Bellweather Rhapsody (19 page)

There’s nothing sexier than bunnies.

“What?” Alice asks.

Maybe now is the time. To tell her, to tell Alice about the gay stuff. Maybe it’ll distract her from—all of this.

“Alice, so—”

“What do we
do,
Rabbit? We have to
do
something. No one is doing anything because no one believes she’s dead. They think this is a stupid prank. But it isn’t. She didn’t kill
herself,
she was murdered, Rabbit. We should at least tell someone about the psycho dog lady, tell whoever’s in charge—” She swallows a huge lump of sausage. “Have you seen Wilson anywhere? It’s like she dropped us off and then poof. The lady vanished.”

Now is not the time. “Haven’t seen her,” he says.

“What the hell do you
do
when shit like this happens? Brownies did not prepare me for this. You were a Boy Scout.”

“Cub Scout.”

“Are there merit badges for reporting murders everyone else thinks are pranks? Is there a way to force people to believe you?” Alice braces her arms against the table and goggles at her empty plate. “Where did all my food go?”

“You ate it.”

“Right. So. Jill’s dead and I should probably not be sleeping in the same room, because killer invisible dog lady is going to come back tonight with an ax. Can I stay with you? Who’s your roommate? Will he care?”

Rabbit shrugs. “You can stay with me.”

She exhales slowly and narrows her eyes at him. “You believe me, don’t you?”

Rabbit looks down at his toast.

“Rabbit,” his sister says softly. “Rabbit, please. Why would I lie about this? Why would I lie to
you,
of all people?”

He shakes his head.
Because you’re an actress first and my sister second? Because it kills you when the world isn’t paying attention?

“A murder at Statewide,” Alice says. “Nerdy concert camp full of nerdy musicians and their nerdy teachers—is it so hard to believe none of us are killers? Jill was a star. Jill, out of all of us, was
real,
Rabbit. You honestly think no one here would be jealous or crazy enough to wish she were dead? And that’s not even counting the legitimate suspects. Deranged dog lady. Jill’s own
mother
.” Alice pushes her fingers back through her hair. “You know, that’s the difference between you and me, Rabbit. You believe people are basically good. I know it doesn’t matter whether people are good or bad. It matters what they do, not what they are, and I know people are capable of doing more horrible things than you can imagine.”

She’s scaring him. He has seen his sister under many circumstances, she’s dramatic, melodramatic even, but he has never seen her quite like this. This is manic, desperate, unhinged. He isn’t sure if it makes him believe her story more or less.

“Alice, go to rehearsal.”

She frowns.

“Right.” She pats his hand across the table. “Thanks, Rab. I’m going to go throw up now.”

“Bulimia is so ’87,” Rabbit says automatically. He’s suspected this for a while now, he hates to say, but there it is. Maybe he should just blurt the gay stuff too. Maybe casually blurting bombshells minimized the damage from the blast.

“Oh, I’m not bulimic,” she says with a dismissive wave. “I’m just freaking out. See you later.”

She lied; she is bulimic, a little. Every once in a while, when her stomach felt too tight with food or before a big show, a concert, or an audition, throwing up took off the edge. It left her feeling alert, hungry, controlled, and at the ready. But today, after realizing that just going back to her room to collect her music or her clothes could be dangerous, it does absolutely no good whatsoever.

12

F
ISHER RUNS INTO
Viola Fabian in the Bellweather lobby. Physically runs into her, so that the paper cup of bitter goat piss the hotel is passing off as coffee is crushed against his chest when their bodies collide. He shouts—not only is the coffee toxic, it has been brewed to a temperature barely below scalding—“Gah, bugger!” and spreads his arms wide, flinging drips of molten pain onto the lobby carpet. While he didn’t necessarily mean to direct the epithet at his collider, when he realizes it’s Viola, he doesn’t apologize.

“Hi, love,” he says.

She makes no sound, but her eyes, and her nostrils, could not possibly be wider. A hot dark stain is spreading across the lapels of one of her trademark wool suits, but she makes no attempt to remove her jacket. Perhaps she’s actually drawing power from the searing pain in her chest. No question, she was on her way to disembowel someone. Fisher can’t help smiling. He has never slept with a more evil creature.

And yet, for all he knows of her reputation (scheming, conniving, backstabbing, resolutely amoral), she was never particularly violent in bed. If the rumors were true, and they usually were, she saved all her psychopathic behavior for the wider world of social interaction, manipulating colleagues shamelessly in the pursuit of getting what she wanted.
That
appointment.
His
grant money.
Those
concert tickets.
This
lover.
That
husband. It was as if, by the time she got what she set her eye on (in Fisher’s case, the young Scottish piano prodigy with the tragically mutilated hand), she had no further objective, no further plan, and, again, in Fisher’s case, no further interest. Which is why their brief affair suited them both. Over the course of two years, while he was living in New York, they saw each other at two conferences and four concerts. Every time they fucked. Then they returned to their respective homes.

“I heard you’d be here,” Fisher says to Viola. “Just coming up from breakfast myself. Was late to my own rehearsal yesterday, if you can believe that. Now I’ve got to change my bloody shirt, so I’m going to be late again.”

Viola smoothes her ponytail and tugs her suit coat down.

“Good to see you again, Dr. Brodie. I trust this will be the last rehearsal you’re late for. Conductors are a dime a dozen.”

“Ouch.”

“Sorry, were you expecting a hug and a kiss?”

It’s been a decade and a half since they last saw each other, and the lag is catching up to him. She is every bit as stunning as the first time she caught his eye, during an intermission at Lincoln Center: stark white hair, fine, harsh features, tossing back a glass of red wine. There was something chiseled-in-marble about her, classically unyielding, but Fisher senses a new shadow, a darkness pulled and stretched out of proportion. Viola Fabian has blackened. She is speckled with flecks of rot.

Maybe it’s not Viola who’s changed. Maybe it’s him.

“Have you seen a girl with short dark hair? Name of Alice?” she asks. “I have a message for her. You know I’m running the show now?”

“That’s what I heard. Congratulations.”

She responds by smiling, brilliantly, and Fisher almost forgets the unease crawling up his spine. Her beauty cannot be unseen.

“Say, will you be at the reception tonight?” he says. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

“The drinks are comped,” she says. “But yes. We should catch up. Because we are old friends who used to screw. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“I’m not that old.”
And are we friends?
“Mostly what I’m thinking is—” He pauses, thrown. Was she always like this? “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” she says. “So you haven’t seen an Alice? Last name Hatmaker.”

Fisher has no reason beyond instinct not to tell Viola everything he knows about Hatmakers—for surely Alice must be his valiant bassoonist’s sister or cousin—but he holds his tongue. “No,” he says. “Bad news? I mean, the message. Not that it’s any of my business.”

Viola smiles again. “It really, really isn’t,” she says. She gives his arm a squeeze and says she’ll see him later.

Viola was one of his Unavailables—Fisher’s preferred sort of lover, married, partnered, steadfastly independent, or otherwise engaged—yet she always stood out as something rather special. They met when he was twenty-one and on his own in the great city, though he’d been legally on his own for the past five years. Fisher was born in Edinburgh, but he spent his childhood on airplanes and trains and in hotel rooms. He was a textbook child prodigy. One day at the age of four, he sat down at the family’s upright piano and played along perfectly to a song on the television; by the time he was six, he was performing in pubs and concert halls; by the time he was nine, a year after his beloved Auntie McDunnock died, Fisher had a recording contract and a full slate of concert bookings that left very little time for school or friends, for bicycles or films or birthday cakes, even. His mother and father, who were both semiprofessional musicians (and, until they began managing their son, accountants), had no intention of letting Fisher’s mental and social well-being stand in the way of their good fortune.

The only person he ever felt truly cared for him was his mother’s great-aunt, Clara McDunnock. He loved her more than anyone else on earth, including his parents and his three older sisters, who he thought were all a bit shite. She never asked him to play the piano for her. She never instructed him to do anything other than stand up straight and eat his vegetables, be nice to the cats in the barn and come in before it got full dark. Every summer the Brodies visited her in the country, Fisher’s engagements permitting, and every summer, up to her last, he never left her side.

“Fisher,” she told him on her deathbed, “I’m going to die in just a bit, and when I’m gone I want you to take a little something of mine. But you can’t tell anyone. They’re mine to give as I please, and you’re not to tell a soul, understand?”

He nodded.

“I want you to take them and—” She coughed viciously, and Fisher felt close to death, right up in its face, for the first time in his life. “Take them and keep them safe and get yourself something beautiful. If it’s really beautiful it will probably be useless, not good for anything, but that’s just fine. It doesn’t have to feed anyone or save lives or combat suffering and injustice, it just has to be beautiful. It has to stop your heart. And maybe its useless beauty will inspire you to go out and feed people and save lives and combat suffering. Or not.” She coughed again. “That part’s up to you.”

Fisher was kneeling by her bed with his arms propped on the mattress, and he put his head down between them and burrowed his nose against her side like a dog already grieving for his lost master. He didn’t want her to see him cry.

“Stay with me, Fisher,” his Auntie continued, “and lock the door and don’t let anyone in until you’re sure that I’ve gone up to the Lord. And when you’re sure I’m gone, but before you unlock the door, I want you to take those pliers over there—by the bookshelf, see?—and you’re going to just pinch my teeth and slip them out of my old mouth.”

Fisher raised his head. His Auntie smiled at him, a golden smile, with four golden teeth that she’d had planted in her mouth in the years between the wars. “Your mother,” she went on, “is a loon, who married a loon, who begat three loons and a swan, love. You take what I want to give you, don’t be squeamish now, I won’t feel a thing. You take them and don’t tell a soul, and you get yourself something beautiful.”

Fisher was eight when he watched his Auntie die—peacefully, all things considered—and suddenly much, much older when, as instructed, he knelt in the bed beside her corpse and gently pulled her golden teeth from her mouth. He unlocked the door and ran to his parents’ bedroom, finally allowing himself to cry, shouting that she was dead, she was dead, and when later his parents asked what the hell happened to her teeth, he could turn out his empty pockets and not lie when he said maybe they’d been swallowed. He just didn’t specify down whose throat.

Another eight years would pass before Fisher knew freedom, and it was a terrible kind of freedom, the kind you arrive at because you’ve been left with no other options. He lost three fingers from his right hand. Ha: “lost” is the wrong word. He tore three fingers from his right hand, tore his own future from the rest of his life, while he was on tour in Germany. The German doctors, unable to reattach his middle and ring fingers, thought they could at least save his mangled pinkie. But Fisher, white with shock and blood loss and the realization that his hand was useless—for turning doorknobs, let alone playing the piano—told them to chop it off.

When his parents protested, he pointed out that he was sixteen, the legal age of consent in the marvelous country of Scotland, and would thereafter be taking complete financial control of his destiny. He had his newly autonomous fingers bronzed and delivered to them, tucked in a lovely potted fern. The hand that remained consisted of right index finger and thumb and three rounded stumps he was astonished to discover he could still wiggle. Fisher felt his phantom fingers for weeks, still felt them when he woke some mornings, muzzy from dreams of playing, playing, always playing the piano.

When he held his hand down to his side, it looked like a perpetually cocked finger gun. A child had brought this to his attention one day when Fisher was visiting London, purely as a tourist, something he’d never had the luxury of doing before the accident. He was riding the tube to the British Museum, hoping centuries of archeological plunder would distract him from his own modern troubles, when a little boy sitting across the aisle brought his hands together, pointed with both index fingers, and unleashed a hand howitzer. Fisher frowned at his destroyed hand and leveled it directly between the child’s eyes. “Bang,” he said, “you’re dead,” and got off at the next station, even though he was nowhere near the museum.

After that he moved to New York, where he studied music composition and conducting. Where he first met Viola Fabian. It’s bizarre to see her here at the Bellweather, now, the morning after meeting another strange, intriguing Unavailable—as he’s quite certain his late-night red-headed visitor will become. Maybe he’s passed on. Maybe the Bellweather is some purgatorial soap opera where he can’t help but stumble over lovers old and new alike. He doesn’t quite feel up to dealing with both.

Fisher is so unsettled by the encounter with Viola that he’s standing at the conductor’s podium rolling up his sleeves before he remembers his shirt front is drenched with coffee. It’s starting to cool. He smells slightly burnt. He’s of no mind to go back to his room to change, now that he’s here and his musical minions are gathering. He’s pleased to see that most of them are giving him odd looks. Unpacking their music hesitantly. He’s made them wary, on guard. He’s woken them up.