The Moonlit Mind: A Tale of Suspense

11

Over dinner, December 3, the eve of Crispin’s thirteenth birthday …

Amity Onawa, formerly Daisy Jean Sims, also the Phantom of Broderick’s, has put a plate of little tea cakes on the table for dessert. They are flavorful but not too rich.

The dog begs, receives half a cake, and lies down to sleep.

With her black hair, compelling blue eyes, and knowing attitude, the girl looks like a Gypsy about to read someone’s fortune by the glimmering candlelight.

“So, Crispin Gregorio.”

“That’s not my name.”

“Crispin Hazlett.”

“That’s the name my mother used.”

“And you never did?”

“I did but not now.”

“Why not?”

“I never knew any man named Hazlett.”

“So it’s what — just Crispin?”

“That’s right.”

“Travel light, huh?”

“One name’s enough.”

“So, Crispin, what do you want for your birthday dinner tomorrow night?”

“Whatever. I don’t care.”

“Got a walk-in refrigerator full of stuff. And for Christmas, they have an entire special department of delicacies down on the second floor.”

“Anything. It doesn’t matter.”

“Everything matters,” she disagrees.

He shrugs.

Cocking her head, Amity asks, “Still got your deck of cards?”

“Same deck,” he confirms. “Bought the night me and Harley met.”

“You still do with it what you used to do?”

“That’s all it’s for.”

“Did you turn up the four sixes yet, one after the other?”

“Not yet.”

She shakes her head. “You’re a strange one, boy.”

Smiling, he says, “Not just me.”

With the small bankroll and the eight gold coins that she had when she fled from that house of murder, Amity lived many months on the streets. She dressed tough, acted tough, and over time she became tough.…

In that year, she learns many things, one of which is how to fabricate a life. Any kind of dope is available, and fake but high-quality ID is no more difficult to score than pot or coke. She has no interest in drugs, but she is determined to make Amity Onawa as real as Daisy Jean Sims once was.

In time the police conclude that the missing Daisy must be dead, and she is dead to Amity, as well. Dwelling on memories of her former life is too painful to endure — and dangerous. Her psychic moment with the scissors sometimes recurs in dreams, and she remains convinced that any contact with relatives or even old friends will be the death of her and them.

After six months of sleeping in a bedroll — in parks, in church basements, under bridges — she uses a bogus but convincing driver’s license and Social Security card to rent a tiny studio apartment with a half-kitchen and a minuscule bath. She needs to shower every day and to wear fresh clothes if she is to find a job and keep it.

In the current topsy-turvy world, jobs are scarce; and if you know how to game the system, the dole pays better than work. Most street types she’s met are grifters, and their favorite mark is one program or another of the Department of Health and Human Services, from which they finesse more than a single income stream.

Amity, however, is a wide-awake girl. She knows that dependency is another word for slavery. Besides, in the long run, counting on Uncle Sam to see you through is like expecting to find sure footing across a sea of quicksand.

On her first job, she spends three hours a day cleaning and chopping vegetables in a joint serving pretty good Mediterranean food, followed by three hours of busing lunch-hour tables. Soon she is promoted. She makes and plates salads and performs a host of other culinary chores.

When she applies for an opening at Eleanor’s in Broderick’s Department Store, she is hired at once. She is only fifteen, but her ID says that she’s six months short of her eighteenth birthday. After her time on the streets, she has an air of been-there, and she can look anyone in the eye longer than they can meet her stare.

In time she comes to see that Broderick’s potentially offers more than a job. It can be also a home, and more than a home, a haven.

Each employee has a personal locker with a combination dial in either the men’s or women’s change room on the ground floor. Here she keeps her purse and, in cold and inclement weather, her coat, scarf, gloves, rubber boots. Many keep their bag lunches in their lockers, but as a benefit of being on the staff of Eleanor’s, Amity receives her lunch free in the kitchen at the end of the noon rush.

Over several days, Amity brings a complete array of toiletries to stash in her locker. A hair dryer. A few T-shirts and sweaters. Two pairs of jeans. Socks, underwear. She keeps everything folded and out of sight in a couple of carryalls, so that when she opens her locker in front of others, it doesn’t look like a closet.

Each day, at the end of her shift, she appears to leave, but she in fact deceives. She knows scores of places in this immense building where she can hide until Broderick’s closes for the night and the last departing guard has set the perimeter alarm.

The first-arriving employees — stockroom guys, guards, cleaning crew, and some front-office types — clock in at 7:30 A.M. to prepare for a 10:00 opening. But for the ten previous hours, Amity has the department store to herself. Ten hours of blissful solitude and security. On Sundays and holidays, of course, this magnificent temple to disposable income is hers alone all day and night.

As the Phantom of Broderick’s, by night-lights on the ground floor and by flashlight on the upper three, she can shop for hours if she wishes, try on fancy dresses and other clothes that she will never wear in the world outside, and indulge whatever fantasies this vast realm of merchandise encourages.

In the general manager’s office on the fourth floor, there is a private bathroom in which she can shower. If she wipes it down with a squeegee afterward, the stall is dry only three hours later, and no one can know that she used it.

The restaurant kitchen is windowless, so she can turn the lights on there to cook her meals. She usually eats at the desk in the chef-manager’s office, while reading a book.

Reading is her favorite pastime, as it was for Daisy Jean Sims. In certain fiction, she perceives truths that she rarely finds in nonfiction; therefore, in her quest to better understand the world and the meaning of her life, she reads those novels that suggest a world of wonders, dark and light, forever unfolding for eyes willing to see.

If she gets hungry for fresh cashews or fine chocolates, the nuts-and-candy counter on the ground floor offers a smorgasbord.

She takes nothing but food from Broderick’s, and she pays for it by organizing tables of sweaters and pants and other clothing that the day’s shoppers have left disarranged, by better cleaning places that the store’s own maintenance crews have left less than spic-and-span, and by making sure that Eleanor’s, in particular, sparkles.

During the fourteen months that she has lived mostly here, she has kept her tiny studio apartment as a mail drop and a place to do laundry. Her days off are Sunday and Monday, but she leaves the store only on the second of those days. Monday nights, she sleeps in her apartment, and she yearns to be once more in Broderick’s.

She has chosen this way of living not to save money on rent, but in the hope of finding again the security that she knew before her family was slaughtered. Life on the streets has toughened her, but it has not restored the sense of stability and permanence that she once enjoyed.

Perhaps even Broderick’s can’t give her back that most precious aspect of her childhood. But alone within its walls, she feels safer than she feels elsewhere. Except on those occasions when Crispin pays a visit, her only company is who she meets in books, as well as, in various clothing departments, a community of mannequins, none of whom can rob her of her virginity or kill her. She enjoys over 380,000 square feet of living space, surely the largest home in the world, and the longer she lives here without incident, the more easily she can make herself believe that this place is not merely a home but also a fortress.

The first time Crispin sneaked into Broderick’s with his dog, before closing time, he might not have made it safely through the morning without setting off an alarm or being caught on his way out. Thanks to Amity Onawa, he now knows how to come and go with almost as much stealth as the spirit of a nine-times-dead cat.

And now here they are, friends for almost a year, and except for Harley, each of them is the other’s only confidant.…

Over the final little cakes, Amity says, “I saw your mother at tea with some women about two weeks ago.”

“What — here?”

“At that table,” she says, pointing.

“I thought you worked in the kitchen.”

“Sometimes now, if a waitress drops out of a shift at the last minute, I take her tables.”

“What did you think of her?”

“She’s even more beautiful than her pictures. And very sure of herself.”

“Don’t ever serve her again,” Crispin warns. “Serving one of them in any way … well, it gives them a hook in you, I think. They can pull you into further and darker service as if you’re a fish on a line.”

“I don’t believe I’d be that easy. Anyway, I doubt I’ll ever have another chance to serve her. Certainly not soon. I overheard her tell the other women that she and your stepfather were jetting off to his home in Rio the next day for an extended stay.”

“No mention of her children, I suppose.”

“She said you, Harley, and Mirabell were doing well in boarding schools in London.”

“Jolly good,” Crispin says sourly.

“Will you ever confront her?”

“She’d kill me on sight.”

“Or you her.”

“I might.”

“And now that Theron Hall is empty?”

“A few staff will still be there, three or four.”

“But mostly empty,” Amity persists.

Crispin favors silence.

She reminds him: “You told me once that something happened there that you need to better understand. Something you need to go back and see again.”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

“When the cards tell me it’s safe.”

“Have you consulted them recently?”

“No.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Everyone should be afraid.”

After a long silence, Amity says, “There’s a cool display in the toy department. You’ve got to see it.”

As Amity slides out of the booth, Crispin says, “You mean now?”

“I didn’t know you had a busy schedule tonight.”

He gets up to follow her, and she points to the wall of tall windows. “Look. Snow. So beautiful.”

With the dog between them, they cross the room and stand at the huge panes of glass.

The first flakes are as large as silver dollars and look as soft as little pillows. The heavens shed their bedding on a city seeking sleep, crystalline goosedown spiraling through darkness, through the million feeble night-lights of a civilization always one dawn away from obliteration.