Nevermore

8 Ligeia

Her back pressed to the wall, Isobel lingered just outside the staff door. Finally, steeling herself with a shuddering breath, she pushed away from the wall and gave the door frame a timid double knock. “Hello?” she called into the pitch-blackness. “You—you back there?”

No answer.

Isobel reached a tremulous hand inside and patted the wall. Her fingers fumbled over a light switch and she flicked it upward, causing fluorescents to sputter on with a soft clink.

Inside, shelves packed with boxes of ice cream cones, packages of napkins, and cartons of paper cups lined the hideous lime green, cracked plaster walls. Her searching gaze traveled past a dark gray locker cabinet and the rear exit, stopping to rest on the door to the walk-in freezer. It stood ajar, mist whispering through a slim gap.

Isobel stepped into the room. She moved to the freezer and glanced down to find it propped open to a slit by a small wooden crate.

She put her hand to the latch and pulled, surprised when it opened easily, sending huge gales of cold air tumbling out over her sneakers. She peeked her head inside first, sliding in only when she thought she saw, through the veil of fog, one black boot.

“What are you doing in here?” was the first thing, the safest thing, she thought to ask.

He sat in one corner, lounging on a bench composed of shrink-wrapped ice cream canisters. She inched farther into the cold, suddenly glad of the turtleneck and the pair of blue sweatpants that she’d brought to throw on after the game. She let the freezer door thud back against the wooden crate, her shoulders hunkering, and wrapped her arms around her middle.

His visor sat on the floor between his boots, and his hair once again hung in his face so that she couldn’t read his expression.

“I . . . ,” she began, groping for the next thing to say, the right thing to say. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words sounding lame in her own ears, and she knew that, on their own, they weren’t enough. “I . . . didn’t know they—”

“I know,” he said.

She hugged herself tighter. “I—I put the money back in the—”

“Thanks.”

Isobel pressed her lips together in a tight frown, a wad of frustration knotting itself in her chest. “Look—I’m trying . . . I said I was sor—”

“Why?” He looked up at her sharply, anger etched on his features. “Why did you do that?”

“I—,” she stammered, entrapped once again within the force of those eyes. “What do you mean? I couldn’t just—”

“Those were your friends, right?”

“Yeah, but—” Her gaze dropped to the frosted metal floor. She shook her head furiously, though more to combat his questions than to answer them.

“What do you think you proved, cheerleader?” He rose suddenly, and Isobel felt herself shrink back with an involuntary step.

“N-nothing,” she stammered. “It just . . . it wasn’t right.”

“Why do you care?” he demanded, drawing close enough to stand over her, close enough for her to feel the anger rolling off of him, washing over her.

She paused to swallow, to think. She stared up at him, quivering from the cold and from nerves. She’d expected his anger, yes, but this blatant challenge? When she opened her mouth to respond, no words came. Why did she care?

She thought about it, then cleared her throat, all too conscious of his looming over her like a thundercloud. “Why—why do you care?”

“Who said I did?”

She flinched. There it was again. That blockade of his.

“You did,” she whispered, her breath leaving her in a plume of white. Teeth chattering, she unfolded her arms and held out, between shaking fingers, the slip of paper Brad had left on the wicker table. “When you slipped me this note.” She glanced up at him.

His face changed, uncertainty taking the place of resentment. He looked quickly at the note, then just as quickly away. He stepped back from her.

“Because,” he started, but stopped himself. “I don’t know,” he amended, and turned to face the wall, shoulders stiff.

“How did you know, anyway?” she pressed. She watched his back, hoping the question would defuse his anger. And she wanted to know. “How did you know that they knew I lied about Saturday?”

“Someone—” Again, he checked himself. “I heard it through the grapevine, I guess. What does it matter?”

It mattered, Isobel thought, watching him, because that would mean he’d been listening in the first place.

“Never mind,” she said, her teeth chattering. “Forget it. Can we just . . . ?” Her shivering worsened, and she waggled her knees to keep her blood flowing. How could he stand it in here? She shut her eyes for one elongated second. Opening them again, she said, “Look, can we please just get out of the freezer?”

He whirled and motioned in an offhanded after you gesture toward the door.

Hesitating only a moment, unsure if he would follow, Isobel slipped out.

Blessed warmth rushed over her as she re-entered the stockroom. As her nose thawed, she blew warm air into her fists, curling and flexing her fingers in an effort to regain feeling.

He came out behind her, kicking away the makeshift doorstop, letting the enormous freezer door ease shut and click into place.

She didn’t wait for him to tell her to leave, and she didn’t ask him where to find the cleaning supplies. Instead she went straight to the double-tub sink against the opposite wall and crouched to peer underneath. There she found an empty janitor’s bucket and a stack of folded rags. She wrestled the bucket free, straightened, and turned on the hot water.

She glanced back at him. “Do you have a mop?”

“Who did you say this was again?” she asked, using a napkin to peel a wad of gum she could only assume had belonged to Alyssa off the display glass. She sprayed Windex in its place and wiped the case down with a rag.

“Cemetery Sighs,” he replied, nodding his head to the grim beat of the churning, haunting music. Before they’d set to cleaning up the mess the crew had left, Varen had replaced the steel drum CD with one from his own collection, which he’d dug out of his car. He’d brought it in along with her gym bag, which Brad, gentleman that he was, had dumped in the parking lot before speeding off. She was actually grateful, though, seeing as the bag held both her phone and her house keys.

“This song is ‘Emily Not, Not Gone,’” he said. “It’s about a woman who dies and then rises from the grave to be with her true love.”

“How romantic,” Isobel scoffed.

“It is,” he said, and dragged the mop through the last of the malt goo that had gone runny on the floor while they’d been in the freezer.

“It just sounds gruesome to me.”

“Gruesome can be romantic.”

“Sorry.” She shook her head and made a face. “But that’s just a strange thing to say.”

He stopped mopping and turned to regard her. “Don’t you think it’s at all romantic—the idea that love could conquer death?”

“I guess.” Isobel shrugged, but really she didn’t want to think about it. The only thing that came to mind was the phrase “death breath.” She grimaced at the thought of kissing a dead guy and walked to the sink behind the counter to rinse out her rag. Over the rush of cold water, the churning music broke to silence, and the female vocals crooned a cappella, beautiful and sad.

Let this death shroud be a wedding veil,

Though this skin is clay, my lips so pale.

My eyes, for you, ever more shine bright

Blacker than the raven wings of night.

’Tis I . . .

’Tis I . . .

Your lost love, your Lady Ligeia. . . .

Isobel paused in thought as the haunting melody began again and then dissipated, the woman’s voice trailing off, reverberating in a mesmerizing throb. She shut off the sink and swiveled around. “I thought you said her name was Emily,” she said, her words seeming to pull him out of a trance.

He looked at her, lifted the mop from the floor, and dunked it into the dingy water. “It is. Lady Ligeia . . .” But he stopped and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as though considering whether or not to explain.

“What?” Isobel asked. Was she missing something? Did he think she was too stupid to get it?

“Lady Ligeia,” he began again, “is a woman in literature who returns from the dead, taking over another woman’s body to be with her true love.”

“Oh, yes. Lovely.” Isobel blanched. “I guess the other chick didn’t mind at all?”

He smirked and, grasping the mop handle, wheeled the janitor’s bucket behind the counter, guiding it toward the back room. “It’s actually one of Poe’s most famous stories.”

Oh, she thought. So that’s why he hadn’t wanted to elaborate. She stood for a moment, arms crossed, thinking, one hip leaning against the display glass. Then, rounding the counter, she dropped her rag into the sink before going to stand in the doorway of the staff room. Hands braced on either side of the door frame, she leaned in.

“Hey,” she called. “Speaking of, did you do the project yet?”

“No.”

She watched him hoist the bucket and pour the filthy water into the tub sink.

“It’s due week after next.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. He set the bucket down and kept his back to her while he washed his hands. “Shouldn’t you be the one worried about that?”

“I guess so,” she mumbled, and cast her eyes to the polished floor. They’d scrubbed the place till it sparkled and she was convinced that it was actually cleaner now than it had been before Brad and the crew trashed it. If she had learned one thing for certain about Varen now, it was that he was thorough.

She looked up again and watched in silence as he opened the locker cabinet in the corner and brought out his wallet, strung with three different lengths of chain. He scooped something else out with his other hand, and when he made for the door, she stepped out of his way.

He brushed past her into the main room and deposited his wallet, coils of chains, and a handful of rings onto one of the wicker tables. Next he grabbed the plastic trash bag they’d filled during the cleanup and, pulling the plastic drawstring closed, tied it off.

“Give me a sec,” he said. “I gotta take this out.” Isobel watched him disappear into the staff room again, lugging the trash bag behind him. She heard the back outer door open.

She glanced down at the wallet on the table and the small collection of rings. One of the rings, she realized, was his high school ring. No one could have guessed by looking at it from a distance, though. The ring’s boxy silver frame cradled a bulky, black rectangular gem in place of the traditional Trenton blue sapphire. A silver V stood in the middle of the onyx stone instead of a T and, on the side, where people usually had the school’s hawk-head emblem, there was the profile of a crow or a raven or something that wasn’t a hawk.

Her gaze drifted away from the rings to his wallet.

She glanced at the open staff door, then back to the wallet. Outside, the Dumpster banged.

Quickly Isobel snatched up his wallet and pried it open.

The first thing she found was a little plastic insert for pictures. It held a single oval photograph—the girl from Varen’s morning group, part of the woe-is-me convergence that met at the radiator next to the side doors every morning. It was the girl who had handed him the red envelope, Isobel realized, and she thought her name was Lacy. Did this mean she was his girlfriend?

The girl wasn’t smiling in the picture. She had a defiant expression on her round face, as though she were silently daring the onlooker to address her directly. She had mounds of thick black hair that fell past the cut of the photo, though Isobel knew that the black waves ended in coils dipped in red dye. She had full lips, too, painted a deep burgundy, and her eyeliner, drawn with sharp wingtips, made her huge dark eyes seem even larger. Those eyes, combined with her copper skin, made her look like an Egyptian goddess.

Varen’s music ceased without warning. Silence pulsed. Hands fumbling, Isobel snapped closed the wallet and set it back on the table amid the rings, just as he’d left it. She dropped into one of the chairs and crossed her legs, trying to look nonchalant.

He emerged from the back room with his black booklet of CDs in one hand, his jacket in the other. He set the CD case aside and pulled on the worn hunter green jacket, the one with the silhouette of the dead bird safety-pinned onto the back. Stopping at the table, he stuffed his wallet into his back pocket and, turning halfway away, lifted his shirt to hook the chains through a front belt loop.

Isobel stole a glance.

A black silver-studded belt encircled his narrow hips. Beneath the baggy T-shirt, he was thin and pale but strong-looking. She tried not to go pink in the face when she suddenly caught herself wondering if his skin felt warm to the touch or vampire cold.

Isobel averted her eyes. She stared out the store windows instead, but she could still see his reflection in the darkened glass. She stared, watching his every movement as he set to putting the rings on his fingers methodically, one at a time. His arms, sinewy and graceful, moved as though conducting a ritual, and she blinked, unable to look away.

When he was finished, he snatched up his CD case and she snapped to.

“C’mon,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”

“It’s the next right,” she said, “by the fountain.”

The headlights of Varen’s car swept over the tiered fountain as he steered them into her neighborhood, Lotus Grove. He drove a black 1967 Cougar, the interior a dark burgundy, a nice ride.

The Cougar, rumbling, purring like its namesake, rolled to a stop in front of her driveway. Isobel took her time unfastening her seat belt. She stalled, remembering how Poe had come up again at the ice cream shop. That couldn’t have been a coincidence, could it? He had to have been dropping a hint, right?

She’d thought about this the whole ride home. In truth, she’d been thinking about it ever since he’d introduced her to Cemetery Sighs. But she hadn’t yet worked up enough courage to ask. Now that she was at her house and about to get out of the car, however, she couldn’t ignore the now-or-never feeling churning in her gut.

“Listen,” she began. She shifted in her seat to look at him, though he didn’t return her gaze. Maybe he knew it was coming. She took the dive anyway. What did she have left to lose?

“Are you . . . set on doing the project by yourself now?”

He said nothing, only continued to stare forward out the windshield. Isobel waited but, deciding not to hold her breath, took his silence as a yes. She grasped the door handle and pulled, not about to argue that she didn’t deserve it.

“I get off of work at five on Sunday,” he said, and she paused, one foot on the pavement. “Can you meet after that?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” he said. “Nobit’s Nook is a bookstore on Bardstown Road, you know where it is?”

She nodded. She knew where it was.

“I’ll be there at five thirty,” he said.

Sold, she thought. “Five thirty Sunday,” she echoed, and grabbed her stuff, climbing out before he had time to change his mind. She shut the car door behind her, waved, and jogged up the slope of her lawn to her front door. She dug around in her gym bag in search of her keys, but when she tried the handle, she found the door unlocked. She slipped in, careful not to make any noise, since her parents had probably gone to bed sometime around eleven.

Once inside, she fished out her blinking phone and flipped it open. The LCD light lit up, showing seven missed calls—what? Oh crud, Coach always had them turn off their phones before a game, because she hated hearing them go off in the locker room. Had she left it on silent this whole time? Mom and Dad were going to—

“Where have you been?” A familiar voice broke through the darkness. Isobel’s eyes flew wide. She turned and saw her mom sitting at the dining room table and her dad right next to her, neither of them wearing their happy faces.

“And who was that?” her father asked.