CELESTE SAT by the window of Nate and Nancy's Coffee Shop on Buckingham Avenue across from Jimmy Marcus's house as Jimmy and Val Savage parked Val's car half a block up and started walking back down toward the house.
If she were going to do this, actually do it, she had to get out of her chair now and approach them. She stood, her legs trembling, and her hand hit the underside of the table. She looked down at it. Trembling, too, and the skin scraped along the lower half of the thumb bone. She raised it to her lips and then turned toward the door. She still wasn't sure she could do this, say the words that she'd prepared in the motel room this morning. She'd decided to tell Jimmy only what she knew-the physical details of Dave's behavior since early Sunday morning without any conclusions as to what they meant-and allow him to make his own judgments. Without the clothes Dave had worn home that night, it didn't make much sense to go to the police. She told herself this. She told herself this because she wasn't sure the police could protect her. She had to live in this neighborhood, after all, and the only thing that could protect you from something dangerous in the neighborhood was the neighborhood itself. And if she told Jimmy, then not only he, but the Savages as well, could form a kind of moat around her that Dave would never dare cross.
She went through the door as Jimmy and Val neared their front steps. She raised her sore hand. She called Jimmy's name as she stepped into the avenue, looking like a crazy woman, she was sure-hair wild, eyes puffy and black with fear.
"Hey, Jimmy! Val!"
They turned as they reached the bottom step and looked over at her. Jimmy gave her a small, bewildered smile, and she noticed again what an open, lovely thing his smile was. It was unforced and strong and genuine. It said, I'm your friend, Celeste. How can I help?
She reached the curb and Val kissed her cheek. "Hey, cuz."
"Hey, Val."
Jimmy gave her a light peck, too, and it seemed to enter her flesh and tremble at the base of her throat.
He said, "Annabeth was trying you this morning. Couldn't get you at home or work."
Celeste nodded. "I've been, ah..." She looked away from Val's stunted, curious face as it peered into her own. "Jimmy, could I talk to you a sec?"
Jimmy said, "Sure," the bewildered smile returning. He turned to Val. "We'll talk about those things later, right?"
"You bet. See you soon, cuz."
"Thanks, Val."
Val went inside and Jimmy sat down on the third step, made a space for Celeste beside him. She sat and cradled her bruised hand in her lap and tried to find the words. Jimmy watched her for a bit, waiting, and then he seemed to sense that she was all bottled up, incapable of speaking her mind.
In a light voice, he said, "You know what I was remembering the other day?"
Celeste shook her head.
"I was standing up by those old stairs above Sydney. 'Member the ones where we'd all go and watch the drive-in movies, smoke some bones?"
Celeste smiled. "You were dating-"
"Oh, don't say it."
"-Jessica Lutzen and her bodacious bod, and I was seeing Duckie Cooper."
"The Duckster," Jimmy said. "Hell ever happened to him?"
"I heard he joined the marines, caught some weird skin disease overseas, lives in California."
"Huh." Jimmy tilted his chin up, his gaze gone back half his lifetime, and Celeste could suddenly see him doing the exact same thing eighteen years earlier when his hair was a little blonder and he was a whole lot crazier, Jimmy the kind of guy who'd climb telephone poles in thunderstorms, all the girls watching, praying he didn't fall. And yet even at the craziest times, there was this stillness, these sudden pauses of self-reflection, this sense one got from him, even when he was a boy, that he carefully considered everything with the exception of his own skin.
He turned and lightly slapped her knee with the back of his hand. "So what's up, dude? You look, uh..."
"You can say it."
"What? No, you look, well, a little tired is all." He leaned back on the step and sighed. "Hell, I guess we all do, right?"
"I spent last night at a motel. With Michael."
Jimmy stared straight ahead. "Okay."
"I dunno, Jim. I may have left Dave for good."
She noticed a change in his face, a setting of the jawbone, and she suddenly had the feeling Jimmy knew what she was going to say.
"You left Dave." His voice was a monotone now, his gaze on the avenue.
"Yeah. He's been acting, well...He's been acting nuts lately. He's not himself. He's starting to frighten me."
Jimmy turned to her then and the smile on his face was so icy she almost slapped it with her hand. In his eyes, she could see the boy who'd climbed those telephone poles in the rain.
"Why don't you start from the beginning?" he said. "When Dave started acting different."
She said, "What do you know, Jimmy?"
"Know?"
"You know something. You're not surprised."
The ugly smile faded and Jimmy leaned forward, his hands entwined in his lap. "I know he was taken in by the police this morning. I know he's got a foreign car with a dent in the front passenger quarter. I know he told me one story about how he fucked up his hand and he told the police another. And I know he saw Katie the night she died, but he didn't tell me that until after the police had questioned him about it." He unlocked his hands and spread them. "I don't know what all this means exactly, but it's beginning to bug me, yeah."
Celeste felt a momentary wash of pity for her husband as she pictured him in some police interrogation room, perhaps handcuffed to a table, a harsh light in his pale face. Then she saw the Dave who'd craned his head around the door last night and looked at her, tilted and crazed, and fear overrode pity.
She took a deep breath, let it out. "At three in the morning on Sunday, Dave came back to our apartment covered in someone else's blood."
It was out there now. The words had left her mouth and entered the atmosphere. They formed a wall in front of her and Jimmy and then that wall sprouted a ceiling and another wall behind them and they were suddenly cloistered within a tiny cell created by a single sentence. The noises along the avenue died and the breeze vanished, and all Celeste could smell was Jimmy's cologne and the bright May sun baked into the steps at their feet.
When he spoke, Jimmy sounded like someone's hand clenched his throat. "What did he say happened?"
She told him. She told him everything, up to and including last night's vampire madness. She told him, and she saw that every word out of her mouth became just one more word he wanted to hide from. They burned him. They entered his skin like darts. His mouth and eyes curled back from them, and the skin tightened on his face until she could see the skeleton underneath, and her body temperature dropped at an image of him lying in a coffin with long, pointed fingernails and a crumbling jaw, flowing moss for hair.
And when the tears began to fall silently down his cheeks, she resisted the urge to press his face to her neck, to feel those tears leak into her blouse and down her back.
She kept talking because she knew if she stopped, she'd stop for good, and she couldn't stop because she had to tell someone why she'd left, why she'd run from a man she'd sworn to stand by in good times and bad, a man who'd fathered her child, and told her jokes, and caressed her hand, and provided his chest for her to fall asleep on. A man who'd never complained and who'd never hit her, and who'd been a wonderful father and a good husband. She needed to tell someone how confused she was when that man seemed to vanish as if the mask that had been his face fell to the floor and a leering monstrosity peeked back at her.
She finished up by saying. "I still don't know what he did, Jimmy. I still don't know whose blood that was. I don't. Not conclusively. I just don't. But I'm so, so scared."
Jimmy turned on the step so that his upper half was propped against the wrought-iron banister. The tears had dried into his skin, and his mouth formed a small oval of shock. He stared back at Celeste with a gaze that seemed to go through her and down the avenue and fixate on something blocks away that no one else could see.
Celeste said, "Jimmy," but he waved her away and closed his eyes tight. He lowered his head and sucked oxygen into his mouth.
The cell around them evaporated, and Celeste nodded at Joan Hamilton as she walked by and gave them both a sympathetic and yet vaguely suspicious glance before clicking her shoes up the sidewalk. The sounds of the avenue returned with its beeps and door creakings, its distant calling of names.
When Celeste looked back at Jimmy, she was fixed in his gaze. His eyes were clear, his mouth closed, and he'd pulled his knees up by his chest. He rested his arms on them and she could feel a fierce and belligerent intelligence coming from him, his mind beginning to work far faster and with more originality than most people would muster in a lifetime.
"The clothes he wore are gone," he said.
She nodded. "I checked. Yeah."
He placed his chin on his knees. "How scared are you? Honestly."
Celeste cleared her throat. "Last night, Jimmy, I thought he was going to bite me. And then just keep biting."
Jimmy tilted his face so that his left cheek rested on his knees now, and he closed his eyes. "Celeste," he whispered.
"Yes?"
"Do you think Dave killed Katie?"
Celeste felt the answer rumble up through her body like last night's vomit. She felt its hot feet pound across her heart.
"Yes," she said.
Jimmy's eyes snapped open.
Celeste said, "Jimmy? God help me."