Slice Of Cherry (18 page)

“Right,” said Kit, tossing her handful of Claudia’s hair on
the cellar floor. “You wanna be at Ryan’s house establishing your alibi.”

Fancy bumped Mason aside and looked into the kinetoscope. A tent materialized on the screen, a big billowing tent on the big hill by the sea. “Gonna have to get a new alibi,” said Fancy, cranking the kinetoscope.

“So you
can
talk,” said Claudia, startled. “I heard you were mute.”

Fancy found the idea of people coming to stupid conclusions irritating. “I ain’t mute, and you ain’t going to Ryan’s stupid party.”

“Why not?”

“Because the show’s about to start.” Even as Fancy spoke, the happy place came to life around them, overrunning the entire room.

Claudia gasped and backed up against the wall . . . only to find she’d gone through it. She nearly fell but was graceful enough to keep her balance. The change from gray and dank to colorful and warm had flummoxed her, but only momentarily.

“How’d we get here?” Claudia asked, and then didn’t wait for an answer. “Was there a door? I didn’t even see a door! Bill was right.” As she wandered to and fro on the platform of the headless statues, taking in the sights, her shoes clicked rhythmically
against the stone, almost like she was tap-dancing. “This is how y’all made those boys disappear, isn’t it? You can open doors.”

“She can,” said Kit, flicking her switchblade. “I’m just the muscle.” But when she moved behind Claudia to jam the blade in her neck, Fancy stopped her and pulled her back. “No.
They’re
the muscle.”

The same two men in white, the minions, stepped out of the hedges and entered the garden. They joined the sisters on the platform, and their hands were big and ungentle as they grabbed Claudia.

“Escort her and this gentleman to the stage.” Fancy pushed Mason toward the minions, and they grabbed him, too.

“What stage?” Kit asked, irritated, though Fancy didn’t understand why. This was the fun part.

“The stage in the Pavilion. For the dance-off.”

Kit gave her a puzzled look. “Pavilion?” “Dance-off?” Claudia interrupted, trying to jerk away from the minions but unable to. “I don’t . . . You’re supposed to kill Mason, not get him work!”

Fancy eyed her coolly. “You say you’re a better dancer. If you’re right, we’ll kill him. If you’re wrong, we’ll kill
you
for wasting our time over some pointless rivalry.”

Claudia harrumphed. “I can outdance him any day of the week.”

“Yeah, now that he’s drugged.” Fancy stood before Mason and looked him over, trying not to let his weird smile rattle her. “What did you give him?”

“Yes-man,” Claudia admitted, not the least bit embarrassed. A person on yes-man would do anything anybody said, and was usually associated with the worst sort of freaks. “I got it from a boy named Carmin. He knows how to make all kinds of drugs. I had to practically sign over my firstborn, though. That stuff is
not
cheap.”

“Why didn’t you just tell him to jump off a building or drown himself?” Fancy asked.

“If they find that drug in his body, they could trace it back to me. With you, there won’t be any body. Though I might have made other plans if I had known I’d have to jump through all these hoops.” Claudia tried and failed again to escape her minion. “Why can’t you just kill him and be done with it?”

“She’s got a good point, Fancy,” Kit said. “Why can’t I . . . you know.” She jabbed the switchblade in Claudia’s direction.

Fancy ignored her; she’d had more than enough of stabbing
things, thank you very much. “Where did you inject him?” she asked Claudia.

“His neck.”

When Fancy saw a faint pinprick near Mason’s jugular, she squeezed it like a zit until the drug seeped from the injection site and rolled whitely down his throat.

Mason’s pupils shrank to a more normal size, and awareness came back to his face; the smile shut off like a light switch. The first thing he said was, “My folks’re waiting for me in San Antonio. My grandma. I have to—”

He started to run, but couldn’t, not with the minions holding him. He looked around. “Where am I?”

“In the happy place,” Kit told him. “We brought you here through a door.”

“Why?”

“Your friend wants you dead.”

He followed her pointing finger. “Annie?” He seemed more shocked that his friend wanted him dead than that he was in another world.

“I need to nail that audition,” said Claudia defensively. “It’s not like you need the work.” She turned to Fancy. “Tell this goon to let me go!”

“You asked them to kill me?” Mason’s minion had to get a firmer grip on him to keep him from tackling Claudia. “Over a
job
?”

“All the jobs, Mason! I can’t have you taking what’s mine.”

“It’s not my fault that I’m better than you, Annie!”

“It’s Claudia!” she screamed, her face as red as her hair.

“Claudia Cresswell, and no one is better than me!”

“That remains to be seen,” said Fancy calmly. She snapped her fingers. “Minions! Prepare them both for the dance-off.”

It was no contest. Mason and Claudia seemed evenly matched in the beginning, both standing onstage in tap shoes performing increasingly difficult steps. And Claudia was good, even masterful as she wowed the audience with her complicated spins and syncopations. But Mason began to show his true colors, matching and then surpassing every step she made. He not only had more skill than Claudia, but more of a sense of fun, letting the crowd in on the joke, inviting them to laugh at the absurdity of a girl with such joyless, textbook moves trying to outdance him. He literally danced circles around her, and the audience ate it up.

When it was over, a panel of judges that included Fancy
and Kit awarded the points. On a scale of one to ten with ten being the highest, Claudia averaged an eight, while Mason scored a perfect ten.

“That’s not fair!” Claudia screamed, her voice booming from the stage, breathless from her exertions. She shoved Mason in the chest. “Why does everybody always choose you over me?”

“Because you suck!” Kit screamed from her place at the judges’ table. The audience cracked up.

When Fancy climbed onto the stage to award Mason his well-deserved trophy, Claudia snatched it and tried to run, but the minions were there in the wings and quickly dragged her back to the stage. Mason snatched back his trophy. Eventually. He had a tough time prying it from Claudia’s grip.

To console her, Fancy said, “We have a prize for you, too,” and presented Claudia with a pair of bright red shoes. “We’d like you to dance for us one last time.”

“Go to hell!”
Claudia yelled. She had to be held down while Fancy strapped the shoes to her feet. Finally they left Claudia alone on the stage. She stood there trembling, rooted to the spot—by the shoes or by fear, no one could tell—until the audience began to clap.

When they clapped, Claudia’s toe began to tap. And then she
began to dance, a much more inspired routine than she’d given previously. Only this time she was screaming in agony. The more she danced, the brighter the shoes became, until they were lava red and smoking. Claudia danced until she burst into flames.

The crowd surged to its feet and cheered, and didn’t stop until Claudia danced herself into ashes.

“Why didn’t you just stab her?” asked Kit as the crowd left the Pavilion. “I mean, that was entertaining and all, but—”

“Why should I get
my
hands dirty?” Fancy admired her snowy nails. “And you know I hate having to scrub off other people’s blood.”

The minions approached the judges’ table, where the sisters were sitting, one of them bearing all that was left of Claudia: a blackened set of car keys and the bright red shoes brimming with her ashes and a few bits of bone. Mason stood behind them, holding his trophy with only his thumb and forefinger, as if it felt dirty.

Fancy took the keys and the shoes and said to the minions, “You may leave.”

“Maharaja,” Kit muttered.

As Mason and the sisters walked back to the Headless
Garden, Fancy noticed that several trees had sprouted on the platform between two of the statues. Kit noticed it too.

“Isn’t that where we buried those ears?” she asked.

“Yep.” The middle tree was a wizened thing with a pale, bulbous trunk and skinny, grasping branches from which hung enticing red fruit. It was ringed by four much smaller trees, which seemed withered and lank and buried beneath the bigger tree’s shadow.

Fancy hopped onto the platform and stopped at a different earth-filled stone circle. She held up the ash-and-bone-filled shoes. “I wonder what’ll grow from these?” she said, and tipped the shoes into the earth. The soil yielded beneath them like water and they sank into the ground like capsized boats, the soil settling smooth and still over them.

Fancy knelt on the edge of the stone and dipped her head into the earth—it really was just like sinking into water!— and saw the shoes floating below her, drifting in the earth as worms converged on them.

Fancy pulled out, shaking the dirt from her hair, eyes, and ears. “There’s worms nibbling Claudia’s bones,” she said, laughing. “Look!” She pulled Kit down to kneel beside her.

Kit bent forward as Fancy had, but the happy-place soil
wouldn’t yield to her, and her head rebounded off solid earth. “Figures,” she said, rubbing her forehead. She looked at Mason. “This place always did like her more than me.”

Mason didn’t speak.

“You okay?” Kit asked.

He set his trophy on Claudia’s stone circle. “No.” He looked nothing like the vibrant performer who had wowed them such a short time ago. It was like he’d been drugged again, only with something that made him frown instead of smile.

“Don’t tell anyone what happened to your friend,” Fancy warned him, “unless you wanna know what it’s like to dance in high heels.”

“She
was
my friend.” He burst into tears. “Fuck that. She was like a
sister
to me. I can’t believe she would do that to me!”

“A real sister would have killed you herself instead of farming it out to strangers. What?” Fancy said when Kit gave her a speaking look.

“Don’t cry,” Kit said. She stood and gave Mason a big hug. “Hey! Do you wanna try some horny-old-man fruit? I bet that’ll perk you right up. Fancy, go get him some fruit.”

“I’m not going anywhere near that tree.”

“Just do it!”

Fancy walked off in a huff to get the fruit, and then stopped short with a jerk. “Ow!” She rubbed her nose and scanned about, but saw only air. No, not air. A dim gray wall. Four gray walls that quickly coalesced around the sisters and Mason, and in a blink they were back in the cellar.

It took them a moment to readjust.

“So that’s it,” said Mason in a small voice, still in Kit’s arms. “Annie’s really gone.”

“Looks like,” said Kit.

“It’s a day for death,” said Mason.

Fancy snorted. Like that was some big revelation. As if people didn’t die every day.

“First my grandma and now—” He started crying again, and Kit gave him another big squeeze.

Fancy remembered how the Mortmaine had hugged her and, even through her irritation, felt slightly wistful. But she didn’t know how to make strangers feel safe. She wasn’t Mortmaine.

Kit let go of Mason and reached into Fancy’s pocket for Claudia’s wad of cash. When Fancy tried to take it back, Kit smacked her hand and gave the money to Mason. “Get your grandma some nice flowers. On us.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Well, go on,” Fancy said when Mason just stood there sniveling. “We can’t spend the whole day fooling with you. Claudia’s car is parked down the road.” She gave Mason the keys. “If anyone asks, say she lent you her car to drive to your grandma’s, and that was the last time you saw her.”

“Thank you,” he whispered—to Kit, not her—and then fled the cellar.

After Mason had gone and the sisters were heading back to the house, which was shining like a lantern in the darkness, Fancy said, “You don’t think he’ll tell like that idiot Bill did?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Kit kicked at a rock as though she hated it. “As long as there’s no proof, none of this matters.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“Why would he thank me when I didn’t do anything? All that stuff in the happy place. It was fun, but not . . .”

“Satisfying?” Fancy threw her arm around Kit’s shoulder. “Next time I’ll let you stab someone. To death, if you want.”

“Okay,” said Kit, but not with her usual enthusiasm.

I
WAS WALKING DOWN
E
L
C
AMINO
R
EAL THROUGH THE WOODS.
A
FTER ALMOST EVERY STEP,
A
LIGHT WOULD SHINE ON ME FROM THE TREES.
A
FLASHLIGHT.
W
HEN THE LIGHT HIT ME, I COULDN’T MOVE UNTIL IT SHUT OFF.
I
COULD HEAR THEM WHISPERING IN THE WOODS.
T
HEY WERE WHISPERING MY NAME.

On Sunday, Madda put on a pair of her good shoes, the black leather ones with the ruby red heels. Because she spent most of her life in unattractive Dickies, whenever Madda went anywhere non-work-related, she tended to dress up. “Fancy, you wanna come to the square with me?”

Fancy was dusting the tiger paintings that Big Mama had given Madda and Daddy as a wedding present. “Okay,” she said, happy to quit her chores. Fancy hurried to the door and paused. “Kit?” Her sister sat pounding at the piano. “Come on.”

Fancy waited, but Kit just waved her hands. “Y’all go on. I wanna practice.”

Fancy allowed Madda to pull her out of the house and into
the car, positive that Kit was joking and would run out and say, “Ha-ha, fooled you!” and jump into the backseat. But as Madda drove off their property and into the forest, Fancy realized she had to face facts: Kit had abandoned her. She was still numb when Madda parked in the square and led her in and out of the shops on Seventh Street.

“Okay,” said Madda, consulting her list, arms laden with shopping bags. “Oh shoot, I didn’t put foil and paper towels on the list. Remind me to—oh, look at those!”