Page 4 of The Children of Eve

“I could kill you,” said Elizalde, “and worry about settling debts later. I have enough money to leave the country and seek treatment elsewhere.”

“You could, you could,” agreed Seeley. “Of course, apart from the unlikelihood of your beingableto kill me—shooting a man is a lot harder than it looks in the movies—it also assumes that I came here alone. Which, being prudent, I didn’t.”

“I see no one else,” said Elizalde, “only you.”

“That’s because you’re not looking in the right places.”

Seeley stood, or perhaps “uncoiled” might have been more accurate, because there was a serpentine ease to the movement. Elizalde could see that, upright, the interloper was slightly taller than he’d previously thought, with handsome, intelligent features. He looked like someone a stranger might be inclined to trust, an asset for a salesman, even if you weren’t convinced you wanted what he was selling. Elizalde didn’t wish to die, making him a reluctant mark unless Seeley had something better to offer than a death, easy or otherwise. But the man’s patter was almost hypnotic. It demanded that one hear him out, one reasonable human being to another, and neither party could leave until he’d finished his pitch.

Seeley gestured to the statue of the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan.

“Do you think the gods talk to one another?” he asked. “Do they love, hate, fear, and mourn like we do? Me, I was raised Presbyterian, so one deity was enough, even if He had to be divided into three to spread Himself around better. The church doesn’t see me much now, not even at Christmas. I was a doubter from youth, and that hardened into atheism in adulthood. I figured we were all alone on this rock, with nothing above but sky and only damp earth below.

“But since I was required to venture into your fine country, I must admit that Hamlet had a point and my philosophy may have been inadequate. At first, I thought it might be exposure to excessive sunlight, because I do like my shade and AC. Soon, though, I came to an understanding—a new philosophy, if you will. I’ve decided that gods may be just another kind of creature. I don’t think they have a form, or none beyond the ones we give them, which we create from what’s familiar to us, whether frightening or consoling. Some gods endure and some don’t. A few don’t even want to make themselves known to us, so we don’t get a perception of them, not ever. Others, they drift in and out of belief and can slumber like spiders, waiting to be jerked into life by being remembered again. Your goddess here, she’s pretty muchallspider, which is why she’s surrounded herself with them. She summoned them out of fear.”

Elizalde glanced down at the totem of the Great Goddess. Now that Seeley had drawn his attention to it, he could see that the spiders had formed a mass around her, like a wall of bodies set against an approaching enemy.

“Fear,” repeated Elizalde. “Of what? Of you?”

“Of the one I came here with. To be honest, Mr. Elizalde, I generally prefer to work alone, but the difficulty is that I’m not by nature a violent man. I don’t like inflicting pain, never have, although I’ll do it if I have to; if it’s them or me, so to speak. Like I told you at the start, I’m primarily a fixer, a negotiator, with a Rolodex for a brain and a talentfor squirreling out connections that others have missed. I like to leave behind as little mess as possible—blood, bodies, widows, orphans—because mess attracts attention.”

Seeley sighed theatrically.

“But unfortunately,” he resumed, “it seems to me that this job is going to involve a great deal of suffering and no small amount of killing. It’s more than I can handle alone, reluctantly or otherwise. In fact, it’s already begun, and you’re next in line.”

Something struck Elizalde on the back of the head. His vision blurred, and the office nook grew muddied around him. He crashed against his desk before dropping to his knees, the dimensions of his beloved store altering, its walls drifting away, its ceiling descending, so that he experienced simultaneous surges of agoraphobia and claustrophobia. It all happened in just a few seconds, from the striking of the blow to the pain of his knees hitting the floor, though Elizalde felt that he might have been falling for a long time—for all his life—and the landing, when it came, would be final. He kept his head down while he waited for the feeling of dislocation to pass. When he peered up, Seeley stood closer, and someone else was moving behind Elizalde.

“I’d stay down there if I were you,” said Seeley, as the other finally came into view. “After all, that’s how a man ought to greet a lady.”

CHAPTERIV

With the smell of salt in the air and the road through the marshes empty once more, the ghost of the girl stood before the house. She was present yet unsubstantial; the mist surrounding her had more solidity than she. The lamp in the window flickered beneath her gaze. It always shone in the night, even when her father was away from the house, because he kept it on a dark-activated timer. It burned, she knew, for her, so that she might know she was not forgotten.

However, she was aware that perhaps he thought of her less often now than in the past, and not only because she had been dead so long; more than two decades, even as it felt like less to her, time passing differently in the place where she waited, if it really passed at all. Sometimes, it seemed as though only days had elapsed since she arrived at the lakeshore, there to sit on a promontory between worlds, watching as the dead immersed themselves in the water, wading deeper and deeper before being lost to the great sea. At first, she tried to keep count of them, but they were too many and too similar; different, yet all the same. Some noticed her, but only momentarily, curiosity being for the living, the dead having no use for it.

She had learned not to wander beyond the environs of the water. Hills bordered it, and forests, but these were not uninhabited. Theywere largely the abode of the irretrievably lost: the angry, the insane, or those who, because of their pain, were unable or unwilling to surrender themselves to what lay beyond. A few, she thought, were somewhat like her—watching, waiting—but unlike her, they did not move between worlds. She believed they might be content to let her do it for them, so she became their agent, their intelligencer. Now and again, she caught some of them regarding her from the shadows, even if they did not approach. Those ones were always children. She felt they were frightened of her, even as they also desired what she desired: revenge.

And she would think to herself:You have no reason to fear me. That’s for another.

SHE ENTERED THE HOUSE,occupying its spaces, her fingers passing over chairs, books, scattered possessions, without disturbing even a single speck of dust. She paused by a photograph of herself with her father and mother, when all three of them were unruined. Mother and child had died together, leaving the father behind. The girl no longer knew where her mother was. She had hidden herself away: a disunited being, unpredictable, so that even her daughter was wary of her. But she had been beautiful once, as the picture showed. The girl could remember being held by her, read to, loved. No more. All gone.

On a shelf nearby stood another series of photographs, these of her father with his other daughter: Sam, the dead girl’s half sister. In only one were they joined by Sam’s mother, Rachel. There were, the girl noted with something like amusement, more pictures of the dog, Walter, who had left this house with Rachel and Sam to go and live with Rachel’s parents in Vermont. Walter was now gone from the world. Sam had been aware that he was dying, but she was unable to prepare herself because she had not yet been exposed to mortality on an intimate, personal level. She still had her parents and grandparents and had not lost any friends to death. She had been fortunate, but that luck lasted for noone. The blow, when it came, would hit hard. That was the first lesson death taught. The second was that so many of the losses to follow would hit even harder.

The dog had been with Sam since early childhood, and she was a teenager now, if not for much longer. When the dog was finally put to sleep, her childhood was laid to rest alongside him, and the bond between the girl and Sam had frayed still further. They had been close when they were younger, the dead girl shadowing the living, whispering to her, sharing some (though not all) of what she knew. But as Sam entered adolescence, the girl could not connect with her as before. The girl was both trapped in childhood and strangely ageless, but Sam was neither. Part of their growing estrangement, the girl understood, was a consequence of that awareness of difference, but she felt it more acutely than Sam because the latter was progressing toward an adulthood that had been denied the former. Sometimes, the girl struggled to contain her envy at the experiences Sam had already enjoyed and those yet to come, and her rage at the unfairness of it all.

She had watched from the dark as Sam received her first kiss from a boy; had stood amid daffodils as Sam’s grandfather taught her how to fish for bass; and had crouched by the bathtub as Sam realized she was having her first period, its coming already prepared for by her practical mother but its arrival nonetheless greeted with a combination of embarrassment, discomfort, and pride. After every such event, the dead girl had retreated to her sentinel post by the water, where she briefly contemplated joining the ranks of the dead and embracing unknowing. It had taken all her resolve to wait for the urge to pass, aided by the glimpses of herself that she caught in mirrors and glass when she traveled to the other side: a bloody, ravaged creature, eyeless but not blind. The damage reminded her of her purpose and made her patient once more.

From above came the sound of bedsprings protesting and the coughing of a woman: Sharon Macy, who was sharing her father’s bedthat night, as she did once or twice each week. The girl had seen them becoming ever closer, ever more intimate. They shared secrets, whispering them to each other when the world was quiet; softly, body to body, though the girl could hear, when she chose to listen. Her father even spoke of her to the woman, which concerned her. It was unwise. But as with Sam and her progress toward womanhood, the girl was conscious of other emotions beyond fear of the harm that might result from her father’s sharing of confidences with his lover: jealousy, a sense of betrayal—and sadness.

He no longer thinks of me as often. His pain is less intense.

The girl had never felt more alone.

CHAPTERV

The last of the spiders had returned to their webs, the insects to the gloom, and the statue of the Great Goddess lay in pieces on the floor of Antonio Elizalde’s store. Elizalde, too, was no more. His pain was over, his spirit departed. He had suffered at the end, but not as much, Seeley reflected, as he would have had cancer and the medical profession enjoyed their way with him. There was less blood than Seeley had anticipated, though he had decided to step away at the climax. By then, Elizalde had given up all he knew. What came after was pure punishment.

Seeley’s eye was drawn to the pack of Marlboros. He hadn’t smoked in years, but if he was ever going to start again, this would be the time. To avoid temptation, he crushed the pack in his gloved hand and disposed of it in the trash. It was time to leave, but first, Seeley went through the shelves of rare books and manuscripts in Elizalde’s office in case they contained anything worth rescuing. To his pleasure, if not entirely his surprise—Elizalde’s taste, unlike his judgment, had never been in doubt—Seeley discovered a volume of posthumously published poems by the seventeenth-century Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, part of an edition of her complete works printed in Madrid in 1700, just five years after her death from plague. The original vellum binding was in desperately poor condition and the leather tieswere missing, but Seeley could work with what remained. He even had a buyer in mind. Elizalde might have approved, had he still been in a position to do so. Seeley swaddled the volume in paper, followed by a couple of layers of bubble wrap. He then found a suitable box, laid the book inside, and sealed the folds with tape.

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