’Tis I . . .
’Tis I . . .
Your lost love, your Lady Ligeia. . . .
Isobel paused in thought as the haunting melody began again and then dissipated, the woman’s voice trailing off, reverberating in a mesmerizing throb. She shut off the sink and swiveled around. “I thought you said her name was Emily,” she said, her words seeming to pull him out of a trance.
He looked at her, lifted the mop from the floor, and dunked it into the dingy water. “It is. Lady Ligeia . . .” But he stopped and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as though considering whether or not to explain.
“What?” Isobel asked. Was she missing something? Did he think she was too stupid to get it?
“Lady Ligeia,” he began again, “is a woman in literature who returns from the dead, taking over another woman’s body to be with her true love.”
“Oh, yes. Lovely.” Isobel blanched. “I guess the other chick didn’t mind at all?”
He smirked and, grasping the mop handle, wheeled the janitor’s bucket behind the counter, guiding it toward the back room. “It’s actually one of Poe’s most famous stories.”
Oh, she thought. So that’s why he hadn’t wanted to elaborate. She stood for a moment, arms crossed, thinking, one hip leaning against the display glass. Then, rounding the counter, she dropped her rag into the sink before going to stand in the doorway of the staff room. Hands braced on either side of the door frame, she leaned in.
“Hey,” she called. “Speaking of, did you do the project yet?”
“No.”
She watched him hoist the bucket and pour the filthy water into the tub sink.
“It’s due week after next.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. He set the bucket down and kept his back to her while he washed his hands. “Shouldn’t you be the one worried about that?”
“I guess so,” she mumbled, and cast her eyes to the polished floor. They’d scrubbed the place till it sparkled and she was convinced that it was actually cleaner now than it had been before Brad and the crew trashed it. If she had learned one thing for certain about Varen now, it was that he was thorough.
She looked up again and watched in silence as he opened the locker cabinet in the corner and brought out his wallet, strung with three different lengths of chain. He scooped something else out with his other hand, and when he made for the door, she stepped out of his way.
He brushed past her into the main room and deposited his wallet, coils of chains, and a handful of rings onto one of the wicker tables. Next he grabbed the plastic trash bag they’d filled during the cleanup and, pulling the plastic drawstring closed, tied it off.
“Give me a sec,” he said. “I gotta take this out.” Isobel watched him disappear into the staff room again, lugging the trash bag behind him. She heard the back outer door open.
She glanced down at the wallet on the table and the small collection of rings. One of the rings, she realized, was his high school ring. No one could have guessed by looking at it from a distance, though. The ring’s boxy silver frame cradled a bulky, black rectangular gem in place of the traditional Trenton blue sapphire. A silver V stood in the middle of the onyx stone instead of a T and, on the side, where people usually had the school’s hawk-head emblem, there was the profile of a crow or a raven or something that wasn’t a hawk.
Her gaze drifted away from the rings to his wallet.
She glanced at the open staff door, then back to the wallet. Outside, the Dumpster banged.
Quickly Isobel snatched up his wallet and pried it open.
The first thing she found was a little plastic insert for pictures. It held a single oval photograph—the girl from Varen’s morning group, part of the woe-is-me convergence that met at the radiator next to the side doors every morning. It was the girl who had handed him the red envelope, Isobel realized, and she thought her name was Lacy. Did this mean she was his girlfriend?
The girl wasn’t smiling in the picture. She had a defiant expression on her round face, as though she were silently daring the onlooker to address her directly. She had mounds of thick black hair that fell past the cut of the photo, though Isobel knew that the black waves ended in coils dipped in red dye. She had full lips, too, painted a deep burgundy, and her eyeliner, drawn with sharp wingtips, made her huge dark eyes seem even larger. Those eyes, combined with her copper skin, made her look like an Egyptian goddess.
Varen’s music ceased without warning. Silence pulsed. Hands fumbling, Isobel snapped closed the wallet and set it back on the table amid the rings, just as he’d left it. She dropped into one of the chairs and crossed her legs, trying to look nonchalant.