All the Rules of Heaven

by Amy Lane

  “It’s a little bit important,” Tucker said. In his peripheral vision, Angel was nodding like mad.

  “You go on in.”

  They turned, and Josh frowned. “That’s weird. When you drove up, I could have sworn there were two of you in there. I was going to ask you to introduce me to your friend, but….”

  Tucker stared at him.

  Josh stared back. “Please tell me I was seeing things.”

  “Sure.” Tucker nodded. “You were seeing Angel.”

  “Goddammit. I do not want to get sucked into this. It’s fine for Rae and the kids to think that shit’s real, but—”

  “That shit’s real,” Tucker said, no bullshit in his voice. “And it could be dangerous. Just have a little respect for it, okay?”

  Josh patted the hood mournfully. “I’m probably going to want to hear whatever you and Rae are talking about, aren’t I? Dammit, baby, I thought you and me would get some time alone.”

  Tucker chuckled as he and Angel followed the poor man inside.

  Rae was standing by the sink washing her hands when they walked in. She nodded at Tucker and then squinted behind him.

  Then she squinted at Tucker again and just that quickly invaded his space. “What did you do to your face?” she demanded. “And what did you do to my work?”

  Tucker touched the necklace at his throat and frowned. Glancing at Angel, he pulled the chain over his head and held the circumscribed pentagram in the palm of his hand.

  “It’s… twisted,” he murmured. The points of the star remained firmly soldered to the circle around them, but all stretches of the silver had twisted, warping, creating a three-dimensional sphere, with what had once been a garnet suspended in the middle.

  The stone was now black as an onyx, but cut in facets, like a diamond.

  “That is very interesting,” he said, wondering what it meant. “Angel, any ideas?”

  “Well, the pentagram is supposed to represent the five senses,” Angel said thoughtfully. “And safety—hiding—because of all the angles, the nooks and crannies it holds. This looks like the epitome of that. The shape is using the nooks and crannies to protect the rare thing inside.”

  “Is that really a black diamond?” Tucker turned the sphere to try to get a better look at it.

  And then it turned red.

  Tucker looked to see what Rae thought, but she was looking over his shoulder. “Angel, you are almost visible. Do you know that?”

  “Even Josh saw me,” Angel said, sounding proud.

  “Tucker, what in the hell is going on over there?” With a frustrated grunt, Rae pulled a scrunchy out of her pocket and used it to capture the frothy wealth of graying hair on the top of her head.

  “I’m thinking hell is sort of the problem.”

  “Sit down,” Rae gestured. “Both of you. God, Tucker, your nose is truly special, you know that? You sit too, Josh.” She turned her head and started to holler. “Coral! Murphy! Tilda! You guys get in here and listen and fetch, okay? Coral, you especially—we’re going to need you!”

  “Mom! I’m in the middle of Overwatch!”

  “Coral Catherine, do you ever want to play that game again?”

  The grumpy sound of irritated preadolescent was enough to lighten the air in the kitchen, so by the time the kids came in, big-eyed and sober, Tucker managed to not feel like he was including grade-schoolers in on a council of war.

  “Oh!” Coral said, hanging over what was probably a vacant chair to her father and mother. “Sorry about your face, Tucker. Hey, Angel. You’re looking very solid today.”

  “I can’t see him,” Tilda said flatly. “Am I excused?”

  “No,” her mother told her. “Just ’cause you can’t see shit, that doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you. Tucker, tell us what happened.”

  Tucker started with discovering the pentagram around his neck and the confrontation with a dangerous ghost in the garden.

  “Angel doesn’t think Conklin will come in—he thinks it violates all of the rules Conklin valued.”

  Rae snorted. “Yes, well, you and Angel violate all of the rules you value, so I’m with you, Tucker. I wouldn’t trust Conklin’s ghost, not for a minute.”

  “What do you think he will do?” Josh asked, frowning. Tucker was relieved that he didn’t look doubtful—it was good to have Josh on board.

  “I’m not sure.” Tucker leaned on his elbows. “If he’s corporeal, he could come in and attack me as I slept. I’m worried about that, but not too worried.” He smiled briefly. “Me and Angel could take him.”

  Angel snorted.

  “What if he’s not corporeal?” Rae asked, equally serious.

  “That’s the scariest part,” Tucker admitted. “When we tangled in the front yard—” He touched his swollen nose gingerly. “—he wasn’t running at me to attack me. He was running at me to do what the ghosts at the graveyard tried to do.”

  Rae and the kids all shuddered, apparently understanding the direness of having another person’s soul inside them.

  “He wanted to take you over,” Rae said, and Tucker nodded. “Why didn’t he try before then?”

  Tucker tugged at the charm at his throat. “I don’t think he saw me without this. So this was like a gift and a curse. It helped me fight that ghost off, but it took away my camouflage as a standard member of the living.”

  “Hmmm….” She tightened her scrunchy and paced. “Why this guy?”

  Tucker and Angel exchanged glances. “He’s an asshole?” Tucker said after a moment.

  She pinned him with a “mom” gaze. “You will elaborate.”

  “He was some sort of millionaire back east—one of those captains-of-the-universe types who think they own everyone. He was sexually abusing his daughter-in-law, so she fled out here with her lover to see if her brother would take her in.”

  “Did he?” Josh asked, apparently captured by the story.

  Tucker smiled, remembering Sophie and Bridget and how happy they’d been. “Yes. He was going to take the girls in. He didn’t care that she wanted a divorce, in fact. He’d been missing his family, and his wife was lonely when he was gone working. He was….” Tucker shrugged, trying not to wish for the perfect ending. “He was a good guy.”

  “Girls?” Tilda apparently forgot this was boring and gazed at him like he was the TV.

  Tucker winked. “Yeah. Girls. Bridget was Sophie’s ladies’ maid. They… they were special. They were nice, nice ladies. And they came out here because they wanted to get far away from her father-in-law.”

  “But he followed?”

  “Yeah.” Tucker thought about it—thought about the terrifying glimpses he’d had into Thomas Conklin Senior’s life. “He thought he owned them. He was furious that they would try to escape. He was an addict and entitled and….” He shuddered. “His heart was as black and as evil as they come.”

  He had them. The whole Greenaway family was staring at him openmouthed, and he found he didn’t want to stop. The fairy-tale words fell from his lips, framing the story in mystery and beauty and terror and ugliness and joy, because that was the way of all the best stories.

  “So the girls arrived at Daisy Place, and for a while, it was paradise. They stayed in the gardens and their rooms, mostly, but some days they walked through town and along Church Street, seeing the steep drop of canyon beyond the cemetery and talking about flying under the sun. Sophie sent word to her brother a few weeks after they arrived—”

  “Why so late?” Murphy wanted to know, as entranced as his sister.

  “It was a honeymoon to them,” Tucker said, guessing. He’d known they’d fled in the spring and James had arrived in the fall. He would fill in the gaps as he may. “But also they were afraid, and they wanted to get their courage up. Sophie had traveled across the country uninvited, and she was leaving her husband. She was afraid her brother might not want the disgrace she brought upon her family name.”

  Coral socked her brother in the arm. “He’d better
take her,” she said, glaring at Murphy as if he’d rejected her.

  “Hey!”

  “Wait—you said he did!” Tilda burst in excitedly. Then, to her mother, “See. I was listening.”

  “You were indeed.” Tucker inclined his head. “Very good. So her brother was coming, and the girls were so excited and nervous. And just as they read the letter, they heard another voice calling from downstairs.”

  “Oh no!” Josh was leaning his chin on his fists like a girl in a ’50s movie. “Conklin?”

  “Oh yes,” Tucker said. “It was Sophie’s father-in-law, and he was furious. He was maddened beyond reason. He burst into the hotel room and stormed forward to attack Sophie. Bridget stepped in, and he backhanded her across the room. She fell, hitting her head, and struggled to get back up. Conklin, enraged, continued his assault, and poor Sophie.” Tucker swallowed. He hadn’t seen inside Sophie’s heart for this rape, but he’d been there for the first one, and he would carry her helplessness, her degradation and pain, for the rest of his life.

  “She was in pain,” he said softly. “And being abused terribly. And just then, in the middle of all that chaos, her brother walked in.”

  “I’d kill somebody who’d touch my sister!” Murphy growled.

  Tucker regarded him sadly. “Of course you would. You’re a good brother. And so was James. He seized a glass paperweight, one with a solid base of bronze, and he crashed it down on the back of Conklin’s head.”

  Everybody in the room put their hands to their mouth in horror. Including Angel.

  “Oh, he was dead all right,” Tucker told them. “But Sophie and Bridget, they were strong and quick-thinking. They knew James could get charged and convicted of murder—Conklin was very powerful, and James was a railroad man, no more, no less. So they rolled the body in a sheet and used Sophie’s ripped clothing to sop up the blood and clean the room. Bridget and James took the body into the graveyard in the dark of night, by the light of a waning moon, and buried it. They thought it was on consecrated ground, mind you, and they did not realize that Daisy Place is built upon an abomination. The metal there is made to trap the souls of the dead. Or sometimes, parts of the living.”

  That was what had happened to James Beaufort, after all.

  “So they buried Conklin’s body and then went back for Sophie, and the girls ran out of the hotel and left all of the trouble behind them.”

  “You can’t leave that sort of thing behind you,” Rae said with the certainty of an adult.

  “No, you can’t.” Tucker closed his eyes and saw Damien. “A part of your soul always stays behind. Every time. And so the girls, Sophie and Bridget, left a part of themselves at Daisy Place. Part of it was the happy part—the part that made love and took walks and enjoyed breakfast with strawberries and days with no fear. But some of what they left behind was that terrible, terrible night, the one that nobody ever spoke of. The one that ended when James drove their buckboard away and they looked behind them and saw, pressed against the glass of the window, the bloated and insane face of Thomas Conklin Senior.”

  Everybody gasped—as they should have—but it was Josh who asked the question that had truly haunted Tucker.

  “But what about James? He couldn’t have walked away free and clear either.”

  “No, he did not,” Tucker answered, nodding, the storyteller’s spell still upon him. “He left a big chunk of his soul there in Daisy Place, much of it out of doors, on the moonlit ride to and from the hidden grave. He was haunted by what he’d done—haunted even more because it was a secret, one he could barely stand to tell his wife. And he’d had no friends to absolve him of the guilt and the pain of taking another life.”

  Tucker took a deep breath, finding something resonant and painful in this fact. He felt a squeeze on his shoulder and a kiss on his temple. He closed his eyes and savored Angel’s touch for as long as it would last.

  “Although James was a good man and died a peaceful death, much of his soul is still on the lawn of Daisy Place, in a constant battle with Conklin as he tries to keep the man’s viciousness from harming people, even in death.”

  A collective sigh went through the family as the story ended.

  “Wow,” Tilda said softly. “That was cool. Awful, but… you know. Cool.”

  “But Sophie and Bridget had a good life?” Coral asked.

  “Oh yes. They had cats and chickens and nephews and then great-nephews and nieces to play with,” Tucker told her. Something in his heart healed as he said it. Angel had been right. Telling the story made it true; he hadn’t needed the women to tell him that part. He’d known it in his heart. “They were very happy in the end, and all of the suffering they’d undergone faded in their memory, until, for the most part, they only remembered the joy of falling in love.”

  And now the family seemed to inhale.

  “But that doesn’t tell us anything about the bauble at your neck,” Rae said, frowning. “Except… it changed. Tucker, how did you get that story?”

  “I felt it,” Tucker said, feeling like one of the children now. “Angel finds the items in the room with the emotional charge, I touch them, and the story sort of plays for both of us.” He looked at Angel for confirmation. “It’s how Angel and my aunt helped dispel the trapped spirits in that house for years. I guess ghosts need catharsis and absolution as much as humans do.”

  Rae nodded but was still troubled. “So you knew much of Conklin’s story before he attacked you?”

  Tucker thought about it. “Yes. I mean, I had an idea. I was hoping Sophie and Bridget had gotten away, but….” He remembered the terrible night he’d seen from James’s point of view. “I had no idea how badly James felt about it. That changed. I thought it was just a story about madness and violence. What it should be is a story about redemption. Not for Conklin—he was a douchenugget. But James. James was a good man, and part of his spirt is still at the hotel because he was forced to kill a bad one.”

  “Oh,” Rae said, her soft smile of wonder lighting her plain features with a luminous beauty. “That’s it. That’s what happened. The pendant—its power—it’s not broken, it’s changed. Like you. You changed toward the situation you were watching.” Her eyes flickered over his shoulder. “You and Angel changed toward each other. I know you were afraid because the ghosts, the protective symbol—the falling in love with Angel—they all seemed to be breaking rules of dealing with the dead. You’re not supposed to be concrete to a ghost. You’re not supposed to fall in love with one. You’re not supposed to wear a pagan symbol to a place of Christian burial. These are the rules as you know them.”

  Tucker gasped. Some of those rules he’d known internally but had never vocalized.

  “But they’re not true,” he said.

  “It’s like how I felt about the fairy hill,” Angel murmured. “That wasn’t true either.”

  Tucker nodded, and so did Rae.

  “You’re right,” she said. “The rules of dealing with the dead are always fluid. They depend on who and where and why and how we understand their lives. You were afraid because it felt like this thing you were doing—dealing with the spirits—was breaking rules. But it’s not. It’s changing the rules. Which means the rules are still there. You just need to figure out what they are.”

  Oh. Tucker swallowed. “What was that thing about Angel?” he said, his voice lost in the babble in his head.

  Rae grabbed his hand and held it to her cheek. Augh! He was being mommed again, and he was not so blind as to fail to see how much he craved it. “Tucker, I don’t even have to see Angel. I just have to see how you look when he’s near.”

  “I do like the way you look at me,” Angel said modestly. “In all of my forms. Once the initial surprise is over, the look doesn’t change.”

  Tucker choked back an emotion-fraught laugh. “Your eyes are the same,” he said shortly. “If you want to try to make me look at you different, you need to change your eyes.” He sighed. “And even then, I’d still know i
t was you.”

  Again he sensed a kiss on the temple he couldn’t feel—but it was just as well. An actual kiss from Angel right now might destroy him.

  “Anyway,” Tucker said on a deep breath, trying to recover, “I was wondering about some more charms. I can pay—”

  “Don’t finish that sentence,” Rae barked, and Tucker subsided.

  “Okay, well, if you need anything—yardwork, exorcism, sexual epiphany, ghost hunting; those are pretty much my specialties—I can help. But something for my room, so I can sleep, would be nice.”

  Rae nodded and fingered the pendant again. “I can do that.”

  “Thanks. Also, can I borrow your sketchbook for a minute?”

  “Sure.” The book appeared, with a pencil and a pen, and Tucker looked up at the family and smiled weakly. “This is going to be sort of boring,” he apologized.

  The children just watched, wide-eyed, as though expecting him to pull magic from the plain page. Well, in a way, he was.

  He muttered to himself as he sketched, trying hard to pull up the obscure pages of a misspent youth in college behind his eyes. Even then he’d known holding a job would be impossible. He’d tried a few times, things with flexible hours. The time he’d worked in a movie theater had been the best, until he’d gotten busted having sex in the bathroom. Twice. The other times had ended up much the same: the job was great, and he’d enjoyed the employment, until that thing in his chest started up… again.

  But he’d gone to school, and he’d learned (and cut a few classes, but since he’d had his share of professors, that had worked too), and one of the things he’d learned had been….

  This.

  He spelled the words out because this was all about stories, and linked the letters because it would have to be jewelry. He finished in the breathless silence and rubbed his eyes. How long? How many days had it been since he’d not been emotionally exhausted or not worried about his life or his privacy as he slept?

  He gave the picture to Rae and grimaced. “It’ll take a while. You don’t have to get it done in a day. And if it’s too much—”