Bone Dance

I did not, of course, turn around. “Frances?” I called.

“I don’t—” I heard the clunk-squeak of a car door opening. “Ah. I see,” she said. “Sparrow, before I decide how to manage this, tell me, who are these people?”

I was frantic to look behind me. People, plural; the woman must be there. I tried to figure out what Frances wanted to know. “Night before last, Mick saw their car and avoided it,” I said slowly. “Then yesterday, when Mick left his last body at my place, I went to someone — someone I thought I could trust — to help me get rid of it. She brought these two around. They were pretty peevish when they found out Mick wasn’t resident anymore.”

“Is that true?” Frances asked, but not, I realized, of me.

“It is so, absolutely,” said the other familiar voice, the rough, low-pitched female one. I could hear that she, too, was smiling. “A careful witness, that one, who draws no conclusions. But it is not all that is so.”

“What do you want?” said Frances.

“That we should help one another, maybe.”

In failing tones, with a fortune in skepticism, Frances said, “And this, I take it, is symbolic of your good intentions. My God.”

“And which one is yours?”

I couldn’t bear it anymore. I looked over my shoulder.

The long black car had pulled out of the alley at as much of a diagonal as it could manage; it blocked the sidewalk as well. The woman Dana had addressed as “Maitresse” stood in the open passenger’s side door. Her costume yesterday must have been casual wear. Now she was a different kind of formidable: black suede pumps, long dark legs, a black sheath dress of dull nubby silk, a fur stole white as a cloud of talcum, long dark neck rising out of it. Her face, under a black-and-white turban, seemed younger than it had yesterday. And still, nothing shone or sparkled anywhere about her except her immobile silver eyebrows.

Behind the wheel was the dark-ski

The back door on our side was also open. And on the back seat, head lolling down as if it had been propped against the door before it opened, entirely unconscious, was Mick Ski

Then one of Mr. Lyle’s big hands closed around my wrist, and the other plucked the bottle away, sent it flying to smash on the sidewalk. His fingers closed around my upper arms, pressed them to my ribs. It felt as if he might flatten me between his palms like softened wax. He half walked, half carried me to the car and poked me in the back on a rear-facing seat opposite Mick. I shot across to the other door and tried the handle. No response, and no lock in sight. The driver with the bright hat turned and smiled at me through the glass between us.

“If you will come with us,” the woman said to Frances, “we will go to a safe place, where we may talk. You will not come to harm.”

Frances nodded toward the back seat of the car. “How do I know you have him, and not just a body?”

“He is there,” the woman with the eyebrows said. “You know it.”

“Yes.” Frances’s voice was low, but I heard her.

None of us moved, and time seemed to keep us company. I was waiting for an explosion of violence — soon the rifle would come up in Frances’s hands, there would be lots of noise, and we would probably all die — or a ripple of the bizarre — soon, now, Frances would possess one of them.

Slowly, Frances got out of the trike. Her face was full of resigned and weary disgust, and her hands were empty.

“Leave the key,” the woman said. “Etie

“If Etie

Etie

Mr. Lyle gestured Frances into the back, and she slid onto the other rear-facing seat. Not for Frances the indignity of being tossed in like a piece of luggage. He pushed Mick’s unresisting body farther along the upholstery, and closed the door. Somewhere inside it a lock chunked.

Mr. Lyle took the driver’s seat, and the dog wagged its tail once, briskly. The trike did not explode when Etie

Frances had rescued me once; against all reason, I had expected her to do it again. “You didn’t shoot them,” I said finally, watching her.

She’d let her head drop back to rest against the glass partition, and her eyes were closed. “No. I didn’t.”

“Or ride them. Or even drive the hell away. Why not?”

“You sound as if you’re taking it personally.” She opened her eyes and rolled her head to look at me. The lights of the trike slid and shuffled over her face, and I saw her eyes clearly for a moment, all pupil. “I found, on examination, that I couldn’t afford it.” She turned her face back toward the roof and closed her eyes again.

Her nose was short, and tilted up a little at the end. But then, it wasn’t her nose. “Are you ever going to let her back out?” I asked sharply.

“Who?”

“The person whose body that is.”

I thought she wasn’t going to answer. The pause was attributable, perhaps, to thinking. “No. Either way, no.”

“Either way?”

But that, she didn’t answer.

Outside it was dawn, a light so fragile that it seemed a strong wind could break and scatter it. On the edges of the City, people would be gathering the things they would bring to market: peppers, poultry, straw hats, water jugs, fabric dye, burn ointment, door hinges. On Loring Common, the milking would be finished; the heavy-shouldered, lyre-horned cows would be plodding out of the shed to graze. The milk would be on its way to market soon. I was on my way to… where? Someplace safe, where we could talk. What if I had nothing to say?

The long black car passed out of the gates of the Night Fair. Somewhere in the City Theo and Sher were alive, or dead. Myra and Dusty and Dana and Cassidy were doing whatever they pleased, or could get away with, or thought they had to. To them, for now and maybe forever, the three people in the back seat of the limousine were irrelevant. I wedged myself in my corner of the car and wrapped my arms around me. I wouldn’t, had I been asked, have said I was cold.

In the morning light, the Schmidt beer cap sign looked as if it had been painted on the sky behind it. The suspension bridge, its cables looping like the flight of swallows, ran above and below us. If La Maitresse hadn’t intercepted us, we’d have gone this way anyway; the Underbridge was on the other shore, east along the river.

Then the car slowed and turned, and I straightened up and pulled my gaze down from overhead. We’d turned off — not on the other shore, not quite as far as that.

I stared, and breathed, “We’re on the island.”

“I know,” Frances said. Her head was up and her eyes open. “What, then?” She must have understood me from my voice; hers was low and level. I saw in her face the effort to focus her mind, to gather up her scattered reserves and hold them ready.

“The place has unreasonably high ju-ju levels. For instance, they say if you don’t belong, or weren’t invited, you won’t be able to turn off the bridge onto this street.”

“The ultimate private subdivision.”

I shrugged. “Don’t believe it, then.”

“I almost do, actually. This always was an oddity sink. Maybe someone’s found a way to use it. Do you believe it?”

“I’ve never had business on the island.” That was true. There was no reason to mention the times when, on the way to or from business elsewhere, I’d intended to test the folk wisdom, and forgot the intention until I was on the other side of the river. I wished I’d been paying more attention to where we’d turned off.