CHAPTER SIX
honeyed words
ᴏᴄᴛ. 16ᴛʜ, 9ᴀᴍ.
THE NEWS IMMEDIATELY swept the FBI, and they had to take a new perspective on the whole case. The night truly was just like a broken mirror. Nothing but long shards of glass that originally began to seem like they were fitting together only to turn out too small or too rugged. No matter how the detectives tried to place their gathered information together, it ended up looking all totally and indisputably wrong.
Mrs Jane Miller was pulled into the station the morning the initial shock of Anne's scandal subdued. 16th October, the day after the Blanchard sisters were declared dead on sight.
Jane Miller was a pretty woman, slim and willowy with lips forever wearing red lipstick. She walked into the station as if she were arriving to a funeral, and perhaps in some macabre way, she was. A mesh headscarf covered her brunette hair that had been pulled taut back into a bun, and a long coal-black dress hung glumly all the way down to her feet. A pair of thin, cat-eye sunglasses perched still on her face, though it was raining outside. Not for a moment did she let her neck bow, and her jaw clenched right as she was guided to her questioning room.
David Rossi and Emily Prentiss sat in front of her. Miller made no noise as she lowered herself into her seat. Leather gloves cloaked her hands and she placed them atop her knee as she crossed one leg over the other. Despite her composure, when she finally removed the sunglasses, the ring of red that tenaciously clung to her waterline was unmissable. No doubt about it, she had spent her night crying. Afterwards, she would visit Anne's body. After all the questions had been answered, she would say goodbye, and alone, she would run away to Paris.
"Hello, Mrs Miller," Prentiss started, straightening out the file she had in front of her. A foul, cold feeling soaked in the air. All the guilt from Bernadette seeped through the walls, and the aching silence of grief clouded up the corners of the room, hardening into tension. So thick, one could cut it with a knife. "I believe you already know why you've been called in here today."
Jane Miller was a young woman, much too young for her husband who had started to grow a soft belly and sprout grey hairs like a charred plant. She casted a look to her side and licked her teeth.
"I do," she replied. "It's about Anne Blanchard. My . . ."
"Your?" Rossi started, but when Miller's eyes narrowed, he nodded and lifted a hand as if to surrender. "We're not here to talk about the origins of the relationship. We're here to talk about the last day of Miss Blanchard's life."
Miller's nose curled upwards with disgust. "Say her name," she snapped, "not Miss Blanchard." Her nostrils flared and her upper lip snarled meanly, "when you say Miss Blanchard, she is just another sister. Another dead girl. She's reduced to nothing but the title of someone else. When you say Miss Blanchard, it sounds too much like that wretched old hag."
Rossi and Prentiss shared a look, and turned back to the angered expression now metastasising on Miller's features. There is a certain disgust that cannot be feigned, that cannot be brought on from situations one had just heard about. Jane Miller was talking about Wilhelmina Blanchard, and she was talking about an experience received first handedly.
Miller composed herself. "You will say her name in front of me. You will call her Anne." For a brief moment, when Miller shut her eyes, she heard music. She heard the swelling sound of dainty fingers pressing against the Ivory keys of a piano, the soft murmur of a girl humming out a song in french. For that brief breath of eternity, Jane Miller saw a future in Paris with a girl who smelt of roses and had skin as soft as silk. Then, she smelt the bitter coffee of a police station, and she was sucked back into the vortex of reality.
Anne was dead. Gone, gone, gone. Her lover. Dead.
Rossi started, "Anne▬▬" Miller winced from an internal pain, "▬▬we need you to tell us what she was like on her last day, yesterday. Before she entered her home, you were the last person of the public to of seen her alive. You'll need to recount every moment, every word. We know this must be painful for you, Mrs Miller, but in order to let Miss B▬▬ to let Anne have justice, those memories are vital."
Jane Miller took a long, hard look at the two agents in front of her. Her lips opened and closed a few times, letting her misery live and die on her tongue, letting her teeth become tombstones for the start of sentences she didn't want to finish, but then the same french song whispered in her ear. With one nod, Mrs Miller composed herself, and began to tell the two FBI agents of the last time she saw Anne Blanchard.
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
It seemed, from the moment Jane woke up on October 15th, everything was going wrong. For starters, her husband, Nicholas, had managed to thieve the sheets in the night, and had forgotten to shut the window before he finally drifted off to sleep. In retrospect, Jane should've known it would've happened. He was always forgetting things she told him to do▬▬ clean the dishes, turn the washing machine on, lock the back door, clean the sink after you brush your teeth. It was a never-ending cycle of immortal forgetfulness, and Jane was growing sick of it.
In truth, she really was planning on getting a divorce, she just didn't know how hard it was to unglue herself from the vows she had promised mere years ago. Until, of course, the girl from down the street asked for piano lessons. She had big, doe eyes and pink lips. Her hair smelt of green apples and she wore a rose scented perfume. One that she had probably saved up her pocket money for, and bought it down at Kohl's after school. She had been Captain of the netball team, but quit after her 18th birthday, and spent her Wednesday afternoons curled up in the satin sheets of Jane's bed.
Jane and Anne were friends before anything else, having moved into the town alone, the Blanchard family were the first neighbourly friends the Millers made, albeit Mrs Wilhelmina Blanchard sending sideways looks at twenty year old Jane, and her husband who had grown wrinkles in his forehead. 'She's in it for the money,' they'd think, and perhaps because Jane truly felt nothing for him, they were right. Men did not please her, and since she had not discovered the touch of a woman, she decided to bathe in their riches instead.
There was a refreshing aroma about the girl from 76 Rosefield street. Her honeyed words and dulcet voice made the icy hearts of austere men crack. There was something so eternally beautiful in her touch, in her smile, her teeth, her hands, her hair . . . Forever Anne would remain a temple with grand walls and golden pillars. Forever Jane would come eagerly on her knees to serve at the altar.
Jane left the cold side of the bed, knowing it would later be swarming with a warmth no man could conjure, and headed for the shower. Upon looking in the mirror, Jane saw the golden cross necklace Anne had bestowed upon her a almost a year ago. Jane was given it during the first time Anne had kissed her. It was on the day Anne turned eighteen, the very same hour. Anne had come running down the pavement at twelve oh six in the morning to crash her lips upon the stained red ones of Jane. Then, as a promise, Anne had slipped the golden necklace into the palm of her hand.
Jane hadn't taken it off since.
After Nicholas had parted ways and said goodbye for work, Jane placed the kettle on, and at exactly 10am, a knock sounded at the door. Except, this one was more pleading than the careful grace every other time had come with. This knock was urgent and demanding. Jane fled to the door, swinging it open only to have an armful of her doe-eyed girl, tears tracking her cheeks.
Ushering her inside and locking the door shut, Jane steered Anne towards the white couch shrouded in crocheted blankets and frilly pillows. The fire crackled, its warm breath bleeding into the room. The sunshine was fogged behind a sheet of mist outside, but there was a specific heat that came from the unity of the two women, and for a moment, there was no cold feeling in Anne's sadness. Only relief that she was resting against the flesh of her lover.
"Ma Cherie," Jane whispered gently, her exhalation as soft as butterfly wings against Anne's cheek. So delicate it was barely even there. "Who did this to you?"
But, Anne refused to speak. She shook her head, forcing her hands around Jane's body. They were needing and honest, trailing up and down her back, touching every square inch of skin as if she'd never feel it again. Later, Jane would realise that that had been the case. Anne's fingers were slightly cool, and when they pressed against Jane's collarbone, an eruption of goosebumps spread out in a hurry. Jane did not know she had skin before Anne touched it, before she claimed it. Anne trailed Jane's jawline with kisses, sweet and long, her touch lingering more than it should've. Or maybe, that was just Jane looking back. How blessed those kisses were now that she knew she'd never get them again.
Afterwards, when what had been needed had happened, the two lay atop each other under the knitted blanket. Hair stuck to foreheads and skin was sent aglow by the fire steaming up the room. Their words and whispers, their callings and pleads dawdled like an echo, and a smile had crept tiredly across Jane's lips. The weighted feeling of Anne's head listening to her heart made the world pause. She could've eaten the world raw.
"Would you like to explain, mon amour?" Jane hushed into her ear so that only Anne could hear, even if there was no one else in the room. It was much more intimate to be quiet, like they were passing secrets no one else was worthy of knowing they were even being exchanged.
Anne shook her head. "Forever I will live with you in this moment." At the time, Jane grinned. An earthy, extraordinary grin. Anne continued, "I love you, Jane."
Jane did not have time to respond, instead she brought Anne's face to hers and peppered it in small replies of her love. She sprinkled some of it across her cheeks, others on her shoulder, more of it against her fingers. Everywhere Anne was kissed with Jane's love, and she did not wash when she went home.
Once the sacred hours were up, and Jane placed a long, candied kiss atop her forehead, Anne went back home. The wind played with her hair and let the lingering dampness of Jane's kiss grow slightly cold against her flesh. Anne returned back home and stayed in the clothes she had just been with, in the skin she had just pressed against Jane's, and locked the front door. The air was swollen with music from her mother in the hallway, and the scent of baked bread seeped into the room.
Anne went back home, and she did not come back out again alive.
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
"So there you have it." Miller snapped, and kept her eyes closed in hope her eyelids would absorb the tears already watering. "Those last few moments of Anne's time with the outside world, they are no longer mine." Miller looked bitter, she no longer had her lover to herself, there was no more pleasure in the memories of her dead girl. "Ma Cherie, she was so . . ." Miller's eyebrows stitched together as she fought to find the world.
Rossi and Prentiss waited, respectfully.
"Anne Blanchard was so so," Jane Miller concluded, "what a sin it is to sum her up. What a wicked thing it would be to even try and describe her. Blasphemous to deduce her down to that, when she was everything and more." A long few moments passed, "I now understand how the moon feels, waiting for her stars to go out. It's like living on borrowed time once their lights have finally extinguished. There is no colour in the world, there are only dying stars and a weeping moon."
Emily Prentiss looked distressed, and she had to bow her head when Jane Miller had finally finished. A tear dribbled down her nose, and Miller's eyes were as red as her lips. She would not shed tears for her love in the presence of her murder investigation. Not until she saw the body.
Another prolonged sequence ensued. The room held still, each person composing themselves as if trying to push off iron weights from their shoulders and scoop out heavy rocks from their pockets. Finally, after what had most definitely been perpetuity, Rossi spoke.
"Thank you, Mrs▬▬," he sighed. "Thank you, Jane." She met his eye, and her eyebrows trembled. There was no holding in the solitary tear that quivered down her skin. "But, one more thing. When you first arrived, was it Anne's mother you spoke so distastefully of? May I ask why such abhorrence overwhelmed you when you spoke of her?"
Jane Miller had never been an angry woman, so it was harrowing to see the contorted, twisted look that cruelly came upon her face. A haunting glare, and crooked eyes fixated on David Rossi.
"That woman never loved her children," Miller said. "It was not the first time Anne Blanchard came running to my doorstep with tears spilling from her eyes." One more pause. "And if her soul had not been taken from us just a few hours ago, then it would not have been the last."
Something else stirred in that second. Emily Prentiss remembered the story she had just been told, and something ugly was birthed at the back of her mind. She stood up, thanked Jane Miller, and left the interrogation room. She was met with curious silence when eyes fell upon her behind the glass, and whilst she digested the information herself, her skull shrieked.
Anne Blanchard knew she was going to die.
TERRY PRATCHETT
❛ No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away. ❜
( artemis speaks ! )
i haven't written this fic in like a month but
i genuinely missed bernie and her story so much
i sat down and finished cooking this up in an hour
so i could finally publish it! i hope it's getting you
all on the edge of your seats.