There Is No Wheel Read online

  Marsha fires her on the spot. All my months of hard work, down the drain, because now even Darcy is convinced that Rosa was staging the haunting in a scheme to shake them down for money. I’m pissed at Rosa, though I know she should be pissed with me. I have to remind myself Rosa really wasn’t guilty of anything; she’s out of a job due to my mischief.

  In the aftermath, I lay low. I want the talk of installing video cameras put on the back burner. Darcy goes into labor a few weeks later. She’s whisked off to Charlotte. I have the house to myself. I take a long, hot shower. For the first time in years, I shave. I cut my hair, cropping it short to the scalp. I gather up all my trimmings in a plastic grocery bag. There’s a lot of me to throw away.

  In the mirror, I see the man I used to be. Do I see the man I might be again?

  Crib Death. The baby’s been home for two weeks. It cries a lot; it’s almost as bad as the puppy. I get some relief when they take it out to the car and drive around the neighborhood. Apparently, the baby sleeps like a baby when they drive.

  In fairness, it dozes off at other times as well. Starting at two in the morning, the baby can reliably be counted on to slumber for at least a few hours. During this time, Eric, Darcy, and Marsha sleep like corpses.

  It’s three in the morning on a Saturday. I’m at the foot of the crib, staring at the infant. They’ve named him Franklin. Franky, he’ll be called. As he grows, he’s going to explore every inch of this house. He’s going to take a flashlight and poke around the cellars. He’ll spend hours in the attic, clawing through two centuries of clutter. He’ll play with Tulip and Professor Wink and Bojangles.

  I’m afraid of Franky.

  Kids know all the best hiding places. Kids imagine their house is full of hidden panels and trap doors and secret passages—and this particular kid will be right. One day, he’s going to find me.

  Approximately one baby in a thousand dies from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. They pass away quietly in their sleep for no reason at all. This is today, with modern medicine. Think about this house, dating back to Colonial times, when babies had the mortality rate of goldfish. I don’t know of actual numbers, but I’m guessing a dozen babies have died in Seven Chimneys. A hundred, maybe.

  It’s a dark thing to stand beside a crib contemplating a hundred dead babies.

  I reach out my hand, holding it inches over Franky’s pink little face.

  I linger a moment, unable to move closer, as if an invisible hand has caught my wrist and holds it with supernatural strength.

  I can’t swallow. My mouth is dry.

  I can’t do it. A puppy is one thing. If I do this, though, I’ll cross a line. I’ll no longer be a ghost.

  I’ll be a monster.

  I release my breath, silent as dust.

  Franky really is a cute baby.

  No longer blocked by the moral barrier, I lower my hand to stroke his pink, plump cheek.

  Again, my fingers stop short. It’s not my imagination. Something is holding my wrist.

  “I’m not going to hurt him,” I mumble, saying it half to myself, half to the unseen thing gripping my arm.

  I watch as dust swirls in the dim moonlight, and a second shadow appears on the wall beside my own. Bony old fingers the color of coffee materialize on my wrist. My eyes follow the arm upward, to find a skeletal old man, his face dark beneath a halo of white hair. His expression is stern; his eyes are thin slits.

  “Cyrus?” I ask.

  He says nothing.

  “I won’t hurt him,” I say.

  Then, a third shadow, and a fourth. A soldier stands beside me, gray and grainy as old film. He’s soaked. Water pours from his clothes, chilling my bare feet.

  Beside the soldier, a little girl with sad eyes shakes her head slowly. She looks familiar; was she the girl in the cellar? She’s little more than mist; I can see right through her to the mirror on the back of the door.

  Then I realize I’m seeing only a sweater over a chair in the mirror; in the moonlight, it drapes like a girl’s dress. My feet are cold—it’s an October night in a house with hardwoods like ice—but they are dry. The soldier was nothing more than the shadow of a tree.

  And Cyrus? Cyrus is still standing there, oak solid. He whispers, in a voice of rustling leaves: “We’re watching you, boy.”

  He vanishes as the headlights of a passing car sweep across the room.

  I rub my wrist. My whole arm is numb. I decide that Franklin’s chubby little cheeks are best left uncaressed.

  After a quick trip to the attic, I go to the laundry room and steal some clothes. Eric’s jeans invoke a certain sense of déjà vu; it’s not the first time I’ve worn his used pants. His old tennis shoes are too big for me; I compensate with two pairs of socks.

  Then, I’m out the door, into the open sky. Leaves crunch beneath my feet as I walk across the lawn. On the front porch, a line of jack-o-lanterns grin, a few still faintly aglow with the last flickers of their candles. I reach the end of the sidewalk and glance back at Seven Chimneys, before crossing the road and taking my return step into the wider world.

  Beneath my arm, I cradle Professor Wink.

  He’s going to miss the place.

  Me, not so much. Even with thirteen thousand square feet, some places are just too crowded.

  Final Flight of the Blue Bee

  WHEN THE OLD MAN came out of the bathroom wearing the faded costume, Honey placed her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. The black and yellow fabric over his round stomach was stretched skin-tight, revealing several inches of white, hairy flesh between his belly button and metallic gold underwear. The sleeves and leggings of the costume sagged, as if once filled by muscles that had vanished long ago. In the center of his chest was an appliqué bee, the silver foil wings crinkled and ripped. He looked away from her, studying himself in the mirror. She wondered how he saw at all in the black mask that concealed the upper half of his face, the eyes hidden by thick, gold, faceted lenses.

  “A little early for Halloween, isn’t it?” Honey said.

  “Yes,” he said, frowning.

  Recognizing she’d offended him, Honey assumed her best poker face.

  “So,” she said. “You’re a bee.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You, uh . . . ,” she paused, biting her lip. He showed you the money, she thought. Don’t blow this. “You wanna talk about it?”

  “Buzzzzzzzz,” he said.

  * * *

  They’d let Mick Payton out of prison with a new suit and $147 in his pocket. He’d declined the halfway house’s offer to send a car to pick him up. He walked out the gate and didn’t look back. It was twelve miles to the small town of Starksville. He needed the fresh air, the sunshine. Bees danced in the flowering fields as he walked past.

  By that evening he’d blown half the money, starting with a T-bone dinner. The meal cost an outrageous $12. Back in 1964, you could eat out for a week on $12. Once he’d finished, he’d walked to a hardware store and spent a breath-taking $15 on an axe. Finally, the bus ticket to Collinsville, New Jersey, set him back $50. By now, he was braced for the extra zeroes that followed the prices. He tried to shrug it off. Once he reached Collinsville and the old farm, money wouldn’t matter.

  * * *

  “You haven’t heard of the Blue Bee?” the old man asked.

  “Blue?” Honey asked, studying his costume, which didn’t have a stitch of blue.

  “He was my mentor,” he said. “I was his partner, Stinger.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Stinger.”

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Honey,” she said, instantly regretting it. She’d spent the better part of the week practicing the name Xanadu and now she’d blown it.

  “That’s not your real name,” Stinger said.

  And yet, it was. It was her childhood nickname, the name her father called her, and the fact that she would now be “performing” under the name bothered her. It also bothered her that the one honest th
ing about her that had slipped out of her mouth tonight was being treated as a lie.

  “I suppose Stinger’s on your birth certificate?” she said.

  “You don’t understand.” The old man lowered his head, staring at his shimmering gold booties. “Our secret identities, they were important to our mission. Vital. Without them, our enemies could have . . . could have attacked our loved ones. Those of us who had loved ones.”

  The seriousness of his voice, the sad sincerity—Honey suddenly understood that this wasn’t a joke. She raised her hand to cover her mouth, but it was too late. The laughter exploded from her.

  * * *

  The family farm looked like it hadn’t been visited since 1964. Thickets of brush covered the fields where the cows once grazed. The old barn leaned at a fifteen-degree tilt, and most of the roof had fallen in. Out back, the once white hive boxes were black with mildew, half rotted. Only the tiny, three-room farmhouse stood unchanged.

  Mick used the axe to break the door open. Inside, the kitchen was exactly as he’d left it when his grandmother died. But one thing was new—the hellish ceaseless vibration that trembled the walls.

  He pulled down the door to the attic to discover that the entire space had been filled with a maze of honeycomb. The attic was now a single, giant hive.

  “How perfect,” Mick said. “Buzz. Buzzzz. Buzzzzzzzzzz.”

  In response, a swarm of bees coalesced, forming a living carpet on the stairs. Slowly, gracefully, the locked suitcase appeared at the top of the stairs, gliding down the carpet of bees to come to rest at Mick’s feet.

  He unlocked the latches with trembling hands, then took a deep breath before opening it.

  The trunk was half full of twenty-dollar bills. He could buy all the T-bones he wanted now. Sitting neatly atop the money was his spare costume, folded smoothly, the gold and silver gleaming like treasure. And atop this, his back-up Sting-gun, plus a dozen vials of pheromone and venom.

  He picked up the vials and studied the cloudy fluid, swirling in the dying light.

  All the tools he’d need to enforce payment of the old debt.

  * * *

  Stinger sat on the edge of the bed. He shook his head. “Laughed at by a whore,” he said, his shoulders sagging. “The future is a rough place.”

  Honey wiped the tears from her face, smudging her fingers with mascara. His use of the word “whore” sobered her. So blunt—and so accurate. What did it matter that this was her first time? What did it matter that she’d been in New York for six months without a job and all of her money was gone and she was forty-eight hours away from eviction? Nothing erased the fact that she’d made the decision to rent her body for money. She could have been approached by any number of horrible creeps. This old man was strange, but he didn’t seem dangerous. She needed to be more professional.

  “About the costume,” she said. “I’m cool with it. Whatever floats your boat.”

  “This isn’t some sexual thing,” Stinger said. “Back then, there were whispers, of course. You’d have to be blind not to see I was a lot younger than Blue Bee. He was thirty-five, I was twenty, but looked younger. I remember when our archenemy the Hatchet called Blue Bee a pedophile. That really set Blue Bee off. I thought he was going to cripple the Hatchet. Beat him for ten minutes. There wasn’t a tooth left in that bastard’s mouth afterwards.”

  “You were, uh, some kind of superhero? A real one?”

  “Yes! My God, forty years isn’t that long. You remember the Beatles don’t you? You remember Ed Sullivan, and JFK, and Vietnam?”

  “I’ve heard of them, sure.”

  “But not of Blue Bee and Stinger?”

  “Sorry.”

  Stinger stared into the mirror. Honey got on her knees behind him and rubbed his shoulders.

  “We saved the world,” he said. “And the world’s forgotten.”

  * * *

  They’d reached Mr. Mental before the police. They were always a step ahead of the police.

  Mr. Mental stared the Blue Bee down, a touch of madness in his eyes, as he announced:

  “I control the H-bombs. All of them.” He tapped his silver helmet. “I know the launch codes. I have the detonators primed. A single thought, and I trigger Armageddon.”

  “You fiend,” Blue Bee said, straining against the bars of the cage that had dropped from the ceiling. Blue Bee looked terrific in his skin-tight navy costume. He had a Charles Atlas build, and when he was angry his eyes took on this fiery, determined cast that made Mick feel that he was in the presence of a true man, a hero.

  And that day, climbing through the window behind Mr. Mental, listening to him brag about the bombs, Mick stood in the presence of a true villain. He could have tried something clever. A tap on the shoulder, a quick quip, a punch to the jaw. He could have somersaulted across the room with acrobatic grace and kicked open the bars of Blue Bee’s cage. He could have commanded that bees swarm Mr. Mental, and told him to stay still or get the stinging of his life.

  But there were all those bombs to think about. Literally, the fate of the world might be decided by what he did next.

  So Mick silently placed his Sting-gun about an inch from Mr. Mental’s spine, set the dial to ten, and shot him with a needle that pumped in a quart of venom. Mr. Mental slumped to the floor in severe anaphylactic shock. He was dead by the time Mick unlocked Blue Bee’s cage.

  The police kicked open the door, led by the Commissioner, who hated vigilantes.

  “Our work here’s done. We’d best buzz off,” Blue Bee said, leaping from the window to grab the ladder dangling from the waiting Bee-Wing.

  “Yeah, hate to be a drag on your little sting operation,” Mick said, perching in the window, glancing back with a white-toothed grin.

  The Commissioner shot him in the shoulder. Mick toppled from the window, his hand stretched out, spots dancing before his eyes, when a second bullet caught him in the thigh. Blue Bee reached for him. The tips of his gloved fingers brushed Mick’s wrist.

  Then Mick fell, nine stories, his life spared by a bounce from the hotel awning, and a crash landing through the roof of the Commissioner’s car.

  * * *

  “So,” said Honey. “We gonna do something, or what?”

  “Yeah,” said Stinger, sagging on the edge of the bed, lost in thought. “Probably.”

  “You want to . . . you want to leave the mask on?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She brought her lips near his ears and said, the way she’d practiced, “Just tell me what you want, baby.”

  Stinger chuckled, then sighed. “What I want? Justice.”

  Honey tensed slightly. “I, um, don’t think that’s on the menu. How about . . . ?” She leaned in close and whispered a suggestion she didn’t quite have the guts to say out loud.

  Stinger shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Then how about—”

  He cut her short by saying, “The rumors about us, they were right. We were, well, I believe the current popular term is gay. Blue Bee was my lover. My God, he was something. He had a body like a Greek statue.”

  “Oh,” Honey said, pulling back, leaning against the headboard. “Then why am I here?”

  “Because I still have needs.”

  “Okay, baby, okay,” she said. Maybe she could still get some money out of him. “Just tell me what you need.”

  “A hostage,” Stinger said.

  * * *

  Three weeks in the hospital and Robert didn’t come to see him once. Not a terrible shock, he supposed. Mick had been unconscious when they pulled off his mask. He was gratified to learn that he was listed on the hospital charts as John Doe. They didn’t recognize him. Why should they? He had no life outside of being Stinger, and no relatives now that his grandmother had died. Publishing his photo in the paper didn’t turn up any leads. They’d fingerprinted him, but he’d never had any real trouble with the law. If millionaire physician Robert E. Eggers were to suddenly drop in to visit the
John Doe handcuffed to the bed, it wouldn’t take a terribly clever person to connect the dots.

  The police had quite a case against him. The murder weapon had his prints on it. He’d been caught fleeing the scene of the crime. The final blow—after he’d healed enough to eat solid food again, he’d been taken down to the police station and interrogated under bright lights for five hours. The police hadn’t been shy about banging on his casts, or landing punches on areas of his body already bruised and broken. He’d finally admitted to shooting Mr. Mental. The guy’s real name turned out to be Paul Carpenski, who’d made his living as a hypnotist on the Jersey Shore before becoming a bank robber.

  “He was going to detonate the world’s nuclear arsenal with his electro-helmet,” Mick protested. “I’m a hero, not a criminal.”

  The commissioner tossed the helmet onto the table before him.

  “This is an army helmet wrapped in tin foil, kid,” the Commissioner said. “Now, you going to tell us your name, or not? After they sweep your ashes out of the electric chair, wouldn’t you like your headstone to say something other than John Doe?”

  Despite the beatings, the threats, the tricks and promises of a bargain, Mick never broke. He never told them his name, or betrayed the Blue Bee. He claimed partial amnesia after his nine-story fall, claimed he couldn’t remember who he had been before that final confrontation, and eventually they’d given up. Perhaps they believed him. Certainly, his boyish good looks, his stoic air, and his insistence that he’d done the world a favor by killing Mr. Mental, swayed the jurors. They found him not guilty of first degree murder. But manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon, breaking and entering, resisting arrest, all brought in guilty verdicts. At twenty, Stinger, a.k.a. John Doe, secretly Mick Payton, found himself in jail for forty years to life.

  If he’d ever ratted out the Blue Bee, he could have cut his sentence in half.