Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

And for that reason above all others, Joseph Hiram Peacock decided she had to go.

It really isn’t tough for a kid to get a domestic fired, particularly in a house where the mother thinks of the kid as a swatch of wallpaper that occasionally needs food and school.

I was too smart to think one theft would do it, and I was too smart to take something they might think a boy would be interested in. I knew where the money was kept. That was out of the question.

I started with earrings, a pair of modest pearls. Nothing so expensive Mom would make Dad call the cops; something small and losable. Something she wore a lot so she’d notice and it would bug her and put her on notice that something was wrong. I hit the bull’s-eye.

“Edwin?” she said; it was always Edwin when she had a demand and Ed when she wanted to make sweet. “Would you please keep your eyes open for those pearls I got in Chicago? They seem to have grown wings.”

“They’re not in the box?” he said from behind his newspaper. Of course they weren’t in the box, nobody says their earrings are missing if they’re in the box. It was a bullshit question so he could snatch another paragraph off the New York Times before he had to pay attention to what she was saying.

“No,” she said, more quietly. More quietly meant she was going to handle it herself. Louder would have meant he’d better get in there. She put just enough pout in it so he’d know she knew he was more interested in the paper, but really it was just for herself since he wasn’t fucking listening.

It certainly wasn’t for me. She didn’t know if I was in the house, in the garden, in the park, or at the bottom of the East River. I actually put my hand in my pocket and rolled the earrings in my fingers while she stomped and huffed around upstairs, making the floorboards creak. For a woman with size-six feet she had quite a huffy stomp.

The only person looking at me was the maid, Elise, who was tickling the bookshelf with a feather duster. She caught my eye just then, not that we were chummy, but her look seemed to say she knew something had been set in motion, that she would come under scrutiny, that my words for or against her would be the finger on the scale. She was only four years older than me, but we couldn’t have lived in more different worlds. Doing her very best every day, never stealing, never lying, she might or might not be able to keep her reputation intact. I was a rotten little bastard, but because my face was white and my name was Peacock, it would have taken an act of Congress to put me under suspicion.

Another complicating factor was my attraction to Elise. She had the dubious good fortune to live under the same roof with me at the very dawn of my adolescent sexuality. You know what teenaged boys are famous for doing? Of course you do. I had just discovered that very thing the previous year, while holding a heavy encyclopedia on my lap and simultaneously nervously twitching my leg up and down. Soon I gave up my hunt for John Wilkes Booth and started fanning the pages for anything female, finally settling on Joan of Arc. I imagined her sweating under all that armor, then, God help me, I pictured her in a cell like in a dungeon getting ready to get burned at the stake. This whole thing took like three minutes; I didn’t know what dizzying, rapturous thing had happened to me, I had an idea, but I had better sense than to tell my parents about it. I just cleaned myself up and resolved to investigate the situation further. It actually took me a week to figure out a book on my lap wasn’t necessary.

But Elise. She went from being sort of an older fellow child from a less fortunate family to being Cleopatra, Bathsheba, Jezebel. I loved watching her polish the silverware, clean the glass, make the beds; I lived for floorboards day. I tried to talk with her a few times, and she was polite without being overly friendly. I think she saw through my interest, understood this was normal for boys and that it was best not to encourage or offend me. I think she was perfectly neutral toward me, no love, no hate, and as guilty as I felt for the unlikely situations I imagined us in together, I was grateful for that neutrality. I expected that neutrality to end any day; any day she would sense the secret and anatomically naïve relationship we were having inside my skull and begin to despise me as a peeper and a sex pervert.

But that’s not what happened. If she knew, really knew how much I thought about her, she never let on. And now she would need me.

Help me, Joey, her look said, dust motes in the air lit up by the sun. You know I’m good.

I let myself almost smile, which she took to mean yes. She almost smiled, too. This all took less than three seconds. Then Solly started yapping because a key slotted into the front door and it opened, and Margaret came in with her big tatty coat and the paper sacks of groceries she would turn into Saturday dinner. A bunch of cold air came in with her.

She said, “Good afternoon, Joey,” to me, but I just looked down.

Rolled the earrings in my fingers.

Tried not to smile.

Mom did ask Elise about the earrings but seemed mostly to believe her when she said she hadn’t seen them. She was on guard, though, and now so was Elise. Runners on first and third. I went for the base hit the following Saturday. Not earrings this time, but a cameo. Valuable, but not send-you-down-the-river valuable. Just pretty, something a woman would love. A white Grecian lady with snaky hair on a coral background the color of good salmon. I had always liked that one, had asked Mom about the pinkish stone when I was a kid, had loved the idea that it came all the way from the sea. Coral is still one of my favorite words, even after everything. But I hadn’t paid it any mind since I was little; she’d never think I took it.

She’d certainly never think I would put it in the purse of an Irish cook who had done me no harm. The idea was so shitty, so cowardly and rotten as to be beyond belief; her Ashkenazi blood was too noble to produce such corrupt stock, right? But Irish thieves crawled off the bogs in droves and freighted themselves west across the Atlantic; what was Brooklyn, where the McMannises had their hatchery, but a weigh station between Ellis Island and Rikers Island? That cameo would land in Margaret’s purse with an audible thud, David’s stone hitting Goliath right on the X s-for-eyes button. Only I was Goliath. I knew I was going to win this one. But how to get it in there? And how to see that it was found?

“Why does the lady have snakes in her hair?” I had asked my mother years before.

“Because the gods were angry at her and turned her into a monster.”

“You mean God?”

“No, Joey, back in olden times the ancient Greeks believed in lots of gods. Some were nice and some were mean.”

“Like the devil?”

“Something like that.”

“Why did they put snakes in her hair?”

“You know, Joey, I forget. Go ask your father.”

I don’t know if she forgot or she just didn’t want to tell me, but I know what the snake lady did. Medusa. She got raped. The god Poseidon went and raped her in the temple of Athena, and Athena was pissed. She couldn’t punish Poseidon, her uncle, but Medusa? Just a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just an Irish girl off the bogs.

My plan was to slip the cameo into Margaret’s purse and then tell Elise I had seen Margaret take something from my mom’s jewelry box. Remove myself one step from the crime, enlist an ally with skin in the game, it was perfect. You see why I’m such a good vampire? We’re all lying, devious bastards, not like werewolves, if there are werewolves, whose MO is, “Hi, I’m a werewolf, surprise! And fuck you!” No, we lurk. We’re lurkers. And I was off to a good start.