Black as Night: A Fairy Tale Retold (46 page)

“We need to find Blanche first. And we need to call the police,” Bear said, starting to untie his legs from the couch.

“Right.” But his father sounded bewildered. “I knew Elaine was jealous of Blanche. Still it’s hard to believe...”

“Dad, don’t worry about it right now. We’ll work it out somehow.” The cords came free and Bear turned anxiously to his fragile father. “Let me help you back to bed.”

“No, I won’t go back to that bedroom,” his father sounded surprisingly vehement. “Help me downstairs.”

Bear shouldered his father’s good arm, frightened at how light his father was. “Dad, what’s happened to you?” he asked as he helped him down the stairs.

“Don’t you know? Brain tumor,” his dad said, the working side of his face tense as though he were holding in pain. “The doctor said I’ll probably go into a coma soon, most likely for good.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t know,” Bear fumbled for the words as they reached the first landing.

“I wrote to you—didn’t you get the letter?” his father queried, tilting his head at him.

“No, I never got anything,” Bear said.

“I gave the letter to Elaine to mail,” his father said, his voice sad.

His father was still trying to absorb everything that had happened, and Bear knew that would take time. A shudder of fear passed over him. They were not safe yet. Down below them, the stained glass mirror glimmered.

Bear realized that the front door was opening and barely had time to push his father down and shield him before the gun went off.

One bullet sank into the wall with a thud and the beams of the house reverberated. The second bullet ricocheted off the marble railing and disappeared into the ceiling. But Bear was unhurt, pressed against the steps, covering his father. He stared down at Elaine, whose jaw was thrust forward, her eyes blue steel as she leveled the semiautomatic at him again.

There was a shout, and Elaine spun around, only to be slammed into by Fish, who flew through the door in a running leap. Both of them fell to the ground, Fish on top, but Elaine’s gun arm was pointing out the open door. Through the entranceway, Bear could see Rose standing breathless at the outer door, holding it open. She froze when she saw the gun pointed at her.

“Rose move!” Fish shouted, pinning Elaine’s arm to the ground and grabbing at the gun. Elaine shoved her arm free and fired off a shot at Rose. The bullet skittered across the marble tile but Rose had leapt out of the way just in time. Fish, grappling swiftly, tried to force the gun up and away from the doorway, but Elaine changed direction, yanking the gun towards her own head. She broke her arm free of his grip, and viciously cracked him on the side of the face with the gun.

Stunned, Fish fell back and then crawled forwards, disoriented, his face bleeding. But she shoved him aside and got to her feet first, her long black coat whipping around her, two hands on the gun.

“Freeze!” shouted a deep and terrifying voice, and Bear caught a glimpse of Hunter running up the front steps, grabbing Rose and sweeping them both behind the door jamb just as a jumpy Elaine fired another clip at their shadows. Fish tried to grab the gun muzzle, burned his hand on the hot barrel, and released it with a yelp. It was happening too fast. She fumbled with the gun, then leveled it at Fish’s head, getting her hand on the trigger...

Bear leapt down the stairs, seizing her from behind and lunging for the gun. He narrowly missed Elaine’s wrist as she swung her right hand up over her head to point the gun over her shoulder.

She was trying to shoot him over her back. Quickly he grabbed her waist and the wrist of her gun hand. She fired straight past his face, deafening him. He drove all the force of his arm against her weapon hand, forcing the gun down as she writhed in his grip and shot wildly. Glass shattered and a wild spider web of cracks spread across the mirror’s shining surface as a bullet went through.

He was trying to pry her fingers off the handle with one hand. “Elaine, drop the gun!” he grunted in her ear. “Drop it!” But she screamed in answer and suddenly kicked her heel against his left shin, making him stumble. They began to fall, but with vehement tenacity, he didn’t let go of her gun hand. She fired again as they fell through the mirror.  And again as they hit the floor amidst a shower of broken glass. The last shot sounded strangely muffled.

Silence.

In that catastrophe of shattered glass, he didn’t dare to move, more for fear of cutting himself than of gunfire, deafened by the ringing in his ears, completely tense, waiting for Elaine’s next move. The smell of blood crept across his nostrils. His left shoulder throbbed and his vision swirled, but he couldn’t move. The fall had been hard.

He became aware that Hunter was bending over him warily. He saw the big man step on the gun and slide it away from Elaine’s grasp. She did not resist. He realized that her body had become a dead weight.

Tears sprung to his eyes.

Hunter picked up the gun. He was silent for a moment, then his impassive eyes traveled to Bear.

“You okay?” his lips said.

Bear made out what he was saying, and nodded. His ears were still humming loudly. “How’s my dad?” he managed to ask, but he couldn’t hear his own voice.

Hunter nodded, and spoke again, inaudibly, and, gently pushing the body away, gave Bear a hand up.

Bear staggered to his feet, brushing glass shards away from his clothes and cutting himself in the process. His hands were shaking, and he decided to leave the rest of the glass until he had regained control. Sweeping his eyes around the room, he saw Fish...Rose in the doorway...his father on the steps...all looking at him, and all breathing hard.

His hearing was returning. He saw Hunter punching numbers in his cell phone. Calling the police.

“Are you all right?” his brother asked, and Bear could make out his voice, and nodded.

“When did you get here?” he managed to ask Fish.

“About forty-five minutes ago. But we couldn’t get in until Elaine drove up and...” Fish halted as Bear suddenly pivoted and ran out the door and down the steps.

There was a car parked at the curb, a white car. He pulled open the door on the passenger side. A black blanket lay crumpled in the front seat. He yanked it out. The seat was empty.

She could have put Blanche in the front seat, and covered her with the blanket...

Slamming the door, he ran to the front of the car and forced himself to get down on his hands and knees and look at the bumper and front tires. They looked smooth and black. He felt them, trying to see what was on them with only the help of a streetlight. They were dry.

He sensed Fish and Rose coming out. There was a heavy tread beside him, and Hunter stood by him.

“She had taken Blanche with her,” Bear made himself say. “She was unconscious. Elaine said she would dump her body on the parkway and run over it...”

Fish and Rose were silent. Hunter squatted down beside him, pulled out a flashlight, and checked the car.

“It doesn’t look to me like she ran over anyone with this car tonight,” he said.

Bear prayed a silent prayer of thanks and nodded.
But someone else might have run over her by accident
, he told himself.

A patrol car pulled to the curb just as they were standing up, and Hunter took charge of the situation. He talked to the first policeman, who radioed a message immediately for another car to go and look for a body on the parkway. Hunter then led the policeman inside while a second policeman blocked off the area with yellow tape, and an ambulance pulled up behind the police car.

The police took Bear’s personal information and a brief statement from him, as well as a gunpowder analysis test to verify who had fired the gun, before sending him off with another policeman to the parkway.

His bleeding hands still shaking, Bear thrust his head out the window as they slowly crept up the ramp, looking for any sign of her, anything—

Up and down the parkway and the surrounding streets, around and around the ramps they went in the night, until Bear was forced to admit the reality.

There was no sign of Blanche. She had vanished again.

Bear was persuaded to go to the hospital to have his cuts treated. While he was waiting for the emergency room doctor, Fish and Rose, who had already been checked over and treated for minor injuries, sat with him. There was still no word about Blanche.

Elaine had been pronounced dead from a self-inflicted wound upon arrival to the hospital. Her husband was in a stable condition, overall, and was being kept overnight for observation.

Breaking a silence of some duration, Bear said, “Fish, thanks again.” His brother was still holding an ice pack to his bruised and cut face. “I’m always indebted to you somehow, tonight being no exception.”

“Thank Rose,” Fish said, unexpectedly.

Rose, surprised, looked up from where she sat on an end table next to Bear. For a moment she looked shocked and disbelieving, not accepting that Fish would be joking about something this significant and recent.

But Fish’s face was serious. “I wouldn’t have been there, Bear, if Rose hadn’t raced up those steps right after Elaine and grabbed the door before it swung shut behind her. We would have been locked out again, and you and Dad probably would have been dead in that hallway.”

He stood up, put down the ice pack, and extended a hand to Rose. “I admit it, I was slow to react. You made up for my deficiency. I am sincerely grateful.”

She tentatively gave him her hand, and unexpectedly he raised it to his lips and kissed it, then patted it and put it down.

“And thank God for that man, Hunter, getting in when he did. I got his number from the DEA earlier today, and called him as soon as Rose told me where you had gone.” Fish replaced his cold pack and turned to Bear again. “He’s volunteered to testify on our behalf. Charles told me that he could become the pivotal witness.”

“Is that right?” Bear wished for a moment that Fish would see it too, but his brother was facing the other way, seemingly more interested in telling Bear about federal laws concerning agents testifying in court. Rose was transfigured in wonder, holding the hand that Fish had kissed with astonishment. She actually did not speak a single word for several minutes.       

Chapter Twenty-Four

She was floating in the darkness, alternately sinking and rising.

Sometimes she drifted to the edges of consciousness and caught snippets of things—a siren, people jabbering, someone sobbing. She thought she recognized a child’s voice. Marisol’s little girl.

“What happened to you, Princess? What happened to you?”

She fled the child’s voice, down the labyrinthine ways back into the suffocating blackness, for fear the child’s words would distort into more hallucinations. A scream, a scream that was never going to be heard.

And down, down, into darkness. She hung there for a while, a shy fish terrified of shadows, of the light that gave things form. But she was still breathing, breathing, and her own oxygen drove her back up towards the surface—too fast, too fast.

And then she was halted, gripped by an iron weight freezing her limbs, and something in the darkness laughed maliciously at her. She had not been able to get away.

Why?
She asked wearily.
If you knew what was going to happen, God, why didn’t you stop this? If he wasn’t going to come in time, why did you let me trust him?

There was nothing but the emptiness of echoes and her own pointless breathing. And the creeping, paralyzing doubt that had been hovering in the corners of her mind came flying out, screaming.

See? There’s no one here. This is the darkness. This is the other side, where God is supposed to be. And it’s empty.

Empty.

Except for the laughter in the darkness. Elaine’s laughter. The delight of destruction.

So there was no point to anything. No platonic ideals, dazzling in the darkness. Just empty shells of people, randomly endowed with strength and weakness. Her sickness had labeled her from birth as one of the weak, which would never be fit to survive anyone’s evolutionary scheme.

Only the good die young. Because the good are weak.
She huddled in the murky pool and fought desperately against the paralyzing strength of the idea.