Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

They held a funeral for the bits and pieces of Aleta they could find. It wasn’t much. Marie chose to have her cremated and then there was even less.

She kept her in a jar in the living room. She had always believed in burial, but had dreams of wolves digging Aleta’s bones up at night, gnawing on them and taking them away off to some dark magical forest. Night after night. So in the jar she went, and the jar was placed high, and when her mother died she cremated her as well and set them side-by-side.

“Hello, family,” she greeted them once, and then she was unable to get out of bed for three days straight.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said again, once she was standing in front of the jars again. “You died because I wanted the selfish luxury of a bath.”

She was in bed for six days after that, unable to move or speak or sit, and when the young second officer couldn’t get a hold of her, he managed to break down her door.

“We don’t need all of you lined up in a neat little row on that shelf,” he told her. He patted her hands gently, a man used to holding the hand of a woman, and she looked at him with eyes that were already dead.

“Why not?” she asked, but then the sirens were heard and the ambulance was there to take her to a place that pumped her full of liquid food and questions and synthetic hope.

The nice officer brought her a bouquet of flowers that his daughter had picked out (although he certainly wouldn’t tell her that) and told her that he sat up at night, trying to find this man who slaughtered small children.

Then Christmas came and she was released, but the officer and his beautiful and kind wife came by on Christmas Eve with a small tree and some decorations and gifts and an eye for anything out of place, like a pair of too-sharp scissors or a knife with the serrated blade turned toward a mourning woman’s throat.

“May I use your bathroom?” the officer’s wife asked, and The Grimmest of Maries told her of course, that she was more than welcome. The officer’s wife took a discreet peek in the medicine cabinet to make sure the razor blades were all properly blunt. Then she returned and hugged Marie.

“There’s nothing I can say that will make this any better,” she said, but the fact that she was saying it really did make it better. “But we think of you all of the time. Will here is working tirelessly on the case. And even though I haven’t met you before this, I feel as though I know you. You really are loved."

“Do you believe in angels?” Marie asked, and the officer’s wife smiled at her.

“Of course I do. I have to.”

“Do you think my daughter is looking down on me as an angel, or as a headless corpse? If I burned away the knife marks and sexual abuse, do you think it will help her in the afterlife? If I find this man, this Wolf and spill his blood, will that cleanse her like the blood of Christ is supposed to have done for all of us? Because,” she said, and her eyes glittered in a way that should have made Will’s wife step back, only it didn’t, “I think the Wolf’s blood on my hands would erase any infraction I ever made. Do you?”

The officer’s wife didn’t blink or wrinkle her nose or any of these things. She simply looked Marie dead in the eye and said solemnly, “Darling, you are going through something no mother should ever have to go through. I see my husband pouring over papers and pictures and chasing after every scrap of information and evidence he can. He’s done things that keep him awake at night. But he’s a good man, and I love him.” Her eyes glittered in a way that reminded Marie of sharpened cutlery. It was the soft, sexy, slow slide of blade against skin. “If such things could absolve a person, then I would advise him, or her, to do as much as possible to make sure that tainted blood flows. Make it flow, dear one.”

There were kisses on cheeks and Marie spent that evening staring at the tinsel star on top of her new Christmas tree. The star, like Marie’s heart and that silent blade wedged within in, glittered, flashed and spun.