Shadows of the Past, page 7
“Who’s next?” I asked.
“Lanny Shaw, but not ‘til tomorrow morning,” he said. “Also Gwen somebody, right after Lanny.”
“So—you think one of those two is the killer?”
He looked at me. His gray eyes looked compassionate, and I realized he felt sorry for me. The interrogations, simple and brief as they’d been, had left me feeling drained and a little sick to my stomach. It wasn’t the mere act of asking questions and listening to the answers that was so exhausting, of course—it was the emotional stress of waiting for someone to declare himself a killer. It was the balled-up uncertainty that had made a dense shape in my abdomen. It was the sense that I had to be ready to jump up and tackle a self-confessed murderer as he made a break for freedom.
Victor didn’t look particularly tired or upset. In fact, he had assumed a greater air of calm than he usually wore, and even his ordinary state was preternatural. “Possibly Lanny or Gwen is the killer,” he said. “Possibly not. As you have said before, it could be a client. It could be a former employee. This is just our best short list.”
I heaved myself to my feet. I had been slumped in one of Victor’s comfortable office chairs and I felt as if I had gained a ton and a half during the course of one guilt-ridden, anxious day. “Then I’ll be back tomorrow morning to hear what the others have to say,” I replied.
Victor moved smoothly to cut me off at the door. “Let me take you out to dinner to reward you for your exertions,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I said huffily.
He laughed. “I promise. No additional importuning. Merely food, possibly some alcohol, and a chaste goodbye at your door.”
Sounded good, but I was a skeptic. What sounded good in theory so often was wrenchingly bad in execution. “How about a chaste goodbye right here?” I said.
“How about it?” he murmured. Before I realized what he intended, he swept me into his arms, laying his cheek against mine and holding me tightly to his chest. I was almost overwhelmed with conflicting feelings of sadness, desire, comfort, and the sense of coming home. Was Renata right? Had he held me like this, just so, in other times, in other lives? Was Victor’s embrace the one place I truly belonged?
I wasn’t ready for it to be true. I stamped on his foot, yanked myself out of his arms, and flung open the door in one grand swoop of movement. Victor made no move to stop me, merely watched me with a lurking smile. “Goodbye, quite chastely,” he called, but I barely heard the words in the crash of the door into the frame. Kibbi stared as I practically ran past. I was crying by the time I climbed into a cab.
During the short ride back to my house I kept rubbing my face where Victor’s beardless cheek had lain against mine. The hug had been so brief—surely it was my imagination now that my skin had picked up his scent of tumbled sage.
In the morning I was back, dressed in dark colors and spiny jewelry that would puncture someone’s skin if he pressed too close. I’d also worn ankle boots with high spiked heels, the better to kick or trample someone. These accouterments were not lost on Victor, who merely grinned when I stepped through his door.
“Just in time,” he said. “Lanny will be here in five minutes.”
But Lanny, asked point-blank if he had committed the Ciexi murders, told us he had not. Gwen gave the same answer. I was both relieved and discouraged to find no murderer among the people I knew. Who had done the killings, then? On the bright side, no one else had died in the last two days. Maybe we were done with slaughter.
“What do we do next?” I asked Victor rather glumly once Kibbi had escorted Gwen out. “I can get you a pretty comprehensive list of companies we’ve done business with in the last two years.”
“First, we eat something,” Victor said, summoning Kibbi back into his office. “Can you get some sandwiches and some bottled water for Lorelai and me?” he said. “And some for yourself, too. We’ll all sit here and brainstorm a while.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said automatically. I was, actually, but I was making a point: I was not willing to submit to any kind of caregiving from Victor.
“Sandwiches for three,” Victor said. “Kibbi and I will eat them if you find yourself without an appetite.”
There was a little deli on the ground floor below Victor’s third-story office. Kibbi would be back in ten minutes. I sighed—lately I had been doing that more often than was attractive—and stretched my high-heeled feet before me. “The problem with the client list is that Jack, Dalton, and Lola usually dealt with different customers,” I said. “So while a client might certainly have a wish to kill one of them, he probably wouldn’t have known all three of them well enough to want them dead.”
“Maybe it’s not a client, then,” Victor said. “Back to the employee theory. Maybe we’re looking at the wrong people.”
“Maybe we’re asking the wrong questions,” I said.
“Those are the only questions,” Victor said firmly. “‘Did you kill these people? Do you know who did?’ Those should elicit the right answers.”
“Should, should, should,” I said impatiently. “What if we’ve come up against the only Pobestani in the universe who can lie? We could ask the right questions all day and still get the wrong answers.”
“I realize we must consider all the possibilities,” Victor said gravely, “but considering that one is a waste of time.”
Arrogant, manipulative, and condescending. I was very glad Victor was displaying all his least likable traits. It was making it easier for me to resist him. I decided not to answer this latest comment and sat there for a few minutes, brooding in silence. Victor flipped through files open on his desk.
“Something we haven’t considered,” he said, as if there had been no break in the conversation, “is former employees. Particularly those who have been fired or who left under less than ideal circumstances.”
I straightened in my chair and shook my head. I could hear the outer door open as Kibbi returned. I said, “I can’t think of a Pobestani employee who’s left within the past eighteen months. Whether or not under protest.”
“A human employee with a Pobestani lover,” he suggested.
I tilted my head and gave him a hard look. “Just like you and me,” I said. Kibbi was stepping through the door into the inner office, but I didn’t care. His ears were so acute he would have heard this whole conversation even if he’d been sitting at his desk. “A Pobestani realizes his human lover is unhappy in her place of employment. Because loyalty is one of his defining characteristics, he thinks to make her happy by killing off her mean bosses, one by one.”
“That could be the scenario,” Victor said cautiously.
I leaned forward, staring into his wide gray eyes. Sometimes they seemed so expressive to me; sometimes, like now, they seemed shadowy and full of secrets. “Maybe I didn’t phrase it exactly right the first day I came here,” I said slowly. “Did you kill any of the three top executives at Ciexi?”
“I did not,” Victor said.
“I did,” Kibbi said, and handed me a sandwich.
The food fell from my nerveless hands as I stared up at Kibbi. His round, happy face looked worried but hopeful, the face of a puppy who’s chewed up his owner’s shoes but thinks perhaps his owner will understand there was an exceptionally good reason. “Kibbi,” I whispered. “But why?”
“Anolishka,” he said, and gave me his usual loving smile.
I caught my breath. “Me? Anolishka?” I choked out. “Kibbi, I—”
But Victor spoke from across the room. “Not you,” he said. “Me.”
Kibbi was glancing between us, and again I was put in mind of canine metaphors, for he wore a look of doglike devotion. “I would do anything to make Victor happy,” he said earnestly. “But only you make him happy. And I thought, how can I convince Lorelai to come back to us again?” He spread his arms. He was smiling. “And here you are.”
“But Kibbi, I—I wouldn’t have—I mean, to kill people just to drive me back into Victor’s arms, that’s—you can’t—” Really, I had no idea how to explain why this was such a terrible idea. Anyone who had conceived of it would be hard to convince.
“I know it was wrong,” he said, still earnestly. “I know what I have to do next.”
He turned and hurried out the door. I jumped to my feet, intending to run after him, but quite suddenly, Victor was beside me, holding me close despite my unfriendly jewelry.
“Don’t look,” he said, and bent my head so that my eyes were against his chest. I struggled, but only until I heard the harsh report of a firearm going off in the outer office. I sagged against Victor as I realized that Kibbi must have shot himself. Had planned to shoot himself as soon as he was discovered, which he had assumed would be sooner rather than later. Had planned this whole series of events, this grand tragedy, from the first break-in at Jack Peterson’s to the suicide this afternoon.
All for me.
All for Victor.
Anolishka.
I stayed ’til the police arrived, gave my statement, comported myself with far greater calm than I was really feeling. I refused to make eye contact with Victor, stayed as far away from him as I could while Detective Falmer and her troops scoured the offices and asked the same questions about four hundred times. The minute I was cleared to go, I was out the door, not even saying farewell to Victor. He made no attempt to stop me.
He always could tell when it was best to leave me alone.
I headed straight for Renata’s and poured out the story, bursting into tears before I’d even dropped to the couch. She hugged me, fetched me a glass of wine, and listened to me tell the entire story over again from the beginning.
“I don’t understand,” I said, hiccupping as I finished my second glass of wine. “I thought—anolishka—I thought everybody found his own soulmate and lived happily ever after.”
“Most Pobestani do find their anolishka,” Renata said gravely. “But sometimes it’s one-sided—not often, but sometimes. It can lead to great heartache, but most often it becomes what you saw between Kibbi and Victor—deep friendship. The anolishka who does not love in return usually tries to display great kindness to the one who loves him. After all, he would hope for such treatment from his own anolishka if that person did not love him. Kibbi was content, you know. He spent part of every day with his soulmate. And he died trying to make Victor happy. He considered that a triumph.”
“Yes, but—to murder people! For whatever reason! I can’t—I mean—that’s so extreme. So extremely wrong.”
“Which Kibbi knew. Which is why he killed himself at the end.” That made me start crying again, so Renata gave me another big hug. “Don’t be so sad,” she said. “Kibbi knows that he goes to the Great Circle, where he waits to be called out again when the wheel spins his way. He believes that he will encounter Victor again in his next life, and the life after that. Death brings hope, not despair.”
“Four people have died because of me,” I sobbed, burying my face in one of her decorative pillows. I could feel the scratchy embroidery turn soggy with my tears. “And I wasn’t even sorry the first three were dead! And now it’s my fault! Don’t talk to me about wheels and circles and soulmates! Everything is terrible! Everything will always be terrible from now until forever!”
Renata patted me on the shoulder. “Nothing is ever terrible for quite that long,” she said.
Despite my guilt and grief, I managed to make it to work when the office re-opened two days later. As expected, literally no work was accomplished during the entire day, and neither Rance nor Betty seemed to expect it to be. They’d clearly spent the enforced holiday redrawing organizational charts and re-apportioning responsibility, for they bustled about the office having private conferences with key employees, informing them of their new roles and duties. They were officious and annoying but, on the whole, less evil than Dalton Bettis, and I found myself being glad that Kibbi had stopped his spree before working his way any farther through the executive committee. I mean, this whole thing was a tragedy wrapped around a nightmare, but that didn’t entirely obscure the fact that Dalton Bettis was actually dead. While he sat in the Great Circle, awaiting his next call to life, the rest of us could go about actually enjoying ours.
It was a full week before I could bring myself to go see Victor.
He already had a new secretary in place, a woman who looked to be half Pobestani and a hundred-and-five years old. Her white hair was so thin I thought she’d be better to shave it all off completely, since the shape of her skull, distinctly visible, was regal and pleasing. Her eyes were sharp and her smile, though conditional, seemed ready to be welcoming if I proved worthy. I wondered if she had been the one to clean away all the blood. The outer office was spotless.
“Lorelai Landis,” I introduced myself. “I was wondering if Victor Denning would be able to see me now.”
“I’m sure he would,” she said, and I walked right in.
He was standing in the middle of his office, facing the door, waiting for me. As he was always waiting for me. His smile was broader than the secretary’s, but equally provisional. It was clear he was not entirely sure what to expect from me, but was braced for whatever might come.
“Lorelai,” he said. “Anolishka.”
“Did you know?” I asked him, coming to a complete halt just inside the room. I wondered if the new secretary had ears that were as good as Kibbi’s and decided I didn’t care. At any rate, it seemed likely she’d found her own soulmate some years in the past and was less likely to be intensely interested in everything that happened in Victor’s personal life.
“Did I know what?” he replied.
“That Kibbi. That he felt that way about you.”
“Yes.”
“Did you realize he was the one who had committed the murders?”
He shook his head. “Not at first. I had begun to put the pieces together that morning, when our last two employee suspects didn’t pan out. But even then it was only an inkling.”
“Would you have taken the case if you had known?”
He looked surprised. “Of course.”
“Knowing that Kibbi—your friend, your—whatever he was, this person who loved you—would be arrested and go to jail and maybe be put to death for what he’d done? You would have taken the case knowing that you would have done that to him?”
“Of course,” he repeated. “Kibbi would have expected me to. He did expect me to, that’s why he committed the crimes in the first place.”
“And then—you didn’t seem surprised—did you know he would feel obliged to kill himself? There at the end?”
Victor nodded. “It is common among our people who realize they have reached a grave impasse. It is clear this life has reached its useful stopping point. Time to end this one and move on to the next.”
Impasse didn’t seem like quite the right word to describe Kibbi’s actions, but I couldn’t think of a better one. I felt sad and small and hopelessly confused. “I’ll never understand the Pobestani,” I said. “You or any of them.”
Victor smiled and took a step toward me. A small step, but it was definite forward motion. “I will be happy to explain,” he said. “We can move from the general to the particular in a very short span of time.”
“Maybe I don’t want to know you any better,” I said haughtily.
Another step closer, then one long stride. He was right beside me, lifting one hand to stroke my cheek. “And maybe you do,” he said.
I closed my eyes briefly and realized I had swayed in his direction. I opened my eyes and stepped back, hostility flaring. “Don’t try any of your Pobestani tricks,” I warned.
He was laughing. “What tricks would those be?”
I clutched my purse tighter. “Well, I’m not sure exactly. The ones you’re going to tell me about.”
He put a hand on my shoulder and urged me to the door. “Tonight. Right now. Over dinner,” he agreed. “I won’t keep anything a secret.”
The new secretary looked up when we came out and gave us a benevolent smile. She had decided she liked me after all. “Are you leaving for the day, then?” she asked, sounding as if she approved of such lax behavior.
“Oh, I think so,” Victor said. “Lorelai and I have a great deal of catching up to do.”
As soon as we stepped outside the door, Victor took my hand again, and I allowed him to keep it. I still wasn’t sure if I believed in that Big Wheel, or whatever the Pobestani called it, and I was far from certain I would want to tread it over and over at Victor’s side even if they were right about the endless cycle of death and rebirth. But in this lifetime? On this day? There was only person I wanted to walk with. One arm I wanted to feel around my shoulders. One kiss on my lips.
No choice but to go forward with his hand in mine.
The Unrhymed Couplets of the Universe
Henry sipped from his morning coffee, gazing over the rim of the cup at the green plastic ball in the middle of the kitchen table. It had not been there twenty seconds previously. He had looked up from buttering his second piece of toast to find it sitting jauntily on top of the real estate section of the newspaper.
Henry was eighty-two years old, retired since he was seventy, a widower since he was seventy-six, and nothing much alarmed him or terrified him anymore. Certainly not a child’s scuffed green ball, no matter how sudden its appearance. It didn’t do anything interesting for the five minutes he watched it, so he eventually shrugged, stood up, and cleared the table. By the time he had finished rinsing out the coffee pot and loading the dishwasher, the ball was gone.
That evening while he watched television, a fat red pillow manifested itself beside him on the couch. It was edged with gold braid and looked like it belonged in a living room that was much fancier than anything Henry would find comfortable. Like the ball, it didn’t stick around long. Before the next commercial break, it had vanished.
