The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  He held out a hand to her to help her up, but paused with his fingers linked in hers. “Just one thing, miss. You said ‘we.’ What happened to the other people?”

  “Oh,” Kelsey said. “They fell overboard during the storm. They all drowned.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes,” she said and could tell by his relieved expression that she’d told the right lie. It made the hours she’d spent cleaning up after herself worthwhile. “All of them.”

  FIVE

  27

  It started with the dancing.

  Earlier, the floor had been pretty clear — just a few older men in Hawaiian shirts who’d already had a few too many drinks, their teeth gleaming white and bright under the black lights. “Heyyyyyy!” They cried, holding up their hands for high fives, leering, the liquid in their plastic cups sloshing as they moved in on Kathleen and Molly, circling the women like sharks. Kathleen and Molly held up their hands to be slapped and let the men dance up on them for a minute or two before turning back to each other, heads tossed back in laughter, shuffling on the floor already sticky from all the spilled booze.

  It was girls’ weekend away.

  They hadn’t gone out together in a while, the duties of husbands, children, pets, floors that needed to be swept and laundry that needed folding taking precedence over something as simple and giddy and decadent as a girlfriends’ trip. Still, they’d been friends since junior high and even though the effort of making time for each other was becoming more difficult as the years passed, they’d managed to book a room in a beachfront apartment, pack their bags with nothing but stuff for themselves, and just…go.

  And now they were here in this huge nightclub with the whole night stretching out in front of them, full of nothing to do but drink and dance and have a good time. Kathleen loved to dance, and she didn’t much care what she looked like doing it. That saying — “dance like nobody’s watching,” well, she totally got that all right, except she danced alone in her kitchen while she unloaded the dishwasher the same way she kicked it out here on the dance floor. Hips bumping, arms lifted. Bounce, bounce. Bust a move. She looked like an idiot, and it didn’t matter because everything inside her was the thump and throb of the bass beat. The music took her.

  Kathleen danced.

  And Molly was right there with her, shaking her groove thang, the two of them consumed with the sort of laughter that bubbles up all the way from your toes. Some stumbling-drunk college girls beside them started grinding, ridiculous, making Kathleen’s lip curl. If you were going to do that sort of thing at least keep your feet, she thought as the taller girl fell back, taking her friend with her and stepping on Molly’s toes while Kathleen put out her hands to keep them from completely toppling her over.

  “My bad! My bad,” the girl slurred, and wrapped her arms around Molly’s shoulders. “Sorrrrrry! Sorry, I looooove you!”

  Molly shrugged her off and rolled her eyes. The girls stumbled away, and their spot was taken up by a matched set of young men in polo shorts and madras shorts. The song had changed, some woman shouting “err’body lift your drinks in the air,” and like lemmings, the entire dance floor did. The guys who’d surrounded Kathleen and Molly had identical cans of Bud Light. Cold beer splashed as they fist-pumped. One apologized, but it was with the blurry, weaving smile of a guy who wasn’t really sorry, since helping to wipe up the spill was a good excuse to get his hands all over Molly’s front. And yet…it didn’t matter, somehow, that he was handsy and a little out of control, that one of his friends had moved up on Kathleen’s ass like she’d put a neon sign on it that said “hands go here.” Somehow, all Kathleen could do was laugh and laugh as she twirled just out of reach.

  It didn’t take long for the dance floor to get so crowded any sort of real dance became impossible. They’d started out in the center of the floor but had been slowly pushed toward the bar along the side of the room. Two steps led up to the bar level with a narrow countertop around the edge so people could stand there and have a place to put their drinks as they watched the crowd. It probably kept them from falling off, Kathleen thought as she and Molly found a space on one of the wide metal risers next to the railing. The advantage of this spot was that even though she had to be careful not to fall off, herself, she couldn’t be shoved from behind because the railing was there, and her feet were safe from being stabbed by stilettos because she was standing on the stair. It also meant that with a slightly raised viewpoint, she could more easily see out over the room.

  “It’s like watching the nature channel,” Molly shouted, pointing out at the seething, writhing mass. “Look at them.”

  Kathleen looked. She laughed. A bachelorette party that was dancing right in front of them, the bride resplendent in a penis tiara and blinking penis necklace, her girls beside her in matching t-shirts, were being freaked by… “Oh. My. God. A cowboy!”

  The cowboy ripped open his shirt.

  “Holy Shit.” This came simultaneously from both of them, and they dissolved into laughter again. Just like in the eighth grade when they’d giggle over posters torn from Teen Beat and Bop magazine, fingers tracing the hairless bare chests of pouting, pretty musicians and TV stars. In eighth grade, Kathleen wouldn’t have known what to do with a chest and belly like the one the cowboy was now encouraging the bride to rub…and…lick?

  “I should ask him if you have to be a bride to get some of that action,” Kathleen said. “Jesus Christ, look at the abs.”

  Bounce, bounce. The crowd got bigger, the music impossibly louder, the beats fast and the bass down low. The man standing next to Kathleen on the stairs that led to the bar area, the handrail separating them, grinned at her when she looked his way and said something she couldn’t catch until she leaned in close — which was, she realized, probably what he’d been going for. Again, it didn’t matter. At home she mopped floors and cleaned toilets, packed lunches and chauffeured dozens of children to an unending array of sports and activities but here, now, in this place, she was not a wife, mother, daughter, sister. Right now, with her best friend and a couple hundred strangers squeezing up against her, she was simply Kathleen.

  It had been a long, long time since she’d been only that.

  “What?” She cried, leaning in.

  He was saying something she couldn’t make out, something about how he smelled good, offering his neck to take a sniff, and she did because why not? He did smell good, and he was blatantly cute, and as always when something like this happened she wondered why on earth he’d take the time to flirt with her when there was a handful of scantily clad, intoxicated and twenty-something bridesmaids shaking their asses not two steps in front of him. Not that she cared really, because the next thing that happened was that he was offering to buy she and Molly both drinks. It was totally a seller’s market for the ladies, and Kathleen wasn’t going to complain about that, even if in her real life she was just as likely to hold a door for someone as to expect it to be held for her.

  This wasn’t real life.

  The bridesmaid in front of her fell down.

  There were so many people around her that she didn’t make it to the ground before grasping hands pulled her back onto her feet. Kathleen’s lip curled again and she moved onto the higher step, watching the girl bend over. If there was going to be puke, Kathleen wanted to be well out of the way. In the next moment, the girl came upright, not puking, though her mouth was wide open. She dove at the cowboy, and it really was like the nature channel, only Kathleen wasn’t sure if she was watching a mating ritual or a carnivore attacking its prey. The bridesmaid was either kissing him or eating his face, it was too hard to tell.

  “Drinks!”

  It was sort of like magic. The guy returned, drinks in hand. Then he turned around and left. Molly caught Kathleen’s eye and shrugged, and they laughed again. They drank and danced, at least as best they could. The crowd in front of them shifted, groups merging and splitting. The cowboy and the bridesmaid had disappeared, thoug