Alysse Aallyn

Category: Murder Confessions

  • Depraved Heart: a crime novel

    Chapter Two — Ménage

    Long before the Palladian window adorning the ornate double stair looked out over a yellow-taped crime scene I preferred the other staircase. Unfortunately since the murder the windows show a really bad view. We’re not allowed to fix up the pool area because the jury might request a field trip. Wouldn’t you go anywhere you could, if you were sequestered in a room full of nose-pickers and butt-scratchers? Even nose-pickers and butt-scratchers don’t want to be around other people’s butts and noses.


    The servants’ stair — we call it the children’s stair because that’s the part of the house we inhabit — has no windows at all. Its view is strictly into the past; that’s where most of the family pictures hang. Oz doesn’t care for “frozen moments;” he believes in living in the present. Even though I’m only eighteen I know the present doesn’t help a writer. The past is where it’s at. Ever since I can remember I’ve touched those photos ritualistically on my way downstairs. I like the past, unlike Shelley, who feels embarrassed by last year’s styles. “I can’t believe we looked so stupid!” Memories are a writer’s language.


    Trevor used to play a game with me called “The Monster”. I would stand at the bottom of the stairs, giggling at the delicious inevitability of it all, while Trevor, starting out as himself, evolved step by step into this roaring Hulk-like creature coming down to scoop me up and bear me away to his cave. That’s my metaphor for the quiet game of Who Am I Today? I play every morning by myself. By the bottom step I’ve decided what face to wear.


    The back stairs were usually safest because Oz and Colleen had lots of parties and I don’t like noisy, drunken strangers. People in groups act least like their real selves, so it’s pointless trying to get to know them.


    “Put on your party face,” Colleen would wheedle, “and try to be pleasing,” but that doesn’t work for me. If you try to be your idea of “pleasing” then aren’t the “people” that you meet projections of yourself? Pardon my boredom over mirrored games of mime; I’m interested in truth. I’m starting to think only one on one does a palimpsest of reality emerge.


    “Palimpsest” is my favorite new word. Words have layers of meanings because they’re composed of “morphemes”; a morpheme being the part that makes sense. Some morphemes are “bound”, (just like some people) which means they must be attached to something else, they can’t stand alone. So words have memories, not just strength. They trail all the meanings, all the affinities, all the throw-downs they’ve ever had.


    Palimpsest means writing that’s imperfectly erased and then overwritten, so that you can see the various additions of thought showing through like the layered cities of an archaeological dig. I can’t think of a better description of the way memory works. Artists always have to see through to what’s underneath and not be distracted by surfaces, however shiny and alluring they appear.


    I was scheduled to go into the writing program at Arizona but I here I am suffering without choice through something actually worth writing about. I’m stuck here; this material is forced on me. I’d rather write about somebody else’s misfortune. Writing about something while it’s happening is like simultaneously trying to get your sea-legs and not throwing up, an experience I’ve been through, since Oz considers sailing part of a “classical” education. My body says it’s not for me.


    Oz grants that I’m “earthbound” but he always did reach conclusions about people much too fast. Sailing inspired my first poem, How Not to Throw Up, which, like all first poems, is pretty bad. Oz says writing poetry’s like having sex, just plunge in. Get the first time over with so you can really get started.


    I say now rhyming “puke” with “poop” doesn’t work, but I was only six. Though written out of deeply felt experience, now in maturity I see that it is usually better to just throw up and not hold it in. Return to port and let the internal and external chaos subside, which is probably what I should do now about these present circumstances.


    At any rate I could certainly do a better job of writing about this than the tabloids do, that’s for sure. Talk about shiny surfaces! Swimming Pool Slaughterhouse! is a headline you can see all the way from frozen foods. Then they add an exclamation point, punctuation Oz says you should never use. I say there are plenty of times when nothing else will do.


    A possible headline might be, “What Happened on My Summer Vacation, or How Dad was Arrested for Murdering my Mom.” But I digress, which is why no one but me should ever read my diary. It makes me look offensively scatterbrained, when it’s just an artisan dumping out her tools so she can take a good look at everything she’s got. It will never make any sense to anybody but me.
    “Palimpsest” replaces “octothorp”, which is the proper name of that number sign on the telephone. It also means any eight-pronged thing. I can turn Jake red with rage just by calling him an octothorp.
    So back to my morning ritual. Just writing it out makes me happy. No nightmare can be so bad that this walk downstairs fails to dissipate its fug. If I pause in the hush at the top of the stairs I can feel the photographs waiting with me, yearning for me to touch them like pets, leaning companionably out of their frames, offering their support.


    First comes Oz’s father, The Scary General, who used to break three men before breakfast, then youthful Oz a dead ringer for Jake, almost unbearably handsome in his West Point whites, then Colleen so incredibly young and hopeful at her first wedding, so starry-eyed at her second, then Skylar in full graduation regalia, Shelley in a tutu with her crane’s legs encased in pink, Jake posing all cavalier with epee and saber. Christmas in Rome, Easter in Las Vegas, Bastille Day in Paris, Canada for the fishing season, Oz’s birthday (he calls it Hurricane Day — he says they can’t start without him) on the Outer Banks. Colleen in the garden wearing gloves because her eczema’s acting up, Jake teasing bears, Shelley in Jackie O sunglasses, Skylar in a hat worthy of a Queen’s garden party and Oz stark naked cooking fish on an outdoor grill. There I am holding both my breath and a beating fish-heart in the palm of my hand.


    This is the only picture ever taken of me when I wasn’t aware I was being photographed, so of course it’s my favorite. We artists prefer the real thing whenever we can get it.


    Somewhere in the hall behind me a door banged, making me jump. Jake returning to his own room, most likely. Party’s over, and the work of the day – which in his case means properly representing your caste – begins.


    More pictures posed on the lawn at Napier, the prep school I alone didn’t graduate from, because I was thrown out ignominiously for smoking Queen Anne’s lace and then telling the truth about it. (It’s god-awful stuff, thanks for asking.)


    Cats and babies land on their feet; turns out I prefer public school because as long as you’re not a discipline problem they let you do pretty much whatever you want. Here the teachers are afraid of the students instead of the other way around and that seems fair to me: if we pay the bills aren’t they employees? In Oz’s colorful phrase, the boss’ dick won’t suck itself.


    The art teachers there were touchingly grateful for someone like me to play with. Incredibly, (to my family at least), I think they understood art a lot better than the teachers at Napier ever would. At Napier “original” is an insult. I was also allowed to satisfy my math requirement with a program I found on the Internet, and they let me use my poem cycle “Having Sex With Lord Byron” as my English final. Conserve your gunpowder says Oz. Multi-tasking be damned. “Precocious” or “preconscious” are the only two choices.


    In public school if you read a book they’re impressed. I could read whatever the hell I felt like without being told it was politically incorrect or inappropriate or passé or just wouldn’t get me ahead, which is the Napier school mantra.


    Oz didn’t want me to go to public school either but when I pointed out he was the one who said writers need to have adventures, he admitted “Touché”. He says anyone can get a good education reading everything they can find and our house has a super library. While Colleen and Trevor worried noisily about what kind of people I’d be hanging out with, Oz gave me a pseudonym “Velda Chai” (means “wild thing”) in gratitude for his screen name. Considering that “education” is a process of sifting through contradictory and self-serving facts trying to figure out what’s what, I think I designed a very good education for myself. History may frustrate, but art does not lie.
    Then there’s the extra benefit that at public school you never have to see the inside of a gym if you really don’t want to — they want the talentless to stay away from sports. So there you are, free as a bird at two in the afternoon. What’s not to like?


    The family complaint about me is that I don’t listen. At least I think that’s what they said – I wasn’t paying attention at the time. Artists must tune in selectively. You’re building a house of cards inside your head; the least disturbance brings the structure down.


    Trevor says my problem comes from being the baby and never getting any discipline. Oz’s military regime for the two boys was very watered down when it came to us. Things that made his neck cords stand out with his sons produced a “whatever” when it came to me. I think this is another example of Trevor shortchanging himself; underestimating his own power. Oz knew if he ragged on me he had Trevor to deal with. Trevor is my “parfait gentil knight”. And there’s age. When Oz got older, he was less interested in family. Hobbies absorbed his interest.


    There are three pictures of Trevor. My favorite, touched superstitiously as I descend, captures a microexpression so fleeting the others don’t think it looks like Trevor at all. When he’s suffering he gets this dog-like remote look; I call it Praetorian Nightshift. He really hates having his picture taken because of the adolescent acne thing, but he’s too proud to seem vain and so this expression says, “Bring it on.” So Trevor.


    Colleen, who claimed to keep her own allergies in check with the power of positive thinking, had him visiting trendy charlatans, getting shots, bathing in cold water and banned from eating anything really delicious. She ultimately swore it was her “fleuroceuticals” that cured him, using him as a before-and-after success story to his undying embarrassment. I’m sure really he just exerted the power of his amazing will.


    I learned to copy him; in my sophomore year I found the most satisfying way to fend off family paparazzi was a faceful of henna tattoos. The resulting hysteria was so enjoyable I went out and got a tongue stud. Trevor worried I would sound different, but thanks to Shelley’s vocal exercises it’s invisible unless I flaunt it. I can twist it out through my lips with my tongue and protrude it at people I don’t like. How I thrill to the shrieks of the squeamish.


    After Trevor’s skin cleared he refused dermabrasion because I told him the ripples around his chin look like dueling scars. He told me it was me he’d been dueling for and I said when I get famous he can consider those scars a check to cash.


    Trevor has other embarrassing pictures — the “hairy one”, where he’s wearing such wild sideburns Oz called them “côtes sauvages”. Everyone made such fun of him he’s allowed barely a speck of hair on his body since. He shaves like a racer. He wasn’t good at sports the way Jake was; a fact his father ceaselessly drew attention to. You’d think Oz the debater would value his Dean’s list son, but with Trevor he acted as if the physical stuff was more important. He never criticized Jake for needing a harem of assistance to complete any intellectual project.


    Down at the bottom of the stairs are all the baby pictures, so here are the ones of me, the little red-headed spheroid everyone wanted to hold. I was just so gosh darn cute. Oz says kids live in the moment, the way you’re supposed to live. I guess infancy is his “beau ideal” of mental health.
    Being the baby means I lack grown-up pictures, like me in the to-die-for strapless gown of violent purple ribbed with royal blue (our school colors – go Mudskippers!) taken at graduation, the event we were celebrating the night Colleen died. God knows what’s become of those pictures. Well, God and Colleen. Probably the police have them, they took everything else.


    As I said before, Oz eschews family photographs. Over his desk sits only that famous one Lewis Carroll took of his muse, Alice Liddell. If the cops knew it was titled “Open Your Mouth and Shut Your Eyes”, would they have dragged it away with the rest of the porn?


    At the bottom of the stairs I slow because I’ll run into someone — usually Mina but maybe Craig – and all I want is to slurp the strongest coffee in silence. Yes, the lawyers are staying in the house, Craig Axelrod, imported from what he calls The Other America, says it’s to keep the cops from bugging the house with listening devices.


    Mina says it’s really because Craig despises the Marriott, and there’s no five star hotel closer than Fairfax. I think they just want to be close to us, the way the press does, because now we’re celebrities. Trevor says Thank God anyway because he’s the one who has to pay the bills. It does sort of destroy any shreds of privacy we might have had to clothe ourselves.


    I peek around the corner and yup, there’s Craig’s assistant Mina Pyloti, an early riser sitting all collapsed-looking at the twelfth century French refectory table. Contrary to what the needlepoint pillows want to have you believe, it is possible to be too thin. Mina is tall and gangly, with pointy bones sticking out in all directions, looking more like a challenge round of pick-up-sticks than anything walking down a runway.


    Oz, who treasures thinness (he used to give Skylar hell) would say it’s just her posture, Colleen would have said it’s the way she thinks about herself, but I say some people need meat on their bones. Whatever she is, she’s sitting squarely between me and a life-giving cuppa Joe. If I had any money, I’d buy a coffeemaker for my room and never come downstairs. But there are no more allowances for any of us because of trial expenses, which is why it burns me up so much when the tabs portray us as spoiled rich kids.


    If I could pry Fayette away from Trevor I could maybe get some cash out of him, but his attention is shredded and Fayette not only barks, she bites.


    Well, I have to face Mina at some point. If only she didn’t come equipped with some kind of mother complex about us Poor Orphans. Innocence Demands Rescue is the legal concept she quoted as, oohing and goo-ing, she mauled my head and shoulders upon meeting me. More likely it’s her biological clock gonging away. She’s that age.


    She doesn’t move as I step out on the distressed-tiled floor (Colleen “rescued” these tiles from a dairy somewhere—probably they weren’t even grateful) and cross over to the coffeemaker. It’s only just been started; can the case be going that badly already? Mina isn’t reading the newspaper; there are no court documents spread before her, instead she sits, head in hands. Hangover?
    Untouched in front of her is a bowl of bark-and- twig breakfast cereal reputed to “spark” the system. Was she sorrowing over her irreparably filthy colon?


    I take a mug – my favorite, labeled It’s Never Too Late to Start Procrastinating and pour myself a sludge of black gold.


    Mina isn’t even dressed. Still garbed in her kimono. Who gave her permission to treat this public place as a forecourt to her boudoir? Even for an attorney with the ordained dispensation of cataloging a family’s most disgusting derelictions this seems too familiar. Where was the verve with which she processed our public misery as recently as yesterday? If like most people she lives entirely vicariously, viewing her own life as distasteful downtime, then reveling in our misfortune should have the effect of making her more real to herself, no? No revelry here. She looked almost like a real human being, one who really suffers. Or suffers at the suffering of others.


    Why was I so uncooperative with Jake last night? If I’d accepted his offer, wouldn’t I have his Porsche keys by now? I know he has charge cards. He charges, Trevor pays, Fayette screams. That’s the division of labor. I could be at Starbucks now, shaking my head over the morning paper like all the other people who aren’t in it. Ever since Trevor sold the spare vehicles around this place joyriding has been a thing of the past. The limo is a rental. You’d have to arm-wrestle Spike for it.
    She knew I was there. She looked at me over her little glasses and said quietly, “I’m afraid we’ve had very bad news, Brontë. You might not want to go to court today.”


    I was in the process of writing “milk” rather pathetically on the magnetized refrigerator list. Whose duty it was to attend to this list might be unclear, but without a car I was well out of it. Clearly Mina had used the last of the milk and I was now sentenced to as many scrapings of powdered creamer as I could extract from an age-encrusted jar. She should be apologizing about that, I was thinking, and not telling me that on day two of the trial the news was already bad my fragile psyche couldn’t deal with it. Had Oz been killed in a prison brawl? Did he escape, or maul a prison guard? There wouldn’t be a trial today if any of those things were true. No plea bargain, I knew that, because I eavesdropped on Oz turning it down. That was when I heard about things like “depraved indifference” and “reckless disregard”.


    Mina told me later the law school definition of a “depraved heart” killing is someone opening the lion’s cage at a crowded zoo and not caring what happens. Or, say, leaving an uncovered pool in a state of disrepair for people to fall into.


    But Oz said no.


    So what could it be?


    Mina took off her glasses and fixed me with her big, nearsighted eyes. Her eyes aren’t so bad. She should wear contacts to let people know she’s trying. Without makeup, without those little emo glasses she looked nothing like a high powered attorney’s high-powered assistant, but a forest creature flushed unwillingly by bulldozer.


    She said, “Maybe you’d better sit down.”


    Maybe I can’t take this. The last time anybody cared about whether I was stayed vertical or folded at the knees was the morning after graduation when I staggered downstairs with the mother of all hangovers to be told Colleen was dead. I went down then. I went way down. How Not to Throw Up should have been a much better poem.


    Had those distant relatives always trying to get custody of me and Shelley finally managed to score? Oz warned the trial would bring them around like flies. All that Sturm und Drang had ceased when I finally turned sixteen. Now Shelley and I are too old to be passed around the country like a pair of homeless kittens.


    So I sat. “What is it?”


    “They’re bringing your mother into the case,” said Miss Pyloti, and she blinked rapidly as if she might cry for me.


    I think I sat for a few moments with my face all crumpled, hearing sounds, but not hearing meaning. It was the English language, I guess, but it didn’t make sense.

  • Depraved Heart :a crime novel

    Bronte’s stepfather is on trial for his life. But is he the real murderer or is it one of the multiple suspects in Bronte’s own house?

    Chapter One — Midnight

    On the first night of the trial Jake came into my room to offer me his body. I knew what he was up to. I was lying in bed reading Dostoevsky’s Raw Youth, still enveloped in the web of his prose and looking up from my circle of light saw him close the bedroom door with an air of uncharacteristic caution. Jake seems to want people to think he can have anyone; but according to Big Brother Trevor his daredevil pretense is just a masquerade. Trevor says Jake is ruled by The Group Dynamic and lacks an individual soul. Like some lesser life form, say, fish or bees. But, to quote Trevor, a hundred times zero will always be zero.


    Not that I believe everything Trevor says. Trevor isn’t perfect. Oz, my stepfather, says you can’t trust anyone and you should always be especially skeptical of Special Pleading. So I ask myself, if Trevor has such a low opinion of Jake and his sorry, spiritless homies, how come he goes to all their parties? That those are the only parties worth going to is not an excuse.


    Probably it was Trevor from whom Jake was concealing this current maneuver; Trevor has done everything in his power to put me Off Limits. But Jake was being uncharacteristically over-careful; Trevor has problems of his own — in the person of a high-maintenance, and high-yaller girlfriend, Fayette. Better sleep with one eye open if you have Fayette by your side because you could get a lamp in the face at any moment. Their fights are a reality show all their own, much more interesting than anything on television, like a two-person “Survivor”.


    Lately she’s taken to throwing him out of his own bedroom, so you might come across him wandering the halls at all hours, sleeping upright while moving, like a shark or a horse.
    But Jake averted any run-in by closing the door snappily and locking himself on my side of it, not that our locks are unpickable. Live to tell. Unaware that his strongest argument would be total nudity, he was keeping his court clothes on, possibly out of the old-world Southern gentlemanliness that is such a bizarre feature of our otherwise free-for-all upbringing. I’ve seen Jake naked lots of times, and I’m here to tell you he’s a breathtaking sight, a glamorous swordsman any Sister of Smegma Sigh would be honored to be molested by.


    But I was kind of surprised that he thought he could get me. He had to be desperate. We’ve lived together for fourteen, maybe fifteen years as brother and sister. How can you get romantic about a kid nicknamed “Brownie” because he flunked Toilet Paper? There must be something more at stake. He’d loosened his tie so when he came close enough I could see the pulse beating in his throat. As he settled down on the bed I was grateful for the linen, the silk, the broadcloth, the gabardine and yes, even the bizarre Southern gentlemanliness lying between us. Anything that creates the illusion of choice.


    “Guess today was hard for you, huh,” he said. And tried to put his arms around me.
    Almost fooled me there. Comforting me had always been Trevor’s job and we both knew he was otherwise engaged. While Jake hugged me, testing t my shoulders for deltoid strength, I wondered, was I just wampum in the never-ending fraternal game of one-upsmanship or did he imply that masculinity and a two-year age advantage made watching Oz’s trial for murdering our stepmother more of a breeze for him? I’ve seen other guys produce the “men-don’t-have-feelings” card as a magic talisman when their emotions start to scare them.


    His feelings ought to be more engaged than mine, because, after all, Oz wasn’t my real dad. Plus I’m an artist, so I’m an outsider in the universe as well as in this family. Oz says people become artists out of temperament, rather than ability. He says they better stay wary and emotionally cold, backing away from other people in an effort to get the whole picture. Probably why it comes more naturally to men.


    Technically I wasn’t related to the man who sat so diminished at today’s defense table, looking like a disgraced philosophy professor in his leather patches and clubby tweeds, registering on his sensitive face such shocked reactions to the horrible things the prosecution said about him right out loud; like how he must have come back a second time to make sure his wife was dead and then hit her again, how he calculated so exactly the time for “bleed out” before calling 911. I barely recognized the two people described in either sides’ opening arguments as my adoptive parents, Oz and Colleen.


    The prosecutors said Oz had long since spent his own epic inheritance, was in way over his head with debt, and when Breadwinner Wife tightened the financial screws he threw her twelve feet into an empty swimming pool and kept hammering her from above with some long, cylindrical object when she tried to climb out. Until her head exploded.


    Courtrooms are divided into halves like wedding chapels and we sat on the groom’s side listening while our attorney, like all good things an expensive import, played the 911 tape. Oz’ voice urging paramedics to hurry, conveyed a stark terror that did seem to me a little bit phony. Oz brags about all the wars he’s been in; the guts and dismemberment he’s seen. He doesn’t lose it like that.
    “She’s still breathing!” was the assertion the prosecution said couldn’t be true. All our eyes turned to the man morphing from philosophy professor to Oscar-level actor: was such a thing possible?
    Craig Axelrod told the jury the marriage was not only just fine thank you but legendary among the couple’s family and friends. Plenty of them would soon crowd forward to testify on behalf of the defense. That was the Colleen and Oz I recognized. Of course they had debts; gentlemen are notorious slow to pay because they demand good value. The spirit of noblesse oblige means those to whom so much is given must extend their reach, Craig intoned, real-seeming tears glistening in his eyes. Assets always outweighed debt so where was the emergency? Colleen’s stock options alone were valued at four million dollars, and the house they jointly owned was appraised for two.
    Jake pressed my breasts to his hard chest, patting my back as if burping a baby. Not arousing, more insulting.


    “I thought jury selection was worse,” I said. Jake doesn’t begin to know everything about me, but this was the truth anyway. They had to be “death-qualified”; guess what that means. It means waking up in someone else’s nightmare because I never have dreams that bad.
    “They’ve had it in for us since Oz wrote those letters to the paper,” said Jake. “Imagine a legal process where Bubba and Bubba’s Auntie-Mama are encouraged to say whatever’s in their empty heads.”


    Bubba and Auntie-Mama didn’t look friendly, and they looked at all of us the same way. Although he bought the biggest house in the neighborhood fifteen years ago, Oz never had been really accepted. He would have considered “acceptance” insulting. Deference was more what he had in mind.


    And Oz loves making enemies. He enjoys needling people to see what makes them spit. It’s no accident that his last job for the military was interrogator. He would have water-boarded this lot and somehow they knew it. Probably knew he calls everyone born around here “inbred degenerates.” He says the country is pretty but the people are not.


    He does claim to be proudly American; his first marriage even fell apart because his wife wouldn’t leave Europe. (He calls Europeans “juiceless”.) But Oz is the least democratic of men. He says the founding fathers were naturally elitist and most of the “booboisie” should be drowned at birth. He describes our current governmental system as a “mediocracy.” That’s a combination of “media” and “mediocre”. Guess whose hands he’s fallen into now?


    Since there’s nothing else to do out here in the woods most people watch a lot of TV. Their first requirement in life is a satellite dish; their second is the bomb shelter they think they need after watching all that scary shit. According to Trevor television is a form of sleep-learning. The jury they picked claimed they hadn’t followed the case, so Trevor says that means we ended up the vindictive and the dishonest. Who could have missed the celebrity look-alike talking heads yammering about “socialite couple”, “blood-spattered crime scene”, “unemployed jetsetter”, “executive wife” 24-7. It was the most exciting thing to happen around here since Shiloh.


    Craig tried hard to make Oz sympathetic but he may have made it worse. “Kindly retired military man adopts penniless daughters of dying friend” sounds OK but when the jury looks at us they don’t see two little girls but a pair of well-endowed teens. Then they find out Oz retired on “full disability”, but there’s no disability on view. In fact, for a guy in his sixties, Oz looks fantastic. All those hours in our basement gym.


    Craig won’t let Oz get on the stand because he’d say the disability is the governments’ and he just knows where the bodies were buried. That would really help! Of course Oz wants to testify, he thinks he can charm anyone. Chekhov says we are blind about ourselves and that’s for sure.
    Take Jake, at this moment stroking my hair and pressing on my neck, like he wants me to huddle on his shoulder. All I want to do is smack him. I only wish I could delude myself that the brother who called me Squirt for fourteen years suddenly realizes I’m Hotness Nonpareil. More likely he wants to find out if it’s true what they say about tongue studs. He doesn’t come across many in his circle. It’s not the sort of thing Bitsy takes to college.


    Almost unwillingly I admitted, “It has been horrible.” Wish Trevor were here.
    “Poor Brontë,” said Jake. He placed a hand on my pajamaed thigh.
    Unmistakable. He was mine – for the night – if I wanted him.


    I tried to envision the future. Just how would this change our relationship? Sex always changes relationships, even when the guy swears on Granma’s Bible you’re just “friends with benefits”. Jake maintained a constant criticism of my “Goth” clothes, my “raccoon” eyes, my “bushy” hair, my “worthless public school diploma”. Would any of that change? Would he treat me at least as well as he treats my sister Shelley? He never acts that way toward her. But poor Shelley is but a passive clone; I am an incipient revolutionary, trying to graduate from just frustrating expectations into transforming them, but this murder trial has cramped my style.


    I admit I was tempted. Sex can be so comforting. Unfair that women can’t absorb sex like ice cream. It’s the way men think they can consume us. Those woodenheaded girls who throw down so publicly on Facebook will rue the day, not that you can blame them. I was a high-school slut so I know. Stepping off the cliff without looking doesn’t mean the drop’s not there.
    It’s men’s own faults if they end up with girls who hate sex. They “sportfish” the willing ones — tossing them back — and then they have all this mysterious respect for the lock-kneed. I understand these things because our household suffers from a certain “grandiose dickism.” Colleen was no match for it. The secret is: stop looking for approval, the snag is; less ice cream. Me, I’m making it up as I go along.


    I teased Oz that his coat of arms is a “dick rampant”; that made him laugh. Later I found out Dick Rampant is his screen name. It was the first time I discovered that he valued my ideas.
    Oz is an old-timer suffering from the usual schizoid philosophy: freedom may be everybody doing everything to anybody but no man willingly signs up for a country club without standards. Oz is no feminist; hear him bewailing the fact that women no longer ride sidesaddle. (“It trains the important muscles so perfectly.”) Colleen was too fastidious ever to discuss such matters. If the conversation turned to sex she found something in the kitchen that needed attention, but I overheard her checking with her own daughter, Skylar, just to be sure she was keeping herself “exclusive”.
    Arrest and trial alienated us from town, pretty much mandating a period of celibacy after the inaugural hot-weather skirmishes — you can’t get through graduation summer without them — and I was feeling mighty deprived. I could get philosophical, like Montaigne in his tower, but I’d rather be young.


    Jake might be a step up from the country boys, a sort of Tantric do-over. Jake’s reputation of being “good in bed” probably means he makes love like a girl — going for pores as well as orifices. This is such a rarity I’ve heard you should grab all you can get. He stays friends with all his girlfriends, that’s really a good sign. If I disappeared into the warm cocoon of his harem, would I ever come out?


    Theoretically I should just enjoy him as a body and forget he’s Jake, with incredibly bad taste in music and an indelible fear of spiders. He’s creampuff; wavy pale hair he “forgot” to cut (knowing the effect on us), true-blue eyes (helped out by color contacts), straight patrician features and that smooth, hard, hairless fencer’s body. Mine for the taking. Couldn’t I just allow myself just a brief wallow? I could say I’d “had” Jake. Another notch on my lipstick case, as the poet says.
    Trevor’s spent my lifetime trying to teach me “delayed gratification.” That’s because he’s the delayed gratification poster child and I’m the baby of the family. He makes some good points. Why get sick on pica when there’s real nourishment lying hidden somewhere — waiting to be found?


    I’m too proud to share Jake with the universe. Jake is beyond easy; Jake is a super-slut. And God, he’s so irritating! Theoretically you ought to be able to have sex with a person without conversing with them, but can I abandon myself thoroughly around someone who thinks things are “egregiously good” as well as “egregiously bad”, who spells “nostalgic” as if descended from “nasty”, whose favorite philosopher is Khalil Gibran and whose favorite poet is Eminem? Can’t do it.


    Not even to get a good night’s sleep for once, instead of tossing like a salad or prowling the darkness dodging Trevor. Pretending is hard work, and it’s the opposite direction artists should go. We need to figure out what’s real. Pretenders never care.
    So I cast a jaundiced eye at the hot, hot hand creeping up the cold, cold flesh beneath my Hello Kitty pajamas.


    “No,” I said.
    “Don’t be such a virgin.” He showed his irritation too plainly. Something I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been officially his sister.


    “Who are you calling a virgin?” I snapped, insulted beyond bearing. “Yes I do; just not with you.”
    He tried a new tack, softening his approach and leaning into me, enveloping me with his seductively sleepy breath. “Why shouldn’t we comfort one another?”


    He had me there. Long, cold December night; two eager bodies. Anything wrong with this picture? I could feel myself on the edge of Bad Decisions. Like when you’re at a drive-thru window and you’re way too hungry. In the master scheme of the universe decisions so tiny will vanish as if they’ve never been. You could always deny it later. No one will know.


    I was so mad at him for making me uncomfortable I decided to bounce him a little at the end of his own stick.


    “So what would you do to me if I said yes?” I teased, letting my voice go all throaty.
    He picked up my bare foot and began to kiss it. Inspired! Made me shiver with pleasure. This guy is good.


    “Everything you want one second before you realized you wanted it,” he wheedled, kissing all the way up to my ear. Then he ruined it all by disclosing breathily, “You know he’s innocent.”
    I jerked away. So that was what this was all about! I should have figured it out before; I pride myself on sub-text. I had something he wanted, the old “quid-pro-quo” that passes for lust among the prostitutes of this world.


    Jake doesn’t need intelligence; (luckily for him); he has emotional radar fine-tuned like a bat. His feminine intuition sniffed out my doubt. I sat listening in that courtroom really wanting to know. Disloyal, of course. Couldn’t be allowed.


    Maybe it was just a lucky guess based on my lifelong reputation for oppositional tendencies; always the family holdout. Just this morning in the limo Craig emphasized the importance of a united family front; a manifest belief in Oz’s innocence for all the world to see. “That alone won’t sway a jury,” he told us, “But the lack of it definitely will. If his own family wonders…”


    Usually my dislike of lockstep and groupthink pushes me outside any huddle, but in the hysteria and dread leading to the arrest — the “evidence gathering” phase when the police marched their jackboots through every facet of our lives — I went along with the chant of Absolute Innocence, swaying like a sea fan controlled by a powerful tide. I couldn’t help myself; it was just too scary, like being in a war. But calm reflection is always a subversive thing, as Oz himself would be first to say.
    Saying he didn’t do it, he couldn’t have done it, should be good enough for us, but I wondered. The question, I thought, was not so much whether Oz could have done it, but whether he would tell us if he had.


    A scholar of Machiavelli, a student of the Art of War, Oz makes no bones about favoring “information management”. Information is always managed by somebody. “Sensitive” information is especially need-to-know.


    If it wasn’t an accident, then it was a horrible crime, but Oz can get horribly angry. I’ve seen him scream so loudly at Shelley that she wet herself in front of all of us – and she was seventeen years old.


    Colleen got the worst of it. Marrying him, poor Colleen was absorbed by a force majeure. She was no longer allowed to be herself, because now she reflected on him, and just as the Scary General had been tough on Oz when he was growing up now Oz was tough on her. As “thoroughbred” was Oz’s Holy Grail of concepts; the precious confluence of gift and heredity, so he was vocal in his doubt about Colleen. Wasn’t her father practically a coal miner? An education that led her to trust flowers over science clearly left something out. But Oz had high confidence in his ability to mold people, and Colleen needed re-booting. So marriage was boot camp for poor Colleen.


    Being alone with them that last year was awful. Everyone else was away at college — didn’t see how bad things got. Sometimes Oz acted like I wasn’t there. God knows I tried not to be there — I was sneaking up the back stairs for sleep and down the front for food. Colleen and I once came across each other hiding from him in the same downstairs bathroom.


    The prosecution mentioned three domestic abuse calls Colleen made to 911; one more than even I knew about. She tried concealing their fights from me, (ironically, she actually was as loyal as he insisted) but there was plenty she couldn’t hide.


    I like thinking that was why I slapped away Jake’s invading fingers. I don’t do quid-pro-quo. Jake’s major flaw is overconfidence. He’s not that beautiful. Did he think his gifts of meat and motion would silence me?


    I’m his sister. I couldn’t resist needling him. Looking into Jake’s blue eyes at a quarter past midnight, I said, “You know perfectly well he could have done it.”


    Jake didn’t look shocked, exactly, but he left my pajamas alone.
    “How can you say that? Of course he couldn’t have. He loved her. They were soulmates.”


    Soulmates means half a soul apiece. Oz takes his half out of the middle.


    I faced him down. “You know how angry he gets.”


    “But not at…her. Never at her! They never even had an argument!”


    This revisionist history took my breath away. It’s true that you can’t call Oz’s yelling an argument, exactly. Oz only argued with people he was trying win over, people he perceived as equals. He argued interminably with Trevor, on the other hand. Jake and Shelley already agreed with him about everything, so no fun there; and me? I was too little. Just “cute”. Adorable. “Save your wiles for the little boys,” he used to tell me. When it came to a clash I had Trevor to stand up for me. Trevor speaks Oz’s language.


    Oh, the benefits there are to being the baby! It’s a family joke that when Colleen told us we could grow up to be anything we wanted, Shelley said,


    “Can I be the baby?”


    So why should I ever focus Oz’s lasers on me? I grant him the power to verbally destroy me. I may be just another coward after all, but need to get out of here alive. I am getting up my nerve in many areas. Next year I’ll be gone, away at college on scholarship. No trial lasts a whole year, Craig admits it.


    Oz himself gave me the direction. “Soar, baby. Soar.”


    “He didn’t have enough respect for her opinion to argue with her,” was the way I put it to Jake. One of Oz’s antique expressions is that no man is a hero to his valet, “valet” being it seems, an old-fashioned word for “wife”. Colleen knew his orders. If she rejected his commands, he humiliated her.


    She didn’t know what she was talking about. It was “her time of the month.” Or it would never be her time of the month again, which is to say she would be PMS-ing forever. He’d imitate her voice, he’d imitate her walk — unflatteringly of course — and swirl a finger at the side of his ear. Fun-nee. Especially when it’s not you that’s the target.


    “You owe him a fair hearing,” said Jake, “Consider the law of Occam’s razor. Accident is more likely than murder! Of course Oz corrected her — he was older and more experienced. He’d been round the world having adventures while she was beavering away nose-down in that silly company of hers. The “science” of “flowers!” Please! Colleen was so parochial. Really just a small-town girl.”
    I stared at him awestruck. Jake sounded just like Oz. As though not just the torch, but the “inner light” had “passed”.


    Could we all trade up? Trevor was talking to the press, negotiating with lawyers, answering middle-of-the-night margin calls, paying bills, debating with bankers and stockbrokers. Now Jake was playing Trevor. So who am I? There’s a lack of models here.
    Jake worked my brain as well as my body.


    “You should have studied enough psychology to know Colleen was really the aggressive one. Passive aggression is still aggression. It’s more dangerous because it’s secret. Didn’t you study anything at public school? She undercut his masculinity trying to make him out to be the bad guy. He would never have done anything to her. Be logical! Where’s the murder weapon? They searched everywhere. He didn’t leave to dispose of it, he had no time, and besides, there was no blood in any of the cars. You know him, Brontë. Would he take away…our Mom?”


    It worked, I was speechless. No one ever called Colleen “Mom”, except for Skylar, who was her actual daughter. Was this some new family directive I had missed, some memo never received? Could the “baby” be that much out of the loop? Jake and Trevor had a mother still living, even if she stayed in Europe because she was so embarrassed about America.


    At least she remembered Christmas, always sending her boys leather and gold versions of the “classics”. Trevor was twelve when he got The Decameron, which we all perused with plenty of interest. Very instructive. Since she’d be subpoenaed if she showed up now she was even less likely to visit, but still. She existed.


    Neither Shelley nor I had even that much of a mother. For us, Colleen was it. Jake is dumb because he’s – well, born dumb, and he thinks I’m dumb because I went to public school. At college he majors in “business psychology”, which is some sort of a synonym for “brainwashing” or “mind control”. Here he was practicing his “dark arts” on me. So I heckled him out of sheer self-defense.


    “Oz’s story is unbelievable. They’re spending the evening alone together, having what he describes as a “nice time”, then she goes outside for a smoke, doesn’t come back, and he never went to check on her? Seems funny-strange to me. They said it took her forty-five minutes to die, trying to get out of the empty pool. His soulmate dying in the pool and it took him an hour to look?”
    Jake played with his tie as if thinking of using it on me. Isn’t it interesting how many sex games dance around hostility? In biology they say all that extreme courting behavior birds go through is because they can’t stand to be touched. It’s hard for them to get close enough to one another to actually conceive. Explains party dolls, if you ask me. They’re like trainer-wheels.


    Jake honored me with some late-breaking honesty.


    “You know what must have really happened. He was passed out and didn’t want to admit it! Likely they were shit-faced; you know how they got on weekends. Plus the police have their heads up their asses over the time element; Craig says he can prove their lab has never been right about anything. As for all the blood, she was taking blood-thinner. That made her a bleeder. She would have died from any little cut.


    If you have to make it murder, maybe someone came out of the woods and killed her. Even that is more likely than that Oz did it. Since when is it our business to invent scenarios? Stop playing devil’s advocate. You think it’s cute but it doesn’t become you. Could prove fatal.”


    See how much power I have? Like the devil needs an advocate! Suddenly Oz’s life and death is up to me. Step out of line and you throw the planets out of alignment! I deliberately leaned away from him, out of the reading light that was starting to feel more like an interrogation tool.


    “It doesn’t strike you weird that in that short window of time they weren’t together, someone seized on that moment to murder her? Not robbing her or raping her or anything?”


    His breath expelled in a hiss. “Murder is weird, sis. Who knows how weirdos think? It was probably one of these inbreds — do they need a reason for anything? Anyone watching, planning to murder her would wait for Oz to leave.”


    “But where’s the motive?”


    “How do I know? Someone at her stupid business. Her secretary was just let go. The whole place went cutthroat the moment she took it public, that’s how the stock market works. Maybe it was one of Oz’s lovers. It’s not up to the defense to prove who did it, or even that Oz didn’t. Only that someone else could have done it. Admit, someone could have.”


    I know he was right about that. Murder trials can’t about probabilities. It’s “beyond a reasonable doubt.” As they’re always saying.


    We were arguing, now. He was giving me some respect, in trying to convince me. Nobody had yet mentioned what was to me the strongest argument in Oz’s favor; that it’s a stupid crime and he is not a stupid person. He loves mysteries and thrillers and he knows all about forensics; if he was going to get rid of somebody he wouldn’t do it in a mess like that. He insinuates he was involved in lots of Cold War “disappearances.” Bodies undiscovered, motives still buried.


    Yet smart people do dumb things. As I weakened, Jake played yet another “asshole” card.
    “Brontë, the one person who didn’t have a motive was Oz,” he lectured. “Look at the mess we’re in now! Oz had everything he wanted. Everyone envied us. Our lives were perfect.”


    Revisionist history! He hated Colleen having all the money. After he encouraged her to take her business public, he thought she’d sell her stock options, but she loathed the new management. Talked about buying the business back.


    “Six hundred thousand dollars insurance money,” I said, “sounds like motive to most people.”
    “Chump change,” Jake sniffed. “He didn’t do it and they’ll never prove he did.”


    “But what if they do?”


    Me being honest. Paying (undeserved) respect to him. Awful as this trial was, our isolation and imprisonment in this house with international press camped by the gate — worse was possible. Conviction. Execution.


    We stared at one another. That moment of sexual possibility slipped irretrievably past. Slapping and strangling still on the table. Slurping and kissing, no.


    “Have you talked like this to anyone else?”
    His voice was threatening.


    “Who am I going to talk to? All my friends are at college and nobody from town will speak to me. ”
    If I sounded sorry for myself, well, I was. Who else ever had this amount of shit to contend with? My homies disappeared into that federal witness protection program known as “higher education”, where they were busy building new identities.


    “Well, listen to Craig. Don’t hurt Oz.”
    I collapsed. Time to get him out of here.


    “Just venting.”


    I tried to drag my book out from under his hip. Even Dostoevsky at his most hysterical was more fun than this family. “Sorry about going negative on your offer.”


    Jake stood up, looking insultingly relieved, as if he’d been planning to “take one for the team.” The gentleman in him said generously,


    “Oh well. Maybe some other time.”


    No skin off his nose. Or off his foreskin, to coin a phrase. Shelley’s room is right down the hall.

  • Queen of Swords: a novel

    Whitney:
    Chapter XXXIV – Strength and Knowledge

    “He’ll make the right call,” said Eight, squeezing my hand. “You can trust him.”


    “I’m scared she’ll leave,” I said nervously. “It would be so awful if she gets away. I tell you right now I’d never sleep another night.”


    “Mr. Wilmot and the marshals won’t let that happen. Strength to Strength,” he said. “It’s a Native American expression. To know is to believe and to believe is to know.”


    I knew strength as a Tarot card. Strength is important. But there isn’t a knowledge card. There should be. Facts. God, they are beautiful.


    “I feel better,” I said. “But I’m embarrassed.”


    “Peyote on the first date?” he teased. “Sorry. I won’t even mention getting naked.”


    “Asking you to marry me on the first date. That’s what’s really bothering me.”


    “Hey, don’t you know that wolf spirits mate once and forever? I’m a Gemini – I’ve been looking for my soulmate my whole life.”


    And what have I been doing my whole life? Fighting Charmian. That’s what it feels like.


    Eight picked up my hand where it lay in his and kissed the back of it. “I was waiting for someone who knew what it was like to grow up in the heart of a monster,” he said. “I just didn’t know it.”


    “I have two sisters,” I told him. “They’re a lot older. They’re always telling me – they used to tell me – that I was just like her. They referred – I mean, obviously they didn’t mean in the physical or in my relations with men –“


    “I get it. They really meant that you were determined,” said Eight. “Goal-focused.”


    It feels so much better to be recognized! “They just felt that – since Dad wouldn’t want Charmian exposed –“


    “What does it matter what “they” think?” asked Eight. “They’re two different people, so in spite of what they might want you to believe, they don’t really think together.”


    And that is incontestably true. McKenzie’s bossier. Darby’s more of a rabble-rouser. Darby might be following McKenzie…some of the time. Don’t I sometimes get more of a hint of “You go girl” from the glint in Darby’s eyes?


    “People talk about “they,” Eight was saying, “But there’s no “they” there. People’s lips may say one thing, but their eyes say something else. And their actions may be completely different. Who knows what their hearts say? We have to go our own way, on our own path.”


    “As long as its the right path,” I agreed. “I felt like, even if my father had begged me, back there in the sweat lodge, to let Charmian go, I couldn’t have done it.”


    “She’s too dangerous,” said Eight. “People like that are just too dangerous.”


    Beat. So, as the old joke goes, enough about me. What do you think about me? At a certain point a girl had better start showing some interest in her date, other than caring only about how fantastically sensitive he is to her.


    “So you grew up in the heart of the monster,” I started. “How did you escape?”


    “I almost didn’t,” he admitted. “It was completely the church elders. They just rescued me. It was like I was drowning and they set up life buoys. Lifeboats.”


    “So, I guess your Mom’s a member.”


    There I touched it. The pain. The exposed nerve. He looked away.


    “No,” he said. “She’s really not. She’s eaten out inside from the drugs. There’s not much left.”
    What he described was horrible. But I’ve seen it. In my own father.


    “I have to be straight edge,” he said. “There’s too much addiction on both my family trees.”
    A straight edge peyote taking visionary? I could see it.


    The inner door burst open and Justice’s Avenging Angel – in the person of Mr. Wilmot – stood before us.


    “I think you may have landed the big one,” he said.


    “The big one?” We rose, as if before a verdict.


    “Female serial killer,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be great? Female serial killers are very hard to catch. They lie low. They don’t have the need to show off. They’re very astute at blending in.”


    My stepmother without the need to show off? I wouldn’t recognize her. On the other hand, if she hadn’t been “showing off” for Eight, would we ever have nailed her?


    “I need a judge to sign the arrest warrant,” said Mr. Wilmot. “Fortunately we’ve got one waiting right around the corner.”


    “Arrest warrant for murder?” I asked. It was too good to be true. Nothing was proven.


    “For jury tampering and obstruction of justice,” said Mr. Wilmot. “And that’s just to begin with. Wait till Judge Kozlowsky discovers she swore a false oath in his court! We’ve got her dead to rights on her own words. I’ve got to notify the other side that we’ve got a mistrial. They’ll be jubilant.”
    “Won’t she just bond out?” I asked wearily. “I mean, Charmian?”


    And then there would be – literally – hell to pay. And I would be the one to pay it. Charmian’s first call would be to Nicholas Rudoff, our trustee. He takes her calls, wherever he is. She has him on speed dial.


    “Impossible. She’s really outsmarted herself this time. She has to prove who she is just to get out of jail. The criminal justice system doesn’t recognize “uxes”, let me assure you. We don’t bond out “Jane Does.” By all means, let her prove she’s Pearleen Purdy. That will help us make our case. And by the time she’s ready to do that, we will have dug up a certain catalpa tree dedicated to Robert Garvin, Junior.”

    The marshal knocked on the door to the jury deliberation room. Eight grabbed my hand tightly in reassurance and solidarity. For the few seconds that we waited for the door to open I actually felt sorry for Charmian. She was so wrong about everything. She made the very mistake she wanted everyone else to make; she judged by appearances.


    Some woman in glasses opened the door. The jurors were seated around the table, papers strewn, faces heated – obviously we interrupted them in the midst of an intense discussion. All faces but one turned to us in calm surprise, taking this to be some ordinary interruption, as if we had come with coffee or cookies. But the woman at the door saw the marshals had their hands on their pistols and she stepped hurriedly behind the door as if it was the only safe place in the world. Charmian’s eyes flickered over me and saw Eight. Saw our joined hands, and rose to her feet with her teeth bared in a snarl.


    Mr. Wilmot spoke the words.


    “Jane Doe, also known as Pearleen Purdy, also known as Charmian Carr, also known as Charmian Quantreau, you are under arrest for perjury, jury tampering, and obstruction of justice. You have the right to remain silent –“


    He read the whole Miranda warning, asking her “Do you understand?” She said nothing, never taking her eyes off me. Eight and I stood there calmly and faced her. She wasn’t to know about our clenched guts and our dry mouths.


    The trees know where they are. The trees are not afraid.


    He read numbers and statutes as the marshals handcuffed her. I saw her pupils recognizing, swiveling, hypnotizing, trying to suck me inside to join her in the yawning abyss that was left of her soul. But there was still enough of a human being left in there to feel pain. I saw the agony of her loss as she recognized that Eight had never been hers, that she had never known him, that he had chosen me. I almost wavered at the sight of so much suffering.


    Then I remembered how she used to torture my father when he wanted a drink of water. “You’ll only piss your pants.”


    “We’ll take this,” said Wilmot, darting forward to grab her juror’s notebook. I saw the panic in her face.


    “You can’ take that! It’s private!”


    “It’s the property of the court now,” said Mr. Wilmot dryly. “Who else does it belong to? Pearleen Purdy? Charmian Carr? Jane Doe?” he faced the astonished jurors, saying, “Judge Kozlowsky thanks you for your service, but he has declared a mistrial in this case. The clerk will be in momentarily to take your statements.”


    It knocked the wind out of them. It would have silenced anyone else, but as they dragged my stepmother past me, she mouthed words. At me. “Well played. All Hail the New Queen!”
    What a bitch!


    Eight pulled on my arm. “Now what were we talking about when we were so rudely interrupted?” he demanded, turning my body to face him, forcing me to focus on his face.


    I felt like a drowning swimmer pulled away from the undertow. Pulled out of the riptide. Life buoys. Lifeboats. Wasn’t that what we’d been talking about? How just when you think you’re going under for the final time –


    I wiped my tears away. “Infinity?” I suggested.


    “Before that,” he countered. We were walking now. Every step was taking us farther away from what was left of my stepmother. Farther away from the jail, from this courthouse in the heart of the city.
    He prompted, “Weren’t you saying something about wanting to get to know me?”


    Out on the steps we paused a moment to enjoy the magnificence of the soft spring night. The stars were out, every single one of them. Even the ones that had been dead for years.


    “You’re right,” I agreed. “I remember now.”

    THE END

    TOMORROW: Cuck’d – Alysse Aallyn’s play “Othello in an American High School”

  • Queen of Swords: a novel

    Charmian:
    Chapter XXXIII – Judgment

    As we, the jury, filed out, the whole courtroom rose to their collective feet – everyone except the judge – who looked at us as if he had never seen us before.


    With the door closing behind us Roccam rubbed his hands with the infernal busybody’s pleasure. “Shall we order dinner?” he asked, reveling in his appointment as foreman. “Let’s get right to it. We can get a couple of hours in anyway.”


    He wasn’t fooling me. He just wanted to see that video. They all did. The judge’s clerk wheeled in the audiovisual cart, but we weren’t going to play it with her around.


    They insisted on watching it twice; Howling Woodchuck had the nerve to slow it down and follow it frame by frame. The jerky stop-motion didn’t do the participants any favors. I rolled my eyes.


    My husband considered himself as a “serious” collector of pornography. Art, he sometimes had the nerve to call it. Did you know that all women’s bodies are considered Art? He was a silly, silly man. Of course it had to be a great big secret – one of many of Papa’s nasty little secrets I was deputized to keep. Secrets of the diaper, secrets of the catheter. The precious daughters weren’t to know. Porn served as his instructional and physical therapy textbook, unfortunately, and since he was so disabled it was up to me to do all the work.


    After he died, mouth open, hands coiled around the pillow, I tossed out most of his collection with a sense of considerable satisfaction. All but a few choice pieces I positioned for Whitney to find. Time she was apprised of the extent of Daddy’s distinctly unwholesome breast fixation.


    In the jury room, at last the TV was turned off and the binders of evidence handed round. We each received our own. At that point the sandwiches and Snapples arrived; just in time for an “amuse bouche”; making such a nice counterpoint with the apparently endless crime scene photos and the autopsy report. The rest of them picnicked carelessly atop their evidence binders. Luna and Bea squabbled, in an intense yet polite way, over the sour cream versus the onion potato chips. Bea won. Age before Obesity, my dear.


    I couldn’t eat. These people were savages. I know I had to go through this for you, but whatever compromise I must invent to keep me from up and murdering the lot of them, I will just have to pursue. I have the self-control. I have the power. Eyes on the prize. The prize, of course, being you.
    “I’ll take notes,” I offered. Now they won’t question your presence in our midst. If they ask me what any one of them actually said, I’ll make up any old damn thing I please. Our notes are ours alone – nothing else could be so private. I’ve been told we take them home. No one else will read them, except for you. They’ll just have to trust me. Har, har.


    “Guilt and innocence,” said the crone, whose name was Bea. “It’s a big responsibility.”


    The guilty and the innocent? I wrote. Or the detected and undetected? How many of the innocent wish they were guilty, would be, if they could only summon up the nerve. The worms. Yawn.


    “Fortunately we don’t have to deal with such unfathomable concepts,” said C.D. in a superior way. “We only have to decide if the state has proved its case.”


    I was rifling the fashion magazines for the Bond girl – Selina Kavanaugh’s address. Just in case. Oh! Found it!. 14-B, Pierce Point Acres. I secreted it gracefully in my bag.


    “Maybe we should take an anonymous vote,” said Roccam. “Just to see which way everyone is leaning. It would be more democratic.”


    “I don’t know what’s so democratic about anonymity,” I contributed, unable to resist. “Surely people should stand up for what they believe.” So I know what I’m up against. My husband was not much of a democrat. He prided himself on being an “elitist.” He used the word “Kantian” pejoratively, trying to force me to agree that if Kant’s theorem came true and we actually behaved the way we wanted other people to act the world would be simply unbearable; a miserable place where everyone was the same. That’s “democracy” for you. Fortunately, the thing’s impossible.


    “I don’t think we should vote yet,” said one of the clone-men. “We gave an oath to pass judgment after due deliberation, not off the top of our heads.”


    I could tell he was really just annoyed at Roccam for winning foreman.


    “I think she’s guilty,” said Luna boldly. “That girl’s the manipulative type. You can see her twining herself around the whole defense table like some sort of Virginia creeper. That poor old Haymaker was in enough hot water already, why would he borrow trouble? I understand he was all coked out, but really. If she really had nothing to do with it, why did she act so guilty? Why run away? Why not turn him in immediately after the crime?”


    “She talked to this guy nonstop about her problems,” objected Howling Woodchuck, “And suddenly the problem’s removed. She goes rushing off to Europe? The way I see it, she’s afraid to dump him, she’s afraid to turn him in, but she’s also afraid to be with him. Maybe he was going to have her offed, for all she knew! I mean, he knew where to find hitmen and she obviously didn’t. I have to say her behavior looks like innocence to me.”


    “She did turn him in,” said, Bea, and Luna joined in, “Because the FBI made her. They said to her, like, it’s either him or you.”


    Honestly these people don’t have a pair of working brain cells to rub together. I began to think maybe it was my best gambit to let them talk and talk until they all got sick of each other. When they were ready to go home they would be ready to listen to reason. But can I stand it?


    “I believe Haymaker,” said one of the alternates. “People tell the truth when they’ve nothing left to lose.”


    “Heck no, that’s nonsense” said a white haired trucker leaving most of his meatball grinder in his beard. “People act the way they’ve always acted. Selfish people continue to act selfish. People who like throwing a wrench into the works – what do they call them – saboteurs – continue to throw wrenches. Sociopath, that’s what the doctor called him. He doesn’t want to see anybody win. Spread the grief around. Misery loves company.”


    “Are you sure you’re not feeling favorable towards the defendant just because she’s so good looking?” Bea asked acidly.


    The schoolmarm said, “You can’t believe Haymaker because the defense got him to admit he’s a perjurer! How can we possibly believe a guy like that?”


    I looked daggers at her. What a jackass! If they were going to continue being so stupid I wouldn’t be able to stay out of it.


    And then the old black woman, who had never said a word, spoke up.


    “Well, you know what I think,” she said, “ I think that little girl doesn’t have the personality of a killer.”


    “How can you possibly know what a killer’s personality is like?” demanded Luna.


    “Well, you see,” the retired housecleaner – or whoever she was – offered shyly, “I read lots of true crime. It’s my favorite. And murderers can’t help bragging. They always brag. They think they’re the center of the universe and everything revolves around them! They want people knowing just how smart they’ve been. They’re so sharp they cut themselves! But she didn’t tell anyone. She refused to even talk about it with Haymaker. Don’t you think they would have caught her on tape if they could?”


    Now we had an authority on murderers! My pen jabbed right through the paper.
    “You know what I hate,” said Lacey, speaking up haltingly for the first time. I think she’s one of those agoraphobes. The more people present, the more trouble they have participating. “If we acquit her then she’s getting away with it. Then she’s committed the perfect murder!”


    Really, I had to speak up. You would have been proud of me. “Having someone commit your murder for you is hardly the perfect murder,” I objected. “If she’s guilty she involved no less than three people to get the job done! Not to mention Tobin’s girlfriend and God knows who else. It’s the mark of an idiot.”


    They all turned and stared at me, chewing with their mouths open.


    “I just didn’t believe that shrink,” said Luna, changing the subject in order to push her weight around. “All I know is, they’ll say anything to keep the paying customers coming. You don’t ever get well with one of those guys. They always keep changing their diagnoses. First it’s manic depression and then its bipolar and then it’s not bipolar and then it’s type one or type two. They’re the ones that should be on trial.”


    “So you’re saying that he’s not a sociopath,” said Woodchuck, folding his arms across his belly like it was going to be a long night. “So what is he? Just a mean, evil guy?”


    “He’s sick,” said Bea. “There must be something wrong with him, to do all the things he did.”
    I imagined tying them to their chairs and setting the room on fire, their piteous eyes and hysterical wails. Denial! Bargaining! Bribery! The exits barred. Should we let them go? Never! The two of us, laughing together. A good time had by all. Sick!


    The pleasure of being rich is that your voice, you will counts for so much more than anybody else’s. You get what you want, they stand in line. You don’t have to waste your precious time arguing with the little people. It was gong to be a long night.


    Eventually anybody will vote anything, just to get out of this room. These are the wolves, sniffing at each other’s behinds. Almost idly, I announced, “Not all murderers are sociopaths.”
    “Oh, that can’t be true,” the schoolmarm lectured me. “There has to be something wrong with a person who thinks they have the right to take another’s life.”


    Let them talk. In my mind I pulled a card. The Judgment card of course. Cosmic forces have been set in motion. My card displays a robed dignitary weighing a “blood payment” in his golden scales. Balance. Ancient justice was based on compensation, not punishment. What’s past is past. The Sivarros give the Zanellis a couple of cows, they throw a big party, and everybody’s happy. When bloodshed is necessary, it’s a balm for our rage, a force for change, the milk that nourishes our future.


    I looked at my watch. After eight already! Outside there was a commotion in the corridor and a series of knocks at our door. Rescue! I rose expectantly. Have you noticed how often when I desire something, it automatically appears? See how the universe continually confirms my royalty?

  • Queen of Swords: a novel

    Whitney
    Chapter XXXII – The Ace of Swords

    I was so full of delicious barbecue, berry cobbler and spinach lasagna that I could barely run. But Eight and I managed to power walk down the courthouse hallway. As long as we were hand in hand, my connection with this total stranger was strong and fierce. Mr. Wilmot, whom I recognized as the prosecutor giving the closing argument I listened to just this afternoon, thrust his head outside his office.


    “So Zach,” he asked, “What’s the emergency?”


    “We’ve got some facts about one of your jurors that you really need to know,” said Eight.
    I felt a strange exhilaration that the prosecutor, whom Eight called a “friend”, nevertheless didn’t know – or use – Eight’s secret name. The club I belonged to was way more exclusive.


    In the prosecutor’s office was a nightmarishly uncomfortable Danish “Oldern” sofa bearing a single needle-pointed cushion bearing the legend: “The meek may inherit the earth, but without you they won’t keep it very long.”


    “My wife made that,” said Wilmot. “Come on in. Have a seat.” I felt kind of guilty for bothering him, he looked so harassed. He wore his gray suit pants but no jacket, had removed his tie and his collar was undone. His pepper and salt hair stood up all over his head like a bulldog’s fur, and he peered at us over his bifocals as Eight said,


    “First tell him about your stepmother’s identity problems, Whitney.”


    But first I looked around. You are not lost; the trees know where they are. The walls were covered with plaques, awards, framed certificates and degrees. In a painting of justice the blindfolded goddess holding the scales pulled her blindfold down just enough for one eye to peek out. Made me think of Charmian’s mesmerizing tarot cards. I didn’t like thinking about them.


    We sat down together on the uncomfortable sofa. It was all right because Eight and I were together.


    “I’m Whitney Quantreau,” I said. “My stepmother’s on your jury. Charmian Quantreau. But that’s not her real name. I just came back from Cold Creek, Texas, where I found out that the real Charmian Carr has been missing for the past ten years. Her family just had her declared dead. I have a picture of her here,” I gave him my manila envelope with the copy of Charmian’s book and the Firewalker material, but he made no move to open it. “Her real name is Pearleen Purdy and I think she stole Charmian’s identity.”


    “She stole your stepmother’s identity?” he asked me.


    This was going to be a touchy story to tell. But I had Eight beside me. I swallowed, took a breath and went on, “She was pretending to be Charmian Carr seven years ago when she married my father. Now he’s dead and she killed him. She admits it all in this book.”


    “It’s a love letter to me,” said Eight. “She thinks I killed Rafe Zanelli. She thinks I’m a fellow spirit.”
    Wilmot sat down. I think he fell into his chair.


    “It’s all in the book,” said Eight. “She murdered her stepfather first, and then she cut Charmian Carr’s throat and buried her under a catalpa tree in Texas. Then she murdered Whitney’s father.”
    “I made a copy,” I offered. “It’s in there.”


    “I have a mistrial,” said Wilmot. Not looking happy about it. “Mistrials are expensive.”


    “Sorry,” I squeaked. More guilt!


    He recovered fast. He was a fast recoverer. Probably how you get to be prosecutor.


    “It has a good side,” said the prosecutor. “It’s like moot court. We get to find out how the jury was tending. Does anybody else know about this?”


    “Only my church elders,” said Eight. “They won’t speak to anybody.”


    Wilmot rose decisively. “I need the original. I always need the original.”


    So I had been right about that. Could it just be fate that I stole the book on the very day Charmian didn’t go home? The last day of the trial? I guess sometimes fate works one way, and sometimes another.


    Eight gave him the book. Now he had everything. It was literally out of our hands.
    “Excuse me,” said Wilmot, and he proceeded through a glass door into an inner office.


    Eight and I were alone. We looked at each other. I swear to you we recognized each other. But what did we see? Who did we recognize?

  • Queen of Swords: a novel

    Whitney
    Chapter XXX – The Lovers

    I left the courthouse at the break. Eight’s text told me to drive out to the country, so I had a lot of time to think. Charmian hadn’t reacted to my presence in any particular way, so I was feeling a little encouraged. But I knew her well enough to know she was mostly annoyed by my presence. She didn’t look like the plain old Disney lady who had tricked them into seating her on the jury, but she did look like she was “blending in”. As if she was determined to stay where she was. I played the Mountain Goats’ Up the Wolves to help me concentrate.


    The prosecutor’s closing argument really affected me. You would think as a psychology student I would know all about “antisocial personality disorder”” but I didn’t. It was as if I was hearing about it for the first time.


    Everything he said applied to Charmian! Adolescent crime? Like, does murder count? She had some excuse, but still. It was obviously premeditated so you couldn’t really call it self-defense. Even if it got reduced to manslaughter, anybody would have to count it as a crime. And, grandiose enough? Is Charmian-Pearleen-Purdy-Carr-Quantreau grandiose enough for you? How about, blames others? Doesn’t care about people? No kidding! Even her passion for poor Eight is really the same kind of “ownership” my wretched father in his fear and empty loneliness felt for her! She only wanted an audience to her own magnificent, because how can be the Queen be a Queen without a courtier? A body-slave. You can’t call that love.


    Eight told me she was a demon, and that sounded about right to me. Anti-social personality disorder, sociopath, psychopath – isn’t it all the same thing?


    Since I knew for certain now that my stepmother was the monster I had always feared, why was my spirit so light? Was it only because Eight had magically come into my life with all his intelligence and wisdom, with the beauty of his scars? No, it was because for the first time I was sure my stepmother and I were nothing alike, and that if we feared to study monsters because of the threat of becoming too much like then, monsters would rule the world.


    I turned on a dirt road marked “Church”. Eight’s text told me: “Drive to end” but I had to slow down to a crawl because the ruts were pretty deep.


    At the end of the road was a long low ranch house and a garden where people in sun hats worked patiently among the rows of flowers and vegetables. They didn’t look up, but I recognized some immature sunflowers. Didn’t Charmian say the sunflower is my flower? That’s all right by me.
    I parked with the other cars at a sign that said, Native American Church. Eight came running down the steps of the house.


    I searched his face for signs of disgust. “Did you read it?”


    “I read it,” he said. “She’s a demon, all right.”


    He guided me away from the house.


    “So is this your church?” I asked.


    He nodded. “My Mom’s Arapaho.”


    Behind the house was a little shack that I have to say, looked like an outhouse. It was painted a fading read, but it had no other markers on it at all. Once again I felt a ripple of fear. The trees are not afraid. The mountains aren’t afraid. We, the sunflowers, are not afraid. My new mantra.
    “So,” he asked me, “How did it go for you?”


    “I saw her. And she saw me. I listened to the prosecution’s whole closing argument. But she didn’t do anything. She’ll probably like it that I left.”


    “See?” he said. “She doesn’t recognize your power. You have the element of surprise.” He opened the door to the shack and fragrant steam jumped out.


    “Oh,” I said. “A sauna.” My father loved the sauna. We had one in our old house.


    “It’s a sweat lodge. You have to take off your clothes,” Eight directed.


    “You first.”


    “Done and done.” We both started to strip.


    “I usually don’t do this on the first date,” I joked nervously.


    “You have to be serious,” said Eight. “You have to tell the truth from now on.”


    So I was silenced. Did that mean he thought I did do this on the first date? Let’s hope not!
    The fragrant steam turned out to be a pile of wet grasses on the hot rocks.


    “Sage,” said Eight. He picked up a branch off the floor and began stroking me with it. “You do the same as me.”


    So we stroked each other with the fragrant branches. The tattoo Charmian couldn’t recognize was a pair of wolves. Eight saw me looking.


    “It’s the twin Wolf spirit,” said Eight. “A powerful spirit animal. What’s yours?”


    “Tattoo or spirit?”
    He laughed. “Either or both.”


    I thought. Tattoo was easy, I have a stupid hummingbird on my ankle Penn encouraged me to get. Spirit animal’s a lot more difficult. What animal hates its stepmother? The cuckoo?


    He helped me out. “Have you ever had another creature look at you as if it recognized you?”


    Brainstorm. “Sure,” I said. “A marmot. It stole all my food while I was camping. It hung around until I woke up. I think it was thanking me.”


    “Perfect,” said Eight. ”Spirit of the Great Marmot, Spirit of the Powerful Water Bird, we who are your children have much need of you. We summon you in all your majesty.” He took me by the elbow. “Now you sit down.”


    I sat on the wooden seat and hunched forward, trying to suck my belly in.


    “You’re beautiful,” said Eight, who really was. “Forget about yourself. You’re a marmot now.”
    “That’s me,” I echoed. A thieving marmot.


    “This is the hard part,” said Eight. “But it will be over fast.” He opened a box and took out some rabbity little vegetables and held them out in his palm. “You only get two,” he said, “Because you’re a beginner.”


    “What are they?” I asked, trying not to be scared.


    “Peyote buttons. Do you trust me?”


    “Is this all right with your church?”


    “It’s a sacred ceremony. As soon as I told them we were up against demons, they were first to suggest it. Don’t you trust me?” he repeated.


    I do. “I do,” I said, taking two strange little vegetables. Like smaller brussels sprouts. He extended a jar of water.


    “It might made you feel kind of sick,” he warned.


    I got them down. I’m a good pill taker. My vitamins are like horse capsules. I used to take diet pills before I got smart.


    “Wow,” I agreed, “I do feel sick. I’m afraid I’m going to throw them up.”


    He poured out the rest of the water on the floor and it steamed up at us. He handed me another jar.
    “It’s tea,” he said. “Drink it.”


    It wasn’t as good as his tea, but it was better than the peyote. At least I didn’t feel like throwing up any more, but I had to drink it all to stop from coughing.


    “Now tell the spirits of your problems,” said Eight. “Tell them everything.”


    I hesitated. It was so hot in here, I felt a little faint. Would I pass out disgracefully, like a drunken date? The only light came from the glowing rocks. I tried to focus on his face.


    “It helps to close your eyes,” said Eight, but he took my hand. I felt better immediately. “So we don’t lose each other,” he said. “Like the otters. You know they hold paws while they float sleeping, so they don’t drift apart.”


    I didn’t know. Don’t let us drift apart, I prayed.


    “Mother Spirit, Father Spirit,” said Eight, “Spirits of all the mothers, all the fathers, all the spirits gone before; Great Spirit who guides the universe in its right path, we come before you to defeat the machinations of a demon. She possesses the power of rage, the power of hate, the willingness to murder. We will need all your courage, all your cleverness to bring her down.”


    The “Father Spirit” part made me think immediately about my father. Eight said his spirit was safe and I wanted to believe that. I thought of him back when I was eight and realized, that’s the way I wanted to remember him. Teaching me how to fish, baiting a line with baloney. We had to sit all afternoon, because that’s what you do when you fish. But I was so proud of being with my dad. That was all right for me. I could have sat there, happy, forever.


    “He’s with us,” I said. “My father. I feel him.”
    “Talk to the Spirit,” said Eight.


    I was sweating so hard I wasn’t even certain whether I was crying or not. I felt definitely light headed. Had I had any breakfast? I couldn’t remember, it seemed so long ago. Didn’t I eat a piece of cold pizza, going out the door to confront my stepmother? I was brave then, wasn’t I? I definitely hadn’t had any lunch, rushing to meet Eight, and his text told me not to eat. That cold pizza lay in my gut like a rock. I began rocking myself, back and forth. “Dad,” I called, out loud, “Daddy? I want you to meet the man I’m going to marry.”


    What was I, out of my mind? I was so astonished by myself I fell into a shocked silence. Eight squeezed my hand encouragingly and I began to babble. The words just poured out of me.


    “I’m sorry I have to stop Charmian,” I said. “I know you wanted me to leave her alone, but she’s evil. She’s going to destroy and destroy until there’s nothing left. We have to stop her.”
    I hesitated.


    “He’s here,” said Eight. “I see him. Talk to him.”


    I was so thrown that I stood up. Eight stood up too. Suddenly the planks that formed the shack fell away outward, like the petals of a flower. The morning mountain air was cold on my naked skin.
    “Daddy!” I shouted.


    He was loading his fishing rods into his truck, the old blue Chevy.


    His face lit up at the sight of me. “I’m going fishing,” he said. ”Want to come?” He didn’t mind at all that I was standing naked there with some guy.


    “His animal’s the rainbow trout,” I said to Eight. “He loved them so much he couldn’t even eat them. He always threw them back.” I sobbed. “He’d kiss them, saying You’re so beautiful. And then he’d throw them back.”


    “Pleased to meet you sir,” said Eight.


    “Daddy, I need to destroy Charmian,” I said. “She’s a monster. She kills people.”
    “She rapes people,” said Eight.


    “But she has swords. I’m so scared of her. She’ll cut me.” I dug my fists into my eyes.
    “Swords are nothing,” My father said. “Her swords are mirrors.”


    Another childhood memory. I used to be afraid of mirrors after my mother died. My father cured that by showing me that the only thing in mirrors is what you put there.


    My father held up his fishing knife. It glittered in the sun. “She has fake swords,” he said, “But I have this.” It wasn’t a fishing knife, it was a scalpel. He used to show me his medical case, and tell me about all it contained. What each weapon could do. That was back when we thought medicine could fix everything. “You don’t need me,” he said. “You can do it by yourself with the help of this fine man. I’m going fishing.” He looked right at Eight. With approval. My father could be so charming when he was whole. And when he chose to be.


    “You take care of her now,” my father said. He was getting into the truck, whistling. He always whistled “Beautiful Dreamer.” He said it was his and my mother’s song.


    “He’s leaving,” I whined at Eight. “I don’t want him to go.”


    “He’s happy,” said Eight. “He has to go.”


    And if I ran after him, I would have to let go of Eight’s hand. I didn’t let go.
    “Sit down,” Eight encouraged. We sat down. “Close your eyes.”
    I closed my eyes.


    “Now lean your head on my shoulder. Everything’s going to be all right.”
    And I could tell that it was.


    We came out into the afternoon and my father’s truck was gone. The shack’s planks were back in place. There was an open shower behind the sauna and we washed away the sweat and the tears. Together.


    “Solar water,” Eight commented. The soap smelled wonderful. Like mountain thyme. That’s Eight’s deepest, most intimate scent. We soaped each other vigorously.


    “My father didn’t believe in an afterlife,” I said.


    “Luckily an afterlife believed in him. So how do you feel?”


    “I feel powerful,” I told him. “Like I can do anything.”


    “You can,” he said. “You know, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. You have so much power.”


    And I believed it, his eyes shone so. We kissed a long time.
    After we dressed, he checked his phone.


    “They’ve gone into deliberations,” he said. “They’re good for a couple of hours. Come on into the main house. The elders have a meal prepared specially for us. It’s time for you to meet them.”

  • Queen of Swords: a novel

    Whitney:
    Chapter XXVIII – The Knight of Pentacles

    Thanks to Charmian, I knew where Zach Tobin lived. I parked on the street and saw him sitting on the steps, white earbuds suggesting he was listening to music. But he looked right at me as I parked, and when I stepped out of the car, he stood up, picking up a backpack that seemed to contain schoolbooks. I was carrying both Charmian’s book and the copy I had made, but he didn’t look at them. He looked at me.


    “Can I help you?” he asked.


    Charmian’s description of him was surprisingly accurate. Maybe when she’s not looking at herself (which is rare) she actually sees. I knew he was my age but he looked older, a big soft-faced guy hiding his head under a bandana. Not any scarf that could ever have belonged to Charmian, I was glad to see.


    “I think so,” I said, my voice going all quavery at the thought of what these documents contained.
    “Let me call my ride,” he said, texting rapidly with his phone.


    “Am I interrupting something?” I asked, still feeling awkward because I knew so much about him that he didn’t know I knew. And he knew nothing about me.


    “No,” he said. “I was waiting for a ride to the courthouse but I’m telling them I’ll find my own way there.”


    “I can drive you,” I said. Thinking, that’s if you still want to go after reading this. A few more minutes and I might have missed him! I have to get this over with.


    “OK.” He said. “Come on back.”


    When he turned I had the nerve to study him. He wore a Bull Durham t-shirt and a pair of multi-patched jeans that had definitely seen better days – probably in someone else’s lifetime. Obviously if he was going to the courthouse, it was as a spectator.


    He had big muscles. His “bruiser” physique” and his youth, and I guess their original connection must be what had turned my hard-ass stepmother into a “lovestruck girl.”


    But there was also an aura about him I couldn’t put my finger on, an air of having come out of some other world. Some foreign place where things are different. That was what made Charmian see him as a knight.


    He took me back to the shack she had written about – more of a shed, really. I knew it had no running water but it didn’t look so unrespectable. In the back yard, a pair of basket chairs looked out on an unkempt jungle of yard and a panorama of distant mountains. Native American blankets were thrown over the basket chairs. He picked up mine, shook it out and flipped it.


    “My lady,” he said. On top of a rusty airconditioning unit was a miniature refrigerator. He took out a pitcher and two frosty glasses.


    “Sweet tea?” he offered.


    “Sure,” I said, still uncomfortable. The tea was full of mint. It was not too bad. I began to relax. When I sat down, so did he.


    “I guess you’re not serving me with papers,” he commented, “Or you would have done it already.”
    “So I look like a process server?” I was really upset.


    “No,” he answered. “You look like a person in trouble.” And he reached out and touched my hand.
    A galvanic thrill ran through me. I jumped.


    “So you felt that?” he said. “Wow.”


    “I did feel it. Are you – magic?”


    “No,” he said. “I’m definitely not magic. But you are.”


    I shook my head. “Can’t be,” I said. “Believe me.”


    “So,” he offered, “Maybe we’re magic when we’re together. My spirit touching your spirit.”
    Maybe so. I didn’t understand any of this. Did it make what I had to do harder or easier? I decided it made it easier. We seemed to need fewer words with this current of understanding that was passing between us.


    “I’m here about my stepmother,” I started, gesturing with the book, hoping it would take it from me. It lay in my lap like a stone.


    But he wasn’t looking at the book. He was looking at me with his deep, soft, liquid green eyes.
    “Do I know her?” he asked.


    “Unfortunately,” I admitted, “You do.”


    There was silence between us for a moment. But it was different from any other silence I have ever experienced. It was weirdly, as if we knew each other already and were both trying to remember. I felt more like a person coming out of a coma, who looks around for clues, trying to figure out who she is.


    I shook the book at him. “She wrote it down,” I said, “It’s all in here.”


    Still he didn’t take the book. Had he figured out that I didn’t really want him to read it? He said instead, “Tell me about her.”


    I looked out toward the mountains to break the connection between us, summoning up my nerve.
    “She’s a juror on the Sivarro trial,” I told him. “Your father introduced you to her on your fifteenth birthday.”


    His eyes widened, his faced reddened and he gasped. “What goes around comes around,” he said. “My father is a demon.”


    “Well my stepmother is a demon and that’s for sure,” I agreed. “In this book she admits murdering three people. It’s a love letter to you.”


    He looked at the book, appalled. I could see he really didn’t want to read it now.


    I went on, “One of the people she killed was my father. I stole this book from her house. And now I don’t know what to do. It was all so long ago, I’m afraid the police won’t investigate. She’s a very powerful person.”


    “A witch?” he asked me.


    His language – a word that revealed his understanding – was making this easier. What I had instinctively known – that only he could understand –was coming true. “Well, yes. She believes in magic anyway. She calls herself the Queen of Swords.”


    He nodded. “There’s only one way to defeat magic.”


    “How?” I asked helplessly.


    “You need bigger magic.”


    I breathed a relieved sigh. “And you’ve got … that?”


    He touched my hand again. “I’m sure I do.”


    When he was touching me I couldn’t think of anything but his skin, his lips, his strong thighs. It was all I could do not to launch myself at him. I began to shiver, as if the hot day was freezing cold.
    “So what do you want?” he asked me softly.


    “I want to erase the past,” I spat, “Before my father had his stroke, before she came into our lives. She was supposed to take care of him, but she ruined him. First she made him get rid of me and then she destroyed him. She robbed me. She stole everything I have.”


    Humiliatingly, I started to cry. Did I know he would hug me? Was I trying to force his hand? Over-thinking things again! I despised myself. It’s my usual feeling.


    He took me into his arms. His sweat smelled like a field of thyme. I sighed blissfully, feeling I could be safe there forever.


    “You want your father back before he began to suffer,” he said. “It’s the most natural thing in the world.”


    “She corrupted him,” I insisted, but feeling that I was lying. My father wanted to be corrupted. Still, it wasn’t fair.”


    “You know, your father’s perfect spirit still exists,” said Zach Tobin, holding me on his lap and rocking me – hideously huge old me, like I was a baby! He could lift me up as if I was a feather. “Concentrate on that. His spirit is bigger than his life.”


    I struggled with the concept, summoning up everything I’d learned at the prep academy, and at college.


    “Our spirit is bigger than our choices,” said Zach. “Our spirit weeps when we choose the wrong thing.”


    I wanted to have sex with him right there in that basket chair. Was that the wrong thing to want? But I didn’t feel confused. I was beginning to see that clarity was possible.


    “I stole this book out of her house,” I said. “I made one copy, but I’m afraid a copy has no value. It’s almost too crazy a story for anyone to believe. She’s stuck at the courtroom now – I looked at my watch – but when she comes home tonight she’ll see it’s missing and she’ll do something. Something awful.”


    “We won’t let that happen,” said Zach.


    “But you don’t know her. She’s powerful. She feels things. She’s fixated on you. She’s going to know that I interfered and drop everything to come after us!” My teeth chattered.
    “Stop being afraid of her,” he said. “It gives her power. Repeat after me, the trees are not afraid.”
    My teeth were still chattering. “They’re not?”


    “Repeat after me. I am not lost. The trees know where they are.”
    I repeated it. “I am not lost, the trees know where they are.”
    “The trees are not afraid.”


    “The trees are not afraid.” I did feel better. Imagine if I was a tree! What could Charmian do to me? It would take her a long time to cut me down. She probably couldn’t do it! She’d get blisters on her hands.


    “So,” I asked him, “No police?”


    “We need bigger magic than the police,” said Zach. “We’re going to get Mr. Wilmot, and Mr. Wilmot’s going to get the police. But first, we have to have a sacred ceremony.”


    “A sacred ceremony?” I repeated hopefully. A sacred ceremony! You bet that was just what we needed. Plus the police, and the prosecutor. Then we’d have everything covered. I liked this magic. Charmian could never be ready for this. Firepower.


    “And she will be destroyed?”


    “If she’s a demon,” he said,“She will be destroyed. Put your number in my phone. Your name is –“


    I flushed, painfully. Talk about not taking care of business!


    “I’m Whitney Quantreau,” I told him, taking his phone. And you’re … Zach Tobin?” I still knew too much about him.


    “My legal name is Zach Zanelli,” he said. “Because those people lost a son. Whatever can be repaired is repaired. Whatever can be made whole is made whole, even though the river rushes on. My friends call me Eight.”


    “Eight…” I breathed. I felt better that he had a magic name. Two names that Charmian didn’t know. “Why Eight?”


    “Because I was so happy when I was eight years old.” He smiled, and when he smiled he looked like an eight year old. “Until now.”


    “I need a magic name,” I said.


    “We’ll get you one,” said Eight.


    “She calls me the Princess of Wands. I don’t want to be the Princess of Wands.”


    “Well, she’d wrong right there,” said Eight. “You’re not the princess of anything. You’d be the Queen.”


    “I would?”


    “Look at your strength, going up against her. Hell, yeah!”


    “You’ve got better magic, right?” I stood up uncertainly. “I mean, you’ve got the trees. But –“
    “And I’ve got the mountains,” said Eight.


    “You’ve got the mountains?”


    “The mountains aren’t afraid. And I’ve got all the animals.”


    The tears came back in my eyes. “That is a lot,” I agreed. “She’d nothing but a pack of cards.”
    He pried the book from my hands.


    “You’re going to the courthouse,” he said. “Make certain she’s still there.”


    I didn’t want to tell him I was afraid after he’d worked so hard to build me up. But what can I say? I was scared. “Without you?”


    “I have something else to do. I’ll text you where to go. And when.”


    One look at my face and he repeated, “She cant touch you. I’ll tell Wilmot to keep her there.”
    He’ll tell…the prosecutor! This kid! This kid who had seen his father murder a man. Whose father tries to tell everyone who will listen that his son is the murderer!


    “We have right on our side,” said Eight.


    Hmm. True. Plus the trees and the mountains. And the animals. But in the courtroom…she will look at me.


    “It’s important to let her see you,” he said. “It will help the ceremony. If she’s shaken just a little bit.”
    It would surprise her.


    “It’s important to do what you fear,” he encouraged. “Face her. We’re going to take her down.”
    I shook my head a little. I’m not a knight. I’m not a queen.


    “If it’s any comfort to you,” he continued, “She can’t really see you. Because she is blind. If she’s made herself into a demon, the spiritual world is closed to her.”
    That did help.


    “Mr. Wilmot says this afternoon are closing arguments. Then the jury usually wants to start deliberating right away, and they have dinner sent in, because they don’t want their dinner ruined. Trust me. We’ll get her.”


    And he kissed me. That was where I received all my courage.

  • Queen of Swords: a novel

    Charmian:
    Chapter XXVII – The King of Swords

    Surprise! There was no defense! So often that’s the case. That’s why, when you’re in doubt, the best policy is always to attack, because quite often the defensive posture is a sham. The other side disintegrates into a hasty and undignified retreat. The defense’s only witness was Haymaker’s psychiatrist. Lacey would be disappointed. I know she hoped O’Hara would put Karen Sivarro on the stand.


    But the man is wily. He has the manner of a Prince of Swords; since he kills no one himself. I began to wish that I had googled his birthday, so that I could give him an astrological chart and a full reading. He must have realized that as long as sweet little Karen sits there at the defense table looking pretty and piteous she at least has some benefit of the doubt. If she gets on the stand Mr. Wilmot can trap her into admitting – or at the very least seeming to admit – that some of what Haymaker said was true.


    Mr. Wilmot stood up to give his closing argument. I wish you could have been there to see it. A king of Swords at bay is a magnificent sight, even though any knight worth his armor could cut him down in a moment.


    This must explain why the courtroom was more crowded than it had ever been, why even Whitney took an afternoon out of her boring schedule snoop through my spoor to bother to attend. It’s as if everyone has been notified by the press, here comes the “juicy stuff.” When Mr. “Push” – in the person of Mr. Wilmot – gets to go for the jugular of Mr. Shove! Who doesn’t enjoy a good hand-to-hand?


    “Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” began the prosecutor, “You have heard an open and shut case of murder for hire. The state has conclusively proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Reuben Haymaker hired Barry Tobin to empty bullets into Rafe Zanelli until he was dead, and that in fact that is what happened. Reuben Haymaker got up on this stand to testify that the plot originated with his then-girlfriend, Karen Sivarro, that she asked him to do it, and that once the murder was accomplished she behaved in a manifestly guilty fashion, leaving the country as fast as she could go, and relying on extradition treaties to keep United States justice at bay.


    How likely is it that Haymaker, beset as he was with financial, sexual, family and addiction problems, suddenly decided to commit this crime for a woman who had already become his lover, merely as a surprise for her? Without informing her about it or keeping her apprised? If he really intended to bind the defendant to him for life, wouldn’t divorcing his wife be a more practical step? Yet we know he made no such gesture. I maintain the secretive murder that the defense is forced to posit is extremely unlikely. And that is what you have to consider.


    The defense, in their closing, will doubtless make much of the words, “reasonable doubt”. Ladies and gentlemen, we chose you because you struck us – both sides, I might add – as exceptionally reasonable, and it is to your reason. We expect no less of you when you assemble to deliberate together.


    The defense agrees that the murder was performed for Karen Sivarro. It is her culpability you will question, knowing that Rafe Zanelli had been a thorn in the side of her family for months and when he died, was threatening to take a loved child out of state – as was his perfect right. Mr. Haymaker would have never even heard of Mr. Zanelli if it hadn’t been for her. By the way, the beloved grandchild now lives under her grandparents’ roof. This murder achieved its aim. In the annals of murder, it ranks as a partial success. If Karen Sivarro is found guiltless by you, she will have gotten away with it. How reasonable is that?


    The defense in the person of my esteemed colleague, Mr. O’Hara, has leaned heavily on the blemished character of Mr. Haymaker. Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Haymaker will be in prison for the rest of his natural life. He will not even be considered for parole until he’s 82. That’s appropriate, because without him. Mr. Zanelli would never have died. The evidence you have heard makes it plain that Karen Sivarro refused to soil her hands to that extent. A pretty, adored and intelligent child, she has been accustomed all her life to finding someone else to perform all her messy, dangerous and laborious jobs.


    What Mr. Haymaker could not help but make plain as he sat on the witness stand, was that she owned him. He would have done anything for her. She gambled that the law would not hold her accountable; although this murder benefited no one but her family, she felt safe, because she thought herself too far removed from the bullets and the gun that fired them ever to face justice. Who would believe Reuben Haymaker, busy stealing from his clients, and drug dealing Barry Tobin over her?


    But who do you think sat in the saddle of this relationship, giving orders, and who do you think was the listener, the performer, who took directions? Mr. Haymaker paid for all her living expenses, he gave her a car, he pretended she had a cushy, well-paid job with no actual expectations. And when the time came, he found a hitman. Or a person who said he was a hitman.


    That person is in jail, now too. He has confessed. He won’t even get the chance of parole. The judge will explain to you that if you find her guilty, she is even more guilty than the man who fired the gun. In this state we punish the central conspirator – the one who set the murderous ball rolling – with death. But that will be up to you. You will have lesser included offenses to consider.
    What else but guilt explains her long flight through Europe, in search of a country that has no extradition treaty with the United State?


    The defense called Haymaker’s own psychiatrist to the stand to testify that he suffers from “anti-social personality disorder.” That was pretty much all Dr. Loden could testify to, since he knew nothing about the crime itself. He told us Mr. Haymaker is a liar and an addict. Well, we already knew that.

    A jury hears from a lot of liars in the course of the average case and it is the apex of their duty to sort the lies from the truth. We can pretty much assume that Haymaker said whatever he had to, to keep that supply of Adderall and Xanax coming. Dr. Loden is very free with his prescription pad.
    When his relationship with Karen Sivarro started to heat up, Mr. Haymaker had a new painkiller, and he didn’t need Dr. Loden any more. Dr. Loden has testified in this courtroom that there is virtually no treatment for what he deigned to diagnose as Mr. Haymaker’s “disorder”, yet he was apparently willing to keep treating him forever. “Keeping an eye on him,” he said, not simply to feather his own nest. Does that sound reasonable to you? I think in your good old-fashioned common sense all of you are familiar with practitioners like Mr. Loden. They regard whatever they have to sell as exactly what we need, and we pay the bill – or our insurance company does – but we don’t get a say in it.


    Dr. Loden admits people with personality disorders are never really cured. But does Mr. Haymaker even exhibit the formal markers of this condition? You will recall that I got him to admit on the stand that Haymaker does not match one of the central qualifications of anti-social personality disorder; adolescent crime. His career path is just the opposite: he was a pillar of the community until he discovered he couldn’t pay for his private thrills legally.


    Another one of the characteristics of anti-social personality disorder is a complete lack of remorse: is that how Reuben Haymaker appeared to you? I don’t think so. I think Mr. Haymaker is a narcissistic, opportunistic individual whose every crime was committed as part of a short-term effort to make his life easier. How likely do you think it is that a person who doesn’t care about other people – another marker, you note, of antisocial personality – would risk his own neck to personally personality mastermind a dangerous, expensive, secret surprise -which might – or might not — delight his current girlfriend, or would he simply give in to her pleas in order to get her in the mood for love? To turn off the crying machine? I assert that he did what he had to to keep her gratifying him, and he didn’t care one way or another about Mr. Zanelli, or even the traumas of the Sivarro family, except as if affected the availability and intensified the cooperation of his current sex partner.


    I think once his supply of joy-juice was cut off and it hit him how he had destroyed the lives of everyone around him in a short term quest for personal thrills he was damn sorry. But is that the way Mr. Haymaker struck you? Did he blame his wife or girlfriends for his financial situation? It seems to me he realizes the blame lies squarely with himself. He knows he’s in prison for life, and he deserves to be there. He admitted hiring Barry Tobin, he admitted planning the crime, but he’s also telling us is that he did it on the direct request of his girlfriend, who wanted help with her family situation. You need to talk that out, and decide how realistic, how reasonable that course of events seems to you. In that effort, you have an unexpected source of help: the testimony of the defendant herself.


    Our jury system is the pride of the world, and this is why: because it’s very hard to fool twelve ordinary hard working citizens. Abraham Lincoln says, “you can fool some of the people some of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” And that’s what any jury trial in this fair country of ours proves again and again. Some of you will be fooled, some of you will be forgiving, some of you will be doubtful and some of you will be generously inclined. But when the twelve of you get together and talk it out, I am confident that the true picture will emerge. Guaranteed. Your honor, the state rests.”

  • Queen of Swords: a novel

    Charmian:
    Chapter XXV – The Hermit

    After lunch I was astonished to see Whitney in the courtroom, sitting right up front in the “cheap seats” along with the rest of the public. I was so flooded with rage that if we had been alone you would have had your sacrificial victim right there.


    The defense was putting on its case beginning with the testimony of Haymaker’s psychiatrist, a bald-headed bumbler in a cheap suit who babbled on at length about what a psychopath Haymaker was; that in fact his diagnosis was “anti-social personality disorder.”


    I could barely focus on his nonsense. I attempted to calm myself by scrying – seeing distant or past events in my crystal ring. It’s a well-accepted form of astral travel for adepts. After a moment’s clarity I began to see how it could have happened. What if Whitney went to my house; found me absent and engaged the judge in conversation? She couldn’t have talked to the gardeners. They don’t know where I go each day. Judge Sugarman on the other hand is a born blabbermouth. That’s a problem with arriving at the top of the tree. Things become so easy for you there’s a tendency to forget how tentative a winning position really is. The fact that all your underlings are looking at you adoringly doesn’t mean they’re not plotting your overthrow.


    I also think the judge’s vision is defective. Whitney is sufficiently youthful to qualify as “pretty” in his book. She’s no dummy. Most likely she could get any fact out of him that she wanted to know. He might even have been stupid enough to suggest he had a hand in my privileged position.


    I should have been better prepared for this turn of events. My morning’s card was the Hermit, but I was distracted by my horoscope. My horoscope offered such a vision of joy and power: “Glimpse of future revealed. You will perceive possibilities and opportunities. Romantic relationship beckons. Do not give your trust to anyone who reveals a secret. What seemed a setback boomerangs in your favor.” And it could still be coming true, if I could put the Hermit in his rightful position.


    The Hermit is a special card others lacking gifts often interpret incorrectly. Beginners see his sad face, his rough clothing, hard path and cave dwelling and are frightened. They allow their intelligence to be clouded by fear. When terror threatens to rule you, its time to double down.


    In my case I know the Hermit card must mean a cycle of depression is ending and one of success is beginning. I am coming out of the sacred loneliness in which my power was ordained. I will leave the cave behind, drop my monkish disguise and assume my royal prerogatives. With you at my side.

  • Queen of Swords: a novel

    Whitney:
    Chapter XXIV – The World

    I few back to Denver with a sense of frustration and feeling a lack of resolution. I also felt very alone, but what else is new? The Carr family wouldn’t want to hear from me, and really, without a body, what could I prove? It seemed obvious to me that my stepmother Pearleen-Charmian, hadn’t activated the real Charmian’s caregiver’s license, filed taxes, or done anything else that would allow the authorities to locate her; otherwise Charmian’s family would have found her long ago. What she had done was fix her pit viper vision on my father and promise him heaven if he elevated her to partner. The kind of heaven he ultimately got, he didn’t expect.


    All I knew for certain was that the game had moved irrevocably forward. We were all different now. I couldn’t do nothing. Even sending an anonymous letter telling her someone knew that Pearleen Purdy and Charmian Quantreau were the same person was no longer enough for me. As an experienced salesperson I decided to do what I usually do when a prospect is an unknown quantity; I would play it by ear. See what hint I could drop. Scope out the situation.


    Knowing her routine, I planned to show up at exactly nine o’clock, when she would be having coffee on her deck and contemplating whatever mayhem her silly cards told her to inflict that day. She would be awake but totally unprepared. I know how she relishes her morning solitude. To nerve myself for our encounter I listened to the Decembrists’ My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist in my way over.


    But to my amazement, Charmian-Pearleen wasn’t home. Where could she possibly be at this hour of the morning? It must be an appointment she hadn’t been able to schedule at a more convenient time. Taking the risk that she had rushed out temporarily on some short-term errand, I hid my car and let myself inside.


    This was too good an opportunity to pass up. Now that I knew about Pearleen, about the real Charmian, there might be some evidence I would have previously overlooked that I could now find.
    Once inside the house I reveled in my momentary possession. There is something fascinating about studying another’s life when they don’t know you’re looking. I felt like a cop on one of those detective shows, assessing my competitor through a one-way mirror.


    There’s a spicy, musky smell that hovers over Charmian, and her house was full of it. Kind of an old potpourri, carpet-cleaner smell, as if someone was trying to cover up a disgusting effluvia of bodily odors. Or was it my imagination? All I knew for certain was, if my sisters and I ever inherited this house we would have to get rid of everything in it because Charmian ruins everything she touches. In converting it to her use, it’s as if she has destroyed its spirit and corrupted even its utility.


    The place was immaculate. Thick white carpeting, pink leather sofas, sequined Indian pillows, glossy brass lamps. The huge painting over the fireplace displayed “The World” – one of her silly Tarot tropes. That was a bit reminiscent of the paintings I had seen in Charmian Carr’s old house in Texas. Some of her taste must have been set then, and so even though she sought rebirth, she was forced by her very nature to drop little clues to her disavowed self.


    What I really wanted was the mauve suede book I had seen through the glass. It drew me like a magnet. And there it still was, on her fussy mother of pearl inlaid desk. When I opened it I was gratified to see that every page was ornamented with her looping green ink scrawl. It could have easily been empty or contained only bills. Most of what Charmian does is just for show, and if you take the trouble – as my father didn’t – to look beneath the surface, the demonic reality of her real self is all too evident.


    I picked a hard, uncomfortable chair that wouldn’t betray me by taking a mold of my ass – and began to read.