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She finishes and waits for jealousy. Or lukewarm congratulations. She gets neither, and is ashamed she ever felt she had to hold back. But maybe it was better that she did, because Jerome’s reaction—a babbling and excited mixture of questions and congratulations—delights her.
“So that’s it! That’s where you’ve been at! Oh my God, Ba! I wish I was there so I could hug the shit out of you!”
“That would be mondo nasty,” she says, and wipes her eyes. The relief is so great she feels she could float up to her stick-on stars, and she thinks how good her brother is, how generous. Did she forget that, or was her head so full of her own concerns that she blocked it out?
“What about the essay? Did you kill?”
“I did,” Barbara says. Thinking, You bet I did. They’ll read it and toss it in what Dad calls the circular file.
“Great, great!”
“Tell me again about the woman whose son disappeared. I can listen now. You know, with both ears. I wasn’t before.”
He tells her not just about Vera Steinman, but recaps the whole case. He finishes by saying Holly may have, purely by accident, uncovered a serial killer who operates on the Red Bank Avenue side of Deerfield Park. Or at the college. Or both.
“And I figured something out,” he says. “It was bugging the hell out of me, but it finally clicked into place. You know, like one of those inkblot pictures that you stare at and stare at, and all at once you see it’s the face of Jesus or Dave Chappelle.”
“What?”
He tells her. They talk a little more, and then Barbara says she wants to tell her mother and father about the Penley Prize.
“Before you do that, I need you to do something for me,” he says. “Go down to Dad’s old study, where I’ve been working on the book, and find the orange flash drive. It’s sitting next to the keyboard. Can you do that?”
“Sure.”
“Plug it in and send me the folder marked PIX, P-I-X. Mara is thinking the publishers will want photos in the middle of the book, and they may want to use them for promotion, too.”
“For your tour.”
“Yeah, except if Covid doesn’t go away, it’s apt to be a virtual tour on Zoom and Skype.”
“Happy to do it, J.”
“One of em’s a photo of the Biograph Theater, with Manhattan Melodrama on the marquee. The Biograph is where John Dillinger was shot. Mara thinks it would make a great cover. And Barbara…”
“What?”
“I’m so happy for you, sis. I love you.”
Barbara says she feels the same and ends the call. Then she cries. She can’t remember ever being quite this happy. Olivia has told her happy poets are usually bad poets, but right now Barbara doesn’t care.
July 2, 2021
Bonnie wakes up thirsty and with a mild headache, but nothing like the hangover symptoms Jorge Castro and Cary Dressler felt on waking. Roddy used an injectable ketamine solution on them, but switched to Valium for Ellen and Pete. It’s not because of the vicious mornings-after they suffered, he couldn’t care less about those, but postmortem samples showed incipient damage to Castro’s and Dressler’s cellular structure in the thorax and lymph nodes. It hadn’t reached their livers, thank God, the liver being the center of regeneration, but those damaged lymph nodes were still worrying. Cellular damage there can conceivably pollute the fat, which he uses for his arthritic hands and Emily uses on her left buttock and leg to soothe the sciatic nerve.
There are many uses for the brains of their livestock, and such organs as the heart and kidneys, but the liver is what matters most, because it is the consumption of the human liver that preserves vitality and lengthens life. Once the liver has been fully awakened, that is, and calf’s liver triggers that awakening. Human liver would undoubtedly be even more efficacious, but that would mean taking two people each time, one to donate a liver and the other to feed on it before being slaughtered, and the Harrises have decided that would be much too dangerous. Calf’s liver serves very well, being close to the human liver at a cellular level. Pigs’ liver is even closer, the DNA nearly indistinguishable, but with pigs there’s the danger of prions. The risk is negligible, but neither Rodney or Emily wants to die with prions eating holes in their valuable brains.
Bonnie knows none of this. What she knows is that she’s thirsty and her head hurts. Another thing she knows: she’s a prisoner. The cell she’s in appears to be at one end of someone’s basement. It’s hard for her to believe it’s below the tidy Victorian home of the Professors Harris, but harder not to believe it. The basement is big, lit by fluorescents that have been turned down to a soothing yellow glow. The space in front of the cage is bare, clean cement. Beyond is a flight of stairs, and beyond that is a workshop containing machines she doesn’t know the names of, although it seems fairly obvious that they’re power tools for cutting and sanding, things like that. The biggest item, on the far side of the room, is a metal box equipped with a hose that goes into the wall next to a small door. She assumes it’s an HVAC unit for heating and air conditioning.
Bonnie sits up and massages her temples, trying to ease the headache. Something falls to the futon she woke up on. It’s one of her earrings. The other appears to be gone, probably knocked off or pulled off in the struggle. And there was a struggle. It’s hazy, but she remembers lurching along the front of a deserted building, trying to hold onto consciousness long enough to get away, but Rodney grabbed her and pulled her back.
She looks at the little golden triangle—not real gold, of course, but a pretty thing—and tucks it under the futon. Partly because one earring is no good unless you’re a pirate or a gay guy trying to look suave in a singles bar, but also because the three corners are sharp. It might come in handy.
There’s a Porta-John in the corner of the cell, and like Jorge Castro, Cary Dressler, and Ellen Craslow before her (Stinky Steinman perhaps not so much), she knows what it means: someone intends for her to be here awhile. It’s still hard for her to believe the someone is Professor Rodney Harris, retired biologist and nutritionist. It’s easier to believe that Emily is his accomplice… or, more likely, he is hers. Because Emily’s the Alpha dog in their relationship, and although Em extended herself to make a colleague of Bonnie, if not actually a friend, Bonnie never completely trusted her. Even in her brief time of employment, she tried to do everything right, because she had an idea Emily wasn’t a woman you wanted to get crosswise with.
Bonnie examines the bars, home-welded but rock solid. There’s a keypad—she can see it by leaning the side of her face against the bars—but there’s a plastic cover over it and she can’t get it off or even loosen it. Even if she could, happening on the right combination would be like getting all the Powerball numbers.
As did the previous inhabitants of this cell, she sees the camera lens peering down at her, but unlike her predecessors, she doesn’t yell at it. She’s a smart woman and knows that at some point someone will come. Most likely one of the Harrises. And are they going to apologize, say it’s all been a terrible mistake? Unlikely.
