I think of what Bones told me. I think about what I can’t let go of, how I’m always so afraid, how I’m too scared to get close to someone because I know they’re just going to die on me, how most of the time I feel so lost and alone. I think about how sick I am of the way I’ve lived my life, how I want to change it, but I can’t seem to do it. Not on my own. I think about all of this. I look in the eldest fate’s eyes and I see she understands.
I’m not going to live forever. I know that. I don’t expect that. I don’t even really want it. All I’ve ever wanted is the chance to be normal, to have a piece of what everybody else seems to have: a respite from the hurt and pain. I don’t have to die to find that.
“I could use a friend,” I tell her.
If I Close My Eyes Forever
Beauty exists whether a person has the eye to behold it or not. That principle also applies to ugliness.
—William Arthur Herring
from A Horse of a Different Color
1
There are only a pair of old-fashioned cemeteries left in the Crowsea-Foxville area. All Souls, over in Crowsea, hasn’t been used in fifty years, but it’s under the protection of the Crowsea Heritage Society. Unfortunately, that protection only means that bodies haven’t been moved, mausoleums, crypts, statuary, and other stonework haven’t been torn down to make room for condos. The place is seriously run-down and overgrown, and the only people hanging there are drug dealers.
Foxville Cemetery is still a working graveyard, as witness the fresh grave I’ve just laid flowers on. Neither’s a fun place to be, but then being here isn’t about fun. It’s about closure.
I think the same architect designed both places—someone with a serious jones for New Orleans-style graveyards. Has to be that, because Newford’s certainly not under sea level, so we don’t need the crypts and mausoleums. The closest we get to New Orleans is the seriously watered-down Mardi Gras that’s organized every year by the owners of the Good Serpent Club. The parade they put together never gets to be much more than a big block party, but you can’t fault them for trying. It’s not like we have a French Quarter here, primed and geared to be party central, or the tradition of Mardi Gras. The people who observe Lent in Newford aren’t thinking along the lines of a carnival Fat Tuesday, and to everybody else, it’s just another weekday.
I look down at the bouquet of six red roses lying on the freshly turned earth at my feet, then my gaze rises to the small stone and its incomplete inscription.
ELISE
Born,. . .–Died, July 23, 1994
R.I.P.
No one claimed the body and the police never did identify her beyond what little I had to tell them.
I was working late in my office the first time I met her. No, let’s be honest. I was pushing papers around, killing time—trying to make myself so tired that by the time I did get home, I’d just fall into bed and sleep.
There was nothing left for me at home anymore. Peter took everything when he walked out on me.
What I missed the most was my confidence. My self-esteem.
2
Thursday night.
My business card says: FINDERS, LTD.—IF YOU NEED IT, WE CAN FIND IT. KIRA LEE, PROP., followed by my e-mail address, my phone and fax numbers, and finally my office address. The office is the least important part of the equation—at least insofar as dealing with clients. It’s basically a tiny hole-in-the-wall of a room in the old Sovereign Building on Flood Street that barely manages to hold a desk, swivel chair, and file cabinet, with another chair parked across the desk for a visitor. A computer takes up most of the desktop—the tower sits on the floor beside the desk while my printer and fax machine are on a table over by the window. There’s also a phone, stacks of papers and files, and, inevitably, a cup of coffee in some stage of depletion and usually cold.
I don’t worry about clients coming by the office. With the kind of work I do, they don’t have to. I get my contracts by phone or messenger; I get paid when I deliver the goods. It’s a simple system and helps me keep my overhead low because usually by the time a client contacts me, all they’re interested in is how fast can I get the job done, not how pretty my workspace is.
That night I’m sitting behind the desk, feet propped up on a corner while I flip through a fashion magazine. The window behind me’s tuned to the usual dull channel: a nighttime view of an inner-city block, shops on the ground floor, apartments above them. The most predominant piece of color is a neon sign that just says BAR. Looking at all the models preening on the glossy pages propped up on my legs, I’m thinking that maybe what I need is a makeover. My idea of work clothing is comfort: jeans and hightops, a T-shirt with a lightweight shirt overtop, blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. About the only thing I have in common with these models is my height.
Of course a makeover means maintenance and I don’t know if I have the patience for it. Shower, brush my hair, dab on some lipstick. Anything more and I’ll be running even later than I usually am in the mornings. Then she comes walking in, drop-dead gorgeous like she stepped out of the magazine I’m holding, and I think, why even try?
Dark hair cut stylishly short, eyes darker still. The makeup’s perfectly understated. The clothes, too. Custom fit, snug black dress and heels, clasp purse, and tailored silk jacket, also black. Her only jewelry is a short string of pearls.
“I need you to find someone for me,” she says.
“That’s not exactly my line of work, Ms . . . ?”
She lets my question hang there as she sits down across the desk from me, tugs her skirt down.
“It’s extremely urgent,” she says.
I have to smile. “It’s always urgent, but I still can’t help you. I don’t do people—only things.”
“I don’t understand. Your card says . . .”
Well-manicured fingers take my business card from her purse and place it on the desk between us.
“I’m sorry if it’s misled you,” I tell her. “It just means that I find objects.” She looks confused, so I go on to explain. “You know, like tickets to Cats for a visiting businessman. Props for a theater company or a film crew. Maybe some long out-of-print book. The kinds of things that people could find on their own if they had the time or the inclination. Instead they’ve got money and I do the legwork for them.”
Now she takes a package of cigarettes from her purse.
“But it is an object I need you to find for me,” she says.
It’s my turn to look confused. “You started off saying you wanted me to find someone . . . .”
“I do. She stole my heart and I want it back.”
The woman lights her cigarette and places the package and matches on the edge of the desk. I turn in my chair to look out the window. The same channel is still playing out there.
Well, this was a first. No one’s ever contracted me to find a broken heart before. I want to send her right back out the door, except I start thinking about Peter, about how I felt when he walked out and took my heart away with him. So it was a woman who took hers instead of a man. Big deal. It had to hurt the same.
I turn back to look at her. “I have to level with you. I’m not really sure I can be of much help. What you really want is a private detective.”
“I tried a few of them, but none of them would help me. The last one gave me your card.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Can you remember his name?”
“A Peter Cross of the Vax Agency. He said it was just the odd sort of thing that would appeal to you.”
Great. First he dumps me—“You’re too intense, Kira,”—and now he’s sending crumbs of work my way. Like I can’t find work on my own. Though I’m not saying business has been good lately . . . .
I realize I’m frowning, but I can’t seem to stop myself. Instead I reach for the woman’s cigarette package.
“Do you mind?” I ask.
“Not at all.”
“Thanks.”
She gives me enough time to pu
t a cigarette in my mouth.
“Will you help me?” she asks.
I pause with a lit match in my hand. “You know you can’t ever get something like that back. When someone wants to walk out of your life, you can’t force them to stay.”
I’m thinking as I light the cigarette, trust me on this. I know. But I don’t say it aloud.
She shakes her head. “Oh, no. You’ve misunderstood me. It’s true we had a relationship, and it’s true she left me, but I’m not looking to get her back. I just want my heart back. It’s a pendant. She took it with her when she left.”
“This is still a job for a private detective,” I tell her. “Or maybe even the police, if you can prove ownership of the stolen property.”
“It’s not that simple.”
It never is, is it?
I prop my elbow up on the desk, cup my chin with my hand. The cigarette smolders between the fingers of my free hand. It doesn’t taste nearly as good as I was hoping it would.
“So tell me about it,” I say.
“The heart was a gift to me from Faerie,” she says.
This is getting kinkier by the minute. “So you’re into gay, or I guess, bisexual guys, too?”
“Not at all.”
“Hey, I don’t have a problem with it,” I tell her. “Live and let live, I say.”
“When I say Faerie,” she says, “I mean the Otherworld. I did a favor once for a prince of the realm and he gave me the pendant in gratitude. It allows one the gift of second sight. Of piercing the barriers between what we believe we see and what is actually there.”
Scratch the kinky, I think. This woman belongs in a padded cell at the Zeb. Except she’s so earnest. I can’t help but lean forward as she talks, knowing it’s all hogwash, but wanting it to be real. I mean, how many of us didn’t go through a rainbow-and-unicorn phase when we were eleven or twelve?
So I let her ramble on about gifts from the faerie folk and how they don’t work for everybody, but then what does? How her particular pendant not only gives its bearer this second sight, but also protects her from some of the, shall we say, less friendly denizens of the Otherworld. The friendlies pretty much ignore you, but the others . . .
See, the way she tells it, once you get their attention, once they know you can see them, you’ve got to have protection or your ass is grass. Sounds like life on the street to me, business as usual, except she’s describing creatures with knives for fingers and worse.
I feel like I’m trapped in a video edition of The Weekend Sun, directed by Roger Corman—somewhere between “Nun Gives Birth to Pig Twins” and the Elvis Spotter page—so when I find myself agreeing to help her track down her friend and the pendant, I startle myself.
I mean, this really isn’t my line of work. I’m strictly an over-the-phone girl. I do research, go electronic-tripping through the on-line services. Sometimes I have to leave the office to work the stacks at the Newford Library or something similar. I wouldn’t know where to begin to find a missing person except from what I’ve seen in the movies.
My nameless client isn’t stumped. She tells me to hit the girl bars on Gracie Street and gives me a photo of her friend. Tells me she’ll be in touch with me tomorrow night. Leaves me sitting there in my office wondering, if she knows how to do it so well, why’s she bothering to hire me? Leaves me wondering just how much Peter’s leaving me has screwed me up that I’d agree to something like this.
I don’t know my client’s name. I don’t know the name of the woman I’m looking for. My head’s spinning with fairy tales. But at least she left her smokes. I give them up every couple of months. Right now I’m off them. Was.
So I stuff the pack in my pocket and hit the street. It’s going on eleven, which means the action’s just starting on Gracie Street. It’s busy down here—not Times Square before Disney cleaned it up, but still big-city, inner-core, out-for-some-fun busy. The names of the bars range from the obvious to the less so: The North Star, Neon Sister, Girljock, Skirts. There’s plenty of traffic on the pavement, cars cruising, cabs. Plenty of people on the sidewalk, too—street people, couples, single men and women. The couples I pass are all same sex: male and male, female and female. It’s not too outrageous out on the street—you know, leather scenes and the like—but inside the clubs it’s a whole different story.
Some of the women are femmes, some butch. Lots of sexy tops, short hair, body piercing, tattoos, dancing, smoking, drinking. I try not to do the tourist thing and gawk as I show around a photograph of two women standing on a street corner—one’s my client. In the photo she’s got her hair tied back. She’s wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, black cowboy boots, and still looks like a million dollars. Around her neck, sparkling against the black shirt, is a small gold pendant in the shape of a heart. She has her arm around an attractive smaller woman who has short, spiky dark hair, angular features. The second woman is dressed in a short black dress and is barefoot. She’s holding a pair of high heels by their straps with one hand and leaning against my client.
I show the photo around, but I seem to be generating more interest for who I am than the picture. I remember what I told my client earlier—live and let live—and I believe it. But I’ve never been hit on so many times in such a short period of time as I have in the past couple of hours. And not once by a guy.
It really isn’t a problem for me. My best friend in high school, Sarah Jones, came out to me in our senior year and we’re still good friends. But I’m being hit on so often right now that I find myself seriously wondering what it’d be like to go out with another woman.
I take a look at these cigarettes my client left behind and wonder what’s in them, because first, she has me out here playing detective for her and now I’m actually considering . . .
There’s an attractive woman with short red hair sitting at the other end of the bar, looking back at me, one eyebrow raised questioningly. She makes a victory sign with the first two fingers of her right hand and then flicks her tongue through them.
No, I don’t think so.
I turn away quickly and bump into a tall black woman who’s standing on the other side of my stool. She’s wearing a white halter top, a short skirt and pumps, and has a ship captain’s hat scrunching down her kinky black hair. There are three studs in her nose, half a dozen more in each ear, running up from the lobes.
“Easy now,” she says, steadying me.
I jerk away from her. “Look, I’m not interested in—”
I break off when I realize the woman was just helping me keep my balance. She smiles at me, obviously non-aggressive, and I feel like a fool.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m just feeling a little . . .”
“Flustered?” she asks.
I nod.
“First time down here?”
“Yes, but it’s not what you think.”
When she cocks an eyebrow, I show her the photo and point to my client’s companion.
“The other woman in the picture has got me looking for her,” I say.
We’re both leaning against the bar now, the photo lying on the bar between us. The music’s still loud, making it hard to talk. All around us is the press of bodies, women dancing with each other, flirting with each other.
“I know them,” the woman says. “Are you sure you’re really into their scene?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, the whole S&M thing. The girl you’re looking for is your client’s slave.”
“Slave?”
The woman smiles. “You really are a virgin, aren’t you? Your client’s a top—you know, a leatherdyke.”
I give her a blank look.
“The sexually dominant one of the pair. The other girl’s a femme.” She’s still friendly, but maybe a little too friendly now. “Like you.”
I shake my head. “No way.”
And I mean it. Except even I can hear the trace of uncertainty in my voice.
My companion shrugs. “Then what?
??re you doing with a recruiter?”
I’m getting more confused by the minute.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I tell her.
She gets a tired look on her face. “The leatherdykes are always looking for new blood, but the trouble is, you sweet young femmes don’t always know you’re looking for them, too.”
She turns away, leaning against the bar with her elbows supporting her. She doesn’t look at me anymore, her gaze on the crowd. I get the sense that this conversation is finished, thank you very much, but then she adds, “So people like your friend go out and recruit them.”
“Oh.”
What the hell have I gotten myself mixed up in?
The woman turns to look at me. “It’s nothing heavy. Nobody’s forced to do anything against her will. But sometimes people get talked into doing things that they regret later. The leather crowd can get a little rough.”
“I’m really just trying to find this woman,” I tell her. “After that, my job’s over.”
“Whatever.”
She points to the photo then, finger resting on the chest of my client’s ex-girlfriend.
“Somebody told me she’s dancing at Chic Cheeks,” she tells me. “That’s a straight club over in the Combat Zone. I don’t think her top knows about the gig. It’s a big city. Easy to disappear in, especially if you go someplace where no one’s going to look for you. At least no one in this crowd. We’ve got our own strip joints.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I really appreciate—”
“And considering the kind of clientele it caters to, you might want to go round the back like the girls who work there do.”
“I will,” I tell her.
“I’d say be careful, but you girls never listen, do you?”
I smile and leave with the photo in hand, pretending I didn’t hear her.
Back out on Gracie Street, I find myself thinking about lesbian relationships again. Do women treat each other better than guys treat us, or is it the same-old same-old only with the gender changed? Call me naive, but I don’t feel like that sailor girl would have treated me the way Peter did. But while I liked her, and I know she liked me, I still can’t muster up a sexual interest in another woman.