Bellweather Rhapsody (27 page)

Natalie began to find everything about Hollis tremendously irritating. Pathetic. This seemed like a perfectly natural reaction for a sane person to have to seven straight months of noise, of crimes against drums, with an added bonus of delusions of grandeur.

As quickly as it had begun, everything ended. Natalie wasn’t even supposed to be at school, but she stopped by on a Saturday afternoon to pick up her plan book and caught Ed Hollis stealing the drum kit. The rear doors of the band room were propped open and he had a snare drum and a hi-hat, one in each hand. He froze, as though, once motionless, he might blend into the pale yellow cinderblock walls.

“Hey, Miz Wilson,” he said eventually. “I swear I’m just borrowing it. For the gig tonight. I’ll bring it back tomorrow, I promise.”

“Hollis,” she said, “you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to steal—”

“Fuck that,” he said. “Sarah Reinhardt’s tuba belongs to the school. She takes that home and you don’t call
that
stealing. How is this any different?” His voice was the voice of an angry adult. For the first time in months, he frightened her.

“It’s different and you know it,” she said firmly.

“I’m taking it anyway. I need this. I won’t get famous without—”

“You won’t get famous, Hollis,” she said. “Period.”

“Yeah, I know, I need some fucking drums.”

“The drums have nothing to do with it. You won’t get famous because you aren’t any good,” she said, and she didn’t regret it. Not then. “You’re a fucking terrible drummer, Hollis, so put the kit down and get out of here before I call the police.”

Every part of him—his arms, his hands, his face, his eyes, even, it seemed, his hair—went slack. He dropped the snare but tossed the hi-hat at the nearest folding chair, where it made a deafening crash. “Fuck you,” he said, and ran out the propped doors.

She doesn’t know what he was officially suspended for, though it wasn’t for attempted robbery; she didn’t rat him out. She probably should have. He might have gotten some kind of help. He might have turned himself around, might have graduated.

He might not be standing in her house, in her bedroom, trying to rob her two years later.

“Miz Wilson,” he says flatly. “You live here?”

“Yes, Hollis.” This is absurd. “Obviously.” She holds the gun down at her side. Her arm quivers.

“Was that your husband downstairs?”

Oh no. Oh no, Emmett. “What did you do?”

Hollis shrugs. He looks sick.

“Hollis, you don’t have to—you don’t have to do this.” Whatever this is, whatever he is planning to do.

“How else am I going to make some money?” He frowns. “I’m a fucking terrible drummer.”

Hollis steps closer, and Natalie is terrified. This feeling, this bright, whirling, too-alive feeling is terror, and she knows it; she’s never felt it before, but in her oldest, most animal brain, she recognizes this moment for what it is. Hollis is an arm’s length away, but he’s staring at her from across two years—two years that might have been different if she’d have let him take that drum kit, just for the night, he meant it when he said he would bring it back. Or even if she hadn’t let him take the drums, if she had let him go on believing he was any good at it. If only she’d let him keep the thing that he loved, the one thing in his whole rotten world that made him feel like himself, that made him feel special.

He slaps her, hard, right across the mouth.

Natalie tastes warm salt as her teeth pierce her lip. She knows what comes next. She remembers this scene. She played it once herself, with her own teacher, only Viola didn’t know the second blow was coming. And Viola hadn’t been holding a handgun.

It was self-defense, all right.

“He was me,” she tells Fisher. “I was Viola. And before he could take another swing, I shot him in the chest.”

Allegro Furioso

17

A
LICE CAN’T MOVE.
She really . . . can’t move, and it’s dark, and holy shit, she’s tied up.

Her wrists and ankles are held tight against the arms and legs of a chair with heavy bands of cloth. She tries to scream but there’s fabric, soft and rough at the same time, in her mouth, on her tongue. It absorbs her spit. It tastes like soap.

The floor growls.

Alice freezes. She’s been kidnapped and now she’s going to die.

She opens her eyes wide and blinks, but the dark doesn’t get any lighter. Is she blind? How did she . . . what’s the last thing she remembers?
Think, Alice, think.
The party. She remembers leaving the party, a little buzzed, sad about her brother, hugely disappointed with him and with herself for not being able to get to him, get him out of there. He knows that dance. He
loves
it. Won’t he feel like an asshole when his sister’s dead body is discovered. Bet he’ll wish he danced with her
then
.

She has to pee. It must be morning.

The floor jingles. Dog tags. There’s a dog in the dark with her, a guard dog, probably a Doberman, a starved, fed-a-diet-of-human-flesh Doberman, he’s going to tear her throat out.
Oh God oh God.

Think.

After the party, Rabbit’s key in her hand. She started to go to her brother’s room but—she changed her mind. She was half drunk. She was pissed off. She wanted to sleep in her own damn pajamas. She went back to her own room instead, the room she shared with Jill. Alice was afraid of nothing and no one. Not evil moms. Not psycho dog ladies.

Light slices through the black, through a crack in the door. She can see she’s in a closet. Wooden hangers dangle above her. There’s a half-size ironing board mounted on the far wall and an iron, strangled with its own cord, lying beneath it. At least she’s still in the hotel.

A dog, a fat little fox of a dog, is sitting in the corner next to the iron. He tilts his head, opens his mouth, and smiles an idiot smile at her.

Alice remembers everything.

She went to her room, yes, she went to 712. She was brave with beer. If Jill’s killer came back, Alice was in the mood to give her a piece of her mind. She had shoved her own key in the lock and turned the knob and the room looked like she and Jill had never been there. No stink of cheap wine. No pinked sheets wadded beside the sink, no rosy waterline in the tub. The wine-rippled tarot cards she’d spread to dry on the bathroom floor that morning were all missing. Two coats hung in the closet, two suitcases beneath. Both beds were neatly made.

After everything—a murdered, stolen roommate, a condescending concierge, her nonbelieving brother transforming into a frat boy before her eyes—after all of that—

They turned down the room as if nothing had happened?

Alice sat down hard on the closest bed, on Jill’s bed, and cried noisily, desperately, choking herself with her own breath like an exhausted three-year-old. But crying wasn’t going to be enough. Crying alone wasn’t going to ease the feeling of having been so thoroughly erased.

She stood up on the bed, the mattress elastic beneath her sneakers, and bounced. She bounced again. She bounced harder until she was jumping, grunting with each landing and shrieking as she sprang up, thrashing that mattress and box spring to pieces. Then she howled in animal rage and leapt to the second bed.

The crazy dog woman must have been there the whole time, must have been sleeping or lying silently on the small strip of floor between the second bed and the wall, but to Alice the woman was not there, and then the woman was
everywhere,
red-faced and shouting, arms flailing, hands clenched in fists flying through the air. Alice’s legs jellied in shock. As she collapsed to the mattress, the woman punched her in the face so hard, so fast, it was the last thing Alice knew for eight hours.

The crazy dog woman. Minnie.

Alice is going to die. She allows herself a tiny whimper.

She hears a door open. “You can just give it to me,” Minnie says, which is Alice’s cue to go bananas. She struggles in the chair, which is too heavy to move, too heavy to knock against the wall or into the closet door. She hollers damply through the cloth in her mouth. The dog whimpers in sympathy and trots over, head-butting her shins. It’s weirdly comforting, but Alice is in no mood to be comforted.

The room door closes again. She droops, defeated.

Minnie flings open the closet doors and smiles at her.

“Breakfast is here!” she says.

Alice shrinks into the chair. Her eyes gush tears in the sudden brightness. She looks down and sees she’s been tied up with hotel linens, her wrists with pillowcases, her legs with towels.

“Oh, sorry.” Minnie reaches in and gently removes a washcloth from her mouth. Alice coughs. Too late, she thinks she ought to have tried to bite her. “I didn’t want you to accidentally wake me up again. I kind of lose it when that happens. Like last night, when you found me—you woke me up. I feel awful about your eye.”

“What about my eye?” Alice croaks.

“It’s pretty black.”

The left side of Alice’s face wakes up with an epic throb.

“Please untie me,” she says.

“Oh, sorry about that too. You smelled like beer and I was afraid you’d ralph in your sleep and choke on it, and I wanted to make sure you were propped upright. Let’s see, what else are you probably wondering about . . . You’re in the closet because I didn’t want room service to get the wrong idea.” Minnie smiles a shaky smile. “You know there’s something like thirty inches of snow outside today? And it’s still coming down? We can watch the news while we eat.”

Alice shakes her head. She’s so hungry she’s dizzy. Or maybe she’s been drugged. Minnie is going on about the breakfast she ordered—she didn’t know whether Alice was a vegetarian or a carnivore, so there’s pancakes and waffles and fruit and bacon and sausage patties, and aren’t sausage patties
better
than links, somehow?

“I like patties,” Alice murmurs.

Minnie squats, wrapping both hands around the front left leg of the chair, and Alice and her chair are dragged out of the closet in a straight line. The room service breakfast tray is nestled in the sheets of an unmade king or queen bed. She sees a fork and a knife, and on the small desk beside the bed, stationery scattered across the surface, an uncapped pen. Alice peers at Minnie and imagines having the chance to stab her with something.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Minnie says.

“How am I looking at you?”

“You’re looking at me like you think I’m going to kill you. If I were going to kill you,” Minnie kind of laughs, “I’d have done it by now.”

“If you
weren’t
going to kill me, you’d have untied me by now.”

The dog yawns squeakily.

Minnie flushes. “I know. I
know
.” She sits on the bed and the breakfast wobbles beside her. A drop of jostled OJ rides down the outside of the glass. “How about I untie one hand so you can eat?”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Alice says angrily. This woman, however dangerous and crazy she may be, might be bullyable. She sure looks like a pushover. “Who the hell do you think you are? What gives you the right to treat me like this?”

“I told you who I am. My name is Minnie. And I believe you about your roommate. I believe she’s dead.”

Alice’s heart stops at
I believe you.
Her mouth doesn’t. “That doesn’t give you the right to tie me up in your closet!”

“I know.” Minnie stands up. She’s overweight, but beyond that, she’s tall, and Alice truly fears that this giant woman will hurt her. She’s certainly strong enough. She’s certainly
crazy
enough. “I know what I did is just about the least okay thing to do, under any circumstances, to anyone, but I didn’t know—” Minnie frowns and looks down at the dog, who is wagging his tail and smiling his idiot canine smile. “I didn’t know what else to do. I need help.”

“No shit.”

“I need
your
help.” Minnie locks eyes with Alice. “To prove there’s something going on here, someone or some
thing
bad here in this hotel—that it isn’t just us, we’re not nuts and this isn’t our fault. When I was a little kid, what I saw here broke me. And I grew up around the broken parts but it wasn’t the right way to grow up. I’m all twisted and weird inside and I’m sick of bad dreams and horror stories. What happened here doesn’t get to dictate how I spend the rest of my life, or how you spend the rest of yours, and it’s no coincidence, us meeting last night in the room where it happened.
We are the girls who survived
. We are the girls who saw something awful and lived to talk about it, and now we have a chance to join forces and
beat it
. We can win. We can
win
this time, not just survive.”

Minnie looks away.

“I don’t want to hurt you. I would never hurt anyone on purpose,” she continues. “And now that I’ve said what I needed to say, I’m going to untie you and you can decide for yourself what you want to do.”

Alice’s heart beats all over her body. In her temples, her fingertips. Blood pulses into her ankles and her arms when Minnie loosens the linens binding her to the chair. She flexes her toes and rolls her wrists.

Minnie laces her fingers together and sits on the edge of the bed. The outside of Minnie—unassuming as oatmeal, from her dull, messy hair to her
ORANGEMEN
sweatshirt to her holey athletic socks—is a perfect disguise for the angry, avenging little girl Alice now sees inside. She’s just the sort of person Alice needs: someone who has a history with this hotel, someone with nothing to lose, and, most important, who believes her with dead seriousness.

“What do you propose we do?” Alice asks.

“What do you mean? Oh, hey, have some breakfast. It’s getting cold.” Minnie hands her a plate of pancakes. “There are some packets of syrup around here too—ah. Here they are.”

“I mean, I’d love to find out who killed Jill. It’s just a little . . . overwhelming.” Alice tries to sound nonchalant. “Can I have a fork?”

The dog has stopped grinning and gazes longingly at Alice, as though she holds all the keys to all the happiness he might ever know.