Heirs of Grace (11 page)

“What happened?” Trey said.

“Good question,” I muttered, sitting up. I looked over at the body. “I found Melinda. Like this. I tried to heal her with the sword, and…” I shook my head. “It didn’t work. Pretty emphatically. I’ve got a hangover without the fun of getting drunk first.”

Trey looked at the sword, poking out of the compost heap like a low-rent Excalibur, and whistled. “You tried to raise the
dead
?”

“When you put it that way, it sounds like a bad idea. Help me up.” He got to his feet and offered me a hand, pulling me upright without apparent effort. He was stronger than I’d realized. I might have found that kind of sexy, if not for the corpse, vomit, headache, and existential terror.

My mother always did say I was picky about men.

“I can’t believe you tried to bring someone back from the dead,” Trey said.

“I don’t know. If you thought there was even a
chance
you could save her…”

“Oh, I get it.” Trey retrieved the sword, wiping off the blade with a handful of leaves, then picked up the sheath and turned it back into a cane before handing it over. “Looks like there are some things you can’t do, though.”

“Definitely a failed experiment.” I spotted a water hose coiled in the garden and traced it back to the faucet, then rinsed my mouth out and spat, making sure to do so well away from the body. The puddle of puke was enough contamination of a possible crime scene already. “I think I tried to make the sword do something it wasn’t meant to do. Like using a spoon to dig a swimming pool. Or maybe more like sticking a key into a power outlet.”

“Don’t try that, either, please. Even if you think it’s a magic key.” He was trying to keep his tone light, but he kept staring at Melinda’s body, and I could tell he was shaken. “She…Melinda was a nice woman. She didn’t deserve this.”

“She didn’t. Nobody does. And if the Firstborn did it…I don’t know what I can do about that, but I’ll try to do something.” I sighed. “You should probably be the one to call this in, since you’re a pillar of the community.”

“You’re thinking of my granddad. I’m barely a fence post of the community.”

“Close enough. I don’t want to lie to the authorities, but it’s not like I can tell the cops about the sword, so I think I have to play the ‘I’m-a-helpless-girl-who-can’t-handle-reality’ card to explain the barf. God, I hate that kind of bullshit.”

“It’s better than being institutionalized for delusions of grandeur,” Trey said.

“True. I’m not feeling all that grand at the moment anyway.”

The sheriff’s deputy who interviewed me was clearly suspicious—a dead body turns up, and I guess it’s only natural to wonder about the new girl in town, so maybe it wasn’t even necessarily racist, though I’m sure my being on the brown side didn’t help. But Trey was in full lawyer mode, without ever quite needing to deliver the “I’m her attorney” line, so I didn’t get hauled in for questioning. The cops knew Trey, anyway, and believed him when he explained he’d been showing me around the grounds and bringing me to meet Melinda when we stumbled on the corpse.

The part of the story about me seeing the body, then puking and passing out from shock, also helped ease their suspicions, especially since the puddle of vomit provided corroborating physical evidence. I guess murderers don’t usually throw up all over the scenes of their crimes.

While we’d been waiting for the police to arrive, Trey and I had agreed it would be irresponsible to leave out the Firstborn entirely—Melinda was dead, and my father’s eldest daughter might be responsible, and we needed a way to convey that useful information without sounding like lunatics. We got our story straight, basically, and so when the police asked if we’d seen anything suspicious lately, we told them a white-blonde, sharp-featured woman had been skulking around the property. Trey said, “Mr. Grace was pretty well off, and he had a lot of antiques in his house, so we thought maybe she was sneaking around with an eye toward breaking into the house and stealing something. I don’t know her name or anything, though—I’ve never seen her around before.”

All true. Just incomplete.

The cops took our statements, and lots of photos, and finally Melinda was lifted away from the garden and loaded onto a gurney, into an ambulance, and taken away. Seeing her lifeless form disappear into the back of the ambulance knocked something loose inside me, and I started shivering hard enough that Trey noticed and got a blanket to drape around my shoulders.

I don’t know why her death suddenly hit me so hard. The Firstborn had tried to murder Trey—she
would
have, if I hadn’t been on hand with a magic sword. I didn’t even know Melinda, had probably never actually exchanged a single word with her, but seeing her vanish into that van, bound ultimately for a coffin or crematorium, made me feel like my brain had been dipped in ice water. Everything went numb and far away, frozen, dead inside. It was just too much, in too short a time.

I vaguely recall getting a ride back to my house in a police car, with Trey sitting beside me in the back. When we got home, he came inside and made me tea in a big old kettle on the old-fashioned gas stove, murmuring things I didn’t really hear, until he asked me—probably for the second or third time—if I needed him to stay. “My grandfather wants to see me, he must have heard about Melinda from his friends in the sherrif's department, but if you need me—”

I shook my head. In my current condition it didn't matter to me if he was there or not. There wasn't room in my head for much besides Melinda, and the Firstborn. I must have said something that reassured him I was okay because not long after he went away, leaving me to hold my mug and stare at the wallpaper and not exactly think.

It took me a long time to realize what I was feeling, underneath all the shock.

What I was feeling was
furious
.

Furious at the Firstborn for showing up and screwing with my life when I just wanted to paint and figure my shit out. Furious with Archibald Grace for giving me this poisonous gift, with no preparation for the dangers that came along with it. Furious with myself, a little, for not just running away and moving in with Charlie and forgetting all this bullshit. Take the money and run—why not?

A few reasons, but mainly because that’s what the Firstborn had told me to do, and I wasn’t going to give that house-breaking murderous monster anything she wanted if I could possibly avoid it.

I don’t like feeling clueless and out of my depth. If there was initiative to be seized, I wanted to seize it. The house had reacted to me, maybe, or at least reacted to my
peril
, so I decided to give that unlikely avenue a try.

I cleared my throat. “So, house. Help me out, here. If there’s an instruction manual, or an address book, or letters, or
something
to tell me about the Grace family—”

I heard a thump from the living room. Naturally, my first thought was a home-invasion murder scenario, but it didn’t sound like an assassin, unless she’d accidentally dropped her silenced handgun on the carpet. I rose, picking up the sword cane—yes, the most useless weapon in the universe, but hitting someone with a heavy cane does make an impression, and if someone tried to kill
me
maybe I could save my own life by giving myself a nick with the blade—and made my way toward the front of the house. I gripped the cane tight, thinking it would have to do until I found a fireplace poker that turned people into applesauce or an eggbeater that transported my enemies to the outer reaches of the solar system or something.

In the living room, I found the source of the thump: a book had fallen from one of the overstuffed shelves, and now rested in the center of a garish Turkish carpet on the floor. I let out a sigh of relief, not realizing I’d been holding my breath in the first place. A minor book-a-lanche wasn’t shocking, since Trey and I had shoved books back onto the shelves in a fairly haphazard fashion after the Firstborn’s whirlwind of destruction. I knelt and picked up the book…which wasn’t a book at all, really, but a small photo album.

I keep my photos on my laptop and a backup drive and in the cloud and on social media like a normal person, so I was intrigued to look at someone’s ancient analog memories, especially when there might be hints to my secret family history inside. I opened up the album to a page near the back…and the first thing I saw was a photo of myself as a child, trapped under the wrinkled cellophane page protectors.

The picture was a candid in the truest sense—at a guess, it was taken with a telephoto lens by someone so far away they wouldn’t have been visible to my naked eye. My father himself, maybe? In the picture I was standing on top of a slide at the playground where my dad—the one who raised me, the
real
one—used to take me when I was little. I was wearing a red cape with flowers embroidered around the edges, and I had a little-kid potbelly and wild hair, and my arms were raised above my head in triumph. I realized the photo was probably from an event that lived in family infamy as “the day Bekah thought she could fly.” I didn’t remember it myself, but family lore said when I was four years old, high on superhero fantasies, I decided to jump from the top of the eight-foot-tall big kid’s slide, apparently confident that my homemade fancy cape would keep me aloft. My dad looked over from the bench where he was sitting just in time to see me leap.

I didn’t fly, of course, but amazingly, I didn’t get hurt, either. Dad said he enrolled me in gymnastics class the next week, because he saw me fall, headfirst, but when I hit the ground, I somehow instinctively tucked, rolled, did a perfect somersault, and bounced up to my feet, laughing uproariously—at least until I got a well-earned tongue lashing for doing something so dangerous. Despite a few years of classes, though, I never showed much of an aptitude for acrobatics after that, and my dad sometimes joked that I used up all my talent in one shot, to keep myself from breaking my neck.

Now, seeing evidence that my biological father had been watching from a distance—and knowing he had a certain ability to make reality do his bidding—I wondered: Had he saved my life that day? Given me a little lift, a little nudge, sent me rolling instead of crashing? And if he’d acted that day, had he acted on others? The car wreck I walked away from in high school? The time the riptide nearly carried me away on one of our rare vacations to the ocean, only for a weird crosscurrent to come bearing me back to shore?

Was the thought of Archibald Grace watching over me from a distance creepy, or sweet, or both all at once? More and more my life contained contradictions and multitudes.

I curled up more comfortably on the rug, leaning my back against a handy couch, and flipped through the album. There were a few more photos of me, most from ages six to twelve, all outdoor shots taken from a distance. But there were other pictures, too, of other children. The first one in the album was an old black-and-white photo of a preteen girl with pale hair and thin lips wearing a prairie dress, posing in front of a log cabin, utterly serious and unsmiling. The Firstborn as a little girl, I was pretty sure, or at least a relative of hers. I took the photo out, looking at the back, hoping for a date, a name, something, but it was blank. That girl showed up a few more times, always posed with her arms by her sides, usually next to a tree or a crumbling shack or in a field, her expression always serious, and I felt sorry for the kid, because no matter what she grew up to be, she didn’t look like she was having much fun in her life as a child. Of course, she
did
grow up to be a murdering house-breaking lunatic, and the last thing I wanted to do was think of her in human terms, but there it was: basic empathy rearing its doleful head.

I worked my way through the book, and there were more pictures of kids, most of them in color, a few of them ancient Polaroids. Mostly they were terribly shot and unremarkable and blurry—apparently being a wizard didn’t make you a good photographer—but a few pictures stood out.

There were many shots of a chubby, sour-faced little white boy at the beach—wading in the surf, building a sand castle, standing on a pier—all pictures apparently taken on the same day. None of them made much of an impression, except the last: the boy stood facing the camera, lips and chin and cheeks smeared with chocolate, holding an ice cream cone in one hand, and—I had to stare at it for a while to be sure—a seagull in the other, the bird dangling from his fist by its feet, beak open, wings outstretched, caught on film in a moment of frozen terror. The kid’s expression was hard to make out under all the smeared ice cream, but I was pretty sure he was smiling—and it was the only photo in the bunch where he looked anything other than bored or annoyed.

Next there were several more or less interchangeable photos of three infants in a row, resting on a pale blue blanket, all dressed in frilly gowns, all three babies holding hands with one another in each photo. Did babies usually do that? Maybe they’d just grab onto anything in reach, and the hand-holding was a coincidence, but there was something eerie about the sight anyway.

Just before the photos of me, there was a nearly blank section, with three empty pages, and one photo not quite centered on the fourth and final page. It was a little girl, with skin darker than mine, wearing a one-piece black swimsuit. Her back was to the camera, and the setting was muddy and blurry, but she seemed to be sitting on gray sand in a cavern—there were stalactites hanging down above her head. Something huge and dark loomed beyond the girl, but it was so out of focus I couldn’t tell if it was a boulder or a bear or something else. The picture was chilling, though. Wherever it was taken, it was no place for a little kid.

I closed the album, frowning. I was in there. So was the Firstborn, I was pretty sure. Did that mean the other kids were my half siblings, too? Other children Grace had stalked, watched, looked after? But, no—the other photos weren’t taken by someone hiding far away in the bushes. They were up close, or at least showed awareness on the part of the kids that they were being photographed. Had those other children had relationships with our presumed father? If so, why was I the only one who got abandoned, left on a doorstep like an unwanted phone book or a take-out menu flyer or a bag of flaming dog poop?