She shook her head, flowing ebony wig swinging in sync. “We keep a fire burning in homage to the goddesses. It’s my duty to tend to the eternal flame. My duty, in fact, and my mother’s before her, to make sure the fire stays lit, the fuel source below ground never running low.” Her smile went reverent, eyes suddenly closed, just as Topaz and VaVa had done at the mention of my friends. Funny because, in life, said friends never needed stoking; their flames were always set on high. Always. When Ginger’s eyes again opened, she added, “I heard a noise and came in to investigate.” The smile vanished. “What with, well, all that’s happened lately, I mean.”
I nodded. I knew that I could’ve mentioned the clothes in the case, but thought the better of it. After all, it seemed an intentional ruse. The why was something we’d have to find out on our own, though. “Can we see the flame?” I asked instead.
Her smile lit up again. She nodded and turned back the way she’d come, while we in turn followed. Dara glanced my way. I knew she was thinking the same thing I was: to keep what we’d found just between ourselves for now. Great minds, not to mention insanely old ones, think alike, after all.
Several minutes later, we found ourselves behind the museum. We saw the light as we approached. It was radiant in the otherwise dark surroundings. Sadly, it also illuminated the reason it was placed where it had been placed.
I stopped—this time no pun intended—dead in my tracks. “Is that where . . .?”
Ginger again went all reverent on our asses. “It’s the goddess’ earthly remains.”
The light of the flame flickered on the nearby tombstones, three of them, all side by side, the trio fenced in. Had my heart not stopped pumping ages ago, it would’ve right then and there. It was one thing to see there clothes, beaten and bruised as they were, but this, this was something else entirely.
Like I said, my memory was locked in place, everything about me just as it was the day I, to coin a word, zombified. So, even though it had been centuries now, it seemed like only yesterday that we had all been together. Dara reached her hand across the gap that separated us and gave my hand a squeeze. She knew what I was feeling at that very moment.
We walked the remaining few feet and stared down at the markers. They were fairly basic, given that, I assumed, there were few tools and stones available on the island at the time of their untimely deaths. Still, it was clear who was buried there. And, yet, again something was amiss.
“Huh?” I managed, once more.
“What now?” Dara whispered in my ear as she bent down and lifted a souvenir Lady Liberty off the ground, one of many left in homage, I assumed, instead of flowers by one of the Libetians.
I turned to Ginger. “Can we please have a minute with my . . . with my friends here?”
She nodded. “Take all the time you need. If you need me, just holler.” And with that, she sashayed away, hips swaying like a well-oiled pendulum.
Dara waited a moment before asking, “What’s with the latest ‘huh?'”
I looked from her to the graves. They were evenly spaced, headstones too, all tightly fenced in. And that was what was giving me pause. “Notice anything funny?”
She tilted her head. “Um, I know I’m a zombie and all, but funny? Ain’t nothing funny about that, hon.” She pointed to the markers.
“Not funny ha-ha; funny as in strange,” I reiterated.
Her head remained tilted. There was a pause, then, “Huh.”
“So you see it, too?”
She turned my way. “Aflo Sheen, she looks just like your friend Kit, right?”
I nodded. “Hell to the yeah. Could pass for her twin, in fact. Same coloring, same style of clothes, mannerisms—”
“Girth?”
My nodding continued. “If anything, Kit was just a bit, um, rotundier, but yes, girth. Check.”
Dara again looked down at the graves. “Would’ve been a tight fit then. Three full grown drag queens, one extra grown, all of them fitting within this fence, evenly spaced like they have them.” Again her scalp got a scratching. “Seems to me, the overall size would be a bit wider, but, then again, we don’t know the shape they were in when . . . well, you know.”
“True,” I allowed, my belly suddenly in knots at the “you know,” because indeed I did know. “And if it wasn’t for the clothes back there in the case, I might not have even noticed, but two things off like that does make me wonder. Especially now, with the return of the zombies.”
“But what does any of it mean?” she asked.
I forced a sigh and shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me.” I stared down at my friends. “Sorry, ladies. No disrespect intended.” Fun as it always had been to dis them in the past.
***
We walked back in silence after that. If something was indeed amiss, and intentionally so, then whom could we trust? Then again, the museum case and the graves were ages old, so maybe no one even knew the answers to our questions anymore. Maybe they were just as lost in time as my friends were.
In any case, we had more pressing issues to contend with, like the return of the zombies to Liberty Island. And if we were going to prevent that from happening again, we had to find said zombies and, more importantly, find who was controlling them. And how. And why.