and Aunty Sophie’s hands that he didn’t even notice when the brass button popped off the cuff. Bridget and Sophie didn’t worry so much with buttons and cuffs as his mother, so Jimmy kept holding on to them even after he saw it missing, all the time planning to visit a faraway place where his father and grandfather would read him stories and let him come in from the cold.

  TUCKER HELD in his palm the dirt-encrusted bronze button with a sailing ship impressed across the front.

  The bit of nylon thread that had come loose from Jimmy’s coat still trailed from the post in the back.

  “Perfect,” Tucker breathed.

  “Oh, Bridget, look!” Sophie exclaimed. “My brush and your pin, and see? The letter from James.”

  Tucker looked up quickly, and Angel didn’t understand the panic in his eyes. This was their job, wasn’t it? To tell the stories of the dead so they could pass gently into the next world? The women, touching those objects that held such strong memories, would simply pass over, but the thought seemed to hurt Tucker in ways that Angel didn’t understand.

  “No, ladies, not yet, please—”

  Sophie reached into the box and lifted the brush and the letter with one hand and pressed Bridget’s pin into her hand with the other.

  “Oh, boys,” Sophie said, fading diaphanously into the shadows. “Thank you for the lovely summer day. Send my brother if you can. We miss him.”

  Bridget’s blue eyes remained bright, though the rest of her was transparent as glass. “And you two don’t put off yer own fine love, if you can help it!” she cautioned, and then….

  They were gone. Leaving Tucker on the ground clutching a brass button, an almost empty box beside him on the grass.

  “No!” The cry was ripped from him, open grief for women long dead. Angel sank to his knees next to him and wrapped his arm around Tucker’s shoulders, holding him close.

  “Tucker. Tucker, you knew this would happen—”

  “Oh, Angel, I was going to give them their things. I wanted to tell them goodbye, and I wanted to see them happy in the house by the river. I wanted to tell that story too!”

  Of course he would. Angel dropped a kiss in his hair, knowing he couldn’t feel a thing but hoping. “It’s okay—we’ve met them. We know that story. They don’t need us to tell it to them. Nobody needs absolution or catharsis for two lovers living a long and happy life.”

  “But….” Tucker wiped his eyes on his shirt and sagged into his spot in the shade. “Angel, I just need to…. God! Don’t you just want to know there’s a happy ending?”

  “Of course I do!” Angel told him, the bitterness welling, blood in an old wound that he couldn’t remember sustaining. “But they had their happy ending, and you haven’t. I’d rather work to get you your ending than see someone who’s lived a happy and full life live theirs. That’s their story, Tucker.”

  Tucker turned a tear-ridden face toward him. “But it’s the only happy ending we’re likely to get,” he whispered. He was as destroyed as a child, as innocent as Jimmy hoping his father and grandfather were in Iwo Jima. The cynicism, the bitterness—it had washed away under Angel’s hands four nights before, and Angel had given him no armor to replace it.

  Angel opened his mouth to say something, anything at all, but he could make no promises.

  He couldn’t even kiss Tucker’s tears away.

  Stay

  TUCKER STOPPED for In-N-Out on the way home, so dispirited he almost forgot and asked Angel what he wanted.

  When he realized what he’d almost done, he changed his fries to “animal style” on general principles.

  In a life filled with strangers touching his body, he couldn’t ever remember needing the touch of one person—casual or intimate—so much in his life.

  Angel’s tentative voice broke into his savage mastication of a double cheeseburger.

  “I just wish I understood the rules.”

  Tucker swallowed. “Of what?”

  “Of us touching. Like, we know it happens when your heart is bleeding—as long as you’re not wearing the necklace.”

  “We know it happens when you’re getting all badass and protective,” Tucker said, smiling a little.

  “Or when you’re holding hands with ghosts,” Angel said, also smiling.

  “That was both of us, Angel.”

  “Oh yes!” Angel brightened. “I’ve got it. I think I get it.” He frowned. “I’m pretty sure I get it.”

  “Well, then, would you give it to me?” Tucker finished off his cheeseburger, and silence descended on the cab of the truck.

  And the tumblers clicked, unlocking the erotic potential of what Tucker had just said.

  “Is that how you like it?” Angel asked, sounding coy. “Do you want me to give it to you?”

  Tucker gasped. “I knew it! I knew that’s why you picked that form.”

  Angel disappeared and came back as the redheaded woman. “What form?” he asked guilelessly.

  Tucker broke into a cackle of laughter he almost couldn’t stop. “Oh my God, Angel. I know your secret!”

  The redhead disappeared, replaced by the Angel Tucker was most familiar with. “What secret?” he asked carefully.

  Tucker sighed. “Not the big one. I still don’t know what you are. I was talking about the….” He couldn’t fight the flush, so he gave up and let embarrassment sweep him. “You want to top. You want to… to….”

  “To give you pleasure,” Angel said humbly. “Yes. I’d like to experience it from you, but….”

  “But what?”

  “But you have given so much. I just wanted to give you something.” After experiencing pleasure at Angel’s hands, Tucker could smell the heat washing through him. “And it seemed like a very pleasurable thing for me too.�
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  “Having, uh, gotten it from both ends, as it were, I can vouch for both those things.” Instinctively Tucker reached over to squeeze Angel’s knee.

  And his fingers met the resistance of flesh.

  He almost cried. “If there was a place to pull over so we could put our boy parts where our mouths have been, I would so do it.”

  Angel grabbed his hand. “I would probably enjoy that. But I do not think it’s what you really need.”

  Tucker squeezed back. The warmth, the physical reassurance of having a real person there in the car seeped into his soul, and he could breathe again. Finally he could admit he’d been battling the loneliness—the terrible, life-draining loneliness that had wrapped him in grieving for over a decade—since the women had faded from the graveyard on the hill.

  “I’m grateful,” he whispered.

  “For what?”

  “That you’re at least here when I’m bleeding.”

  Angel stroked the back of his hand until he needed it to steer again.

  TUCKER PULLED up to the Greenaways’ little ranch-style about twenty minutes later, grateful when he saw Rae’s minivan in the driveway, with a little Ford truck behind it.

  “So the sedan really was for Andy.” Tucker had guessed, but apparently the Greenaways’ oldest bird had really flown the coop.

  “Do you think Josh misses the truck?” Angel asked.

  In answer, Josh came running out of the house, barely waiting until Tucker had stopped before patting the beaten quarter panel. Tucker gave Angel’s hand one last squeeze before throwing the door open in time to hear Josh say, “Oh, baby! Did you miss me? Don’t mind the other truck in the driveway, baby—she’s a harlot and means nothing.”

  Tucker met Angel’s amused glance. “Yes,” he said. “I think he missed the truck.”

  “Shh,” Josh whispered, draping his body across what must have been a fairly hot hood. “She thinks this is forever.”

  “Is your sane half in the house?”

  Josh grinned at him, but he didn’t stop hugging the quarter panel. “Indeed she is. She’s working, though, so it better be important.”