Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

But not perfect.

I went upstairs to Elise’s room. Elise lived with us every day but Sunday when she trained it north to some crumbling shitbox in the 130s where they took her money but no longer had a bed for her; here she slept in a sort of glorified, skylit closet on the top floor. One closet within this closet was where the cook kept her affairs. Margaret went home at night, but worked from six thirty A.M. until eight P.M. six days a week, with a two-hour break in the middle of the day, just enough time for her to get home, slap her children, and clean the whiskey bottles off the stairs, or whatever poor Irish women do in Brooklyn. Anyway, there I was all quiet in my sock feet, opening the cook’s closet door with nary a creak. Medusa was in my hand and only inches from slipping into the cheap canvas handbag. And then I stopped. Cold sweat on my temples and upper lip. I know how much this sounds like trying to make myself look better after the fact, but given the other rotten things I have told you, and will tell you, why would I tidy this up? Anyway, whether you believe me or not, I stopped. I was suddenly aware that this was a big moment for me, that who I was as Joseph Hiram Peacock was getting decided exactly then, not in trench warfare, not in some deal with the devil with a fancy contract and an offered pen to dip in my own blood, but right there. On the fourth floor of a narrow town house in Greenwich Village with a stupid little cameo in my hand. I shook my head a little. It was too rotten. I couldn’t do it. I started pulling my hand back.

“Mr. Joey,” she said. I almost jumped out of my skin. Elise. Only she called me Mr. Joey. She said it breathy, a stage whisper, she knew something bad was happening. I turned around to look at her. All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe. I looked at Elise and she at me and just like that I failed. I ran from the trench my buddies ran into. I dipped the pen in the blood and signed, the devil twirling his waxy black mustachio and chuckling at his windfall, or maybe at the irony of all this ceremony for such a wormy little soul.

I held up the cameo on its chain, Medusa spinning in the dim light, my eyes begging Elise to believe me as I said, “I found this. I mean I saw her. Margaret. She put this in her purse, from the dresser.” Something very complex but quick happened in Elise’s eyes just then, something I only fully understood later: the arithmetic of the real world carried out by a young woman of fragile circumstances, an expert in such calculations.

She didn’t believe me any more than the man in the moon. But she knew her best chance of staying on here was to side with me. If she tried to rat me out, I might say she was the thief. Even if they believed her, she’d have a permanent enemy in the house that could never, ever be fired. She knew all this in a second.

“Missus Peacock,” she said, tentatively, looking me in the eyes as if asking, Are you sure? Are you sure this is who you are? Because we can do it this way if you want, but you’re starting on a long road now and you might not like where it goes. Or maybe she was just a scared kid from Harlem learning yet again how bad the world sucks.

I almost nodded at her, the way I had almost smiled before. She almost nodded back, and then she called for my mom again. Louder this time.

“Missus Peacock!”

I looked at Medusa.

Turning on her fine chain, turning.

The next cook was colored. My father overruled my mother on that, stopped her from hiring a mealymouthed sixtyish Russian crone I’m reasonably sure was a witch, and insisted on a cocoa-skinned, smiley Tennessee negro named Susie, though it wasn’t a week before we were calling her “Sugar,” as she said everybody else did. In addition to the permanent, genuine smile and pearly teeth, the gods had gifted Sugar with perhaps the largest bosom I had ever seen; it made a sort of geological shelf above her smallish waist. It wasn’t a point of sexual interest, not for me anyway, but it was definitely a novelty. Sugar’s audition consisted of her cooking us six fried eggs in a row without breaking one yolk, making jokes with my dad the whole time. Mother wasn’t hungry, she was never hungry, so Solly got her second egg. It was a good day for Yorkshire terriers. It was even a pretty good day for me, despite my guilt for what I had done to Margaret.

Margaret.

Yeah, let’s go back to that Saturday.

I had asked Dad not to call the police, trying to sound persuasive while remaining aloof. My dad was quiet but shrewd, very shrewd. You don’t steer a business through the Great Depression by being a sucker.

“Why do you think we should be lenient with this kind of behavior, son?”

“Because. She has a family?”

I made myself look at him. He would notice if I didn’t look at him.

“Most people have families, Joseph. And most people don’t steal.” His eyes were cannons, ready to fire a broadside that would knock my head clean off.

Margaret sat stiffly in a dining room chair, her chin high, her arms folded in a pose of suffering righteousness as old as accusation.

“Call the police if you’d like, Mr. Peacock. I’m an honest woman, and I’d like to see this sorted out as much as you.” She looked at Elise then, which was a relief, but then she cut her eyes to me, dragging Elise’s gaze my way with her. She knew. She knew, but had no proof, and hoped I would panic.

Yes sirree, she was going to eyeball me straight into a cold sweat.

Those outsized blue gorgon’s eyes of hers went through me, her gaze worse than my father’s, tempered by neither love nor doubt. Her look was not a question mark, it was the drip, drip, drop of Chinese water torture, but I couldn’t look away.

Suddenly, my mother walked over and stood between us, standing closer to Margaret.

“I would appreciate it, Mrs. McMannis, if you would stop staring at little Joseph as though it were his fault you’re a thief.”

“There’s a thief in this house, and no question,” she said.

“If you’ve got some ridiculous accusation to make, well, you just go ahead and make it, but I’d think twice if I were you,” said my mom.

Now the gorgon’s eyes swung up to her.

“I’ve no interest in seeing you arrested,” my mom went on, “but neither will I stand for your lies. Your position here is terminated—”

“And good riddance.”

“Do. Not. Interrupt. Me. Your position here is terminated. I will not call the police, and I know that’s a great relief to you whatever you want me to think, but only if you admit what you did. I cannot conscience a liar.”

My mother was doing the finger-pointy thing that made you want to sock her; I could see Margaret was thinking about it.

“Leah,” my father started.

“No, Edwin, I want to hear it from her mouth.”

“If I say I stole that thing, I walk out of here and never have to look at any of youse again?”

“Yes,” my mother said, using the word like cheese wire.

“Then I stole it,” Margaret said, standing up. “I reached my filthy little hand into your drawer…”

“You know good and well it wasn’t in a drawer.”

“No. I don’t know that. And you just think on that later. But I reached my filthy little hand into whatever you say, and I slipped that ugly necklace into my handbag. Never mind the diamonds and pearls you own, I wanted that tawdry little pendant, to match the collection of gold and necklaces you always see me wearing. And I lied about it all. And sure an’ I’m going to hell if I don’t confess it all to a priest before I die.”

Now she looked at me again.

“Get out,” my mother said.

“Nothing would please me more.”