“Don’t have a granddaughter,” she said. “And Barbara isn’t in town. Sorry to disappoint.”
It didn’t take me long to put that one together. If this was Puck’s granddaughter…then Puck had to have a century or two under his belt. Wow, capital W.
“You’re Ophelia?” I asked, though I knew the answer easily enough.
“Yeah,” she said. Her face went from confused to angry in seconds. “Granpa sent you? Are you serious?”
I raised an eyebrow. She must know something all right. Either that or she thought having a living grandfather who might have fought in the Civil War was
normal.
“Come inside,” she said, and sighed. “I guess we have talking to do. Mind picking up my gun on the way up?”
With that she disappeared inside the house. I grumbled, scooped the cold, heavy revolver out of the grass, and walked toward the house. As I did, I popped the chamber of the revolver open, thank you, Dad, and dumped the cartridges into my hand. One-two-three-four-five-six. I’d never seen a silver bullet before, but I’ll be damned if those weren’t them. The rounded tips gleamed with a sheen lead envied.
Unbelievable.
I followed her into the house and shut the door behind me.
The house was cozy, if a little cramped. Old-fashioned, elaborate ottomans and free-standing cabinets choked every hallway. I actually had to walk sideways into the living room to fit past all the shelves of knick-knacks. And though they were notable for their number, I couldn’t help but notice that almost all of them were coated with a blanket of dust. Many of them had been jostled out of their poses and left there—a few of the Hummels lay on their side, looking forlorn, or maybe just sleepy.
Ophelia stopped our little silent, awkward tour in the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee with unsteady hands. She didn’t offer me any. In fact, she went about the task in silence. It wasn’t until she stared into the sink drain for about thirty seconds without moving that I cleared my throat.
No response. I dropped the empty revolver on a little table next to the toaster. It landed beside the cordless phone with a prolific
wham-crack
.
“Christ!” Ophelia said. Half of her coffee slopped into the sink. She looked over her shoulder at me, under her drooping eyelids. “Forgot you were…never mind. Coffee?”
I shook my head and raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Knowing Puck, and I liked to think I did, even if only a little, this is not what I had expected from his granddaughter. Not in the slightest. Puck was a college professor. Puck knew sign language. Puck could be a gentleman when he wasn’t being a crazed lunatic. He ghosted class with every movement. Playful, irreverent class, but class unmistakably.
Not much time
.
I took a deep breath. Ah, to hell with it.
“Puck sent me because—”
“Robin.”
I looked up at her. I’d intended on running right through the speech I’d been rehearsing on the walk over. The air I’d saved up sort of just…leaked out of my body.
“What…Robin?”
“My grandfather’s name is Robin Woodrow Goodman. Doctor, in fact,” Ophelia said, her harsh vulture voice returning. “His name is not
Puck
.”
I tried to rub warmth into my face. And maybe even a little patience.
The thought of Morgan and Zack lying in hospital beds was beginning to plant seeds in my mind. In those distant train windows, that hospital had seemed dream-like, our problems interesting but hypothetical. But there, in the kitchen of Doctor—in fact—Robin Woodrow Goodman’s granddaughter, they began to feel real. And the knowledge that Abraham was all that stood between them and death did little to comfort me.
“Whatever,” I said. “He sent me here because I need your help.”
There it was. From the look on her face, that wasn’t surprising.
“Your somewhat…hands-on help.”
She shrugged and took a swig of coffee. The hand on her hip told me one thing—make it quick, sister.
“You don’t find it odd that you’re one-hundred-and-fifty year old dead grandfather has sent a fifteen-year-old girl—”
“Fifteen-year-old phantom—”
“Fifteen. Year. Old. Girl,” I said.
My nostrils flared. An upside-down teacup shivered on the counter next to her. She looked at the cup, then back up at me. Her smug look faded somewhat.
“He’s one-hundred-and-twenty-five, actually,” Ophelia said, quieter.
“Swell,” I said. “You don’t find any of this, I don’t know, weird?”
She downed her coffee. As she poured another one, she shrugged.
“Honey, I don’t mean to hurt your little ego,” she said. “But I’ve been dealing with dead Grampa Robin since before you were born.”
She turned.
“Lucy, is it?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“How—?”
“It’s a two-way street,” Ophelia said.
“Grampa used to pick up on our thoughts, dreams, particularly loud emotions—eventually it began to rub off on us. Not a whole lot—I only now and again pick up little inklings. Names more than anything, like neon signs sometimes.”
I nodded. She left the kitchen, and I followed. I knew I should hurry, and even though Ophelia had the warmth of a snow bank, I couldn’t just run off. I didn’t want to. So far, her answers were easy, off-hand. And those answers had become everything, hadn’t they? The things Puck couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say. To protect me.
Ophelia didn’t want to protect me. Hell, she probably wanted me to take a long walk off a short pier. She led me to a door at the end of a cluttered hallway and shouldered the door open.
“Story time,” Ophelia said, and walked into the room. I followed her inside.
I heard a click. A small green-glass shaded desk lamp burned to life. It illuminated a desk cluttered with leather-bound journals and ancient papers.
She sat down in the creaky leather chair behind the desk. “I don’t come here at night,” she said, and glanced around.
I followed her furtive gaze through the shadows, but I didn’t get a vibe from the room. Well, not a creepy one, anyway. I actually felt sort of comforted, safe. Maybe knowing Puck found some kind of refuge there in his living-life gave me solace. Or maybe I’m just a sentimental weirdo twit.
She hadn’t told me the room was Puck’s study, but she really didn’t have to. This was his real home, I knew. I could almost see it—Puck sitting at his desk, a calabash pipe clamped in his mouth, leaking tendrils of smoke from his lips like a sleeping dragon. Poring over volumes of old…history? Huh.
“Ophelia?” I said, and looked up at her.
She’d already cracked one of the leather journals on the desk, and was flipping absently through the pages.
“I brought you in here for a reason. Now, I don’t know why Grampa sent you—”
“My friends are in trouble—”
“Wait,” she said, and continued. “But there is something you have to understand first. Before anything else happens.”
My eyebrow came up. Couldn’t help myself.
“And you’re not going to want to hear it.”
Oh boy. I could feel her tone. It’s how I imagined a nun would speak to a pregnant teenager. Just a succotash of lost potential and guilt sliced thick. Add a pinch of sage wisdom and serve cold.
I actually…don’t know what succotash is.
“This…thing. This way you’ve chosen to live is a mistake.”
The anger showed up first. A hot swell of it boiled up into my face, and I half-stood from my chair.
“Lucy—”
“Stop. I didn’t choose anything,” I said. “And besides, you don’t know anything about my situation.”
She leaned back in the chair. The vulture voice returned, but icier.
“I know a few things, Ms. Lucy Day. You’re a runaway, right? Twice in as many weeks?”
“Shut up,” I said. The words barely fit through my teeth.
“You’re here tonight,” she said. “So my guess is you fell off the bandwagon of the living…what…last Friday?”
“Stop.”
“Can I take a wild guess? Maybe underage drinking and driving? Raped in an alleyway? Stop me when I get close—”
The base of her chair broke with a thunder-crack, dumping her onto the ground. She flapped her arms comically, but didn’t catch a hold of anything and ate it spectacularly. A live current of raw electricity sparked across the fingertips of my open right hand. I looked down at them, expecting to see lurid blue arcs, but saw nothing. I stood up.
“Feel good about that?” she asked, scowling.
“Yes.”
She made her best effort in collecting her dignity as she got to her feet. Frankly, the amount of guilt I felt about knocking her on her ass could fit underneath a door. Still, I couldn’t help but think I was proving her point. Just another out-of-control freak.
“Well,” she said, and glanced around the room. Finding nothing satisfactory, she scooped up one of the journals and sat on the edge of the desk, her legs dangling off the side. “How much time do we have?”
I raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want to know what it is you’re going to be doing for me?”
She shrugged. “In a few. How much time?”
“Not much,” I said.
I pictured Morgan and Zack lying in their hospital beds, bristling with tubes. Another vulture, Abraham, floating above them. No, not floating—circling. Then again, he was after me, wasn’t he? Puck said we were
yin
and
yang
, two parts of the same whole. He hadn’t even told me how to kill him, if it came down to it—told me I couldn’t. Told me I wouldn’t have to. Forewarned is forearmed, they say, which means I was going in with a rubber band gun.
“Then I’ll be as quick as I can, because the soul you save just might be your own,” she said, her face curling into a wry smirk. That line might have been funny from any other face.
“Hurry,” I said. “I don’t need a lesson. I need help.”
“Too-bad, so-sad,” Ophelia said. “You’re getting both.”
I sighed. I actually made a point of sighing. Not my most mature moment, I admit.
“This, as you might have guessed, is one of the diaries of one Robin Goodman. My grandfather, and your ‘Puck,’” she said. “And this particular volume is of unique interest.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, still all immature anger and snotty tone, I admit.
“Because it’s the only one that talks about his Mors. Drop the tone if you want my help.”
I snorted, crossed my arms, and nodded. Fact was, this was what I needed. What Puck wouldn’t tell me. How he did it. He wanted me to run tonight, to bait Abraham and get away. To hell with
that
. One of us wasn’t walking away tonight. I bit my lip, clenched my working fist, and tried to steady my jangling nerves.
Ophelia looked up at me, the diary cradled in her hands, her eyes showing something uncharacteristically like sympathy.
“Ready?” she asked.
“I doubt it.”
She cleared her throat and began to read.
Chapter Sixteen
Puck, Revisited
Robin Woodrow Goodman, born in Year-of-Our Lord Eighteen-Eighty-Four, came screaming to life in the back room of a saloon. His mother, Adeline Emelda Goodman, owned the establishment and hadn’t spent a day of her pregnancy in rest. When the time came, little Adeline, who had never tasted the air above Five-Feet-One-inch, put down her bar rag, blew out a long sigh, and motioned for Jamison Curdly, the piano player, to come over to the bar.
She whispered a few words in his ear, turned, and walked calmly into the saloon’s back room. Jamison Curdly swept off his hat, wiped his forehead, and called Doctor William Darwin over to the sideboard. Now, Doctor William Darwin was no doctor, but that wasn’t a secret. And he had no relation to the famed Evolutionary, I assure you. In fact, the only thing he did own was a mortuary and a quick tongue.
When Jamison Curdly whispered in
his
ear, Dr. William Darwin laughed and slapped his leg. Jamison shook his head. The Doctor explained that he wasn’t
a
doctor. Jamison said he wasn’t one either. They shook hands and went into the back room.
The procedure was messy, but successful. Luckily Adeline had done her share of research on the topic, and directed her two would-be pioneer gynecologists through every grisly step. She survived the encounter, against all the laws of God, Man, and Irony. Three powerful figures, with the last reigning over the first two. Then again, a baby and his mother dying in a messy birth didn’t even touch spheres with Irony. That was of Reality, an ugly Force of Nature that ought to be done away with.
And so I tried to live like I was born—foolishly, bravely, and with a hint of the absurd. It did me well, and to be sure, there are many worse ways to live.
I was raised in Arizona, the town of Strawberry, the son of a widowed bar owner. My mother, aforementioned Little Adeline, had owned the place ever since my father, her sweet Benny, died of illness. That illness being lead-poisoning—he’d been accidentally shot by a drunk with a penchant for waving his gun around. An ignoble death, indeed.
As I aged, I had two obsessions. One of them was my mother—I spent more time at the bar than any child had the right to claim. Strike that—than any adult even had the right to claim. This changed when I was of age to go to school, and even then I returned swiftly and with excitement to my mother’s side. Not the most healthy relationship, perhaps, but she was my everything, and she doted on me.
I played cards with the more trustworthy customers, decided by Mother, of course. I learned Poker and Faro and Black Jack before I knew how to read. Another lesson also found its way to me, at a much quicker pace than the most of man—I learned the effects of alcohol–sheer observation, of course–in all of its gory details. I watched more than a few men drinking themselves into death, and I witnessed the discharging of more bodily fluids than most doctors could credit. To wit, I have never been, nor will I ever be, I imagine, much of a drinker. The smell of a good whiskey, or hell, even a bad one, conjures pleasant memories, but the taste is not for me.