Some Velvet Sin Read online

  SOME VELVET SIN

  Some Velvet Sin

  Copyright © 2021 by Heather Crews

  All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  The Truth about Vic and Cyn

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  They all have weary mouths,

  bright souls without a seam.

  And a yearning (as for sin)

  often haunts their dream.

  - Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Angels”

  Tell me tales of thy first love—

  April hopes, the fools of chance;

  Till the graves begin to move,

  and the dead begin to dance.

  - Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Vision of Sin”

  PROLOGUE

  1982

  The rain had started just moments ago, but already it fell in torrents, sheeting down the windows of Sly’s parents’ old station wagon. Tomoko lifted her gold-rimmed glasses from the dash and slid them on, blinking as she adjusted them. She spied a trickle of water leaking through the seal on her window and watched it drip onto the cracked leather interior.

  “Looks like we’ll be here a while,” Sly said, flicking the dark curls from his forehead. He played with the dial on the radio until he came to a Human League song. Settling back, he slung his arm across the seat and gave her a contented glance.

  His hazel eyes were so expressive. Tomoko had noticed that a lot lately, even though she and Sly had known each other for years, having both grown up in this town. She smiled at him as she carefully buttoned her blouse. With the rain came an unseasonable chill, and her skin prickled beneath the thin material.

  “I don’t mind,” she said, snuggling up against him. His arm dropped down to encircle her shoulders. He was warm, and his presence always brought her comfort. Somehow he eased the pressure she put on herself without having to do much at all.

  It wasn’t until last year, during her oral report on Manzanar in American History class, that she’d finally taken notice of Shawn Sylvester as someone separate from his class clown persona. As class clowns went, the easygoing, bronze-skinned boy everyone knew as Sly wasn’t terribly obnoxious, just goofy and never serious if he could help it. He liked making people laugh. Everyone knew him, and no one had a single bad word to say about him. Tomoko, who numbered among the school’s brainiest students, simply didn’t have time for such characters. She had Ivy League ambitions. For her, school always came first.

  She’d chosen Manzanar for her subject because it was personal; her dad and his parents had been taken there. During her report, which had been complete with handouts and slides, she’d noticed Sly listening carefully to every word and studying each slide. Afterward, he was the only one to ask follow-up questions. To her surprise, they had been thoughtful, intelligent questions rather than the silly ones he usually popped off with at the end of a presentation. That day, she had been forced to see him in a new light.

  They ran with different crowds. Her extracurriculars were math club and rotary. His was smoking pot by the bleachers. However, once they’d started speaking to each other after class, everything had progressed so naturally. Somehow, they complemented each other. Although they couldn’t have been any more different, they got each other.

  Now that she was leaving for New York in the fall, she couldn’t help feeling melancholy. College was what she wanted, yet she wanted him too. She would miss him terribly, and she knew he felt the same, even if he told jokes to conceal his true feelings. That was all right, because she could see what he felt every time he looked at her.

  Come with me. She’d wanted to ask him several times, because although she was going to experience new things and meet new people, she couldn’t imagine her life without him. Move to New York. The choice had to be his, however, and he’d shown no interest in going anywhere except to the beach and this overlook. Sly was satisfied with his life. He didn’t strive for more.

  “Hey, Tommy,” he said, his fingers stroking her arm. She snuggled closer to him, the fabric of his baseball tee soft against her cheek. He gazed into the darkness beyond the windshield, though the rain fell too heavily to see anything. It pelted hard on the roof, nearly drowning out their voices. “Wanna hear something crazy?”

  “Of course I do.” She loved listening to his stories—the more fantastical, the better. He thrived on attention, and she was more than happy to provide him a captive audience.

  “This road is haunted.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is,” he insisted mildly. “I’m dead serious. It’s our town’s very own urban legend.”

  “You’re never dead serious,” Tomoko said, but she was smiling. She always played along. “Okay, what happened?”

  “It was back in the fifties. This couple died, a boy and a girl. Seniors, like us.”

  “Oh. I think I’ve heard of that. How did they die?”

  “It was a race. Like a drag race, you know? That’s what teens did back then, just drag raced all the time and hung out in ice cream parlors. And had sock hops.”

  Tomoko laughed. “Sure.”

  “Well, anyway, there was this race, and their car crashed, and they both died.”

  “Why were they racing?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they were in rival gangs or something. So they were racing for pinks to settle a dispute.” Sly grinned down at her, his dimples deepening. “Anyway, some nights you can still see their ghostly forms walking along this road. Hand in hand. Tragic teen lovers.”

  She sat up, reaching over the seat for Sly’s worn army surplus jacket to throw across her chilled legs. Glancing out the back window, she half hoped to see a shadow or some suggestion of movement, but the silvery rain obscured everything. “We can’t see much of anything right now.” A thought occurred to her as she settled back into position against him. “If that couple was real, our parents might have known them. They were young in the fifties.”

  “Could be, Tommy. Could be. But you know, I didn’t tell you the best part.”

  “What’s the best part?”

  “The girl, she was an escaped mental patient. And the guy had a hook for a hand.”

  Her laughter burst free, unrestrained. “I don’t believe you!”

  “It’s true!” His eyes shone with hilarity as he gazed down at her. “So what they do, while they’re haunting this road, is go to cars parked right here in this overlook. Rainy nights such as this are their favorite.”

  Sly let the words linger in the air. Tomoko’s laughter dwindled, and she found herself hugging his waist tightly. “Then what?”

  “The guy uses his hook to scratch at the door. People usually think it’s an animal, or one of their friends playing a trick. So they open the door. And it turns out, it was a trick, but not from a friend.” Sly’s voice lowered to an ominous tone, and Tomoko held her breath,
hanging on his every word. “The guy raises his hook, like he’s going to bring it down right on your face. But that’s not what you should fear. It’s the girl, who floats right through him, coming toward you, screaming like a banshee. Anyone who lays eyes on her? Bam! Instant death.”

  “So the person dies of fright?”

  “That’s the way I hear it,” Sly said.

  She nodded, knowing Sly hadn’t heard anything of the sort. “I can accept that. But why does he have a hook for a hand in the first place? No wonder he crashed instead of winning the race. At racing speeds, he’d have trouble with these curves.”

  “Uh… You got me. I don’t have an answer for why a juvenile delinquent from the fifties would have a hook for a hand. I’ll have to come up with something good next time I tell the story.”

  “I can’t wait to hear it.”

  “There’s a bright side, if you look at it the right way,” he said after a moment.

  “To your story? How?” she demanded skeptically.

  “That boy and girl might be ghosts now, but at least they get to stay together forever. Their love will never die.”

  Tomoko was too practical to consider something like that romantic, but she found herself smiling at Sly anyway. He wasn’t too practical.

  The levity slowly faded from his face as he looked at her. He took a deep breath, and she knew he was about to say something meaningful. “I really appreciate it that you listen to me the way you do. People don’t take me seriously, and I can understand why. But you’re different, Tommy.”

  “Of course I listen to you, Sly,” she said softly. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.” He licked his lips. “I’ve been thinking about… the future.”

  “Me too.”

  He rested his forehead against hers, flattening her teased bangs, and for a moment they sat in silence. The rain eased into a steady dribble. She knew they would be driving back into town soon, and real life would have its hold over them once more. Although the whole summer lay ahead of them, she thought there wouldn’t be a more perfect time than right now to say the thing that had been weighing on her mind ever since she’d gotten her acceptance letter.

  “Sly, I wish…” She sat up suddenly, gazing around with a frown.

  His hands fell down her sides as she leaned away from him. “What is it?”

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” Tomoko looked at him, expecting to see a familiar teasing light in his eyes, but he had turned to gaze out the driver’s side window. “Was it a car?”

  “No. It was a scratching noise.” She caught her breath and scrambled onto his lap. “I heard it again,” she whispered, her arms tight around his neck.

  “Tommy—”

  “I swear I heard something. It sounded like…” Like a sharp hook dragging along the side of the car. Metal on metal. She shuddered, not daring to say that out loud. The story wasn’t real.

  “Do you think it’s them?” Sly hissed in her ear.

  “Of course not—”

  As her gaze strayed toward the window, she caught sight of movement beyond the rain-speckled glass. A shadowy shape appeared from the darkness, drawing closer, until she could see the fog of its breath. Ice-cold fear flooded her veins.

  “Shit, the doors,” Sly muttered. “I thought I locked them.”

  “Sly!” Tomoko gripped him so hard her hands ached. “It wants to get in!”

  The thing outside began to strike the door with thunderous blows. Tomoko couldn’t hold herself together any longer, and she released a bloodcurdling scream.

  ONE

  Between

  We drove to the graveyard at midnight. That was what I remembered—a slow crawl along darkened streets, Susie giggling wildly about nothing at all.

  But before that… I struggled to remember. The boardwalk games, the jaunty music, the bright blinking lights. Tart lemonade and the crunch of corn dogs. My boredom making me wish I’d never come, even as I lifted Jack’s wallet from his back pocket, slipped some of the bills into my bra, and tossed it down by the carousel with him none the wiser.

  At some point we’d moved underneath the boardwalk, where waves crashed over the distant notes of music. A few beers took the edge off my boredom. After a while the music had stopped, and the lights blinked out, and still none of us were going home. I didn’t know about the others, but I’d never had a curfew to keep. As long as nobody caught me coming or going, I did what I wanted.

  It was just six of us—Cathy, Susie, Richard, George, Jack, and me. They weren’t my friends and no one really wanted me there, but Cathy had been adamant about making me feel welcome, so I thought I’d play along. Every time George made some sly comment about me being fast, she’d shoot him a scolding look and then ask my opinion about the new flick at the drive-in or a poem we had studied in school.

  Good, nice Cathy. She wanted to be perfect and wanted everyone to like her. She had always given me sympathetic looks when the other girls at school knocked me with their shoulders, perfectly curled hair bouncing as they passed with books clutched to their chests, their trills of laughter echoing down the hallway. Cathy never laughed when I stumbled into the lockers, but she didn’t speak up for me either.

  She was the reason I’d come to the boardwalk that night. I remembered her taking pity on me in the bathroom at school that day, where she’d caught me wiping away tears and struggling to fix my eyeliner. Whatever she saw in my face moved her to offer an invitation to come out with her and her popular friends that evening. Feeling spiteful, I’d accepted.

  Spite. It always got me into trouble.

  After school Cathy brought me to her house, her arm linked through mine like we were the best of friends. “Oh, Cynthia,” she said, as if I were a hopeless case. She’d loaned me a skirt and a crinoline. A pastel blue sweater too, though it didn’t hug my figure the way it did hers. I wore my own cinch belt—$1.49, boosted from the department store—over the ensemble, though it didn’t help me look any less square. I’d sat quietly as she fixed my face, powdering over the dried tears and plumping my lips with her rose-colored lipstick.

  “You look so nice,” she’d said, pleased with her handiwork. I looked like her and her friends—pure and virtuous. I’d never have chosen these threads for myself, especially not for a Friday night out in town. When we got to the boardwalk, I saw the boys in their varsity sweaters and pressed slacks, looking so wholesome I could’ve just died.

  The night was mostly a blur in my memory, just moments flashing past, no significance to them, no weight. Until we moved out from beneath the boardwalk as the tide crept up the sand, and Richard said he wasn’t ready to go home. Waves crashed, the sound swallowing half the words we spoke.

  Cathy pursed her lips, watching Richard. They were steadies, only she didn’t seem to like him very much. Who would, I kept wondering. I certainly never had. He was a catch, though, if you cared about those things. I’d told her, back at her house, that she didn’t have to settle, but she’d only given an embarrassed smile.

  “Let’s go to the graveyard,” he suggested, and no one bothered to argue. I had the feeling none of them ever argued with Richard.

  So we all crammed into his car and drove there, at midnight, on the road that snaked alongside a cliff over the beach. The graveyard lay outside of town, at the end of the beach road, on the last low patch of land beyond the scrubby hills and before the mountains, thick with trees, began their ascent to fog-wreathed heights. From this direction it seemed an isolated place, but another road led to the graveyard too, right from the center of town, just on the other side of the hills. People used that shorter, straighter road to visit loved ones and attend funerals.

  But this road, the beach road, was for fun: the boardwalk, the sun and sand, the overlook. It was for thrills. For wild things that happened only beneath the moonlight.

  It was odd to be here, with this group of people I barely knew. They weren’t the kind to find amusement in a graveyar
d. They preferred a more conventional good time. But at this hour, there was nothing else to do in this nowhere town, and they wanted thrills. Richard had insisted. This was his game, after all.

  Richard slowed and cut the headlights. We all tumbled out. Companionably, Cathy tried to take my arm again, but I dodged away, exhausted from the façade I’d maintained all night. I rooted around in the clutch she’d loaned me and came out with my pack of Lucky Strikes. She shook her head when I offered her one, nose wrinkling slightly, though she was too polite to say anything as I struck a match and exhaled smoke into the cooling air.

  “My grandmother just died,” Richard told us as we all approached the gates surrounding the graveyard. “Her funeral was here last weekend.”

  “Richard,” Cathy said softly, admonishing him, like she thought he might be disrespecting his grandma.

  “She was a sweet old lady,” he said, and she pursed her lips.

  “Should we go in?” Jack wondered, peering through the thick iron bars. A fine mist gathered in the vine-choked trees lining the far side of the graveyard. Real atmospheric. “Let’s have some fun.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Cathy sounded reluctant. “It’s so late.”

  “So go home.” Richard slid his arm around her tiny waist. His eyes, dark and oily-looking, found mine. “We can have plenty of fun on our own, can’t we?”

  I stared back at him, acutely aware of Cathy’s pout and the way all the guys looked at me. It was no mystery what they thought of me. What they expected. “Maybe,” I said evasively.

  Richard’s brows rose with interest, and Cathy flinched. I felt bad for hurting her, especially since Richard repulsed me and I had no intention of stealing him from her.

  Stealing his wallet—that was something else. I eyed him sidelong, wondering if I could get close enough.

  “What kind of fun?” Jack asked suggestively.

  Dream on, pal. His sudden attention didn’t fool or flatter me. Guys like him didn’t go for girls like me except for one reason. Besides, he was too dumb for me to bother—the idiot still hadn’t noticed his missing wallet.