Black as Night: A Fairy Tale Retold Page 4

  “And she didn’t work Sunday?”

  “The schedule goes from Saturday to Saturday, and she’s not on this week’s schedule. You say she’s not working here any more?”

  “That’s what I was just told.”

  “Well, not everyone here knows what’s going on. Maybe she’s just on vacation this week. It’s August, after all, and it’s been real hot around here.”

  “Was she going on vacation?”

  “Well, you know, she never mentioned it to me. But I don’t really know for sure. You might want to call back in the morning. The day manager will be in then, and he’ll have the full story for you.”

  “Thanks very much,” Bear said.

  “Hey, no problem. Have a good night.”

  Bear hung up the phone, his ears ringing.

  After the turbulent transatlantic phone trip to past midnight in New York, he paced back to the sitting room and tried to mentally readjust to morning in Italy. Blanche wasn’t working at the banquet hall any more. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t at home. Where was she?

  Now, feeling acutely concerned, he phoned the Bronx police department and explained the situation—could they send someone by to check the house? They agreed to send a patrol car over, and he left his number so that they could call him back. Then he hung up the phone.

  There was a knock and he opened the door. A hotel worker swept in with a breakfast tray, set it on the coffee table, and exited.

  Fish, who had been reading in the chair, set down the poetry book and with mild irritation surveyed the Italian rolls, tea, and fruit. “Continental breakfast—a big name for ‘not much,’” he muttered. “Is there any place around here to order eggs and bacon and pancakes at this hour?”

  “I seriously doubt it,” Bear said. He dialed the phone number for the airport and confirmed that there were available flights leaving for New York that afternoon. When he hung up, his brother was dumping several spoonfuls of sugar into his tea with a melancholy expression on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” Bear asked.

  “I’m getting a feeling of my own. You’re not going to find Blanche this morning, which means that we’ll be flying back to New York this afternoon.”

  “Fish, I didn’t ask you to come back with me. You should stay and finish your vacation,” Bear said, surprised.

  “No, no,” Fish said, sounding like a martyr dying of slow suffocation as he spread jam on his roll. “I’ll go with you. I don’t have a girlfriend, but I still get to suffer the effects of having one.”

  Bear heaved a sigh. “Fish, I might go back and discover out that everything’s fine—that Blanche just went away to a friend’s house for the weekend or something. This time she just didn’t tell me, that’s all. You might be coming back for nothing.”

  “In that case, I’ll just go back to taking my classes,” Fish said wearily. “No, I’m coming. Knowing you, you’ll walk right into some huge mess. And you’ll need me to extricate you from it, again. So you called that place where Blanche works?”

  “Yes. They said she wasn’t on the schedule. I think that means she was let go. The girl I talked with sounded surprised herself.”

  “The mystery deepens.” Fish tasted his tea and added a few more grains of sugar. “Especially as Blanche is not the type to get fired. She’s quiet, she works hard, most likely shows up five minutes ahead of time every day—no reason to fire someone like that. Yet, apparently, she has been fired. And now she’s missing. Even stranger.” He started sipping his tea and looked at his brother keenly. “I think you’re ready to go home now anyway, aren’t you?”

  “I’m still not sure,” Bear confessed. “But I think I should.”

  Fish humphed but kept his thoughts to himself.

  Once again Bear opened the card and studied her agitated handwriting. Perhaps Blanche had gone away for the weekend, which might be understandable, if she had lost her job. But why hadn’t she called him if she was in trouble?

  He came back to reality and realized Fish was saying again, “Are you going to eat your roll or can I have it?”

  “I want it,” Bear answered evenly.

  Fish eyed it critically. “I’ll fight you for it.”

  “Not a chance,” Bear said, cracking a smile at his lightweight brother.

  Fish sighed and reached for the hotel phone. “How do you say, ‘Bring me steak and eggs or I’ll slit your throat’ in Italian?” he asked.

  “Look it up in the phrase book,” Bear said absently, and glanced out the window at the sky, whose clouds were streaked like white marble. I’ve been gone for too long.

  Chapter Three

  She woke up in a fright when the el train went by, roaring on its elevated tracks like an airborne dragon. And then she remembered where she was. In a ground floor room at the back of St. Catherine’s High School, in what had formerly been a dismal office cubicle—as she had reason to know—but which had now been transformed with pale paint and soap into a room with a distinctly monastic air. There was nothing in the room but a cot and a chair and a small crucifix on the wall. For the first time in a long while, she felt safe.

  Breathing deeply, she blinked at the glow of a streetlight coming in through the one window high up in the sturdy thick block wall. It was still night outside, and she could hear the screeching of tires and the thudding of boom boxes. It was perhaps twenty-four hours since her escape.

  Eventually the rattle and screech of the metallic dragon passed, vanishing into the night. The subdued aftermath passed for silence, enough for her to think about sleeping again. At least it was cooler in this basement room.

  It was a paradox. St. Catherine’s was her old high school, the place she had dreaded going to for an entire wretched senior year and which she had sought refuge from, day after dreary, miserable day. And now, in a surprising reversal, it had become the place of refuge for her. Here, of all places, she now felt safe.

  Everything in my life is turning into its mirror image. I’m not safe at home or with my family. I’m only safe in the dark and tangled woods of the City where no one I know can find me. I’m on the other side of the looking-glass…

  Stop thinking, she told herself curtly. Stop extrapolating. Stop drawing connections between things that aren’t really connected. The whole point is, you’re safe.

  Curling up on the hard but comfortable cot-bed, she tried to get herself to relax again. Safe. An ironic term. Particularly when part of the enemy was herself. Her intuition. Her imagination.

  But there is a real enemy out there, she told herself. Hadn’t last night confirmed just that?

  You’ve been jumping at shadows and seeing threats in ordinary conversations all summer, the other side of her said sternly. Calm down. Don’t think about it now. Just let it go.

  But no, no, no! I’m not deranged! Someone really was after me!

  But why? It makes no sense.

  In an attempt to explain herself to herself, she tried to rebuild the events of the preceding days like a tenuous house of cards, trying to see if the structure would hold. It was still wavering.

  Would you really be thinking that this was anything but a freak incident if you hadn’t been working off the supposition that you were in danger in the first place?

  That’s not the point. The point is, I’m in trouble. All right, most likely I’m in trouble. How can I escape?

  A partial answer emerged from her construction work, a face card balanced tremulously on two others. I could go to him. I need to talk to someone, and he might understand, even though … it involves him.

  Rubbing the back of her head painfully, she sat up and looked around for a clock to check the time, and then realized there was none. She had no way of knowing what time it was. But even if she was crazy, she was rational enough to know that this time, the witching hour of the City, was no time to go outside alone. No matter how important it was for her to get help.

  I’ll wait until tomorrow morning, she thought. I can slip out sometime tomor
row, and come back here if I need to. At least one more time, I’ve got to go and see him, and tell him everything that’s happened.

  The realistic side of her concurred. At the very least, you need to get a second opinion. Since you can’t reach Mom or Rose, and Bear isn’t here…

  It was ludicrous, ludicrous to think she could begin to handle this by herself, without her family or her friends. But I’m alone, both sides of her merged into agreement. For better or for worse, this is my battle. For sanity. For my life.

  Mentally discarding the pack of cards and her efforts to reconstruct the past few days, she closed her eyes, wishing for sleep. She tried to think about something that had nothing to do with this situation, nothing to do with the cold black and red calculus of jacks, queens, kings, and aces.

  Her hand on her heart, she tried to breathe deeply again. She could never remember dreaming, but perhaps she could escape into memories, memories of things that had been, that were wound up with wishes of how things might be—

  Remember before this all happened, she told herself. Back when you felt like you were a princess and that nothing terrible was going to happen to you ever again…

  * * *

  Till it has loved, no man or woman can become itself… Emily Dickinson had said that, and it was true. At least, the girl felt it was true.

  Holding his hand. Walking close to him, in the enclosed garden, shielded from the wind. They had been at a museum, and he had suggested they go outside and walk in the cloister gardens, even though it was the beginning of January.

  “I love walking in gardens in the winter time,” he had said abruptly, as they paced around the perimeter of the perfectly square garden, cut into four shapely but simple quadrants.

  “Why?” she had asked, leaning against his dark brown overcoat.

  “Because in the winter time, you can see them for what they really are. Their true shape. They say a truly well-designed garden is beautiful even in the winter, when to the eye, all its growth is barren and sleeping,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”

  She looked around. It was not a particularly elaborate garden. At the center of its four quadrant beds was a font of water, drained at this time of year. There were a few trees, the winter remnants of plants and a lawn, and the arches of the medieval-style architecture surrounding the little space. The winter air made everything seem gray, black, and silver—the roof tiles, the pillars, the forked branches of the naked trees. “It’s very simple.”

  “It doesn’t need to be more complex,” he said. “Does it?”

  “No, you’re right,” she said with a sigh. “It’s irreducible beauty.”

  She had been perfectly happy that day, wearing the white dress he had given her, still in that festive mood of the days that followed Christmas like trailing banners. Once again, she wondered how she, a very ordinary girl, had found herself in this situation. There was nothing particularly unusual about her. She didn’t think she was extraordinarily beautiful or fascinatingly charming. For most of her life, she had been utterly typical—a rather shy, not noticeably talented person who did fairly but not unusually well in school, played the piano with average talent, a girl who was inclined to be bookish but certainly not a genius. And from time to time, she had odd senses about things, senses that were troubling, but usually accurate.

  And yet somehow she had acquired a rather extraordinary boyfriend, and she still wasn’t sure how that had happened.

  “I still feel as though a unicorn has followed me home and wanted to be my friend, and I’m not sure what to do next,” she murmured.

  He had laughed at her analogy as he pushed back his dark unruly hair, shorn of its recent dreadlocks but already growing shaggy again. “Why a unicorn?” he asked, feeling his forehead. “Is it the horn?” They had just seen the Unicorn Tapestries a few minutes ago, so the image should have struck him as natural.

  She laughed a little. “It’s just that—I’ve always liked unicorns, but I’ve always been afraid of them at the same time.” She felt silly, explaining. What she meant was that there was a mystery and a wonder about Bear, even now.

  “I never believed in them before,” she said truthfully after a moment. “I always thought they were myths. I never thought I’d find someone like you.”

  He had looked at her then, with his dark brown eyes, which always seemed to see more of her than she saw of herself. And as usual, she felt self-conscious, and a bit afraid, mixed with a generous amount of pleasure at being appreciated. To hide her feelings, she traced a finger around the cold edge of the empty stone font. It was astonishing how different it was to be close to a young man. She still hadn’t gotten over how fundamentally unlike girls guys were.

  “Do you know, I never believed that girls like you still existed either?” he said, running his own larger hand over the beveled rim of the bowl. “Not today. Not anymore.”

  She couldn’t help smiling at him. “We were laboring under the mutual impression that our species were mythological.”

  He grinned. “Well, now that we have met each other, let’s make a bargain. I’ll believe in you if you believe in me. Is that fair?”

  “That sounds fair to me.”

  “Should we shake on it?”

  And so they did, shaking hands over the font. But he held onto her hand a bit longer than the handshake demanded, and searched her face. Again, she wondered, fleetingly, if this would be the moment they would kiss. He had never really kissed her before. Now as he looked at her, she felt her heart quicken, but for some reason, he seemed to be holding himself back. At last he squeezed and released her hand and turned slowly away.

  “Unicorns can be dangerous companions,” he had said, walking to a further quadrant of the garden, leaving her standing in the center. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you, Blanche. After all, in some ways we are different species.”

  She had thought at first he was referring to the danger she had encountered when he was tracking down a ruthless criminal, but his last remark was cryptic. She waited, to see if he would explain.

  He didn’t. Gazing through the fork of one of the four trees, he looked over at her, a shadow of the old secretiveness about him still. “If I’m taking this slow, can you understand why?”

  “I think I can,” she said, in a small voice. She looked up at the peaked roofs around them, feeling a bit hurt nevertheless. She didn’t understand why he seemed so unsure. Granted, it would probably be difficult for anyone to settle back into normal life after serving an unjust prison sentence, living on the streets, and engaging in a risky undercover investigation for a year or two. Being a witness in two criminal trials hadn’t helped him either. She could appreciate why he was finding it hard, but his uncertainty hurt, even though she knew he wasn’t trying to hurt her.

  He paced around the perimeter of the garden in silence for a few minutes. She watched him from the center, and thought to herself that he was still like a creature of the wild in some respects. “You want to finish college, right?” he had said, apparently changing the subject.

  She was quiet before she answered. “I don’t know.”

  “Why not? I thought you said you wanted to become a nurse, like your mom.”

  She looked at the ground. “I’m not so sure anymore.”

  What she meant, but she couldn’t say it, was that she had been wondering if she really wanted four years of school, only to take a job she wouldn’t be working at very long, because what she really wanted was just to—

  “I thought that if you went to college, maybe I might—try it out too, for a while,” he said at last.

  “Are you sure that college is something that you should just—try?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s not as though I can’t afford it. I’m just not sure if I want to go yet.”

  She was quiet. Despite the fact that according to contemporary mores, there was no difference between men and women, she was realistic enough to realize that his not being sure if he should go to college had entirely d
ifferent ramifications than her own uncertainty. For one thing, when he talked like this, she started to wonder if they should even be dating. It was frustrating, that her college decision was hanging on his. If he went, she wasn’t sure she would go, but if he wouldn’t go, and wouldn’t engage in any kind of decision towards his life direction, she knew she probably should go ahead and make her life plans, regardless of him.

  But yet, she had this inexplicable (and from the modern point of view, foolish and dangerous) urge to plan her whole life around his. She kept wondering if the modern point of view was ultimately the more practical one.

  “I suppose it’s one of the risks of getting involved with unicorns,” she murmured to herself.

  That fabulous monster paced towards her again, frowning. The wind rushed between them, stirring her white skirts around her ankles. She shivered inside her gray cloak.

  “You know I have an errand to do in Europe,” he said at last, kicking at a loose twig on the path.

  “Donating Father Raymond’s treasure to the Vatican Museums,” she said softly.

  “Yes. I’m going to bring them over personally. But once that’s done with, I’ve been thinking of staying over there for a while. Would you mind that very much?” He wasn’t looking at her, but at the twig.

  “No,” she had said, and realized that Bear extending his trip was not altogether unexpected. There had been a lot of tension building up in him over the last few months. Bear still couldn’t talk about much that was troubling him, but she was beginning to see part of it. Maybe better than Bear could see it himself.

  He ruminated, and then looked hopefully at her. “Maybe—if I stay till the summer—maybe you and Rose could come over and visit me. We could do some hiking together. That would be fun.”

  She had to smile at his sudden eagerness, but she dropped her eyes and shook her head. There was the whole issue of money, which hovered constantly between them. Bear was independently wealthy now, and her family had never been well off, particularly since her father had died. She couldn’t afford to go to Europe—she couldn’t even afford to go to community college without student loans—and she didn’t want to remind Bear of that, because it would seem as though she were asking him to pay her way to Europe. He would, in a heartbeat, but she didn’t want to ask. “I don’t think I could,” she said. “I’ve got to work this summer if I’m going to keep taking classes in the fall. Rose is going to be working too. It just wouldn’t be possible, Bear. I’m sorry.”