“You’re probably wondering why I asked you over here.” He hadn’t moved from the doorway. He hadn’t told Mandy that Peaches was coming. He hadn’t told Ted. It occurred to him that he didn’t even have to invite her in.
“Kinda,” Peaches admitted. “I’m pretty sure it’s not to announce to your wife that you’re leaving her.”
Stuart stared at her. She was blushing and there was a sort of terror in her eyes. He had all the power in this situation and he didn’t want it.
“No,” he said.
“You just wanted to hang out?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I was just hoping to not ruin a perfectly good friendship. I thought maybe if we all hung out and you were just, you know, Nurse Peaches from school, we wouldn’t like, feel what happened was a threat. Like the kiss could just be a kiss on a stoop on a confusing night and we could leave it at that.”
“Oh.” Peaches’ face fell. She made as if to take the pie away from him and then put her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket instead. She took a deep, shuddering breath and shook her head. Her blue eyes were glassy and faraway-looking. “I think this was a bad idea,” she said in a flat voice. “I’m gonna go.”
* * *
“Who was it?” Mandy asked when Stuart came back upstairs.
Mandy was on the floor doing crunches, her wet-nailed fingers fanned out behind her head.
“Just the neighbors. Their Full Plate box gave them an extra pie.”
“Twenty soldier jumps,” the voice on her ab workout app instructed.
Stuart put the pie down and watched her. He’d never seen Mandy exercise in his life, and now she was doing military-style core curls with jumps he wasn’t even sure he could attempt without spraining something.
“Whew. That felt good.” She took a sip of whatever green juice she was drinking and smiled coyly. “I have a surprise for you.”
“What is it?” Stuart asked.
Mandy jogged in place and took another sip of juice. “I’m thinking about modeling again.”
Stuart removed the quiche from the oven and cut it in sixths. Mandy had been cooking the most awesome food lately. “Seriously? Shouldn’t you check with Dr. Goldberg first?”
Chapter 19
“We want it to look realistic,” Elizabeth had instructed. “Don’t just scatter the body parts clean. We need dirt and leaves on them. Blood. It needs to look authentic. You’re not used to this sort of risk, but authenticity requires risk. Just don’t get arrested.”
What sort of “authenticity” were they going for? Tupper wanted to ask, but didn’t. She might question his ability to collaborate.
Elizabeth was reluctant to leave the house in case the MacArthur people called again. She was certain she’d already missed several of their calls while they were at Tupper’s warehouse in Red Hook, collecting more limbs. Over the years he’d amassed a huge selection of human forms. They were all experimental, all failed designs, but they were perfect for their collaboration, which Elizabeth had decided to call The Hunt.
There were people in the park—a couple of teenagers horsing around on the swings, a man with a toddler on the baby slide, two guys shooting baskets—but Tupper paid no attention to them. Whistling, he rolled a pale white calf with foot attached in the mulchy dirt beneath a hedgerow and left the foot displayed, as if the rest of the body might be hidden somewhere beneath the branches. Next, he knelt down in a pile of dried leaves adjacent to the tennis court and removed the canvas pack from his back. Inside was the torso from one of his oldest fabrications: “Friend.” It was supposed to sit in your house and keep you company in an unthreatening, undemanding way. It wasn’t supposed to be cute like a stuffed animal, or needy like a live pet; it was supposed to be human-ish. The skin was a sort of brownish gray, like the color of a mouse, and had dimpled with age. With its featureless, hairless head and rigid limbs hacked off, Friend looked like a target for shooting practice.
Tupper stood it up in the leaves, and then knocked it down again. He dragged it around and kicked soil and leaves and sticks over it. The torso was almost completely camouflaged, but perhaps that was best. Ironically, Friend was the most artificial-looking body part in his collection.
Was there a connection between Elizabeth’s staging of her death and rebirth and this trail of body parts? Tupper wondered. What was her intention? Maybe