Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet

  “My stepfamily gets it all.”

  That’s what I figured.

  8

  Insanity does NOT run in my family.

  It strolls through, takes its time,

  and gets to know everyone personally.

  —T-SHIRT

  I tucked Harper in, harassed Pari and Tre a bit, then headed home. The good news was that it’d stopped raining again. The bad news was that my hair was still wet underneath but the top layers were dry and it created that frizzy, homeless look I was so not fond of. I totally needed a better conditioner.

  All the parking spots in front of my building were taken, so I had to park in the back of Dad’s bar. When I grabbed Margaret and climbed out of Misery, I realized the SUV in my spot belonged to my uncle Bob. He would pay and pay dearly. With his life. Or a twenty. Depending on my mood.

  I took the stairs to my floor and heard hammering coming from the end unit when I got there. I looked at it longingly. Lovingly. It had the coolest kitchen I’d ever seen. Mine had a kitchen, but comparing the two would be like comparing the Mona Lisa to a drawing I once did of a girl named Mona Salas. Her head kept ending up on her left shoulder and she had really big boobs. We were in kindergarten. Though I liked to think of that drawing as some form of extrasensory perception, because when Mona got boobs, she got boobs to spare. Clearly that drawing was irrefutable proof that I could see into the future.

  “Where have you been?”

  I stepped into my apartment and met Uncle Bob’s glare with one of my own. “Out trying to pass myself off as a movie producer to get hot guys to sleep with me. Where have you been?”

  Uncle Bob ignored my perfectly worded question and handed me a file. “Here’s what I’ve got on the arsonist. He sticks to old buildings and houses, but that probably won’t last.”

  Without missing the look of concern that flashed across his face when he saw Margaret in my arms, I placed her along with my bag on the breakfast bar and took the file. “I need to do a little research,” I said, heading for the bathroom and my toothbrush while reading. “I know the basic psychological profile of the everyday arsonist, but nothing that would impress anyone of import. And now that he’s killed someone—”

  “He didn’t,” he said, interrupting. “The homeless woman was already dead when the building went up. From what the ME could tell, she probably died of pneumonia about two days earlier.”

  “Oh, but you’re still on the case?” I asked, studying the guy’s profile while squeezing toothpaste onto the bristles.

  “Decided to stick around, give a hand. And you went out,” he said, his tone pleased.

  I said through the bubbles of toothpaste, “Had to. I got a case.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  After rinsing, I headed back that way, still looking over the file. “That’s a negatory. But I’d like to keep that option open. You know, if I get in trouble.”

  “So, you’ll be telling me all about it by tomorrow afternoon. Have you talked to your dad?”

  “Negatory times two. This guy seems to be very precise in what he’s burning down. I’m assuming there’s no insurance angle?”

  “Not a single one. Different owners. Different insurance companies. We can’t find a single thread connecting them.”

  “Hey,” I said, thinking about the news show I’d seen. “Do you guys have any idea who those Gentlemen Thieves are? Those bank robbers?”

  He perked up, clearly interested. “No, do you?”

  “Darn. Not really. They just look familiar.” I glanced toward the ceiling in thought. “Like their shape. I could swear I’ve seen them somewhere.”

  The door opened, and Cookie waltzed in with her twelve-year-old daughter, Amber, in tow.

  “Well, if you figure it out, give me a call, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  Cookie offered an absent wave to Ubie, barely taking note of him. But he noticed her. Both his pulse and his interest rose. So either he was still pining over Cookie or he was having a heart attack. I voted for pining.

  “Hey, Robert,” she said, dumping an armful of groceries on my counter. “I’m going to try out some of these appliances before we send them back. Who knows, I may wonder where they’ve been all my life.”

  “What is all this anyway?” he asked, indicating the boxes with a nod of his head.

  Amber spoke up then. “Hey, Uncle Bob.” She gave him a quick hug. “This is Charley’s attempt to cope with her feelings of insecurity and helplessness. In a sad effort to gain control over her life again, she has turned to hoarding.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” I said, offering Cookie my best glower, “I’m not a hoarder.”

  “Don’t look at me.” She pointed to the fruitcake of her loins.

  “We watched a documentary at school,” Amber said. “I learned a lot.”

  “Obviously, but for your information, I am not attempting to hoard control over my sad … helplessness.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Her eyes narrowed into a challenge if I’d ever seen one.

  “Yeah,” I said, following suit, trying not to grin.

  “Then why do you wear that gun everywhere you go?”

  “Why does everyone have to give Margaret a hard time?”

  She raised one brow. “You’ve never carried one before.”

  “I’ve never been tortured within an inch of my life before, either.”

  “My point exactly,” she said, but her face softened, and I realized I shouldn’t have brought that up. Apparently my being tortured not fifty feet from her had caused her no small amount of distress. Or nightmares. “And I’m sorry for making it so rudely,” she continued.

  Cookie put a hand on her shoulder.

  “No,” I said, stepping forward and taking her lovely chin into my hand. “I’m sorry that happened, Amber. And I’m very sorry you were so close when it did.”

  I’d never told her that the man who attacked me had been in the room with her for God only knew how long before I showed up. I’d never even told Cookie, and I never kept secrets from her. But I had no idea how she would take it, knowing that the wreckage from my life had spilled over into hers. Had almost gotten her daughter—and herself, for that matter—killed. I just didn’t know how to tell her.

  “Well, I wish I’d been closer,” she said, a vehemence thickening her voice. “I would’ve killed him for you, Charley.”

  I pulled her into a hug, her graceful body more bone than flesh. “I know you would’ve. Of that, I have no doubt.”

  “Am I interrupting?”

  I looked past Amber as my sister, Gemma, walked in. She had long blond hair and big blue eyes, which was a bitch growing up with, getting asked questions like, “Why aren’t you pretty like your sister?” Not that I was bitter.

  Gemma and I weren’t super-close growing up. Her insistence that our stepmother was not an alien monster sent from a tiny settlement somewhere on the seventh ring of Saturn had tainted any rapport we might have had, sibling or otherwise. But now that she was a psychiatrist, we could talk about the fact that our stepmother was an alien monster sent from a tiny settlement somewhere on the seventh ring of Saturn like two grown adults. Though she still didn’t believe me.

  Amber turned. “Hi, Gemma,” she said before heading to my computer. Or trying to head to my computer. “Can I update my status before I do my homework, Charley?” She craned her neck so she could see over the wall of boxes. Hopefully she’d find the computer. I hadn’t seen it in weeks, but surely it was still where I’d left it.

  “Sure. What are you going to say?”

  “I’m going to tell everyone Mom had the talk with me.” She air-quoted the pertinent information.

  I snorted and regarded Cookie with a questioning brow. “The one about the birds and the bees?”

  “Oh, no, not that one,” Amber said. “We had that one ages ago.” As tall as she was, I still lost her when she entered the forest of square trees. But her voice was coming through the boxes
loud and clear. “The one about how guys are really aliens sent to Earth to harvest the intelligence from young, pliant brains like mine. Apparently, I won’t be completely safe from their techniques until I’m thirty-seven and a half.”

  Cookie shrugged a brow.

  “She’s right,” Uncle Bob said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “I’m actually from Pluto.”

  Gemma put her bag down and came over for a hug, a tradition we’d only recently started partaking in. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks. After the torture thing, she was coming over every day. But between work and her pretending she had a social life, her visits had dwindled to a slow trickle.

  “I see you took our last talk to heart.” She offered me her stern face, the one that used to make me giggle. Now it just made me appreciate her lopsided sense of reality. Like I took anything she said to heart. We’d been related way too long for that. “Do you think you have enough small kitchen appliances?”

  “We’re working on that,” Cookie said as Uncle Bob gave Gemma one of his big bear hugs.

  “Yes, we are,” he concurred.

  “Well, good,” Gemma said, stepping into the kitchen to see what Cookie was up to. “I just came to check on things, see how you were doing.”

  “Okay, well, thanks.”

  “How are you sleeping?”

  “Alone, sadly.”

  “No, I meant are you sleeping?”

  I figured I could tell her about how I roam my apartment all night like a paranoid drug addict, checking and rechecking the locks, making sure the windows were shut and the door was soundly bolted. I could explain how I would then go to bed only to lie there conjuring images of burglars and serial killers with every creak and groan the old building had to offer. But then she’d only insist on medicating me. A prospect I refused to consider.

  “Of course I’m sleeping. What else would I be doing at night?”

  “Not sleeping.” She appraised me with a knowing gaze, probing, measuring my reaction. Freaking psychiatrists.

  I let a carefree smile part my lips and said, “I’m sleeping just fine.”

  “Good. Because you look a little sleep deprived.”

  “Is that your years of training talking?”

  “No, that’s the dark circles under your eyes talking.”

  “I’m not sleep deprived.”

  “Wonderful. I’m glad.”

  She wasn’t glad. I could feel suspicion on her every suspicious breath.

  So, Cookie was here to check out my new appliances that I would never use. Amber was here to use my computer, of which they had two in their apartment across the hall. Uncle Bob came all this way just to give me a file. And Gemma came over to check on me. I hadn’t had this much company since I had my apartment-warming party and invited the UNM Lobo football team. Only about twelve of those guys would actually fit inside, so the party spilled out into the hall. Mrs. Allen, the elderly woman in apartment 2C, has never stopped thanking me. And every time she did, her voice got this husky tone to it and she would wriggle her brows. I always wondered just what happened that night to make her so appreciative. Maybe she got a little on the side. Or copped a few feels. Good for her either way.

  But with this many people in my apartment, and with all of us surrounded by a jungle of boxes, I was beginning to feel claustrophobic. And wary. Especially when Cookie kept throwing secretive glances at Ubie. I should have known she was too dismissive of him when she came in. She usually grinned like a schoolgirl at a boy band concert. They were totally up to something.

  I faced my well-meaning but garishly obnoxious group of friends and/or family members, trying to decide, if this were a video game and they’d all been turned into zombies, which one I’d take out first. “Okay, what’s going on?”

  “What?” Gemma asked, her expression the picture of innocence.

  Her.

  Uncle Bob rubbed his five o’clock shadow. Amber peeked over a stack of boxes, her huge blue eyes watching warily from afar. Or, well, a few feet away. Cookie was looking at me from behind a set of instructions for the electric pressure cooker, fooling absolutely no one. Unless she could read instructions in French. And upside down. And Gemma propped onto a barstool to examine her nails.

  “We’ve been worried about you,” Uncle Bob said, shrugging one shoulder.

  Gemma nodded. “Right, so we thought we’d come over and make sure everything was okay.”

  “All of you?” I asked.

  She nodded again, a little too enthusiastically.

  My brows slid together, and I regarded Uncle Bob, my expression a mask of bitter disappointment, knowing he’d cave before anyone else, the old softy.

  He held up a hand. “Now, Charley, you have to admit, your behavior has been a little erratic lately.”

  I crossed my arms. “When is my behavior not erratic?”

  “She has a point,” he said to Gemma.

  “No,” she replied, mimicking me by crossing her arms as well, “she doesn’t.”

  I sighed in utter annoyance and strode around the breakfast bar to get to Mr. Coffee.

  “Did the stain come out?”

  “What stain?” I asked, pouring a cup of Heaven on Earth.

  She pointed to a section of my living room I referred to as Area 51, where a huge pile of boxes cleverly disguised as a mountain sat. It served a purpose: to conceal that area of the room. That particular section. That black hole of turmoil and disorder. I’d shoved box after box over it as they came in so I didn’t have to look at it, so I didn’t accidently get sucked in by the gravitational force of millions of solar masses. I knew how crazy it sounded, but burying the place where I was once cut to pieces, shoving it under a mountain of shiny new products, seemed like a good idea at the time.

  I figured I could call it a monument. No one ever questioned art.

  Gemma’s expression grew sympathetic. “The stain. Did it ever come out?”

  Boy, she wasn’t pulling any punches this trip. All the times she’d come over, she never talked about that spot. That stain. The one where my blood and urine had spilled over the sides of the chair as Earl Walker sliced into me with the confidence and precision of a surgeon.

  “Intervention time, huh?” I asked, chafing under her scrutiny.

  “No,” she said, rushing to placate me. “No, Charley. I’m not trying to control you or take away even an ounce of your autonomy. I just want to try to get you to see what you are doing and why.”

  “I know why,” I said, my tone even, my voice dry. “I was there.”

  “Okay. But do you understand what you are doing?” She looked around, indicating the stacks and stacks of boxes.

  I drew in a deep ration of air, letting my irritation slide through unheeded, then took my cup and headed for my bedroom, the only safe haven I had left at this point. “You could take every single thing out of this room right now, and I would be fine with it.” I waved my hand in the air. “Do you understand that? Peachy as a Georgia plantation.”

  “Do you mind if I test that theory?” she asked.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  As I continued to my room, she walked toward Area 51. I paused and watched as she took a box down and handed it to Uncle Bob. He stacked it on top of the wall Cookie had been working on earlier. And the protective coating around my shell cracked. Just barely. Just enough to cause a quake at the very base of my being.

  I knew exactly what was underneath those boxes. If she took away many more of them, the chair I’d been bound to would show through. The bloodstain in the carpet would reappear. The truth would scream in my face. I felt the sting of metal sliding through layers of skin and flesh. Nicking tendons. Severing nerves. Welding my teeth together to keep from crying out.

  “Charley?”

  Uncle Bob said my name, and I realized I’d been standing there, staring at the mountain of boxes for some time. I looked back embarrassed as everyone waited to see what I would do. The pity in their eyes was almost too much.


  “You know,” Cookie said, coming around the breakfast bar, “you are so strong and so powerful, sometimes we forget—” She looked back at Amber, not wanting to give too much away, then she continued, her voice softer. “—sometimes we forget that you’re only human.”

  “I won’t ask you to take a box away until you’re ready, Charley,” Gemma said, stepping closer. “But we’ll take one box away from that spot every day until that time comes.”

  It was so odd. I’d never been afraid of a chair before—or a stain in the carpet, for that matter—but inanimate objects seemed to take on a life of their own lately. They were beasts, their breaths echoing around me, their eyes watching my every move, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. To cut into me again.

  When Gemma spoke this time, her tone was so gentle, so unassuming, I had a hard time holding up my wall. “But only if this is okay with you. Only if you’re comfortable.”

  “And if I’m not?”

  I wondered if it was wrong of me not to want to deal with anything beyond lethargy at that moment in time. I’d just been robbed blind by a parking attendant, accosted by a demon, manhandled by the son of Satan, and withheld vital information by a group of nuns. I didn’t know how much more of this I could take.

  She put a hand on my arm. “Then we’ll be here until you are.”

  After offering her an appreciative smile, a horrific thought hit me. “But not, like, literally.”

  An idea sparked in Gemma’s eyes. “Yes,” she said, her lips inching into a sly smile. “Literally. We’re going to move in.”

  “Oh, can we have a slumber party?” Amber asked.

  Gemma beamed at her. “We most definitely can.”

  Shit. This was going to suck. Until I let Gemma fondle my boxes, I’d never get any peace.

  “Fine, play with my boxes if it makes you feel better.”

  “Oh, man,” Amber said. “We never get to have slumber parties.”

  I cracked open another smile until Gemma, on a roll, said, “And I’d like you to do one more thing.”

  “Soak your contacts in lighter fluid?”

  “Now you’re just being hostile. I’d like you to write a letter every day. One a day to whoever comes to mind. It can be a different person every day, or the same person throughout. But I want you to tell that person in the letter how you feel about him or her and something general, like how you’re doing or what you did that day. Okay?”