The Onion Girl (42 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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“No,” I finally say when I feel I can trust my voice. “It's not that at all. I just started thinking about all those paintings I lost, that's all.”
“What paintings?”
I realize then that I never told him. My friends know, but we don't talk about it and I didn't tell anyone else. So I tell him now and he gets this stricken look on his face that makes me want to comfort him, but I'm still the Broken Girl and all I can do is lie here and talk.
“It's okay,” I tell him. “Well, it's not okay, but I can deal with it. I have to deal with it.”
“Who would do such a thing?” he says.
Well, when your sister hates you enough, I think, but I don't even want to get into that.
“Who knows?” I say.
“Do the police have any leads?”
I shake my head. “Nothing concrete.”
It's funny. He's always been perfectly okay with my injuries. But this has really thrown him and I can tell he's feeling all awkward now. He never pitied the Broken Girl, but his sympathy for the loss of those paintings is close to pity—this knowing that I might never be able to paint their like again—and he doesn't know how to deal with it.
“Let's do that date,” I tell him, as much to change the topic of conversation as that I'd like to get to know him better. I don't hold out any real hopes—you can't when you're a Broken Girl—but I can't seem to let it go, either. I want to explore the “what if” that lies between us, though I already know where it's going to take us in the end. Why couldn't I have met him a month or so ago?
“When's your next night off?” I add. “Because my calendar's pretty much clear these days. We could do the movie thing.”
I say it like a joke and he accepts it that way. I see him put away the shock of all those paintings having been destroyed and give me a smile.
Another point for him. What I don't need from anyone right now is more pity.
“How about tomorrow night?” he asks.
“Tomorrow night's perfect.”
“Anything you'd like to see?”
“Something light and silly,” I tell him.
After he's gone, I lie there and stare up at the ceiling. But I'm not counting the holes in the ceiling tiles this time. Instead, I find myself looking forward to tomorrow evening and that's weird, because I can't remember the last time I looked forward to anything. I wish I could pick up the phone and talk to Sophie or Wendy, but even not being able to reach for the receiver and dial doesn't bring me down.
It takes Lou to do that.
“Raylene Carter,” he says after he's asked how I'm feeling and takes a seat in the chair Daniel so recently vacated. “Turns out your sister's got a record.”
“How high did it get on the charts?” I ask.
“Ha, ha. I ran her name and came up with a solicitation charge in L.A. for which she pleaded guilty and did six months in county. That was back in '81. Since then, she's kept her nose clean—at least on paper.”
“What's that mean?”
“I've got a friend on the LAPD—you remember Bobby Kansas? We used to call him Oz.”
I nod. He walked the Lower Crowsea beat for years. “A young, redheaded guy …”
“Not so young anymore,” Lou says. “And he hasn't got that much hair left, either, but yeah, that's him.”
“What's he doing in L.A.? I thought he got transferred uptown.”
“He did. But then he moved out west. He was going to work in the movies.” Lou shakes his head. “Instead, he's a cop again and the closest he gets to a film set is working for the studios on his off hours, providing security for film openings and stuff like that.”
“I wonder if he and Geordie have run into each other?”
Lou looks at me for a moment, then files my comment as irrelevant and goes on.
“Anyway,” he says, “I asked Oz to dig a little deeper for me. He
came back with the same charge I got off the computer, but also a lot of associated material. Turns out she surfaced in a case he had dealing with a porn actress named Pinky Miller who went berserk on a set and knifed a few people in '95.”
“Porn?” I repeat, my heart sinking.
Lou nods. “Your sister wasn't in the movies herself, but this Miller's her best friend and she was definitely a part of that scene. Miller did time—six years in the pen with the usual time off for good behavior—but your sister kept her nose clean. Or at least she didn't get caught. She turns up again a little earlier as a witness in a shooting at a copy shop—this is '94. She was still working there at the time Miller did the knifing, but she also had a side business by then, writing computer programs and selling them on the Internet. Nothing major, strictly small-time shareware stuff.”
Lou's been reading from a spiral-bound notepad. Now he looks up and fixes me with that cop look of his.
“Here's her arrest photo from '81,” he says, pulling it from the back of the notepad and handing it over. “Looks a lot like you at that age.”
I nod. She could be my twin.
“Funny,” Lou says. “The two of you having different surnames.”
“I changed mine,” I tell him. “Legally,” I add when I see his eyes narrow.
“This back in the days when you were under Angel's care?”
“Can't we just leave it as old history?” I say. “Please? I mean, whatever happened back then, hasn't the statute of whatever run out by now?”
I can see he has to work at it, but he gives me a reluctant nod. I know what's going on inside his head: all that old history between the two of them, Angel playing loose with the same law he was determined to uphold. It's what broke them up and I don't think he's ever forgiven her for that. Or himself for letting her go. Considering the two are mutually incompatible, you can see how it'd leave him messed up, even after all these years.
“Does she have a car?” I ask.
Lou nods and looks down at his notepad. “A '68 Cadillac convertible with California license plates.”
“Does it say what color it is?”
He gives me an odd look. “Pink.”
It's the car Sophie saw near my place, I think. The one Wendy said showed up on Cassie's cards. So it really is my sister behind all of this. Lou catches whatever's going on in my eyes, though he mistakes where it's coming from.
“You remember something about the accident?” he asks. “According to the report we got back from forensics, the car that hit you was a dark blue Toyota Camry.”
I shake my head. “I don't remember anything more than I told you.”
He continues to study me, finger tapping against the open page of the notepad.
“There's something going on that you're holding back,” he says.
“Woo-woo stuff,” I tell him. “Dreams and premonitions.”
All true enough, and he buys it. And because that kind of thing makes him uncomfortable, he doesn't push it.
“You know I'm only trying to help you, Jilly.”
“Of course I know that,” I tell him.
“If there's anything else you can tell me about this sister of yours …”
“Lou. I haven't seen her in over thirty years.”
“But Sophie says she could have a mad on for you.”
“I really don't know,” I say. “I abandoned her in that hellhole I grew up in, so maybe. It could even be likely. But I think it's pulling at straws. I mean, if it is her, why would she wait so long to get back at me?”
“Time does funny things to people,” Lou tells me. “For some, it lets them forget. For others, it just makes the old hurts bigger and more painful.”
I don't have to ask how he knows. You just have to see him and Angel in the same room to understand.
“We're still trying to get an address on your sister,” he says after a moment, “but we're running into a wall. She moved out of her L.A. apartment in February of this year—when Miller got out of prison—and so far as Oz can tell, neither of them have been heard from since.” He pauses, then asks, “You think they came back here?”
“Here or Tyson,” I say. Then, reluctantly, I share a last bit of information with him. “Sophie says she saw a pink Caddy convertible on my street not too long ago.”
Lou doesn't say anything for a long moment. Then finally he nods.
“I'll put an APB out on the car,” he says as he gets up.
“Lou?”
He pauses in the doorway and gives me a questioning look.
Don't be hard on her, I want to say. From the little he's told me, her life after she left that hell that was our home just went from bad to worse. I don't want to add to her pain.
But if it is her, if she is responsible … I can't take the chance of anybody else getting hurt.
I don't know how to tell him any of that.
“Thanks,” is all I say.
He nods, and then he's gone.
After he leaves, I'm back to staring at the ceiling again. I'm like a Yo-yo Girl, today. Up one minute, down the next. Daniel coming by, all sweet and full of possibility, then Lou's bad news …
I think of what Joe told me, what feels like years ago now, how I have to deal with the old hurts before he can get someone to help me mend the new ones. So by setting the police on my little sister—is that adding to the burden, or lightening it?
I just want to get away from it all, but even the cathedral world has gotten complicated. Between that nasty Tattersnake and the threat of my sister, the Amazing Wolf Girl, not to mention Toby running off, all bummed out the way he was, the dreamlands don't hold much promise of relief.
Do I even deserve relief? I ask myself, free to do so now because Sophie and Wendy aren't here to try to convince me that what's happening with Raylene isn't my fault.
What I need is a miracle, I think. Or those wizard twigs that Toby was going on about …
His voice comes back to me, talking to me about the magic those twigs embody.
The more you want it or need it, the harder it is to get.
But that doesn't mean it's impossible. Hard doesn't mean impossible. It just means difficult. And if there's one thing I've never done it's back down when times got hard.
So I close my eyes and I think about that cathedral tree, the place where I left off my climb, and as I drift away, I wonder if I'll make it there this time, and if I don't, where I'll end up instead.
It doesn't feel like it'll matter right now. Because wherever I end up in the dreamlands, I'll be mobile and able to take care of myself.
I can just leave the Broken Girl behind like she never was.
If only the rest of my life was as easy to fix.
Returning from a late lunch, Wendy sat down at her desk and found a message from Angel waiting on her voice mail.
“Hello, Wendy,” it began. “Jilly asked me to give you a call. She wants to know if there's something bothering you and if she's somehow the cause of it. If you could come by and talk to her after work, she'd appreciate it.” There was a pause, then Angel added, “Is there something bothering you? You know you've always got a willing ear with me—and I say that in friend mode, not as a social worker.” Another pause. “But do talk to Jilly if you get a chance.”
Like many people, Angel's voice when leaving a phone message was different from her normal speaking voice. You could still hear the warmth, but the sentences were clipped and there was just a hint of the discomfort that some people get speaking to a machine instead of a real person. But the meaning had come across, loud and clear. Jilly knew something was up between them.
Well, they were so close, the three of them, how couldn't she?
Sighing, Wendy erased the message. She thought about what Cassie had said to her last night, how she should talk to Sophie and Jilly about it, but what was the point?
“It's not something that can be fixed,” she said as she cradled the phone.
Not unless she could join them on the other side of nevernever where the lost boys fly and her namesake kept house for them.
But I wouldn't keep house, she thought. No way. I'd be out having adventures. Let the boys clean house and do the cooking for a change. She'd hand Peter Pan the duster, drop her apron to the floor, and off she'd go.
Off she'd go and she wouldn't look back.
She blinked, and looked around the office.
Was that what Jilly felt? she wondered. Was that unfettered feeling of utter freedom that had gripped her, just now, for one daydreaming moment … was that what Jilly experienced in those faerie dreamlands?
She picked up a stack of galleys that needed proofing. Chewing on the end of her blue pencil, she tried to concentrate on her work, but her thoughts kept returning to that feeling. Just for a moment there her heart had seemed to swell far beyond the boundaries of her body, encompassing anything and everything. It was probably what an epiphany felt like, though if she'd learned anything from it, it was only empathy for Jilly and why, given half a chance, she would be happy to just vanish into the dreamlands.
If that's what you feel, she thought, then maybe I understand how you could want to go over there and not think about coming back.
She tried practicing what Cassie had told her, to look sideways at things and see if some hidden landscape might appear in the corner of her eyes, but all that happened was that she kept missing typos and had to go over the pages again.

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