Free Into the Dark by Alison Gaylin Page A

12:45 P.M. , in the parking lot of a bar that was never written up in Page
     Six, and if Ludlow had only seen the look in Morasco’s eyes when she pulled away
     . . . No, that was wrong. Brenna’s memory couldn’t tell a lie, even a
     white one. It had been Nick who’d pulled away.
    Brenna gritted her teeth. Don’t go there, not now .
    “Lula Belle,” Morasco was saying now. “Sounds like
     a cartoon cow from a milk commercial.”
    Brenna laughed. “Wait till you see her.” She called
     up the next download and hit play. At the start of it, Lula Belle was standing,
     arms and legs akimbo, backlit as ever so that the edges of her hair glowed,
     halolike.
    Morasco frowned at the screen, but within moments,
     Lula Belle turned to the side and arched her back. Then she slipped into the
     splits, touching her toes to the crown of her head. “I’m open to you.”
    “Oh my,” he said.
    The silhouette rolled onto her back, raised a
     delicate hand to her brow. “So please, my sweet . . . be open to
     me.”
    Morasco moved closer. The screen flickered in his
     eyes.
    “Still thinking about cartoon cows?” said
     Brenna.
    “Uh, no.”
    She smiled at him. “Didn’t think so.”
    “When I was seven years old,” Lula Belle said, “I
     found a little bird that had fallen out of its nest. I knew Mama wouldn’t let
     me
     have it, for she believed all animals to be crawling with disease. And so I took
     a shoe box, and I filled it with warm, soft things—cotton balls, scraps of
     fabric, even a white cashmere glove my grandma had left behind during her last
     visit.”
    “She knows the color of the glove.” Morasco took a
     swallow of his beer. “She has a good memory.”
    “A good imagination ,”
     said Brenna. “And just so you know, she says ‘Mama’ so much you could build a
     drinking game around it.”
    He snorted, though his gaze stayed on the
     screen.
    “I put that little bird in that shoe box and hid
     him in my room under my bed. I found an eyedropper in the medicine cabinet, and
     I fed him sugar water with such tenderness as to make him trust me.” She took
     a
     trembling breath. “If Mama were to see me, she’d have been amazed. She thought
     I
     was crazy like my daddy. She thought I couldn’t take care of nothin’ without
     breakin’ it. Mama said that gift for destruction ran through my veins.”
    “Mama,” said Brenna. She raised the glass to her
     lips, and smiled at Morasco.
    He didn’t smile back, didn’t drink. He set his
     bottle down on the coffee table and leaned forward, and his expression changed,
     deepened into something Brenna couldn’t quite figure out. It wasn’t the rapt,
     obvious lust with which Trent had watched Lula Belle. Sure, she supposed he
     could have been turned on and trying to hide it from her, but it seemed to
     Brenna more of a sadness.
    Lula Belle said, “I kept thinking, if I was the
     reason why that little bird lived . . . then I must have also been the
     reason why he died. Right?”
    Morasco swallowed hard. He closed his eyes.
    Brenna clicked off the download. “Powerful stuff,
     this performance art.”
    “It is.”
    “Nick?”
    He looked at her.
    She knew she had no right to ask, not when she
     couldn’t stand in a parking lot with him for five minutes without lapsing into
     a
     memory she couldn’t talk about. She knew it wasn’t fair, but she put her hand
     on
     his, and she asked him anyway. “When you watched that video, what were you
     thinking?”
    Her cell phone beeped out Morse code—the tone she’d
     chosen for text messages: SOS. “That might be Maya,” she said, but the text was
     from Trent.
    At fish market. No sign
     of Persie.
    Hope U R getting luckier on your porn date.
    She exhaled. “Trent is looking for a lost cat,” she
     said, her voice trailing off once she caught Morasco’s gaze .
    “Brenna,” he said softly. “It moved.”
    Brenna blinked. “Excuse me?”
    “You asked me what I was thinking