Disembodied Bones (14 page)

Then Olga, Dacey’s daughter burst inside the
room, zipping past the curtains like a miniature whirlwind. Six
years old, she was a mass of energy, whizzing here and there,
always active and ready to play at the drop of a hat or anything
else that would fall into her little hands. The Gingerbread House
was a playground for her and the employees indulged her like a
princess. “
Mamacita
!” Olga cried happily and threw her tiny
body into her mother’s arms. She had the same black hair and dark
eyes as Dacey and the same generous curving smile. “Grandma took me
to Chuck E. Cheese’s and I had two cokes! And we played games! And
I won! And Antonio lost! He lost a lot! Then Grandma said we had to
come home!” The little girl was in the throes of a sugar induced
fervor.

Dacey’s welcoming smile dipped for a moment.
Looking over her daughter’s body, she mouthed clearly to Leonie.
“My ex-mother-in-law. Did it on purpose. The hag.”

“And pizza?” Leonie asked.

“Leonie!” cried Olga and let go of her mother
to hug the other woman. Leonie picked the girl up and twirled her
around.

“You’re getting too big to do that, Olga,”
Leonie said laughingly. She put her down on her feet and gently
pinched her nose, pulling back to show the girl her prize. “Got
your nose.”

“No, you don’t,” Olga stated firmly. “That’s
just your thumb between your fingers.”

Leonie smiled. “You’re getting too big and
too smart for me.”

“Mama,” said Olga immediately. “Can I play
outside?”

“I don’t know, baby,” Dacey vacillated. It
was getting later in the afternoon, it was hot outside, and there
were tons of tourists around.

“I just want to look at the courthouse.” Olga
put her hands behind her back in an innocent fashion. “They’re
re-re-re-fur shen it.”

If they looked outside, they could have seen
the tall courthouse with its majestic clock tower covered with
scaffolding. The pink granite and red sandstone façade was getting
a facelift and parts of the west and northern porches were being
rebuilt from having suffered some water damage from last summer’s
tornado.

“Refurbishing it,” corrected Dacey.

“That’s what I said,” insisted Olga
indignantly.

“Go ahead, little girl,” Dacey said after a
lengthy pause. “But you stay just outside the store.” She began to
tick off items on her fingers. “You don’t go across the street. You
don’t go into other stores. You don’t go down the alley. You don’t
chase a kitten down the sewers. You don’t talk to strangers. And
you come back inside the store in ten minutes. You got it,
Olga?”

“Yes, mama,” Olga said obediently and
disappeared through the curtains.

“Sixteen years old and you’ll be telling her
all the reasons she can’t have sex with Blackie, the lead singer
from the Hip-Hop Sex Monsters.” Leonie laughed.

“Oh, God,” Dacey moaned. “Let her stay six
forever.”

However, it was almost thirty minutes later
when Dacey realized that Olga hadn’t returned to the shop.

-

Bound by age, comfort and zest,

The inquiring hand could not rest.

But given to her heart’s desires,

She gave to us - our worst quagmires.

And so now we wallow in our grief,

And seeking to close the box we weep.

While famine, plague, and other woes,

Best ourselves - and our foes.

What is it?

It is Pandora’s box.

Saturday, July 20th

It can be said:

To be gold is to be good;

To be stone is to be nothing;

To be glass is to be fragile;

To be cold is to be cruel.

Unmetaphored, what am I?

Leonie was covered from head to toe in a fine
white dust that had come from cleaning out a nineteenth century
highboy. It was American made, but sometime in the last twenty
years some industrious soul had refinished it and slashed its value
in half. She decided that it must have been stored at the bottom of
an active quarry judging by the enormous amount of powdery residue.
Halfway completed, she knew it would look wonderful when it was
done, close to what it had been a hundred years before.

“Sweetheart,” said someone behind her and
Leonie looked up just as Elan Carter’s hand gently brushed her
cheek. She checked herself and caught her breath. She hadn’t heard
the rattle of the curtain rings on the metal rod and her eyes slid
past Elan to see that Dacey had left the curtain open. The material
at the bottom was moving gently as if someone had passed there
recently. A random thought had her wondering if he had been
standing behind her, silently watching her work for minutes. When
her eyes came back to Elan she couldn’t help the other elusive
thought from entering her head.
He’s glad he surprised
me.

Leonie straightened up and slapped dust away
from her overalls. Grayish white billowed away in tiny clouds. “You
caught me in the middle of the dirty work.”

Elan laughed and she took a second to study
his face, just as she had studied the man she knew as G. Lily. In
many ways they were similar. About six feet tall, brown hair, brown
eyes, close to the same age, with the powerful physique of a man
who had been gifted with good genes. However, Elan’s hair was
professionally cut, swept away from his well-shaped face, and his
striking features often shone with some purposeful meaning that he
kept hidden behind a carefully blank veneer. He dressed as nicely
as any businessman and it wasn’t uncommon that he was in a suit,
sometimes one with a vest, and wearing ties she knew were designer
originals. Today it was a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a
burgundy tie. He looked the cool sophisticate, seasoned and
prepared to do whatever he needed to do to succeed at his
profession. He appeared strangely at odds with the aged, worn
atmosphere of the back room of the antique store, as if he was a
shiny, new penny in a sea of burnished, battered copper.

Leonie couldn’t help but glance down at her
ragged denim overalls covered with dust and wonder,
Why me?
She didn’t regard herself as particularly attractive, although Elan
had lavishly praised her looks on more than one occasion. There had
been others who called her beautiful, but she had never been able
to look at herself in a mirror and see what they were seeing.

And Elan was scrutinizing her with those
brown eyes, the color of coffee, dark enough to hide whatever lay
behind them. He had that warily neutral expression on his face
again as he looked at her. She wanted to reach up with both hands
and touch his sloping cheekbones while she stared into those
fathomless eyes, trying to understand what was going on inside his
head. He was a private man, who worked as a defense industry
consultant. Sometimes he was gone for weeks at a time, to other
countries, bringing her back trinkets from Paris and Munich. They’d
met when he’d come into the store; he collected Depression glass
for his mother. He’d sworn on a stack of bibles that he wouldn’t
leave until she’d promised to have coffee with him at the café next
door. Dacey had lightheartedly pushed her partner out the door and
locked it behind her.

There had been interest and more between the
two, but both seemed to shy away from too much touching. In six
months there had been some cautious kissing and not much more, with
Elan saying easily with a charming smile, “We have all the time in
the world to get to know each other, Leonie. Let’s not rush
it?”

“What is it?” Elan asked, breaking Leonie out
of her reverie, referring to her staring.

“Why haven’t I met your mother?” she said,
keeping her voice impartial. That natural wariness on both their
sides seemed excessive at the moment not unlike a wall of
concertina wire strung on the barriers of a prison.
Who’s inside
and who’s out?

A broad smile split Elan’s face and she was
struck by how handsome he was. Erica Jones had noticed and so had
their other female employee, a high school aged teenager named
Tinie Perdue. She had said, “Mr. Carter is frost-ee. I mean, if he
were ten years younger, I’d be getting a groove on for him. All
that.”

“You haven’t met Mom because I like you so
much,” Elan said easily.

Leonie glanced down again and brushed
vigorously at the white dust that clung to her clothes like a leech
on warm flesh. “What does that mean?” she said calmly.

“It means my mother isn’t the greatest woman
on the planet. I had to employ a nurse to be with her. It means
that she’s got Alzheimer’s disease.” The broad smile on his face
had vanished and Elan was staring at Leonie as if he hadn’t seen
her in quite this light before. “I would have told you before, but
well, it’s not something I like to talk about. For certain, she’s
not the same woman who gave birth to me. She doesn’t even recognize
the Depression glass I buy for her. It used to be something she
really enjoyed. Not anymore.”

There was an instant rise of shame in
Leonie’s gullet. Her head shot up at the words and she said
quickly, “Oh,
Dieu
, I’m sorry, Elan. If I’d known I wouldn’t
have said-”

Elan reached out and clucked her under the
chin with his hand. “Forget it. I have.” He hesitated for a moment.
“It’s good to be reminded sometimes that you come from Louisiana.
You have that slight accent that I forget about and then you go and
use a French word.”

“I grew up speaking Creole French and
English. It’s a pocket of people in north-west Louisiana. They live
around Twilight Lake and tend to be very…clannish.” Leonie watched
his fingers pull away.

“Clannish?” he repeated. “I’d like to go
there some time.”

“Maybe we’ll take a weekend off and go?”
Leonie wasn’t sure she wanted to take Elan Carter to visit with her
family. Her mother was still alive; Babette would probably live
until she was in her nineties. Her father, Jacques, had died eight
years earlier of congestive heart failure. Every Friday, Babette
put flowers on his grave, and her voice was still cold when she
called her daughter every other week to ask her when she would
return to the fold. Babette didn’t like using the phone much, nor
did she like admitting that her daughter was psychically damaged
and had been since her encounter with Monroe Whitechapel and his
gun. Half a woman was what some of the family had called Leonie and
a few to her face.

“You want me to meet your family?” he said
quietly.

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I?” Leonie’s response was
hurried and the words didn’t ring quite true in her mind.

“Anyway,” he breathed out slowly, realizing
it was an appropriate time to change the subject. “You think we can
go out tonight? I know I’m a little late in asking and I probably
shouldn’t presume you’re free, seeing as how beautifully you’re
attired right now, and how many men probably trip over themselves
getting to your door.”

“Ha-ha,” Leonie said saccharinely. “That’s
not going to get you any sugar.” She waved her hands around to
indicate the dusty, dank work room filled to capacity with various
antiques and collectables. “It goes with the work. And I can take a
shower.”

There was another brief flash of white teeth
in his face and then Elan said, “I went by your cottage earlier,
and there was a man there.”

“You know I work on Saturdays,” she said
after a moment.

“So do I. I thought I could catch you before
you came down here. I was on my way to Dallas, and well, I missed
you. But this guy looked shady.”

“No.” Leonie shrugged a little. “Maybe he
wanted to break in? He can have my black and white TV and he’s
welcome to the broken VCR. He can’t have my cat, however.”

“An alarm system would take care of that,”
said Elan, folding his arms over his chest.

Leonie went back to oiling the highboy. “An
alarm system wouldn’t be authentic to a 1909 cottage.”

Elan frowned. “We’ve had this discussion
before.”

“And you’re going to lose again,” Leonie said
decisively.

“Fine.” The neutrality of his tone slipped a
little and Leonie detected something odd about it. She couldn’t
tell what it was but it made her uncomfortable. That was funny
because nothing about Elan seemed to be uncomfortable. He was
always aware of her feelings, considerate, and conscientious to the
point of being almost too selfless. Dacey said it was because he
loved her. Leonie privately thought it was something else. Elan
waited a moment and added, “Dinner, then?”

“Eight?”

“Pick you up at your cottage, then,” he said
with a note of arrogance and leaned over to brush her cheek gently
with his lips. The flesh there burned with feeling as if his lips
had temporarily branded her skin. She resisted the impulse to touch
the spot.

Leonie stood still for a moment and then
turned to smile at him. The smile wavered a little. “I wasn’t
trying to pry about your mother.”

“I know,” he answered politely. “You don’t
like to talk about your mother, either.”

“I don’t, I suppose. Mothers,” she said with
a little wave of the oil-soaked rag. “What are you going to do with
them?”

Elan’s eyes glittered at her. Then he
laughed. “God, I don’t know.” He paused and then said, “Looking
forward to tonight, then.”

He was turning to leave when Dacey hurried
inside the backroom and asked in a rush, “Have either of you seen
Olga?”

Leonie glanced around. She had been caught up
in finishing up the Pennsylvania Dutch chest and then had
immediately started in on the highboy. A herd of rampaging
elephants could have trampled past her and she probably wouldn’t
have noticed. “No. She’s not back?”

Elan said, “I just got here.”

Dacey ran a nervous hand through her black
hair. “She’s probably asking a workman at the courthouse if she can
climb the scaffolding or something equally deadly. I’ll run outside
and look for her again.”