Mockingbird (30 page)

  She doesn't want to talk about this anymore.

  "I want to see Wren."

  She moves toward the greenhouse. Eleanor touches her arm.

  "It's through her that I saw you, Miriam. You are a part of her life. You are just one more piece of her wreckage. Because of her, a piece of you will one day go missing." Eleanor's voice grows quiet. "We're not so different, you and I."

  Beck shifts closer. Water thumps dully against the umbrella.

  The old woman's grip on her arm tightens.

  "We're very different." Miriam says, but she doesn't want to think about it.
Don't look at this one too close. You may not like the answer.

  "Are we? Fate has a path. You step in. You change lives by ending lives. Don't you? That's what I do. What we do. As a family. We see those girls twisting in the wind – poisoned girls, damaged girls,
ruined
girls. Girls who will themselves become ruiners. Their lives are hurricanes and tornados, sweeping up everything in their paths and throwing them back to earth so hard they shatter."

  "Get your hand off me. I said I want to see Wren."

  But Eleanor continues, eyes wide with the fervor of her beliefs. "Annie Valentine's death is a pure thing. A good thing. And good things, truly good things, don't come without sacrifice. Hers is a garden of hate: Leave the ground barren and only barren things grow. A dead child. A dead mother. So many others. Remove her from the timeline–" Eleanor forms scissors with her two fingers –
clip clip clip
. "–and the garden grows."

  Miriam tries to pull away, but the old woman has a grip like pliers. Eleanor's breath is fragrant with rose hips.

  
Burning roses and carnation, wisps of smoke from the mask's noseholes.

  Eleanor's eyelids flutter, almost as though she's caught in the throes of an ecstatic revelation. "It's like cancer, you see? Sometimes to save the body you must cut out the disease. Remove an organ. Sever a limb. Annie Valentine and all the others –
all the others
– were malignant. Tumors deserving the knife."

  "Or the axe."

  At this, Eleanor smiles.

  Then she turns and, with a small brass key, unlocks the greenhouse door. From inside Miriam smells a hothouse breath of turned earth, fertilizer, and the heady scent of wet leaves. Sees the splash of green punctuated by pockets of bright flowers. Orchids and tea roses and birds-of-paradise.

  In the center of the long hothouse is a tree – a ficus tree with three separate tapering trunks winding together into the branches.

  Wren sits next to the tree. Her hands are bound in polished cuffs. Another chain links those cuffs to a rusted eyebolt in the greenhouse floor.

  Her chin dips. Eyes half-lidded. Bottom lip wet with saliva.

  "You drugged her," Miriam says.

  "To keep her quiet," Beck answers. "She's… a bit mouthy."

  Miriam hurries to Wren, kneels next to her. The girl's eyes try to focus on Miriam, but the pin-prick pupils wander the empty space around her. Like Wren's seeing more than one. Two Miriams? Three? An infinity of her?

  
The scariest thought of all.

  "Shh," Miriam says, pulling the girl close. She's not good with affection but the girl needs something. As the heavy rains pummel the windows above their heads, Miriam continues to shush her and rub circles in the girl's back. Her shoulder grows wet from the girl's drool.

  "Mom," Wren mumbles.

  Miriam shivers. It's like she can feel her ovaries tighten, breaking off a decade's worth of ice and snow. It's a terrible feeling. It takes everything she has to swallow back a pained cry and to dam up the tears that want to fall.

  She eases Wren back against the tree and stands.

  "What do you want from me?"

  Eleanor eases toward her. The beneficent smile on her face gives her an eerie, grandmotherly glow. All around her, the verdant plants – life spilling out of pots and boxes and over table edges – call to mind the Garden of Eden. A place where a woman made a choice, a choice predicated on a lie.

  "I want you to join our family," Eleanor says.

  "You've gone off your meds. You're monsters."

  "We're healers. Aggressive as excision. As radiation or chemotherapy. Aggressive as bloodletting leeches. But healers just the same."

  "That's what it's about, isn't it? The whole… ritual. The Medieval doctor's get-up. The mythic underpinnings. The table. The fact you're a nurse. You've fallen in love with the idea. You're huffing your own crazy vapors like all the old oracles. Except you've taken the oracular thing one step further. You get your hands dirty. You
make
things true."

  "And what is it that you do, Miss Black? A life for a life. We both step into the stream and let our bodies change the direction of the water – we redirect fate. By ending some lives we save so many others."

  Miriam feels the Xs in her palms itching. She needs to do something. Soon.

  But not yet.

  "You could just kill them. The bad girls. But oh, the theatrics. You don't only put a bullet in their heads. You make a… presentation out of it. A ritual for all the bullshit gods and non-existent goddesses to see."

  "Ritual is necessary," Beck says.

  Eleanor says, "My gift is from the divine. We must celebrate it in all its aspects. I'm surprised you don't feel the same way. Don't you believe in things greater than yourself?"

  "I don't believe in freaky folk songs and fucked up medical masks."

  "The song is our prayer. It's an old song. Carl's mother used to sing it to him." Eleanor offers a strained smile. "The mask is both symbol and function. The beak doctor's mask was the face of the bird – the plague affected mammals, you see, but not birds. And so with the herbs in the beak the doctor was protected from catching the plague. The plague was more than just sickness back then. It was thought to be a mark of sin. A punishment by God."

  "Fuck. Who taught you all this?"

  "My father was an academic. What can I say? His florid imagination was infectious."

  "These girls. Why not just… help them? Offer them a chance? You say you have the power to sway fate – so why not show them how to be better people? Instead of torturing them.
Killing
them."

  "That
is
what we do," Eleanor says, as though Miriam should have this figured out already. "It's why our schools exist."

  
Oh, god
. "Schools. Plural?"

  "We have four schools in three counties. Caldecott. Woodwine. Bell Athyn. And Breckworth. Three through dummy corporations, but I serve on the board of each school, as does my son Edwin."

  Miriam doesn't want to ask. Doesn't want to know. She already feels sick to her stomach. But that urge to know,
to see
, is present – the same urge that makes her put skin to skin so she can see the most intimate and troubling moment of a person's life.

  And so she asks, "How many? How… many girls? How many
victims
?"

  Eleanor says to Beck, "Show her."

  Beck waves her on.

  He leads her past the ficus. Down a row of white orchids, flowers like white spiders.

  At the end of the row, a metal cabinet. Rust at the hinges and edges.

  Beck puts his hand at the middle of Miriam's back (
not the small of her back, thank all the gods
) and his touch makes her feel queasy and unstable, like she's tuning in to some nauseating frequency.

  He pulls a small key. Unlocks the padlock. Opens the cabinet.

  Inside?

  Jars.

  The cabinet is filled with jars.

  Five shelves. Easily a dozen on each shelf.

  Each containing cloudy fluid. Turbid, like brackish pond water.

  In each, something that looks like a slug or a sea cucumber. Lean at one end. Fibrous at the other, like the root of a stubborn weed.

  
Tongues.

  In each jar, a girl's tongue.

  
She wrung her hands and groaned and cried

  And gnawed her tongue before she died.

  Miriam doesn't want to do it, but she has to.

  She plucks a jar from the top shelf. Nothing identifies to whom it belongs. No tape. No name. No date. The jar shakes in her grip. Bubbles long-clinging to the mouth meat flutter to the top.

  "What do you do with the bodies?" she asks, though she's not sure she wants to know.

  Beck reaches over into a pot where a bromeliad the color of fire blooms. He fishes out a fistful of earth and holds it in front of her.

  Moist earth, rich as pipe tobacco but speckled with white – like shards of finely shattered pottery – tumbles to the earth.

  
No, no, no, no.

  "We compost," he says.

  Black dirt. Bone shards. Headless corpses feeding lush plants as fertilizer.

  "So many dead girls." Tears creep down her cheeks.

  "They needed to die. You'll see that."

  "I'm not like you."

  "My father proves otherwise. You're a killer, Miriam."

  
Go get 'em, killer. You have work to do.

  
An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

  
A life for a life.

  
You are who you are.

  "So be it," she says, and she bows her head.

  Then she whips the tongue jar around and smashes it against Beck Daniels' head. The stink of formaldehyde blooms fast, and he staggers to the side. Bits of glass stick in his temple, his cheek, that prodigious jaw. An archipelago of shards around his eye socket.

  
Run!

  She shoves past him–

  But his knee comes up and nails her, a hard hit to the kidneys. She falls forward, cracks her head on a table edge. A pot spins off the side. Dirt –
grave
dirt, the dirt of dead girls – rains down on her.

  She tries to get up, but he grabs her and throws her down.

  Pins her.

  Flips her over.

  His hands close around her neck.

  Blood pulses in her cheeks, lips, eyes.

  He bangs her head against the concrete. Once, twice. Shotgun blasts of stars.

  Her palms slap against the ground. She slides one hand beneath her as his thumbs press hard against her windpipe.

  She feels the waistline of her jeans, fingers searching blindly along the small of her back.

  
Where is it where is it where is it

  Beck leers above. Glass glittering in his face. Blood oozing to the edge of each shard, dripping down on her face –
pat pat pat.

  Darkness rips away the light.

  Her hand, still searching.

  Then–

  She finds it.

  The fork.

  She made a big deal about that butter knife from breakfast. Waving it this way and that. Beck's earlier words echo in her head.

  
"Your words, your attitude, all a big misdirection. A magician's trick."

  Misdirection, indeed.

  They watched the knife. They missed her tucking the fork into her pants.

  Her hands curl around the utensil.

  She brings the fork up hard–

  And jams it deep into the soft meat of his armpit.

  
Release
. Light pushes back the darkness as his hands loosen. Miriam gets her knees up against his midsection, extends her legs, pushes him off her as he howls in rage, pawing at the fork like a bear.

  Miriam finds her feet beneath her.

  Still woozy.

  Will-o-wisps still dancing in front of her eyes.

  A small gust of pride swells within her:
Second sonofabitch I dispatched with a fork.

  She bolts. She knows that staying to fight Beck is a losing battle. A broken jar and a forked armpit will slow him down, but he's easily the superior fighter. And going toward Eleanor – she's an old woman and Miriam's sure she can take her but doesn't want any surprises.

  That means going out the window.

  Miriam gets a running start.

  Foot up on one table–

  Launches herself at the Plexiglass.

  Her shoulder hits it. The window bends inward, pops out of its frame, and takes her with it. Suddenly it's all wind and rain and the great outdoors. Miriam runs.

 

Louis shivers in the rain, the cop's gun tucked in his waistband.

  Everything here at the school is lit up like a carnival. Red and blue lights strobing, disrupting the wan light of morning. He hides behind an alcove corner, peering out, unsure what to do, where to go. His head is a dozen cats running in a hundred directions – he doesn't know how to find Miriam, doesn't want to talk to the cops because if one of them is in on these murders then many might be, doesn't like being this close to a parking lot full of cops with a stolen police revolver in his pants. He's paralyzed.
Some protector.

  Water rushes down the school gutters, overwhelming the drains. The streets are wet at the sides, and soon those deep puddles will meet. It won't be long before all of it floods. The rains are endless and without mercy. Hurricane Esmerelda is here – and she's showing her teeth.

  By now, some of the cop cars are leaving. Soon they'll all be gone.

  A shadow falls over him and above him, the airy
fwump
of an umbrella unfurling. It's Katey.

  "Louis, I'm so sorry." She's been crying. "I left her alone and then… The next thing I knew, all hell was breaking loose. This is my fault."

  "Your fault." He almost wants to laugh. "Katey, I told her I'd protect her. That my job was to be there for her. This doesn't look like that."