Or perhaps, I thought to myself, to keep the murderess in, should she try to escape.
They must suspect.
Then again, even if they do…
Even if they were to find the broken-off hatchet head I so carefully wiped clean of any trace of blood, or the stained dress hidden deep in my pillow…
Even knowing what they know about our family, and my open contempt for my miserly father and for Abby, whom I haven’t called “mother” in years…
They will never grasp the truth.
I am, after all, a woman.
A temperamental, sharp-tongued, spoiled woman trapped in a miserable, miserly household…
But a woman nonetheless.
No matter how damning the circumstantial evidence, should any of it come to light, they’ll be sure to look beyond it. They’ll be certain that things cannot possibly be as they seem. They believe, as my father did, that nothing ever is.
Fools.
I wander into the parlor and stop short, seeing a figure silhouetted before the sofa. In this faint light, I can’t see the splotched upholstery and spattered wallpaper, but I know they’re there.
“Maggie,” I say, and she jumps, startled, whirling to look at me.
The room is too dim to betray the knowing flash in her eyes, yet it’s palpable as bloodstain.
Will she hurtle an accusation?
If so, I’ll deny it-just as I did yesterday, when the house was crawling with police wanting to know where I was when my stepmother and father were hacked to death so viciously that one of his eyeballs was flung from its socket.
Never again will I see that terrible glint in his brown gaze, betraying his hideous plans for the wee hours.
Never, never again.
The nightmare is over; at last, I am in control.
For a long time, Maggie just looks at me.
Perhaps she, too, suffered sleepless nights. Perhaps she, too, lay awake, listening in dread for the creak of a heavy masculine step on the stairs. Perhaps she, too, fantasized about making it stop.
“My name,” she tells me in her soft brogue, “is not Maggie.”
No, it isn’t. But it’s the only thing my sister Emma and I have ever called her. It was easier that way; the maid before her had been Maggie.
I look her in the eye. “I’m sorry… Bridget.”
She nods, clearly satisfied.
No fool, Bridget Sullivan. She grasps what so many do not: that things are often exactly as they seem.
“I accept your apology, Miss Borden. Old habits die hard, I know.”
At long last, I smile.
“Please,” I tell her, “call me Lizzie.”
The bestselling author of more than seventy novels, WENDY CORSI STAUB has penned multiple New York Times bestselling adult thrillers under her own name and more than two dozen young adult titles, including the current paranormal suspense series Lily Dale, which has been optioned for television. Her latest thriller, Live to Tell, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and launches a suspense trilogy that will include sequels Scared to Death and Hell to Pay. Under the pseudonym Wendy Markham, she’s a USA Today bestselling author of chick lit and romance.
Industry awards include a Romance Writers of America Rita, three Westchester Library Association Washington Irving Awards for Fiction, the 2007 RWA-NYC Golden Apple for Lifetime Achievement and the 2008 RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in Suspense. Readers can join her online at www.WendyCorsiStaubcommunity.com.
Children’s Day by Kelli Stanley
Golden Gate International Exposition Treasure Island, San Francisco Bay, 1939
Shorty was complaining about the grift around Midget Village when Miranda saw the clown. Sad eyes. No smile. The Gayway wasn’t always gay, even for a clown and the little blonde girl with him, waiting in line for cotton candy.
Too many kids, too many clowns. Monday, April 3, Children’s Day, and Miranda wondered why the fuck she’d come back to the fair on her one day off. Maybe because she had nowhere else to go.
“You take it up with the bulls?” she asked Shorty.
The little man shook his head, the red light of the cigarette dancing at the end of his mouth.
“You know how it is. Don’t take us serious. Come in for a belly laugh and drift over to Sally Rand’s or Artists and Models for a tweak of some tit. Christ Almighty, I can’t blame ’em for that, but we need protection, not a goddamn babysitter.”
Miranda nodded, looking over his head. The clown was crouched at the side of the refreshment booth, talking to the kid, pink sweat dripping on his dirty white collar. Puffs of spun candy hid her face. A stout woman in a green plaid coat smiled at them through her peanuts.
Miranda dropped her Chesterfield and rubbed it out in the dirt next to a wadded-up napkin from Threlkeld’s Scones. “I’ll do what I can. I don’t have much pull with the cops-”
“You got pull where it counts, sister. You got in the papers, you got your shamus license, you caught your boss’s killer. That’s enough for Leland Cutler, and it’s enough for Shorty Glick.”
She bent down to shake the midget’s hand. “I’ll do what I can. Be seeing you, Shorty.”
He nodded, put the ten-gallon hat back on, hoisted up the chaps and kid’s gun belt with dignity, and waddled into the compound. Singer’s Midgets, carted around from sawdust heap to sawdust heap, stared at, laughed at, gee whiz, they’re tiny, Bob, just like kids. Fuck you, too, lady. How’s that for kid talk?
She walked down the fairway, leaned against the wall of Ripley’s Odditorium and lit another Chesterfield, staring down at the line waiting for Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch. Sally’s girls needed protection as much as the midgets, and the only kind they’d get from the cops came with a price. Miranda just charged money.
Women were clutching their hats against the cold Bay wind, and some Spanish flamenco dancers from the Alta California exhibit huddled, laughing, in front of the fortune teller. Miranda pressed herself against the stucco wall, closing her eyes. No fortunes left, not for Spain. Not for Miranda. Fortunes meant future, and she didn’t think about the future anymore, not since ’37. Johnny wasn’t in it.
Poor, tired Spain, poor tired world, tired, so tired of war, and yet more coming, more fucking wars, more corpses, white flesh bloated and ruptured, rotting in farm house wells, mangled bodies on the streets of Madrid. No future, no fortune. No Johnny. Just the carnival. Listen to the calliope and it’ll all go away.
Step right up, folks, one thin dime, neon and fishnets, girls in G-strings, babies in incubators. Welcome to the Gayway, Leland Cutler’s Pageant of the Pacific, pride of 1939, and who gives a fuck if New York has a world’s fair, too.
She blinked, watching the cigarette ash burn closer, Laughing Sal’s mechanical cackle drifting on the wind. No treasure on Treasure Island. Just another world’s fair. Another goddamn calliope.
She walked back again toward Midget Village. The line at the refreshment stand was shorter. The clown and the kid, still in sight, headed toward Heather Row. But the clown was pulling the kid’s arm, the girl crying, upset. Fat lady in green nowhere to be seen.
Miranda gulped the cigarette, nicotine hitting her lungs. Burnett hadn’t taught her much. Wiggle when you walk, Miranda, you know how to be an escort. Fuck being a detective. Wrong again, Burnett, you bastard, rest in fucking
