Elsinore Canyon (20 page)

She walked out of her sandals and dragged her hand across her mouth to get the last of her lipstick. The lights hurt her now. Off with them all. Candles were set here and there. She walked about lighting them. The task ordered her nerves. She would need something more powerful for the talk with Garth and then to obtain the sleep she would need afterwards. Packet, pills, water. She lowered herself onto a cushioned bench and rested her elbows on a table. For a moment—just the frayed end of a fleeting thought—she wondered how things would be if Danielle were still alive.

Words, words, words. She said them—out loud, even—but they did not reach loving ears. No, how could they? She had poured poison into those ears, and it had worked its way through the body, the vessels and tissues of blessed Mercy, and left the wholesome blood curdled and stagnant and the golden skin corrupted by a harsh and scaly crust that crumbled away in Claudia’s craving fingers, impervious to prayer. She had murdered Mercy itself.

Dana left the solarium and walked barefoot through the house. She carried her mother’s picture in both hands. The entire world felt still and secret. Where were the others? Off in their cells and dells, planning and plotting, maybe even sensing that someone was on the hunt for Claudia.

She headed for the master bedroom. Three rooms, actually—the bedroom and the two private rooms on each side, one for him and one for her. Door number one, door number two, or door number three? Claudia’s. Hugging the portrait of her mother, Dana pushed. The door opened a sliver. No movement within, not a sound. She
petit jetéd
in.

No Claudia. Only the bathroom lights were on. Catch the woman on the toilet? Whatever. She ran swiftly, silently.

No Claudia. The dressing room, on the other side of a swinging door? No one. Where was she? Dana looked over the marble surfaces, the decanters and rows of earrings. To think this space had been her mother’s. Dana used to come in here whenever whyever, but now it was just a display room in a tacky museum. Everything of her mother’s gone. Right after it happened, Claudia had come to pack away all those precious, painful mementoes—after Dana and her father had taken out the few treasures they wanted, they couldn’t stand to sort through those now-ownerless things, the dresses, the makeup, the knickknacks, the seashells—but the bitch had made a lot more of her task, hadn’t she? Well, after killing her sister, why not set aside the widower for herself? Dana tiptoed back into the bathroom.
Claudia’s
mother-of-pearl combs, Claudia’s perfumes, Claudia’s towels and mats, all the colors in the room redone, Christ even the room with the toilet completely transfo‍—

A noise, and the lights flew on in the room proper. Dana shrank against the wall, clutching the portrait to her chest. Claudia was in—must have come in from the master bedroom. Should Dana step forward? She looked through the tiny crack at the door frame. There was the death doctor all right. Wandering around like a—what the hell? What on earth was her problem? She was making weird noises and reeling around the room. Jesus, she was high, she was stumbling. She turned off the lights and lit some candles and dove for a little table with some pills and water. More pills? Then she was—somewhere. A piteous sigh came from the middle of the room. Feeling sorry for herself, was she? Say, could this be a suicide ritual? Dana peeked around the bathroom door.

Velvety brown shadows filled the corners and lay softly over the furnishings. There sat Claudia on the other side of the room, at a little cushioned bench and table. Her face was buried in her hands and she looked for all the world as if she was suffering. “Ohhh!” She sighed loudly. She slid off the bench onto her knees and—no way.
She made the Sign of the Cross.
Praying? Claudia? Her hands were folded. Jesus, did she know someone was watching? She gargled phlegm and started speaking in a slow, deliberate voice.

“I have done the worst thing a person can possibly do. The worst. It cannot be reversed. There is no hope. And I’m in a vicious circle because of it.” Her voice was tortured. “I can’t escape my guilt long enough to beg forgiveness, even though that’s what forgiveness must be for. I know now there’s something bigger than me out there, because there is no other way I could feel this much guilt. I’m not big enough to make it myself. So come on!” She clenched her fists and looked upward. “Any force or being that made my conscience this heavy must be big enough to relieve it!” She sank to her heels. “You want me to pray? What am I supposed to say? ‘Dear God, please forgive me for killing my sister’? I know that won’t work. All the things I gained from that, I still have. My place in life. My home, my name.” The muscles of her face tightened. A tear rolled from her unblinking eye and her voice dwindled to a pathetic quiver. “My husband.”

She fondled the gold band on her finger and went on bitterly. “Why did she go and threaten to take what little I had? A roof over my head—why did she care how I got it? And now that I have the things I wanted…” Her voice dulled. “Can’t have your cake and eat it too. So I can’t make things right unless I give up the very things I killed for. What kind of cosmic joke is that? It would be a life taken in vain.
Everyone
would lose.”

She pushed herself off her knees and wandered. She dared raise her eyes to a crucifix that hung high on the wall. “Why is it like that on the other side? Here on earth, you rob a fortune from some fat cat who’ll never miss it and give ten percent to charity. Your account is clear. But there’s no ‘mitigate’ over there, is there? It’s all about the act itself, and no one’s allowed to point to the good they made of it.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “Let me repent. Merciful God, please!” She looked at the door to the bedroom, ran to it, and flung herself against it. “I love him! I can’t give him up. So because I love him, being sorry counts for nothing? I wanted my life! God could give me all the gifts of creation and all the punishments of hell—why couldn’t he have given me what I wanted? What was wrong with wanting the thing I loved?” She dropped to the floor and wailed. “Everything’s all tangled up in guilt and anger! I need peace in my heart to pray. Ohh, let me do it.”

She held her hands open like a book. “This is how I used to.” A minute, a solid minute Dana stood unmoving inside the bathroom door without taking her eyes off Claudia, who stayed on her knees with her hands lifted out and her eyes squeezed shut. Claudia’s eyebrows trembled a few times and she shuddered or gasped softly, but there were no more words until a few tears drained down her cheeks and she dropped her arms with a cry of despair.
I can’t.

She curled her hands like dying buds and lowered them slowly. Bent and sore, she got off her knees, lowered herself onto a chaise, and pulled a silken cover over herself. A whimper. “Comfort me, someone.”

She lay still for a minute, then two.

Dana stared in amazement. Lying there, sleeping. That sight. It was so human. After the things it had just confessed to, the wreck it had made of Dana’s life, how could it be? The blanket sliding off her, all her clothes on, as if she had flopped down dead tired after a long day’s work. Dana herself had done that, so had her mother. The eyes were closed, the lips slightly parted. Just like a
human.

Dana took a step forward, cradling her mother’s portrait. The candles flickered around her. She kept walking. No cameras, she knew; Marcellus had swept these rooms on Claudia’s orders when she moved in. No eyes but their own now. In fact, no eyes but hers. Why didn’t Claudia move? Not a finger, not an eyelash. Was she faking it?

Dana kneeled slowly over the still face and the rhythmically rising chest. Of course she was alive. But…Dana held the picture beside her own head, two solemn faces looking down on the killer, and spoke in a low, firm voice. “I’ve come to kill you.”

Claudia didn’t move a muscle.

“You murdered my mother.”

Nothing. Dana reached out and touched the blanket where it covered Claudia’s leg. Pressed her hand down hard enough to feel the bone and flesh of Claudia’s knee. She pressed harder and the knee straightened slightly, then eased back as Dana took her hand away.

A slim arm dangled off the edge of the chaise. Dana picked it up by the middle finger and dropped it. Nothing. “Claudia. Aunt Claudia. Doctor Black.”

Dana sat on the floor and rested her mother’s picture in her lap. So Claudia had regrets. Fine, she could parse that mess of an Act of Contrition straight to God’s face before the night was out. Dana had only one regret: that this would happen without Claudia knowing. At least Dana could say it aloud. “Murdering bitch.” She spoke to the sleeping face. “Remember what you said to me at your wedding reception? That circle of life crap? Your mother had an agent of death, and so did mine. So do you. I’m your killer.” Maybe drips of sound and sense were hitting Claudia’s ears, maybe some part of her brain was quietly processing Dana’s words. Surely Dana could make her know, deep down. She picked up a pink pillow that Claudia’s inanimate arm had knocked to the floor.

“I’m going to kill you now.”

She lowered the pillow towards Claudia’s face, then stopped. Something, something—she walked softly around the room blowing out candles. Finally it was dark. Feeling her way back to Claudia, she steadied herself on a table where a pill packet lay. Plenty left. She tucked it into her belt and tiptoed back to the sleeper on the chaise. She picked up the pillow. The features of the soon-to-be-dead face were barely visible, as if brushed by a single layer of photons emanating from God’s eyes. Dana lowered the pillow. How long would she have to hold it on the sleeper’s face? How hard? What if Dana didn’t do this? Was it possible that Claudia had already OD’d? She might be headed into a permanent coma even now, or she might soon die of the toxins alone. Her liver shutting down, her kidneys, her blood darkening in her veins.

“No,” Dana whispered. She crushed the pillow against her belly and dug her nails in. She forced the sobs to stay in her chest, then lifted the pillow to Claudia’s face again. She wouldn’t look at what she was doing, she wouldn’t know—she turned her head. “No!” She grabbed the pillow back to her chest and rocked on her heels, searching the room through wide, tearful eyes. What would become of her if she didn’t do this? What would there be to believe in in her unweeded garden of a life? She was a vessel of acid that leached into the few innocent hearts that were open to her. Say it out loud! “Why, oh lord, am I roaming this world saying, ‘Not yet’?” Her head hurt too much for an act this big. The pillow slipped from her arms and she scrambled off her knees. She grabbed her mother’s picture, ran into the bedroom, and hurled herself against the other side of the door as she slammed it shut. “Everything tells me to do it. But I can’t!” Her legs dissolved and she sank to the floor, her tears collecting on her mother’s face as she clutched the picture to her chest.

I can’t.

Polly seethed at the top of the stairwell as he watched Claudia walk away. The tide was turning against him yet again. Earlier in the day, she had scoffed him out of her presence and retreated for some secret conference with Garth and Oscar. He had carried Dana’s lacerating message in his ears all the way from the terrace and through the house, and delivered it to Garth (sanitized of its humiliating implications for himself). “She says she will be here right away.” And then she hadn’t gone there. Everyone making the fool of him, strange and significant events falling out one after another, and Polly shut out of it all. He had to stay in, he had to stay relevant, and the only way to do that was to accumulate the thing that would swell him with power at this critical moment: knowledge. He would gather. He would report—or not. But he would know.