The fancy painted box had once contained candy, a Christmas gift from Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo the previous year. The lid featured a portrait of an Italian maiden dressed in a costume from centuries past. Flowing, gold-trimmed red script declared La Florentine, and below that, in a different font, blazed the word Torrone. The box had contained a pound and a half of almond nougat candies, a product of Italy, in three flavors—lemon, orange, and vanilla. The candy had been delicious, but of the bonbons and the colorful metal container, the latter seemed to be a greater treasure.
I kept things in the box that I valued or that intrigued me for reasons only a boy my age would understand, some more important than others. There were a dozen items, among them: a cat’s-eye marble in vivid shades of gold and blue, a penny flattened by train wheels and now the size of a half dollar, the copy of the lunch check from the restaurant where Mom and I ate the day after she sent Tilton packing, a silver dollar Grandma Anita had given me when I memorized the Our Father, which she said I should spend on the day of my confirmation.
The box didn’t contain the heart pendant with feather. I still kept that in a pants pocket, always with me.
I hesitated before adding the plush-toy eye to the trove. In the unlikely event that some dark magic was embodied in it, perhaps it might in some way contaminate the other items.
“Idiot.” I dropped the eye in the box, and replaced the lid.
I put the box on the nightstand, rose from the bed, and turned to discover Fiona Cassidy standing in the doorway.
20
I was certain that I had engaged the deadbolt on the apartment door. A couple of windows were open, but she couldn’t have gotten to them either from the sixth floor or from the street.
She didn’t say anything. She stared at me, expressionless, her face lovely but robotic, as if what she did next would be decided by the application of certain algorithms and computations run on printed circuit boards. Her blue-purple eyes seemed to be luminous.
I would like to say that I was worried but not afraid, though the truth is that she scared me, the way she materialized like a ghost, the way she just stood there, staring.
Instinctively, I sensed that I shouldn’t speak first, that repaying her stare with a stare and silence with silence might unnerve her. But I couldn’t restrain myself: “What’re you doing here?”
She stepped off the threshold, into the bedroom.
“How’d you get in?”
Not deigning to answer me, she looked around the small room, paying special attention to the poster of Duke Ellington in a tuxedo—he was standing in the Cotton Club sometime in the late 1920s, with the famous murals behind him—to a framed photograph of Grandpa Teddy with Benny Goodman, to a poster of my favorite TV star, Red Skelton, dressed as Freddy the Freeloader because I hadn’t found a poster of him as Clem Kadiddlehopper, the character who made me laugh the most.
She closed the door behind her, alarming me, and I said, “You better get out of here.”
Returning her attention to me, still expressionless, she finally spoke. “Or what?”
“Huh?”
Her voice was soft and dead-flat. “I better get out of here—or what?”
“You don’t belong here.”
“Or what?” she insisted.
“You’ll be in big trouble.”
The lack of inflection in her voice chilled me more than would have any quality of threat. “What’re you going to do—scream like a little girl?”
“I don’t need to scream.”
“Because you’re so tough?”
“No. Because my mom will be home in a minute.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, she will. You’ll see.”
“Liar.”
“You’ll see.”
I began to think that her emotionless demeanor was not the truth of her, that under her surface calm was volcanic potential.
“You know what happens to little snoops?” she asked.
“I’m not a snoop.”
“Bad things happen to them.”
In the ashen day beyond the window, light pulsed, pulsed again, so that the building next door, just six feet away, seemed to leap closer, as if collapsing toward us, and in the aftermath of those flashes, thunder rolled deep in the throat of the sky.
The woman started around the bed, and I thought about jumping onto it and plunging across it, but I knew she’d catch me before I reached the door.
“You don’t scare me,” I said.
“Then you’re stupid. A stupid, lying little snoop.”
Backing into the corner, acutely aware of my vulnerability, I said, “I’ll bite.”
“Then you’ll be bitten.”
She was maybe five foot seven. I was a lot shorter. I felt like a pygmy, if you want to know.
As she rounded the foot of the bed and as stutters of lightning again broke across the wall beyond the window, I said, “The thing is, I saw you in a dream.”
This time when thunder chased the light, it seemed to me that she had brought the storm with her, had called it forth. “How old are you, snoop?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Better answer me.”
I shrugged. “Going on ten.”
“So you just turned nine.”
“Not just.”
She stopped and stood looking down at me, an arm’s length away. “You dream about girls, do you?”
“Just you. Once.”
“Awful young for a wet dream.”
Surprised, I said, “How’d you know there was water in it? At least the sound of water all around.”
Instead of answering me, she said, “Why did you follow me to the sixth floor, liar?”