Tell My Sorrows to the Stones (24 page)

Her mother approached her, stepping into the moonlight, and Donika saw the tears streaking her face. Sorrow weighed on her and made her look like an old woman.

“No?” Qendressa said.

Somewhere in the trees, an owl hooted. Donika flinched and looked up, searching the branches, just as her mother had done. A second owl replied, sharing the sad song.

“Even when they were gone, I could not go away. I should have run. I did not know when they would be back for their skins, the shtriga, but I knew that they
would
be back. The shtriga went ’round the town and through the forest and they hunted the lustful and licentious. They had the scent of those whose lust was strongest, and the shtriga drank their blood to sate their own hungers.”

“Sounds like a vampire,” Donika said.

Qendressa frowned, shaking her head. “No, ’Nika. Vampires are make-believe. The shtriga are real. But the power they have, it has rules. The shtriga must come back to its skin by morning.

“My mother had told me many stories of them. How they grow. How to stop them. And I dreamed of a baby, ’Nika. It hurt my heart, I wanted it so much.

“I knew I only had till morning, and maybe not even that long. I ran into the clearing and I took the skin of one of the women, with her beautiful black hair. I carried it home, hurrying and falling, and I locked the door behind me. I took my scissors and sat at my work table and I cut the skin of the shtriga. I cut away large pieces and later I burned them.

“And then I started to sew. With the shtriga’s black hair for my thread, I patched the skin back together, only now it was not the skin of a grown woman, but the skin of a baby girl.”

Donika shivered and hugged herself, staring at her mother’s eyes shining in the moonlight, tears glistening on her face.

“No,” the girl said.

When her mother spoke again, her voice had fallen to the whisper of confession.

“I sat and waited in the corner of the room, in a chair that my husband had loved so much. A little before dawn, the shtriga comes looking for her skin. I left the window open and the owl flew in and landed on my work table. It spread its wings and ducked its head down to pick at the skin it had left behind. The owl pushed itself into the skin.

“When the sun rose, a baby girl lay on my work table and she cried, so sad, so lonely. I took her in my arms and rocked her and I sang to her an old song that my mother loved, and my baby loved it, too. She didn’t cry anymore.”

Qendressa bit her lip and gazed forlornly at her daughter. Through her tears, she began to sing that same old song, a lullaby that Donika knew so well. Her mother had been singing it to her all her life.

“I don’t believe you.”

But then the owls began to cry their mournful song again, hooting softly, not only one or two but four or five of them now. Donika saw the fear in her mother’s eyes as the woman searched the trees. Qendressa put out a hand to her.

“Come, ’Nika. We go home.”

Donika stared at her.

“I don’t believe you,” she said again.

But she could taste the salt of her own tears and feel them warm upon her cheeks. She backed away from her mother’s outstretched hand, shaking her head. Denials rose up in her heart and mind but somehow would not reach her lips.

She knew. The hunger churned in her gut, gnawing at her, and she knew.

“Why did you tell me?”

Qendressa sobbed. “Because you are not my baby anymore, ’Nika. You sixteen. Sixteen years since that night. I know the stories. You are shtriga now.”

Donika felt something break inside her. She spun on one heel and ran. Low branches whipped at her face and she raised her arms to protect herself. She stumbled over roots and rocks that she’d always avoided before. The owls hooted above her and now she could hear their wings flapping as they moved through the trees, keeping pace.

In her life, she had never felt so cold. No matter how fast she ran, no matter how her pulse quickened, she could not get warm. Her sobs were words, denials that felt as hollow as her own stomach. The hunger clutched at her belly and a yearning burned in her. Desire.

Josh
. She summoned an image of him in her mind and focused on it. They could run together. He would hold her. He could touch her, and maybe, for a little while, the madness and hunger would fade.

A numbness came over her, but Donika began to get control of herself. She still wept, but silently now. Her feet were surer on the path. She saw the stone wall to one side and the firepit ahead and the memory of last night gave her something to hold on to.

Soon, she found herself at the end of the path, stepping out into the backyard of the bitter old couple. An owl hooted, back in the woods, and she hurried away from the trees, wanting to leave the forest behind for the first time in her life.

She strode across the back lawn unnoticed. A dog barked nearby, the angry yip of a canine scenting the presence of an enemy. Donika made her way between houses, but as she came in sight of the corner where Josh would be waiting, she paused.

Hidden in the night-black shadows of those homes, she watched him. Josh sat on the curb, smoking a cigarette, content to be by himself. He waited for her, and didn’t mind. In the golden glow of a nearby streetlamp, he was beautiful to her. They would run through the dark woods together once again, but this time she would give herself to him.

Desire clawed at her insides. She ran her tongue out to wet her lips. She could almost taste the salt of his skin, and the urge to do so, to taste him, tugged at her.

A smile touched her lips and she almost called out.

Donika’s smile faded.

No
, she thought.
It isn’t love. Desire isn’t love. Hunger isn’t.

She understood hunger now. Donika fled silently back into the woods, where she belonged. The owls cried and flew with her. Loneliness clutched at her until she realized that she wasn’t alone at all. She had never been alone.

The woods received her with love. She could never go back to her mother’s house. Not now.

She hurtled along the path and then left the trail, breaking off into rough terrain. She raced through the woods, leaped fallen branches, and exulted in the night wind whispering around her. Her tears continued to fall but they were no longer merely tears of sorrow. Her mind whirled in a storm of emotions, but beneath them all, the hunger remained.

Surrendering to the forest and the night, she stripped her clothes off as she ran, paying no attention to where she left them. The moonlight and the breeze caressed her naked flesh and now the warmth returned to her at last. She felt herself burning with want. With need. And then she could feel her skin hanging on her the same way that clothes did and she reached up to the edges of her mouth and pulled it wide like a hood, slipping it back over her head.

Donika slid from her skin and, at last, took flight, returning to the night sky after sixteen very long years. Reborn.

She flew through the trees, thinking again of the boy she desired, thinking that maybe he would be inside her tonight after all, and they would both get what they wanted.

Her mouth opened in a low, mournful cry. It was a tune she’d always known, a night song that had been in her heart all along.

Courtney Davis crossed Montana Avenue on strappy, five-hundred-dollar heels, her sheer dress cascading around her upper thighs with every swing of her hips. Enormous black sunglasses hid most of her face even as they drew attention to her identity, and her blonde hair fell in shoulder-length waves that perfectly framed her features.

The world knew her business—thanks to TMZ and the tabloids, they knew every detail of her divorce proceedings, and had seen her in positions not meant for public inspection—but they could not possibly know of her crime.

A car honked at her and she fought the instinct to give the driver the finger, just in case someone should film her doing so. Then she remembered why she had chosen Santa Monica for this meeting in the first place—no paparazzi. Montana Avenue was trendy as hell, but the celebrities generally hung out elsewhere. The shops and boutiques and restaurants here were for the wives of wealthy men, the producers and studio heads and lawyers who raked in all the real Hollywood cash.

In a few short years, Courtney had gone from waitress to actress to sexy screen star to celebrity, and then her manager had taken her up to a meeting at the home of James Massarsky, to discuss a part, and she’d become a Hollywood wife. In his thirty years in the industry, Massarsky had gone from mailroom to major talent agent to studio boss to independent producer. Part of his appeal, to Courtney, was that his initial rise mirrored her own. But James had been around longer, and in that time he’d earned his reputation as a bastard and as a brilliant businessman, picking up seven Oscars and three wives along the way. He was a man who got what he wanted, and after their first meeting, what he wanted was Courtney Davis.

She hurried across the street, her heels clicking on the pavement. She hopped onto the sidewalk, pretending to be oblivious to the handful of people who shot her the “hey, isn’t that—” stare that so many of the semi-famous endured in L.A. People dined on outdoor patios, but she passed those by without looking inside, just as she did the little dress shop and the new Kismetix cosmetics store. The women she knew who shopped and lunched and lingered in Santa Monica were not her real friends, but other Hollywood wives—and she could ignore them if she wanted to.

That was good. Courtney wasn’t in the mood to talk.

You’re a fool,
she told herself, as she avoided the water dripping from the edge of an awning. It had rained this morning, but the sky had turned perfectly blue afterward. The sun shone its warmth down upon her, and she shook her head with the moment of her epiphany.

You could’ve met this guy anywhere. Burbank. Sherman Oaks
. Hell, she could’ve arranged for her accomplice to meet her up in Santa Barbara at some roadside bar, like in an old-time mystery novel. Somewhere with a million times less chance that someone she knew would see her, and know she’d been here.

When she had made arrangements for this meeting, she had been tempted to suggest drinks at the Ivy in Beverly Hills. She’d have felt at home there, with friends around her. But the Ivy was more than just a see-and-be-seen sort of place. It was Paparazzi Central. Photos and videos would be inevitable, and she didn’t want that.

Montana Avenue wasn’t much better, really. Her chances of being seen by someone, of word getting back to James, were high. But in the end, though she hoped to delay it as long as possible, she had decided it wouldn’t matter much if her soon-to-be ex-husband found out about today’s rendezvous. He would likely think what anyone seeing her in some clandestine coziness in a Santa Monica restaurant would think—that she was having an affair.

If only it were that simple.

At the corner, she turned off Montana onto a narrow side street, where trendy crumbled away like all Hollywood façades. She paused there, in the shade of a tree that grew up out of the sidewalk, and stared at the patio outside Lemongrass, the little bistro halfway down the block.

There were other reasons for her wanting this meeting to take place somewhere familiar. Outside of her Los Angeles, the places she hung out, the trendy clubs and shopping districts and the studio lots, the rest of the world seemed brittle and unreal, the dry husk of an empty beehive, no more substantial than dust and cobwebs. Ever since the day she had arrived in L.A., shitbox car loaded up with all her earthly belongings, Wisconsin license plate revealing the almost absurd truth about her small-town-girl past and her sickeningly trite Hollywood dreams . . . ever since then, she had known that this place was what she had lived for. She needed to be a part of this world.

Hollywood had a vibrant urgency that made it matter. The rest of the world was the façade. Whatever happened to her—celebrity, divorce, scandal—it only mattered here. Courtney Davis no longer believed she really existed outside this place.

She understood the shallowness of this thinking, and had come to terms with it. The small town Wisconsin girl still lived inside of her. She tried to be a good person, to create a life full of love and kindness. But somehow that person co-existed with the all-night clubbing that had gone on before she married James Massarsky, and the bitterness that marriage had brought her.

So, yes, perhaps James would learn more quickly than she would like about her meeting today. But Courtney wondered, now, if that had been her plan, subconsciously, all along. Maybe she wanted James to find out, so that he would know who it was that had hurt him, and stolen from him.

Lemongrass must have had live music out on the patio, for she heard sweet, gentle guitar rising on the light breeze, accompanied by a rich, warm voice. The song was unfamiliar to her, but the singer had an aching sadness in his tone, and it settled around her heart and made her linger a few seconds longer under the tree.

“This is a little strange, don’t you think?” Courtney asked.

Behind the wheel of the car, Don Peterson shrugged. “Nah. Guys like this, they think in ‘old Hollywood’ terms. Every one of them wishes they could have been Jack Warner and acts like the fucking Godfather. Massarsky is really the last of a dying breed, younger than the rest but with the same mindset. That’s why he’s an independent producer, now. There’s only so long an agency or a studio is going to let themselves be run around by a guy whose life is a scorched-earth policy. That’s what boards of directors are for. So now Massarsky works for himself.”

“Jesus, Don,” Courtney said. “That really makes me want to be in one of his movies. Thanks for the pep talk.”

Her manager laughed. “Relax. This is the old Hollywood thing. The director wants you. The producers want you, even though they’re bitching because you won’t show your tits—”

“You know—”

He held up a hand even as he steered them in amongst the trees.

“I know, Courtney. This is me, remember? No nudity. I get it, and I respect it. That’s your choice. Massarsky likes to meet people, look them in the eye and shake their hand. It’s an old-school thing. Once you get his seal of approval—which Brad is one hundred percent sure you will—you’ll never have to deal with him directly again. This isn’t an audition. You’ll talk. He’ll try to impress you. You’ll be impressed, or pretend to be. And we’ll go. End of story. Don’t be nervous.”

She smiled. “I’m not nervous.”

“You shouldn’t be.”

“I am.”

“I know.”

Don drove up winding roads that took them into hills higher than Courtney had ever known existed in L.A. She’d taken Coldwater Canyon many times, but this was different. Commuters drove that road. Up here, it was all private, a world apart from the buzz of life in the city.

A white wall sprang up to the right. In places she could see over it, down into valleys where massive, sprawling estates covered acres, with neighbours half a mile distant from each other. Soon they climbed a steep curve to find a gatehouse waiting at the top, complete with a uniformed guard, security cameras, and more fences. Don pulled up to the gatehouse as the guard leaned out.

“Courtney Davis and Donald Peterson to see James Massarsky.”

The guard checked a clipboard, nodded without saying a word, and reached into the gatehouse. The gates swung slowly open. Don thanked the guard and drove through, and then they were travelling along a much narrower, even more winding road. Tall hedges lined the sides. There were wooden fences, stone walls, even warnings about electrified gates.

“Look at that,” Don said.

He pointed to a small bit of exposed property on the left side of the road, where a trio of deer nibbled grass in amongst a few trees.

“That’s so weird. What are they doing in here?” Courtney said, mostly to herself.

“I’m sure they’re stocked, like fish in a private pond. The whole neighbourhood is fenced in. The deer are just more pretty things to look at.”

Courtney said nothing more until they pulled into the long driveway of Massarsky’s home, wondering how much of the man’s life was defined by acquiring pretty things to look at. Massarsky had built his legend on too much alcohol and too many women, a childish temper, and a savant’s eye for choosing film projects. But he had to have some serious smarts to have gotten to the top and surviving there for so long.

The stone driveway ended in a circle, off of which there were several individual parking spaces, each separated by a thin strip of perfectly manicured grass. Two slots had cars already in them, each pristine and elegant. Don parked in the last available slot, and even as they got out of the car and turned toward the house, the front door opened and James Massarsky stepped out.

Massarsky was fifty-six years old and moderately handsome in a tanned, relaxed, country club sort of way. His curly hair was thinning and he had a roundish belly that only added to his casual air. In a pale blue t-shirt and knee-length cargo shorts, all faded and rumpled, he didn’t look like a Hollywood mogul. Of course, she hadn’t met many, and none on his level.

“Hello,” he said, smiling. “I saw you drive up. Sorry for the grubby look. I was out in the garden, checking on my tomatoes, and sort of lost track of time.”

Courtney smiled. He grew tomatoes.

“I’m James Massarsky,” he said, putting out his hand.

“Don Peterson,” her manager said, shaking. “And this is Courtney Davis.”

When he took her hand, James Massarsky gave her a paternal sort of smile. His grip was firm and welcoming.

“Hell, I know who you are,” he said. “Thirty years in this business hasn’t broken me of my love of movies, yet. You were fantastic is that Scorsese picture, Courtney. What I want to know is if that performance came from you, or from Marty’s cameras and a great script.”

Off guard, she gave him a small shrug. “I’ve wondered the same thing. But thanks, just in case.”

Massarsky hadn’t let go of her hand, and now he looked at her oddly and squeezed a bit tighter. Then he laughed softly and looked at Don.

“You’ve got quite an actress here,” he said, obviously having already forgotten Don’s name. “She’s gonna take you far. Why don’t we go in the den and we can talk about whether or not I’m going to be along for the ride.”

“Sounds good,” Don said.

Massarsky pointed them along a corridor and shut the door, which had been standing open. Wonderful breezes swept through the house and sunlight rushed in from the tall windows in every direction.

“Marta!” the producer called toward the back of the house.

“Yes, Mister?” a thickly accented woman’s voice replied.

“Can we get some drinks in the den, please?” Massarsky said. He turned to his guests. “Want a soda? Juice? Something harder?”

“Juice would be great,” Courtney said.

Don nodded. “For me, too.”

Massarsky smiled. “Marta, three of those pomegranate juices, okay? We’ll be back in the den. Don’t forget the ice!” He glanced at them again. “You’ve gotta have the ice. Makes it sweeter, somehow.”

Pomegranate juice. Courtney said nothing. Massarsky hadn’t even asked if they liked pomegranate juice. She’d had it in martinis before, but never on its own, and knew it had a sharpness to it. It wouldn’t have been her first choice, but there was no arguing with James Massarsky. He was the sort of man who was used to deciding what other people would like to drink.

The rest of the house—what she could see of it as they passed through—was bright and airy, a true Hollywood palace of the sort that she had only ever seen in movies or on television or in magazine layouts. But as they made their way back into the den, they passed into dark corners of the man’s home, a kind of living museum of Massarsky’s history in the industry. Bookshelves were lined with leather-bound volumes of the scripts of every movie he had ever had a hand in, with no distinction between the classics and the crap. Photographs on the walls in the same hall showed Massarsky with a who’s-who of Hollywood royalty, some in their prime, but many more recent. Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster, Will Smith, Steven Spielberg, and Clint Eastwood. There were photos with four American presidents and a handful of sports stars as well. Some of the photographs had clearly been cropped to remove non-famous faces. In several, the arms or hands of those who’d been removed still remained in the pictures. Courtney assumed that the attractive blondes who recurred in several of the photos were Massarsky’s ex-wives.

The den itself was darkest of all. The blinds were open, but the room seemed to swallow sunlight. The brown leather furniture and rich wood of the shelves and tables and the mantelpiece over the fireplace embraced them all. As Don and Massarsky took seats on creaking leather, Courtney wandered a bit, examining some of the odd knick-knacks that sat on shelves along with more bound scripts and a lot of books that looked unread, spines unbroken.

“Go ahead and look around,” Massarsky said, though she’d already begun. “There are all sorts of odd mementoes in this house. I’m a collector. I’ve acquired hundreds of bits of Hollywood history over the years, not to mention the folklore of the industry.”

“Folklore?” Courtney asked.

Massarsky laughed. “You don’t want to hear this.”

She smiled. “I do.”