You're only dreaming, I try to tell myself. You're sick and you have a fever and this is only a dream.
I manage to come out of it. The lights bright in my eyes— must be mid-morning already. It's impossible to focus on anything. I have some dry heaves which only makes me weaker. I try to fight it, but eventually I fall back into the dreams again.
That's when I finally see her, rising up from behind the ranks of the drowned dead. She looks just like the picture of the rusalka in that book. A water-wraith. The deadly spirit of the well.
22
Wendy stayed over at Jilly's studio Saturday night. She slept on the Murphy bed while Jilly camped out on the sofa— over Wendy's protests. "I'll be up early working," Jilly insisted, and refused to discuss it any further. And sure enough, when Wendy woke the next morning, Jilly was already behind her easel, frowning at her current work in progress.
"I can't decide," she said when she saw that Wendy was awake. "Have I made it too dark on this side, or too light on the other?"
"Please," Wendy said. She put on the kimono that Jilly used as a bathrobe and shuffled across the studio toward the kitchen area, looking for the coffee. "At least give me a chance to wake up."
The door buzzer sounded as she was halfway to the coffee carafe sitting on the kitchen counter.
"Would you mind getting that?" Jilly asked. "It's probably Geordie coming by to mooch some breakfast."
"Wonderful," Wendy said.
She was barely awake and now she had to put up with Geordie's ebullient morning cheer on top of Jilly's. She considered writing a sign saying, "Quiet, please, some people are still half asleep," and holding it up when she opened the door, but she didn't have the energy to do more than unlock the door. When she swung it open it was to find a stranger standing there in the hallway.
"Um, is Jilly here?"
Wendy gathered the kimono more closely about her neck and looked over her shoulder. "It's for you," she told Jilly. Turning back to the stranger, she added, "Come on in."
"Thanks."
Jilly looked around the side of her easel, her welcoming smile turning puzzled.
"Jim?" she said.
"I hope I'm not interrupting anything," he said.
So this was Jim Bradstreet, Wendy thought as she continued on her quest for a caffeine hit. He wasn't as handsome as she'd imagined he'd be, but there was a warmth about him that was directly evident. Mostly, it had to do with his eyes, she decided, the laugh lines around them and the way his gaze had immediately sought her own.
Behind her, Jilly laid down the paintbrush she'd been using. Wiping her hands on her jeans, which left new streaks of a dark red on top of the other paint already on the material, she sat Jim down on the sofa and introduced him to Wendy. Wendy offered him coffee which he luckily refused, since there was barely one cup left in the carafe.
"Well, this is a pleasant surprise," Jilly said. "I didn't think you even knew where I lived."
Wendy brought her coffee over to where they were sitting and curled up on the end of the sofa opposite Jim. That was Jilly, she thought. Always happy to see anybody. Sometimes Wendy thought Jilly must know every third person living in the city— with plans already formed to meet the rest.
"I looked the address up in the phone book," Jim said. He cleared his throat. "Uh, maybe I should get right to the point. I've been kind of worried about Brenda ever since you called yesterday. You see, I got the impression that you didn't even know she was out of town."
Jilly's eyebrows rose quizzically, but she didn't say anything. Wendy stared down at her coffee. She hated getting caught in a lie— even one so well-intentioned.
"Anyway," Jim went on, "when she called me last night, I tried to find out where she was staying, how long she'd be gone— that kind of thing. I was trying to be surreptitious, but I could tell she felt I was grilling her and she acted very evasive. We hardly talked for more than five minutes before she was off the phone."
Nice-looking and kindhearted, too, Wendy thought. Obviously concerned. She wondered if he had a brother.
Jilly sighed. "Well, it's true," she said. "We didn't know anything was wrong until yesterday when we found out her phone was cut off and she'd lost her job."
"But it's the paper that's sent her out of town," Jim began before his voice trailed off. He nodded. "I get it," he added, almost to himself. "She just didn't want to see me."
"I don't think it's quite like that," Jilly said.
"She's been avoiding everybody," Wendy said. "I haven't seen her in three weeks."
"And you say she's lost her job?"
Jilly nodded. "Brenda will probably hate us for telling you about any of this, but you seem to care for her and right now I get the feeling she needs all the people she can get to care about her."
"What— what's the matter with her?" Jim asked.
"We don't know exactly," Jilly said.
With Jilly having opened the Pandora's box, Wendy realized she couldn't hold back herself now. She just hoped that it wouldn't put Jim off and that Brenda would forgive them.
"Brenda's got a serious case of low self-esteem," she said. "Way serious. She's always had money problems, but now we think she's quit smoking and gone on some weird crash diet. If you've done either, you probably know how it can make you a little crazy. With everything coming down at once on of that— losing her job, obviously way broke— God knows what she's thinking right now."
"She never said anything..."
"Well, she wouldn't, would she?" Wendy said. "Do you lay all your problems on a woman you've just met— especially someone you might like a lot?"
"She said that?" Jim asked. "That she likes me a lot?"
Wendy and Jilly exchanged amused glances. It was almost like talking to Brenda, Wendy thought. That'd be the first thing she'd center on as well.
"When you were talking to Brenda," Jilly asked. "Did she say where she was staying?"
Jim shook his head.
"Well, I might be able to fix that, Jilly said. "Or at least, Lou might."
She got up and dug her phone out from under a pile of newspapers and art magazines and dialed a number.
"Who's Lou?" Jim asked Wendy.
"A cop she knows."
"Yes, hello?" Jilly said into the phone. "Could I speak to Detective Fucceri, please? It's Jilly Coppercorn calling." She listened for a moment, then put her hand over the mouthpiece. "Great," she told them. "He's in." She removed her hand before either Wendy or Jim could say anything and spoke into the phone again.
"Lou? Hi. It's Jilly. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.
"That's not true— I called you just last week to ask you out for lunch but you were too busy, remember?
"How soon we forget.
"What? Oh, right. I want to get an address to go with a phone number.
"Well, no. I don't have the number yet. I need that as well."
Wendy sat fascinated as she listened to Jilly deal with number traces and the like as though she were some TV private eye who did this all the time. Jilly passed on Jim's number and the approximate time of Brenda's call to Lou, then finally hung up and gave Jim and Wendy a look of satisfaction.
"Lou'll have the address for us in about half an hour," she said.
"Can anybody do that?" Jim asked.
Wendy just looked at him. "What do you think?" she asked.
"What's the big deal?" Jilly asked. "All I did was ask a friend to do us a favor."
"But only you would think of tracing Brenda's call," Wendy said.