Bellweather Rhapsody (18 page)

The doors open again on six for a short boy with dark hair.

His eyes bulge and a gigantic smile parts his face like a curtain. He knows the other boy, the older boy, but not well—this isn’t the easy reflection of old friendship, or even the cautious kindness of recent acquaintance. The boy knows him from across the room, from stories, from rumors his friends have told him. Minnie, on a normal day, fades into the background, but here she is completely invisible. The new boy has a crush on Tiger Beat, a life-killer of a crush, a crush the size of the former Soviet Union.

“Do I know you?” says Tiger. “Wait. Last night. You’re the bunny boy, aren’t you?”

Bunny Boy nods. He flushes. “Yeah. That’s me. Last night, at the party.”

“How late did you stay? Heard it got pretty crazed.”

There is an awkward moment when Bunny Boy realizes he’s still facing Tiger, grinning at him like a moony moron and holding up the elevator. He steps into the car and they stand side by side. The doors close.

“I was there until the end, I think. I guess it got . . . crazed.” Bunny Boy is glowing with joy. Minnie is surprised the car doesn’t spontaneously combust in a pop of gleeful light.

“So you haven’t heard yet,” says Tiger. He touches Bunny Boy’s forearm conspiratorially, casually, but with artful intention. Tiger understands the power he has over Bunny Boy, and he is enjoying every second of this. “You haven’t heard about the girl.”

Bunny, distracted by the two square inches of flesh so recently indented by Tiger’s fingertips, looks up. “Um, what? Who? What girl?”

“The dead girl,” Tiger whispers, “in seven-twelve.”

“
What?
” says Minnie.

Everyone in the car is shocked to hear Minnie’s voice, including Minnie.

Tiger, slick, rolls with it. “No kidding,” he says. “There were cops in the lobby last night. I saw ’em when I was coming back from the bar. They were saying some girl killed herself last night in room seven-twelve.”

Is this a hallucination? This is not what she expected. None of this is what she expected. Not the band geeks. Not the constant dread.
Never
another dead girl in 712. She knew she had to return to the Bellweather before she could get on with her life, but she never—she couldn’t—
it was supposed to be metaphorical.

“Are you
sure?
” she says. Her voice cracks. “You mean to say a girl . . . in room seven-one-two . . . in
this
hotel . . . killed herself last night? On the night of November thirteenth?”

Bunny Boy and Tiger regard her with mirrored mixtures of confusion. Tiger’s has a touch of don’t-upset-the-crazy-lady, while Bunny Boy, more compassionate by far, is concerned. He leans closer to her.

“That’s what they’re saying,” Tiger says. “What do you know about it?”

Minnie laughs.

At first it’s a single, short bark, but the more she considers the question—
What do you know about a dead girl in 712?—
the more absurd, the more horrifying, the more hysterical her life becomes, and Minnie laughs until she doubles over, her stomach muscles contracting. Her face is wet and she understands she’s crying with laughter, that she must be terrifying these kids—and then Minnie’s knees and legs go out from under her and her back slips down against the mirror. When her big butt hits the floor, the elevator gives a little hop, and Minnie Graves is laughing louder and harder than she’s ever laughed in her life.

The doors open on the lobby.

Tiger bolts, eager to distance himself from the insane laughing fat lady as soon as possible. Bunny Boy holds the doors open with one hand and shouts across the lobby that he needs some help, there’s a woman . . .

His voice trails off.
Yes, Bunny Boy,
Minnie thinks,
how would you describe me?
After which she takes a breath and starts laughing all over again. She wishes Auggie were here. He can probably sense her distress; she can picture him hopping nervously at the door on his tiny legs. He hardly ever barks. The most noise he ever makes is a low sort of growl that means he’s happy or hungry or has cornered a chipmunk.

Minnie howls loud and long enough for the both of them.

11

F
OR THE FIRST
time in her life, Alice has nothing to say. She wakes up Friday morning remembering, like a series of slaps, everything that happened the night before—Jill’s story. The tarot hand. The spilled wine. Jill’s feet swinging in the air. She grabs her Trapper Keeper and her pen but doesn’t have words. Well, she has plenty of words, starting with
WHAT THE FUCK,
followed by
I KNOW WHAT I SAW, AND I SAW HER CORPSE
and
THERE’S SOMETHING WEIRD ABOUT THE CONCIERGE,
based on the blank look he’d given her along with his business card. But none of the words feel like they’re ready to be written down, preserved for future generations. Whatever this is—and Alice has no doubt that this is a
this,
a thing, an event—it’s still happening.

She cries in the shower, because it was all so horrible and Jill is gone, it’s so horrible to be so young and dead for no good reason. Was there
ever
a good reason to be dead? Alice, blow-drying her hair, starts to cry again, because yesterday Jill had blown her hair dry for the last time without even realizing it.

Jill’s disappearance, the fact of it, gnaws on her insides. A riddle she feels compelled to solve. How could Jill disappear herself—how could she be both magician and charming assistant at the same time? Answer: she couldn’t have. Answer: Jill had help. She didn’t cut
herself
down from the sprinkler system. Which means it wasn’t suicide. She didn’t kill herself; someone hanged her and hid her. Someone murdered her. Alice has to find out what happened when the police talked to Jill’s mom. She has to make them believe Jill was afraid of her own mother. She feels sick. Alice is the only one who knows the truth. The cops don’t even think she’s dead, let alone murdered. Why would they suspect her mother of a crime they don’t believe was committed?

No one is down in the banquet hall yet. The breakfast buffet is still being set out. Alice watches as pans of milky-looking scrambled eggs and sausage patties the color of puddles are ferried from the kitchen, and feels conquered. She touches her throat. What time is rehearsal? Where is rehearsal again—what are they singing? Why is she here?

Her roommate was
murdered.

She sits heavily in a chair at one of the empty tables and blinks back more tears. Why is she so weepy? It’s not like she even knew the girl—not really; if she were still alive they wouldn’t have known each other for twenty-four hours yet—but. But. There are no napkins on the table, so Alice blots her running mascara on the maroon tablecloth. All this crying has made her eyeballs feel too big for her face. She doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting here before other people begin to trickle in for a chance to be disappointed by the food. They wake her from her reverie, and when the first warming tray lids are lifted, the smell of grease and fat overwhelms her. Alice decides to skip breakfast.

She splashes cold water on her face in the hall bathroom and walks back toward the lobby. The concierge desk is unmanned. He must know what the cops found out by now. So where is he? When will he be back?

Someone shouts for help. Alice wobbles. It’s happening again. There’s been another murder. It’s—

It’s her brother’s voice.

Rabbit is holding the elevator in the lobby, shouting for help, that there’s a woman—

And then Alice plows into him, it’s her brother, it’s her Rabbit, it’s the soul who was with her at the beginning. She locks herself around him. She doesn’t speak.

“Alice, that—that hurts, Alice,” he says.

“I don’t care,” she says, and squeezes harder, pressing her nose against his shoulder until it’s squashed flat.

“Uh, help,” Rabbit says, and Alice faintly realizes there is someone else with them: a woman on the floor of the elevator making odd keening noises that might have started out as laughter. She senses the woman standing up.

The elevator, annoyed at having been held open all this time, buzzes like an angry wasp.

“Rabbit, don’t you dare leave me again,” Alice says, just as she feels herself being pried from her brother by two strong hands on either side of her waist.

“You two know each other?” says a voice close by Alice’s head. The other person, the woman from the elevator, is holding her up off the floor as easily as if she were a bag of mulch.

Rabbit steps aside and lets the elevator close. “She’s my sister.”

“Rabbit,” Alice gasps, struggling weakly. “Rabbit, someone killed her. She’s dead, someone killed Jill.”

He squints and frowns. “What—”

“My roommate got murdered last night.” The words and all the remaining fight in Alice floods out of her body in a single gush. She sags against her captor, who sets her down on her feet.

“I found her, I found her hanging.” Alice’s throat clogs.

“That’s not funny,” he says.

“No, it isn’t,” says the woman. “Are you telling the truth?”

Alice faces her. She’s younger than Mrs. Wilson, overweight, wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans, with pale skin and blondish-brownish hair in a messy bun. There’s very little to hold on to about her. She’s unfinished and hazy around the edges, except for her eyes, which are small and angry.

“I’m Minnie,” she says. She gives an awkward half wave. “I was here—I was here fifteen years ago.”

Alice and Rabbit look at each other.

“The first time this happened,” Minnie says.

Alice can’t believe she’s still here. Still at this hotel, standing in the lobby as though a crazy stranger named Minnie
didn’t
just tell her and Rabbit about a murder-suicide she witnessed fifteen years ago last night, in Alice’s room.

She, Alice, should be calling the police. The papers. Her mother. She should be shouting to anyone who will listen: Hey! Here’s your headline:
CRAZY WOMAN RETURNS TO KILL AGAIN! FREAKISHLY STRONG, TORMENTED BY THE HORRORS SHE WITNESSED AS A CHILD!
No
way
this was a coincidence, her showing up and having a fit the morning after a similar crime is committed, on the anniversary of the crime she witnessed. Minnie told them her life story right there in the lobby, down to the color of her bridesmaid’s dress, and then, with another awkward little wave, she got back on the elevator because
she had to take her dog for a walk.

“Are you hungry?” Alice asks her brother as soon as the elevator doors shut. “Do you want to get some breakfast and talk about how that insane woman killed my roommate?”

“Yes,” Rabbit says.

They find a small table tucked in a corner of the banquet hall, away from the larger crowd. Alice’s appetite has returned with a fury. The food doesn’t look any more appetizing, but she doesn’t care. There’s a crazy murderer on the loose and she needs fuel.

“First I thought Jill’s mother did it. But now I think
she
did it,” Alice says, folding a sausage patty in half and biting off the end. “
She
killed Jill.”

“How could she?” Rabbit’s plate is similarly heaped, but he hasn’t taken a bite. He looks at it despondently. “You were gone from your room for, what, a minute? Two minutes?”

“She could absolutely string Jill up in that time. The woman was
strong
.”

Rabbit pokes at his eggs with his fork. “It doesn’t make any sense. Unless she’s experiencing a total break with reality.”

“
Ding.
” She slugs back her orange juice.

Now he’s looking at
her
funny. Like he doesn’t believe her, or doesn’t trust her, or thinks she’s going to hurt him.

“What?” she says.

“You’re not doing so great with reality this morning either.”

“Oh, I wonder why. Maybe because a psycho lady with beady little eyes hung my famous roommate off the sprinkler system with an extension cord last night. I mean,
right?
” She tears off a hunk of unbuttered toast with her teeth. “What the hell did you do last night?”

Rabbit examines his food.

“I mean,” she says, “how was the party?”

Boring, thinks Rabbit, with three moments of total exhilaration. One: about an hour into the party—which largely consisted of people who knew each other too well, and whom he didn’t know at all, drinking cheap beer and laughing at inside jokes—when the Tenor first came to the door. Two: a half hour later, when he overheard that the Tenor’s name was Pete Moretti, that his
a cappella
club was from the University at Buffalo. And three: another hour into the party, after an exhausted Rabbit had given up hope of conversation with the Tenor in the crowd and was making a quiet exit, when he opened the door to leave and found Pete Moretti on the other side.

“Hey,” said Pete. “Leaving so soon?”

“Uhhhh, no,” said Rabbit. “Just getting. Um. Air.”

“Good answer,” Pete said, smiling as he squeezed by Rabbit to get back inside. Rabbit caught a whiff of something soapy and sweet underneath the funk of cigarettes and beer. He closed the door again, lost track of Pete, and ended up staying until midnight without once speaking with him again.

“Fine,” he says to his sister the next morning. “You know. A party.”

Alice nods slowly. She looks worn out, paler than usual, so pale she’s nearly see-through. He feels genuinely terrible that, while his sister had been dealing with a hanged roommate, he’d been killing the night at a stupid party. Nursing a beer, which tasted gross. Waiting for the chance moment that came right at the end and that, when it came, he hadn’t been able to seize. How hard would it have been, while Pete Moretti was brushing by him, to mention that his name was Bertram Hatmaker and he was (now, definitely) applying to the University of Buffalo?

And this morning, in the elevator. Again fate had thrown him a perfect pitch and Rabbit had swung and missed. Minnie Graves and her episode must have been fate’s smack upside the head for being such a bozo. He can’t even remember what they’d said to each other. Though apparently Pete knew who he was, had heard a story about the Bunny Boy. Rabbit flushes. Great.