Teardrop

destruction of Blavatsky’s office. What had the intruders been looking for?

Where was her book?

She knew she was biased, but she couldn’t picture any culprits other than the ghostly people from the dark road. The idea of their pale fingers holding Diana’s book made Eureka shoot to her feet.

At the back of the office, near the open window, she discovered a tiny alcove she hadn’t seen on her first visit. The doorway was strung with a purple beaded curtain that rattled when she passed through. The alcove held a little galley kitchen with a small sink, an overgrown planter of dill, a three-legged wooden stool, and, behind the micro-fridge, a surprising flight of stairs.

Madame Blavatsky’s apartment was on the floor above her office. Eureka took the stairs three at a time. Polaris chirped approvingly, as if this was the direction he’d wanted her to take all along.

The stairs were dark, so she used her phone to light the way. At the top stood a closed door with six enormous dead-bolts. Each of the locks was unique and antique—and looked utterly impregnable. Eureka was relieved, thinking that at least whoever had ransacked the downstairs atelier wouldn’t have been able to break into Madame Blavatsky’s apartment.

Polaris squawked angrily, as if he’d expected Eureka to have a key. He swooped down and pecked the ragged carpet at the foot of the door like a chicken desperate for feed. Eureka shined her phone’s light down to see what he was doing.

She wished she hadn’t.

A pool of blood had seeped through the crack between the door and the landing. It had soaked most of the top step and was now spreading downward. In the silent darkness of the stairwell, Eureka heard a droplet fall from the top step onto the one where she was standing. She inched away, repulsed and afraid.

Dizziness gripped her. She leaned forward, intending to rest her hand on the door for a moment to regain her balance—but she flailed backward as the door gave way under the slightest pressure of her touch. It tumbled, like a felled tree, into the apartment. The door’s weighty thud was accompanied by a damp slap on the carpet, which Eureka realized had to do with the blood pooled behind the door. The impact sent red splatters sloshing up onto the smoke-stained walls.

Whoever had been here had taken the door cleanly off its hinges and, before leaving, had propped it up so that it still looked bolted from the outside.

She should leave. She should turn around right now, rush down the stairs, and get out of here before she saw something she did not want to see. Her mouth filled with a sickly taste. She should call the police. She should get out and not come back.

But she couldn’t. Something had happened to a person she cared about. As loudly as her instincts screamed Run! Eureka could not turn her back on Madame Blavatsky.

She stepped over the bloody landing, onto the fallen door, and followed Polaris into the apartment. It smelled like blood and sweat and cigarettes. Dozens of nearly extinguished candles flickered along a mantel. They were the only source of light in the room. Outside the single small window, an electric bug-killer zapped in a steady beat. In the center of the room, sprawled across the blue industrial carpet, in the first place Eureka suspected and the last place she allowed herself to look, was Madame Blavatsky, dead as Diana.

Eureka’s hand went to her throat to choke off a gasp. Over her shoulder, the stairwell to the exit looked endless, like she’d never make it without fainting. On instinct, she felt in her pocket for her phone. She dialed 911, but she could not bring herself to press the call button. She had no voice, no way to communicate to a stranger on the other end of a line that the woman who’d become the closest thing Eureka had to a mother was dead.

The phone fell back inside her pocket. She moved closer to Madame Blavatsky but was careful to stay beyond the spread of blood.

Clumps of auburn hair lay on the floor, surrounding the old woman’s head like a crown. There were bald patches of pink skin where the hair had been ripped from her scalp. Her eyes were open. One stared vacantly at the ceiling. The other had been torn completely from its socket. It dangled near her temple, hanging on by a thin pink artery. Her cheeks were lacerated, as if sharp nails had dragged across them. Her legs and arms were sprawled at her sides, making her look like a kind of mangled snow angel. One hand grasped a rosary. Her patchwork cloak was slick with blood. She had been beaten, shredded, stabbed repeatedly in the chest by something that left much larger slashes than a knife. She’d been left to bleed out on the floor.

Eureka staggered against the wall. She wondered what Madame Blavatsky’s last thought had been. She tried to imagine the kind of prayers the woman might have said on her way out of the world, but her mind was blank with shock. She sank to her knees. Diana always said that everything in the world was connected. Why hadn’t Eureka stopped to consider what The Book of Love had to do with the thunderstone Ander knew so much about—or the people he’d protected her from on the road? If they were the ones who’d done this to Madame Blavatsky, she felt certain they’d come in search of The Book of Love. They had murdered someone over it.

And if that was true, Madame Blavatsky’s death had been her fault. Her mind went to the Confession booth, where she’d go on Saturday afternon with Dad. She had no idea how many Hail Marys and Our Fathers she’d have to say to clear that sin.

She should never have insisted they carry on with the translation. Madame Blavatsky had warned her of the risks. Eureka should have connected the old woman’s hesitation to the danger Ander said Eureka was in. But she hadn’t. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to. Maybe she wanted one thing sweet and magical in her life. Now that sweet and magical thing was dead.

She thought she was going to gag, but she didn’t. She thought she might scream, but she didn’t. Instead she knelt closer to Madame Blavatsky’s chest and resisted the urge to touch her. For months she had longed for the impossible opportunity to cradle Diana after her death. Now Eureka wanted to reach for Madame Blavatsky, but the open wounds held her back. Not because Eureka was disgusted—though the woman was in gruesome shape —but because she knew better than to implicate herself in this murder. She held back, knowing that no matter how much she cared, there was nothing she could do for Blavatsky.

She imagined others coming upon this sight: the gray pallor Rhoda’s skin would take on, the way it did when she was nauseated, making her orange lipstick look clownish; the prayers that would stream from the lips of Eureka’s most pious classmate, Belle Pogue; the disbelieving curses Cat would spew. Eureka imagined she could see herself from outside herself. She looked as lifeless and immobile as a boulder that had been lodged in the apartment for millennia. She looked stoic and unreachable.

Diana’s death had killed death’s mysteries for Eureka. She knew death was waiting for her, like it had been for Madame Blavatsky, like it was for everyone she loved and didn’t love. She knew that human beings were born to die. She remembered the last line of a Dylan Thomas poem she’d once read on an online grief forum. It was the only thing that made sense to her when she was in the hospital:

After the first death, there is no other.

Diana was Eureka’s first death. It meant that Madame Blavatsky’s death was no other. Even Eureka’s own death would be no other.

Her grief was powerful; it just looked different from what people were used to.

She was afraid, but not of the dead body before her—she’d seen worse in too many nightmares. She was afraid of what Madame Blavatsky’s death meant for the other people close to her, dwindling as their numbers were. She couldn’t help feeling robbed of something, knowing that she would never understand the rest of The Book of Love.

Had the murderers taken her book? The thought of someone else possessing it, knowing more of it than she did, enraged her. She rose and moved toward Blavatsky’s breakfast bar, then her nightstand, searching for any sign of the book, being as careful as possible not to alter what she knew would be a crime scene.

She found nothing, only heartache. She was so miserable she could hardly see. Polaris squawked and pecked the edges of Madame Blavatsky’s cloak.

Everything might change with the last word, Eureka thought. But this couldn’t be Madame Blavatsky’s last word. She deserved so much more than this.

Again Eureka lowered herself to the floor. Her fingers found their way across her chest intuitively, making the sign of the cross. She pressed her hands together and bowed her head in a silent prayer to Saint Francis, asking for serenity on the old woman’s behalf. She kept her head bowed and her eyes closed until she sensed that