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FACADES
As I examine an obscenely expensive handbag at Gucci, I hear a shotgun blast ringing in my ears. I smell smoke. I see Frank Geary’s chest exploding and watch as he falls backward down a flight of stairs. I hear my mother screaming. I don’t know where these bloody images have come from, if they are memory or dream.
“You seem distracted,” Ella says as we sit down to drink espresso in the food court. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I say lightly.
I keep seeing Simon Briggs in my mind’s eye. He’s the headache I can’t shake. His face, so rough and ugly, is familiar without being recognizable. There are so many things like this that I can’t quite remember - people, events slipping through my fingers like sand. “I’m just…not sleeping much.”
“Well,” she says knowingly, “you’re probably still freaked out by that incident on the beach. That would keep
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THE VENGEFUL LUNA POWERLESS
The only thing I like about Gray’s office is that it’s filled with books. Big, thick books bound in leather, with gilt-edged pages, texts on war and military theory, encyclopedic tomes on world history, classic literature, poetry. But it’s not a library collected after a lifetime of reading. It is a library that has been purchased for show - Drew’s idea of which books should line the shelves of a military man’s office. He has a similar collection in his own office. Most of the books have never even been opened, eyes have never rested on their words, fingers have never caressed their pages. They are as untouched and virginal as nuns.I scan the covers: Sun-tzu, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley. Anyone sitting in my husband’s office would think him a great reader. He’s not. My husband opens a book, he falls asleep.Curled on the leather couch, I recount my meeting with Detective Harrison for Gray. His face
THE VENGEFUL LUNA WHAT DID YOU?
“Lolita,” she said, covering her eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”I left her without another word. She called after me, but then I heard Frank’s truck pulling up the drive. A moment later the water was running in the bathroom, and I knew she was brushing her teeth so he wouldn’t smell the booze on her. She’d probably taken the whiskey from Frank’s secret stash I saw in the barn. There were always two or three bottles of Jack in a crate near the back under a pile of flannel blankets. Twice I’d found Frank passed out in the barn, a bottle nearly drained, cigarette butts in an ashtray beside him. Dangerous behavior in a barn filled with hay.Later that night I found Marlowe sitting on the floor of the stable smoking a cigarette. We hadn’t spoken since that night in my room when he’d suggested unthinkable things to me. Instead we’d been circling each other ever since. I was simultaneously draw
THE VENGEFUL LUNA IT'S LOLITA
He lifts his chin up, puts his hand to his face, and starts rubbing at his jaw. The stubble there and the dry, hard skin on his hands makes an irritating scratching sound. He regards me carefully, seems to think twice before deciding to say, “You’re not being honest with me, Annie.”“I don’t remember,” I say quickly. “You know that.”“I’m starting to get the feeling that there’s a great deal you’re not sharing with me. I’m afraid it’s affecting how much good I can do.”I give a slow shake of my head and purse my lips. There’s a moment - no, a millisecond - when I think maybe, just maybe, I’ll come clean, tell him everything. But the moment passes in silence.He looks at his watch and stands up. This means our session is over. “I can’t help you if you won’t face the truth. Okay?”“Okay,” I say, getting up and walk
THE VENGEFUL LUNA EVIDENCE
It’s nearly dark when I wake up in my car in the parking lot of my doctor’s office. The sun has disappeared below the horizon line, and the sky is glowing a deep blue-black. My peripheral vision is almost gone from the migraine I have coming on. I am struggling to orient myself, to separate reality from fantasy.I see her face again, her blood-drenched clothes. I see my doctor slumped over his desk, blood draining from him onto the floor.I don’t feel the appropriate level of terror, I’m just stunned, numb. I look at my watch; it has been only forty minutes since my session with the doctor ended, which seems impossible given what’s happened. There’s a large bloodstain, still wet but drying quickly, on my jacket. I shrug out of it, crumble it into a ball. I don’t want to look at the blood. Then my cell phone, balancing on the dash, starts ringing.I answer.“Hi, Annie.”I already recognize the vo
THE VENGEFUL LUNA GONE
I got back into my bed quickly, wrapped myself up in the covers, and closed my eyes. I measured my breathing, made it deep and steady. After a minute I heard Marlowe creaking on the stairs. The floorboards outside my door groaned beneath his weight, and I heard the knob on my door start to turn. I tried to control the quaking of my body, to fight the urge to scream as I heard the door open just a little. The seconds dragged on as I waited to hear him come in or to speak my name. But he didn’t. After a moment I heard him walk away and go back down the stairs.When I thought it was safe, I raced to my mother’s room. I was sure I’d see an empty bed. But when I burst through her door, she was sleeping soundly, undisturbed by the events that had just transpired. I thought of waking her, telling her what I’d seen, but I didn’t. I just went back to my bed, lay there wide-eyed and listening to the night. Frank didn’t return until just before d awn.
THE VENGEFUL LUNA THE GROUP
He keeps his distance as we walk down the hallway and get into the elevator. My mind is racing through options: wrong floor, wrong office, wrong building. The doctor’s dead; someone hid his body and cleaned out his office. Or someone, as Drew so eloquently put it, is fucking with me. I can see from the look on Gray’s face that he’s running the same catalog of possibilities in his mind. He’s holding my hand tightly, as if he thinks I’m going to make a run for it.At the desk the guard gives Gray the building directory. I notice that the pages on the clipboard are crisp and new. On the list, Dr. Paul Brown, Ph.D., is nowhere to be found.“This looks like a brand-new directory. When was it printed?” asks Gray.The guard shrugs. “Does look new,” he admits, peering over Gray’s shoulder. “Maybe he moved his office. I don’t know.”“Do you know him?” I ask. “Dr. Brown?
THE VENGEFUL LUNA A LIFELINE
“These people need to move on,” my mother said that morning, annoyed by their grief and suffering. She was driving me to school, and Marlowe was along for the ride. “Frank’s not even in the car. Why would he be throwing rocks at us?”“He wants revenge,” said Marlowe from the backseat. We locked eyes in the rearview mirror.“He wants it from the wrong man,” said my mother. If she remembered her confession to me about Frank, about his strangeness, she showed no sign. I hadn’t even bothered to tell her what I saw the night before; she wouldn’t have believed me, and I didn’t want her to tell Frank. Fear was a stone I carried in my chest, so heavy I could barely stand upright. I thought of her in her used wedding dress, how she’d pranced about like Cinderella at the ball, thinking no one could see the frayed edges or the cigarette burn in the lace. The story of her life.At school that day,
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