Kiss of the Bees

of half-moons on her flat chest, encircling the little brown knob of flesh that would someday grow into a nipple.

Then, pulling on her nightgown, she went racing through the house. She wanted to show someone her handiwork, but her parents were out. Instead, she went searching for Rita Antone. She found Nana Dahd in her room at the back of the house, working on a basket.

“Look,” Lani crowed, pulling up her nightgown. “Look at what I did. Now I can be just like Mommy.”

Rita’s face had gone strangely pale and rigid the moment she saw the circle Lani had drawn on her body.

“Go wash,” she ordered, in a terrible voice Lani Walker had never heard before. “Go wash that off. Do not do it again! Ever!”

“But why can’t I be like Mommy?” she had said later, after she had showered for a second time. Once again dressed for bed, she had come back to Nana Dahd’s room to say good night and hoping to make some sense of what had happened.

“Shhhh,” Nana Dahd had told her. “Your mother looks like that because the evil Ohb did something to her. Because he hurt her. You shouldn’t say such things. Someone might hear you and make it happen.”

Now someone had.

Lani’s eyes came open. The pain wasn’t any less. If anything, it was worse. She looked down at the angry welt of seared flesh. It was red now and blistered, but someday it, too, would be a pale white scar, almost the same as the one that encircled the nipple on her mother’s right breast.

And that was the moment when, without being able to say how, Lani knew this was the same thing. Lani had learned from reading her mother’s book that Andrew Carlisle had been blinded and terribly disfigured by the bacon grease Diana Ladd had thrown at him. And she remembered a few weeks earlier, when her mother had told her father at dinner that it had said in the paper that Andrew Carlisle was dead.

Mr. Vega had worn his hair long and in a ponytail when he had been out on the mountain, painting. This man’s hair was very short. He was neither blind nor disfigured, but he was somehow connected to the evil Ohb.

Knowing that, Lani had a blueprint of what to do.

“I’m going to untie you now.”

Once again the man was standing over her. “Actually, ‘untie’ isn’t the word. Do you see this knife?”

In one hand he held a long narrow knife. The blade was very long and it looked sharp. “I’m going to cut you loose,” he continued. “If you don’t behave, I’ll use it on you. Do you understand?”

Lani nodded again.

“All right then.”

One at a time, he cut through the strands of silk that had held her captive. As soon as he set her limbs free, the pins and needles in her arms and legs—the cramps in her shoulders and hips—were bad enough that the new pain took some of Lani’s attention away from the pulsing throb in her breast.

“Get up now,” he ordered.

She tried to stand and then fell back on the low bed with a jarring thud. “I can’t,” she said. “My legs are asleep.”

“Well, sit there, then.” He turned away for a moment and came back holding out a cup. “Drink some of this,” he said, sounding almost solicitous. “That must hurt, and maybe this will help deaden the pain.”

Lani had figured out by then that he must have drugged her, that he must have put something in the orange juice she had drunk that morning or whenever it was when she was supposedly posing for him. And if he had drugged her once, no doubt he was going to do it again.

She reached up as if to take the cup. Instead of taking it, though, she slapped it out of his hand, gasping with pain at the shock of the cold water slicing across her burned flesh, searing it anew.

“Why, you goddamned bitch!” he muttered. “There’s still some fight left in you, isn’t there. But believe me, there’s plenty more where that came from.”

He walked as far as the kitchen. She saw him pouring something into a fresh cup of water, then he came back. This time, before he gave her the cup, he knotted his other hand into the hair at the back of her neck, yanking her head backward.

“This time you’ll drink it like a good girl, or I’ll hold you down and pour the stuff down your goddamned throat. Got it?”

She nodded.

He placed the cup in her hand, and this time she drank it down. When she gave it back to him, he checked to make sure it was empty.

“That’s better,” he said. “You swallowed every drop. Here are your clothes now. Get dressed.”

Concerned about fingerprints, he had rinsed out her clothing earlier that morning, but hadn’t bothered to dry them. How could he? He didn’t have a dryer, and if he had hung them on the clothesline, someone might have noticed. They were still a sodden lump when he tossed them into her lap.

“I can’t wear these,” she said. “They’re wet.”

“So? This isn’t a fucking Chinese laundry,” he told her. “Go naked if you want to. It sure as hell doesn’t matter to me.”

After a struggle, she finally managed to pull on the jeans. The shirt hurt desperately whenever it touched the burned spot on her breast, but at least the man couldn’t look at her anymore. Without further protest she pulled on the wet socks and forced on the boots.

“Come on now,” he said impatiently. “Off we go.”