Fathom (33 page)

She held still. No response came from inside. No one raised an alarm or asked about the commotion.

She swung her head from side to side and noted that she was in a kitchen, and that the kitchen had been very thoroughly cleaned before being abandoned. There was no whiff of smoke and no hint of anything cooked, and the air indoors was uncomfortably warm and stale. No windows had been opened in days, and the light that squeaked in through the shutter slats was dusty and thick.

Nia shut the door behind herself and made a quick, quiet investigation. Downstairs past the kitchen and dining areas there was a small parlor and a living room. Upstairs there were three bedrooms—a master and two others. All were tidy and mostly empty of personal effects. The washroom cabinets held little of interest, and the wardrobes showed signs of having been sorted for packing.

The owners were out of town, and had been gone for no less than a week. It was perfect.

She tiptoed back down the stairs and retreated from the kitchen door, which she drew shut even though it was broken.

Ten minutes later she returned with a bleary-eyed Sam, who was intensely uncomfortable about the prospect of breaking and entering, but too exhausted to do anything but lodge a feeble and formal
complaint. Nia convinced him to take the smallest bedroom, because it backed up to the woods and no one would see if the window were opened for air; and the chain-drawn ceiling fan didn’t squeak so loudly that it would attract any unwanted attention.

He dropped himself onto the small bed and was asleep before Nia had time to suggest that he brush himself off. But if the worst that the family had to suffer for the illicit stay was a little bit of dirt in the child’s room and a broken back door, then the intrusion would have been a gentle one.

Nia left Sam and wandered back to the master bedroom, where a few clothes meant for an adult woman remained in the wardrobe.

She stripped off the baggy shirt she was wearing and let it fall to the floor. She faced the full-length mirror, closed her eyes, and then opened them again, resolved to keep looking until she got used to the idea of her new body.

Except . . . it wasn’t very different from her old body, now that she had a minute to stare at it. The shape was the same, lean and not terribly tall. Her face hadn’t changed much; it was still wide at the cheekbones and narrow through the chin.

But her color was off. Once she’d been brown from a life in the sun; now she was so pallid and white that she looked nearly gray—and it wasn’t just from dust left over from her shell. The texture of her body had changed from ordinary skin with fine hairs and creases at the corners to something milky and matte, with veins that crept just barely beneath the surface. “Marble,” she murmured, because that was what it made her think of. There was a bank in Tallahassee with floors that were creamy and gray, with streaks of blue-purple cutting through the pale like lightning.

When she squeezed herself, pinching at the skin of her upper arm, the flesh depressed and sprang back. It was not hard; it was only smooth. With long sleeves and long skirts, she could hide
enough of it to pass for sickly or shade-prone. It didn’t look too unnatural, she decided.

But then there was the hair.

Knotted and twisted like rope, and rough like tumbled burlap, it had lightened from its original dull brown into a vibrant mass threaded with copper and white. It was long and heavy, and she wondered if trimming some of it away would make it look more normal.

Naked, she padded into the washroom and found a small pair of scissors left beside the basin. But her hair resisted the blades, and when she tried to compel them to trim, the handles shattered between her fingers.

“Fine,” she said, throwing the broken scissors onto the bureau. “I give up. It can stay—until I find some pruning shears, anyway.”

One drawer at a time, she went through the clothes of the lady who lived and slept in the bedroom where Nia lurked. She felt like a petty thief, but at least she was robbing someone who could afford the loss. And besides—these were the things that the owners had left behind. Someone had gone on vacation, or had left for the hot season, and nothing that was left behind could be that important.

Nia found camisoles and stockings, socks, an old girdle, and a brassiere. She didn’t want the stockings, and the brassiere was entirely too large, but the socks were soft cotton and they felt nice around her toes, so she put them on. In another drawer there were folded shirts and rolled-up nightgowns, lavender-stuffed sachets that smelled like barley husks and flowers, and dressing slippers that wouldn’t have withstood a trip into the front yard.

All of it was very pretty, but none of it was very practical.

Finally, at the bottom of the last drawer, Nia found a white knit top. The shirt was too short to serve as a dress, but beside it Nia spotted a folded pair of dark brown pants. She opened them and held them up.

Nia had worn pants before, castoffs from male cousins or friends. After all, if there was real work to be done around the farm and orchard, there was no good reason to do it in a dress or in high-heeled shoes. She wondered if pants for women were coming into style, or, if not, what a rich woman was doing with them. Abandoning that line of thought, she climbed into the pants and found that they fit well enough to wear. There was a belt hanging in the closet. It didn’t match, but she didn’t care. It made the pants fit better. Then she found and added some lace-up shoes.

Except for the hair, she could possibly pass for an ordinary girl.

In the closet there were hats, small felt things that would have been tight even if her hair had been short and normal. As it was, she couldn’t get them down to even the tops of her ears.

The scarf she’d been wearing had landed on the edge of the bed. She picked it up and used it to tie back what she could. She coiled the rest around her hand and used a pencil to jab it into a bun at the nape of her neck.

This was the best she could do. This was the most normal she was capable of looking, and it made her stomach sink. But it would have to work.

By the time she finished her transformation, Sam was stirring on the squeaky springs of the child’s bed. She went to wake him up. “Come on,” she told him, smoothing the sweat-plastered hair away from his forehead. “Get up. We’ve got work to do. I can hear the factories from here, when the wind blows right. We’re not far away from town, and we need to—”

“Find the Greek with the shop in the cigar district, or find your cousin, and follow them to the water,” he parroted the instructions Mossfeaster had left them. “I remember.” He looked haggard and unhappy, but clearer.

Nia smiled at him.

“There’s a pump out back and a basin in the other bedroom if you want to clean up. Use the back door, the one in the kitchen. We don’t want any of the neighbors to know we’re squatting.”

They left the house an hour before sundown and set out for town while the sky was still orange and a bit pink. By then they were walking the streets and sidewalks as if they had nothing to hide, as if there was nothing unusual at all about their stroll.

The air grew darker from smoke and from the later hour, and the narrow streets were cloudy with tobacco and coal. Fragments of a conversation pricked at Nia’s ears from somewhere close, around a corner or on the other side of a wall.

“Anna Maria . . . ,” she heard, and she reached out an arm to slow Sam.

“Wait,” she told him.

He’d learned to quit asking questions and let her lead, so he quit walking and let her nudge him off the main walkway.

She took his hand and held it with both of hers, and stood in front of him as if she were about to close in for a kiss or embrace, but she did neither of those things. She was only shielding him and trying to lean closer to the sound of the conversation. Her ears almost pivoted to better hear.

It came to her in pieces, but the gist was easy enough.

At least one murder reported. Two or three more dead on the road, from the pieces of the stolen fire engine and its heavy tanks. A church had been burned to the ground, and they were looking for . . .

“Sam,” she told him, her mouth only inches from his. “Sam, we have to move fast. We have to get you out of here.”

“Me?” he asked. “What for? I thought you were the one we needed to hide.”

“No. Not so much. Not anymore. They’re looking for you.”

“Who’s looking for me?”

She took his elbow and began to walk him away. “We should’ve changed your clothes, back at that house. We should’ve . . . done something about your appearance.”

“What’s wrong with my appearance?” he objected, but he let her lead him away and down another street where fewer people were walking. Down the road, a shift had ended at a factory and a crowd of dirty men came pouring out from the main doors. Most of them rattled back and forth to each other in Spanish. Nia couldn’t understand them, but she guessed that they’d be unlikely to finger Sam as a person of interest. They had been busy all day, indoors.

She guided Sam into the crowd, and they walked in its midst down to the center of town.

“They’ll have your description, and they’ll be circulating it,” she told him.

“Who?”

“The police. They know what happened back on the island. Or I guess they don’t know, really, but they found a few dead bodies and a burned-down church and they’re kicking around your name since Mel said that you were the one who drove the truck down to the ferry.”

“Oh,” he breathed. He might’ve said more to defend himself, but the bustle of the bodies pressed around him and he clutched at Nia’s arm to keep her from drifting away. “Oh, that’s not good. Wait.” He tugged at her elbow and crushed close to whisper toward her ear, “Wait, what about the church? I didn’t burn down the church. For that matter, I didn’t kill anybody either. I realize that there might have been . . . interference from the water, but . . . Oh, Jesus. Mossfeaster didn’t say what happened back there. Do you think he burned it down?”

“I don’t even know what church they’re talking about,” she said. “But I didn’t smell anything burning before you two made
off with me, and I don’t think he would’ve doubled back to cover our tracks. He said he couldn’t touch the water, or the water witch could find him.”

“So where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He said he had things to take care of.”

“Like burning down a church?”

Nia shook her head. “Word wouldn’t have gotten here so fast. The church must have gone down when the people died. But they’re saying
murder
, Sam. Those people who were following the truck, we didn’t murder them. Nobody murdered them.”

“Mossfeaster did, if you want to get precise about it.”

“That was self-defense, and you know it. And since no one saw what happened, I don’t think . . . wouldn’t they talk about it like it was a weird accident? Why would they assume it was murder?” Her thoughts were racing, trying to piece together what was happening even as she tried to direct Sam along with the crowd’s flow.

“People are dead, and it was strange. Murder’s an easy guess. How much farther to the Greek?”

“Not much,” she said, feeling the insistent pull of Mossfeaster’s directions planted in her brain. “Seventh Avenue is up there.”

“How do you know?”

“Because this is Fifth.” She pointed at an iron sign with a white curled embellishment. The crowd was beginning to thin as the workers siphoned off down side streets and alleys. Ybor was dotted with ethnic clubs that catered to various members, and outside the core of the town there were residential neighborhoods. Few people had cars, but the streetcars chimed and cut through the streets on their cables, culling the throng even further.

They hurried past the Spanish club, Las Novedadas, and the Afro-Cuban club, and then another block down. Off to the right there was an alley, tight and dark. A sign reading
POPPO EFODIAZO
hung down from a pair of squeaking chains.

Down the alley they ran, but when they reached the door it was firmly latched, as if the store was shut for the afternoon. There were no hours posted, but it was early enough that someone should be manning the counters.

Nia held her face against the window and saw a wonderland of different products and items inside. But she saw no people anywhere, and she smelled metal and fire.

“Is this the place?” Sam asked.

“It should be.” She knocked on the door, almost hard enough to break it.

No one answered, and no one came; but out on the main street, several passersby stopped to see what the commotion was about. Nia smiled at them, trying not to look too guilty or strange. They continued to stare until she took Sam by the arm and led him away, out the alley’s other side and onto Sixth Avenue, where the few people left on the streets moved quickly toward home, out of the heat.

“Now what?” Sam inquired, and it annoyed Nia because she’d been on the verge of asking the same thing and he’d beaten her to it.

“I don’t know. Mossfeaster talked like this man was a sure bet. Maybe we should let ourselves inside and help ourselves,” she suggested.