Malus Domestica (2 page)

“Oh, I’m semi-retired. I write these days, mostly romance. I have a mystery series, too:
Deirdre Poplin and the Broken Warrior, Deirdre Poplin and the Strange
Hitchhiker,
that kind of thing. I don’t imagine you’ve read any of them.”

They shook their heads regretfully. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I haven’t,” said David.

The pan of brownies was calling his name. He reached out and touched the still warm pan with a finger. “Ma’am, do you mind if I have another one? I hate to eat all—”

“Ohh, pssh.” She cut and served him another. “Have all you like. You’ve earned no less than this, out there doing the Lord’s work.” She served Greg another one as well.

“Thank you,” he said, breaking it in half (as much as one could ‘break’ something so soft and fudgey and wonderful).

He slipped it into his mouth. “So…are you religious, at all?”

Marilyn screwed up her face, squinching one eye. “I guess it depends on what you consider religious.” The ice in her glass tinkled as she picked it up, swirled it demurely, and raised it for a sip.

Her red lipstick had smeared on her teeth. It made David think of snow and starving wolves.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I’ve been here in the States for a very long time, but I moved here with my family from Europe when I was young. Our family has always been part of an obscure European faith as far back as anyone can remember, and I guess if I had to consider myself religious, I would claim that one.”

“Is it a Christian religion?”

“Not quite. Ahh…” She became pensive, then shook her head dismissively. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Let’s just enjoy each other’s company, shall we? And you can tell me all about Jesus and the Witnesses.”

Sounds like a rock band,
thought David, fighting a smile.

“I’ve never really paid much attention to the American religions,” Marilyn noted, “Except for a peripheral interest in the Mormon…Mormonism? Mormonic—”

David giggled. “The Moronic faith?”

Marilyn laughed again, her head tipping back. Her gums were black, as black as coal, as ink, as night.

“The Book of Moron.” Laughter bubbled up out of him and David huffed brownie crumbs into his hands. “Oh, that’s great.”
Are these pot brownies? Did we eat pot brownies?
The idea was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. They weren’t allowed to smoke cigarettes, much less marijuana, but who could blame them for being tricked into eating it?

Confusion spread across Greg’s face, but he was smiling. “That’s horrible.”

“Speaking of horrible,” said Marilyn, picking up the butcher knife. “Check this out.”

Pressing the tabby cat against the counter, she raised the knife and with one swift motion decapitated it, the edge thunking against the marble. Both boys jerked in surprise, kicking the back of the island. The old woman cackled. Greg got up so fast he almost knocked his stool over.

“Holy shit!”
he squawked. “What’d you do
that
for?!”

Vivid red blood squirted across the marble, that once Comet-sterile countertop in that clean, gleaming kitchen. The cat’s body flopped and shuddered under Marilyn’s spotty hand like a trout in a boat, kicking and flexing its claws.

Oh god oh god, make it stop, please make it stop,
David thought, slowly getting out of his seat. His hands were shaking.

Marilyn tossed him the cat’s head. Hot potato! It bounced off his shirt (off the backboard) and he instinctively caught it (nothing but net). Blood left a huge watercolor kiss in the middle of his chest, divided down the middle by his necktie.

David fumbled the cat’s head back onto the counter. “What is
wrong
with you, lady?!”

“There’s nothing wrong with
me.”

Marilyn got up and rinsed the knife in the sink, rubbing it down with a washcloth. She dropped it into the silverware compartment of the dish drain. “Your friend Gregory seems a little out of sorts, though.”

Greg made a weird creaking noise, like he was trying to do an impression of a squeaky door hinge. His eyes had gone from their customary deep deer brown to an insidious pea green. The pupils were thin vertical slits. As David turned to look at him, Greg’s lips peeled back in a snarling grin, revealing clenched teeth.

“RrrrrnnnnNNNOWWWL.”

His fingers were hooked into claws, so tight the tendons stood out across the backs of his hands.

“What—” David started to ask, and Greg flew at him.

Thumbs collided with his eyes and the stool slid out from under him. The travertine floor slammed into David’s back, driving the breath out of him. Sharp, frantic fingernails raked down his face and neck and Greg was shouting,
screeching.
He’d lost his freaking mind.

David hit him in the side of the head with the rolled up
Watchtower.

Greg flinched, scrambled backwards.

“What the hell are you doing?!” David demanded, and kept hitting him,
whap whap whap.
Standing over his cowering, incoherent friend, he touched his stinging face and found blood on his fingers.

“What did—” he started to ask Marilyn what just happened, but she was gone.

A skinny arm hooked around his shoulder, steel flashed in his right eye, and a line of pain seared across his throat as it was flayed open. The wound gushed decadent crimson down his shirt.

He spun around to face his attacker, and his elbow caught the edge of the counter. He leaned against it, blood coursing down his chest.

The old woman stood on a slowly tilting floor in a merry-go-round kitchen. “It looks like you’ve had an accident,” she said, her voice muffled by his cotton ears. She waved the bloody carving knife to and fro like the slow swish of a cat’s tail. “You
did
let your folks know where you were going to be, didn’t you?”

David lost the strength in his knees and he fell, sliding down the back of the island, coming to rest on the floor.

Some subconscious caveman thought told him he could keep the blood in with his hands, so he cupped them under his neck, but it ran between his fingers. He furiously undid his necktie and whipped it out of his collar, stared at it in his hand, wondered what the hell he thought he was going to do with it (you can’t put a tourniquet around your neck, you moron, you Mormon, hahaha), and threw it on the floor.

Marilyn crouched over him. “Take solace in the knowledge that you won’t be going to Hell, at least. As you said, after all, it doesn’t exist.”

David’s vocal cords didn’t seem to work.

“Why, you want to ask—why? Why?” She smiled sadly, flashing those hideous black gums again. “Blood for the garden, young David,” she said in that smoky, patronizing blackbird voice of hers. “We always need blood for the garden.”

L
OCAL
W
OMAN
M
URDERED
IN
D
OMESTIC
V
IOLENCE
I
NCIDENT

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ODY
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OCAL
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AN
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OUND
 

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EAD
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UMPING
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OUGHT
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IRE

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AMP
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IRE
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OSSIBLY
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YSTERY
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OMAN
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ESCUES
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ISSING
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IRE

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EORGIAN
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ILMS
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ONZO
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T
HURSDAY

1

R
OBIN
AWOKE
TO
BIRDSONG
tittering through the windows of her tiny cupola bedroom. The first breezes of June came in through the open screen. Outside, green trees flashed the pale undersides of their leaves as if they were waving dollar bills.

A blue creature lay crumpled in a heap of legs at the foot of her bed. She dragged the stuffed animal over. “Look, Mr. Nosy,” she squealed, “it’s the first day of summer vacation!”

Mr. Nosy was a felt mosquito the approximate size and style of a Muppet, with big white ping-pong ball eyes. At the back of his open mouth was a sort of voicebox, and when you pinched one of his feet he whined like a kazoo. In her tiny hands, he came alive. “Yes, Miss Robin,” she said in a high, growly giant-mosquito voice. “It’s very warm today and I think I’m going to go down right now and find someone to bite for breakfast!”

Robin giggled. “Okay. Wait right here.”

She sat him up very carefully on top of the quilt and wriggled out of her nightshirt, putting on a sundress and a pair of sandals. Cradling the puppet, she clomped down the twisting stairway and opened the door at the bottom.

The smell of bacon and biscuits were waiting to roll over her in a warm wave. Robin danced along the second floor landing and down a flight of switchback stairs to the foyer, skipping into the kitchen. Her mother sat at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee.

Robin stared at the back of the newspaper and tried to read it again, but as always, it was just a grid of black squiggles.

“Goo morvig,” said her mother.

“Good morning, Mama.”

Mrs. Martine—Mama to Robin, Annie to everybody else—talked as if she had a mouthful of water. She had a speech impediment that made her difficult to interpret, but Robin had grown up with it and found her as easy to understand as anybody else.

She smiled, scooping bacon and eggs onto her daughter’s plate. “Did you sleep good?”

“Yep.”

Robin arranged her pet mosquito on the counter in front of the bread box and hopped into her chair.

“Your birthday is at the end of the month.” Annie cut a biscuit open and knifed grape jam into it. “Have you decided what you want yet?” Annie Martine wasn’t the loveliest of women, but her petite Audrey Hepburn frame and heart-shaped face gave her an ethereal, elven quality that people couldn’t seem to resist.

In that brutally honest fashion of curious children, Robin had asked her several times over the years why her tongue was the way it was.

Annie gave her a different tale each time. “I stuck it out at a crab and he pinched it,” she’d say, or “I was running with scissors and tripped and, well,
snip snip!”
and sometimes, “I tried to kiss a turtle and he bit me,” and the last time she claimed she’d stuck it in a light socket. Once Robin had even hauled out her toy doctor bag and asked to examine Annie’s tongue with a magnifying glass. A jagged red scar about an inch long bifurcated the very tip, twisting it.