Chapter 15
Allie stroked Donna’s hair, smoothing it out and away from the nape of her neck. There was the clasp of that odd, flat iron
chain, lying between two knuckles of her spine. Allie squeezed the latch with her thumbnail and the necklace popped off, fell
into her crotch, slithered half under her. That was the easy part.
The hard part was shifting Donna’s head off her, squirming out from under. Allie raised her skull out of her lap and edged
to the side, an inch at a time, her butt squeaking over the leather, and was there a more embarrassing sound in all the world?
Every squeak sounded like a trumpet blat, and she expected Donna to twitch and wake and look blearily around. Allie contorted
herself to slip out from under Donna and then set her head down and got up. The necklace—and the key—was now half buried under
the couch cushion, and Allie had to lean across her friend and dig for it, her belly almost in Donna’s face. She found it,
collected the chain in her fingers, and stood up, key dangling from her fist.
She rose and looked down and found Donna staring back at her. Her very blue eyes seemed almost angry, her face blotchy. Allie
felt as if all the breath had been driven from her lungs.
“I love you,” Donna said, with unmistakable resentment, and shut her eyes again.
“I love you too,” Allie said.
She turned off the light but left the TV on, the sound muted.
Allie went down the stairs in her bare feet, through the kitchen, and into the study.
She stood by the piano for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the moonlit dimness.
The French windows threw tiles of bone-colored light on the floor.
The dead butterflies might have been stamped from silver foil.
Allie’s hand drifted to the piano, touching it lightly, as if warning it to remain quiet.
It had been a long time since she had been able to trust that piano.
Allie circled the desk and stood before the Cabinet, tall and narrow as a coffin. The big iron hasp was across the two doors,
that ancient lock decorated with ornate scrollwork, holding them shut.
She hesitated, then put the key aside and approached the door without it. To feel again, for herself, the sensation she had
felt when Colin brought the lock home and challenged her to touch it.
I’ll catch you if you fall, he promised her, a smile touching the corners of his lips.
I’ll need a few more drinks before there’s any chance of that, she told him, but in fact, the moment Allie put her hand on the lock, he had needed to grab her arm to keep her from going
down.
Now she spread the fingers of her right hand and stretched them toward it and she felt it. It was a little like pushing two magnets toward each other, only her hand was one magnet and the lock the other, and
the reverse polarity wanted to shove her arm down. As her fingers closed to within an inch of the dark iron, the blood rushed
from her head and the world grayed out around the edges of her vision and she wobbled . . . then she quickly retreated, placing
a hand on the desk to steady herself. Well, then. That first experience with what Colin called the Distortion Lock had not
been imagined, had not been the power of a pre-hypnotic suggestion. The hand on the edge of the desk felt around and found
Donna’s key.
This time she held the key out in front of her, brandishing it the way she might’ve brandished a pocketknife if menaced by
a drunk in an alley. She waited for another rush of dizziness, but it didn’t come. There was a sensation of pushing through something, almost like thrusting a hand through water, or something more viscous than water, and the key slid into the lock
and turned, and abruptly the sense of fighting against something was gone. She thought of an electric fence; when she turned
the key, it was as if someone had flipped a power main and cut off the juice.
She slipped the lock free from the hasp, weighed it in her palm.
Allie had heard about an object in the ruins of Chernobyl, a lump of radioactive slag called the elephant’s foot, which was considered the most lethal object on the planet.
She could not help feeling the lock itself was made of far more dangerous stuff.
She tossed it in the general direction of the desk, glad to let go, and opened the Cabinet.
A smell of sweetly seasoned wood spilled out, an odor of cedar and oak. Allie’s hand flitted here and there, touching, as
if for luck, old acquaintances. John Smith’s gun, the ball-peen hammer from the Los Feliz murder house, the 8mm Elwood Hondo
film. Her hand dropped two shelves and rested on the cloak, carefully tucked into a large square of silky white paper. Set
atop it was a glass bulb filled with what looked very much like blood. The cork had been pulled more than once, but Colin
had melted fresh wax each time to reseal it. Allie could see where different-colored waxes had bubbled down over the older
wax.
She slipped the martyr’s robe out of its envelope of pale paper and left the paper behind. Maybe Colin wouldn’t even notice
it was gone. She found the Russian mirror, the one with the Y-shaped crack across the face, and folded it inside the cloak.
It unnerved her, to be alone in the study at this hour of the night, in front of this cabinet full of murder weapons and objects
with ghosts stuck to them. She put her bundle on the seat of the desk’s chair, glanced about for the Distortion Lock—and couldn’t
find it. She remembered tossing it on the desk, but it wasn’t there. It had slid all the way off and dropped almost soundlessly
in the inch-thick carpet. She tried to pick it up by Donna’s necklace, that loop of dull iron chain hanging from the key,
and tugged the key right out of the lock.
A door closed somewhere deep in the house.
Her blood quickened, rushing to her heart. Donna was up, she was awake, and she was coming. Allie dropped the key on top of
the folded robe and, in her haste, bent and grabbed for the lock, had forgotten what would happen.
Darkness rushed up behind her eyes. The floor tilted beneath her.
She reeled and grabbed at the desk to keep from toppling.
She could taste bile, sweetened ever so slightly by elderflower, in the back of her mouth.
She sank to one knee and waited for her head to clear. A light came on in the hallway.
She took one breath, and another. Allie grabbed the key with one hand, snatched the lock with the other, and this time remained
clearheaded. Footsteps approached. For the life of her, she didn’t know what she’d tell Donna. At least Donna was drunk. Tomorrow,
she might not even remember finding Allison here.
Allie shut the Cabinet, put the lock on it, and turned, just as Colin stepped into the doorway. He beamed at the sight of
her.
“Did you get lost?” he asked her.
He was in the doorway, one arm resting against the doorframe, his whole body sagging to one side. She couldn’t see his face
in the dark, although the moonlight gleamed off his bare, shiny scalp. Her heart flew to her mouth, and for a moment she was
too frightened to speak.
She was surprised when she finally found her voice and it was relatively normal. “Lost?”
“Did you get lost looking for the Excedrin?” he said. “And is it for you? Or Donna? How much did she drink?”
“For me,” Allie said, and her gaze fell to the desk once again. There were plastic cubes to one side, a collection of paper
clips in one, Sharpies in another. There had always been a third, full of the Excedrin that Colin ate like candies, but she
couldn’t spot it in the dark.
“I had to stop taking them,” Colin said. “They were chewing up the lining of my stomach. I have a powder now, a mix of oxycodone
and Adderall. I rub it into my gums. Do you want?” He began to pat his pockets, feeling around for it.
“That’s all right,” Allie said.
He nodded.
“You’re back,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be back tonight.” To her own ears, this sounded like the beginning of a confession,
a thief explaining why she thought she’d get away with her crime.
“I was in New York City for six hours, and that was five and a half hours too long.” He tried to draw himself up to his full height, then gave it up as too much effort and slouched once more against the doorframe.
He was drunk himself, then, or stoned, or both.
“I spent most of my afternoon in a boardroom seventy-five floors up from Fifth Avenue, surrounded by money guys who wanted to nail my scrotum to the table. One of ’em said it was lucky for me the windows didn’t open, or they’d chuck me out.
I had to laugh at that, just thinking what would happen if they tried.
Would’ve been a hell of a thing to see King Sorrow come through the glass and start playing Frisbee with billionaires. ”
“How much trouble are you in?” she asked.
“With them? None, really. Not in any way that matters. What are they going to do? They can’t get their money back now. It’s
like that old saying: if you owe a bank a hundred thousand dollars and you can’t pay, you’ve got a problem. If you owe a bank
a hundred million dollars and you can’t pay, the bank has a problem. Dragonware took some hits last year, and that shitty little video of our stupid altercation at Rackham, that
was the icing on the cake. But if my investors pull their money now, they walk away losers. They can only walk away winners
if they stick with me.”
“They can’t, I don’t know, take your company from you? Vote you out as CEO?”
He stared at her blankly, and she felt her skin roughen with goose bumps. No. Of course they couldn’t. He’d scour them off
the face of the earth before he’d ever let that happen. He had a dragon, after all.
“I don’t really care if the equity people like me,” he said at last, which was no answer to her question. “But I do care whether
you do. Are we cool, Allison Shiner? The last time I saw you, you were expressing a difference of opinion with your bony little
fists.”
Allison said, “I was drunk. And I didn’t understand.
Donna made me understand. I didn’t want to believe it for a while.
When I jumped on you, I was mad about you sending King Sorrow after Gwen, but I guess maybe I should’ve hit you for not doing something sooner.
” As she said this, she was painfully aware of the martyr’s robe, folded up on the seat of his desk chair.
All he needed to do was take a few steps forward and he’d be able to see it.
Colin bobbed his head in a slow nod. “It’s one thing to wipe out people who are dangerous, people who mean to strike at the
innocent. But harmless old folks . . . ? And I do feel partially responsible. Gwen didn’t have our education, wasn’t really equipped to deal with what we laid on her. She
was a working-class kid who never had to wrestle with anything deeper than whether to buy Pabst or Schlitz on a Saturday night.
She never should’ve been part of this. It’s not a surprise the strain of it made her sick inside.”
“Yes. I think that’s right,” Allie said. What a terrible person Colin was, with his money and his shitty intellectual superiority.
What a terrible person she was, to have been his friend all these years. To have ever sought his approval or love.
“I’m glad you and Donna had a—what do we want to call it? A kiss-and-make-up session?” Allie felt a rough heat in her face.
It had always been obvious to everyone how badly she wanted to belong to Donna. It was a running joke to everyone but her.
“We watched a Remembering Leonard Nimoy marathon and had a healing sisterly cry over ol’ pointy-ears,” she said, pretending his dirty little innuendo had sailed
over her head.
“I tried to honor Spock’s death by not getting emotional about it.” Swaying from one side of the doorframe to the other, then
pushing off and wandering into the room at last. He couldn’t quite manage a straight line but was listing toward the bookshelves.
“I probably drank too much before getting on the plane. Especially since I was the one flying it. If we’re not still mad at
each other, can we hug it out?”
Allie left the robe folded in the chair and crossed over to him. He took her in his arms. That was when she realized she still
held Donna’s key, on its heavy iron chain, in her right hand. She squeezed it into a fist to hide it. His chin rested on her
shoulder. His lips slipped close to her ear as if to whisper some intimacy.
“I have to urinate so bad,” he said.
He let go of her and swayed across the study.
As he passed the desk he wobbled and put a hand down to steady himself, set his hand on the back of the chair.
Allie expected him to turn his head, look down and see what was in the seat, his face befuddled—and then his eyes clearing, as understanding dawned upon him.
But he didn’t slow, just kept going, staggering into the darkened bedroom and out of sight.
A toilet seat banged. Pee drizzled into the bowl.
Allie almost sprinted to the desk to get the folded cloak.
She left the martyr’s robe and the Russian mirror in the grand entrance hall, hidden under her snow parka, and hurried upstairs
in her stocking feet. Donna was right where she had left her. She did not stir while Allie looped the necklace back around
her throat. In sleep, Donna’s features were bunched up in an expression of ugly, childish resentment. On impulse, Allie reached
with one thumb to smooth her eyebrow, then leaned in to kiss her temple. It felt as if she were kissing her goodbye—and not
just for the night. Donna’s face relaxed, and she sighed and even smiled slightly. And in spite of herself, it pleased Allie
to think she could bring Donna any relief at all, even if only in her sleep. It had to be exhausting work, being her all the
time.
Colin appeared in the front door as she was pulling away from the house. She raised one hand in a wave, her heart drumming
as if she had just escaped a psychopath, which, in a sense, she supposed she had.
When she pulled out of the gates, she turned left.
She didn’t see the Shelby Boss Snake parked to the right, off the road, didn’t see it turn on its headlights, wasn’t aware
of it following her at a distance of a quarter mile. But then she hadn’t seen it when it followed her to The Briars either.