Bijou Read online

  So I was right. Bruce knew all about it and Ivy would never admit it. But I pressed her. “Hollis. You took Hollis’s soul, didn’t you? He died right here on the lawn.”

  Ivy got to her feet, pressing down on the counter. Her forearms quivered. “Annie, you are losing it completely. This has nothing to do with anything. Bijou traffic is Delphine property. Think about it. Dominique has all the souls she needs for her dirty business. Why would she bother with us out here in Boonieville?”

  I knew Zoe was hearing all this and would be full of questions. I knew Bruce knew all about it and I was going to get some answers. I had to know. “Why did you think you could get me down here on a pretext of a haunting and not realize I would be on to you? I know you too well. I know what you’re capable of.”

  Ivy walked stiffly past me. She hadn’t picked up her cane. Gray shaded the outlines of her eyes and mouth. Resembling a sad, stiff doll, or dancer, too weary to realize she had no performance left. As she reached for the back of a chair, I grabbed her arm.

  “I’m sorry I yelled. Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

  Her face was a wrinkled mass of distaste, but she let me put my arm around her. Silently we walked down the hall, leaving Zoe and Bruce watching, each with their own separate thoughts about what just happened.

  In her dark, disheveled bedroom, I helped Ivy sit on the side of her bed, knelt and took off her shoes. Her purse, slung around her shoulder, fell heavily to the floor. So that was where the gun was—all this time. It was lucky Sawyer acted with restraint when he discovered his daughter had spent the night at our house.

  “Annie, don’t you ever ask me about Bijou again. How can you think I would be that stupid? It’s an insult.” She lay down with a grunt. Spilling some Vicodin into my hand I gave them to her with a glass of water from her bathroom. The room smelled vaguely of patchouli and dirty socks. I would have to do some cleaning in here soon, in spite of the fact that I hated cleaning.

  Ivy’s eyes closed. I pulled the sheet and blanket over her, sat beside her, listened to her breathe, deep, watery dread spilling into my heart. I still hadn’t told her about my temporal stumble into Dominique’s bedroom.

  Touching her cheek, I said. “I will ask again, Ivy. I have to. And I have to know what you know about Bijou Xtra.”

  I don’t know if she heard me. She was out like a light.

  Chapter Ten

  Wind and a Wake

  I woke up three hours later in Zoe’s bed. She curled beside, me, reading yet another horror novel. I could hear Bruce snoring through his closed bedroom door. A sleep disorder clinic would welcome him as a client, I thought. Getting up, after checking on Ivy, I made us some cereal and took my bowl to the living room, dark with heavy curtains shrouding the bay window. As I drew them partly aside, the day’s bright light shone in.

  The old cabinet stood beside the fireplace. Scars nicked the mahogany, tarnished brass pulls were loose and the lock was gone. I found it tucked inside on a shelf. Nothing here to hide any more anyway, since Dad brought it home from his lab.

  What his employees thought about it, I’ll never know, as it stood for years in the lab, locked tight. When it appeared one day in this corner of the living room, I was instantly curious. What was I, fifteen? Already Dad was growing anxious, losing weight, going for long runs at night, making private phone calls from his bedroom, disappearing for hours at a time on weekends.

  So it was natural that he ignored my harassing him to let me see what was in the cabinet, to teach me more about the family trait. And just as natural that I despise him with violence only a teenager can know.

  Would Zoe hate me with the same feeling a few years from now? I didn’t doubt she would. I understood the worry, the urge to protect. But from what? If I only better understood the dangers we now faced, more ominous than anything I had encountered before, I would be better prepared.

  Sliding open the cabinet’s top drawer, I took out the book. No more than a tattered scrapbook, really, tooled black leather stained and torn, pages chewed by time, the book had been pasted together over the years by various Novaks. My great, great grandmother Charlotte Magee Novak started the thing, filling the large pages with a tidy cursive, nearly unreadable, pasting in the occasional photograph, newspaper clipping, strips of ribbon, crushed petals, strands of hair. I skipped her pages and went straight to the back.

  Dad did not add much to the book, but our grandfather Augie had. It was from Augie’s uneven block print I first learned about Bijou, Augie the rebel in the family; a conscientious objector during World War Two, he lived in a religious commune in the San Gabriel Mountains before moving north to settle in the Bay Area.

  Grandpa Augie desired that the Novaks compete with the Delphines for Bijou. His recipe and equipment lists for what was required for capturing and distilling dying souls had been torn out of the book. I suspected the pages must be around somewhere; where else would Ivy have learned the skill, certainly not from Dominique herself?

  Sitting on the sofa with the book in my lap, the thought brought me up short. Why not? It was possible Ivy had contact with Dominique, wheedled the secret out of her. A perfected Ivy-talent was wheedling. It could have happened any time in the fourteen years I was gone, or perhaps, even more interestingly, before I left home, before Dad died, while we were teenagers together.

  Of course, I had no evidence other than a clear instinctive impression that Ivy had Bijou. Where would she be making it? Where was it hidden?

  But more than this, I wanted to find out about Bijou Xtra. Did Ivy know how to get it? Had she learned the method from Dad? And from whom did Dad discover it? Had he pursued it in the lab, a secret project all his own, searching for the soul in the cyclotron? Perhaps it was no coincidence that a government lab experimenting with particle physics happened to be placed where the barrier between the living and the dead was very thin, criss-crossed with portals, knocking on the doors of the Underworld? Souls traveling the speed of light, tearing rents in the veil. Oddly, the thought amused me.

  This wasn’t the first time I questioned why the Rad Lab was here and why Dad worked there. Dad evaded my questions. I had too many, and no ready answers still. He had so under-prepared me for what I was forced to do now.

  Someone had tucked a misty Polaroid of Dad between the book’s last two pages. Odd how this book ends with him, as if the magic family line slams on the breaks with Ivy and me as mere duds. Dad squats in the back garden of the old house, where he built a crazy landscape, his hand on a tottering concrete castle embedded with marbles, shells, washers, screws, Mom’s discarded earrings. Cut off by the photo’s borders was the figure of a small child, hand and shoulder visible—I couldn’t remember, was it me? Or Ivy.

  The living room darkened as if a cloud drew abruptly over the sun. I stared at the photo of my father, and knew what I had to do. I hated the thought—it lay heavily in my stomach like a rich meal, delicious in the mouth, but once in my bowels, a bloated lump of fear.

  I could go now.

  My heart swung, trapeze-like, to land just behind my tongue. Now, before anyone woke up—I could be back before they even knew I was gone.

  Letting the book slide off my lap onto the couch, I rose. Pepper stood, staring at me, knowing with her brown eyes what was needed. Nodding at her, I started down the hallway, paused to look outside, where indeed clouds gathered a breeze to shove around the pines bordering Ivy’s fence. A storm? In summer? In California?

  A confirming shudder thudded against the walls, rattled the sliding glass. Roof tiles swept past, accompanied by newspaper fliers and plastic bags. The sky glowered blackly. Looking up, I could see swirls, espresso dribbled onto foam. Only these were in motion, the color of oil and tar.

  Mae.

  Whistling howls answered my thoughts. I didn’t dare go outside as I watched someone’s garbage can bounce through our yard and over the fence. Beside me Pepper leaned against my leg, ears whisking back and forth as she traced distant sounds of d
estruction that I was glad I couldn’t hear.

  Dimness crowded the house, shouldered against us. Fear traveled up my back with cold fingers and laced them against my neck. My hand found Pepper’s warm head, and stayed there.

  The row of pines along the fence changed color in the wind, flicking different shades of green. Staring at them, hearing far away crashes and roarings and screams, I saw hues change and form something—or some things—dancing and whirling in the storm.

  As I watched the shapes, fascinated, I became aware, the way you do, of my reflection in the glass between me and the chaos. The day had grown night-dark, clouds banking low, gravid with rain and disturbance. I saw a smile on my face, a look of wonder, enjoyment. How could this be so, as the world outside my door was being shredded by the claws of a supernatural gale?

  But it wasn’t my face that smiled back at me. It was Mae, superimposed upon mine. When I forced my eyes to see beyond, I saw the patio, chairs toppled, leaves stripped from the grapevines. When I looked at my face again, I saw hers.

  “Don’t hurt anyone,” I shouted, the roaring wind outside trying to blast a hole in my ears.

  Despite the noise, her voice was very clear, as if she were a tiny announcer standing just inside my right ear. “I only need to make a point. You didn’t seem to understand me the last time we spoke.”

  “I found the diary.” It was whining, I knew, but I didn’t care. She would judge me no matter how I said it.

  She cocked her head the way she had, as if a weight pulled her forehead to one side; her entire body would sway in that direction, and then the other, like a tree in the very wind engulfing our house. “Yes, you found the diary, and Sawyer has it, of all things. How could you let him read it?”

  Raising my hand, I interrupted. “He is the best one to get you off the hook with that one, if that is what you are going for. But I don’t think that’s what you want the diary for. Otherwise why would you have asked me to find Justin?”

  “You’ve screwed that one up, too. You told your ex to find him.” Mae’s head swung again, as she shook the hair from her eyes. “I give you three tasks, three simple things to do, like the witch queen gives her faithful servant, and you fail at all three. That’s not how it’s supposed to go.”

  “Life isn’t a fairy tale,” I muttered, but she didn’t seem to hear me. Me, faithful servant to the queens who ruled my life, Mae and Ivy. Serving up the dead on a platter, baked apple in her mouth. “It’s barely 24 hours. Stuff has happened you wouldn’t believe, Mae Woo.”

  Her nose wrinkled. Naming herself the Chinese Empress when one year she ordered us to celebrate Chinese New Year with stolen fireworks, she came up with that name, and now she hated me to say it.

  “Listen, Mae. You have to cut me some slack. Something is happening, bigger than your little, dead life.” Dead life. That was pretty funny. “Someone is making Bijou Xtra. Do you know what that is? It’s Bijou made from living souls. Priceless. Someone is dealing it. Someone is buying it. I have to find out who and stop them.”

  The words, as I said them, took on a life of their own, small birds set lose in the room, fluttering around, seeking a way out to tell my promise to the universe. I wished I could snatch them back.

  Mae’s head did a 360, twirling, hair flying across her face to slap her cheek. “I don’t care!” she shrieked. “No one wanted my spirit, my soul. They could have, and they didn’t want it. But what’s worse than living as a gray spirit slouching around the universe, is being a white one, a true one, given a ticket to the land of the dead which I can’t use. I’m glued to the earth, Annie, by lies and self-deception and sick glamor.”

  The glass door rattled fiercely—a crack spidered through it. Behind, through Mae, the pines lay on their sides as if to get out of her way. The wind would pull them out by their roots. Under my feet, the floor quivered as if a freight train were rolling through the house.

  “OK, I’ll do it, I’ll help!” But the wind overpowered my voice, and nothing came out but a wheezy cry. Beside me Pepper gave out a sharp woof.

  As I looked through the glass, I saw Mae’s face whiten into an almost blue shade and begin rotating like a ball. Then she bounced away, a blue globe slipping through the waves of wind.

  Then all was silence.

  Little bell-sounds pinged my ears. My hands pressing on the glass touched ice, and I snatched them away, looking at my palms white with frost.

  Through the door I saw sun slanting across the pines, standing in an orderly row, not flung about in the storm.

  Had there been a storm?

  Sirens haunted the edges of my hearing. Carefully sliding the door to one side—a series of cracks radiated from a central flaw as if it had been struck by a bullet—I stepped outside.

  Our lawn and pool was scoured clean, not a shred of detritus anywhere, the water blue glass. But I could hear shouting and laughter outside, mixed with the random expletive. Emerging from the breezeway, Pepper at my side, I looked at what was left of our block.

  Tornadoes in Quantum City? Global warming on an impossible scale, if that were so.

  A car lay on its side on our neighbor’s lawn. Across the street, trees gouged deeply into the neighbor’s roof as if they took big bites. In our ash tree, still scarred by Hollis’s motorcycle, hung a stroller with a little girl in it. Her mother stood underneath, hysterical, trying to reach the wheels. In the stroller, the little girl swung and laughed, kicked her feet—better than Disneyland!

  Boards, roof tiles, branches and blossoms, garden implements, hats littered the street, lawns, sidewalks. Everywhere except our property, as if a protective net had settled over the borders of our lot and kept us clean.

  Getting the ladder, I helped the woman get her child out of the tree. Everywhere, people wandered, picked up sweaters and umbrellas and books tossed around the place, and cast, I thought, curious glances at me and Ivy’s house, as if forming in their minds questions about our worthiness to be neighbors when we had escaped the storm unscathed.

  A confused dog walked along the roof of the house across the street. I found three goldfish in an upturned ball cap, filled with fortuitous water. Mae had always loved animals.

  Power and phones were out for only an hour. There were no injuries. People could have something to talk about for years. I would only learn all this later, because before the mob formed outside to demand why our house escaped any damage at all, I loaned out garden hose, wheel barrow, push broom and garbage bags and went back inside.

  Except for the broken sliding glass door, our house was as good as new. In fact, the pool was completely clear of leaves and the patio swept and the chairs scrubbed clean. Perhaps Mae was embarrassed about her little outburst. I would have to explain to Ivy when she woke up. Because Ivy, Zoe and Bruce slept through the entire conflagration.

  But I didn’t have time to ponder this, nor answer the doorbell—likely a neighbor asking to borrow our shop vac.

  Locking myself into the bathroom, I located the file for Jonah in my head, and his face floated in front of me. Door open, step in, rifle through the memories. Jonah, come. I need to speak with you.

  Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I fully expected him to appear instantly as he had before. The bells still chimed in my head, but I heard nothing except my own breathing. Watching the walls, examining the sky-light, looking in the mirror, I saw nothing, felt nothing. No hint of cigarettes or moldy books. Nothing.

  Jonah ignored my summons. Closing my eyes, I focused my brain on one thought: Jonah’s tongue and mouth. When they touched me, down there, how easy it was to come quickly, many times, over and over. If anything would get Jonah’s attention, it would be the ghosts of sex: damp sheets, quick breaths, the taste of bodies and every secretion.

  No. Nothing. Silence buzzed around me, a hapless, dying fly. What was going on? Where was he? Had I lost my touch?

  Pepper scratched the door; she knew the answer. She had known what we had to do ever since I had gotten out of be
d. There was nothing else for it.

  Changing my clothes, I walked silently into Bruce’s room and tapped his shoulder. I needed a good swimmer. I depended on the fact that he knew what to do—I could not imagine Ivy not training Bruce in the special family ability. I doubted she was strong enough for the journey now, but Bruce certainly was. Several shakes and nudges later he was sitting on the side of the bed, yawning, snagged shorts and beach shoes from the floor, listening, I hoped, to what I was telling him. I couldn’t read his face to know if he agreed, or disagreed, or was frightened or ghoulishly thrilled by what I was asking him to do. No, telling him to do. Either way, he didn’t argue. He knew enough to unearth a rumpled fleece jacket from deep in his dresser. It could be cold as hell in Hell.

  The three of us, myself, Bruce and Pepper wearing her collar and leash, stood on the patio. Bruce couldn’t see the mess in the street from here. A moment ago as he stood at the sink gulping down a diet coke, he didn’t even look outside, fortunate because I didn’t want to spend any time in explanations that would make no sense.

  That would come soon enough. We would have to walk to the portal because the street was blocked by several fallen trees and a generous section of someone’s kitchen.

  By the time we got outside the clouds left behind a mirror-blue sky. The storm had struck only a quarter mile radius from our house, storm-central from what I could see. Police and aid cars paced up and down the streets like nervous parents-to-be, searching for anyone trapped under over-turned bathtubs.

  Bruce looked at everything with eyebrows raised and no comment, except the occasional uttered “Awesome” or “Sweet!”. I wondered if my nephew had ingested something to make his day more interesting; mushrooms, perhaps? That should make his experience in Hell more than spiritual, I thought. So far he was perfectly amiable and agreeable. He had even, at my request, shut off his cell phone as it buzzed with a message from his one and only adorable Agnes.