THE OFFERING
"Retch?" Sassy called up the stairs, pushing the door open wide. It squealed conspicuously, slamming against the wall. She sensed (without knowing for sure) that the downstairs tenant was spying on her from the fisheye peephole of her door. Sassy repressed the urge to turn and stare at it.
She stood in the downstairs hallway of Draper House. She'd been so upset the night before, after she'd gotten off the phone with Rachel, that she'd actually gone back into work at ten o'clock at night and worked on next week's "Home" section articles -and Sassy Parker never works a week ahead of time, particularly over a holiday weekend.
She'd done some work, but she mainly stayed up writing nasty things about Rachel Adair on her computer screen, getting upset, erasing the bad things and typing in: you're my best friend I was only trying to help. But Rachel had been the one who'd asked for her advice, had been the one who said, "Fuck you," had been in the wrong. But it doesn't matter, you don't let your best friend down when she's that upset, you don't tell her off. So Sassy had felt guilty when she'd finally hit the sack at two A.M., got Up at noon, went out and bought a peace offering -the flowers she picked up at her neighborhood florist in Mount Pleasant, wrapped up in tissue paper -and thought she'd surprise Retch. This'll teach you to always call first. A note on the door: Scout, Ran out to pick up dry cleaning -also, cleaning stuff at drgstre -Swept up most of vnty mess -Hugh.
But he must have run out in a hurry, because both the outside and the inside doors to their house were unlocked and slightly ajar. Sassy called out again from the bottom step (she'd moved up one giant step without asking mother-may-I). "This is your good friend Sassy Parker! Halloo! Retch?"
She heard floorboards creak from behind the downstairs tenant's door. Water from the flower stems soaked through the tissue and into her yellow cotton blouse -it felt gross, and she held the flowers away from her body. "Shit."
A noise. Upstairs.
One more giant step up the stairs. "Mother-may-I," she said. Why do I feel like I'm breaking and entering when this is my closest friend's home and nobody's going to get mad if I am caught sneaking up these stairs?
A loud smashing sound, and then scraping. Thumping across the floor. Scraping. A sound like a sponge being squeezed out. Slurping. More heavy objects falling.
"Retch?"
Up more stairs, to the first floor.
A baby began bawling its head off after the last crash, and Sassy, worried, ran down the hallway towards the sound, wondering what in hell was going on at the end of the hall.
When it was over, when the woman had stopped struggling, Penelope Deerfield saw the crumpled piece of paper in the dirt. She disentangled her small pudgy fingers from the woman's scalp -a handful of blood-matted hair was caught like a cat's cradle between her hands. She shook it out.
Penelope knelt down and picked up the piece of paper. Too dark to see what it had written on it, although she could almost make out a photograph. "Slipping notes behind teacher's back, are we?" She stuffed the paper in her apron pocket. The palms of her hands were spotty with calluses and blisters -the gardening had taken its toll this year, between that and her ward. "My little fleshling," she called it. The dead woman lay among the broken jars, her hands streaked red from razor cuts. Her heart was no longer beating. The fleshling was sated and had crawled back behind its brothers -they floated lifelessly, eternally staring out of their watery graves, their bodies barely formed. And none of them chosen, none of them like the baby, the fleshling. None of them inspired with the breath of death, with the spirit of Gil DuRaz, with the spirits of the house. None of them special.
Penelope had to coax him into his jar. He crawled like a slug across the corpse, his tiny bumpy fingers clawing into the earth to propel himself along, then scraping through the tangle of skin and bloodied cloth of the dead woman. The jar was tall and wide, the smell of alcohol stung the air like a tragic memory. Bits of translucent tissue hung suspended in the fluid. "Must stay moist, dear, or we shall never be born." She was exhausted, but this intrigued her -this piece of paper. She knelt down, jostling mason jars -they clinked together like bells with their clappers muted. A rat ran across the dead woman's right foot, which with its shoe, a Papagallo espadrille, lay disembodied alongside an irregular growth of luminescent white mushroom just beneath the stairs to the main house, far above the woman's head. The shoe, and the foot, remained where the woman had stepped down the last step.
When the fleshling had descended upon her. Hungry.
She would have to make sure that no one came down there snooping again.
"But children are always hungry," Penelope Deerfield said to the thing that treaded water in the jar. Large blue eyes staring out at her; wart-filled mouth opening and closing, breathing in the solution; crisscrossed string of veins gorged and throbbing; small raisin heart pumping furiously; the tiny body red with exertion and fresh blood. Penelope pressed her cheek to the side of the jar and felt its coldness before setting it down among the others. She turned and went back up through her trapdoor.
Sitting on the patio at her small table, Mrs. Deerfield brought the crumpled paper out from her apron pocket. "So many years ago, so many lives gone by," she said, shaking her head with memories. "And the children, oh dear, all the children I have loved, all the life I delivered then." She scanned the paper: a photocopy of a newspaper article, the contents of which she knew well.
From The Washington Herald-Examiner, January 17, 1967:
MISSING WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN NW
Identified as "Deadly Baby Sitter" of Baltimore. A woman's body was found early this morning in the Winthrop Park section of Northwest Washington. Cause of death is as yet unknown. She has been identified as Nora Garrett, aged sixty-one, A.K.A. Winifred Stanhope, Sarah Masterson, and Mary Devine. Under this last name, she made headlines in Baltimore in late 1966 as the Deadly Baby Sitter.
Working in the household of the Marrow family of Baltimore, she was held responsible in the deaths of the two Marrow children, Laura and Philip, and with the discovery of the children's deaths came a string of other similar murders, seven in all, of former employers' children. But by then the so-called Deadly Baby Sitter had disappeared without a trace. Authorities know very little about this woman, other than she was an illegal alien born in London, England, and that she had managed to elude them for the four years she conducted her murderous activities. Below this article, two photographs of the woman: One, in death. She lay sprawled across fragments of brick and concrete, her face upward, a raincoat laid over her body, and yet the face was clear, her mouth slightly open, eyes closed. The other photo, taken some years earlier, with a fifties look to the make-up and hairstyle. A small round face. Dull mousy hair, small eyes, nose almost indistinguishable from the rest of the face. Plain. Thin lips. Eyes slightly downcast, a tightness to the face as if she didn't enjoy having her picture taken.
And there was no doubt who the woman was, through the maze of aliases and the nondescript quality of her features.
"So long ago," Penelope Deerfield said to herself, "as if in another life." It was nice to relax on a summer afternoon in the shade, nice to lean back and have a martini, a martini because her body needed it, a martini because alcohol kept her going these days -nice to just rest her bones and have a drink and reminisce about the good old days. When she'd had choices.
When she'd been alive.