Ellisandre
Alice rejoined Ellisandre in the back of a junkyard an hour away. She looked bright for such a cold winter night.
“So, what are we doing?” Alice rubbed her hands together.
“Moving bodies, and trash. From this vehicle to that one.” Ellisandre pointed to a small box truck parked beside the van.
Alice pulled a face. “How many?”
“A lot.”
Alice raised both eyebrows.
Ellisandre opened the back of the van. “If you can, never kill someone unless you already have a plan on what to do with the body. Or you’re okay leaving them where they fall.”
Some of the bodies were large. Alice was game, though. She grabbed the feet ends of each cadaver and swung them into the back of the truck with Ellisandre. Once or twice she shivered and pulled a face.
“Not going to ask questions?” Ellisandre asked as they moved the third body.
Alice grimaced. “I mean, I’m thinking them, but if I don’t know, I can’t confess, can I?”
“They were outside the apartment where you and Dana were, at The Residency,” Ellisandre said.
Alice growled and swung the next body into the back of the cargo truck with a little more oomph.
Once everything had been transferred and the inside of the van cleaned, Ellisandre sent Alice to get in the passenger side of the cargo truck and took the driver’s seat for themselves.
They drove west, taking detours and backroads until they reached their destination, an old barn that looked like it might fall any year.
No one around. They were deep in fields and surrounded by a ratty, abandoned feed lot.
There was a large fire pit where locals burned trash.
Ellisandre backed the truck up through the missing doors of the barn, almost to the vat itself.
Alice was solid, not flinching at the work.
The vat was large, used for a commercial purpose at one point.
It was contained inside a reservoir mostly buried underground with hatches that could be opened at several points.
There was a hoist and pulley above the reservoir, originally used to hold heavy metal parts that would have been dipped into the vat.
The hoist still worked. It made moving the bodies easy.
They had to cut away the plastic and lower each cadaver in one at a time.
Even though it took time for acid to dissolve a body, no one was likely to look inside.
Not for years at least. Though adding this much organic matter was going to dilute the acid.
They might have to siphon some of the reservoir off or add more acid.
Hard part done, Ellisandre and Alice then stacked the furniture in the fire pit. Ellisandre gave Alice the opportunity to douse the pile with kerosene. They lit it on fire by tossing in a burning scrap. Then it was time to wait.
Alice went back to the truck and came back with two thermoses.
“What’s this?” Ellisandre asked.
“Hot chocolate.” Alice smiled and pushed hair back out of her face. “You said dress like we were going to be sitting around in the cold. I figured we’d need it. Don’t worry, I used the good chocolate, the kind I had to melt down. No instant.”
She tapped her thermos against Ellisandre’s as if she were toasting and uncapped the top, taking a sip, then sighed, shoulders relaxing. “Good, it’s still hot.”
Ellisandre’s lips tugged towards a smile. They uncapped their own and tested the temperature with their tongue. It was very warm, but not hot enough to be dangerous to drink. They took a full gulp.
“This is unreal, you know that?” Alice murmured. “We’re out here, in the middle of somewhere that’s nowhere, dissolving bodies and burning furniture. And tomorrow we’re going to walk around Chicago like everything is normal.”
“That’s what we do.” Ellisandre studied the younger woman’s face.
“I know.” Alice huffed. “It just feels weird. Like after they told me my dad had been killed by the Russians. I kept waiting for the world to be different, but I was the only one who was different. Well, some people were different, like Mikhail, and mom, and Collin.
But two days later I went to school, and there were still tests and the charts on the walls were still talking about math and science, and we were all supposed to be reading this book and talking about our feelings about this boy and going on vacation and it all . . . didn’t matter.
Except that it did.”
Ellisandre let Alice talk, giving her space. A fond feeling in their chest as Alice’s voice rose and fell with the lilt of storytelling. The young woman had a lyrical sound, making words roll together with more pathos than their simplicity should have granted them. It was the spirit behind them.
“I remember that feeling,” Ellisandre said, when Alice paused and seemed to wait.
Alice tilted her head, inviting Ellisandre to go on.
“After I killed my father, the next day, I went out to a cafe. I ordered a blueberry scone and a black coffee with cream on the side. I thought it might taste different. I sat at the little table. The sun was bright. The coffee tasted like coffee. The blueberries were like they had always been.”
Alice huffed. “It’s almost like cheating—no, like the rest of the world is cheating. Something happens that changes everything, and then everything doesn’t change.”
Ellisandre chuckled into the dark and took another gulp of the hot chocolate. “The whole world is changing, all the time, but the patterns are similar enough to feel familiar. There’re enough of us in holding patterns, only changing a tiny bit each day, that things can feel the same, for a while.”
“Yeah. Like cheating.” Alice stared up at the smoke curling up into the sky.
“Not going to comment on me killing my father?”
“If you killed him, he had it coming.” Alice shrugged. “If he had it coming, then the story might be heavy.”
“It is.” Ellisandre looked down. It was such an old story now; sometimes it was easy to forget it was heavy. The familiarity of it blocked the sense of weight. It was their only father story, the one they carried. What would it even feel like, to have a lighter one?
“He was the first one to train me,” Ellisandre said.
“After he discovered he might be able to pass me off as a male heir, that’s all he wanted. He went from someone who was never around to spending all his time with us. My mother hated it. She liked it when he was overseas and never there. He taught me a lot, or sent me to teachers. Cut my hair,
bought me suits, made me change the way I talked, made me change schools. He wanted a son, even if he had to carve me into one. But then I started to realize what he was up to. He took me abroad, into meetings, introducing me to his family and friends.
He wanted me to follow his footsteps in the family business. It wasn’t a life I wanted.”
Ellisandre swirled the hot chocolate around in the thermos.
There was only one person to whom they’d ever told the next part of the story.
“I went to British intelligence. But they didn’t arrest him. They offered me a place. My father wasn’t enough. They wanted the people above him. I agreed. Summer camps turned into an excuse to disappear and train in everything. The things I’m teaching you.
They arranged for me to win special educational trips or go on exchanges to get me out of school without raising my parents’ suspicions. In the end, it came down to me.”
Alice studied Ellisandre’s face, her eyes soft with acceptance. “Sometimes it just comes down to us.”
Ellisandre smiled a smile that wasn’t happy and wasn’t sad, just knowing. If anyone understood, it would be Alice.
Sometimes it came down to being in a place and in a time and then you had a decision. And that decision changed everything.
And then you walked the world and no one else knew that everything had changed. Because the coin had another side, the one where nothing had changed. And both were true. Every time.
Ellisandre clinked their thermos against Alice’s. Together they watched the smoke rise up into the sky, erasing the evidence of a change.