Right now, she’s humming. She been doing that more since we left New Orleans, as if the lack of music that rises up in every shadowed alcove of that city could be corrected by her attempts at song. Or perhaps she hears that music in her mind and the humming is a consequence of it. It’s hard to say with Tess. What I do know is that I’d doubted her when she said she couldn’t leave the city, but having been here with her, having woken to her terror-laden shrieking, I think she was speaking a truth that I couldn’t have understood before this trip.
“Did you kill that bum?”
Tess frowns at my question, and after a moment, I realize that it’s not over the accusation of murder but over the act of remembering. She’d not sure if she did or not.
“When?”
“In the Marigny. Luke or Lee or . . . I don’t know. The drunk.” I watch her as I repeat the question, “Did you kill him?
“Lucus!” She smiles, proudly, as she recalls the man she may have murdered.
I confess my amateur sleuthing. “I went to look for him. I couldn’t find him. No one saw him after that night.”
“I gave him money so he could leave.” As if that excuses what I expect her to say next, what I know she is about to admit. “Sometimes when people know things . . . it’s not safe.”
“Did you kill him?”
She sits up, stretches, and stands. “Is he dead? Maybe I did. I think I might have. I can’t always be sure, but I might have done.” She nods, her humming and nodding flow into the off-kilter cadence of her words. “Lucas knew things.”
She smiles at me as she admits that she will kill, that she has killed. I hear it, the warning in her words.
Careful to sound casual, I ask, “So if people know . . . too much, you kill them?”
“I haven’t killed you, Michael.” She laughs. “Lucas knew secrets. He drank too much, and he might have talked when he was drunk. That happens. It’s dangerous though.” She pauses, tilting her head in thought like a child might do. “It’s very important that no one tell tales. Reid taught me that. All the pretty things . . . none could talk when they went home. They couldn’t leave if they would tell stories. Telling tales is bad. That was a rule. Even the pretty things have to follow the rules.”
“The pretty things?”
Tess kisses me. “I need to shower. That helps keep infections out of cuts. We’ll need some antibiotic cream too. You can put it on me later.”
It’s weirdly seductive when she says it, as if treating the injuries that I’ve left on her body is intended to be sexual. She watches me to be sure I understand, and when she’s satisfied, she strips and walks out of the room.
Nothing could have prepared me for the way I feel now. I’d cling to my own illusions: I thought of her as the broken sparrow, a fragile thing, but now I realize that there’s something more akin to a bird of prey in Tess. She’s still been victimized, still broken, but she’s swallowed a bit of darkness along the way. People aren’t always one way or the other, not really. The interesting ones are several things at once, often contradictory things at that.
Logic kicks in and tells me I ought to be afraid: I'm sleeping with a killer. That should upset me, but it evokes a very different reaction I can't look at too closely.
There is something glorious in power. It's why I want to succeed in my career. If I’m completely honest, it's why I "date" the sort of women I do. Sometimes, however, the temptation to squeeze a little tighter, shove a lover down a little harder, push them to do things I can tell they don't want to do . . . it's there. Tess saw it.
Whatever Reid did to her is why she wants me. It's not my money. It's not my body. It's something in me that most women pretend not to notice. A rush of shame fills me at the thoughts that rise up in me. Tess is the sort of broken that means she has very few limits; she's already showing me that.
How far could I go? Would she let me act out the kind of fantasies that I would never have admitted aloud before her?
Unbidden, a darker thought comes to me—or maybe it's just a different shade of dark: Tess has taken lives. She's willing to talk about it. How much more would she be willing to do? I want to be able to understand what it means to take a life, but there’s never been anyone who was willing to let me into the world that Tess knows.
When The Ruins of a Carriage House failed, I was the man at the back of the kinds of bars where the dim light hid what I was pretty certain were bloodstains. I didn’t necessarily want to draw blood, but I want to witness it. I want to see it done. I want to let my senses fill with it. How else am I to write it properly? I want to be a master of words, of realistic darkness. That takes research.
Tess somehow sees that need. For all of her madness, I feel like she understands me in ways no one else ever has. I wonder if it’s why she came out to dinner with me that first night. She said it so casually, told me about Reid’s history as if it was mundane. He killed a few people. How do you reach that place where death is casual?
I spoke to a man she killed.
There was a man I spoke to, and now he’s dead.
Tess did that. She ended his life.
When she gets out of the shower, she stares at me with such an odd smile. “You want to know about dying.”
“I’m a writer,” I start, quickly pushing away the things I'd been thinking.
Tess doesn't allow me even that much distance, that scant comfort. She crosses her arms as she stares at me, and I realize that there is an odd sanity that darkness seems to allow her. I wonder if the way she is, that floating disconnectedness, the almost desperate hurtling toward violence in the dark, is something she’s always carried or if the years with Reid created it.
“I’m not lying.”
“Really, Michael?”
It's a bargain. There are terms to everything with her, and I'm beginning to understand it more and more. I exhale. “I want to know everything."
“Well, let’s go then.”
“Go?”
“Hunting.”
A part of me wants to ask what she means, but the rest of me is afraid of the answer. I can’t decide if I’m afraid that it’ll be what I expect or if I’m afraid it won’t.
We leave the building and walk for several minutes in silence. I’m not sure what to say, and she’s not offering. After walking for an hour, I almost forgot what we were doing.
“The first key,” she whispers from my side, “is learning to assess them. Not every lamb is created alike.”
“Lamb?”
It’s like she can sense it. She pauses mid-step, and consequently, midway through an intersection. “That’s what you want isn’t it? To find the lost lambs?”
I stare at her. There are layers twisted into Tess’ words.
“You can’t cull the herd if you don’t know which are lambs and which are other things.” Tess is seemingly oblivious to the cars now honking at us. “There are lambs, and there are hunters.”
I take her hand and tug her toward the sidewalk. “What are you?”
“It depends on the day. I used to be a lamb, but I bled so very much.” Something darker than I want to face slides into her posture and voice. “I won’t be a lamb again, Michael. Not ever.”