Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories Read online

  “John Calvin, the Reformer?”

  He snorted. “No, Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes!”

  “Oh,” I said. “That Calvin.” Mrs. Miller used to complain that Nathan did all his reading on the toilet. (The things people tell you when you’re a minister.)

  Nathan shrugged again. “The universe is going through a gawky adolescent period right now. Bending, folding—melting down all the walls. Your lives will soon be more like my life, more like what life is like on this side.

  “But until those barriers are gone completely, I’d rather stay over here on my side.” He turned to Mrs. Miller. “It’s been too long between us, Lil.”

  Something snapped inside my head. I heard it, like the crack of a timber under weight. I tasted wood ash again.

  Mrs. Miller nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. She took a moment to look at him, to really look at him. “Good-bye Nathan.”

  Nathan said nothing in response, but waved to me, then slowly dissolved into the air.

  Mrs. M. tipped her head back and howled. Like one of the Hounds of Hell. The windows rattled. I slapped my hands over my ears. The house began to shake and white-hot flames roared around us. But there was no rage left in her, just sheer, unadulterated grief.

  I reached out, pulled her tiny body against mine, and held her hard. I was no longer afraid. Of her, or anything else.

  Her howling filled me, wound through my body, coursing electric. I tasted her bitter life. It melted in my mouth. The bitterness became turmeric, then lemon rind. I wanted to spit it out of my body, but it was part of me now. Had always been part of me.

  After a long time the howling ebbed. Then slowly, the flames fell back, as this first wave of grief eased.

  Then there was silence. And the gentleness that comes after the long, harsh storm.

  So, the universe is transmogrifying, I thought. Growing up. The dead should know.

  Might as well get used to it, I told myself.

  And so, as I held Mrs. Miller, I rained iris blossoms on us, right there in her dining room, because I remembered that she said once how much she loved irises. They rained like purple snow, their rich sweetness surrounding us, filling the air we breathed.

  Originally published in On Spec Summer 1999 Vol 11 No 2 #37

  Steven Mills lives in Burnaby, BC, with the delight of his heart, Holly Phillips, in a tiny 17th floor apartment with a cat who is rather unsure of her own mind. His first short story sale was to On Spec! He has published over a dozen stories and one novel, Burning Stones.

  No Such Thing as an

  Ex-Con

  Holly Phillips

  Was it irony that when Kev told her the company had won the bid for the new courthouse park, the only thing Emily felt was relief? Relief that Mr. Berl couldn’t use the excuse of a slow spring to fire her. She knew damn well he’d only hired her, an ex-con, because she was Kev’s friend.

  (No such thing as an ex-con, Bernice had told her the morning of the parole hearing.)

  Even when she was there, planting with the rest of the crew, Emily didn’t give it much thought. The new courthouse was nothing like the old one, it sparked no memories. She dug holes and tried to remember what had been on that corner before. As a bike courier, she’d known every building in every block this side of the river. Still hard not to miss the riding, but at least she was fit again. No hope of getting her old job back, of course, a felon isn’t bondable.

  Felon. Convict. Accessory to murder.

  Stomp the spade deep, heave out the heavy load of black wet dirt. The hole had to be big, they were putting in four-year-old elms here, American elms that could resist the blight.

  “Emily Lake.” The man’s voice asserted rather than questioned.

  Emily looked up. “Detective Bailor.” She shook off her gloves and cap, raked her short hair into spikes and jammed the cap back on.

  “I heard you were out,” he said. “What was it, three years?”

  “And a half.” With a kind of delayed shock, the hatred she’d once learned for that raspy smoker’s voice welled up and burst in her chest like a bubble of mud.

  He nodded once, looked her over. Looked over the worksite. Nodded again and left, crossing the plaza to climb the stairs to the courthouse doors. The rain started up again, dripping off the bill of her cap. She pulled on her wet gloves and went back to her shovel.

  “So who was that?” Kev asked when they quit for lunch.

  “Some guy,” Emily said, shoulders hunched, face like stone.

  No such thing as an ex-con.

  Ugly, running into Bailor like that, but she couldn’t blame him for the nightmares. Those were already waiting, same as they always were, filling her boarding house room like the fat stench of decay. Memory. What god laughed when he came up with that one?

  The women, of course, mute ghosts haunting her in memory as they’d haunted her in fact. And the dreams of murder, the ache of terror when she’d been sure she was going nuts, the unbearable relief of the letter to the cops, that had not, in the end, been any kind of relief at all. All of that in Emily’s mind as she showered off the mud and sweat, ate a sandwich and crawled into bed. She only knew she cried in her dreams by the pain in her throat in the morning, every morning.

  Bailor came again, of course. She was checking the inventory of the plants just delivered by the nursery. Another rainy day, the sheets of paper on the clipboard were soaked and flimsy, hard to read. She was trying to decide if that was 10 junipers or 18 when that familiar rasp said, “They working you hard?”

  It had to be a 10, because otherwise they were short by nine plants. “Yeah.” Her pencil made a hole in the paper.

  “Had any more dreams?”

  God, she thought wearily, what a shit. But when she looked up, she saw no mockery in his small blue eyes. He looked uneasy behind the cop’s moustache. All the same, she said, “Screw you, Bailor.”

  He snorted, “You used to have better manners.”

  “Yeah, well, prison’s funny that way.” She dropped her eyes to the clipboard, made a careful note.

  “Actually,” Bailor said, and stopped.

  Rain pattered on the plaza bricks, on the inventory list, on the bill of her cap. She looked up.

  Bailor stood, raincoat bunched up so he could shove his hands in his pockets, watching dirt spill from a tear in a root ball’s burlap cover.

  “Actually,” he said again. Then, “Aww, to hell with it.” He turned and stomped away, growling over his shoulder, “See you around, Lake.”

  At night, the dreams.

  Bailor’s smoker’s voice, “Look at this.” A woman’s face, teeth bared above the ruin of her throat. “Look at this.” The smell of stale smoke on his breath. The slashes across her breast. “Look.” Photographs of death. “Look.” Mementos of torture. “Look at this. Look at it, damn you!”

  “I’ve already seen it!”

  “Where?”

  “Right there!” Pointing to the empty corner at his back. Empty in his eyes. Not hers.

  “Don’t give me that shit.” Small blue eyes in the red slab of his face. “Don’t you dare give me that shit.”

  “But it’s true. I can’t help it. You think I wouldn’t rather be crazy? You think I wouldn’t rather do anything than live with this? With . . . them?”

  But dream-Bailor is gone and only the women are left. Amanda. Glennis. Cherie. Pam. They wear the wounds of their murders scrawled across the bodies no one but Emily can see. Pam stares with empty eye sockets. Glennis holds her own guts in her hands. Amanda’s bloated and soft from the nights in the river. The nights she’d waited until Emily had written the letter to the cops telling them where to find her. Amanda, Glennis, Cherie, Pam, in death and rage, crowding close. Until she wakes.

  When she showed up at the worksite, Kev took one look and said, “You look like shit. Nobody’ll fire you if you take a day off.”

  To do what, watch the empty corners of her rented room? “I’m fine.” The nursery’s
delivery truck was already there, beep beeping as it backed over the curb. Emily tossed her lunch bag into Kev’s truck and headed over.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I’m fine,” she told him, face hard as concrete.

  No such thing as an ex-con. It was there in his face. “Sor-ry,” he said. They unloaded the plants in silence.

  The sun came out that afternoon and the work drew a small crowd of onlookers, people on their way to or from the courthouse. Every gray raincoat that stopped pulled Emily’s head around, all afternoon, until a scowl was fixed on her face. But Bailor didn’t show until quitting time.

  “You need a lift home?” Kev asked her.

  “No thanks,” She crumpled up her lunch bag, her eyes evading his. “I’ll take the bus.”

  “Suit yourself.” He jerked open the driver’s side of his truck, then said, “If you’re in some kind of trouble, I hope you know you can ask me for help.”

  “Yeah.” She stuffed the lunch bag in her jacket pocket. “Thanks.”

  “I put myself out on a limb, getting you this job.”

  “I know.”

  Kev shrugged, climbed into his truck. “See you Monday.” He slammed the door, started the engine. Drove off, leaving muddy tire tracks across the plaza.

  Emily turned and waited for Bailor to approach. He looked as tired as always, permanent stains around his eyes. He was still walking when she said, “What the hell do you want with me?”

  “You need a ride?”

  Her stomach churned, scalding her throat. “Yeah.”

  He turned, jerked his head for her to follow.

  He drove a Ford sedan, newish but already dented in the driver’s door. There were paper cups stained with old coffee on the passenger side. Emily stomped them flat with her boots. Bailor started up the car and backed out of his parking spot. Reserved for police vehicles only.

  He said, “So how’s it going, now you’re outside? You’re on parole, right?”

  “Eighteen months to go.”

  “That’s a pretty good job you got there. You’re lucky. What’d you do before, bike messenger, right? How come you didn’t go back to that?”

  “You need to be bonded.”

  “Oh yeah? I didn’t know that.” He stopped at the lot exit. “So, where am I taking you?”

  “Broadbent and Third.”

  “Okay.” He pulled out, cutting off a tentative town car. “What I said the other day. When I asked if you’d had any dreams again. That was kind of the wrong thing to say.”

  “No shit.”

  “Thing is.” His thick fingers tightened on the wheel. The first two on his right hand were stained yellow, but the car smelled mostly of old coffee and dog. There was a pale stripe across the ring finger on his left hand. He cleared his throat and swallowed. “Thing is, I didn’t mean it that way. I mean,” his hands so tight the bones showed at his knuckles, “I actually want to know.”

  Emily stared out the windscreen, squinting through the tension. “You sure the hell never did before.”

  “Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat again. “How come you never copped a plea when we had your whole damn confession?”

  “That wasn’t a confession. That was . . . you know what that was.”

  “Yeah, right. Psychic bullshit. Even your dumb-ass public defender knew you were going down. Even if,” he added, in a mutter, “Slobodski did say he never heard of you.”

  She leaned her head back against the seat. “I couldn’t plead guilty to something I didn’t do.”

  “Man,” he said, still as if talking to himself. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The way you tore into the prosecutor, screaming about ghosts and dreams, the judge banging her gavel . . .”

  Another nightmare, a different kind. Emily closed her eyes. “What do you want, Bailor?”

  They were crossing the bridge, she could tell by the way he rode the gas and brake. Rush hour traffic. She would have been home by now if she’d ridden her bike.

  “You read the newspapers?” Bailor finally said.

  “No.”

  More silence, as if he were chewing it over. “I got a case. Child abduction. Fifteen years a detective and this is the first one I’ve had. Couple of boys. First one seven weeks ago, the second one just last week. Both of them eight years old, both of them kidnapped right out of their beds. Good families, no divorces, no angry grandparents. Everything says stranger abduction, and with two kids gone now . . .”

  Emily rolled her head to look at his face and recognized the hard look there. Desperation. She’d felt it from the inside.

  “What do you want from me?” she said, but it wasn’t really a question anymore. She just wanted to hear him say it. Her guts like a fist clenched under her ribs.

  It didn’t look like it was any easier for him, but he got it out: “I need your help.”

  “Again,” she said. “You need my help again.”

  Bailor clenched his hands on the wheel, and his jaw on the words he still refused to say.

  He dropped her off on the corner; she wouldn’t tell him the number of the house. Not that he couldn’t find out easily enough. He handed her a business card with his pager number scribbled on the back.

  “Listen,” he said as she climbed out of the car, “these kids . . . They don’t have forever.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  He leaned across the seat to see her face. “You know how many women Slobodski would have killed if we hadn’t caught him? That’s how many kids this freak could kill. You know what I’m saying?”

  She propped her arms on the roof of the car. “Do you believe I never knew Slobodski, or those women, or saw any of the murders except in dreams? Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe I told the truth?”

  He straightened and put the car in gear. “What I believe,” he said, “is that I will do any goddamn thing it takes to find those kids. Any goddamn thing at all.”

  She pushed off from the car. “Go to hell, Bailor.” She slammed the door and he drove off, turned the corner without signalling, and was gone.

  According to his card, Bailor’d made sergeant since her trial. Detective Sergeant Willis G. Bailor.

  She wondered what the G stood for.

  When the cops had arrived at her door, she actually cried with relief, though they’d mistaken it for fear. The ride to Headquarters had been almost a pleasure. The whole world brighter, the November sunshine rich as gold, as her relief that she was not insane. What she had dreamed was true. But then, sitting in the interview room, she realized the dead women were still with her, naked, expressionless. Dead. And then the questions. How did she know about the body in the river? How did she know the details of the crimes? Why did she tell no one sooner? And especially, repeated so often the words blurred into sound: Who was he, who was the killer?

  And all she could say was, “I dreamed their murders. I see their ghosts. I don’t know who he is.” While the dead women watched from their corner.

  And then being locked into that narrow cell, she and the four dead women, blind Pam, disemboweled Glennis, bloated Amanda, breastless Cherie. That night, that was the heart of all her nightmares, when she first knew that she had fallen so far into hell she might never climb out again.

  I dream their murders. I see their ghosts. I don’t know who he is.

  She dreamed them still. The only thing that had changed was that now she had a face for him, the murderer, whose hair was cropped and clean and whose eyes were small and brown and so shallow they were almost blank. She saw him often in the news, waiting for her own trial, charged with accessory to murder after the fact—just the one count, for Amanda whose body she had told them how to find. Of course she was an accessory, however strenuously Slobodski, the killer, denied it. Because after all, how else could she have known?

  She’d known she would be convicted. The plea they’d offered would have gotten her half the time—a generous one, the prosecutor said, because she had at least told them wher
e to find Amanda. And although no one ever said as much, it had been finding Amanda that led Bailor to the witness who’d seen the van Slobodski’d driven. That was the big break in the case, and the deal was the only way they could bring themselves to thank her—the only way short of believing her. But how could she take that deal, say she had conspired to cover up the killer’s crimes, when she knew better than any but his victims just exactly what those crimes were? She couldn’t, not even when he was convicted, not even when he hanged himself in his cell, not even when the dead women had left her at last, satisfied by his death.

  Because of course, they hadn’t really left her at all.

  She still dreamed them every night.

  Imagine if they were children, how much worse those dreams might be.

  She called Bailor’s pager at dawn, sitting on the bottom stair by the pay phone. A cold draft seeped under the front door and across her bare feet. She pulled her hands up her sleeves as she waited for Bailor to call her back. It took him about a minute and a half.

  “Bailor.”

  “Do you know what you’re asking me to do?”

  A breath. “Emily.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m asking you to help me find a couple of kids.”

  “You’re asking me to climb back down into hell.”

  Silence.

  “Bailor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I lived those women’s murders. Do you realize that? Can you imagine what it’s like?”

  “I know exactly what that’s like.”

  “Why, because you saw their bodies?”

  “I talked to their families—”

  “I felt his knife!” Silence. “You really don’t give a shit what happens to me, do you?”

  “Do you care what happens to those kids?”

  She propped her head on her knees and whispered into the phone. “Tell me you believe me.”