A Drop of Scarlet, page 17
part #4 of Voice of Blood Series
“No, we’re going barhopping.”
“Oh, that sounds fun!” Aunt June enthused, a little too excited, and I wondered if she’d ever been barhopping in her life. Maybe thirty years ago, before I was even born, she and Uncle Stan had gone to a discotheque, did the Hully-Gully, and then gone to—oh wait, don’t tell me—another bar.
When had I become such a jerk? Was it the sleep deprivation? It was their fault for making me come to breakfast.
“Friends of yours?” asked Uncle Stan, crossing his fork and knife over his plate.
“Well . . . not really friends, I guess. I just know Joanie and Ashley, because sometimes we trade study notes, and they invited me to go along with them. They’re all right, though.”
“Do you have a costume?” Aunty W. asked.
“Uh . . . no. I don’t think we need them. We’re just going to a couple of clubs.”
She made an impatient sound. “How can you waste great hair like that and not wear a costume? Imagine if you wanted to be Raggedy Ann—you’d be perfect!”
“You guys, seriously, enough with the hair, okay?” I snapped. “I don’t even know why I do it. Maybe I just see too much blood all the time.”
Aunty W. actually looked contrite. It wasn’t an expression that I’d ever seen on her face. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean anything by it; I think your hair is beautiful. You’re beautiful, Margaret. I just love you, that’s all, and I want you to have fun.” She reached across the table and took my hand. Uncle Stan was staring off into the corner as though he’d never been looking anywhere else.
I took some more deep breaths. “I’m sorry I blew up,” I said. “Everything’s fine, really. I’m just a little stressed out. Everything’s really new, and even though I feel like I should be totally familiar with all of it, it’s still harder than I thought it would be.”
They all threw up their hands with the same gesture of “Is that it!” It was funny to watch; it was like they were going to burst into song. They nearly did. I was in a room with three people with postgraduate degrees, and two of them with PhDs; the agonies of graduate studies gave them ample opportunities for pep talks and sympathy and “I remember . . .”—I was grateful for it; I just wanted to sink into my chair and not talk any more for a while. They even talked among themselves after I’d given them an adequate amount of smiling and nodding, and I picked up the newspaper myself, wondering exactly how cold and rainy it would be, what shoes I was going to need to wear.
It didn’t look too bad; more or less just like now, except with a light rain. I’d have to wear my hair up, and under a hat, so red dye wouldn’t leak all over my face if it got wet, and make it look like I’d gotten a nasty head wound. Then again, it was Halloween.
I hadn’t read a newspaper in a long time, and I got sucked in, chugging down coffee and leafing through the pages. The murmur of conversation didn’t die down around me; they were talking about property taxes or property values or something, and I was trying, not very insistently, to find my horoscope. My eye caught an item well-buried at the bottom of a page that listed cross-streets only two blocks away from my apartment building.
JOYRIDING SPREE KILLS 4. Outside of the Tru Love Car Wash at Southwest 19th and Burnside. Two deaths by stabbing, one, possibly two, by blunt force trauma. The details were vague.
Next to it, AREA NIGHTSPOT SHUTTERED. FOOD POISONING SUSPECTED. Seven people were still in critical condition, one upgraded to stable.
I felt my jaw go numb again, and I dribbled coffee down my blouse out of the corner of my mouth. Instantly Aunty W. was on her feet, waving her napkin at me, like I’d just gotten a stain on something of hers. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I protested, dabbing my shirt dry. “It’s just a couple of drops. And I’m pretty bored with this shirt anyway.” I spread my hands and laughed. “I’m fine. Seriously. Don’t worry about me; I’m great.”
I brought the paper home with me, and lay in bed studying the two articles. The killings had happened right down the street. I’d been warned that Burnside was a rough street, but I hadn’t seen anything worse than a crank-jonesing prostitute trying to hail a cab just by screaming for one. This was a different matter altogether.
The funny thing was, I didn’t feel any less safe. I just felt interested.
Out of six of us who went on the crawl, three were wearing costumes. I supposed it was a good mix; nobody looked completely out of place. Ashley, Kevin, and Josh were in costume. Joanie, Sam, and I were not. Ashley and Kevin were a tandem costume as Miss Right and Mr. Wrong; Josh had a robot costume made out of cardboard and aluminum foil. He was interested more in putting on a show than hanging out with us, which was fine; his costume was great and he didn’t have to buy a drink all night.
I did make the concession to Halloween by dressing all in black, with my hair up and mostly hidden under a black bowler hat. I also just felt like wearing black, and disappearing into the corners of the room, watching other people. Ashley kept trying to talk me up, get me out of my shell, but I just didn’t have anything to say, and she always had Kevin to talk to.
We started out at the Oceanside Shack, an east side bar with the reputation of having some of the strongest drinks in town and a great jukebox. It was already packed by the time we got there at nine. It was fun to watch Josh try to play pinball in his robot costume, but I felt tired already after having had only one drink, and I knew I wasn’t being very much fun. These people weren’t my friends yet, and I wasn’t sure that they would ever be my friends, especially not with me acting so weird and quiet.
We moved on after all of us had gotten one drink, and progressed past a huge, noisy, raucous karaoke bar. “We are definitely going there later,” said Sam fervently.
“Yeah, it’s a shame that we can’t go to the Sunspot,” Joanie piped up, linking arms with Sam. They looked nice together, well-matched, well-proportioned, two animals of the same breed. “Did you guys hear? A whole bunch of people died there last night.”
“Really?” said Kevin. “Died? I thought they just got sick.”
Joanie shook her head. “No, a friend of mine works down at Providence and she told me that a couple of the people they brought in died earlier this evening. She was really kind of freaked out—she says it wasn’t poison.”
“It was that crappy food they serve there,” Ashley said hopefully.
Joanie shook her head again. “Heather told me there was no evidence of any kind of toxic substance in their blood, except for alcohol, and none of them drank enough for it to kill them.”
“Did she say anything else about them?” I asked, trying to sound casual, but it sounded strangled instead.
“No,” Joanie said. “She was on her coffee break. I think she was just trying to give me a spooky story for Halloween. She’s got one for every occasion. I remember the one about the guy who came in with his cell phone up his butt, which he’d put there on purpose so he could call himself and it would vibrate.”
The ladies screamed, the guys guffawed; and we were off to the next place, a cozy little strip joint, where Josh knew all the ladies and all the ladies knew Josh. We all got to drink for free there until Josh tried to mount the stage to do a pole dance and we all got eighty-sixed.
“Way to go, man,” said Sam bitterly, leading us a few doors down and past a big, gruff doorman and then up a few flights of stairs. If I wasn’t tipsy by the time I started climbing the stairs, I was by the time I got to the top, and my fatigue was slowly ebbing away, replaced with a nihilistic excitement. Halloween wasn’t so bad, as long as you embraced the absurd and grotesque, and at least my hair dye hadn’t started to run yet. I was even considering taking a turn on the packed dance floor.
These Portlanders took their Halloween pretty seriously; almost everyone in this bar was in costume—everything from exquisite brocade and lace to a bikini made out of duct tape and beer bottle caps to ripped acid-wash jeans, day-glo baseball cap, and T-shirt with “1988” printed on it. I had begun to have a great time somehow, even not really talking all night, just observing and laughing and recognizing, shaking my head at the startling inventiveness of regular people. I’d had two shots of 151 rum and lime, two beers, and no dinner. I thought a piña colada sounded like the stupidest, most hedonistic drink I could have, so I strode up to the bar to order one, grateful that there were so many people to steady myself against. If I looked over at the dance floor behind me, I could see the silvery form of Josh pogoing—and was that another aluminum foil robot that he was dancing with?
The world couldn’t be more right.
While I was waiting in line at the bar, I bummed a cigarette from the man dressed up as Dolly Parton (or was it Grand Ol’ Opry Barbie?) standing in front of me, and almost didn’t cough at all as I lit it up. I’d been quit for nine months, but what the fuck, it was Halloween, and I was having a good time for the first time in ages . . . except hadn’t I had a good time Thursday night with Ariane? Yes, that was good, but it wasn’t a good time. Ariane had gone from being really uptight and suspicious to softer and more open, but recently she was back to being uptight, but not really toward me. Something else was bothering the hell out of her. I couldn’t figure out what that could be. We’d synthesized the drug, successfully, which was amazing in and of itself. I knew that John was happy, because he’d come down to pick up Ariane at the end of the night last week, and he looked fantastic, amazing, wonderful, almost handsome enough to be a model. He had a twinkle in his eye as he said hello to me, and at first I thought he was just gloating that he got to go home and fuck Ariane. Then I realized that he looked completely better, his hair neater, wearing clean clothes, and his smile seemed like it was coming from someplace real.
But Ariane wasn’t smiling at all; she looked everywhere but at John, and barely even said good-bye to me as she left. It had to be something about him.
Barbie Parton ordered a drink with the bark of a trained drill sergeant, and I looked up, blinking, amazed at how drunk I was. Behind me, the club was raging. I wanted to turn around, but didn’t dare, this close to the bar. I looked past it to the booths on the side, across a narrow path clogged with people ignoring the desperate shouts of the woman trying to leave the kitchen with clean pint glasses. In the very back booth, two tall dark-haired boys bracketed a shorter, pale-haired girl, holding her steady with their hands lightly balanced on her shoulders. The dark-haired boys were kissing the blonde’s neck, but the blonde didn’t seem to be all a-twitter with delight, like I would have been in that situation; instead, her eyes were vague, pointed at the slowly revolving disco ball and the flecks of light swimming around the room.
The neater hair . . . that was John all right, even though he had gotten his hair cut even shorter than I’d seen it the other week. And the other boy was a girl, someone I’d never seen before, younger than me, with hair so short I totally thought it was a guy at first. But it was a really skinny girl, wearing a red tuxedo shirt, who looked freakishly tall even sitting down.
A dark line appeared on the blonde girl’s neck. If I angled my head I saw the dark line glisten wetly, and John held his thumb over the spot where his lips had been, and he licked at the dark line, smudging it, bringing out its color as if with a paintbrush, a startling, deep scarlet, the same color as my hair, exactly.
I decided to hell with the piña colada. I needed to go home. It took an agonizing eternity to fight my way through the dancing people back to the table where we’d all been sitting, only to find all of them gone except Josh, who was slumped at the table with his cardboard head sitting next to him on the floor. I shook him into bleary alertness. “Tell Joanie I had to go home,” I screamed over the music, and he might have nodded, or he might have just gotten tired of holding his head up straight. Either way, I grabbed my jacket and my hat and barreled out the door.
By the time I managed to hail a taxi, I was practically sobbing from frustration and desperation. The driver didn’t ask me if I was all right, and I was so grateful for that that I gave him a hundred percent tip (well, that was partially by accident, but he deserved it, absolutely). I staggered out of the taxi and fumbled my way into my apartment.
No lights. I tore off my hat and coat and shoes in the doorway, and the top and jeans in the bathroom. I sat there on the toilet seat for a while, just hyperventilating a little, trying to regain some kind of control.
What the fuck?
What the fuck just happened there?
Was that blood?
John? But why . . . ? And who was that girl? And who was that other girl? And where the hell was Ariane while all this was going on?
I was at the lab office for more than an hour, uploading the request files from my laptop onto the server, before Ariane arrived on Monday night. She muttered a hello as she hung up a really nice, tailored, dark-brown belted jacket that I’d never seen before. “Is that a new coat?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said slowly, “the weather changed and I figured it was time to break out the rain gear.” She smiled ruefully, rubbing the material of the lapel between her thumb and forefinger. Looked like she’d had her nails done, too; they were shorter, painted a shiny dark brown that matched the shade of her coat exactly. Maybe a haircut as well. I wasn’t sure why her freckles were shading back in; if there’d been any sunshine, I hadn’t seen it. “How was your pre-Halloween weekend?” she asked.
“It was, um . . .”
“It was um, huh? Well, let me take a look over the request paperwork and we can probably get that sent in tonight, and hopefully the shipment won’t take more than a few weeks to arrive. The order we placed on the fifteenth should be coming in tomorrow, so be sure to be here at quarter of six, and I’ll try to do the same. I’m not a fan of getting up early, either.” Ariane sat in the chair in front of the main monitor and fastened the grounding strap onto her wrist before she touched the keyboard. “You did a great job of receiving the shipment last time, so if I can’t make it, I know you can be trusted.”
“Thanks,” I said. We were both silent for a moment, only the faint sound of the printer chipping away at the stillness in the room. “My weekend was pretty interesting, actually. Well, my Saturday. I pretty much spent Sunday either asleep or at the grocery store. But Saturday night, I went out barhopping with some friends of mine from Hissy-Fizz.”
Ariane actually looked up at me with interest then. Even after all this time, her eyes still startled me—they shouldn’t have been that engaging. But they were. I could see the blackness of her pupils inside her irises and the faint shadows cast by her eyelashes onto her cheekbones. “Yeah? Where did you go?”
“Ah, just a couple of bars down in inner southeast.”
“Really.” She looked away again, and I was suddenly able to breathe. “Sounds fun. Tell me more.”
“I saw something at the Hobbs Ballroom that I’m not sure what to make of,” I said. “I saw . . . John. Your husband.”
Ariane still focused her eyes on the computer screen, bringing up more documents, sending them to the printer. “Mmm-hmm?”
“He was there with these two other girls. A blonde and a brunette. The brunette totally looked like a guy at first, until I looked at her again. The blonde girl, though, definitely a girl. The weirdest thing was that the blonde girl was in the middle between John and that other girl, and they were both kissing her. Like, on the neck. And it—I’m not one hundred percent sure, but it looked like they were drinking her blood. I mean, I saw blood.”
Ariane slid the grounding strap off, and got up and walked over the printer. She briskly stacked and straightened the printed pages, separating them into their separate documents, fastening them together with sharp snaps of the stapler. “The brunette’s name is George,” Ariane said, still not looking at me, her voice quietly neutral. “She’s a distant cousin of his.”
“Really? But who was the blonde girl?”
“Who knows,” Ariane said. “Some little piece they picked up.”
“Oh,” I said. “Were they really drinking her blood?”
“I doubt it,” said Ariane. “I think they were just pretending. It’s Halloween; sometimes people act out little weird bits of theater when they go out on that night. And the Hobbs Ballroom, you say?” She waited for my nod. “Yeah, it was probably just a little bit of gothic playacting fun. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”
“So you let John see other women?” I asked.
“Well, no,” said Ariane, and her voice held a quivering edge of impatience like a violin’s vibrato, but I couldn’t tell if the impatience was directed at me or at the situation. “But I also don’t force him to do anything. John’s his own creature; he does what he wants to do. If what he wants to do includes me, then I’m glad. And besides, George is his cousin.”
“Distant cousin,” I repeated.
“Still.” Ariane smiled. “Thanks for telling me, but I don’t think it’s anything to get upset about. I was out that night, too, with people other than John, and I don’t think he would get upset about that. We know where we stand with each other.”
It was so strange to watch her lie so transparently, like even she didn’t know she was lying, but it was plainly obvious to me. How could Ariane lie? Why would she ever feel the need to? She was such a perfect being, it was almost sickening to see that she had her delusions, just like the rest of us. But who wouldn’t, finding out about your husband cheating on you? It was like finding out that there is no Santa Claus. I wanted to throw my arms around her and comfort her, but you couldn’t do something like that to someone like Ariane Dempsey. She was just too dangerous. Sure, I was a couple of inches taller than her, and I knew some aikido, but I’d still have been willing to bet money that she could kick my ass into next Sunday. I settled for saying, “I’m sorry if I misinterpreted things. I just thought it was really weird. And we were going to go to the Sunspot, but you know.”
“Yeah, I heard,” said Ariane. “Awful.”
“If there’s anything I can do for you—”
