chest rise and fall rise and fall and soon no one is talking to him, they are only talking to each other.
“Somebody bashed that old dude but good.”
“Man, we better call the cops.”
“An ambulance.”
“You’re crazy. How are we going to explain the grave?”
“I don’t want any trouble. I don’t need any trouble.”
“I’m not losing my job over this. I got a family.”
“Shutterbug,” they say. Then with some urgency, “C’mon, Shutterbug!”
Then it is quiet once again and dark once again. The truck is gone. Bat and Griz and Todd and Derwin are gone.
The man on the ground is still there.
And the shadows are back, spilling from April Destino’s grave. A slow black surf washes around Shutterbug’s ankles and it smells like the cold blood of the earth. He runs from it but it shoots from the ground, splashing his heels, cold and wet and gushing like a reptile’s blood like the cold blood of the earth and he can never run fast enough to escape it.
4:00 A.M.
Amy Peyton stared into the mirror and saw April Destino staring back at her. In the dim light of the bedroom, the illusion was almost perfect. April at eighteen, before her trip to Todd Gould’s basement. A frosted mane styled in a Farrah flip, just enough blush on her cheeks to accent the gentle curve of her cheekbones, and blue eye shadow that wasn’t at all gaudy because the school colors were blue and white.
Amy smiled. Anger flared in her eyes with a hard, flat intensity that was the antithesis of the secretive, liquid mystery of April’s eyes.
Like Doug had said. You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes.
Unless you were someone like April Destino, someone who could bury anger deep in the pit of her heart. If she sat in front of April’s mirror for a million years. Amy would never understand that kind of restraint.
She straightened April’s cheerleading sweater, smoothed her short blue skirt, and daubed her wrists with April’s perfume before rising from the little chair that sat in front of the dresser. Even in the dim light of a whore’s bedroom, the one thing Amy had overlooked was obvious. Two things, actually. Things that even red lamp shades and deep shadows couldn’t hide.
Amy grabbed a box of Kleenex from the dresser. Each tissue escaped the box with a tired whisper, and with each whisper Amy blushed a little deeper because she knew she needed several tissues and at the same time didn’t want to know the exact number.
Doug’s words rang in her memory: “You do a good job of it. You make it real, right down to the tits. If it isn’t real, the deal’s off. And believe me when I tell you that I want to see two full scoops…”
Amy raised the heavy sweater and stuffed April Louise Destino’s blue bra, molding breasts that were generous and voluptuous. The experience was both humiliating and ridiculous and she knew it.
She reached for another Kleenex.
The box hadn’t been full when she started- Amy realized that even as humiliation burnt a hole in her very core-but now it was empty.
Lipstick. She’d forgotten lipstick.
She searched the dresser but found none.
She opened April’s nightstand drawer. Dug through a pile of tubes until her fingers brushed something cold.
A pistol. Amy shivered. Her stomach rolled. Just seeing a pistol made everything seem so much more dangerous. And touching it… touching it was like touching something that was dead.
She could do without lipstick.
She closed the drawer.
Amy tidied up as best she could. She returned April’s cosmetics to a dresser drawer. She ruffled the shag rug in the dresser’s dead space, erasing the indentation marks left by the box that had held the cheerleading outfit. That done, she replaced the drawer that held April’s bras. Finally, she hid the empty box in a garment bag in the closet and returned to the living room.
Amy knew that such a simple clean-up wouldn’t keep a determined-or lucky-cop from learning of her visit. After all, there was the matter of her little run-in with the lot manager, a man who obviously enjoyed the sound of his own voice. She had given the manager her attorney’s card. A cop who had both luck and determination might make something of it, but that was extremely doubtful. A first-class attorney like Wendy Wong probably handed out ten or twenty cards a day.
Even if a cop tracked Amy down, what could he do? She certainly hadn’t murdered April Destino. April had done that to herself.
Amy didn’t think she had much to worry about. Not on that score, anyway. But before tonight she hadn’t been worried about April Destino, or Doug Douglas, or any of the ghosts from her past. Now, facing a row of cheap paperbacks filled with crazy, impossible ideas, she had to admit that there was something about being involved with April that frightened her, even if April was dead.
The idea that she had unfinished business with a dead woman circled Amy’s thoughts like a buzzard closing in on fresh carrion. Spooky stories had always frightened her. The man with the hook hand, the hitchhiking ghost, the woman with the golden arm-she still shivered just thinking of those stories. They stirred completely irrational fears, but these were fears that she could overcome.
Just as she would overcome her fear of April. Doug Douglas was another matter entirely. He wasn’t dead. He was very much alive. She had seen raw hatred burning in his eyes. Fearing Doug was not irrational. Doug was unstable. Hell, Doug was loony.
She wasn’t accomplishing anything by standing here. The old yearbook was on the third shelf from the bottom, nestled among April’s reincarnation books, just as Doug had promised. Amy pulled it free and turned to page 131. A map-this one with a key taped to it-slipped from between the pages and fell to the floor, but Amy hardly noticed it. Her gaze had locked on one of twenty or thirty portraits on the page.
Peyton, Amelia. Yearbook Editor. I want it all!
But Amy couldn’t see her portrait. A heavy black circle eclipsed it, and there was a message above the circle.
I’ll always be with you.
Love, April
“No you won’t.” Amy glared at all the silly books about reincarnation and ghosts and psychic phenomenon. “You’re dead in the ground, April. You been boxed and buried and I’m closing your account.”
Amy bent low and collected the map and the key. She was tired of thinking, tired of being scared. She returned to the bedroom. Dumped the nightstand drawer onto the dead whore’s bed. Most of the lipsticks didn’t have caps. Amy hated sloppy women. She batted the lipsticks aside, leaving bloody streaks on the bedspread.
Amy’s fingers brushed cool metal. The pistol small and silver. She didn’t know much about guns, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure the thing out, check that it was loaded.
She replaced the yearbook. Her anger receded, making room for fear, and she nearly replaced the gun. Maybe it was part of April’s plan. Maybe April wanted her to have the gun. Maybe- No. April really was playing with her mind, and that was going to stop right now. Amy was going to keep the gun. Playtime was over. Spooky stories, all forgotten. This was the real world.
