Fathom (5 page)

Nia slinked away from her, reaching her hands behind her back and feeling along the courtyard wall. “You’re lying,” she prayed.

“Lying? Why would you accuse me of lying? No one
ever
believes me.” Bernice’s eyes were huge and wet, and she pouted her pixie lips. She hadn’t released the tablecloth. It dragged along the sand like a tremendous red train on a crimson wedding gown.

“I wonder why. You . . . Don’t. Stay away from me.”

“That’s what I used to tell him. I’d say, ‘Antonio, get away from me or I’ll yell for my mom!’ But he never listened. He’d tell me to hush up, and he’d unbutton his shirt, and he’d take it off and leave it hanging on the bedpost. Then he’d slip off his shoes and undo his pants, and lift up the corners of the bedspread so he could crawl into bed beside me.”

“You’re lying,” Nia insisted. She tripped over a patio stone and almost fell into an alcove in the wall.

Bernice’s tablecloth snagged on the circular fountain and she tugged it loose. She guided her free hand down the front of her shirt, letting her white, manicured fingers hang for a moment where her breasts were pressed forward under the fabric.

One by one, she folded the round glass buttons through the slotted holes until Nia could see the top of her lean, pale stomach beneath the cotton and lace of her brassiere. Small beads of sweat gleamed on her skin and dripped down into her cleavage. Without glancing down, Bernice swept the moisture away and wiped it on her skirt.

“What are you doing half-naked out here?”

Bernice whirled around to face Antonio, who stood in the archway entrance to the yard. His brown linen suit looked black in the shadows of the banyan tree, and he wasn’t wearing his hat. The ocean wind kicked up, and his hair rippled wildly.

He paced across the sand and grass and tried to grab her arm, but she turned too fast and he caught her hair instead. Accepting whatever handhold he could seize, Antonio wrenched her around so hard that she toppled over herself and sat tangled in the tablecloth.

“Your mother wanted me to come and check on you, because she’s worried about you. I’ll never understand why she gives a damn. Close your shirt, you stupid little slut.”

He turned his back to her.

“What was she talking about?” he demanded, and even in the mostly dark, Nia could see how red his face was. “Was she making up stories about me again? I know she does that; I know what she likes to tell people. But you can see through her, can’t you? You’re not a dumb kid. You’re a nice kid, I think. You can tell she’s a liar, I know you can.”

Nia thought he was going to add something else, but then Bernice reared up behind him.

There wasn’t even time to call his name before Nia heard a wet blow.

He stumbled forward, slinging his arm back to push her away. A long silver knife rose out of his back, just beyond the reach of his searching fingers. He doubled his elbows up, trying to get a hold on it. He fell.

Nia wasn’t sure whom to shout at, so she didn’t shout at all.

She ran to Antonio and knelt beside him.

Bernice didn’t try to stop her. She simply backed away from them both, unspooling herself from the cloth.

Antonio was lying on his side, trying to rub the knife on the ground to snag and remove it. Nia pulled the knife as quickly but gently as she could, and threw it away with a horrified grunt.

His blood looked black and slick as it gushed heartily over her hands, as it bubbled out of the wound with every breath he struggled to take. Bernice had stabbed him hard. By luck or design, she’d hit something important. Nia took a corner of her dress and pushed it against the gushing hole.

“Where is she?” Antonio wheezed.

Bernice darted in close to swipe the knife, then ducked away again—out of Nia’s reach. She stood a few feet away and fondled the weapon, running her fingers along the wet edge.

Nia pressed her makeshift bandage against Antonio’s back.
She leaned on it as hard as she dared, and kept her eyes on her cousin.

The silver cake knife made Bernice confident.

Overconfident
, Nia thought, or at least she hoped.

Bernice shifted her grip on the blade and pointed it down, prepared to attack again. “I like you, Nia,” she said, and her words were so cold, they left frost in the air. “So I’m going to give you one good chance to get out of the way.”

Antonio had slipped from Nia’s hold. He was flat on the ground and dangling near unconsciousness. He gurgled and twisted himself over with a surprising burst of effort that sent him halfway onto Nia’s lap. “Get Marjorie,” he said.

“I will,” she promised, but his eyes were already glazed, and his chest was not inflating the right way. He was certainly dying. Nia was still pondering the costs of protecting an almost-corpse from an armed madwoman when the armed madwoman pounced.

Nia wasn’t so off guard as Bernice had thought, and the ensuing attack was less than professional-grade. Bernice staggered wildly across Antonio’s limp form, stabbing from above in a way that let Nia catch her forearm.

But she couldn’t keep it. She fell to the side, and there was a brief moment where Bernice could have run her through without resistance . . . but she wanted Antonio more. She used Nia’s weakness to finish him, burying the blade through his chest and between two ribs—using all her weight to jam it down, up to the gilded handle.

He did not gasp or groan, or even quiver. She may as well have jabbed a rotting apple for all the response she got, nothing more than a small drool of warm, sticky blood seeping an anticlimax through his shirt.

Nia rose carefully to her feet.

Though Bernice must have noticed, she didn’t look. She stared down at her handiwork, absorbing every sloppy detail. Nia couldn’t read her expression. Bernice might have been pleased to see him dead, or she might have been disappointed by how easy it was. It was too dark to tell.

But Nia did not believe for an instant that Bernice would let her go. In that fragile moment of silence over Antonio’s body, she scrutinized her cousin and tried to think.

Bernice was taller by an inch or two and solid enough, but Nia was lean from living in the sun and working in the orchard. She was no muscle-bound farmhand, but she wasn’t a pampered city girl either. She was heavier than Bernice, sure; but she didn’t have an ounce of fat on her—even where she would’ve liked some.

It would take Bernice no more than a second to retrieve the knife from Antonio’s body.

Nia was smaller than her soon-to-be opponent, and she was wearing a longer dress. This was not Nia’s home territory. She didn’t know her way around the island, but chances were good that Bernice didn’t either, whether she claimed she did or not.

Nia glanced over her shoulder, checking to make sure all the broken glass was behind her. Then, as inconspicuously as she could, she pried off her shoes.

The careful shuffling broke Bernice’s spell. She peered down at her cousin through tightly slitted eyes. “Nia.” She said it calmly, like a passing introduction. “Mother will never believe you.”

“Yes, she will, Bernice.” She tried to give her cousin’s name the same cool treatment. “But she’ll spend the rest of her life denying it.”

“She doesn’t
have
to. Nia, think how
easy
this would be.” Her tone abruptly changed, sliding from an earnest plea to something more casual and chatty. “Hey, do you know why we had to move here?” she asked with earnestness, as if she actually wanted to share the answer. She walked over to the fountain and sat on
its edge. The cake knife in her hand clinked against the tile and stonework.

“No. Why?” Nia wondered how much space there was between herself and the archway exit.

“That dirty wop.” She gestured down at Antonio. “He and his business partners had a falling out. He was a bookkeeper for a hooch parlor, and in that sort of business, you don’t get fired for skimming—you get dead. So when word got out, he took the money and took off running.”

“You’re lying again.”

Again, she was almost comically serious. “No, not this time. You can ask Mother. She knew about it; he had to let her in on it; otherwise, she wouldn’t have believed he was in enough trouble to make a run for it. Mother’s the one who suggested the island. She had some friends down here, the ones who let us stay in their cottage while this place was being built. I swear to you, Nia. This would be
so easy
.”

“So he really was a crook? Grandmother said she thought he was.”

“She did? That’s funny. Yeah, she was right.”

Nia made a small shrug with her eyebrows and added, “Grandmother thinks everyone from farther up north than Tennessee is a crook. This time, she was just a lucky guesser.”

Bernice smiled, wide and friendly. She started to stand, and Nia twitched, prepared to run. She couldn’t do it—she couldn’t hold the cool, easy stance that her cousin adopted so easily.

Bernice sat back down.

“This is what we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll say we found him this way, and we saw two men leaving through the woods. Everyone’ll think his old partners caught up with him, and no one will be able to prove a thing.”

“Those kinds of businessmen don’t kill people with cake knives.”
Nia’s grandmother had told her about them; they were the men who ran the racetracks where the family sometimes sold produce to vendors.

“Oh, what do you know, anyway? They . . . they’d probably want to keep it quiet, right?”

“Then they could just make him disappear or something. That’s how they work, isn’t it? I’ve read stories about people like that.”

“Shut up, would you?” Bernice stood up, despite Nia’s cringe. “Look, I don’t want to hurt you or anything. You’re family. Besides, we’d make great friends and we’ll have a wonderful time this summer with
him
out of the way.”

“And besides,” Nia added, catching Bernice’s momentum and riding it, out of fear more than conversational flow. “You want someone to help your story. Your mother might swallow it, but the police never will.”

Bernice approached Nia, tiptoeing over Antonio and coming to stand in front of her.

Nia hated to allow her so close, but she knew that if she wanted to make it out of the courtyard, she had to draw Bernice farther away from its exit archway, or she’d never beat her out of it. There in the courtyard, the ground was crisscrossed with paving stones and the grass was clipped close; it would be a fair race between them. And out in the open, it was only a short dash to the beach.

“Nia?” She stopped a few feet away. “Nia, you’ve got to help me out. Nia, what do you say?”

Nia took a deep breath and used her toe to nudge her shoes farther away from her feet. “Let me think about it.”

Then, with as much commotion as she could manage, Nia dived to her left and dodged the flicking knife—which caught on and ripped her dress, cutting out the hem her mother had only recently fixed.

Bernice jumped after her, snaring her nails in Nia’s hair, trying to twist her fingers into the braid there, but Nia grabbed the wall and used it to launch herself free and through the arch.

The grass was soft beneath her naked feet, and she prayed to God that there weren’t any sandspurs. Down at the dune, she took a flying leap and landed on top of the small ridge, then hopped down the other side into the thick, powdery sand. It trapped her briefly, but she dug in with her toes and hurled herself forward onto the beach.

Bernice was right behind her. She hit the sand with a quick grumble and then recovered, only to sink under her next steps. Her tall shoes dug into the sand and tried to bury themselves.

Nia kept running, knowing it would take precious seconds for Bernice to figure out that she ought to take her shoes off, and then perhaps a couple more to unfasten the skinny buckles and cast the things aside.

An endless strip of beach sprawled before them, and a small beacon of light gleamed weakly at the island’s tip where the lighthouse was perched. Nia thought that there must be a keeper there, and surely a backwoods yokel who worked alone all night would have a gun.

The distance between the girls widened as Bernice cursed and hobbled; but she finally forced her shoes away, and once her feet were free, the gap began to close.

Nia prayed that her head start would be enough.

Sand flew up behind her as she charged down the strip, and her legs burned with exhaustion. The light in the distance wasn’t growing close as fast as she thought it should, and God, she was tired. She tried not to pant so hard; it made her side cramp and her throat catch.

But Bernice was almost on top of her again, breathless and tireless, too, so Nia jammed her feet into the sand, crunching
down into shells and seaweed, crab claws and shrimp tails, in a gritty plume. A thin wave trickled over her path. Mere yards away, a larger wave rumbled and rushed after the first.

The tide was coming in. With a burst of inspiration that fueled a second wind, Nia wondered if Bernice could swim.

She turned and ran into the oncoming waves, knowing the water would slow them both. But if she could go deep enough, if she could make it into the surf where the waves were higher than both their heads, she could get out of Bernice’s reach long enough to think—maybe even long enough to swim to the lighthouse. It couldn’t be more than a mile, since the island wasn’t much longer than that, and she could always tread water while she caught her breath.

Black and warm, the Gulf foamed around her ankles and sucked at her toes.

Bernice splashed in after her.

Nia trudged ahead, plowing through water that was up to her knees, then her thighs. Her dress soaked and sagged around her, slowing her some, but she’d expected that. She dived headfirst into the next oncoming wave and pulled herself under the water with arms that were not quite as weary as her legs.

I’ve made it
, she thought, swimming out to sea, kicking for all she was worth. But the tide was against her, and she was only a few strokes into her flight when Bernice’s hand wrapped around Nia’s foot.

She panicked and floundered, sputtering as she tried to stand and breathe. Bernice’s grip slipped, and she dropped the knife in order to hold her cousin with both hands, drawing the other girl toward her like a fish on a line.