by Scott Hale
Stephen pressed his nose to her hair, kissed her scalp. “Let’s go look at it, then.”
Forensics had flayed their bedroom. The bed had been stripped; the closet picked clean. The chest of drawers had undergone an autopsy: the drawers had been ripped open, and the clothes inside torn out. The curtains lay crumpled on the ground, while the picture frames sat askew upon the wall—dirt squares outlining where they’d once been. In the adjoining bathroom, faint remnants of fingerprinting powder dusted the sink and toilet; and with the right light, you could even see the luminol on the tile, along the baseboards.
But it was the ceiling above Linnéa and Stephen’s bed that’d seen the most attention. A Child in Every Home. The phrase had been written in ash with a finger, or as the officers so chillingly put it, “Someone’s finger.” It hadn’t been small, either. The phrase ran just as long as their queen size bed did, and the words had been written in a clichéd, childish scrawl—the same way a kid writes when they’re referencing their parents’ examples. The distance between the bed and the ceiling wasn’t small, either. The intruder would’ve had to have been at least eight feet tall and on the tips of their toes to begin to have a chance at touching the ceiling.
Now, the words were gone. All that remained of them were two black, half-dollar sized smudges a few inches apart from one another. The police had forgotten to scrub them away. Linnéa and Stephen hadn’t even really realized they were there until this moment, when they were staring up at them, almost into them.
“It stinks in here,” Linnéa said. She held her nose. “It doesn’t smell like our home anymore.”
Stephen nodded. He grabbed a pillow off the bed and hurled it at one of the black smudges. They didn’t budge.
Linnéa grabbed the pillow before he could lob it again. “It’s fine. Leave it. I want it to be the first thing I see in the morning, and the last thing I see at night. I’m not fucking around anymore.”
“Yeah,” Stephen said. Furrowing his brow, he seemed to search inside himself for something, and then: “Yeah. You’re right. We’ve done the ‘you’re doing everything you can’ approach. They were in our house.”
Still staring at the smudges, she asked, “They were in our house the night after we found all that out about the vermillion veins. Is that a coincidence?”
Stephen shrugged. “I… I don’t know.”
“Maybe I did hallucinate the others I saw outside, but someone was in here.”
“Right. Obviously.”
“Under our nose. Maybe the whole day. Whoever took our baby… they’re still in town. They’re getting around without drawing any suspicion.”
Stephen shuffled his feet. “Lin, they got four kids. Seems like they’re intending on nabbing a few more. One month and… if they are… that’s a long time to care for that many kids. With no ransom, either.”
“Filipa’s alive,” Linnéa belted at him. “She’s alive.”
“She is,” Stephen said, nodding.
Linnéa didn’t like her husband’s reluctance. It mirrored her own in ways she couldn’t yet articulate. She sat down on the bed, lay back until she was propped up against the headboard. She kept her eyes fixed on the two black smudges. In this moment, they were everything. They were a confirmation that they weren’t crazy, that their daughter was truly missing. They were a validation of all her fears and parental paranoias. They were her, and they were her mother: two misshapen omens, identical despite their differences. Someone could’ve told Linnéa the smudges had always been there, and she would’ve believed them. You didn’t see darkness when you spent your whole life staring into the light. Coolness has its costs.
“You found out all manner of things last night, didn’t you?” Linnéa said, finally focusing on Stephen.
“I did.”
“Why’re you holding back on me?”
“Because…” He sat down beside her, pressed his hand over her knee. “Because you’re going to agree with me. And I think I’ve got my mind made up. And I feel desperate. I feel like… hurting someone.”
Linnéa sat up. “You found Connor Prendergast.”
“I did.”
“We should track him. See where he goes.”
“I know.”
“None of the other parents even bothered showing up last night.”
“They’re keeping their distance.”
Linnéa’s cheek quivered. “We come together, they move away. Bet you they think we’re marked.”
Stephen shifted. “Are we?”
“It’s someone in the neighborhood,” Linnéa said, sure of herself. “Living here or staying here.”
“You think its Trent, or Ellen, or Bethany?”
“I think we’re two parents who’ve lost their little girl.” She covered her nose from the smell. “We’re marked already, you know? It’s all over us. People either get sympathetic, or sick of us—”
“But they get out of our way,” Stephen said.
“As long as we didn’t do anything wrong, for now, we can’t do nothing wrong.” She swung her feet over the side of the bed.
A piece of the ceiling chipped away and fell on Stephen’s hand. He wiped it off and said, “Okay. Get dressed, then. Connor will be waking up for coffee in the next hour.”
With Linnéa behind the wheel, she and Stephen navigated the clogged streets of Six Pillars. Police cruisers and news vans formed frustration barricades that only a good deal of honking and middle fingers could break. Towards the entrance to the neighborhood, where the detoured traffic rumbled bumper-to-bumper, Linnéa noticed not only several trucks from the construction company, Hannover, but also an ice cream truck, a school bus one month too early to be picking up kids, and a blue truck with the logo “Price Homes”—the company that was responsible for building and expanding Six Pillars.
She made a mental note of what she’d seen, and then, as they pulled out of the neighborhood, noticed a white van at a stop sign. The traffic was too congested to get at it, so instead she took a picture of the license plate, and they kept on going.
By 7:45 AM, Linnéa and Stephen rolled up to Connor Prendergast’s house and parallel parked themselves in between two beat-up junkers.
It wasn’t much, this stakeout, but it felt like a lot; at least, it did to Linnéa. For a month and some change, they’d done the missing child routine. They worked the community, hounded the police; they did their interviews, made their public pleas; they went on with their lives, even though their lives had long since left them behind; they played detective from the comforts of their home and cars; they bared themselves in therapy, brutalized themselves in private. And what did they have to show for it? Less weight, more weight; dark circles under their eyes, wrinkles where there hadn’t been wrinkles before; sleepless nights, aimless days; an empty bedroom at the end of the hall; photographs of a girl they’d once known—her name had been Filipa, and who knew when she was due back home.
Maybe nothing would come of this, but nothing was better than the empty something they kept sustaining themselves on. That Internet prescribed diet of happy thoughts and keeping busy and avoiding blame and letting yourself move on. It was the kind of diet made to make you look good to others; fancy robes to hide the skeleton inside.
A light came on in Connor’s house. She and Stephen shot up in their seats like two dogs hearing the garage door go up.
“Did you take a bite out of the vein this morning?” he asked her.
She didn’t say anything.
“Me, too.”
Linnéa glanced at him from the corner of her eye. Whatever the vermillion veins were, whether they were hallucinogenic or not, they made her feel renewed in ways most over-the-counters couldn’t. Besides, if they were truly left as markings or offerings, then eating them was, in a way, like glimpsing the culprit’s state of mind. She wanted to walk around in their shoes a bit, before she knocked them the fuck off their feet.
Connor came out 8:07 AM dressed like a hipster going as a hipster to a
Halloween party. His legs were two twigs stuffed into even skinnier jeans; he wore a white collared shirt underneath a brown vest; and his hair was an oily rat’s nest stuffed into a red, knit beanie that hung off the back of his head like a nutsack. The only thing he was missing was a thick pair of glasses and… there they were; Connor produced them out of thin air like a magician might a handful of flowers and put them on.
The so-called supernatural investigator triple-locked his front door and did a double-take of the street. Securing the messenger bag slung over his shoulder, he hurried to his car, got in it. It took a few turns of the key before the engine came to.
Then he was off.
And they were off with him.
As Stephen had predicted, Connor drove downtown to a non-corporate coffee shop and retreated to the back, where he sat from 8:30 AM until 12:00 PM on his laptop, hitting the drink hard. Linnéa and Stephen watched him the entire time and kept track of who he was chummy with (the silver-haired waitress, the dark-haired waitress, and the redheaded patron—a Neapolitan ménage à trois, as Stephen called it).
At 11:59 AM, he got a call on his phone, and fifteen minutes later, Connor, with Linnéa and Stephen camped out behind some bushes, was out snooping around a low-income housing complex not but a stone’s throw away from Six Pillars. He was there until 1:19 PM, and when he came out, he came out covered in dirt, and sweating. He pockets looked stuffed, too, and soaked through. Trailing behind him was a rough looking, thirty-year-old-or-so woman in a kimono. She tried to hand him a wad of bills that must’ve been tips from the club she probably worked at, but, with a smile and a laugh, he refused and hurried back into his car.
“What’s that about?” Linnéa said to Stephen.
“Start looking closely into anyone’s life and shit’s bound to get weird.”
He took out his phone, called the police, and reported a ‘suspicious person’ at this address.
“Just in case,” he said, trailing off as a man in a business suit walked past their car, waving at them.
1:42 PM, and Connor was at one of Bedlam’s abandoned-for-summer grade schools, Magdalene Middle. On his way to graduating from possible kidnapper to full-on pedo, Connor crept up on a group of five boys monkeying around on the monkey bars. The boys, ages 12 to 14, pushed Connor around, pretended to throw punches at him, and then tossed him a bag of weed. Connor threw a fistful of ones to the wind, and the boys scattered after them, all awkward limbs and cracking voices.
Around 2:00 PM, Connor made a trip to the grocery store. This time, Linnéa and Stephen did get out, and they stalked him through the aisles. He didn’t buy anything of note; just a bunch of snacks for the night to come.
A uniformed police officer noticed them mid-stalking, and made the sign of the cross in their direction.
2:40 PM, he was back home, and Linnéa and Stephen were back between the two junkers, watching Connor through the windows. They waited there until 5:00 PM.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this today,” Linnéa said, rubbing her ass. “I got to pee.”
Stephen said, “Yeah,” and then bit into his thumbnail. “You want to just go knock on his door?”
“Eh, let’s come back tomorrow night. One more go round.”
“I just don’t want to waste too much time on him if he’s not our guy. What he might have to say could be helpful.”
“Then go knock—”
Stephen waved his hands. “No, no. You’re right. You ready to go back?”
“Yeah.” She wasn’t going to say it, but before she could stop herself: “I kind of hope there’s another message in our bedroom.”
With a blank face, Stephen said, “Yeah, I do, too.”
“The more time they’re fucking with us, the less time they’re with Filipa.”
“She could get away,” Stephen said, voice trembling.
Linnéa smiled. Her thoughts drifted to that dark place in her mind, where her daughter was crucified to cruel statistics. “Alright. Let’s—”
Her phone buzzed. She took it out of her pocket.
“It’s a text from Ellen,” she said.
Stephen started up the car. “What’s she want?”
Linnéa laughed and stared at the screen, confused. “She, uh, wants me to come over tonight.”
“You?”
“Yeah.” She held the phone up to his face. “Girls only. That’s what she said.”
The Crosses had lived across from Linnéa and Stephen for the last eight years, and still Linnéa couldn’t help but feel like a stranger as she crept up their rickety porch. Bearing a cheap bottle of wine and a boring ass salad she’d thrown together as soon she got back, she twisted around before ringing the doorbell and had a measure of her surroundings.
The police presence had died down for the night, though there still appeared to be two or three cruisers on patrol in Six Pillars this evening.
No one else, however, was on the streets. Just as it had been the day the kids disappeared, there were no sounds or signs of children outdoors. They were sealed away in their homes, in their rooms, under the watchful eyes of their parents who now could reap the benefits of Linnéa’s and the others’ sufferings.
To her left was Trent Resin’s place—that small, economy sized home that looked as if it’d been cobbled together from the leftovers of the houses surrounding it. Though the lights were off inside it, and the sun was falling fast, Linnéa was certain he was at the window, watching her.
To her right was Bethany and Todd Simmons’ makeover—that mid-sized, middle-class two story that wanted desperately to be one of the mansions from west Bedlam. Painted yellow and green, it stuck out like a gangrenous limb covered in the trashy, overpriced, supermarket jewelry. Everything on, in, or around the house—the doors, the windows, and the American flag; the televisions, tablets, and smartphones; the yard, garden, and swimming pool, and the SUVs on lease—were new, except for the house itself. The house was a forty-year-old overdose, overlooked and looked over, and left to rot in a perpetual, high-school-was-the-best-years-of-my-life daze.
And Linnéa knew Bethany was watching her. She was in the backyard sucking down a twelve pack. She waved when the two of them made eye contact.
Linnéa hadn’t always paid attention to these people or the things they surrounded themselves with, but those days were over for her. Now, she had to watch everything all the time and strip it down with the sharpest of cynicisms. Agnes would be proud.
Going to ring the doorbell, Linnéa took a step back as Ellen flung the front door open and pushed the screen aside.
“Oh, Lin, thanks for coming.” Ellen did a hover hands-like hug and then waved her in. “Richard’s not home.”
The Crosses’ house wasn’t much to look at from the outside. It wasn’t a derelict like Resin’s, or dolled-up like the Simmonses’. But on the inside? On the inside, the Crosses had settled on a decade, the 1970s, and hadn’t budged since. It was all dark wood and brown carpet and leather furniture in odd places. The lightbulbs in the ceiling and lamps burned dully—dimmed by the motes that floated around them like tiny moths. It smelled, too, like rotting eggs and garlic, but who was to say that wasn’t coming off Linnéa? It was all she smelled these days, wherever she went.
“Richard’s not home?” Linnéa said as Ellen shut the front door behind them.
“He went out.” Ellen flashed a smile. “Yesterday. Kitchen’s this way.”
Linnéa followed Ellen through the house. A TV stand without a TV stood out to her; mostly because there were fresh TV dinners in front of it.
When they passed the door to the basement, Ellen stopped and lingered on it.
“Darlene’s room’s down there,” Linnéa said.
Ellen fumbled with the knob. “I wash our clothes by hand in the bathtub up here. Washer and dryer are down there.”
“When’s the last time you went into Darlene’s room?”
Ellen shrugged.
Linnéa handed Ellen the bottle of w
ine. “If we polish this off, we could go down together.”
She tapped her fingers against the glass, sloshed the red inside. “Got any more?”
Girls’ night at the Crosses’ wasn’t so much as a girls’ night as it was Linnéa and Ellen sitting at the kitchen table, tagging one another in on the wine, while the salad Linnéa’d brought and the pasta Ellen made gathered fruit flies on the counter. The bugs complimented the faded yellow, sticky trap-looking curtains well.
After bullshitting for a good twenty minutes, Linnéa leaned back in her chair, wiped the wine off her lips, and said, “No Beth?”
“To be honest, I didn’t ask her.”
“How come?”
Ellen’s eyes went dead. In that moment, she looked everything like the wasteland scarecrow she resembled.
“She’d make it all about her,” Linnéa said.
Ellen came to and laughed. “How do you do it, Lin?”
“What’s that?”
“Stay cool through all this.”
Linnéa twitched. Was it so obvious? Had it always been? What did she look like to the rest of them? She tongued her teeth and tasted the sticky remains of the vermillion veins from this morning. Doing that, she then wondered: Why am I the only parent here?
“I’m not cool,” she said. “I can barely stand it most days.”
Trying to sound innocent, Ellen said, “You and Stephen were gone all day.”
Linnéa cocked her head.
“Did you… find anything?”
“No, we should probably leave the police work for the police.”
Why did she feel as if she were on trial all of a sudden?
Ellen poured herself another glass of wine. She took a few deep, heavy, nervous breaths and then: “Was there really someone in your house?”
“Yes,” Linnéa said without hesitation.
“Did you see them?”
“In the house? No, not—”
“The angels,” Ellen said. “On the yards. Last night”
Linnéa put the glass to her mouth and said into it, “Did… did you?”
Ellen nodded. “What was Stephen doing in Bethany’s yard?”
