Black as Night: A Fairy Tale Retold (5 page)

Where was Blanche?

Bear sat by the window in his hotel room and stared out unseeing at the dark, empty cobblestone streets of the Piazza Navona, pocked with pools of streetlight. The book of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry he had been reading to distract himself had fallen to the floor, its lyrics having turned traitor on him. Once again he picked up the phone and dialed.

It was past midnight in Rome, but still daylight in New York City. Maybe Blanche was away for the weekend. Maybe the New York phone service was down. Maybe she was just at her summer job. But the feeling that something was wrong persisted.

He paused, and dialed her home phone again slowly, letting it ring on till the answering machine picked up the call. She still wasn’t there.

Now he leaned back heavily in the upholstered chair, his six-foot broad-shouldered frame creaking the hotel furniture. He ran his large hands in his longish, and now thoroughly rumpled, black hair, and stared at the floor, unseeing.

He must have drifted off to sleep, because he was startled awake some hours later by his brother shaking him.

 “I know—I need to go to bed,” Bear murmured, half-asleep.

“Go to bed if you want,” Fish said. “But it’s morning now.”

Startled, Bear looked around the hotel room, blinking at the morning sun coming through the windows. Rubbing his sore neck, he looked around the sitting area of their hotel suite.

“Rough night?” Fish said, half-smiling. He was dressed in a paisley lounging robe that, for some reason or other, always made Bear think that his brother was dressed up as Sherlock Holmes. Fish, as his brother was nicknamed (his real name was Benedict), certainly had that air of intellectual detachment, and like a fish, he was swift and hard to pin down. Younger by a year, he was in many ways a shorter, thinner, lighter-haired shadow of Bear, despite his sharper, more uneven features.

“Did anyone call?” Bear asked, trying to stretch the criks out of his spine.

“You were the one guarding the phone,” his brother remarked, “But no. I take it you haven’t gotten a hold of Blanche.”

Bear shook his head, and Fish sank into the chair opposite thoughtfully. “Very strange,” he said. “Not at all like her. Is there any chance she wouldn’t be returning your calls for some reason?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“I thought you said you two had a ‘sort-of fight’ last time you talked.”

“It wasn’t really a fight,” Bear responded, defensive.

“I was quoting your exact words,” Fish said blandly.

“It was really more of an intense conversation,” Bear explained, toying with Blanche’s card, which he had been using as a bookmark in his poetry book.

“Your story is changing,” Fish remarked, picking up the book from the floor and turning the pages. “Who is this? Oh, Rossetti. Pre-Raphaelite poets again. You must be depressed. I’m sticking with your first explanation.”

“I just don’t know what to do,” Bear said. “In a more specific sense than usual. Is this an emergency situation or not?”

“Why not call Mrs. Brier and check with her?”

“I already thought of that, but I have no idea where she and Rose are on vacation. I know they’re in California, but I don’t know what city. Now that I think of it, Blanche said they were going to be traveling around to different parts of the state, visiting different relatives.”

“Call information and look for any Briers in California,” Fish suggested.

Bear shook his head. “They’re her mom’s relatives,” he said. “And I have no idea what Jean Brier’s maiden name was.”

“Well, that’s bad luck,” Fish remarked. “But I suppose if she’s really missing, the Briers will probably notice it before you do and call you first.”

“I don’t want to risk that.” Bear bit the edge of the card in his hand. “Fish, if I can’t get a hold of her by morning—I think I should go back.”

“Look, if you’re that worried, call the police and see if they can check the house.”

“Suppose they don’t find anything there?”

“Then, obviously, we can all start worrying,” Fish said calmly, ringing the bell for breakfast.

Groaning, Bear got up and went to his room to dress.

Reflections Banquet Hall
, he thought as he fumbled with the buttons on his shirt. He had taken her there once for dinner, and she had ended up getting a summer job as a receptionist in the large restaurant/banquet hall on Long Island. Maybe they would have someone there who would answer the phone even at two in the morning. New York parties could run late.
I’ll call and find out if she had been at work this weekend, and if she’s scheduled to work on Monday morning,
he thought.
Maybe she’s even at work right now, still cleaning up after some party.

Hurriedly he called information in the States, got the number for Reflections Restaurant and Banquet Hall, and was connected.

“Reflections.” A deep woman’s voice answered, sounding a tinge irate.

“Hi. I’m trying to get in touch with Blanche Brier, who works there, and I was wondering if you could tell me...”

The woman’s voice came back after the transatlantic pause. “I’m sorry, but she doesn’t work here any more.”

“Excuse me?”

Pause. “She doesn’t work here.”

He fumbled for words. “She told me she was the receptionist there...”

“Yes, she was. But she doesn’t work here any more.”

“When did that happen? I mean, when did she stop working there?” his own voice had a slightly ghostly echo.

“I don’t know.”

“Could you check the schedule for me?” he asked, tinged with impatience.

“She’s not on the schedule.”

His words overlapped with hers. “When was the last time she worked?”

Pause. “I can ask someone.”

“Yes, that would be great.”

The phone was set down and the fuzz of static buzzed and rumbled in Bear’s ear, like the sound of some electronic ocean.

A more cheerful voice came on the line. “You’re looking for Blanche?”

“Yes.”

“Hold on and let me see when she’s working next,” the voice said. There was a pause, and the voice returned. “Funny, I don’t see her on the schedule at all for this week. Sorry.”

“Listen,” Bear said. “I know that. They said she doesn’t work there any more.”

“She doesn’t? Oh, that’s real strange.”

“Could you tell me when the last time she worked was?”

“Sure thing. Lemme check.”

Another thump and more static. Then the voice swam back towards him. “I saw her on Friday when I came on to my shift, but she might have done some weekend hours...” another pause. “Yeah, she got off work Saturday at midnight.”

“And she didn’t work Sunday?”

“The schedule goes from Saturday to Saturday, and she’s not on this week’s schedule. You say she’s not working here any more?”

“That’s what I was just told.”

“Well, not everyone here knows what’s going on. Maybe she’s just on vacation this week. It’s August, after all, and it’s been real hot around here.”

“Was she going on vacation?”

“Well, you know, she never mentioned it to me. But I don’t really know for sure. You might want to call back in the morning. The day manager will be in then, and he’ll have the full story for you.”

 “Thanks very much,” Bear said.

“Hey, no problem. Have a good night.”

Bear hung up the phone, his ears ringing.

After the turbulent transatlantic phone trip to past midnight in New York, he paced back to the sitting room and tried to mentally readjust to morning in Italy. Blanche wasn’t working at the banquet hall any more. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t at home. Where was she?

Now, feeling acutely concerned, he phoned the Bronx police department and explained the situation—could they send someone by to check the house? They agreed to send a patrol car over, and he left his number so that they could call him back. Then he hung up the phone.

There was a knock and he opened the door. A hotel worker swept in with a breakfast tray, set it on the coffee table, and exited.

Fish, who had been reading in the chair, set down the poetry book and with mild irritation surveyed the Italian rolls, tea, and fruit. “Continental breakfast—a big name for ‘not much,’” he muttered. “Is there any place around here to order eggs and bacon and pancakes at this hour?”

“I seriously doubt it,” Bear said. He dialed the phone number for the airport and confirmed that there were available flights leaving for New York that afternoon. When he hung up, his brother was dumping several spoonfuls of sugar into his tea with a melancholy expression on his face.

“What’s wrong?” Bear asked.

“I’m getting a feeling of my own. You’re not going to find Blanche this morning, which means that we’ll be flying back to New York this afternoon.”

“Fish, I didn’t ask you to come back with me. You should stay and finish your vacation,” Bear said, surprised.

 “No, no,” Fish said, sounding like a martyr dying of slow suffocation as he spread jam on his roll. “I’ll go with you. I don’t have a girlfriend, but I still get to suffer the effects of having one.”

Bear heaved a sigh. “Fish, I might go back and discover out that everything’s fine—that Blanche just went away to a friend’s house for the weekend or something. This time she just didn’t tell me, that’s all. You might be coming back for nothing.”

“In that case, I’ll just go back to taking my classes,” Fish said wearily. “No, I’m coming. Knowing you, you’ll walk right into some huge mess. And you’ll need me to extricate you from it, again. So you called that place where Blanche works?”

“Yes. They said she wasn’t on the schedule. I think that means she was let go. The girl I talked with sounded surprised herself.”

“The mystery deepens.” Fish tasted his tea and added a few more grains of sugar. “Especially as Blanche is not the type to get fired. She’s quiet, she works hard, most likely shows up five minutes ahead of time every day—no reason to fire someone like that. Yet, apparently, she has been fired. And now she’s missing. Even stranger.” He started sipping his tea and looked at his brother keenly. “I think you’re ready to go home now anyway, aren’t you?”

“I’m still not sure,” Bear confessed. “But I think I should.”

Fish humphed but kept his thoughts to himself.

Once again Bear opened the card and studied her agitated handwriting. Perhaps Blanche had gone away for the weekend, which might be understandable, if she had lost her job.
But why hadn’t she called him if she was in trouble?

He came back to reality and realized Fish was saying again, “Are you going to eat your roll or can I have it?”

“I want it,” Bear answered evenly.

Fish eyed it critically. “I’ll fight you for it.”

“Not a chance,” Bear said, cracking a smile at his lightweight brother.

Fish sighed and reached for the hotel phone. “How do you say, ‘Bring me steak and eggs or I’ll slit your throat’ in Italian?” he asked.

“Look it up in the phrase book,” Bear said absently, and glanced out the window at the sky, whose clouds were streaked like white marble.
I’ve been gone for too long.

Chapter Three

She woke up in a fright when the el train went by, roaring on its elevated tracks like an airborne dragon. And then she remembered where she was. In a ground floor room at the back of St. Catherine’s High School, in what had formerly been a dismal office cubicle—as she had reason to know—but which had now been transformed with pale paint and soap into a room with a distinctly monastic air. There was nothing in the room but a cot and a chair and a small crucifix on the wall. For the first time in a long while, she felt safe.

Breathing deeply, she blinked at the glow of a streetlight coming in through the one window high up in the sturdy thick block wall. It was still night outside, and she could hear the screeching of tires and the thudding of boom boxes. It was perhaps twenty-four hours since her escape.

Eventually the rattle and screech of the metallic dragon passed, vanishing  into the night. The subdued aftermath passed for silence, enough for her to think about sleeping again. At least it was cooler in this basement room.