Blackbirds (20 page)

  Miriam can't lie to herself. The money feels like it's about to burn off her fingers, like it's wet with blood. She looks down at it, and for a second instead of seeing Andrew Jackson's ugly mug on the bill, she sees Louis, his eyes torn out, black Xs inked across the sockets.

  She doesn't say anything.

  She offers a wan smile.

  Then exits.

 

Miriam knows what to expect, and this isn't it. She expects New Age foofaraw and pseudo-occult frippery: the crystals, the purple fringe, the chimes, the incense that irritates the eye, a fat cat lounging on a pillow. What she gets is fluorescent lighting in a shop for knitting aficionados (
knit-wits
, Miriam thinks). Brown shelves holding afghans, baby hats, bundles of yarn. And no cat. Instead a fat-bellied beagle lies snoozing under a table. He looks gassy.

  And the woman who sits at that table is less "Gypsy scammer" and more "notary public." Hell, she looks like the head of a church bake sale. Powder blue cardigan. Poof of red hair. Reading glasses over the bridge of her nose.

  "Okay, what the fuck?" is the first thing Miriam says.

  The woman gives her a droll, dry look. "May I help you?"

  "I… thought I was walking into the Psychics-R-Us store. Sorry." She turns to leave.

  "I'm the psychic," the woman says. "My name is Miss Nancy."

  "Miss Nancy the knitting psychic?"

  "I do knit and crochet, yes. A lady has to make money however she can."

  Miriam shrugs. "Scream it so the cheap seats can hear, sister. Do I sit?"

  "Sit. Please."

  Miriam does. She drums her fingers on the table. "So, now what? What happens? How much will this scam cost me?"

  "The fee is forty dollars, but I assure you, this is not a scam." The woman's voice is a bit gravely. She smokes, or used to, Miriam thinks, and it only makes her itch for a cigarette – her smoke breaks have been few and far between since she started riding with Louis.

  "Trust me, it's a fucking scam."

  "Don't use that kind of language with me."

  Miriam hears her mother's voice in there, somewhere. She nods. "Sorry."

  "It's no scam, it's no sham. The psychic dimension is a real one."

  "I know it is."

  "Do you?"

  "I'm psychic. Shouldn't you have known that?"

  The woman clucks her tongue. "If you were a true psychic, you'd know it doesn't work that way and is rarely so simple."

  "Well-played, Miss Nancy. Well-played. Fine, forty bucks it is." Miriam slides two twenties across the table. "And maybe if you're really good, I'll buy a knit cap or an ashtray cozy."

  Miss Nancy takes the money, and in something of a surprise, tucks it into her cardigan, under her collar – essentially into her cleavage.

  "What will it be, then? Tarot? Want your palm read? I read tea leaves."

  "I usually just read the bottom of a shot glass. Out of those choices, I'll take none of the above, thanks."

  Miss Nancy looks puzzled.

  "I'm psychic," Miriam says. "Remember? C'mon, Nance. You don't need those things. Maybe the end result isn't a scam, but those items kind of are, aren't they? The pretty cards? The secrets supposedly inscribed upon my pretty palm? You just need skin on skin. Just a touch will do. Am I right?"

  Miriam's not so sure she's right – she's out on a limb here because she's never actually met someone who claims to be a real psychic. But this is how hers works, and presuming that fate works a certain way, with certain rules, and demands certain things of its endlessly toiling workers, then she figures Miss Nancy is bound by the same proscriptions.

  Below the table, the beagle murmurs, then farts.

  "True enough," Miss Nancy finally says, her smile a pinched pucker. She opens her hand, and taps it. "Put your hand in mine."

  "I want you to be honest about what you see."

  "I will, hon. I promise that."

  "No fucking – er, no
screwing
around."

  "Just put your hand in mine."

  Miriam reaches over and lays her hand into the woman's grip.

  Nancy's hand is warm. Miriam feels cold.

  They sit for a few moments. Silent. It hits Miriam suddenly – she's not seeing how this woman dies. No vision. No end game.
No death
. It's like the woman's a rogue agent, disconnected from the flow of fate and time, unbound by –

  Nancy's fingers close like a flytrap around Miriam's hand.

  "Ow, hey–" Miriam says.

  The grip tightens. The woman's neck tenses until the tendons stand out. Miriam tries to pull her hand away but can't. Nancy's eyes snap open. The whites of her eyes start to bloom red from busted blood vessels. Her teeth grind so hard Miriam is afraid they might crack.

  Miriam tugs her hand again, but it's like being caught in a vice – and the woman's hand is growing warmer, hotter, like it might burn her.

  Blood pops from Nancy's nose. It trickles onto Miriam's hand.
Pat, pat, pat.
Miriam idly hopes the blood will lubricate the woman's crushing grasp and get her free. No luck.

  Nancy begins to moan. Her head rolls and pivots.

  Below the table, the beagle starts to bay along with her.

  "Christ," Miriam says, genuinely scared. Is this about her? Is the woman having some kind of coincidental aneurysm? She puts her free palm against the table and shoves hard. The table slams into the woman's midsection, and she gasps.

  The woman's fingers uncurl. Miriam jerks her hand back. The skin is red, and she can already see the bruises forming.

  Nancy looks like shit. Sweat pours from her brow. She licks her lips and pulls out a small handkerchief to mop up the blood. Her eyes have gone totally red.

  Miriam speaks in a small voice. "Miss Nancy? Are you okay?"

  "What are you?" she hisses.

  "What? What do you mean?"

  "Something dead is inside you. A deep, black, shriveled thing, and it's crying out like a lost child for its mother. You are the hand of death. You are its mechanism. I can hear the wheels turning, the pulleys pulling." Nancy fishes into her shirt and withdraws the two twenties. She crumples the money into little boulders and pitches them back at Miriam. "Take it. I don't want your blood money. Death is following you, and you've got some monster –
some presence
– inside your heart and mind. I don't want any part of it. Get out of here."

  "Wait," Miriam pleads. "Wait! No, help me, help me understand, tell me how to stop it, tell me how to close it all off and–"

  "Get out of here!" Miss Nancy screams. The beagle joins her yowl with his own.

  Miriam staggers to her feet and backs toward the door.

  "Please–"

  "
Go
."

  Her shoulders hit the door, and she backs out, dizzy.

 

Miriam spends fifteen minutes in a small alley by a dry cleaner's joint just a minute's walk from the psychic. She smokes. She trembles. Her mind wanders.

  Then she composes herself and heads back to the diner.

  "She tell you your future?" Louis asks.

  Miriam offers a fake smile. "Total scam. She had nothing to tell me I didn't already know. Ready to hit the bricks?"

 
 

 

The stink surprises Harriet. It is the smell of fresh, cut grass. It might as well be the scent of a fruiting body, of a corpse in a drain culvert left for days to the bugs and bacteria. For her, it's the smell of decay. The odor of utter stagnation. All her muscles cinch up like a too-tight belt.

  Ingersoll, from the back of the Escalade (his presence upgrades them from the Cutlass Ciera, without question), sees her shoulders tense and says: "This is familiar to you, Harriet."

  "Yes," she says. The word lies there, gutted of emotion.

  Around her, the suburban boxes. The white-washed curbs, the bird baths. The solar lights, the clematis growing up around mailboxes. Pastel siding. Bright white rain gutters.

  She wants to set fire to everything here, wants to watch it burn down to greasy cinder.

  "I think I turn here," Frankie says, and then doesn't do what he just said. "No, shit, fuck, wait.
This
one. Here we go. These fuckin' little avenues all look the same. The houses, the lawns. Cookie cutter, copy paste bullshit." She can feel him eyeing her before, during, and after the turn.

  "He doesn't know," Ingersoll says.

  "He who?" Frankie asks. "He me?"

  Harriet shifts uncomfortably. "No, he doesn't."

  "How long has it been since I partnered you two?" Ingersoll asks.

  Frankie has to think. Harriet doesn't. "Two years, three months."

  "What don't I know?" Frankie asks.

  "Nothing," Harriet answers.

  "Everything," Ingersoll says.

  "Tell me," Frankie says. "I wanna know. You know everything about me. I'm an open book over here. I don't keep nothing from you."

  "Will you tell him?" Ingersoll asks as Frankie pulls up into a cul-de-sac, a suburban dead-end of same houses. Frankie looks to her.

  She feels ill.

  Odd, given that Harriet rarely feels anything. Does she enjoy the feeling, just because it's a sensation? Is torturing herself as much fun as torturing others?

  She chooses not to answer Ingersoll's question or her own.

  Instead, she says, "We're here," and gets out of the car.

 

"He does not kill them?" Ingersoll asks, his nimble fingers looking through a wicker mail holder hanging in the foyer.

  "No," Harriet says. "He's a con artist. He cons them out of it."

  Frankie yells from the other room, from a den office. "Nobody's here. He's gone."

  Ingersoll nods. "Not unexpected. He will have left some trace. Some sign of his passing. More important, I want a sign of the
girl's
passing. You will find it. I will wait for you to find it."

  He goes and sits at the breakfast nook in the kitchen and steeples his hands, sitting perfectly still and perfectly silent.

  Harriet and Frankie continue to put the pieces together.

  The house – at 1450 Sycamore, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia – is owned by a Dan and Muriel Stine.

  Dan loves fishing, the stock market, and, despite his apparent conservative sensibilities, the glam bands of the 1980s – Poison, Mötley Crüe, Warrant, Winger.

  Muriel also plays the stock market with her own money from her own accounts. Beyond that, the house doesn't contain nearly as much information on Muriel. It's because they are divorced. Six months now. They have a daughter, an eight-year-old named Rebecca. Frankie finds the papers in the office.

  "Dan still lives here," Harriet says. "Muriel has moved on to greener lawns."

  "This place really gets to you," Frankie says.

  "It does no such thing."

  "You're lying to me."

  "Keep looking. Ingersoll will want useful information."

  Gaynes'
modus operandi
isn't that he cons people out of these houses, just that he cons people into telling him where they live. He meets them at a convention, a restaurant, a bar. They're working. They're away from home. Ashley comes, breaks in, lives here until they come back, and that's that. That's his trick. On the one hand, it's simple. On the other, it's
too
simple. Ashley thinks himself better than he is, perhaps.

  Harriet cannot find out where Dan – the owner of a local sporting goods franchise – has gone. Maybe to visit a mistress. Maybe to find out how soccer balls and Pilates equipment are manufactured. Harriet doesn't really care. This place is like a crime scene, but the fingerprints she seeks aren't those of Dan Stine.

  Harriet decides to check upstairs.

  Halfway up the carpeted steps, she smells it.

  Decay.

  Real, this time. Not metaphorical.

  She calls to Frankie. Like dogs, they sniff around.

  Master bathroom, second floor.

  The shower curtain is closed. The toilet seat is down. A little glass pipe, its bulb end darkened with carbon, sits atop it. The stink is terrible in here.

  "Fuck. He's dead," Frankie says, mumbling behind the arm he's got pressed to his mouth and nose. Harriet doesn't bother. The smell doesn't disturb her. Not like the smell of cut grass. Or potpourri. Or a roast in the oven. "Stupid prick got into the product and fucking ODed. Holy shit."

  Behind the shower curtain, a shadow. Harriet pulls it back.

  A body lies in the tub. Plastic bag over the head. Dried blood clinging to the inside of the bag at the back of the head.

  Frankie blinks. "Someone killed Gaynes."

  "It's not him," Harriet says. "It's Dan Stine."

  "How do you – ?"

  "I just know." She holds her breath, then tugs the bag off the head. The back of the head is a ruined mess. "Gaynes hit him with something. A pipe, a bat, a crowbar. I didn't see any blood, but I bet you'll find it downstairs. Or outside. But the hit didn't finish the job. Hence, the bag. While Stine was down, Gaynes suffocated him with the bag. Maybe he did it in the tub, or maybe he just brought the body here."

  She stands up.

  "Ashley Gaynes is now a murderer."

 

"C'mon," Frankie says, stopping her as they walked down the stairs. "I want to know."

  "No."

  "We're up here doing all the work, Ingersoll's downstairs… I dunno what. Receiving important instructions from the devil, probably."

  "Ingersoll doesn't take orders," she says.

  "Whatever. I'm just saying, you can tell me. You don't have to tell me in front of him. That's what he wants. He wants to see it unfold. He likes putting things in motion, seeing how they play out. So tell me what's up. Right here. Right now. He doesn't have to have the satisfaction."