For, and thanks to, Sam.
Agatha’s bones shivered beneath her skin as she stood under the hotel’s awning. She swore she would hear her knees knocking if the rain wasn’t smothering all sound. A butterfly was suffocating in her curls. She plucked it out and repositioned it. No one had told her it was a brooch and that it didn’t go in her hair. Her emerald dress was covered in sequins and from afar she looked like a fish. Agatha felt like a fish as she dragged her shoes through puddles. The water was up to her ankles by the time she got to the car.
Agatha got in and closed the door. “What took you so long, Kelly?” she said to the man next to her.
“Please don’t call me that,” the man groaned. He wore a suit with stains only faded from hours of scrubbing.
“What, do the girls not like your name?” Agatha laughed as she squeezed the water out of her hair. “It’s a horrible night to be going out.”
“You’re the one who said we should go to the party.” Kel watched her as she ran her fingers through her wet hair. Agatha was making a big deal about it, when all she had done was run through the rain. He could have made her stand in it for a while.
“Well, yes, I do want to go to this party. There’s going to be so many rich men!” She smiled at him, and then frowned. “Why can’t you wear nicer clothes, Kelly? You look like you’ve been rolling in dirt.” She straightened his collar, rubbed her hands down his coat to get the dirt off, whatever she could to make him look nice. Kel blushed.
“It’s the only suit I have, you know. You insist I look nice when we go to these parties.” He pushed Agatha’s hands away from him. “Please stop.” Kel blushed again because our hands touched, he thought. She didn’t notice.
“Only suit you have! Are you going to tell me you don’t have enough money to buy more than one?”
Kel sighed. “You’ve got all the money, you know.” He started picking on a thread sticking out of his sleeve and hoped she would talk about something else.
“Now how did that happen?” He couldn’t hear her speak because she was digging through her purse. A cavernous bag, Agatha’s voice was eaten up by it and Kel thought she might fall in. When she rose from its depths she held her wallet. Agatha pulled out a few bills and dropped them in his lap.
“I don’t want your money,” he whispered.
She wondered whether to take it back without saying anything or not. “It’s your money just as much as it’s mine.”
“It’s dirty money.”
“But it’s our dirty money.” Agatha tapped on the glass between them and the driver, as if to say no one is listening. “What did we agree on? I seduce them, you kill them, and we share the money. I’m not taking it back.”
When he took the bills from his lap, the money crinkled in a way that made him shudder. They smelled like lilies. Kel pushed them into his pocket and tried not to look at her.
Agatha clicked her nails on the car door. She pretended they were guillotine blades falling down on her victims.
Kel shifted uncomfortably then looked at her. She was staring out the window. He cleared his throat and hoped to get her attention. “It’s in the newspapers, you know.”
“What is?” She still stared out the window. Maybe there was something out there that interested her more than Kel. There usually was.
“Do you even read the newspaper?”
Agatha laughed. Her voice sounded like a fork slipping on good china. “Oh, I buy it so the guests think I read it—but certainly you don’t expect me to read it?”
His fingers trailed up his face and he held his head—he was trying not to make a sound. “You don’t read the newspaper, then?”
“I don’t see why I would.”
“Well, Aggy, it’s in the newspaper.”
She shuddered. Kel wondered if she understood what he was talking about. “I hate when you call me that.”
“You really have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“No, I really don’t.”
“Someone’s found out about all the deaths. They’re starting to think it was the same person, and they’re finding clues, and—”
“Oh, that?” She laughed again. The fork danced on the good china. “They won’t find anything out. I’ve told you already. They won’t catch us.”
“They know how Ginger Littlejohn died.”
Agatha stared upward and then her mind landed. “How did he die again? Oh, there were so many bodies…”
Kel thought he might be sick all over the cab seats. “You didn’t care about any of them, did you?” He waited for a response. “You’re such a cold bitch, Agatha. You really don’t care about any of them. Are they just money to you?”
“I was never the one to kill them. Why am I the bitch?” She pulled a cigarette from her bag and lit it. Agatha knew how stupid this was—they were in a car with the windows rolled up—but she wasn’t going to risk getting wet again. “And you shouldn’t worry about getting caught. They won’t find us, not for a moment will they suspect us.”
The smoke spread and poisoned what little air they had. The muscles in Kel’s neck tightened when he first sniffed it. “No, they’ll never suspect you. You said it yourself, you never killed anyone. But they’ll find my fingerprints and they’ll talk to someone who saw me with Ginger, or Max, or William, or any of them the night they disappeared. They’ll arrest me and I’ll go to jail. But you, you’ll have your money won’t you? That will keep you happy.”
Agatha frowned. She looked like her face was broken. She couldn’t buy a real drop of sympathy with all the money she had.
“You don’t really think that, do you?”
He bit his tongue. I know you would turn me in if there was a price.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t need to know.” She waved her hands, cigarette and all, like a band constructor as she spoke. “I would never let that happen to you, and more importantly, they can’t catch us.”
Kelly tried taking in her words, believing them, and filtering out the smoke that came with it. It was impossible.
“No, Agatha, they will. I don’t even know why the hell you want to go tonight. You’re crazy, you know? You’re going to find someone you want me to kill and I’m going to go to jail because of you.” He resorted to staring out the window and fantasizing. His hands would crawl up her sides as his knees pinned her to the seat and then he would squeeze so tight around her neck that she would—no, he wasn’t that kind of person. Deep breaths, he told himself.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’ve been worrying about this for a while now.”
Agatha cooed like a mother towards her baby and scooted closer to him—only she wasn’t a mother and she hated children. “I’m sorry it’s upset you so much.” It took her a few moments to think of anything else to say, and Kel knew why. She had nothing else to say; they were all lies. “If they catch you I promise to go sleep next to you in jail. Tell you what, we’ll both go to jail and have parties. It’ll be a riot!”
He had to resist pushing her away. But he liked feeling her pressed so close to him. Kel could feel her hand brushing up against his leg. If only…
“Do you really believe we won’t get caught?” He was watching the scenery outside. It had finally changed from decayed buildings to larger-but-still-decayed buildings. He wondered how far they were from the party.
Agatha licked her fingers and asphyxiated her cigarette. “Of course I do. It wouldn’t be any fun to spend life thinking they’re about to catch me ‘round the corner, would it?” She pushed her hand through his hair and tickled his scalp.
Kel’s lungs shriveled up and he thought he couldn’t breathe. Then he took a breath. “Agatha, I think I love you.”
He wondered if time had stopped because of what he said. After a few moments of silence when only residual smoke pervaded the air, she stirred.
“You what?”
Kel wanted to suck the words out of her ears and swallow them, never to be thrown back up again. “I love you.”
Agatha was shaking as she sat up. She put her hands on the seat to balance herself. The butterfly loosened from her locks and fell to the floor. “But I—” She fainted.
At the hospital the doctors had Kel stay in a small room that smelled like sex. He didn’t dare sit down on the chair they offered, even though it looked clean. There were people screaming in the other rooms. He wondered whether Agatha was screaming, too. At least she’d be awake and screaming.
His feet wouldn’t stop pacing around the room. Kel couldn’t admit that he was pacing—no, his feet were pacing. The tiles were grey with black scum in the crevices. It looked like an ecosystem was thriving in one crevice.
Kel wanted to leave. Hospitals scared him. The fact that people were screaming was terrifying enough—but it was a dirty hospital, as well. It was the closest one, though. Hopefully Agatha wouldn’t wake up and reprimand him for picking such a dirty place. Maybe she would thank him for saving her life.
His feet kept pacing towards the wall with the pictures of children playing ball, turn, towards the wall with no pictures, but a stain at crotch level that might have been urine. Turn. There was something drawn in one of the corners on the other side of the room. It might have been a flower, or maybe a stick figure. It looked more like breasts the closer he got to it—but then he turned again and went towards the wall with the pee stain.
A faint buzz could be heard over the screams. Kel thought it sounded like they were drilling into someone’s head. He ran to the corner with the drawing and threw up. Were they drilling into Agatha? Was she bleeding on the floor? Or was that someone else’s lover they were digging into? The remains of his lunch were on his somewhat-nice evening shoes. He didn’t care, though. If he didn’t have Agatha to go to parties with he wouldn’t need the shoes.
He was considering whether or not to sit on the chair when the doctor came in.
Dr. Phillip looked like a corpse. “Honestly, we don’t know what killed her.”
The buzzing noise got louder. Kel could hear the bone crack as it went through someone’s skull, and then the buzzing stopped.
“Wait,” Kel wasn’t sure he heard correctly. “She’s dead?”
The doctor looked at his chart for a moment then back up at Kel then back at the chart. “The nurse didn’t tell you yet?”
“No one has talked to me since I arrived.”
“Well, she died. And we don’t know why.”
Kel wasn’t sure what upset him more: her death, or Dr. Phillip’s inadequacy. His fist clenched as he imagined himself ripping out the old man’s hair. Kel would kick him in the stomach and pin him to the ground and kill him like he had killed Ginger Littlejohn. With just his hands. More people started screaming in the other rooms.
“Do you have any guesses of what killed her?” Kel asked through trembling lips.
Dr. Phillip looked back at his chart. “Well. It might have been a disease.”
Bright blues and melancholy yellows danced on Kel’s eyelids as he sat in the chair he was hoping to avoid. He felt something wet on the back of his leg. It didn’t matter anymore.
The doctors didn’t know why she had died, but Kel had a guess. The thought was like glue as it spread through his mind—it stuck to everything and refused to be washed away by his denial.
Agatha van Wick had died of love.
^^
