Size Zero

3-2

The mob banged on their car, eyes glaring down at them, trying to see through the tinted glass. Thunderous hits smashed against the windows, and it felt as if the blows went straight to the skin.

All he could do to escape was look into her eyes.

He wanted her now. As he stood outside St. Joseph’s Abbey, his new home, entirely alone.

“You’re just hiding here, right?” one reporter asked. “This monk thing is an act.”

Abbot Joseph swung open the chapel doors. “I can assure you it isn’t. Brother George is a God-fearing man.”

The reporters chuckled at the thought but tried to hold in their laughter in front of the abbot. Even atheists in the twenty-first century respected the monks.

“Murderous Monk will make a good headline,” a reporter said.

A monk exited the chapel, and the reporters made a dash toward him, camera crew clumsily towing their equipment.

Brother George watched as a camera scope zoomed in on Brother Martin’s face, lengthening like a giraffe neck until the camera’s glass stared him in the eye. Brother Martin, small and meek, began to cry, shielding his face from the lights.

“Do you know Cecil LeClaire?” they shouted.

“Has Margaux LeClaire visited the abbey? Has Perdonna?”

“I…I don’t know these people,” Brother Martin whispered.

Brother George stood in front of him, arms splayed out. “These are supposed to be silent hours.”

“And what do you think about during silent hours, Cecil? How many seconds it took to suffocate Annabelle Leigh?” a reporter asked, accompanied by a chorus of naughty laughter, like rats tweeting into the night.

“Come on, Cecil. Where’d you bury her? It’s been ten years. She has to be dead.”

“Get out!” Brother George screamed. His throat rattled, and the veins in his neck squirmed like snakes.

A cameraman pushed toward Brother George and zoomed in on his red face, and he turned, shoving the camera out of the man’s arms. The camera whacked the man in the nose. He stumbled backward, clutching his mouth, fingertips covered with blood.

“I’ll press charges,” he said, holding his face.

Another shook her head. “Go ahead. Perdonna will bribe him out anyway.”

Red-and-blue police sirens flashed up the gravel road toward the chapel, reflecting off the tree leaves.

“Private property,” the officer said. “Time to leave.”

Brother George looked to the sky to ground himself. The stars millions of miles away felt more concrete than his very own existence.

The abbey was most magical at night. When the pond was wiped clean and transformed into a perfect sheet of black that reflected the stars across the Earth. Heaven fell from the sky each night and onto the abbey lawn.

Brother George knelt down to the trunk of a giant maple tree, knees cradled by the soft bedding of autumn leaves. He stuck a twig into the creases of a notch and cranked open the small door he had built to cover a hollow. Inside was a Visage cigar humidor, decorated with tiny pearlescent-blue mussel shells and a stuffed red dog.

He lit a cigar between his teeth, then used the flame from the lighter to illuminate the pages beneath the cigars.

Newspaper articles read: “Lowly Child Stolen from America’s Wealthiest Avenue,” “The Disappearance of the Century,” “Pourquoi la famille LeClaire a tué Annabelle Leigh,” and “Annabelle Leigh, Lost in Her Kingdom by the Sea.”

Beneath the articles was Annabelle’s diary—mostly schoolgirl erotica and meticulous, albeit disturbing, records of Margaux LeClaire. She wrote about the time Margaux whacked her father, the chauffeur, with a silver platter because he bought the miniature rainbow Swedish Fish instead of the originals. One Christmas, she refused to wear stockings. Her legs froze because Margaux said nylons were for maids and Michael Jackson only.

Ten years ago, at 4:00 p.m., a townhouse camera on Sixty-Third Street caught a video of Annabelle. She paced outside of the LeClaire Mansion, appearing in and out of the security footage. It seemed like she was waiting for someone. But no one knew whom.

Then, at 4:09 p.m., she disappeared from the camera’s view, and that was the last anyone had ever seen of her.

One theory had Margaux LeClaire ordering Annabelle’s abduction in front of the LeClaire Mansion to raise the celebrity cachet of LeClaire Model Management. Another speculated that terrorists, funded by Margaux, kidnapped Annabelle for military training in the Middle East. But the most popular theory of all was that young Cecil LeClaire brutally murdered his girlfriend, so Visage and LeClaire covered it up.

The case was adapted into a Lifetime made-for-television movie, which further established Cecil LeClaire as a bad boy, teenaged s*x symbol.

Brother George held a photo of Cecil and Annabelle as preschoolers, riding a kiddie Batmobile. Annabelle with her Shirley Temple curls dressed up in a Catwoman suit with whiskers, a tail, and a giant smile on her face.

He kissed the photo and placed the contents back into the box. He watched as the flame from his lighter scarred the stars in the pond’s perfect black mirror, and he chucked the cigar humidor into the reflections of the flame.

“I see you haven’t exactly given up your worldly possessions,” Abbot Joseph said. He looked down to Brother George’s hand, which clutched a red leather dog. It was in tatters with both ears torn midway. The scruffy, franken-dog was adorable to him, but to others it looked like a lab experiment gone wrong.

“I can’t throw away the stuffed animal,” Brother George said, clutching the dog. “It belongs to someone else.”

“I didn’t mean the dog. I meant the person. Throwing away some paper doesn’t mean you’ve moved on.”

Brother George took the cigar from his mouth and snuffed it out, the smoke floating before his face.

“How can you be married to God if you haven’t even gotten over a dead teenaged girl?” the abbot asked.

“I spent my whole childhood with that dead teenaged girl,” Brother George barked. Unlike the reporters, the abbot didn’t flinch at his show of violence. “I spent my whole adult life as her murderer.”

“You’re angry,” the abbot whispered.

“Of course I’m angry,” Brother George said, clasping his hands to stop the shaking. “I’m sorry. I’ll be quiet.”

The abbot chuckled. “I meant you’re angry in general. You’re holding in a lot of hurt.”

Thunder rumbled through the sky, and the tree frogs’ bright melody faded into the water.

“Ever since I was a teenager, I always felt cursed,” Brother George said. “If the entire world believes I’m an evil psychopath, then there must be some truth to it, right?”

“Maybe.” Tiny droplets of rain fell onto the leaves above them. “But you can’t figure that out here.” The abbot pointed to the water where the box had sunk. “I think you need to go back to New York.”

Brother George’s eyes went wide, and he clenched the stuffed dog in his hand. “Excuse me? Do you think I’m a murderer?”

“Of course not.”

“Then give me another chance.”

“Give you another chance to do what? Shove another reporter tomorrow?”

“Jesus Christ was violent all the time.”

“Jesus Christ wasn’t a monk!”

Brother George sat by the pond, dewy moss sticking to his habit’s fabric. He placed the stuffed dog in his pocket and put his head in his hands. “I’ll stop making s*x jokes about pizza. Or if it’s about that mother earlier—”

“Admittedly, she deserved that,” the abbot said with a sly smile.

“I’m learning the power of God. I’m trying—”

“The power of God is suffering. It is about facing your troubles and having the power to overcome them,” the abbot said, grabbing Brother George by the shoulders. “The abbey isn’t a place to hide.”

“What do you think I’m hiding from?”

Water droplets trickled from the sky faster and faster by the second until the thunder came. With a loud roar, rain pummeled the Earth. A lightning bolt feathered down from the clouds and struck the maple tree a few feet over.

“Come on,” Brother George shouted, shielding the older man’s head.

They ran toward a small cabin beside the pond where Brother George worked on his craft. When they swung open the doors, it was pitch black inside.

“Power lines must be down,” the abbot said, teeth chattering, cold and wet.

Brother George crawled beneath his workbench, feeling his way across the ground, to find a kerosene lantern he stashed away. The tub beside him smelled of animal hides and lime. The animal skins were stripped of their fur with lime to create leather. Brother George made medieval manuscripts, recreating the old masters’ artwork on parchment paper.

When the kerosene lantern burst with flames, the abbot huffed. “Speak of the devil.”

Sheepskins were stretched on a dozen wooden frames, pulled and dried until they became paper. And on clothing lines, large parchment papers sparkled with gold leaf. Intricate illustrations featured a naked Eve, neck arched, seductively chewing the apple among boa constrictors and golden chameleons. Decaying sheep hides were transformed into gold-plated masterpieces that could last over a thousand years.

But the bloody cardboard package took center stage.

The door burst open, and the usually stoic abbot screamed a high-pitched yelp. An NYPD detective shook his drenched head like a drowned rat.

The young male detective stood a foot shorter than Brother George and refused to look up at his face. The man had an innocent, doughboy look, except for the terribly crooked nose that had presumably been bent by the many people he irritated.

“Detective Tom Chandler,” he said, eyes scouring the animal skins. “Good with the epidermis, are we?”

“Yes. But I would’ve never put that corpse on the runway,” Brother George said.

“Why not?” Chandler put his hands on his hips, tilting his pelican beak of a nose.

“No artist would embroider a brunette corpse with purple beading. Brunettes are autumns, not springs—that’s the real crime.”

Chandler snarled like a tiny Chihuahua. He raised his foot to stomp but seemed to think better of throwing a full-blown tantrum. “Now isn’t the time to be making jokes.”

“If not now, when?” asked the other detective as she opened the door, completely dry beneath her umbrella.

The female detective was Chandler’s body opposite. She stood as tall as Cecil with a rotund belly and a roll of fat that jiggled like Jell-O when she walked. But despite her domineering size, she had those marble-round eyes that could only depict kindness.

“I remember you. Detective Roosevelt, right? You’re the detective on Annabelle’s case,” Brother George said.

“Was. The FBI took it over several years ago when it became a kidnapping, and it died there. It’s been out of my hands,” Roosevelt said. “Doesn’t mean I haven’t been studying it.”

Chandler pulled gloves from his backpack and began laying tarps around the bleeding package. He examined the exterior of the box, taking photographs from all angles.

“Do you think the skin coat has something to do with Annabelle?” Brother George asked.

“Possibly.” Roosevelt pulled a pair of gloves over her hands.

Chandler stared at Brother George as Roosevelt inspected the package.

“You’re opening it here?” he asked, then he caught Chandler’s prying eyes and realized they wanted to see his reaction to the items inside. All of the LeClaires were suspects.

Roosevelt tore through the tape to find an invitation to the Visage Collection Presentation wrapped like a scroll. Grasping it was a pale hand.

It’s a plastic hand, he told himself, resisting the temptation to poke the bloody flesh.

The abbot held his nose, gagging as he looked away.

A charm bracelet held the skin-vitation together, positioned to look like the limp wrist was wearing jewelry. Dangling from the chain was a cat charm. It was the bracelet that disappeared ten years ago with Annabelle Leigh.

The purplish hand was the same color as the flesh coat on the Visage runway. A bright red scar marred the wrist.

“The skin coat isn’t a new murder,” Brother George said. “The skin coat is Annabelle.”

“How do you know?”

“That is her charm bracelet.” He touched the scar on her wrist. “And that’s her scar. This is her hand.”