Teardrop

24 THE DISAPPEARANCE

Tap. Tap. Tap.

When Polaris arrived at her window before sunrise Tuesday morning, Eureka was out of bed by the third tap on the glass. She parted her curtains and slid the cold pane up to greet the lime-green bird.

The bird meant Blavatsky, and Blavatsky meant answers. Translating The Book of Love had become Eureka’s most compelling mission since Diana died. Somehow, as the tale grew wilder and more fanciful, Eureka’s connection to it cemented. She felt a childlike curiosity to know the details of the gossipwitches’ prophecy, as if it bore some relevance to her own life. She could hardly wait to meet the old woman down at the willow tree.

She’d slept with the thunderstone on the same chain as the lapis lazuli locket. She couldn’t bear to wrap it up and stow it away again. It was heavy around her neck, warm from lying against her chest all night. She decided to ask Madame Blavatsky’s opinion on it. It meant welcoming the old woman deeper into her private life, but Eureka trusted her own instincts. Maybe Blavatsky would know something that would help Eureka better understand the stone—maybe she could even explain Ander’s interest in it.

Eureka held out her hand to Polaris, but the bird flew past her. He swooped inside her room, flew in an agitated circle near the ceiling, then darted back out the window into the charcoal sky. He flapped his wings, sending a draft of pine-scented air Eureka’s way, exposing the variegated feathers where his inner wings met his breastbone. His beak widened skyward in a shrill squawk.

“Now you’re a rooster?” she said.

Polaris squawked again. The sound was wretched, nothing like the melodic notes she’d heard him trill before.

“I’m coming.” Eureka looked at her pajamas and bare feet. It was cold outside, the air moist and the sun a long way off. She grabbed the first thing her hands found in her closet: the faded green Evangeline tracksuit she used to wear to cross-country away meets. The nylon suit was warm and she could run in it, and there was no reason to be sentimental about the team she’d had to beg to quit. She brushed her teeth and whipped her hair into a braid. She met Polaris by the rosemary bush at the edge of the front porch.

The morning was wet, filled with the gossip of crickets and the clean whisper of rosemary swaying in the wind. This time, Polaris didn’t wait for Eureka to tie her running shoes. He flew in the same direction she’d followed him the other day, but faster. Eureka started to jog. Her eyes were somewhere between groggy and alert. Her calves burned from yesterday’s run.

The bird’s squawk was persistent, abrasive against the dormant street at five in the morning. Eureka wished she knew how to quiet him. Something was different about his mood today, but she didn’t speak his language. All she could do was keep up.

She was sprinting when she passed the paperboy’s red truck at the end of Shady Circle. She waved as if she were friendly, then turned right to cut through the Guillots’ lawn. She reached the bayou, with its army-green morning glow. She’d lost sight of Polaris, but she knew the way to the willow tree.

She could have run it with her eyes closed, and it almost seemed as if she did. Days had passed since Eureka had slept well. Her tank was nearly empty. She watched the moon’s reflection shimmering on the surface of the water and imagined it had spawned a dozen baby moons. The infant crescents swam upstream, leaping like flying fish, trying to outpace Eureka. Her legs pumped faster, wanting to win, until she stumbled over the woody roots of a fern and tumbled into the mud. She landed on her bad wrist. She winced as she regained her footing and her pace.

Squawk!

Polaris swooped over her shoulder as she ran the last twenty yards to the willow tree. The bird held back, still making the strangled squawks that hurt both of Eureka’s ears. It wasn’t until she reached the tree that she realized the reason for his noise. She leaned against the smooth white tree trunk and rested her hands on her knees to catch her breath. Madame Blavatsky was not there.

There was now an angry undertone to Polaris’s chirping. He moved in wide circles over the tree. Eureka looked up at him, bewildered, exhausted—and then she understood. “You didn’t want me to come here in the first place.”

Squawk!

“Well, how am I supposed to know where she is?”

Squawk!

He flew in the direction Eureka had just come from, turning back once in what was clearly, if absurdly, a glare. Chest heaving, stamina fading, Eureka followed.

The sky was still dark when she parked Magda in the potholed parking lot outside Blavatsky’s office. Wind scattered shadowed oak leaves across the uneven pavement. A streetlight lit the intersection but left the strip mall eerily dark.

Eureka had scribbled a note saying she was going to school early for science lab and left it on the counter in the kitchen. She knew it must have looked absurd when she opened the car door for Polaris to fly in, but so did most of Eureka’s actions recently. The bird was a great navigator once Eureka realized that two hops to one side or the other on the dashboard indicated which way she was supposed to turn. Heat on, windows and sunroof rolled down, they’d sped toward the translator’s storefront on the other side of Lafayette.

Only one other car was in the lot. It looked like it had been parked in front of the tanning salon next door for a decade, which made Eureka wonder about Madame Blavatsky, how the old lady got around.

Polaris soared out the open window and up the exterior flight of stairs before Eureka had turned off the car. When she caught up to him, her hand hovered anxiously over the antique lion’s-head knocker.

“She said not to bother her at home,” Eureka told Polaris. “You were there, remember?”

The pitch of Polaris’s squawk made her jump. It didn’t feel right to knock so early, so instead Eureka gave the door a light shove with her hip. It swung open to Blavatsky’s low-ceilinged foyer. Eureka and Polaris moved inside. The entry was quiet and humid and smelled like spoiled milk. The two folding chairs were still there, as were the red lamp and the empty magazine rack. But something felt different. The door to Madame Blavatsky’s atelier was ajar.

Eureka looked at Polaris. He was silent, wings close to his body, as he flew through the doorway. After a moment, Eureka followed.

Every inch of Madame Blavatsky’s office had been ransacked; everything breakable had been broken. All four birdcages were mangled by wire cutters. One cage hung misshapen from the ceiling; the rest had been tossed to the floor. A few birds chattered nervously on the sill of the open window. The rest must have flown away—or worse. Green feathers were everywhere.

The frowning portraits lay smashed on the muddied Persian rug. The pillows on the couch had been slashed. Stuffing spilled from them like pus from a wound. The humidifier near the back wall was burbling, which Eureka knew from nursing the twins’ allergies meant it was almost out of water. A bookcase lay in splinters on the floor. One of the turtles explored the jagged mountain range of texts.

Eureka paced the room, stepping carefully over the books and shattered picture frames. She noticed a little butter dish brimming with bejeweled rings. The scene did not look typical of a robbery.

Where was Blavatsky? And where was Eureka’s book?

She started to sift through some crumpled papers on the desk, but she didn’t want to go through Madame Blavatsky’s private things, even if someone else already had. Behind the desk, she noticed the ashtray where the translator put out her cigarettes. Four cigarette butts were kissed with Blavatsky’s unmistakable red lipstick. Two were as pale as the paper.

Eureka touched the pendants around her neck, hardly realizing she was developing a habit of calling on them for help. She closed her eyes and lowered herself onto Blavatsky’s desk chair. The black walls and ceiling felt like they were closing in.

Pale cigarettes made her think of pale faces, calm enough to smoke before … or after, or during, the destruction of Blavatsky’s office. What had the intruders been looking for?

Where was her book?

She knew she was biased, but she couldn’t picture any culprits other than the ghostly people from the dark road. The idea of their pale fingers holding Diana’s book made Eureka shoot to her feet.

At the back of the office, near the open window, she discovered a tiny alcove she hadn’t seen on her first visit. The doorway was strung with a purple beaded curtain that rattled when she passed through. The alcove held a little galley kitchen with a small sink, an overgrown planter of dill, a three-legged wooden stool, and, behind the micro-fridge, a surprising flight of stairs.

Madame Blavatsky’s apartment was on the floor above her office. Eureka took the stairs three at a time. Polaris chirped approvingly, as if this was the direction he’d wanted her to take all along.

The stairs were dark, so she used her phone to light the way. At the top stood a closed door with six enormous dead-bolts. Each of the locks was unique and antique—and looked utterly impregnable. Eureka was relieved, thinking that at least whoever had ransacked the downstairs atelier wouldn’t have been able to break into Madame Blavatsky’s apartment.

Polaris squawked angrily, as if he’d expected Eureka to have a key. He swooped down and pecked the ragged carpet at the foot of the door like a chicken desperate for feed. Eureka shined her phone’s light down to see what he was doing.

She wished she hadn’t.

A pool of blood had seeped through the crack between the door and the landing. It had soaked most of the top step and was now spreading downward. In the silent darkness of the stairwell, Eureka heard a droplet fall from the top step onto the one where she was standing. She inched away, repulsed and afraid.

Dizziness gripped her. She leaned forward, intending to rest her hand on the door for a moment to regain her balance—but she flailed backward as the door gave way under the slightest pressure of her touch. It tumbled, like a felled tree, into the apartment. The door’s weighty thud was accompanied by a damp slap on the carpet, which Eureka realized had to do with the blood pooled behind the door. The impact sent red splatters sloshing up onto the smoke-stained walls.

Whoever had been here had taken the door cleanly off its hinges and, before leaving, had propped it up so that it still looked bolted from the outside.

She should leave. She should turn around right now, rush down the stairs, and get out of here before she saw something she did not want to see. Her mouth filled with a sickly taste. She should call the police. She should get out and not come back.

But she couldn’t. Something had happened to a person she cared about. As loudly as her instincts screamed Run! Eureka could not turn her back on Madame Blavatsky.

She stepped over the bloody landing, onto the fallen door, and followed Polaris into the apartment. It smelled like blood and sweat and cigarettes. Dozens of nearly extinguished candles flickered along a mantel. They were the only source of light in the room. Outside the single small window, an electric bug-killer zapped in a steady beat. In the center of the room, sprawled across the blue industrial carpet, in the first place Eureka suspected and the last place she allowed herself to look, was Madame Blavatsky, dead as Diana.

Eureka’s hand went to her throat to choke off a gasp. Over her shoulder, the stairwell to the exit looked endless, like she’d never make it without fainting. On instinct, she felt in her pocket for her phone. She dialed 911, but she could not bring herself to press the call button. She had no voice, no way to communicate to a stranger on the other end of a line that the woman who’d become the closest thing Eureka had to a mother was dead.

The phone fell back inside her pocket. She moved closer to Madame Blavatsky but was careful to stay beyond the spread of blood.

Clumps of auburn hair lay on the floor, surrounding the old woman’s head like a crown. There were bald patches of pink skin where the hair had been ripped from her scalp. Her eyes were open. One stared vacantly at the ceiling. The other had been torn completely from its socket. It dangled near her temple, hanging on by a thin pink artery. Her cheeks were lacerated, as if sharp nails had dragged across them. Her legs and arms were sprawled at her sides, making her look like a kind of mangled snow angel. One hand grasped a rosary. Her patchwork cloak was slick with blood. She had been beaten, shredded, stabbed repeatedly in the chest by something that left much larger slashes than a knife. She’d been left to bleed out on the floor.

Eureka staggered against the wall. She wondered what Madame Blavatsky’s last thought had been. She tried to imagine the kind of prayers the woman might have said on her way out of the world, but her mind was blank with shock. She sank to her knees. Diana always said that everything in the world was connected. Why hadn’t Eureka stopped to consider what The Book of Love had to do with the thunderstone Ander knew so much about—or the people he’d protected her from on the road? If they were the ones who’d done this to Madame Blavatsky, she felt certain they’d come in search of The Book of Love. They had murdered someone over it.

And if that was true, Madame Blavatsky’s death had been her fault. Her mind went to the Confession booth, where she’d go on Saturday afternon with Dad. She had no idea how many Hail Marys and Our Fathers she’d have to say to clear that sin.

She should never have insisted they carry on with the translation. Madame Blavatsky had warned her of the risks. Eureka should have connected the old woman’s hesitation to the danger Ander said Eureka was in. But she hadn’t. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to. Maybe she wanted one thing sweet and magical in her life. Now that sweet and magical thing was dead.

She thought she was going to gag, but she didn’t. She thought she might scream, but she didn’t. Instead she knelt closer to Madame Blavatsky’s chest and resisted the urge to touch her. For months she had longed for the impossible opportunity to cradle Diana after her death. Now Eureka wanted to reach for Madame Blavatsky, but the open wounds held her back. Not because Eureka was disgusted—though the woman was in gruesome shape—but because she knew better than to implicate herself in this murder. She held back, knowing that no matter how much she cared, there was nothing she could do for Blavatsky.

She imagined others coming upon this sight: the gray pallor Rhoda’s skin would take on, the way it did when she was nauseated, making her orange lipstick look clownish; the prayers that would stream from the lips of Eureka’s most pious classmate, Belle Pogue; the disbelieving curses Cat would spew. Eureka imagined she could see herself from outside herself. She looked as lifeless and immobile as a boulder that had been lodged in the apartment for millennia. She looked stoic and unreachable.

Diana’s death had killed death’s mysteries for Eureka. She knew death was waiting for her, like it had been for Madame Blavatsky, like it was for everyone she loved and didn’t love. She knew that human beings were born to die. She remembered the last line of a Dylan Thomas poem she’d once read on an online grief forum. It was the only thing that made sense to her when she was in the hospital:

After the first death, there is no other.

Diana was Eureka’s first death. It meant that Madame Blavatsky’s death was no other. Even Eureka’s own death would be no other.

Her grief was powerful; it just looked different from what people were used to.

She was afraid, but not of the dead body before her—she’d seen worse in too many nightmares. She was afraid of what Madame Blavatsky’s death meant for the other people close to her, dwindling as their numbers were. She couldn’t help feeling robbed of something, knowing that she would never understand the rest of The Book of Love.

Had the murderers taken her book? The thought of someone else possessing it, knowing more of it than she did, enraged her. She rose and moved toward Blavatsky’s breakfast bar, then her nightstand, searching for any sign of the book, being as careful as possible not to alter what she knew would be a crime scene.

She found nothing, only heartache. She was so miserable she could hardly see. Polaris squawked and pecked the edges of Madame Blavatsky’s cloak.

Everything might change with the last word, Eureka thought. But this couldn’t be Madame Blavatsky’s last word. She deserved so much more than this.

Again Eureka lowered herself to the floor. Her fingers found their way across her chest intuitively, making the sign of the cross. She pressed her hands together and bowed her head in a silent prayer to Saint Francis, asking for serenity on the old woman’s behalf. She kept her head bowed and her eyes closed until she sensed that her prayer had left the room and was on its way into the atmosphere. She hoped it made it to its destination.

What would become of Madame Blavatsky? Eureka had no way of knowing who would find the woman next, whether she had friends or family nearby. As her mind reeled around the simplest possibilities of getting Madame Blavatsky help, she imagined terrifying conversations with the sheriff. Her chest tightened. It wouldn’t bring the old woman back to life if Eureka embroiled herself in a criminal investigation. Still, she had to find some way to let the police know.

She gazed around the room, despondent—and then she had an idea.

Back on the landing she had passed a commercial fire alarm, probably installed before the building became a residence. Eureka stood and stepped around the pool of blood, sliding a little bit as she crossed the door. She regained her balance and tugged the sleeve of her tracksuit over her hand to avoid leaving fingerprints. She reached for the red hatch and pulled the metal handle down.

The alarm was instantaneous, earsplitting, almost comically loud. Eureka buried her head between her shoulders and started toward the exit. Before she left, she gazed into the room once more at Madame Blavatsky. She wanted to say she was sorry.

Polaris was perched on the woman’s shredded chest, pecking lightly where her heart had once beat. He seemed phosphorescent in the candlelight. When he noticed Eureka watching, he raised his head. His black eyes gleamed demonically. He hissed at her, then squawked once, so shrilly it pierced the sound of the fire alarm.

Eureka jumped, then spun around. She ran the rest of the way down the stairs. She didn’t stop until she’d passed through Madame Blavatsky’s atelier, through the red-lit foyer, until she stood gasping in the parking lot, where a golden sun was just beginning to burn into the sky.