Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection (28 page)

Every square inch of wall space appeared to be taken up with posters, framed photographs, prints and paintings. Old-fashioned curtains—the print was large dusky roses on a black background—stood guard on either side of a window seat. Underfoot was a thick carpet that had been woven into a semblance of the heavily-leafed yard outside.

The more she looked around herself, the more familiar it all looked. And the more her mind filled with memories that she’d spent so many years denying.

The sound of a footstep had her sitting up and half-turning to look behind the sofa at who—or maybe even, what—was approach-ing. It was only Meran. The movement brought back the vertigo and she lay down once more. Meran sat down on an ottoman that had been pulled up beside the sofa and laid a deliciously cool damp cloth against Anna’s brow.

“You gave me a bit of a start,” Meran said, “collapsing on my porch like that.”

Anna had lost her ability to be polite. Forsaking small talk, she went straight for the heart of the matter.

“I’ve been here before,” she said.

Meran nodded.

“With my mother-in-law—Helen Batterberry.”

“Nell,” Meran agreed. “She was a good friend.”

“But why haven’t I
remembered
that I’d met you before until today?”

Meran shrugged. “These things happen.”

“No,” Anna said. “People forget things, yes, but not like this. I didn’t just meet you in passing, I knew you for years—from my last year in college when Peter first began dating me. You were at his parents’ house the first time he took me home. I remember thinking how odd that you and Helen were such good friends, considering how much younger you were than her.”

“Should age make a difference?” Meran asked.

“No. It’s just ... you haven’t changed at all. You’re still the same age.”

“I know,” Meran said.

“But ...” Anna’s bewilderment accentuated her nervous bird temperament. “How can that be possible?”

“You said something about Lesli when you first arrived,” Meran said, changing the subject.

That was probably the only thing that could have drawn Anna away from the quagmire puzzle of agelessness and hidden music and twitchy shapes moving just beyond the grasp of her vision.

“She’s run away from home,” Anna said. “I went into her room to get something and found that she’d left all her schoolbooks just sitting on her desk. Then when I called the school, they told me that she’d never arrived. They were about to call me to ask if she was ill. Lesli never misses school, you know.”

Meran nodded. She hadn’t, but it fit with the image of the relationship between Lesli and her mother that was growing in her mind.

“Have you called the police?” she asked.

“As soon as I got off the phone. They told me it was a little early to start worrying—can you imagine that? The detective I spoke to said that he’d put out her description so that his officers would keep an eye out for her, but basically he told me that she must just be skipping school. Lesli would
never
do that.”

“What does your husband say?”

“Peter doesn’t know yet. He’s on a business trip out east and I won’t be able to talk to him until he calls me tonight. I don’t even know what hotel he’ll be staying in until he calls.” Anna reached out with a bird-thin hand and gripped Meran’s arm. “What am I going to
do?”

“We could go looking for her ourselves.”

Anna nodded eagerly at the suggestion, but then the futility of that course of action hit home.

“The city’s so big,” she said. “It’s too big. How would we ever find her?”

“There is another way,” Cerin said.

Anna started at the new voice. Meran removed the damp cloth from Anna’s brow and moved back from the sofa so that Anna could sit up once more. She looked at the tall figure standing in the doorway, recognizing him as Meran’s husband. She didn’t remem-ber him seeming quite so intimidating before.

“What ... what way is that?” Anna said.

“You could ask for help from Faerie,” Cerin told her.

“So—you’re gonna be one of Paulie’s girls?”

Lesli looked up from writing in her diary to find that the creepy guy by the War Memorial had sauntered over to stand beside her bench. Up close, he seemed even tougher than he had from a distance. His hair was slicked back on top, long at the back. He had three earrings in his left earlobe, one in the right. Dirty jeans were tucked into tall black cowboy boots, his white shirt was half open under his jean jacket. There was an oily look in his eyes that made her shiver.

She quickly shut the diary, keeping her place with a finger, and looked around hopefully to see if Susan was on her way back, but there was no sign of her new friend. Taking a deep breath, she gave him what she hoped was a look of appropriate streetwise bravado.

“I ... I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“I saw you talking to Susie,” he said, sitting down beside her on the bench. “She’s Paulie’s recruiter.”

Lesli started to get a bad feeling right about then. It wasn’t just that this guy was so awful, but that she might have made a terrible misjudgment when it came to Susan.

“I think I should go,” she said.

She started to get up, but he grabbed her arm. Off balance, she fell back onto the bench.

“Hey, look,” he said. “I’m doing you a favor. Paulie’s got ten or twelve girls in his string and he works them like they’re dogs. You look like a nice kid. Do you really want to spend the next ten years peddling your ass for some homeboy who’s gonna have you hooked on junk before the week’s out?”

/_,,

“See, I run a clean shop. No drugs, nice clothes for the girls, nice apartment that you’re gonna share with just one other girl, not a half dozen the way Paulie run his biz. My girls turn maybe two, three tricks a night and that’s it. Paulie’ll have you on the street nine, ten hours a pop, easy.”

His voice was calm, easygoing, but Leslie had never been so scared before in her life.

“Please,” she said. “You’re making a mistake. I really have to go.”

She tried to rise again, but he kept a hand on her shoulder so that she couldn’t get up. His voice, so mild before, went hard.

“You go anywhere, babe, you’re going with me,” he said. “There are no other options. End of conversation.”

He stood up and hauled her to her feet. His hand held her in a bruising grip. Her diary fell from her grip, and he let her pick it up and stuff it into her knapsack, but then he pulled her roughly away from the bench.

“You’re hurting me!” she cried.

He leaned close to her, his mouth only inches from her ear. “Keep that up,” he warned her, “and you’re really gonna find out what pain’s all about. Now make nice. You’re working for me now.”

4,/

“Repeat after me, sweet stuff: I’m Cutter’s girl.”

Tears welled in Lesli’s eyes. She looked around the park, but nobody was paying any attention to what was happening to her. Cutter gave her a painful shake that made her teeth rattle.

“C’mon,” he told her. “Say it.”

He glared at her with the promise of worse to come in his eyes if she didn’t start doing what he said.

His grip tightened on her shoulder, fingers digging into the soft flesh of her upper arm.

“Say it!”

“I ... I’m Cutter’s ... girl.”

“See? That wasn’t so hard.”

He gave her another shove to start her moving again. She wanted desperately to break free of his hand and just run, but as he marched her across the park, she discovered that she was too scared to do anything but let him lead her away.

She’d never felt so helpless or alone in all her life. It made her feel ashamed.

“Please don’t joke about this,” Anna said in response to Cerin’s suggestion that they turn to Faerie for help in finding Lesli.

“Yes,” Meran agreed, though she wasn’t speaking of jokes. “This isn’t the time.”

Cerin shook his head. “This seems a particularly appropriate time to me.” He turned to Anna. “I don’t like to involve myself in private quarrels, but since it’s you that’s come to us, I feel I have the right to ask you this: Why is it, do you think, that Lesli ran away in the first place?”

“What are you insinuating? That I’m not a good mother?”

“Hardly. I no longer know you well enough to make that sort of a judgment. Besides, it’s not really any of my business, is it?”

“CerM, please,” Meran said.

A headache was starting up between Anna’s temples.

“I don’t understand,” Anna said. “What is it that you’re saying?”

“Meran and I loved Nell Batterberry,” Cerin said. “I don’t doubt that you held some affection for her as well, but I do know that you thought her a bit of a daft old woman. She told me once that after her husband—after Philip—died, you tried to convince Peter that she should be put in a home. Not in a home for the elderly, but for the, shall we say, gently mad?”

“But she—”

“Was full of stories that made no sense to you,” Cerin said. “She heard and saw what others couldn’t, though she had the gift that would allow such people to see into the invisible world of Faerie when they were in her presence. You saw into that world once, Anna. I don’t think you ever forgave her for showing it to you.”

“It ... it wasn’t real.”

Cerin shrugged. “That’s not really important at this moment. What’s important is that, if I understand the situation correctly, you’ve been living in the fear that Lesli would grow up just as fey as her grandmother. And if this is so, your denying her belief in Faerie lies at the root of the troubles that the two of you share.”

Anna looked to Meran for support, but Meran knew her husband too well and kept her own council.

Having begun, Cerin wouldn’t stop until he said everything he meant to.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Anna asked. “My daughter’s run away. All of ... all of this ...” She waved a hand that was perhaps meant to take in just the conversation, perhaps the whole room. “It’s not real. Little people and fairies and all the things my mother-in-law reveled in discussing just aren’t real. She could make them
seem
real, I’ll grant you that, but they could never exist.”

“In your world,” Cerin said.

“In the real world.”

“They’re not one and the same,” Cerin told her.

Anna began to rise from the sofa. “I don’t have to listen to any of this,” she said. “My daughter’s run away and I thought you might be able to help me. I didn’t come here to be mocked.”

“The only reason I’ve said anything at all,” Cerin told her, “is for Lesli’s sake. Meran talks about her all the time. She sounds like a wonderful, gifted child.”

“She is.”

“I hate the thought of her being forced into a box that doesn’t fit her. Of having her wings cut off, her sight blinded, her hearing muted, her voice stilled.”

“I’m not doing any such thing!” Anna cried.

“You just don’t realize what you’re doing,” Cerin replied.

His voice was mild, but dark lights in the back of his eyes were flashing.

Meran realized it was time to intervene. She stepped between the two. Putting her back to her husband, she turned to face Anna. “We’ll find Lesli,” she said.

“How? With
magic?”

“It doesn’t matter how. Just trust that we will. What you have to think of is of what you were telling me yesterday: her birthday’s coming up in just a few days. Once she turns sixteen, so long as she can prove that she’s capable of supporting herself, she can legally leave home and nothing you might do or say then can stop her.”

“It’s you, isn’t it?” Anna cried. “You’re the one who’s been filling up her head with all these horrible fairy tales. I should never have let her take those lessons.”

Her voice rose ever higher in pitch as she lunged forward, arms flailing. Meran slipped to one side, then reached out one quick hand. She pinched a nerve in Anna’s neck and the woman suddenly went limp. Cerin caught her before she could fall and carried her back to the sofa.

“Now do you see what I mean about parents?” he said as he laid Anna down.

Meran gave him a mock-serious cuff on the back of his head. “Go find Lesli,” she said.

“But—”

“Or would you rather stay with Anna and continue your silly attempt at converting her when she wakes up again?”

“I’m on my way,” Cerin told her and was out the door before she could change her mind.

Thunder cracked almost directly overhead as Cutter dragged Lesli into a brownstone just offPalm Street. The building stood in the heart of what was known as Newford’s Combat Zone, a few square blocks of night clubs, strip joints and bars. It was a tough part of town with hookers on every corner, bikers cruising the streets on chopped-down Harleys, bums sleeping in doorways, winos sitting on the curbs, drinking cheap booze from bottles vaguely hidden in paper bags.

Cutter had an apartment on the top floor of the brownstone, three stories up from the street. If he hadn’t told her that he lived here, Leslie would have thought that he’d taken her into an aban-doned building. There was no furniture except a vinyl-topped table and two chairs in the dirty kitchen. A few mangy pillows were piled up against the wall in what she assumed was the living room.

He led her down to the room at the end of the long hall that ran the length of the apartment and pushed her inside. She lost her balance and went sprawling onto the mattress that lay in the middle of the floor. It smelled of mildew and, vaguely, of old urine. She scrambled away from it and crouched up against the far wall, clutch-ing her knapsack against her chest.