Slice Of Cherry (20 page)

They went up to the front door, and Kit rang the bell.

“What’ll you say?” asked Fancy, trusting Kit, as always, to speak for the both of them.

A woman—the older sister, they presumed—opened the
door before Kit could answer, a willowy, freckled blonde with a pink mouth and weird, jittery eyes that couldn’t seem to rest on anything longer than a second, including the sisters. She had a white-knuckled grip on a bottle of water, which she held to her chest like an amulet to ward off demons.

“Did we talk on the phone?” she greeted them.

“Sure did,” said Kit, in full bubbly mode. She tipped her newsboy cap. “I’m Kit and that’s Fancy.”

“I’m Datura.” She pointed her water bottle at the kinetoscope. “What’s that? A camera?” She looked vaguely upset at the idea—vaguely because she wasn’t looking at the kinetoscope in particular, but rather at everything. Her restless violet eyes were giving Fancy motion sickness.

“They don’t make cameras out of wood anymore. Der.” Kit laughed in a way that invited Datura to join in, but Datura didn’t. “That’s what we’re gone use to solve your problem. After you let us inside?”

Datura only hesitated a brief moment before she stepped back and waved the sisters indoors.

As she passed, Fancy noted Datura’s strong, sweet smell, as if she herself had been plucked from her own poisonous garden.

Datura’s house was clean and orderly, the living room as bright and steamy as a greenhouse.

Datura waved the sisters to the couch by a glass coffee table piled with books on night-blooming plants.

“What beautiful flowers,” Kit chirped as Datura fussed with a vase of bright red oleanders on the end table. “And what a beautiful garden! I told Fancy outside that I never seen such a beautiful garden. You should give us the name of your gardener.”

“I’m the gardener.” Once she was done with the flowers, Datura smoothed Fancy’s hair off her shoulders and shoved a pillow behind her back, as though Fancy were a wilting flower in need of extra support. Fancy gripped the kinetoscope and shot Kit a freaked-out look.

Kit ignored her. “Oh my God, you’re so lucky! I wish my thumb was as green as yours.”

Satisfied with the sisters’ arrangement on the couch, Datura guzzled from her water bottle. “Y’all thirsty? Want some tea?”

“We love tea! Thanks!”

When Datura disappeared into the kitchen, Fancy said, “Like, oh my God, Kit! I wish I was as full of it as you are!”

“I’m not full of it. I’m full of
shit
. That’s why she likes me. Gardeners adore fertilizer. She seem weird to you?”

“Did you not see her fondling me? That lady sailed past weird a long time ago.” Fancy looked into the kinetoscope, but saw only the happy place.

“What’re you looking at?”

“Not
at
. For.” She leaned forward and shoved aside one of the books to clear a surface on the coffee table. She stared into the glass, and the Woodson kitchen materialized.

“What’re you looking
for
?”

“That.” She pulled Kit forward. “Look.” The sisters watched Datura chop her deadly destroying angel mushrooms into a teapot.

Kit cried, “Well, that won’t taste good!”

But when Datura brought them their tea, the sisters were all smiles.

“Old family recipe,” said Datura, clearing a space on the coffee table for the tray. “It’ll probably taste a little weird at first.”

“Can’t be
too
many in your family,” said Kit, “if y’all sit around drinking destroying angel tea all day.”

Datura froze, sugar tongs in hand.

“Why you trying to kill us?” asked Kit, in a wounded tone. “I told you we’re here to help.”

She sat across from the sisters, her eyes skating drunkenly around the room. “My sister’s growing strangely. She don’t thrive in sunlight like I meant her to. She sneaks out of the house
in sunlight
even though she knows it ain’t good for her. I don’t understand it. I tried to alter her so she’ll thrive in the light, to cross-pollinate her with something really hardy and sun-loving, like a sunflower, but it ain’t working.”

Fancy and Kit exchanged a confused look. Beyond weird was right. Datura was insane.

“I was ready to give up and toss her on the compost heap,” she continued, “but then you called.” She smiled at Kit. “So I figured I’d kill the two of you and then cremate your bodies. Human ash makes excellent fertilizer. Selenicera might thrive in it.”

Kit elbowed Fancy. “Gardeners and fertilizers, see?” Then she sat forward and pinned Datura with her most earnest gaze. “Look, we came here to help you kill your
sister
, remember? If the kid’s as bad as you say, she’s too far gone for any last-minute Hail Mary fertilizer. Know what I mean?”

Datura swiped a fresh water bottle from the tea tray and drained half of it in one gulp. She wiped her mouth so hard she tore the skin of her lip. “You’re right,” she said, a bright
bead of blood trembling on her pastel mouth. “I have to face the fact that she’s more fungus than flower. Follow me.”

The sisters followed Datura to the back of the house, where the smell of earth and plant life grew ever more pervasive. She ushered the sisters into a low-lit room with a dirt-covered floor, a room with plants growing weird and pale in the gloom—up from the earth, down from the ceiling, and along the walls. One of the plants wasn’t a plant at all, but a little girl, maybe six or seven, sitting in a corner in a white nightie, dirt covering her feet to the ankles.

She was albino pale, her white hair creeping over her shoulders like spiderwebs, but her eyes were violet and surprised to see the sisters. Surprised and hopeful.

Kit’s bubbliness fled as she took in the girl’s condition. “You’re Selenicera?”

The girl nodded.

“Doesn’t she look horrible?” Datura waded through the soil to the girl and poured the dregs of her water bottle over Selenicera’s head. “So pale and sickly?” Selenicera flinched from the touch of the water, wiping it from her eyes like tears.

“She’s the horrible one? How can you treat your own sister like a . . . a
toadstool
? Crazy bitch.” Kit whipped out her
switchblade and darted forward, as out of control as the lichen growing over the window.

“Kit,” said Fancy, sharp enough to stop her sister in her tracks. “There’s no need for that, remember?” She held up the kinetoscope.

So Kit held up her knife, her rage replaced with frustration. “But you said next time you’d let me—”

“I don’t feel like scrubbing that woman’s blood out of my clothes, like I had to do with those transies and the old man. It took forever. And think of all the evidence you’d leave behind if—”

“Fine. Do what you want.” Kit put the knife away with an ungracious amount of swearing as Fancy cranked the kinetoscope and sent them all into the happy place.

Datura and Selenicera stared around the garden from the platform with the statues, disoriented and wide-eyed— Selenicera kept patting the cobbled platform, feeling for the dirt she’d been buried in. The confusion soon gave way to admiration; Datura and Selenicera knew a thing or three about gardens, after all, and the headless garden was in fine form today.

“The kinetoscope’s gone!” Kit exclaimed.

“It doesn’t come over, Kit.” Fancy said. “It never has.”

“Why not?”

“I dunno. It’s not like Cherry gave me a manual.”

While the Woodsons were busy gaping, Fancy’s minions entered the garden and made a beeline for Datura, and to her displeasure, dressed her in a straitjacket.

“What’s going on?” Datura demanded, her jittery eyes flitting toward the sisters and then away. “What are you doing? Why’re they manhandling
me
?”

Fancy spoke up as Kit helped Selenicera off the ground, helping her stand on her spindly legs. “Just a precaution. I aim to test what you said. See if the kid can thrive in the light. If she can’t, then we’ll kill her. And if we do kill her, I wouldn’t want you to suddenly turn on us and try to take revenge.”

“What do you mean?” Datura turned to Kit. “What does she mean?”

But Fancy was too busy watching the sky to answer. Under her gaze the clouds parted and sunlight fell on them, as gently as a warm shower.

Selenicera began to grow taller and sturdier. Her thin, lank hair thickened and flourished, and roses bloomed in her milky cheeks. She laughed to see the changes in herself,
running her hands through her hair and twirling on her suddenly strong legs. Fancy realized as she watched Selenicera becoming healthier that she must be closer to nine or ten; life with Datura had stunted her growth.

Unlike her sister, Datura began to weaken in the sun. Her skin shriveled and dried; her hair began to fall out like leaves from a dead tree; she squirmed in her straitjacket, gasping for water.

Fancy told her, “It’s not the kid who can’t handle the light; it’s you. Imagine that.”

“Please.” The minions had to hold her upright. “Water.”

“So by your own reasoning,” Fancy continued, ignoring her pleas, “you’re the one who needs to be killed. Right?”

Datura bared her teeth. One of them fell out and clattered on the stone. “I should’ve followed my first mind and cremated you.”

“But then we wouldn’t be here having a swell time,” Fancy exclaimed, as Kit scooped up the tooth and put it in her pocket.

Fancy snapped her fingers, and a flood of happy place people poured through hedges carrying garden furniture and trays of food. Not muscle, just regular people, who smiled and bobbed their heads when they entered Fancy’s presence.
Within moments they had set up a table and chairs and furnished tea and sandwiches and cakes enough for high tea with the queen.

“Selenicera, do something,” said Datura during the commotion. “Don’t let them treat me like this. Not after all I’ve done for you.”

Selenicera stopped spinning and looked at her sister, took in the straitjacket, seeing her as though for the first time. “It’s because of what you did to me that we’re even here.” She turned to Fancy to speak, decided against it, and turned to Kit instead. “Where
are
we?”

“The happy place.”

“How’d we get here?”

“Remember the wooden box with the crank Fancy was carrying? It’s a kind of door.”

Selenicera got it then. Porterenes understood all about doors that led out of the world. “What you gone do to Datura?”

Kit laughed humorlessly. “Ask my sister. She’s the one ‘handling’ it.”

“Don’t be like that,” said Fancy sharply. “Killing her in her house would have left evidence behind; I told you. We’re kinda trying to avoid that, remember?”

“Well, we’re here now, so why can’t I—?”

Fancy snapped her fingers again and all the happy-place people came to attention. “You may leave.” After they trooped away—all except Fancy’s personal minions, who were still holding Datura—Fancy extended her hands to Kit and the Woodsons. “Please. Have a seat.”

They all sat at the table, Kit on Fancy’s right, Selenicera on the left, and Datura several feet away at the opposite end of the long table, the two minions flanking her.

Fancy smiled, enjoying her role as gracious host. “Now let’s e—”

“Kit!”

Franken loped up behind Fancy’s chair and stopped beside Kit. He’d gotten clothes from somewhere: a long-sleeved turtleneck and pants, both black. He was much thinner than when they’d first met, and his hair was in his face, like he was hiding behind it. But his stitches were still prominent, bulky and black. They’d need to be taken out at some point. Fancy could order the minions to do it. Or she could just leave it. Who cared what Franken looked like?

“Hey, Franken!” Kit pulled him down and kissed his scarred face. Kit obviously didn’t care.

He gestured at the spread. “Room for one more?”

“What the hell?” said Kit as Franken crowded next to her at the table. “The more the merrier, right, Fancy?”

“If you say so. That’s Franken,” Fancy told Selenicera, whose eyes bugged out of her face as she took in Franken’s patchwork visage. “Kit’s old playmate.”

Selenicera waved shyly.

“I need a drink!” Datura yelled, startling everyone, straining helplessly toward the teapot, rattling the buckles of her straitjacket.

“She looks real bad,” Selenicera noted. “And thirsty. She’s always really thirsty.”

Fancy swished the tea in the teapot around a few times and then poured everyone a cup. The tea was as silver as the teapot and rippled in the pink china cups like a liquid mirror.

“What kind of tea is this?” asked Franken, taking the proffered cup.

“My own blend,” Fancy answered, handing one of the minions a cup for Datura. “Brewed in Datura’s honor.”

While Datura gulped her tea with the help of one of the minions, Fancy slid a tray of cakes to Franken.

“Try one of the cream cakes,” she said, and then watched intently as Franken chose one.

He bit into it and then filled a saucer with them. “These’re awesome!” He spoke with his mouth full. “Tastes like—” He slumped forward onto the table, his cheek squishing his saucer of cakes.

Kit tsked at her sister. “What’d you do?”

“Nothing much.”

Kit raised Franken’s arm, then let it go. It dropped limply to the table. “Then why is he passed out?”

“Maybe he’s tired from obsessing over you.”

“You are cold-
blooded
,” Kit said admiringly, ignoring Franken as she filled her saucer with finger sandwiches. Fancy was glad to see that whatever fascination Franken had held for Kit in the cellar was now broken. Perhaps she’d been silly to worry.

“I feel funny,” said Selenicera. Before she had finished speaking, wings tore out of her back and ripped through her nightgown—not Kit’s angel wings, but butterfly wings. Emerald ones with matching antennae wagging atop her head. The sisters laughed at the sight of her.

Fancy held up an empty silver tray so that Selenicera could see herself. “Look.”

“I’m a butterfly?” She seemed more astounded than upset.

“It’s cuter than what you were,” Kit said. “A mushroom growing down in the dark.”

“Much cuter,” Selenicera agreed, taking the tray from Fancy so she could admire herself at her leisure.

But Datura didn’t look cute. She swelled and puffed and changed from white to greenish-brown. Her mouth thinned and widened until she looked like a toad. She screamed like one too, croaky and guttural, as she ordered the minions to bring her more tea—that unslakable thirst that the sisters had first noticed in her still evident.