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Where, around sunset, strolling north through the crystalline water toward Fernandina Beach, the surf rolling and booming and sparkling all around them, the echoes of Ellison Harwood’s well-oiled baritone gradually fading from memory, they saw a woman walking south toward them.
She was alone. She was barefoot and tanned and wearing a one-piece suit in creamy white under a gauzy tourmaline beach wrap. She moved as if she were inside music, something rhythmic and Caribbean.
Her face was partially hidden by a broad-brimmed white straw hat, secured around her neck with a scarlet ribbon. Her eyes were cast down, as if she were lost in thought. She was less than twenty feet away before she seemed to sense rather than see them, and then she stopped and lifted her face up and considered them, as if she knew them, as if she had been looking for them.
Which, of course, she had.
They stopped to talk, then walked and talked and found themselves gradually...enchanted. How old she was—thirty, forty, even fifty—it was impossible to tell, and, after a short while in her effervescent company, it didn’t seem to matter.
Later, sitting by the palm-tree-shaded pool, sharing sips of her margarita with the girls when the waiter wasn’t looking, she told them her name was Diana Bowman, that she was a dealer in antique jewelry based in Palm Beach, that she was here on a much-needed vacation from her wealthy and demanding clientele, and that she loved meeting young people like Rebecca and Karen.
They each felt that galvanic spark of instant rapport that is not an uncommon event when people go on vacation, and by the second round of margarita sharing they decided that they should be newfound friends together and have such great fun while they were all here at this beautiful resort.
By now, thanks to the margarita factor, the girls had relaxed enough around their new friend that they had begun to open up to her about their trip down from St. Louis, and the Harwood-inflicted grinding hell it had managed to become.
Diana Bowman was cautiously sympathetic.
“Well, yes, I confess I do find certain types of religious practice to be, how to put it, so spiritually confining...but I sometimes feel that it is as much a sin to ignore the sensual pleasures that God has given us as it is to, what to say, overindulge in them?”
Rebecca and Karen agreed, or thought they did, although her reference to sensualpleasures definitely touched them on a more primal than theoretical level. But Diana seemed to feel she had said too much.
“You know, I have no doubt that your parents—they are here with you, yes?—oh, how nice—Jerry and Marilyn? And Alyssa, the youngest? That they are doing this out of love. I’m sure they just want you to be...happy and safe.”
“Too safe,” said Karen, with some heat. “They never want us to have any fun—”
“You’d think we were in jail,” Rebecca finished, caught up with the injustice of it all.
Diana listened with every sign of sympathetic understanding as the girls raved on for a while about the unbearable oppression of patriarchal fascism disguised as parental kindness.
Eventually they ran the subject down, realizing from Diana’s sleepy-eyed attention that perhaps they were boring their new friend. But what she said next surprised them.
“I’m a Roman Catholic myself, on my mother’s side, and I do feel that the effect Jesus had on the world was, on the whole, a good one. You need only to look at the world these days to see how important His teachings were to Western Civilization.”
Rebecca, the historian, brought up the Crusades and Diana, sipping at her margarita, agreed that the Crusades were simply awful, but that they had happened nine hundred years ago, and what Jesus had brought into the world, long before the Crusades, could be seen in the artifacts connected to Him.
“Oh God,” said Karen, “don’t tell us about artifacts.”
“Really?” said Diana.
It turned out that Rebecca and Karen knew all about artifacts and relics, since Daddy never shut up about them—he had even brought a lockbox full of them along to classify or decipher or something—but by now their heads were dizzy with the surging sea and the margarita sipping so they missed the sudden sharpening of Diana Bowman’s attention.
“So your father works with these artifacts?”
“God yes. He brought them along, these...”
“Artifacts,” Rebecca repeated with careful precision, feeling the tequila. “He lays them out on the dining room table and studies them for, like, hours. He has a microscope and all kinds of tools.”
Diana was intrigued.
“Truly? He sounds very dedicated. What sort of artifacts are they?”
Rebecca made a hand-waving gesture of dismissal.
“Creepy old dead stuff. From wherever Daddy has to work. All over the world. From New Orleans, this bunch anyway. They were moving graves after that stupid storm?”
“Katrina?”
“Yeah. That. It was like years ago, but now they’re doing something about flood protection, so the graveyards have to be built up. You know the way they bury people in New Orleans? In those concrete churchy-looking little stone houses?”
“Crypts,” said Diana. “They have to be aboveground because the water table is so high.”
“Daddy says they just stuff new bodies into the crypt and shove the old ones to the back of the...whatever...the...?”
“The vault.”
“Yeah, the vault, so that whoever was buried there a hundred years ago gets all crammed up with the new people and it’s all mixed up in a jumble.”
“So your father is trying to sort out who was who, now that the bodies have to be moved?”
“Yeah, although it’s only temporary, ’cause they’re putting them back when the work is through, but he has to figure out which bits belong where, and then there’s all the jewelry.”
“You mean, like gold bracelets and rings and that kind of thing?”
“And lockets and brooches and stuff,” said Karen, not really interested in whatever her daddy was up to. They both felt a spreading warmth moving through their bodies as the tensions of the trip receded and Diana’s silky voice seemed to pull them into a conspiratorial circle. They were too young to notice the voltage that the word locket had sent pulsing through the woman’s body.
“Well, it sounds as if your father is doing the Lord’s work,” Diana said, changing the subject. “You should be proud of him.”
“Oh, we are,” said Rebecca, feeling that they were sounding disloyal. “I mean they’re good people and all that. It’s just this whole Christ thing. Christ this and Jesus that, all the way down from Florissant. It was all, like, so...lame.”
Diana gently disagreed.
“But there’s a true power there, girls. In Jesus. Do you know about the Shroud of Turin?”
This was something important to Diana. They could both feel her...chemistry...change. In spite of their reflexive dislike of the subject, what she was saying—or rather how she was saying it—got their attention.
She was talking about the Shroud of Turin, the moment of Christ’s Resurrection, when His Spirit had flashed out, shimmering so brightly inside that darkened sepulchre...
“A shimmer so powerful that it actually burned itself into the burial cloth he was wrapped up in,” said Diana, leaning in close and placing a soft warm hand on Rebecca’s knee.
“Can you imagine what that must have been like? And Jesus teaches us that that very same Shimmer is inside each of us. That divine spark shines inside us all, waiting to be...released. How beautiful.”
Rebecca found she liked the feel of Diana’s hand on her knee, but the subject of Jesus Christ’s Light Bulb Moment was not nearly as interesting to her, at this twilight hour, as the particular hazel-and-gold colors in Diana Bowman’s eyes and the spicy scent that was coming off her body. From the look on her sister’s face, she was feeling the same sort of sensual pull.
Rebecca felt a warmth rising on the skin of her belly and flooding up to her breasts, her throat, her cheeks. She’s gay, Rebecca was thinking. And she likes us. Both of us.
Diana drew back, smiled at them.
“But it’s getting dark, and you two need to be going back to your room, don’t you? Your parents will be worried, no?”
Rebecca looked at her cell phone.
There were three text messages, all in the last few minutes. She had felt the phone buzzing but ignored it, knowing what they were about but feeling that, where Mommy and Daddy were concerned, it was easier to get forgiveness than permission.
Mommy: We’re going out to get something to eat. Coming?
Mommy: Leaving in five?
Daddy: Girls?
After a moment’s thought, as Diana watched her with some amusement, Rebecca texted back.
Becca: We’re at the Chapel for Eventide. So pretty here. Can we stay?
A pause. The resort was fenced and gated, studded with security cameras and patrolled by armed guards. And it did have a little chapel beside the tennis courts.
Daddy: Okay. But home by midnight. Pinky swear.
Becca: Pinky swear. Hugs.
Daddy: Karen got her puffer with her?
Rebecca tipped the phone to Karen, who read the message, fumbled in her pocket and came up with a small silver canister with a little plastic mask attached—her rechargeable puffer. Karen had asthma, usually caused by stress.
Becca: Yes, Daddy, we just checked.
Daddy: Okay be good love you both.
Rebecca put the phone away, looking up to catch a strange, almost hungry expression on Diana’s face, a kind of pale yellow light in her green eyes.
But then Diana smiled and it was gone.
“Was that your parents, Rebecca?”
“Yes. They’re going out to dinner.”
“So late? Without you?”
“Yes,” she said. “They like to eat late. Alyssa won’t go to sleep unless she has something later on in the evening—”
“She’s so spoiled,” said Karen.
Rebecca ignored that. “We can stay for now, but we have to be home by midnight.”
Diana looked at her watch.
“That’s a while away. Perhaps we can have a quick dinner? Room service? In my suite?”
The words were innocent, but both Karen and Rebecca understood what wasn’t being said.
“We’d love to,” they said in one voice.
“How perfect you both are,” said Diana, taking them in. “How simply...delicious.”
the lady in the lake (#u28112b36-bc24-5294-8754-1428358201f5)
As soon as the three cops disappeared back into the tree line, she surfaced. She was two hundred feet away, in the heart of the swamp, neck deep in the stinking water, hidden behind an island of seagrass, her face coated in lagoon muck.
She slowly lifted her head up, her black hair matted to her skull. She had a pretty good idea of what had happened back there at the Walkers’ truck, what the gunshots really meant, why the cops had bolted, and it warmed her through and through.
The girls had done what she had asked them to do. Well, they had done what Diana Bowman had asked them to do, but she was no longer the woman called Diana Bowman. She was Selena.
* * *
She had never actually been Diana Bowman, but she had met the original at a resort in the Keys last year, a lonely older woman without family or close friends, looking for affection, or at least kindness, which Selena had freely given her with all of her loving heart.
And they lived happily ever after, until late one shining afternoon while they were out cruising in Diana’s boat, when Selena had shoved her over the side into shark water.
Four minutes later, while Selena fended the terrified woman off with a boat hook, a big whitetip, attracted by her thrashing struggle, flashed in, hit her hard and took her under in an explosion of bloody foam.
Other sharks arrived, and things got nasty, the way they do when sharks disagree. For a brief moment Diana’s horrified face reappeared in the middle of a churning vortex of pink water, staring wide-eyed at Selena, her open mouth filled with blood. Then she was jerked back under, the sharks shredded what was left of her and it was over.
Selena had watched the whole thing, fascinated, wishing she had thought to film it for YouTube. But it was too late for that now, and anyway it would have been a risky thing to do.
Amusing, certainly, but risky.
Since Diana, being newly dead, didn’t need her life anymore, Selena took it over, maxing out all of her credit cards and discreetly liquidating her assets—which were considerable, since she was a very successful dealer in estate jewelry and antiques—over a few months.
She banked the results in one of her accounts in the Caymans. Selena was good at that sort of thing because she had been doing it for years and had pretty much perfected it. Bowman’s banker was troublesome, but nothing Selena couldn’t finesse. You could say it was her profession, what she did for a living, but it wasn’t her purpose.
That was something else entirely. And it had to do with finding something she had lost somewhere in time, something perfect and round and made of gold, a locket, and inside the locket was peace and her last childhood memory of loving kindness.
* * *
Selena thought about the cops, the way they had run back up the slope and into the trees, three big heavy men, slow and clumsy and stupid. They had been easy to outrun.
She felt a smile coming but suppressed it. Her teeth were very white and they would show. Some kind of crawling sucking things were up under her clothes and digging into the flesh of her back and her lower belly. She could feel them starting to feed on her. Leeches.
A tiny carp-like fish was nipping at the side of her neck but she didn’t try to drive it away. A large red centipede was moving slowly across the exposed skin of her left wrist. She could feel the feathery tickle of its feet. Mosquitoes and midge flies hovered in a cloud around her face and neck, biting and stinging whatever they could get at through the mud she had smeared all over herself.
She had a long filleting knife in a sheath at the nape of her neck, so if there was a big snake or a gator in this water, she could probably kill it. But killing it would require movement and movement would show the police where she was.
Her long and complicated time in this world had taught her many things, and one of them was that the secret of the hunt was not to run. It was to be still. Humans were born predators. Some of them, anyway, the ones who weren’t born prey. But, like dogs, they were attracted to motion. They would chase anything running. They never saw the thing that was perfectly still.
Cats were different. Cats could be still far longer than their prey. Fear made the prey run to meet its death when it could have been still and lived a little while longer. This was why cats were better hunters than dogs. This was why cats could hunt alone. It was in their nature to hunt alone.
But she had learned that all police officers were like wolves. They hunted in packs. That was their nature. Like those three cops. They heard the gunshots; they all ran off together. In a wolf pack. But they would come back.
The rain was drumming on her skull and she could feel her body heat draining away into the swamp all around her. In a while she’d be shivering badly. She considered the sky. The clouds were breaking up. The white squall would end soon and then the sun would come out.
