Nine
Owen didn’t waste time Googling tile or grout. Instead he dove into social media, plugging the name Natasha Nikoslav into Instagram (nothing), Twitter (nothing), Snapchat (no dice). Facebook.
Jackpot.
And the picture. He placed his index fingers together, rested them on his lips. The profile shot, a spot where most people pinned their most flattering selfie, or some sort of cutesie or ironic icon, was instead... "Sleeping Beauty." In full repose, hands folded atop her chest like a corpse.
A draft settled onto his nape and he pulled his hair from its band, shook it free as he clicked on her name and the picture, brought the whole page up.
A second, larger Sleeping Beauty was tacked up as her page banner and he stared at it, half fascinated, half appalled. This picture, a painting, was again Sleeping Beauty in repose; blonde and almost preternaturally beautiful (“And who does that look like?” he muttered), yet… “Too late to be kissed awake,” he murmured, a little surprised by how oddly romantic - and strangely wistful - he sounded. Yet it was true. The the Sleeping Beauty in this shot didn’t just look like a corpse—she was a corpse. A blade was jammed to the hilt in her chest and a thread of blood leaked from a mouth just as plump and pink as the Tsarina’s. “Fairytales often end violently,” he said, and moved the cursor rapidly over to ‘Friends’. What the hell was all this about? And who were Natasha Nikoslav’s associates?
No Friends To Show
It was just a privacy mechanism, he knew that, yet ‘No Friends To Show’ struck his gut in a way that made him feel hollow. He pushed the sensation aside, clicked on the other pull-down menus. Timeline: no info. Photos: just the two Sleeping Beauties. And no books were listed, no music, no other interests, yet under ‘About’, her biography read: So Beloved
This tweaked his brow. ‘So beloved’—who said that about themselves? It didn't feel like it fit with the quaky hands and troubled face of the exotic Tsarina he’d met in the grocery store.
Although…he had been fooled by a persona before. Had fooled people with a persona before. “But if you’re going to be a liar, be a good one, Tsarina.” Because he, in a mere twenty-second Google search, had already netted a connection to Rob and Jessalyn’s fairytales. Which was something those two should have done themselves. Who in their right mind rented property to people without vetting them first through every set of means possible?
Answer: open-hearted people who thought everyone in the world was as kind and honest as they were. “Fuck, Old Man,” he muttered, to Rob’s absent figure, then grabbed his cell phone to call him.
It chimed in his hand before he could hit his number. A text:
Hard to text with this knife in my back, Night Crawler. Don’t reply. I just wanted you to see this. I wanted you to feel.
A lurch jerked his gut and that hollow, no-friends-to-show feeling widened inside, a greedy thing. Sondra. Wanting him to ‘feel’. He stared at her message. How could she think he wasn’t feeling?
How could she believe that he was?
Christ, he missed her. Missed how her every expression could go from softness to steel in a pulse stroke. The flint-eyed bitch she became always looked like a stranger, and in the end it had become something of a game to win that part of her over, to seduce it the way he could so easily conquer her softer side. She had the ugliest, knotted little hands. But her breath would shudder like she was coming undone when he’d pull each gnarled finger into his mouth, suck them slow. He’d made love to her in the shittiest, seediest dumps because that’s what he’d been expected to do.
And because he’d wanted to.
Night Crawler. His street name. Sort of.
And now…now Sondra had been forced into treatment. Was awaiting trial. And the cell phone she had used for this text was not her number because she would have borrowed it from somebody else, someone smart enough to shut up about it and deny knowing who might have used their phone to send this message to him. And without confirmation, there’d be no proof that Sondra had breached her conditions to contact him. Yet without confirmation there was also no way he could know if by keeping it on the down-low she was protecting herself…or him.
Which, of course, she would be aware of. Sondra was shrewd. Wily.
That’s why he loved her.
He pulled a hand down his face. What the hell had he done? And yet…what could he have done? What had he wanted to do? I don’t know and I don’t know and I don’t know. Was that why he hadn’t he shaved yet? Seen a barber? He did shower (Steve could shove any assumptions otherwise straight up his ass), still…was he clinging to his persona—Night Crawler—because he wanted to be that guy? Or because he was punishing himself by continuing to be that guy?
“I don’t know,” he said again, and when another chime rang from his phone his heart trip-hammered. Sondra again?
No. Rob Haslom. Busy? Can I call u?
Only Rob would seek polite permission instead of just dialing. Owen hit his number “What’s up?” He sounded coarser than he wanted to.
“Would you believe more mail?”
Yes, actually he would. Wasn’t that why he’d told them to go to the police?
“I’m going to send you a picture,” said Rob. “A postcard Jessie picked up today.”
“Postmarked from…?”
“Vancouver.”
Owen glanced at Natasha Nikoslav’s Facebook profile, still up on his screen. ‘I am from eastern Alberta.’ Good enough. But where was her cousin the art dealer from? “Send it,” he said. “Is it a threat?”
“No. It’s just…” Rob trailed off and Owen cringed for him, knowing he was about to employ his oft-used technical term: ‘Weird’.
I’ll call you back,” Owen told him, and hung up. A chime resounded within seconds and he pulled up the picture, read the script on the postcard:
My Dear Mrs. Haslom
How I look forward to seeing you in Vancouver.
I am the most ardent follower of your work.
Any father would be so proud.
A second photo was the picture side of the postcard. “Oho. Game on,” Owen breathed. It was a painting—in the same romantic style as the Tsarina’s dead Sleeping Beauty— a study of castle turrets, flags flapping and stately lawns rolling. In the foreground was a princess, skirt fisted in her hands and the scarf from her cone-shaped hat flying. She appeared to be on the run. “Escaping?” he said, and went back to script of the postcard, re-read it. ‘Mrs. Haslom’. An archaic title—and also inaccurate considering how Jessalyn signed her work ‘Chandler’, a detail he’d noticed when he’d been in her studio. A detail any ‘ardent follower’ would also be well aware of. And that was another thing. The note had said ‘follower’ not ‘fan’—and with a stiffness to tone and a pretentiousness that signified…what? Someone just careful with words? Or a lack of sincerity?
Or maybe indicative that English was the sender’s second language and therefore he (or she) was more dogged about rigid diction. He glanced at Natasha Nikoslav’s Facebook profile again, the memory of her accent settling into his ear.
Back to the postcard. Why send it at all? Weren’t there more expedient ways to get ahold of Jessalyn online? Didn’t she have a fan page? He clicked his cursor into the search cell of Facebook, typed her name.
A page immediately popped up, its profile pic an obvious publicity photo, and the banner shot one of her portraits; a doe-eyed woman in dated couture circa 1982. He scrolled through the posts. Her page had a modest following, many fans ‘liking’ or commenting on the art she had shared. “So why wouldn’t an ardent follower just message her here, free and instant?”
Because snail mail was infinitely more anonymous than a forum like Facebook.
He smiled grimly and hit the back arrow, returning to Sleeping Beauty Tsarina - but frowned as something new chewed at him. Even if Rob and Jessalyn had (obviously) not bothered to research their new tenant, why would Natasha Nikoslav have assumed they wouldn’t have? What were the odds of all of them being that obtuse? He reasserted his gaze upon the murdered Sleeping Beauty. Why would the Tsarina be so blatant? If she was the storybook sender, she would know there were obvious parallels to the fairytales and her Facebook profile.
But, if she was not the sender….
Then this was one hell of a coincidence. Unless…unless someone knew them both.
He pressed his pointer fingers together again and reconsidered the profile, the postcard, and the bizarre, gory storybooks. “Fairytales often end violently,” he murmured and, leaving Natasha Nikoslav’s profile up on his screen, he pushed away from the computer, grabbed his hoodie and keys.
Rob and Jessalyn might be gullible beyond redemption, but he was not—and they needed to be made aware that there was a whole lot more to Natasha Nikoslav than just peaches and cream and bee-stung cherry lips.
©bonnie randall 2005
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