The Children

by Ann Leary

  “Hey, who’s that?” Max called out.

  Everett turned off the headlights and jumped down. “Max?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me. Everett Hastings. I’m a friend of Clay’s.”

  “Oh, hey, man, what’s up?”

  Apparently, it was Max’s screams that had the police there so fast. His parents had awakened when they heard the commotion. They looked out the window and saw that Everett was giving Max a pounding. Just with his fists. Everett was booked on a first-degree assault charge. He really messed up Max’s face. He had followed Max and attacked him, unprovoked, I guess that’s why it was considered first-degree assault. It was considered unprovoked.

  In the end, Everett got a year of probation. Max’s family didn’t want a trial. Everett didn’t want a trial. The prosecutor made a deal with Everett’s lawyer. But Everett was expelled from UConn. He moved back to the caretaker’s cottage and the timing worked out; Bud had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s that year. He and Betty were going to move down to a retirement community in Florida. Now Whit wouldn’t have to find somebody else to move into the carriage house. Everett would live there and do the odd jobs. Everett was like a third son to Whit; Whit had always said so. Whit had even helped Everett with his legal fees, we found out later. I remember thinking that was so generous of Whit and so like him to do so without telling anybody.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Sally seemed to be back to herself the day after Spin and Laurel left. I was worried that she had stopped taking her mood stabilizer, but if she had, she would have ramped up quickly into full-blown mania, which, in the past, had meant a complete break from reality. She thinks, for example, that cars have reptilian brains, that Joan works for Al-Qaeda, that she has the ability to read people’s urine and predict the future—stuff like that.

  What happened that night in the tunnel didn’t make Sally sick, it didn’t cause her disorder. I know that now. I learned everything I could about bipolar disorder after she was hospitalized the first time. The tunnel incident, the rape, didn’t even trigger her first manic episode; that happened months later.

  Sally, I learned from her doctor and from my own reading, has an imbalance in her brain. It’s physiological. You can see the differences in MRIs of bipolar patients. Her moodiness as a child, her intense times of joy, her dark fits of rage; later, during adolescence, her insomnia, her hypersexuality—these had all been signs. Nobody knew what it all meant at the time. Joan had a sense that something was wrong, I had heard her talk to Whit about it over the years, but he had always laughed off her fears. Sally was an artist, a true artist, according to Whit. He had always considered her a wildly gifted musician, a sort of prodigy, and he chalked up her behavior to youthful high spirits.

  “She’ll outgrow this,” he said to our mother. “She’ll end up dull and resigned to life like the rest of us.” That didn’t happen, but she’s been very successful when she stays on her lithium.

  The Monday after the Fourth, Sally was up very early. She’d been working on a thing called a Loop Station. A “Looper,” she calls it. She’s able to record tracks on her violin, the piano, other instruments and vocals if necessary, and then mix them. It’s not recording studio quality, of course, but she was using it to create a sample for the film director.

  Matt responded to my e-mail:

  I didn’t mean Mr. Clean. Hope I didn’t freak you out. Was trying to be funny. But LoneStarLiza has the same IP address as you. She, or he, is there. In the house. Is it you? Is she your sock puppet? Be careful.

  He had to be wrong about this. I’d never told anybody, not even Sally, about my blog. So there’s no way anybody in the house could be commenting on it.

  Rick Cohen came over after lunch. Rick’s a retired electrical engineer and a kick-ass bass player, an old friend of both Sally and Whit. He had agreed to play the bass for her score, and I could hear them playing, talking, and laughing from where I was working in the attic. That evening, I was surprised to hear Sally say that she couldn’t wait for Spin to get back. She wanted him to play some Spanish guitar. Everett can play blues guitar, rock and roll, bluegrass, but Spin is really the better guitarist.

  Sally had a great idea about a solo for the guitar and banjo for one of the sequences in the film. I’d wandered into the music room to see what she was trying to score, and she showed me this sequence of two men driving a herd of cattle over some arid country. This is where she wanted the Spanish music. I played the banjo part and as I was playing, she kept saying, “This’ll be where Spin comes in” and “Maybe Spin will do something there.” I was glad she was preparing a project to work on with Spin. It would help everybody move on from that argument.

  * * *

  It was Tuesday afternoon when Washington Fuentes drove up. I was sitting on the porch, watching Everett and Sally work on her score. Everett had somehow borrowed three enormous kettledrums and set them up on the deck next to Whit’s shed. Sally played the stuff she had already looped, the melody he’d be accompanying, and then they started recording.

  Everett really loves making music, but he had never played kettledrums before, so he spent a good hour messing around with them while Sally set up her equipment. After they’d played the piece through a couple of times, he convinced Sally that they needed a snare and a cymbal, so he brought these from his house. Now, with the accompanying bass and backup violins that Sally had blasting from the Looper, Sally and Everett’s drum and fiddle sounded quite amazing.

  “Brava, Sally!” I shouted when they took a break.

  “I can hear the wind, it’s too much. The rain, I’m afraid it’s about to start,” she fretted.

  They had started up again by the time Washington drove up our driveway. Everett and Sally didn’t hear him, they were so absorbed in their work, but I gave him a big wave and he joined me up on the porch.

  The air was humid, the breeze was hot, and Sally’s hair was damp with sweat. She was wearing shorts and a bikini top. She had the violin tucked under her chin and was tapping the beat with her bare foot as she fiddled. Everett hit the giant drums at this point and they resounded with a Boom! Boom-boom-boom BOOM!

  “Wow,” Washington said.

  “She’s composing it for a movie,” I told him.

  Sally stopped suddenly and shouted, “Jesus Christ, Ev, I told you, the second fucking phrase, you came in too soon.”

  “No, that’s not what you said. But whatever,” he said, laughing.

  They started up again.

  “She’s probably going to be doing this for a while. Did you come to see her?” I asked.

  “Well, yes, but I also wanted to talk to you. Is anybody inside?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Can we go inside and talk?”

  “Sure,” I said. I held open the door. Sally was facing Everett and didn’t see us, but Everett did. I think it distracted him, because when we got inside, I heard Sally shout, “STOP, STOP, STOP. Go back. Start again.”

  I offered Washington a drink and he declined. He seemed a little uncomfortable. I suspected it had to do with Sally.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I’m worried about you,” he said.

  “Me?” I asked. “Why?”

  “You have an enemy.”

  * * *

  The reports were anonymous. They’d started almost immediately after Washington came to our house to talk about the break-ins. Somebody was sending letters to the local barracks. They were printed in plain block letters and were addressed to Trooper Fuentes. They were about my blog. They knew it was mine. They knew that Washington knew me personally. They wanted me to be investigated for fraud. Washington showed me copies of the letters.

  I just listened. The first letter accused me of starting the GoFundMe account for Wyatt’s disorder. He tried to hand it to me, but I didn’t want him to see how much my hands were shaking, so I just kept it clenched in my lap. He placed the others on the table.

  “So, I
know it’s your blog, because I had somebody at headquarters track the IP address,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. We heard the fiddle and the BOOM! Boom-boom-boom BOOM! carried in through the open windows.

  Finally I said, “So, are you here to arrest me?”

  Washington said, “No! Of course not. I mean, I’d shut down the blog if I were you. Somebody might investigate it, but not me. Not state police. Tell your sponsors. Hopefully, they’ll just terminate your contract. They don’t want this to get out any more than you do. You need to talk to a lawyer. You should have just been happy with the income from the sponsors. When you started this fund-raising drive, well, that’s considered fraud.”

  “Wait, what do you mean? The fund for Wyatt? I didn’t start that. I’ve been trying to stop it. It was this LoneStarLiza person.”

  Washington looked at me sadly. “I had our tech guy trace that IP history, too, Charlotte. It’s been coming from here. If not your computer, another computer that shares your Wi-Fi.”

  That’s what Matt had told me. Have you checked the children. LoneStarLiza was coming from inside the house.

  “Washington, I swear, I’ve been trying to make it go away. If you’ve read the blog, you must have seen that.”

  “Who would do this?” Washington asked. “Who would want to set you up like this? Make you look like you’re scamming for money on your own blog?”

  “I have no idea. I just posted the other day that any money should go to a hospital. Did you see that? I haven’t received a penny from that blog except what the sponsors are paying me. Maybe somebody has hacked into our Wi-Fi and they’re making it look like it’s coming from here. That’s possible, right? I actually know some hackers.”

  I was thinking about Matt. Maybe he was playing some kind of sick joke. Why had I even become involved with him? He was clearly unstable, an admitted criminal and hacker.

  “I don’t know. I’m not an IT expert, but it looks bad, Charlotte. Close it down before people start looking into this. Maybe it’ll all go away. It would be bad for your blog if all your followers learned that you don’t have kids, right?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Anyway, the thing that worries me is that you have somebody who really wants to hurt you. Read these letters again. There’s a threatening tone. This person hates you.”

  Just then, Sally came in. “Officer Fuentes!” she said, and she actually blushed a little. He stood up and they hugged. It was awkward, in a sort of adorable way. Everett had followed her inside and was getting himself a glass of water.

  “Hey, Everett, how’s it going?” Washington said.

  “All right, how ’bout you?” Ev was licking the little arc between his thumb and forefinger. It seemed he was getting a blister from the drumsticks.

  “Either of you ever heard of somebody named LoneStarLiza?” Washington asked them.

  Everett just took a sip of water. He seemed lost in thought, and then he realized the question was being asked of him.

  “Lone star who?” Everett asked.

  “No,” said Sally.

  Washington was watching them carefully. He could see that it wasn’t either of them.

  “It looks like somebody’s been using one of your computers.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  In a perfect world, Washington Fuentes wouldn’t have dropped this bomb in front of Sally. But he didn’t know her history. He didn’t know that when she’s on edge, as she had been ever since the night of the hornet spray—ever since Laurel had arrived, come to think of it—that it’s never a good idea to confirm her paranoid ideas. Just a few days ago, she had been carrying on about Laurel having some dark, evil Internet dealings, and now Washington had announced that somebody had been using one of our computers.

  Washington hadn’t quite believed me when I said that Sally and Everett knew nothing about my blog. When he saw their confusion, he looked at me apologetically. I decided just to give them the one-liner.

  “I have this blog, it’s a mommy blog. It’s kind of—huge.”

  “What?” Everett said. “A mommy blog?”

  “Yes, it’s actually a famous mommy blog. I’ve picked up some sponsors this past year. One big one. They pay me a lot. I guess I’ll have to pay them back. They might sue me.”

  I do this thing sometimes when I’m nervous. I giggle. I’ve done it since I was little. In situations where I might be expected to cry, I often laugh. “Paradoxical laughter,” it’s called. I had been giggling when I started with my little confession, but now it was getting out of control.

  “So,” I laughed, “these mommies, some of my really loyal … mommies … they started a fund.”

  I had to keep pausing to gasp for air. “And now Washington’s involved!” I was bent over, I was laughing so hard. “Because it’s illegal.”

  “What?” Everett said. “Baby, what the fuck is going on?”

  “I can’t,” I cried. “I’m going to wet my pants.”

  Now Sally was laughing, too. “I can’t understand anything you’re saying,” she said, choking with mirth. “You joined a mommy fund? What is that? I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Washington, tell them what’s going on,” I said. “Tell them the whole thing.” And I ran to the bathroom.

  * * *

  Nobody was laughing when I came back into the kitchen.

  “It’s her,” Sally was saying. “It’s Laurel. I knew it. She wants to hurt us.” Sally kept looking to the window, as if she expected to find Laurel walking up the driveway.

  “No, Sally,” I said.

  Everett said, “Hey, Sal, it looks like it’s starting to rain. We gotta get those drums inside. I borrowed them from Holden, I can’t let them get wet.”

  “She must have gone into the attic, Lottie, when you were asleep.”

  “My laptop’s password-protected. She’d never have figured out my code.”

  “Or she went into your house, Everett, when you weren’t here. Or maybe when you were asleep,” Sally said.

  “I doubt that,” Everett said. “Anyway, I’m moving those drums.” He went outside. I didn’t blame him. It was clear that Sally was just getting started.

  “Sally, this has nothing to do with Laurel,” I said.

  “I’ve known it all along, Washington,” Sally said. “She’s not who she appears to be. She’s a fucking fraud; I’ve known it all along.”

  I caught Washington’s eye and gave him a look. Unfortunately, Sally saw me.

  “What the fuck was that look about, Charlotte? See? Nobody trusts a thing I say, but we’ll all be sorry when she’s ruined us.”

  “Sally,” I said, “Laurel doesn’t even know about my blog.”

  “HA! That’s what you think,” Sally said. Then she grabbed Washington’s hands and, looking into his eyes, whispered, “Washington, nobody believes me. Nobody in this family believes a thing I ever say, but this is the truth: Laurel Atwood isn’t who she seems to be. She’s some kind of devil. I know you don’t believe me, but she’s fucking evil.…”

  Washington said, “I believe you.”

  “She’s a predator. She’s got something wrong with her.”

  “I know. I believe you.”

  Sally paused and stared at him, blinking. “What? What did you say?”

  “I believe you, Sally.”

  “You do?” she said. Now she was blinking back tears.

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  “How much have you made on the blog?” Everett asked me later, when we were alone at his house. “I mean … just a ballpark figure.”

  “Oh, you know, maybe around two hundred thousand. Roughly,” I said. “This year. So far.”

  Everett howled. “Are you KIDDING ME? Let me see what’s so great about this blog. And, by the way, you need to talk to a lawyer before you fold it. I don’t think what you’re doing is illegal. What’s it called, anyway?”

  He was about to enter the name on his computer, but I told him no
t to.

  “We don’t want this hacker to know. They might be watching your online activity.”

  “Charlotte, there’s no hacker. Sally’s right. It’s gotta be Laurel.”

  “What?” I said. “Not you, too. Based on what? Why would she do that?”

  “Okay, babe, listen.” He closed his windows and then pulled me close and said quietly, “I was going to tell you this. I was sort of waiting for the right time. The night of the Fourth, after you went to bed…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was drunk, okay. And a few of Spin’s friends wanted to go out on the lake. I took them out. I didn’t even know them. They were guys from Holden. We smoked a joint, Laurel was with us. I was really messed up. It wasn’t till we finished the joint that I realized how completely wasted I was. I wasn’t even gonna try to dock the boat. I just turned off the outboard, pulled it up, and we drifted onto the beach. Spin was on the beach, laughing really hard at us. We almost flipped the thing getting out of it.”

  “Okay, yeah, so what happened?”

  “Most people had gone home. Spin and Laurel went in the house and I went to bed.”

  I could see where this was going.

  “I was asleep, I don’t know for how long, and then she was in my bed. I thought it was you at first.…”

  “OH, GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK!” I shouted. “You thought she was me, RIGHT!”

  “Babe, I swear, it’s all a blur. I was wasted. She had been sort of flirting with me all night. On the boat, I admit … maybe I was flirting back. Just a little.”

  “You expected her to come over here.”

  “No.”

  “I think you did. You told her to.”

  “Babe.” He tried to hug me, but I pushed him away.

  “You thought she’d come over after the boat ride and then you were surprised to see Spin on the beach.”

  “Charlotte, not in a million years would I do that. Why would I lie about this?”

  “Don’t touch me. I have no idea who you are.”

  “I was drunk.”

  “I don’t care how drunk a person is, he doesn’t do what he wouldn’t do sober.”