CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
Funny, how quiet it was after Ana left. So much quieter, it seemed, than when she was just in her room. Quieter even than it was all those years before they met her. Quiet as the grave, as Foxy would say if he were around, but as usual, Foxy was in Pirate's Cove, letting the rest of them deal with whatever was happening alone. Which was fine, because nothing was happening.
Well, not 'nothing'. Shortly after dark, a couple cars pulled into the lot and disgorged a bunch of teens. They rattled at the doors, tried unsuccessfully to break some windows, and ultimately gathered around the lobby doors. There, out of the worst of the wind, they lit their candles and did their silly Billy Blaylock thing while Bonnie, Chica and Freddy listened just on the other side of the doors. When the teens failed to conjure anything up (Bonnie couldn't help wondering, as he always did when this sort of thing happened, why anyone would want to summon up the thing Billy Blaylock had become. Even on Day Mode, his animatronic form was creepier than it was cute, and at night…no, no one should ever want to meet Billy Blaylock), they settled in to pass a bottle and smoke some cigarettes and tell each other stories about the Ghosts of Pizzerias Past.
After about an hour of this, however, one of their phones went off, and then another and another, and while they all talked big about strict parents who couldn't push them around, they also all quickly loaded themselves back up and took off. The lot was soon empty, but now Freddy was all keyed up and after checking the lock on the playground door, went into the gym and didn't come out again. Chica followed him in after a few minutes and returned shortly, answering Bonnie's concerned look with a shrug.
"He says he wants to watch the road," she said, tapping her fingers as she glanced back at the South Hall. "He says he's okay."
"Does he want us to take over the patrols or whatever?" Bonnie asked.
"We can," said Chica, her voice lifting on the last word so that it was almost a question.
"But…?" Bonnie prompted.
Chica moved further from the gym and lowered her voice to a self-conscious whisper. "Well, I wouldn't mind if it would make Freddy feel better, but I don't think he cares what we do tonight and we already know the doors are all locked."
"Good point," he agreed with the faintest twinge of conscience. If he didn't have to do it, he wasn't going to. While pacing the same halls and rattling the same doors over and over might give Freddy a sense of security, it reminded Bonnie too much of being trapped again in one of his pre-programmed performances. Given a choice, he'd much rather spend the night with his guitar. Sure, it might look like he was doing the same thing he'd done on thousands of other nights, but the music was always different.
"I don't need to ask what you're going to do tonight," Chica said as he settled himself on the stage.
"Nope. Why? What do you want to do?" he asked, doing his best to sound on-board for getting the fur kicked right off his fluffy butt if she wanted to kill time in the arcade.
"Oh, I've still got some books from the box Ana gave me that I haven't read yet."
"Fun."
Chica retreated toward the West Hall, only to pause with her hand on the door. "I guess we could go get Foxy and watch a movie? Or play cards?"
"Sure, if you want to."
"But do you want to?"
"Not gonna lie, this—" Bonnie plugged the guitar into the amp in his wrist and struck a chord. "—is what I want to do tonight, but if you think Foxy's lonely or whatever, go get him. Or hell, I'll go get him."
"Do you mean that?"
"Yup. I guess I can't say 'no hard feelings' yet, but I'm trying." He offered her a crooked smile and a bent ear. "We're both trying. It's weird right now, that's all, but it's getting better."
Chica nodded, her fingers tapping lightly at the door where her hand rested. "I just don't see how things 'get better' when neither of you do anything about it."
"We're guys," said Bonnie. "This is how guys work things out: in different rooms, not talking to each other."
Chica rolled her eyes, vented her cooling system and stomped off into the West Hall muttering about toxic masculinity.
Bonnie started playing, keeping it light and letting it flow in and out of classic riffs until it was all his own. He was aware in a distant way of the camera looking in on him from time to time, but he didn't let it bother him. He probably didn't have much time to kill. The way the kids had left, all their phones going off more or less at the same time, made him think maybe the tree thing was already over and a bunch of parents had just noticed their teenagers were missing. If that was the case, maybe Ana was on her way back right now.
Bonnie waited twenty minutes, then twenty more. So okay, maybe Ana and her friend (her male friend, the jealous dick at the back of his brain reminded him) went out for dinner afterwards. Which was great. Ana had a bad habit of skipping meals and over the last couple months, she'd visibly tipped from being a little on the skinny side to a lot on the skinny side. Then she'd gotten hurt and the damage to her face probably made it hard to chew. It had only been in the last few days that she'd really started eating again. So…yeah. If that was where she was, that was great.
Eight o'clock. Nine o'clock.
Well, maybe they went somewhere else for dinner. Mammon sure didn't have much to offer and thanks to their recent vacation, he now had a much better appreciation for just how far they were from anywhere else. She'd be back any minute.
Ten o'clock. Ten fifteen. Ten thirty…Ten thirty-two…
"That's nice," Foxy's voice said gruffly from the shadows at the other end of the room. "Yers?"
"Some of it. I don't know. Just riffing." Bonnie folded his ears over to block the light from the camera and peered into the dark until he found Foxy leaned up against the wall next to the Tray Return window. "How long have you been there?"
"Bout an hour." He shifted without coming any closer, his tone one of practiced indifference. "Occurred to me that Fred ain't come through the Cove in a while. Thought maybe I should poke me nose out and see what's what."
"He's in the gym."
"He all right?"
Bonnie shrugged with his ears and nodded, still playing. "We had some kids come by earlier, so he's a little on edge."
"Should have whistled me out."
'Shouldn't have to,' Bonnie thought, but said, "Aw, they didn't get in and they weren't even here all that long," mildly enough. He gave the stage a pat with his foot. "Take a seat."
He made the offer confident that Foxy would ignore it, but after only a second or two, Foxy came over and sat down directly under the camera, where it couldn't get a look at him, although it was trying. There he sat, looking stiff and uncomfortable, holding his hook in his fist like he thought it would fly around the room if he let go.
"You okay?" Bonnie asked, watching his fingers slide over the strings.
Foxy let the question sit unanswered more than a minute before abruptly saying, "Restless. Didn't think she'd be gone so long." He paused, adding with a smile that showed the glint of his gold fang, "That's yer cue to call me a feckless mooncalf."
"Hey, if I was going to call you anything, I'd use real words."
The gym door banged open and Freddy came grumbling into the dining room, stopping short when he saw the two of them on the stage together.
Bonnie silenced his guitar with a wary, "What's up?"
"What's wrong?" Foxy corrected, already on his feet.
"Nothing." Freddy sent a black scowl at the wall in the general direction of the road. "I saw a car go up the mountain twenty minutes ago. I saw a car come back down just now. If no one else lives up there like she claims, then she's home and she never texted like she promised she would." His ears twitched, the only outward sign of some fierce internal argument, and then he gave into it and went full bear. "She has ten minutes to get back here with a damn good apology or I'm marching myself right up to her doorstep and giving her a piece of my mind! Oh and it goes without saying, but she's grounded again! No phone, no tablet, no…" He visibly fumbled for a sufficient punishment. "No coffee!"
Bonnie rubbed his muzzle, stifling a sigh as Foxy laughed. "Freddy—"
"I said no! If I get that apology, she's only grounded until the end of the month. If I don't, she's grounded for the rest of her life!" Freddy's voice had been steadily rising and by the end of this not at all ridiculous over-reaction, he was nearly at top volume, but he punctuated the whole thing with no more than a surly grunt as he snapped his left wrist compartment open. "My phone just buzzed," he explained.
"Be nice," Chica urged, peeping through the West Hall door with a book in her hand and anxiety quivering through her crest.
"I will not be nice. I will be patient and I will be reasonable, but I will not be nice," Freddy warned and thumbed at the phone's screen. "Ana," he began, then stopped, ears swiveling sharply forward as he listened, and then he switched from grizzly bear to teddy bear in an instant. "Are you all right? …Yes, he's right here. What happened? Are you hurt? …Just tell me—all right. All right." He tapped at the phone's screen again and passed it over, saying, "Here he is."
Ana's voice came through the phone, small with more than just the speaker: "Bonnie?"
"Yeah, it's me," said Bonnie, putting his guitar aside and standing up. "What's wrong, baby?"
A shaky breath, maybe a laugh. "Nothing. Christ, this is so stupid." The last word cracked. She breathed some more and was silent.
"Are you okay?" Bonnie asked, looking uncertainly around at Chica and Freddy and even Foxy, just like anyone else here had answers. "Where are you?"
Another laugh. "On my front porch. Isn't that the stupidest fucking thing? I'm right in front of my door and I can't go in."
"Why not?" Bonnie asked. There was only thing he could think of, even though he could hear her voice and he knew damn well something a whole lot bigger than that was at work here. "Did you lock yourself out of the house?"
"No. It's not locked. I never lock it. Even when I think I lock it, I never actually lock it, so I quit trying to remember. Which is also stupid, especially when I know people come here sometimes to fuck with me."
"Is somebody there now?" Bonnie asked and Freddy immediately headed for the nearest door, signaling Foxy with a jerk of his head.
"No," said Ana. "I don't know. Just the usual ghosts, I guess." Another laugh, high and shaky. "I don't know why I called. I just…I wanted to hear your voice."
"Okay," said Bonnie, thinking something must have happened at the town thing, the grown-up equivalent of the bullying bullshit that used to go down sometimes at the pizzerias. It was bad enough to shake her up, which meant it was pretty damn bad, but it was over now and it seemed to him that the most important thing was to get her here, so that was what he focused on. "You need me to come get you?"
"No," she said at once, but she said it in a choked whisper, so he figured that probably meant yes.
"Okay, I'm going to come get you," he said, handing the phone back to Freddy.
"No," she said again, a little louder. "This is…stupid, this is so stupid. I need to just grow the fuck up. I shouldn't have called."
"Don't hang up," Bonnie said quickly, hearing finality in her last words. "You keep talking to me, baby. Where are you now?"
"Still on the porch." More laughter, jagged as broken glass. "I need my keys. They're right inside and I can't… I keep thinking if I go in there, I'm going to…do something else and I… I think I need help, like I really need help. I thought I could do it myself. Hell, I thought it was already done, but I can't…" Breathing. "I don't know what the fuck I thought you were going to do about it," she said suddenly in an almost-normal tone of voice, followed by a savagely self-loathing, "What the fuck is wrong with me?!"
"Where are they?" Foxy asked.
Silence on the phone for a few beats. "Am I on speaker?"
"Um," said Bonnie. "Is that okay?"
Hard breath blew through the phone. "Yeah. I guess. It's fine. Fuck."
"Where are yer keys, luv?" Foxy asked again.
"In my pack."
"And where's that?"
"On my bed. In…In the front room there. The air mattress."
"Keen. Listen to me voice now. Yer going to open the door in a tick, and I'll know when ye does, for them doors has fine creaky hinges. We'll all hear 'em, like we was right there on the porch with ye, ye ken? Ye ain't alone."
Breathing. Then a long, slow creaking sound.
"Go in now," said Foxy. "Four goodish steps should be enough to get ye to the archway. Walk 'em off."
The heavy tap of shoes on a hard floor. Four steps, a pause, then a couple more and then the sound of them changed, although Bonnie couldn't have said just how.
"Off the stairs, luv," Foxy said sharply. "There's nothing ye needs up there." A pause, then a few more footsteps which must have been taking Ana back to where Foxy wanted her, because he said, "Good lass. Now go get yer kit and yer keys. Ye see 'em?"
"Yeah."
"Go fetch 'em."
"And then come home," Bonnie added.
"I should get changed first."
"That can wait."
"My shoes at least," Ana said in an odd voice. Just how it was odd, Bonnie couldn't have explained. Like the sound of her shoes on the floor or the stairs, there was just something off about it. "They're not mine. I should put them back. I'm just going to put them back and get my own shoes."
"Fine," said Foxy. "Do that and then ye—"
"No," said Bonnie. "Forget the shoes, just get your keys."
"I don't know," she said vaguely. "I think I'm fine. I'm fine. I don't know why I called. I'm just going to stay here tonight though. Everything's all right, but I'm going to go now, okay?"
"Nope," Bonnie said. "Freddy says you're grounded again, so get your keys and get your pack and get back here. If someone's got to come get you, you're going to be in even more trouble."
Silence, but the little timer was still going on the call, so she hadn't hung up.
"Yeah," she said at last and then said it again, sounding both embarrassed and a little relieved. "Yeah, okay. I'm coming." Footsteps, the jingling of keys and rustling of fabric, then more footsteps, moving with purpose, and the closing of that creaky door. Her footsteps changed from the hard floor to wooden boards and then to grass and gravel. He heard a car door open and shut and an engine turn over. "Be right there," she promised and the call ended.
Freddy took his phone back and put it away in his wrist, then stayed that way for a while, staring into his open palm. "She said it would end badly," he muttered and watched his hand clench into a fist. "I should never have let her go."
"Ye can't keep her shut up forever, mate," Foxy told him.
Freddy nodded without agreeing. "There are other ways to ensure this doesn't happen again. And I think I've reached that point. If she mentions a name, I'm taking a walk and putting an end to this harassment once and for all."
"It wouldn't help," said Bonnie, although he sure understood the feeling. "It's not just one guy."
"I can take more than one walk."
The camera whined softly, moving over Freddy's features like a caressing hand.
Freddy glanced at it again, his own lenses whining as his eyes turned from blue to black, and then he turned his back on the stage. "I'll wait on the dock."
"Vent it out while ye can, mate," Foxy said, watching him go with a careless kind of sympathy. "But ye can't solve this with more killing and she wouldn't thank ye for it anyhow. Even if she never knew ye were the one behind it or why ye done it, she'd only find a way to take on the blame."
Bonnie snorted agreement. He'd never quite gotten over the way she'd talked about that one guy who died, the Paulie guy. He'd made her life at work a living hell and shit-talked her all over town, but as soon as he was dead…
No point thinking about that now. And hey, whatever had happened tonight, as bad as it obviously was to shake her up like this, at least it wasn't dead-guy bad. Bonnie was a bunny who believed in the power of positive thinking. Sometimes.
They waited. The camera on the show stage wall waited with them, aimed as close to the kitchen doorway as its limited range allowed.
Ten excruciating minutes later, Bonnie heard the loading dock door rattle open and the low rumble of Freddy's voice. "No, I'm fine," Ana kept saying. "No, it's stupid. I'm so stupid. I'm sorry I scared you. I'm fine. I'm fine."
He saw her, just a blur of red through the Tray Return window at first, and then she was in the kitchen doorway, and at first glance, she looked okay. Her hair had come partway out of the thing she'd done with it, but only in the same wild way it always escaped from her control, not like she'd been fighting. There were no new bruises…hell, he couldn't see much of the old ones, between the makeup she was wearing the way she'd pulled her hair over her shoulder. The dress looked good, not dirty or torn. A little muddy around the bottom, but that was it. From here, she mostly just looked tired, but the longer he looked at her, the more those invisible not-right clues registered on some deeper level inside him.
"No, really, I'm fine," she was telling Chica now, but she glanced over at the stage as she said it and whatever she saw in Bonnie made her first pause, then frown. "I'm fine," she insisted, speaking only to him now.
"No, you're not," he said slowly, searching her face, trying to puzzle out just what it was that was setting him off. "You're not hurt, but you're not okay. What the hell happened?"
She shook her head, lips pressed tight together, then shook her head again and came over to drop her pack heavily on the stage. She sat down beside it to take off her shoes (too small, Bonnie noticed; they left red welts where the straps had pinched her) and gave them a toss, first one, then the other, out into the middle of the dining room. The camera tracked them, then came back to her, watching as she began to pick her hair out of the complicated knot she'd tied it in.
For a while, the only sounds were the whisper-soft pump-and-sigh of four cooling systems in peak operation and the occasional whine as the camera adjusted itself for a better view. Ana finished untangling her hair, pulled some of it over the shaved side of her head, and then sat, stiff-backed and stone-faced, while they all watched her and waited. And you had to wait because pushing was never the way to get Ana to open up—
"So?" Foxy prompted.
If Ana had real ears, they'd have snapped down flat. As it was, all she could do was lift her chin. "So what?"
"Paragon o' maturity, ain't ye?" Foxy observed. "So ye going to tell us what happened to ye out there or ye going to keep us guessing, that's what. And dassn't ye dare say naught, for we can all see yer ruffled up. The more ye don't say, the more ye leaves to our imagination and I'll tell ye right now, old Fred here's already set up to skin someone alive."
Ana looked at Freddy, who glared at Foxy but did not deny it.
"Nothing happened to me," Ana said with a faint emphasis on the last word. "Not yet. Things might be different tomorrow, though."
"Enough foreplay," said Foxy, ears pricked with grudging interest. "Talk, woman."
She glanced at him, then Freddy again, but it was only when her eye came to Bonnie that her I'm-fine mask slipped and showed some of the uncertainty beneath. "Do you want to hear this?" she asked after a few false starts. "Do you really? I can just say tonight sucked and find something else to do. It's not like you can help or anything, and I can deal with it on my own."
Bonnie shrugged and flicked his ears pointedly. "I can listen. Sometimes it helps. And take it from a guy who's spent years not being to talk when he really wanted to, sometimes that helps too."
Ana took her time thinking that over.
"It's a long story," she said at last. "I mean, it's not. It'll probably take ten times as long to tell it as it took to watch it happen, but there's…there's shit I can't work out yet. I think I need to start earlier than I probably need to start."
"Ye can start by not speaking in riddles."
"Dude," said Bonnie and shook his head when Foxy looked at him.
Foxy frowned, but shut up.
"Okay," Ana said after running her hand through her hair a few times. "So the thing that I think set everything off was, he was waiting for me when I got there."
"Your friend?" Freddy guessed before Bonnie could ask the same question. "I thought he was picking you up."
"No. I mean, yes, he did. He picked me up and we went in together. No, it was Shelly who was waiting. My boss."
"Your former boss," Freddy corrected in a flat, unforgiving tone.
Oddly, Ana coughed out a little breath—the kind of laugh you make when you know you really shouldn't laugh. "Former, right. Anyway, he was waiting for us when we got there and he lost no time telling…telling my friend what a worthless piece of shit I am. And that… Maybe that shouldn't have surprised me, but it did."
"Yeah, because he wasn't an asshole or anything," Bonnie said before he could stop himself. He winced an apology at Chica, who was giving him the 'Not helpful' stare, and scooted over next to Ana. "Sorry. Go on."
"I know, I know. You're right," she sighed. "He's a sexist, belt-hitching blowhard, and I know he didn't like me much, but I've been working with the guy for almost a year and most of the time, he treats me fine. Yeah, he'll try to cop a feel now and then or steal a peek down the front of my shirt, but there was a certain level of professional respect there, or at least I thought there was…and there wasn't. There never was. He hated me," she said softly, her brows knitting in confusion.
"What did he say?" Freddy demanded and when Ana only shrugged, he added, "That's an order," like that ever worked with her.
But this time it did, because even though she shrugged again, she said, "Same old song and dance. My mom was a whore. Her mom was a whore. My entire family is nothing but whores and blank spaces where the fathers ought to be, except no one knows who they were because everyone's a whore. He's the only man who'll ever pay me for doing anything other than sucking dick, which he only did out of charitable feeling because he believed me when I said I'd left my whoring days behind me, but I hadn't, and now I'd sullied his good name and the reputation of his business with my slutty slut-stank, so no, I didn't quit, he fired me. There was more, but that's the gist of it."
"Wow," said Chica, and even though she'd only had that poofy crest for a few days, Bonnie had no trouble at all reading furious shock in the angle and fluff of its feathers. She eased onto the stage beside her and put her wing around Ana's stiff shoulders. "I…I am so sorry. I can't…I can't even find the words."
"It's fine, it's not important. I hear that shit all the time. Most of the time, you can ignore it, but the whole fucking town heard him this time. Like, there were maybe twenty people sitting this thing out. Literally everyone else was there and he wanted it that way. He could have called me up at any time if he just wanted to cuss me out, but no. He needed every goddamned person in town—man, woman and child—to hear it. And what am I supposed to do? If I let him say it, then it's obviously true and I'm a shameless whore, and if I argue, then it's just as fucking obviously true and now I'm a lying whore. I can't win. I can never win, because he's the proud son of the Shelton line, honest men brave and true, and I will never be anything but my whoring mother's whoring little pup."
"I'm going for a walk," Freddy announced and headed for the door, ears jutting forward over his brows and hands in fists at his side.
"I'll go with ye," Foxy offered mildly and hopped down from the stage, patting Ana on the head as he strolled by. "Let me just get me coat."
And his sword. And Bonnie had to stay home, and as much as he wanted to stay with Ana and help her work through this, he'd really rather be in on the skull-crushing and stabbing.
"Guys, I'm only saying this once," said Ana, rubbing her face again. "If you don't want to be here, fine. If you want me to just shut up about it, that's fine too, but don't go off in a huff now and then expect me to go over it again later. I am one and done with this horseshit. And this part isn't even the bad part yet. It's just the part you have to know so you understand why I'm freaking out a little about the rest of it."
Freddy slowed, took a few more steps, and stopped. The new joints of his hand groaned a little with strain as his fist clenched and unclenched. When the camera shifted away from Ana to watch him deliberate, he glanced at it and then turned around, although he didn't come back to the stage. He folded his arms, his eyes almost full black, and growled, "Tell me you hit him."
"Almost," she said and sat there for a while, staring at the far wall with an expression somewhere between horror and relief. "Holy shit, if there was one way to make this shit-soup any thicker…but no. Shelly said his piece and I did not, thank God, hit him. And as it turns out, someone else actually stepped up and shut him down, which I was not expecting, frankly. I'm not sure I could go as far as to say she didn't believe what he was saying, but she did demand he apologize."
"Did he?" Chica asked skeptically.
"No. He just left. And the lady who called him out told me how much stress he was under. Poor guy, right? Poor guy. But whatever, at least he's gone, right? No reason to let it ruin the whole night. So we walk around and look at the booths and I'm starting to get over it, and finally it's time to do the tree."
She trailed off, staring through the wall and across the desert, miles away while she sat here. At last, she stirred. "I need to set the scene a little. Bear with me. Okay, so the tree is outside next to the community center downtown. It's some kind of desert fir, just like the ones we got all up in the hills across the way there. That's probably where they got it, it had that kind of rustic, free-tree look. And it's about…I don't know, fifteen, twenty feet of tree, trimmed out a little at the top and bottom to make it look bigger than it is. For stability reasons, because the wind out here is ridiculous, they thread the trunk into this thing, like a…like a…" She gestured helplessly, miming something round, then gave up and said, "Did you guys ever have a tree in the restaurant?"
"Sure," said Bonnie, who had helped countless kids make paper ornaments to hang on them.
"Okay, so you know they have to clamp it into this thing so the tree can stand up. Well, the town tree's got something like that too. It's a metal sleeve about…I don't know, this tall," she said, holding her hand up to what would nearly be her standing height. "It's got a flared base flat to the ground, so if anything, it kind of looks like a stovepipe. Tree probably goes into the ground at least a little. You've seen the firs around here—a lot of trunk, not a lot of tree, so it stands to reason. For extra support, they've got a bunch of cables clipped to the top of that sleeve, running out about eight or ten feet down to the ground, like spokes in a wheel. Let's assume they used steel line. It had to be strong enough to hold the tree, after all."
"Luv, I am struggling to hold onto me interest," Foxy warned.
"Yeah, yeah, I know how I sound, but this is all going to be important later, I promise. Right now, just keep a couple points in mind. First, to prevent dumbasses tripping over those cables or fucking with the tree, they've set some stakes into the ground about ten feet out from the tree, and wrapped chicken wire around them to form a kind of ring, and then clipped some mesh lights to it. So it's not a solid wall by any means, it's nothing anyone could climb, at least not without doing some major damage which the lights would definitely show. Okay? Remember that. And second thing is, at the top of the tree, instead of a star, they've got this huge angel-guy, almost as tall as I am, holding a star out in front of him. And when the tree is switched on, the angel spins around, like it's showing the star off to the whole town in every direction. Okay?"
"I thinks I'm beginning to see where this is heading," Foxy remarked.
"You're way ahead of me, Captain, because I sure never saw it coming. Hell, I saw it happen and I still didn't see it coming."
"Well, someone's still got to tell me," said Bonnie. "What happened?"
"What happened," Ana echoed heavily, "is that after Shelly bitched me out in front of the entire town so that absolutely everyone could see there was bad blood between us, he left. And everybody wastes time for about an hour before we all go outside together. The button is pressed and the tree lights up and there's Shelly," said Ana, leaning forward and pointing away into the back of the room like the guy was standing there. "Motherfucker pulled a couple of those strings of lights off the tree—and you want to hear something funny? I saw that first. Like everyone gasps and I look over and at first, all I see is this big dark place and how everything looks messy and I'm thinking someone's catching hell for that, and seeing as how it was his job, that someone's probably going to be Shelly and it serves him right, and only then do I see that Shelly is standing on one of those cables, which, to remind you, is this wide." She pinched about half an inch of air. "And Shelly's twice my age and more than twice my weight. I've seen that man climb a ladder maybe six times in the last year, and now he's just chilling up there on a wire that's strung at a twenty-degree angle in his flat-soled Sunday shoes on a winter night with no support of any kind unless you count the string of lights he's tied around his neck, the other end of which is tied to the angel's arms at the top of the tree."
Freddy uttered an unsympathetic grunt, Foxy, an appreciative whistle, and Chica got that faraway look in her eyes which meant she was thinking, so it was up to Bonnie to ask, "Did he jump?"
"No," she said. "Maybe that was the plan, but he couldn't. See, once the button was pressed, not only does the tree light up, but the angel starts turning. It takes out any slack there might have been in that string of lights and wraps it around itself as it turns, winding like a fishing reel, and it pulls him up off the base and starts dragging him up the tree, and whatever his plan had been up to that point…he changed his mind. He's grabbing at his neck, he's kicking…and I guess his legs get tangled up in more lights because suddenly he can't go up any higher, but the angel's still turning, and now he's stretched between the base and the top, and he's kind of getting yanked into the tree but the lights around his neck were lit, so we could all see his neck getting thinner…and longer…"
Bonnie put his arm around her, and she leaned into his side at once, digging her fingers roughly into the fur of his thigh and sometimes pulling or rubbing, but he didn't think she knew she was doing it.
"I'm sorry if this seems like a stupid question," Chica said timidly, "but why didn't anyone just turn it off?"
"They couldn't," she said, still staring across the room and far away. "The button's just a symbolic thing anyway. All it does is send a start-up signal to the switchboard, and then it stays on until somebody goes all the way to wherever that is and shuts it down. So, I mean, yeah, that's the first thing everyone's screaming, is shut it off, but first they've got to find the janitor because he's the only one with keys and then he's got to run all the way up to the back of the main building, and he's like seventy! And I don't know what happened there, whether the old guy tried to run or whether he gave his keys to someone younger but who didn't know which one of the hundred keys on his ring went to the door or which switch went to the tree, but either way, it was a long time before they shut it down. Ten minutes at least. Ten minutes is a long, long time to get racked on a fucking Christmas tree."
The camera whined, as if agreeing. He was probably enjoying this, getting his rotting rocks off to either the gory details or Ana's obvious distress or both, and probably the smartest thing to do was get Ana to stop talking about it, but it was too late for that. He wasn't even sure she could stop.
"It didn't take ten minutes anyway. I'd be surprised if it even took three," she went on as Bonnie and Chica held her between them. "You couldn't hear anything from where we were, but all of a sudden, his neck was like…long. Twice as long as it had just been. And his arms… One of his hands was stuck at his neck but the other one flopped down and kind of jittered for a while. And it was over. It was over. He was dead when his hips popped, I'm sure of it. He didn't react to that at all. And the cord snapped before his head actually came all the way off, so it wasn't that bad," she said, and clapped a punishing hand over her eyes at once, shaking her head. "He died. A man died. Of course it's bad, I'm just saying, I've seen men go down a hell of a lot harder. I've seen men drawn and quartered. I've seen chainsaws and bandsaws and fucking hand-saws. This was relatively quick, it was bloodless…and it was a choice, right? He didn't trip and spin-flip through the air and land on the tree like a festive Final Destination thing. He made a decision, he made a plan and he took steps to get it done. The fact that he changed his mind later…" She faltered there, troubled thoughts drifting through her eyes. "…doesn't really matter, does it?"
"No," said Bonnie bluntly. "Ana, seriously, don't waste one more second of your life thinking about this shit. He was an asshole and whatever he did tonight has got nothing to do with you."
"It kind of does. He made sure of that. And whether I agree with him or not, here I am," she said with rising frustration, "stuck in the middle of the mess he made and I can't wrap my head around why he did it! Much less how."
"Well, the how-part seems pretty obvious," Bonnie said.
She rocked back into Chica a little so she could stare at him the way that apparently deserved. "Does it? Does it really? Because it's hard enough to picture Shelly getting over the chicken wire without crushing it, but then he, what? Shimmied up the stovepipe? Or did he just walk up the cable like some kind of circus act? In his Sunday shoes, which I can't stress enough. And then, the real million-dollar question, how the hell did he manage to tie himself off to the angel? Did he just fly up there? Because there's no way he climbed the tree."
"Why not? You did say the lights were all messy," Bonnie pointed out.
"Bon, for real, that man went two-eighty easily. There's not a single branch on that tree that could have supported his weight. Besides, all the branches are covered in ten thousand pencil-thin pokey twigs. Seriously, his face and hands would be scratched to shit and the tree would be fucking destroyed. Don't believe me, I will take you up into the foothills right now and you can watch me try to climb one of those white firs and see what it does to me or the tree!"
"Okay, I believe you, but…" Bonnie thought about it, then suggested, "What if he threw the lights? Made a loop at one end and snagged the angel that way?"
"No, it…" Ana stopped, frowning, and shook her head. "I don't think so. The lights weren't just looped around the angel's arms, they were tight. They had to be tied."
"Okay, but by the time you looked, the angel had already been spinning, right? So even if there had been a loose loop, it would have been wound tight by the time you noticed. Right?"
Ana accepted that with a scowl and a nod, then immediately countered, "So he's not just a tightrope walker, he's a Wild West lasso artist? The man can't aim his dick at the toilet nine times out of ten, but he can make a precision throw like that?"
Bonnie shrugged. "You don't know how many times he threw it before he finally did it. Then he could have used that as his handhold when he was climbing up the wire. Tie himself to that, wrap the lights around his neck and wait."
"And wait," she echoed, nodding and rubbing at her face. "Let me tell you, Bon, it's the waiting that gets me. He stood out there in the freezing wind, in the dark, with the fucking tree at his back like a bed of nails for all that time, and he stayed determined. He had a thousand fucking chances…but he waited until no one could possibly save him to change his mind. What did he think was going to happen? He set the whole thing up so the whole fucking town would have to see it, how could he not know he was going to spend his last minutes on Earth shitting himself in front of everyone he knew? Is that how he wanted to go out? Is that how he wants to be remembered to his fucking kids when they have to come back to deal with his body?"
"Once someone reaches that point, they're not thinking about those kinds of consequences," Chica said softly. "They just want a way out."
"From what?" Ana demanded, flinging her arms out wide. "How the hell is he the victim in this scenario? He fucking slandered me in front of the entire town, but the fact that I didn't run out crying or beg him to take me back shamed him so much that suicide was the only option? What kind of sense does that make?"
"It doesn't," said Chica, petting her. "It won't. Lashing out at you like that, as unforgiveable as it was…that wasn't a reason for anything he did. It was a symptom of something a whole lot bigger that only he could see."
"If you start defending this guy, I'm going to pop a pressure valve," Bonnie said seriously. "And yeah, okay, I guess I'll be the bastard who says it, but I'm not sorry he's dead. Even if the guy never said anything to you tonight, he said plenty the last time you talked to make me more than happy he'll never say anything to you again. I know I said this after the other guy died, but it's still true: Being dead doesn't magically turn an asshole into a saint. You don't owe this guy anything, not even being sorry he's gone."
He didn't really expect any of that to comfort her—it hadn't the last time—but if anything, the darkness churning inside her only got darker. "I can't let myself think like that, Bon."
"Why not?"
"Yes, why not?" Freddy repeated, folding his arms with an impressive glower. "Leaving the things he's done to you entirely aside, the man didn't even have the decency to hang himself at home. He needlessly traumatized hundreds of people, many of them children, and he did his level best to ruin Christmas for them while he was at it. I understand that you worked with him closely and his death may be difficult to process, but I cannot begin to fathom how you can feel even a little bit sorry for him."
"Sorry?" She thought that over and slowly shook her head. "No. I'm…something, but it's not that. Tell you the truth, big bear, I'm not entirely sure what I'm feeling yet. It all seems so surreal. That stupid angel with that damned cord twirling around in the air and there's the tree still mostly lit up and twinkling, and there's Shelly with his feet way up by the top of the stovepipe still and his pants half-off so his ass-crack's showing and his neck looking as long as my fucking forearm and his head laying on the ground, looking back up at his own body, mouth open like even he can't fucking believe it."
"Oh Ana." Chica hugged her.
"I'm fine. I'm fine, but I'm…I'm not even sure. Am I pissed? Am I confused?" She thought. "Am I scared? I want to think I would have saved him, but I didn't even try."
"Don't," Freddy said, accompanied by a few long, distorted notes of the Toreador March. "Do not for one second blame yourself for that man's death."
"I don't," she said, not very convincingly. "Even if I could have run in those stupid shoes, I couldn't have reached him. I don't have a knife or anything to cut him down. There's nothing I could have done and I know it, but I didn't even try and that is not a good look for me."
"Did anyone else try?" Bonnie asked.
"That's not the point!" she insisted. "You don't get it yet, do you? Okay, look, they finally shut the lights off, like, all the lights, now that it didn't even matter because everyone already fucking saw it, and everyone was freaking out and kids were screaming and crying and people were starting to run around in the dark and I guess someone got knocked over, and it was a mess," she concluded. "It was such a fucking mess. The sheriff was trying to take control of the whole situation, and the first thing he says, the very first fucking thing, before he tries to secure the scene, before he calls into county for backup, before he even helps the Widow Greene off the ground, you know what he says? He points at me and he says, 'You don't leave until I say you can.'"
Freddy's eyes narrowed. "You, specifically?"
"Yeah. I mean, there were other people around me and he didn't use my name, so if you pressed him on it, he could say he was talking to anyone or everyone, but he wasn't. He was talking to me. Now do you get it? Now do you see why I told you all that other stuff first? When Shelly bitched me out, he wasn't just blowing steam in my face, he was making the entire fucking town a witness to a motive in the fucking making. And this is why it matters how he climbed up on that base or how he got the fucking lights tied to the angel. Shelly didn't just commit suicide tonight," she said and uttered a short, harsh but genuine laugh. "The son of a bitch tried to frame me for his own murder. And he did a damned good job."
"But that's ridiculous!" Chica gasped.
"If this guy Shelly couldn't climb up there and do all that stuff, how the hell does anyone think you did?" Bonnie argued.
"Doesn't matter. He doesn't have to prove how I did it. He's already got a motive with my name on it. If he can find, or fake, an opportunity, then all he needs to prove is that Shelly didn't do it himself and he's got a solid case that someone else did. And that someone is going to be me, mark my fucking words."
"You were with your friend all night, weren't you?" Bonnie pressed.
"Every second? No. I went to the baggage booth once, I think he went to the bathroom…and we weren't exactly sewed into each other's clothes even when we were together. We were two tables or more apart half a dozen times. There was a sign up saying the place had cameras, but that might have been a bluff. If there weren't or if the sheriff can find just five minutes when I'm not accounted for…or hell, find someone willing to lie about seeing me slip outside! Because I can say I didn't and my friend can say I didn't, but that's two people, and if he's got more than that who'll say different just because they don't like me—" She twisted around suddenly to punch a hand into her pack and fling postcards out into the dining room, colorful pictures and hateful words fluttering to the floor like dead butterflies. "—then I'm fucked," she concluded. "I am straight fucked."
Ana fell into a glum silence which lasted until Freddy said what they were probably all thinking: "Sheriff who?"
The camera looked at him, then at Ana, who had burst into wildly inappropriate laughter.
"Oh Freddy," she sighed once the giggles finally tapered off enough to let her breathe. "That is probably the second-sweetest way anyone has ever offered to murder someone for me and I appreciate the sentiment, I do, but if you're thinking you're going to pop up outside his window and give him a convenient heart attack or whatever, please don't. First of all, he'd shoot you and your battery case isn't bullet-proof, and secondly, bumping off the guy who says it's suspicious that a guy I didn't like is dead is most definitely not going to make me look less suspicious."
Freddy accepted that with the sort of grumbling shrug that suggested even if it wouldn't help her any, it'd at least make him feel better, but he nodded. "What are you going to do?"
She shook her head, slumping forward as her hands restlessly kneaded at the padded edge of the stage. "Nothing. There's nothing I can do but wait and see how he's going to play it."
"Did he ever question you?" Freddy's frown darkened. "Or did you just slip away when he wasn't looking?"
"Hey, you can pull that shit on a doctor. You don't do it to a cop. And no, he didn't question me," Ana sighed. "I'm pretty sure he just wanted me to see him working it like a crime scene, throw the fear of God and the law into me, but then county showed up and he probably got an earful about spectators in the grandstand, so he gave me the 'don't leave town' speech and let me go. And my friend said he'd call his lawyer for me tonight, so even in the worst case scenario, all I got to do is lawyer up and shut up. The bad news is, at some point, I've got to go home so I'm there when he comes around to pull his Colombo routine, otherwise he'll add 'evading arrest' to his list of bullshit I've got to have answers for."
"Tomorrow," Freddy said firmly.
"I should really go—"
"The only place you're going tonight is to bed."
"Freddy—"
He set his ears at that I'm-not-listening angle. "Chica will make you something to eat. Give me your keys," he ordered, putting out his hand, but softened his tone slightly to add, "I'll give them back tomorrow morning. You'll want to leave early, I suppose. Six o'clock."
"Five-thirty," she countered.
Freddy grunted agreement.
She passed over her keys and got up to collect her shoes and all the postcards. "Chica, you don't have to—"
"Don't be silly. Go get changed and I'll have something hot for you when you come back."
"What about me?" Bonnie asked, holding out Ana's daypack so she could put her collection of neighborly sentiment away for safe-keeping. "How can I help?"
She shook her head, avoiding his eyes, defeated. "You can't, Bon. No one can."
"I can," said the dead man down in the basement. He nudged at the operator's keyboard with one clumsy hand while stroking at the Puppet's hip as it cuddled up against his chest, tracking the images on the screen until they passed out of the camera's range. He couldn't see much. The lenses of his eyes were crusted over with what had once been blood, vitreous jelly and other fluids of decomposition, and of the three monitors arranged on the console before him, the left had been smashed and the right was heavily overlaid by static, leaving only the one in the middle in anything like working order, although the picture quality depended heavily on how well the remaining cameras upstairs were functioning. But for the moment, he'd seen everything he needed to.
He moved the security feed to the right monitor and set the cameras to Auto-track, activated Babycakes and brought that feed up on the central monitor, then turned his full attention to the Puppet. "You did good, Mare," he said, tickling at its chin, where the duct tape holding the broken halves of its mask together had begun to lift up. "Oh, you did so good. You know, I wasn't going to say anything, but I thought that was a hell of a risk just to have a little fun. I wasn't mad at you," he assured her with another tickle. "I'm just saying, it didn't seem like the smartest idea you ever had. But holy shit, I did not realize the full scope of that story! I'd have killed him myself if I'd been there! And may I just add, I wouldn't have killed him with half your flair. Tied to the angel so he'd be lifted up slowly as it spun? The lights around his neck so you could watch it getting thinner? Genius, Mare. Goddamn genius. I can't wait to watch your movie again when my eyes are fixed. I want to see that even more than I want to see Ana in that dress. I am so fucking proud of you."
The Puppet threw itself against the dead man in an ecstatic embrace.
"Yeah, I am. And there's nothing I want to do more than show you how happy I am, but, baby, you're not done yet. You need to go out again."
The Puppet nodded, springing up from the dead man's lap, eager to please.
"No, no no! Not so fast. It's very important that you do exactly what I say, no less…and no more. Peggy!"
The pig huddled atop the Press flinched at the sound of her name, but reluctantly climbed down and approached the operations desk while the dead man attempted to open a drawer.
"Find something in there to write with and something to write on," he ordered, struggling to extract his hand from the simple pull-latch without leaving a finger behind.
Peggy rifled through the drawer's contents and came up with a Sharpie. She tested it on the back of her arm, then dug back into the drawer and found some newspaper clippings.
"No," the dead man said at once. "She'll never be able to read anything written over other writing."
"But there's nothing else here. Except this," Peggy said uncertainly, fanning out a handful of photographs.
"That'll do, then."
"I thought you wanted to keep these."
"I do. Which means you're going to bring it back," he added sternly to the Puppet, who nodded. "You leave anything behind and you'll fuck it all up. You've been such a good girl tonight, Mare, I'd really hate anything you did now to spoil it."
The Puppet shook its head.
"Good. Do this right and I'm going to make you remember what it feels like to be a woman." The dead man interrupted the Puppet's enthusiastic nod by seizing its long neck and yanking it right up close to the rabbit's rotting grin. Quietly, scarcely louder than the static that underscored his words, he said, "Do it wrong and I'll leave you in pieces on the fucking floor."
The Puppet nodded again, meekly, and the dead man pulled it another inch closer for a kiss, then released it.
"Okay, Peggy, write this down. Use block letters and kind of space them out. Draw a line under each individual word, not under the whole sentence. Separate them. Got that?"
Peggy looked at a photo—a handsome older teen with his arm slung around the narrow shoulders of a shyly-smiling blond boy—and turned it over, pen poised over the pale back. "I'm ready."
"Okay. 'To whoever finds this note…'"