Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

John’s double regarded him with amusement. “A better question would be, what do you want with us?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re the one who’s come spying on us.”

“We’re looking for Isabelle,” Marisa said.

“Oh, she’s inside.”

Alan and Marisa exchanged glances. It was going to be this easy? “Inside,” Alan repeated slowly.

The doppelganger nodded. “Painting.”

“But you ... we were told you’d kidnapped her.”

“How do these stories get around?” the doppelganger said. “We did bring her here to visit with her old mentor, but she certainly wasn’t kidnapped.”

The man was so reasonable that Alan felt confused. It was true Scara had kicked him, but then he’d been threatening her friend with a tire iron. And while the conversation between the pair concerning Cosette hadn’t exactly been comforting, neither of them had actually done anything since then that could be construed as a threat.

“Bitterweed,” Scara said.

It took Alan a moment to realize that she was using the doppelganger’s name.

“This is getting boring,” the girl went on. “We’ve got things to do.”

Things to do, Alan thought. Like stealing Isabelle’s paintings from the Foundation and assaulting Rolanda and whoever else happened to be there. His resolve returned.

“Listen,” he said. “You can’t just—”

“If you’re so worried about whether or not Isabelle wants to be here,” Bitterweed broke in, “why don’t you come in and ask her yourself?” Alan hesitated. “I ...”

“Of course we’ll see her,” Marisa said. “That’s why we came.”

She sounded brave, but she walked very close to Alan as they followed the pair back into the tenement. Cosette bookended Alan on the other side. She walked so near to him that he could feel her trembling.

It was dirty inside the building, the walls smeared with more graffiti, litter clogging the floor. The air smelled stale, with a sweet rankness lying underneath it.

“Why would Rushkin want to live in a place like this?” Marisa wondered aloud.

The same question had lodged in Alan’s mind.

“Free rent,” Bitterweed called back over his shoulder. “Isabelle’s upstairs in the studio.”

When they got to the second floor, Scara darted ahead of them, stopping at a closed door about halfway down the length of the hall. She seemed to take longer than necessary to simply turn the doorknob, but her body shielded whatever she was up to.

“In here,” she said cheerfully when they joined her.

She opened the door and stepped aside. Alan got a glimpse of Isabelle’s startled features turning toward them, and behind her, an unfinished canvas on an easel; then Bitterweed gave him a hard shove.

He stumbled into the room, dragging Marisa and Cosette along with him. The door slammed behind them and he heard the unmistakable sound of a key turning in a lock.

“How could we have been so stupid?” he cried, turning back to the door.

The knob remained immobile in his hand when he tried it. He gave the door a kick, but only succeeded in hurting his toe. Swearing softly, he turned around to face the rest of the room. Marisa was regarding Isabelle with frank curiosity. Cosette had attached herself to Marisa now and stood hip to shoulder against her. Marisa hesitated for a moment, then laid a comforting arm across the girl’s shoulders. Isabelle regarded them with an unhappy gaze. Her eyes were rimmed with red and swollen from crying.

“Why ... why did you come?” she asked, her voice heavy with despair. “We wanted to help,” Alan said.

Isabelle shook her head. “But now he’s got you, too.”

“You mean Rushkin?”

“I mean the monster.”

Alan waited, but she didn’t elaborate. The silence that stretched between them grew uncomfortable.

Alan cleared his throat. He looked at the painting behind her, marveling at its emotive power even in this unfinished state.

“That painting,” he said.

“She was going to be my vengeance on the monster,” Isabelle told him. Her voice seemed drained of expression. Not toneless, but empty. “But then John told me how numena can’t harm a maker and then the next ... the next thing I knew ... he killed John ....”

Her eyes flooded with tears and she began to cry. Alan regarded her helplessly, wanting to be supportive, but there was something about her that made him keep his distance. She simply stood there, shoulders shaking, the tears streaming down her cheeks. She was looking right at him, but Alan didn’t think she actually saw him.

“Alan,” Marisa said softly. “For god’s sake, go to her.”

Her voice broke through Alan’s paralysis. He glanced in her direction to see that Cosette had buried her face against Marisa’s breast, John’s death hitting her just as hard. Marisa indicated Isabelle with a nod of her head. Alan hesitated a moment longer before closing the distance between them. He put his arms around Isabelle, gathering her close. There was no pleasure in the contact. Only days ago, he’d have given anything to be this close to her, but since then everything had changed.

Isabelle pressed her face into the crook between his neck and shoulder. Her arms gripped him tightly. But the weeping didn’t stop. It felt as though it would never stop.

Rushkin hadn’t only killed John, Alan realized. This time, with this death, he’d utterly broken Isabelle.

VII

Roger Davis stayed on at the precinct to catch up on some paperwork after his partner left for the day. Reports were always backing up as new cases took priority, and it seemed like he was always behind. It wasn’t until the evening shift came on that he was finally ready to call it quits himself.

Tomorrow was soon enough to print the files. He shut off the computer he’d been using and leaned back in his chair, stretching the stiff muscles in his lower back. How people could work at a desk job all day was beyond him.

Picking up his sports jacket from where it hung over the back of the chair, he slung it over his shoulder and headed downstairs. On the way out to his car he stopped by the sergeant’s desk to double-check that the All Points Bulletin on Alan Grant had been dropped. That was when he discovered another APB, this time for a pair of nameless thieves: white female, approx. five-one, 105, late teens, black hair, wearing death-rocker punk gear; and a Native American, approx. six foot, 170, black hair in a ponytail, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans.

The mention of the ponytailed Native American was what had first caught his eye, but then his gaze settled on the address where the robbery attempt had taken place. In the offices of the Newford Children’s Foundation. He thought: ponytailed Indian spotted in Mully’s hotel just before she’s murdered, Mully trying to grab the money from her daughter’s books that was being channeled into the Foundation, ponytailed Indian involved in a robbery attempt at the Foundation. There were connections here. He couldn’t see them yet, but he could feel them.

“Who caught this?” he asked the desk sergeant.

Hermanez leaned to have a look. “Peterson and Cook.”

“Are they still in?”

“Nah. Their shift ended the same time yours did, except they were smart enough to go home.”

“Some of us aren’t so good at fitting twenty hours’ work into an eight-hour shift.”

Hermanez laughed. “Tell me about it.”

“So you know anything about this robbery?” Davis asked.

“Started as a ten-sixty-seven, but by the time we got on the scene, the only thing left to do was take statements.”

“What were they after?”

“A couple of paintings—supposed to be pretty valuable, Cook says, but nobody could put a dollar value on them.”