Phantom Prey

Ambien; and then a glass of wine as a base for the Xanax, as a base for the Ambien; and still she didn’t sleep.
    She rolled and turned and her mind cranked twenty-four hours a day, a long circle of jangled thoughts. Sometimes, during the day, from the corner of her eye, she’d see Frances sitting on a couch. She’d come downstairs in the middle of the night, having heard Fran’s music playing on the stereo, only to have it fade as she came closer.
    She felt cool breezes where there should be no drafts, as though someone had walked past her. And she saw omens. Crows on a fence, symbols of death, staring at her unafraid, but mute. A fireball in the sky, when she happened to be thinking of Frances. Fran’s face in crowds, always turning away from her, and gone when she hurried to them.
    Was Frances alive? Or dead?
    Or somewhere in between?
    Fairy had some of the answers, or believed she did.
    Alyssa was a blond, good-hearted, New Age modern woman. Fairy was dark, obsessive, Pre-Raphaelite—and where Alyssa floundered, trying to comprehend, Fairy knew in a moment what had happened to Frances, and focused on revenge.
    Fairy stepped out of the shower, toweled off as she walked into the bedroom. When she was dry, she threw the towel on the bed and chose Obsession from the row of perfume bottles on the dressing table. She touched the bottle to her neck and the top of her breasts, judging herself in the dressing mirror as she did.
    She didn’t call herself Fairy; others did. But it fit—with a pair of gossamer wings, she could have been Tinker Bell’s evil twin.
    Then Loren appeared. “Looking good. Really, really good. Your ass is . . .”
    “I don’t have time to fool around, I’ve got to get dressed,” Fairy said. “But you can watch me.”
    “I know, time to go,” Loren said. “I’ll watch you undress, later.”
    She looked straight into his hungry dark eyes, patted her breasts with the flats of her fingers, fluffing up her nipples, and got dressed: black panty hose, a light thermal vest for warmth, a soft black skirt, a black silk blouse threaded with scarlet, tight over the vest. Back to the mirror, she painted on the lipstick, dark as raw liver, penciled her eyebrows, touched up her lashes; smacked her lips like women do, adjusting everything. Arranged the fall of the hair: like a black waterfall around her shoulders.
    “Wonderful.”
    “Thank you.”
    “That’s what you get, when you sleep with an aesthete.”
    Fairy walked back to the dressing closet and took out the short black leather jacket, pulled it on: the jacket gave her shoulders, and a stance. Two-inch black heels gave her height. Ready now.
    “The knife?” Loren asked.
    “Here.” She touched the breast pocket on the jacket; could feel it in there, new from Target, hard black plastic and soft gray steel, sharpened to a razor’s edge.
    “Then—let’s go.” Loren smiled, teeth flashing, his face a white oval above his dark clothing, and Fairy reached out, took his hand, and they went.
    Loren was the one who’d found Frances’s killers; together they’d scoured her laptop, her photographs—thousands of them, taken with a cell phone and a point-and-shoot Nikon, some of them stored electronically, but hundreds of them printed out, stacked in baskets, stuck to the front of her refrigerator, piled in drawers: a record of her life, from which the killers emerged.
    There were three: “I can actually feel her hand on their shoulders,” he told her. “These are the people who did it.”
    The three were scattered through the stacks of photos, but they were all together in one of them. The photo had been taken at a party of some kind, the three people peering at the camera, laughing.
    “You’re sure?” Fairy asked.
    “Never more. Blood on their hands, missus,” he said.
    “I want them,” she said
    “Revenge,” he said. He smacked his lips. “It’s so sweet; revenge tastes like orange juice and champagne.”
    Fairy laughed at the metaphor and said, “Everything with you goes back to the senses, doesn’t it? Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell . . .”
    “That’s all there is, missus. . . .”
    They bought a car to hunt from—bought it at a roadside person-to -person sales spot, along Highway 36. Gave the seller an envelope full of cash, drove away in the car, an aging Honda Prelude. Never registered the change, never bought insurance; kept it out of sight.
    They began to scout, to make schedules, to watch. Early on, it