M L N Hanover - Killing Rites

We went quiet for a moment.

“You know,” I said, “there was something we were going to talk about.”

He looked up from his book. His eyebrows were quizzical. Chogyi Jake segued from “O Come All Ye Faithful” to “Feliz Navidad.” Ozzie trotted into the room, wagged twice, sighed, and trotted back out. I looked down at my laptop, blushing, and then back up.

“Back at the condo,” I said. “At the ski valley. You said that when this was over, there was another conversation we needed to have.”

His face was smooth and calm, giving nothing away.

“There is,” he said. My heart picked up speed a little. I felt like I was going down a long hill in a go-cart whose brakes I didn’t trust. I lifted my chin.

“Well?”

“It isn’t over.”

And of course he was right. It wasn’t. A few minutes later, he went into the kitchen to help with the rice and left me alone with my semifunctional laptop and my thoughts. I did need to decide what to do. It had been easy before, when I’d believed Eric was one of the good guys. I lost my innocence in Chicago, and since then I’d put up a campaign of lies and misdirection against Chogyi Jake, hung out with Midian Clark despite the fact that he was actively killing people, abducted an eight-year-old girl and left her unsupervised in a place where her family couldn’t find her. And none of them particularly bothered me. I knew the worst thing I’d ever done, and beside it none of these minor sins seemed to matter much.

But probably they did.

My life had been picked up in the whirlpool he’d left when Eric died, and I’d been spun around ever since. Me and the little family I’d made for myself. And as much as I’d learned, and as much as I knew now that I hadn’t before, I still felt like I was listening to someone speaking in a different language.

I couldn’t go back to the cataloging project. We’d done that for months, and all I’d gotten from it were lists and notes and a sense that I would never get my homework done before my paper was due. And I’d chosen not to cast out the rider in my skin. Not yet, at least. Not until I knew how she’d gotten there and how Eric’s plan involved us both. It didn’t seem to leave me with much. All of Eric’s notes and letters were like reminders for himself, as if all he ever needed to do was jog his memory. There was nothing anywhere to tell me what the greater plan was. Nothing for me.

And, what was more, nobody knew him. Eric Heller had been a chameleon, changing to show whomever he was with what he wanted them to see. He hadn’t had friends, he’d had playing pieces. I’d been one of them. His promoted pawn.

Giving up on the Internet connection, I pulled up the local copy of our organizational wiki and clicked through to the listing of properties. Cairo. Westport. Toronto. Page after page after page. And at any one, there might be a folder with my name on it that laid out everything I wanted to know. Or else that file might not exist. I was flying blind, and I couldn’t do that. Not anymore.

I needed to find the mother lode of raw information. I needed to know all the things that Eric hadn’t bothered writing down. And, reading over the list of all the cities and nations we hadn’t even been to once yet, I knew I was looking in the wrong place. The answer I needed wasn’t on the list, because whatever ambition or need or plan had driven Eric, he hadn’t owned it. If anything, it had owned him. Just the way it owned me.

I had to go where the answers were. Where the history was. I had to find the people who’d loved Eric. Or hated him. The ones who knew.

Before I could change my mind, I took my new cell phone out of my backpack. It had two bars, which was a lot better than the old one had managed. I keyed in the phone number from memory and waited while it rang.

Some moments go on for longer than the actual time that they take. The time between the click of someone picking up a handset and the first soft opening of lips as she prepares to speak can take years. Maybe a lifetime.

“Hello? Who’s there, please?”

Her voice was as clear as if she were sitting next to me. There was Christmas music in the background, her “It Came upon the Midnight Clear” clashing with Chogyi Jake’s jazzy “Santa, Baby” from the kitchen. I closed my eyes, and I must have let out some little sigh, some tiny sound small enough that it was below my own awareness but still enough for her to recognize.

“Jayné? Is that you?”

I closed my eyes. If this was a mistake, it was the mistake I was making. I cleared my throat. When I spoke, I tried to sound bright and confident and undamaged. The last one was the hardest.

“Hi, Mom.”