Blow Fly

35

IF YOU NEED ANYTHING, CALL me on my cell phone," Nic says, standing in the front doorway of her father's white brick house in the Old Garden District, where homes are large and spreading canopies of magnolias and live oaks keep much of the city's old establishment in the shade.

Even on the brightest days, Nic finds her childhood home dark and foreboding.

"Why, you know I'm not calling that newfangled little phone of yours," her father says, winking at her. "Even if you don't make the call, you have to pay for it, isn't that right? Or does unlimited mileage, I mean minutes, apply?"

"What?" Nic frowns, then laughs. "Never mind. My new number's taped to the refrigerator, whether you decide to call it or not. If I don't call back right away, you know it's because I'm busy. Now you be good, Buddy-Boy. You're my big man, right?"

Her five-year-old son peeks out from behind his grandfather and makes a face.

"Got it!" Nic pretends to snatch his nose and tries the old trick of sticking her thumb up between two fingers. "Do you want your nose back or not?"

Buddy looks like the proverbial towheaded choir boy, dressed in overalls that are an inch too short. He touches his nose and sticks out his tongue.

"You keep sticking out that tongue of yours and one day it won't fit in your mouth anymore," his grandfather warns him.

"Shhhh," Nic says. "Don't be saying things like that, Papa. He'll believe you."

She peeks around him and grabs her son. "Gotcha!" She lifts him up and covers his face with kisses. "Looks like it's time to go shopping, my big man. You're outgrowing your clothes again. How come you keep doing that, huh?"

"I dunno." He hugs her tightly around the neck.

"Do you think it's possible you might wear something besides overalls?" she whispers in his ear.

He vigorously shakes his head. She gently puts him down.

"Why can't I come?" Buddy pouts.

"Mama has to work. By the time you wake up, I'll be back, okay? You go on to bed like my big man and I'll bring you a surprise."

"What surprise?"

"If I told you, it wouldn't be a surprise, now would it?" Nic kisses the top of his head again, and he irritably musses his hair as if swatting away bugs. "Uh-oh," she says to her father. "I believe someone's getting grumpy."

Buddy gives her a look, a mixture of anger and hurt that never fails to make Nic feel as though she has betrayed and failed him. Ever since her salesman ex-husband Ricky got the promotion he always wanted, he got more impossible to live with, traveling all the time, complaining and unkind. He's gone, and Nic's glad, relieved, but deeply wounded in ways she can't define. Hardships in life are always for the best if you do God's will, according to the doctrine of her father, who loves her but won't take her side in her failed marriage.

"You ought to know that being a cop doesn't mix with holding on to a man, if you ever get married," he told her when she got accepted to the police academy eight years ago, after a dreary career of working as a bookkeeper at the Ford dealership in Zachary, where she eventually met Ricky. They dated three months and moved in together. Another sin. At last she was free of her haunted house.

"Mama had her own business," Nic reminded her father every time he made his comments.

"Honey, that's not the same. She didn't carry a gun."

"Maybe if she had…"

"Now, you hush your mouth!"

She finished the sentence only once. This was after she filed for divorce and her father berated her for an entire afternoon, pacing in his living room, his face a storm of disbelief, fear and anger. He's a big, lanky man, and every upset stride seemed to carry him from one wall to the other and jostled the antique crystal lamp on the table next to the couch until it finally fell over and broke.

"Now look what you did!" he cried out. "You broke your mother's lamp."

"You broke it."

"Girls don't need to be chasing criminals and shooting guns. That's why you lost Ricky. He married a pretty woman, not an Annie Oakley. And what kind of mother…"

That was when Nic said it. "If Mama had a gun, maybe she wouldn't have been butchered by some fucking asshole right here in our own house!"

"Don't you dare use words like that," he told her, emphasizing each stony word with a violent stab of his finger, stabs that reminded her of what was done to her mother.

They never touched the subject again. It remains a stalled storm front between them. No matter how often they see each other, she can't feel his warmth or get too close. After two premature babies who didn't survive, Nic was born and is the only child her father has. After he retired from teaching high school sociology, he got bored and pretty much quit life. He spends his mornings working crossword puzzles when he's not babysitting, and taking obsessively long, brisk walks.

She knows he blames himself. Her mother was murdered eight years ago in the middle of the day while he and Nic were both at work. Maybe she blames herself, too, not so much for her mothers death, she tells herself, but because if Nic hadn't gone out with friends after work, her father might not have been the one to find his wife's body and blood all over the house, from where she fought her killer, running from room to room. By the time Nic got home, slightly drunk from beer, police were swarming the property, her mother's body already removed. Nic never saw it. It was a closed-casket funeral. She's never been able to bring herself to get a copy of the police report, and because the case remains unsolved, the coroner's office won't give her a copy of the autopsy records. All she knows is that her mother was stabbed and slashed and bled to death. Knowing that was enough. But for some reason, it isn't anymore.

On this particular night, Nic is determined to talk, but that can't happen unless Buddy is occupied.

"You want to watch TV for a few minutes before bed?" she asks him.

It is a special privilege indeed.

"Yes," he says, still pouting.

He runs inside the house, and the TV goes on.

She nods at her father, and he accompanies her outside.

"Come on," she whispers to him, and they pick their usual spot beneath the ancient live oak tree at the edge of the yard.

"This had better be good." He has his lines and never tires of reusing them.

She catches the gleam of his teeth as he talks and knows he's pleased when she drags him out in the middle of the night to have a secret conversation, one not meant for a toddler's ears.

"I know you don't want to talk about it," Nic begins, "but it's about Mama." She feels him jerk and withdraw, as if his spirit has suddenly fled from his body. "I need to know more, Papa. Not knowing is doing something to me. Maybe because of what's happening around here now, with these women disappearing. I'm feeling something. I don't know how else to say it, but I'm feeling something. Something terrible." Her voice trembles. "And it's scaring me, Papa. The way I'm feeling sometimes is scaring me bad."

His silence is as formidable as the tree they stand under.

"Remember when I got the ladder and propped it against this very tree." She looks heavenward, her vision caught in thick, dark branches and leaves. "Next thing I know, I'm stuck up there, too scared to climb higher or come back down. And you had to get me."

"I remember." His voice sounds as if nobody is home.

"Well, that's the way I feel right now," she goes on, trying to appeal to the part of him that shut down after his wife was murdered. "I can't climb up or down, and I need you to help me, Papa."

"There's nothing I can do," he says.