The Broken Ones

by Ren Richards

  Just as Nell’s life was contained to the bustle of Rockhollow, Lindsay’s life was equally contained to the posh suburb just ten minutes north. It was a perfect metaphor for how their entire lives had been: close, but entirely different.

  Past the bodega wedged between a neon sign advertising palm readings and a package store, beyond the gridlocked apartments and brownstones, the chaos abruptly died. There were long, winding roads surrounded by trees and farms. Ritzy grocery stores and fresh fruit stands – all of which closed by 9 PM.

  Lindsay was in her own dimension here. A dimension of leggings, fur-lined suede boots and perpetual latte-wielding. She never looked at price tags and she was always sporting some kind of diamond in her ears, on her wrist or around her neck. She had not amassed these financial gains on her own, but rather by way of her two failed marriages. Matthew Cranlin had been first. After that had been Robert Della, from whom Lindsay had acquired a modest suburban mansion with three empty bedrooms, none of which contained the children she ultimately couldn’t give him. The country club with its boozy painting nights was a lingering piece of that catastrophic union. Nell liked Robert, but she hadn’t let herself hope it would last. Lindsay never left her heart in one place for too long, not even if she was in love. Especially if she was in love.

  Nell arrived at Lindsay’s driveway to find her standing there waiting in the glow of her porch light, tapping at her phone. When she saw Nell’s car, she waved and ran towards her.

  ‘Christ, this night,’ Lindsay said as she fell into the passenger seat.

  Nell broke into tears. She didn’t know why. She hadn’t expected them. It was unfair the way they just sprang up without warning.

  ‘What?’ Lindsay’s tone was grave. ‘Is it Easter? Did that psycho do something?’

  Nell shook her head. She swiped at her eyes. Took a breath. Put the car back in drive. But before she could move, Lindsay clamped a hand over the wheel. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘I know where your car is,’ Nell said.

  By the time they arrived at Nell’s building, the crowd was gone. The fire truck too. There was only a lone police car parked behind the tow truck that had come for Lindsay’s car. Lights flickered in black puddles on the street.

  Lindsay saw the skeletal remains of her alimony checks and looked like she was going to throw up.

  Lindsay cared greatly about things. She wasn’t sentimental, but she was hungry for luxuries, hoarding them as though they might disappear if she didn’t.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she said, and yanked open the door even before Nell had finished parking. She sprinted to the tow truck’s driver side door and hoisted herself up to peer through the window. Doubtless she expected the driver to offer her some sort of explanation.

  The mannequin was gone, though a wet tuft of synthetic yellow hair was lying in the street like drenched tumbleweed. No crime scene. Just litter.

  Nell’s eyes were drawn to it. In the periphery was Lindsay’s silhouette against the flashing lights and the blur of cars passing by. She jumped when Sebastian rapped his knuckle on her window.

  She opened the door, and when the air hit her she realised how cold the night was. She hadn’t noticed earlier, when the world had stopped spinning.

  ‘Did you find anything out?’ Nell asked.

  ‘They’re going to check with some gas stations and banks to see if the joyride was captured on any surveillance cameras,’ Bas said. ‘But it looks like someone stole the car and set it on fire to destroy the evidence.’

  That doesn’t make sense, Nell thought. People stole cars all the time, but then they just abandoned them. Fires drew attention. Parking a stolen coupe under a bridge where it would be stripped of its parts did not.

  And why the mannequin? Nell searched her memory. The mannequin hadn’t been wearing clothes. The hair had been blonde. This was generic enough for a shop window mannequin, but it had been a wig. Why a wig? Why blonde? Was it meant to mimic Lindsay, or was that just a coincidence?

  Nell didn’t believe in coincidences, even when she wanted to.

  6

  THEN

  The year that Nell gave birth to Reina, Lindsay aged out of the system and moved into her own apartment. It wasn’t much. The walls were thin, and now that Nell and the baby occupied the living room, the neighbours hated them.

  Reina cried. And not only when she was hungry or she had made a mess. She cried indiscriminately, at every hour. And if someone picked her up, her cry changed to a keening pitch that no human had any business being able to make. She hated being touched, and Nell, in turn, hated having to touch her. She hated holding this small, quivering little body that was always hot, as though flushed with rage. She hated the feeling that she was going to break her, or that she already had.

  Nell hadn’t known what to expect from motherhood. She had hoped it would make her feel important, but it was proving to just be another in her long pattern of failures. She didn’t know how to soothe her baby, and after a month and a half of the constant screaming, she was not sure she could even bring herself to love it.

  Loving her baby was the one thing Nell had been prepared to do well. Love was free. She expected it to be the way family worked. She loved her father, even if she hated him at the same time. And she loved Bonnie, though she’d rather have nothing to do with her most days. And she loved Lindsay, though that love had been well earned.

  But she did not love this baby. How could anyone love a thing that brought nothing but misery?

  When she slept at all, she dreamt that Reina had disappeared, or even that she had never been born. She dreamt that she had taken the money her sister offered and just aborted Reina in the first place. Dreamed of Reina’s little malformed hands and skull being scraped across her uterine walls like caviar.

  Nell awoke from these dreams hating herself, not for the dreams but for still wishing them to be true. She had never known herself to be capable of such ugly thoughts, and she never told Lindsay about them. She never told anyone. Hatred turned to fear and back again, over and over in her head, always trapped.

  Neighbours pounded on the wall. Police came. Once, that old bat downstairs called social services to make sure they weren’t stabbing the kid with hot pins. The social worker had been kind and sympathetic. ‘It’s tough when it’s the first one,’ she said. ‘I have four.’

  Lindsay had looked at Nell and said, ‘I’ll sew your vagina shut myself if you think you’re having four.’

  NOW

  Nell didn’t sleep. She sat at the desk she rarely used; she had never been good at keeping organised or committing to one spot. But right now, she was stationed there, thirty stories up from the rest of the city. A faraway siren wailed, and Nell took comfort that the sound was not for anyone in her own life. Sebastian was asleep in bed, and she could hear his rasped breathing through the open door.

  Lindsay was a small bump in the chenille throw on the couch, also asleep. She could sleep through anything. As children, the sisters had sought out their own superpowers, and they discovered that was Lindsay’s. She could escape to dreamland no matter how frightened she was.

  Nell’s superpower was that she could pretend nothing was wrong. Her foster parents thought she was dumb, or else easy, and she had escaped a lot of wrath that way.

  Nell hadn’t let Lindsay go home, and besides, in the morning Nell would have to shuttle her around to the police station, DMV and insurance office while they untangled this mess.

  For tonight, Nell could only focus on the case that had already been solved. A photograph of Easter Hamblin’s arrest was open on the front tab of her browser, the woman’s hands cuffed behind her back. A police officer is pushing her into the back of a cruiser. Her head is raised in one final defiant look at the free world. She will never see it like this again. For the rest of her life, it will be in fleeting glimpses through prison bus windows as she’s transported to and from the courthouse.

  Nell switched to the next tab. It was an email fr
om Easter’s brother Oleg; they were scheduled to meet in a downtown café tomorrow, and she typed out a reply to let him know that she couldn’t make it. The next day would be better. Or any other day this week. ‘Schedule’s free whenever you are,’ she wrote.

  She hit send.

  She opened a new tab.

  Here she hesitated, staring at the blinking cursor. She checked over her shoulder just to confirm that she was the only one awake, and then she typed her old name in the search bar.

  Penelope Wendall.

  It was a name she hadn’t used since 2011, after it had been legally changed. She wanted to believe that she could abandon her past in a pen stroke. Register for college as a new person entirely.

  Most of the articles that came up were old. Photos of her teenage self, when she had been rail thin with long hair. She looked like a child in all of them, eighteen years old with a dead stare in her eyes. She had felt so old back then.

  If Sebastian saw this girl, would he recognise her? Back then, all the girls her age were on Facebook and MySpace. Their lives were chronicled in photos of parties, drives with friends, posing over plates of fajitas in restaurants. But Nell hadn’t indulged in any of these things. She hadn’t even taken pictures of Reina, much less herself. Who would she have shared them with anyway? She didn’t have any friends. Even Lindsay had eluded her back then, lost in the fiery passion of her courtship with Matthew Cranlin. Nell pretended she hated her sister during those years, rather than accept that she had been abandoned by a third parent. And so the only photos of teenage Nell came from blurry surveillance footage and paparazzi candids.

  Her blood went cold at the photo of Ethan with his arm around her. Her face was covered by the jacket of his suit as he ushered her down the church steps. It had been a long time since Nell had seen her child’s father, and this photo was so clear. He was in focus: pale skin, dark blue eyes, black hair that he let grow almost to his shoulders. She could see in his face that he loved her then. This was the first vigil after Reina went missing.

  She scrolled down, pushing the image out of her mind. She had learned to do that with Ethan. She tucked him away somewhere in her brain amid heaps of awkward social encounters and bitter regrets. He never went away completely, but neither did any other bits of the past. The present was just a slide show projected onto all the things people wanted to hide.

  Her name appeared in no articles in the year after the trial. This was a credit to her defence attorney, who had managed to put a gag order on Ethan’s parents, the Eddletons. They could discuss their missing grandchild all they wanted. They could hang flyers and muscle their way onto talk shows and stand on the roof shouting with a megaphone, but Nell was always to be blurred out of photos and her name was never to be spoken.

  There were a few message boards dated as late as 2017. People trying to find Nell, wondering where she was, hoping she was dead and sharing rumours that she was. But it’s no fun waiting for a witch to burn if the witch never shows, and the interest died away. There were new mothers to hate. Maggie Kitling, who shot her five- and seven-year-old daughters and made it look like a botched carjacking because her boyfriend hadn’t wanted children. Elaine Yeates, who drowned her son in the family swimming pool because his ADHD was too demanding and her church forbade medications to calm him.

  Even these women, with their confessions captured on police interrogation room cameras and uploaded to YouTube, were eventually forgotten.

  Nell closed the tab and went back to reading about Easter and Autumn. The sisters had kept a low profile. There was no social media and no shared photos. The other tenants in their apartment complex had not even known they had ever been conjoined.

  There was more information in the stack of photographs Oleg had given her. Maybe that was how Easter had learned who she was; they were both so good at hiding in plain sight.

  She opened a new private tab and typed in SilverBars.org, a forum that came up somewhere in the search results of every case she researched. A collection of message boards for crime and punishment addicts, it boasted millions of threads, ranging from news and general updates on cases, all the way to prison groupies who discussed their favourite cases, which inmate was the most fuckable and tips for writing a letter that was guaranteed to get a response.

  Nell typed ‘Penelope Wendall’ in the search field. There were no hits, but this was always the case whenever she checked. The website was founded in 2015 by a bunch of prison groupies who were kicked off of other social media platforms for violating their terms of service. And by 2015, Nell’s own story had long since been buried under an avalanche of newer, more sensationalised stories of deceit and murder and unsolved disappearances.

  She intended to keep it that way.

  7

  NOW

  The ride to the police station was silent, neither Nell nor Lindsay in any particular mood for chatter, both of them lost, for once, in their own separate worries. They were never without worries, but they were usually better at hiding them.

  Lindsay still hadn’t been home to change, and now her hair smelled like Nell’s shampoo and she was wearing Nell’s clothes: straight-leg jeans and a white sweater with wooden buttons. The plainness of Nell’s wardrobe irritated Lindsay, but on her, somehow these pieces looked glamorous. The look was topped off with Lindsay’s heart-shaped sunglasses and coral lipstick. Sometimes her beauty was polished and manicured, and other times, like today, it was haphazard and bohemian. But it always emanated strength and assuredness.

  It was a marvel to Nell that they were related sometimes. Every good thing in Lindsay’s life had been hard-won and meticulously planned. Even when it blew up, like her marriages, the pieces fell in a way that could still be utilised. Conversely, Nell came about all her good fortunes by accident, without trying, and lived with the constant fear that she would inevitably fuck them up.

  She parked in front of the station just as a car sped from the lot, siren blaring. Neither sister was unfamiliar with facilities of law enforcement, but this trip felt especially ominous.

  Minutes later, they found themselves sitting in an interview room, waiting for an officer to speak to them. The air was dry and punishingly hot. Lindsay groused about sweating off her concealer. After several moments of fussing, she said, ‘You look like you need a drink. I propose an early lunch after we’re done here. We have another two hours before the appointment with the insurance agent.’

  ‘Sure.’ Nell pulled the phone from her purse and checked for messages. Nothing new since this morning. She turned off the screen and tucked it back amid wads of receipts and a pack of spearmint gum.

  ‘Mrs Della,’ an officer entered the room, pausing to close the door behind him. ‘Thank you so much for coming down to speak with me. I’m Officer Greg Rayburn.’

  ‘It’s Ms Della, actually,’ Lindsay said as she shook his hand. She had kept Robert’s name in the divorce but dropped the implication that it had ever belonged to him. ‘I don’t understand why I needed to come down in person, though. Isn’t this something that can be worked out through the insurance?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that. Your insurance company will want to do their own inspection of the vehicle, but we’re treating this as a threat of bodily harm.’

  ‘A threat?’ Lindsay blinked. ‘Someone took my car out for a joyride and trashed it. I live in the suburbs, Greg. Lots of rich brats looking to rebel.’

  The officer appeared flustered by her easy use of his name, but he went on. ‘Where was your car parked, Ms Della?’

  ‘In my driveway,’ Lindsay said. ‘There’s a gate, but I don’t lock it.’

  ‘And where were you?’ Rayburn asked.

  ‘Out with friends.’ Lindsay was deliberately vague. ‘I wasn’t driving. The car was missing when I got home. I keep a spare set of keys hidden under the back porch and they were gone.’

  Rayburn laid his clipboard on the table, face down so his notes weren’t showing. He leaned closer. ‘Ms
Della, can you think of anyone who might want to harm you? Threaten you?’

  Lindsay shot a fleeting stare at Nell. In that instant, Nell saw the epiphany in Lindsay’s eyes. Shut up, that look said. Don’t you dare.

  Nell didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t have, even without the warning.

  ‘There’s nobody,’ Lindsay said. ‘Like I said, I’m sure it was some bored rich kids looking for something to do.’

  The officer unclipped a manila folder from his clipboard and slid it across the table to Lindsay. She opened it, and her expression almost resembled fear, before she laughed instead. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘That’s the mannequin that was pulled from your car last night. It was stolen from a women’s clothing boutique on 45th and Main. We’re still waiting on security cam footage from the store and the gas station across the street.’

  45th was uptown, in the part of the city that flirted with the outlying suburbs. The absence of any nightlife scene meant it was reasonably quiet. For some kids looking to get into white-collar trouble, it was an unsurprising choice.

  Nell scooted her chair closer and looked at the photo too. The mannequin was made of a durable plastic, with painted eyebrows and blue eyeshadow that gave it an eerily lifelike appearance. The wig was bright and garish; an unlikely choice for such an upscale shop. It looked like a costume store wig. A realistic wig was useless if it wasn’t the right colour. Someone had made sure this mannequin had a cheap imitation of Lindsay’s features.

  ‘I don’t know what this is supposed to tell me.’ Lindsay slid the folder back to Rayburn. ‘If I’ve answered your questions, I’ll be going now.’

  ‘Ms Della—’

  ‘My insurance will be in touch.’ Lindsay stood, Nell automatically following. ‘Thank you for your work, Greg, and your concern. But I’m sure you’ll get your camera footage and realise this was just a group of kids. Don’t go too hard on them. Insurance will get me a new car; I’m not looking to press charges.’