Bellweather Rhapsody (14 page)

She swallows.

“No,” she says. “It isn’t good. But the Tower is facing me, it’s upright from my point of view. That means it’s my card. My fortune, not yours.”

Jill takes another swig. “Cheers,” she chirps. “At least we can be screwed together.”

Alice breathes out. It doesn’t make sense. The Tower may be facing her, but its position in the spread represents the past, and there
is
no great calamity or unexpected sadness—

Unless you count what happened with Jimmy. Or the possibility that her entire life up to this point has been one epic delusion of grandeur.

Every last hair up and down her arms stands on end.

“One more card. One more and we’re done, I promise.” How much has Alice really believed in tarot readings before this one? They’ve always been easy to accept, full of High Priestesses (wisdom, serenity) and Justices (equality, virtue) and Suns (triumph, success). She’s never been in a position to swallow a difficult or sad past, present, or future, has only had to accept a mirror of the extreme fortune to which she’s been born. Reading for Jill, Alice feels as though she’s being teased by something dark and nasty, something that gets a real kick out of inflicting pain. “One more card,” Alice says, and prays for good.

The final card is the Hanged Man.

“It’s going to take him forever to die like that,” Jill says, her voice flat.

The Hanged Man—a man with his arms bound behind him, hanging upside down from one foot, the other leg bent in the shape of the numeral four—is another misunderstood card, like Death: scarier than it looks. But still scary-looking.

“This really isn’t so bad—”

Jill cuts her off. “And this card is the future, right? We’ve already talked present and past, so . . . I thought you promised not to tell me bad news.” Her smile is slight.

“No, it isn’t so bad—he’s not
killing
himself here. The Hanged Man represents sacrifice and . . . and transition. Surrender to something new. I think—” Jill, visibly drunk now, has begun to pitch back and forth unsteadily. The bottle of wine wobbles in her grip. “I think you have every reason to think things will change, and—and get better.”

Jill lets go of the bottle. It falls forward on the mattress and sloshes its remaining contents all over the cards, the bed, and Alice’s pajama pants. For as much wine as Alice knows they’ve already consumed, there was still a lot left, and a lot of wine everywhere at once, all over her. She lifts her arms instinctively. A series of quiet “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!”s hisses out of her mouth, also instinctively; this is exactly what her mother does whenever there’s a spill. This is bad, this is really, really bad—everything smells like wine, and there’s no way they’re going to be able to hide the smell if they don’t clean it up immediately, because you
know
that Jill’s mother is going to come back at 0800 hours and make sure her daughter is up and ready to greet the day, to be penitent, or face another punishment—but Alice tamps all of that down, deep in her gut, for Jill’s sake. Jill doesn’t need Alice freaking out on her too. Jill knows better than Alice how bad this could get.

“Oops,” Jill says quietly. Her face crumples. “Your cards. Your deck. Oh . . . oh, crap, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine—it’s really fine, we just need to—strip the bed. Let’s get this into the tub—” Alice can feel her heart rate rising. There’s no way they can clean this up with those white towels in the bathroom. No way. They need paper towels, something absorbent and disposable. “Jill,” she says, and looks directly at Jill Faccelli and sees not an incredible star, a phenom and a talent to be breathed in and envied, but a girl. A girl with very straight, very black hair. With sad dark eyes set deep in her face. Too young and too old at the same time.

Alice repeats her name.

“Can you get this bedspread into the tub while I go find a housekeeping cart? I’m going to get some paper towels to clean up with. Okay?” Jill nods. Her bangs almost cover her eyes, but Alice can see that they are filling with tears, real tears that might finally get the opportunity to spill.

“Okay,” Jill says. “Good idea. Thanks.” She looks away shyly when she realizes that Alice has ripped off her wine-soaked pajama pants and is reaching for a pair of jeans. “Thanks for the fortune,” she says. She gathers the bedspread to her chest like a toddler massing her security blanket in her arms. “I think you might turn out to be right.”

Alice sets the now empty wine bottle on the TV stand, makes sure she has a room key, says she’ll be right back, and leaves.

She’s gone five minutes. She can’t have been gone longer than that, she knows she can’t have—she finally found a closet at the far end of the hall with two housekeeping carts parked inside, fully stocked with toilet paper, fresh towels, every cleaning supply you could ever wish for. It couldn’t have taken more than five minutes—eight, max—for her to grab three rolls of paper towels and quietly, barefootedly scamper back to their room. To slip the key in the door. To turn the knob. To step inside and shut the door soundlessly behind her.

And yet it was enough time for Jill to hang herself.

She is dangling a foot or so off the bed. Her feet are bare, her toes long and thin. Her feet are the first things Alice sees, because you don’t expect to see feet at that altitude. They surprise her. Her eyes travel up Jill’s legs, which are still in blue jeans, darkened here and there with purple-blue wine stains, and to Jill’s stomach and chest, which is hidden behind a curtain of black hair, her hair dangling forward from her head, her head dangling forward on her neck. Rising above her like a yo-yo string is a bright orange rope—or it’s not a rope, it’s shiny and plastic-looking. It’s an extension cord, an orange extension cord, and it’s tied and looped around an old bit of pipe running across the ceiling. The pipe must have something to do with the sprinkler system, must be part of the hotel’s efforts to keep its guests safe.

For the second time that evening, Alice at first doesn’t understand. Her first impulse is not to scream or run or cry for help. She is merely stunned. She can’t comprehend how Jill has managed to do this to herself.

“Jill?” she says.

Jill’s body is swaying as though in a gentle breeze. The air is still; all the windows are closed. Her body, her long feet and legs and her skinny arms and her knobby red wrists, her pale hands and long fingers—her hands are so ordinary.

Death is the most ordinary thing Alice has ever seen.

Her body grasps the situation before her brain or her tongue. It is almost a surprise to her when her back hits the door, and when her clammy, vibrating hand closes over the knob. Alice is running down the hall, almost to the elevator by the time she finds her voice—or rather, her voice finds her own ears, already in the middle of a word: “—
lp!
” The one part of her body she trusts, the one part she knows is beautiful and strong, Alice’s voice has betrayed her totally. She can barely get it to rise above a whisper.

She steps inside the elevator and presses L.

In the elevator’s mirrors she sees herself, sees her own face, her own ordinary body. She understands, she is screaming now, when she bolts out of the elevator into the lobby, she is shrieking at top volume, “
HELP ME, SHE’S HANGING! HELP ME, PLEASE!
”

Alice tells the man behind the desk that Jill is hanging, Jill is hanging in room 712. The man makes two phone calls, the second to a person he’s calling Hastings, his voice is wobbling, he’s more upset than Alice. Alice sits on a chair in the lobby, her knees drawn to her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs, and her hands clasped over her bare feet. She tucks her head down and closes her eyes and feels herself begin to rock back and forth.

Later, she has no idea how much later, a tall man with a maroon bow tie, undone, kneels on the lobby carpet in front of her. He is balding but still could be described as sandy-haired, and his eyes are blue. They look kind.

“Can you describe what you saw, miss?” he asks her.

Alice swallows. She feels calmer; she has stopped rocking. How is this night even happening? “My roommate, Jill—I left the room for five minutes and when I came back she was hanging from a pipe on the ceiling. I didn’t—oh
no
. I didn’t even think to try and get her down, could I have done that? How would I have done that? Was there a chair? I don’t—” Her head thrums.

“Are you certain she was hanging?” the kind man asks.

Alice nods. She wants Rabbit here, now. The pain of his absence is so horrible, so acute, she thinks she will be sick.

The man grimaces.

“The thing is, miss—Hatmaker, is that your name?”

Alice nods again.

“We didn’t find your roommate, Miss Hatmaker. She wasn’t in the room. She doesn’t appear to be anywhere at the moment.” He reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a piece of paper, ragged on one side where it’s been torn from a spiral-bound notebook. “All we found in seven-twelve was this. Do you recognize the hand?”

Printed in neat block letters—in black Sharpie, Alice catches the tang of permanent marker ink—are four words:

NOW SHE IS MINE

Scherzo Agitato

9

“W
HAT IS THIS?”

The girl is adorable. That’s the only word to describe her, really: adorable. Eyes round and dark as a cartoon. A frightened fairy. She doesn’t look a day older than thirteen, though she says she’s four years beyond that; perhaps Hastings has forgotten what thirteen-year-old girls look like. Caroline, after all, hasn’t been a little girl for a very long time.

“‘Now she is mine’—what does it even mean?” the girl says, blinking at the paper he holds before her. She pulls the blanket he’s given her up to her chin. “Where did you find it? I don’t get it.”

“We found it in your room. Rather, I found it.” He nods sheepishly at Megan—Officer Sheldrake, she’s Officer Sheldrake now, not just Megan whose brother Tim works in the kitchen. She’s already berated him for not waiting for the police to investigate the room. But how could he wait? How could he, Harold Hastings, the face of the Bellweather, be expected to wait after getting Roger’s phone call?

He’d been drifting off to sleep in 130, hands clasped over his chest, thinking he ought to change out of his good shirt, when the phone rang. At first Hastings thought he was having a terrible dream. “She says a girl hung herself, her roommate,” said the voice on the phone. “In seven-twelve. I just called Chris”—the hotel manager, who was next to worthless—“but I knew you’d want to know.”

“Who is this?” he muttered. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s Roger at the front desk, Hastings. We’ve got a report of a dead body on seven.
Seven-twelve
.”

“You called Chris and me—what about the police? The paramedics? Get off the goddamned line and call them!”

Every part of Hastings woke up. He jammed his feet into loafers, his legs into the day’s discarded slacks (realizing, mid-jam, that he ought to have done so in reverse order), and hustled out the door still buttoning his wrinkled white dress shirt, bow tie undone and trapped beneath his collar.

Hastings was the first to arrive on the seventh floor. Chris lived in town, about a fifteen-minute drive away, and the police and paramedics, whom Roger damn well should have called first, usually took about ten minutes to reach the Bellweather. The elevator doors opened on the seventh floor with their customary hollow
donk
and Hastings dashed down the hall. He knew he was awake, but it felt like a nightmare. A nightmare about the only thing he ever saw at the Bellweather that frightened him. He expected to find the groom and the bride in 712 exactly as he had years ago, only this time, if he was fast enough and lucky enough, he might be able to do something about it. He might be able to use those CPR courses he’d taken. He might be able to compress the groom’s bleeding chest with a giant Ace bandage, to stand on a chair beside the bride and hold her up, taking her weight off that horrible orange cord and into his arms instead.

His heart was thumping painfully by the time he came to the closed door of 712. He felt dizzy. Hastings slipped his master key into the lock, turned, prayed, and stepped into an empty room. He tensed. He smelled alcohol, something fruity and cheap, and saw a green bottle on the edge of the television stand. The comforter was off the bed. Hastings found it in the bathtub, soaking in pinkish water—pink from spilled wine, not blood.

He opened the drawers of the dressers and found girls’ clothes. He opened the closet doors and found two empty suitcases and two winter coats, a nubbly green scarf, one pair of yellow work boots, and a pair of grungy pink sneakers. There was only one set of toiletries in the bathroom, one toothbrush and one tube of toothpaste and one pink, daisy-spotted stick of deodorant. It felt as though one and a half girls had checked into the room. Beyond the contraband booze, there was nothing out of order. No orange electrical cord secured to the sprinkler system. No bride, no girl, no body swinging from the ceiling.

Hastings, rubbery with relief, collapsed on the unmade bed.

That was when he saw it. The piece of spiral notebook paper was taped to the back of the door beneath the privacy peephole. Hastings had left his glasses in 130 so he had to squint to make out the black block letters.

“‘Now she is mine’?” he read aloud.

“It doesn’t make any sense. You can’t—I don’t believe you,” says the adorable girl. Her voice quivers. “I saw her. I saw her body. She was dead. She was hanging. Why won’t you believe me?”

“Do you think your friend could be playing a joke on you?” asks Officer Megan.

“This isn’t a
joke.
”

“Maybe not to you.” Megan sighs. “Can you describe for me what you were doing prior to the incident?”

“We were, um.” The girl rubs her nose with the back of her hand. “Hell. She brought a bottle of wine and we were drinking it. I was doing a tarot reading for her. She was upset and I was trying to distract her, you know. Make her feel better. Then she spilled the wine and I left to find paper towels. That’s when she did it, while I was gone. That’s when she—” She swallows. “I know what I saw. I don’t understand how she could just vanish.”