Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(48)

“Well,” says Charis, “the thing is, vampire night was last night.” She sounds guilty.

“You didn’t tell us?” says Tony. “We would have come over. I bet it gave you bad dreams about Zenia.”

“That was the night before,” says Charis. “Zenia came and sat at the end of my bed and told me to watch out for this person … it was a name I didn’t know. It sounded like a woman. A Martian kind of name, you know, it began with a Y. This time, she was wearing fur.”

“What sort of fur?” says Tony. She’s guessing wolverine.

“I don’t know,” says Charis. “It was black and white.”

“Cripes,” says Roz. “And then you watched a vampire film by yourself! That was reckless!”

“I didn’t,” says Charis – now she’s gone pink – “watch it by myself.”

“Oh, crap,” says Roz. “Not Billy!”

“Did you have sex?” asks Tony. It’s an intrusive question, but she and Roz need to know exactly where the enemy stands.

“No!” says Charis, flustered. “It was just friendly! We talked! And I feel a lot better now, because how can you really forgive a person if they aren’t there?”

“Did he put his arm around you?” says Roz, feeling like her own mother. No: her grandmother.

Charis ducks this. “Billy thinks we should open an urban B&B,” she says. “As an investment. They’re the coming thing. In one-half of the duplex. He’d do the renovations, and then I’d do the baking.”

“And he’d be in charge of the money, right?” says Roz.

“The name Zenia told you. It wouldn’t by any chance be Yllib?” says Tony. Zenia had always been good at codes, and puzzles, and reflections.

“Trust me on this: forget it!” says Roz. “Billy’s a drainpipe. He’ll clean you out.”

“What does Ouida have to say about him?” Tony asks.

“Ouida’s a little jealous, I have to admit,” says Charis. “I had to … I had to sequester her.” She is definitely blushing now.

“Locked Ouida in the closet, is my guess,” says Tony to Roz on the phone.

“This is dire,” says Roz.



They devise a phone tree: Charis will get two calls a day, one from each of them, to monitor the situation. But Charis stops answering the phone.

Three days pass. Then Tony receives a text message: Need to talk. Please come. Sorry. It’s from Charis.

Tony collects Roz, or rather Roz collects Tony, in her Prius. When they arrive at the duplex, Charis is sitting at the kitchen table. She’s been crying. But at least she’s still alive.

“What happened, sweetie?” says Roz. There are no marks of violence; maybe that schmuck Billy has pocketed Charis’s life savings.

Tony looks at Ouida. She’s sitting beside Charis, ears pricked, tongue out. There’s something on her chest fur. Pizza sauce?

“Billy’s in the hospital,” says Charis. “Ouida bit him.” She starts to sniffle. Good dog, Ouida, thinks Tony.

“I’ll make us some mint tea,” says Roz. “Why did Ouida …?”

“Well, we were going to, you know … in the bedroom. And Ouida was barking, so I had to shut her in the upstairs hall closet. And then, just before … I simply had to know. So I said, ‘Billy, who murdered my chickens?’ Because back then, Zenia told me it was Billy who did it, but I never knew what to believe, because Zenia was such a liar, and I just couldn’t … with someone who’d done that. And Billy said, ‘It was Zenia, she slit their throats, I tried to stop her.’ And then Ouida started to bark really loud, as if something was hurting her, and I had to go see what was wrong, and when I opened the closet door she rushed out and jumped up on the bed and bit Billy. He screamed a lot, there was blood on the sheets, it was …”

“You can get it out with cold water,” says Roz.

“On the leg?” asks Tony.

“Not exactly,” says Charis. “He wasn’t wearing any clothes, otherwise I’m sure she wouldn’t have … but they’re doing surgery. I feel bad about that. I told them at the hospital, after they’d wheeled him to emerg – I said it was me who bit him, it was a sex thing Billy liked and it went too far, and they were very nice, they said these things happen. I hated to lie, but they might have, you know, put Ouida away. It was very stressful! But at least now I know the answer.”

“What answer?” asks Roz. “The answer to what?”

Charis says it’s all very clear: Zenia has been coming back in dreams to warn her about Billy, who was the chicken-murderer all along. But Charis was too stupid to figure it out – she wanted to believe the best of Billy, and it was so nice at first that he was back in her life, it was like a completion of the circle or something, so Zenia had to take the next step and reincarnate herself in the body of Ouida – that’s why she was wearing fur in the second dream – and she was naturally annoyed when she heard Billy sticking the blame onto her for something she hadn’t done.

In fact, says Charis, maybe Zenia’s intentions were benevolent all along. Maybe she stole Billy to protect Charis from such a bad apple as him. Maybe she stole West to teach Tony a life lesson about, well, music appreciation or something, and maybe she stole Mitch to clear the way for Roz’s much better husband, Sam. Maybe Zenia was, like, the secret alter ego of each of them, acting out stuff for them they didn’t have the strength to act out by themselves. When you looked at it that way …