All The Pretty Dead Girls

by John Manning

  Joyce grinned. “She gets people riled up. That’s what it’s all about, sweetie. Getting people riled up.”

  “Or getting people to think.”

  “Hell, no!” Joyce laughed again. “If they think too long, they start getting too many ideas!”

  If they think too long, maybe they’ll stop buying your books, Sue thought.

  “Do you think you’re getting a good education at Wilbourne?”

  “I guess.” Sue shrugged. “I mean, it’s not easy—I really have to study and work hard to get good grades…and my teachers really push me, you know?”

  “Wilbourne is a great school,” Joyce replied. She smiled and raised her eyebrows. “And did you get a chance to read my book?”

  Sue looked down at her Coke. “Um, yes.”

  “I gather you didn’t much care for it?” Joyce barked out a laugh. “That’s okay, Sue, you aren’t my target audience. Did some of the things I wrote in it shock you?”

  “No. Well, yeah.” Sue looked Joyce directly in the eye. “There wasn’t anything in it that I hadn’t heard before. You and my grandfather agree on almost everything. It was pretty much the way you said things that I didn’t care for.”

  “Because I’m a bitch?” Joyce laughed again. “Yeah, I can be pretty mean, right? That’s the point, you know. I say things that people think but don’t have the balls to come right out and say. Get people riled up. That’s my motto.” The waitress set down her Coke and Joyce took a sip. “But if you think I’m bad, you should see the things the liberals say about me sometime.”

  “I have,” Sue said. “You seem to provoke quite a bit of controversy.”

  “And that’s the point, sweetie! Get things stirred up! You know what my favorite Web site is? Joyce Davenport is a Lying Cunt dot com. Isn’t that great? People get all passionate—and they start accusing me of everything—and then they get mad at each other and actually start arguing with each other! It’s fantastic!”

  The waitress was hovering to take their orders. Without looking at her, Joyce said, “I’ll have the Cobb salad, no dressing. Sue?”

  “I’ll have the Reuben sandwich with fries.” Sue smiled at the waitress and handed over her menu.

  “A Reuben?” Joyce raised her eyebrows. “That’s pretty fattening, Sue.”

  Sue smirked. “I’m not one of those girls who worries about my weight.”

  “Good for you.” Joyce sighed. “But me—I have to watch my weight.” She patted her stomach. “Don’t think I’m not aware that if I gained about fifty pounds, I wouldn’t get on television any more.”

  Sue was becoming impatient. “Please, Joyce,” she said, “I want to know about my mother.”

  “Direct and to the point. I like that.” Joyce laughed. “But I wouldn’t have expected anything less from Mariclare’s little girl.”

  “You knew her well?”

  “Well, as I told you before, your mother and I were roommates at Wilbourne. I really liked your mother. I miss her.”

  I can’t believe my mother would be friends with someone like you.

  “I wanted to see you, to talk to you about her, many times over the years, but your grandfather wouldn’t allow it,” Joyce went on. “I understood. It hurt your grandfather too much to talk about Mariclare.”

  “But you decided to risk his displeasure when you sought me out at Wilbourne.”

  “Darling,” Joyce said, reaching over and patting Sue’s hand. “He gave me permission to do so.”

  “He did?”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t do anything behind your grandfather’s back.”

  “He never told me,” Sue said, Just like he hadn’t told her he’d been in contact with Dean Gregory, that he’d intended for Sue to go to Wilbourne all along…

  “Sweetie, I understood that everything would come out in time.” She sat back in the booth, looking over at Sue. “That’s why I phoned your grandparents to tell them we were meeting today.”

  “You did?”

  Joyce nodded. “They agreed not to say anything to you.”

  Sue was dumbfounded. “What is going on? Why does it feel that there’s all this stuff going on behind my back?”

  “Sweetie, it’s time that you learned everything. Of course, a bit at a time. Too much at once would be too much for anyone. Even me!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your grandfather is allowing me a wonderful privilege in giving you this news, Sue. I’m forever grateful to him.”

  Sue was ready to jump out of her seat. “What news?”

  Joyce was quiet for a moment. Finally, she said, “I went to see your mother last week. Told her I was meeting you.”

  “You mean…you went to the cemetery? My grandparents have never brought me, said it was too hard for them…”

  “No, baby,” Joyce said. “Your mother’s not in any cemetery.”

  “Then where…?”

  The waitress was there with their food. She settled their plates in front of them. Neither Joyce nor Sue looked down. They just kept staring at each other.

  “Sweetie,” Joyce said. “Your mother is alive.”

  “No,” Sue said, feeling as if someone had just kicked her in the stomach. “My mother and my father were both killed in a car accident when I was a baby.” There was a dull buzzing in her head.

  “No, baby.”

  “Yes!” Sue struggled to keep her voice steady. The words of Bernadette deSalis echoed in her mind: Your mother is alive. “My mother is dead!” Sue shouted.

  “No.”

  Sue squeezed the older woman’s hand. “Tell me the truth!”

  Joyce leaned back against the booth. “That’s what I’m trying to do, sweetie. Your mother is in a mental hospital in western Pennsylvania. It’s called Fair Oaks, in a town called Star of Bethlehem.”

  “My mother—in—a—mental hospital.”

  Joyce nodded. “It was a terrible thing, what happened to her. You have no idea how many times I’ve blamed myself for what happened—if only I’d done this, if only I’d done that…”

  “What—happened to her?”

  Joyce took a deep breath. “We were roommates at Wilbourne—Room 323 in Bentley Hall.”

  So she had been right. Her mother had lived in the haunted room.

  “One night, I was at the library studying. It was very late. If only I’d gone back to the room earlier…”

  “Why?”

  “Because maybe I could have stopped what happened.”

  Sue swallowed hard. “My mother was the girl who was raped in there, wasn’t she?”

  Joyce nodded. “When I got back, she was gone. She had wandered off. We looked everywhere for her, the other girls and I and Mrs. Oosterhouse…”

  “And she was never found?”

  “Oh, yes. She was found. She was missing for several days, and then one day she just turned up back here in New York.” Joyce’s voice shook as she remembered. “Except she was no longer able to speak. She seemed catatonic. Even when she regained some of her voice, she didn’t make any sense. The experience had driven her right out of her mind…”

  “Did you see her after that?”

  Joyce hesitated. “Not until after…”

  “After what?”

  “After you were born.”

  Suddenly, Sue understood.

  Her rapist got her pregnant.

  My father was a rapist.

  “She’s been in the mental hospital ever since. Your grandparents had every good reason to keep the truth from you. Please believe me. When you go back home after this, don’t judge them. Listen to them. They’ll tell you everything else you need to know.”

  “They’d let you—a complete stranger—tell me this about my mother? About myself?”

  Joyce smiled. “It was a great honor. I told your mother I was going to tell you. I’m not sure how much she understood, but I told her. I told her you were growing up to be every bit the woman we all hoped you’d be.”

 
; “You still see her?”

  Joyce nodded. For just a second, she looked uncomfortable. “Yes, I see her. Every couple of weeks I visit. I’m the only one who does.”

  Everything I’ve ever known about my mother was a lie.

  “Sue,” Joyce said, the energy returned to her voice, “you have a bright and wonderful future ahead of you.”

  There was no car accident, none of that was true…what else have they lied to me about?

  “Eat your lunch, sweetie.”

  Sue wasn’t hungry. She pushed her plate away from her and started to cry.

  “Don’t cry, Sue,” Joyce said as she began nibbling at her salad. “This simply opens the door for everything else.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Go back and talk to your grandparents, sweetie. They’ll tell you everything.” She gazed over at Sue’s Reuben. “Sure you don’t want it? I might take a bite…”

  “How is my mother?” Sue choked the words out. Her entire body was numb, her head was still buzzing, her stomach twisting in knots. “Can I see her?”

  “Oh, definitely. All in good time.” Joyce smiled. “Really, baby, your grandparents will tell you everything else that you need to know…”

  Sue grabbed her coat and stood up. “I—I’ve got to go.”

  “At least wrap up your lunch to take with you,” Joyce said.

  “You can have it!” She ran out of the diner, not caring whether Joyce had intended to pick up the tab or not.

  She didn’t see Joyce take a bite of the Reuben, or pull her cell phone out of her purse. An eyebrow went up as she said into the phone, “It’s done.”

  57

  Ginny poured herself a cup of coffee, and resisted the strong urge to add Bailey’s to it. Drinking first thing in the morning wasn’t going to help anything, tempting though it was. Instead, she just added cream and sweetener, drank half of the cup, and refilled it. She looked out the window. It was going to be another gray, drizzly December morning in Hammond, the perfect background for her mood.

  You’re being ridiculous. Just think it through and you’ll know what to do—what the right thing to do is.

  It was seven in the morning, and she hadn’t slept well. She hadn’t expected to, despite all the wine she’d tossed down the night before. After she’d put Sue to bed, she’d stayed up trying to take her mind off the story she’d just been told, going over her notes and writing out in longhand an outline of what she was going to write the following day.

  But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Sue’s story out of her head. Her mind just kept drifting back to it.

  If it hadn’t been for what Father Ortiz told me the day before I left Lebanon, I’d have never believed her for a minute. Hell, I wouldn’t have listened to her for more than a minute. I would have just called her grandparents and been donewith it. Her story is just too damned fantastic. How could it be possible?

  That was the worst part, Ginny thought as she sat down at the table. She was starting to believe it could be possible.

  The rational side of her mind wanted to dismiss Sue’s story as the product of an obviously unstable mind. It was the part of her mind that tried to dismiss all these Virgins sightings—Bernadette deSalis included—as just part of a mass hysteria. Sue’s ramblings were like something out of the Middle Ages, before science had disproved almost everything religion held to be sacred truths. This was what Ginny’s rational mind told her.

  But her instinctive mind—the part of her that was raised in the Church, that still remembered her catechism and still kept a strand of never-used rosary beads in her purse, the part that had prayed and lit candles for the life of her son—that part believed. It all came together—Bernadette deSalis’s visions, her prophecies, her declaration about the Antichrist. Father Ortiz’s stunning revelations. And even Deputy Perry Holland’s crazed rant about a cult committing ritualized murders at regular intervals at Wilbourne College…

  Father Ortiz was not talking in hypotheticals. Was he preparing me for the day when Sue would show up here?

  Last night, she’d drunk a great deal of wine, hoping to anaesthetize her mind enough to stop thinking about it all. But when she’d finally called it a night and gone to bed, she’d tossed and turned all night, unable to turn off her mind. The thoughts just kept coming, nagging at her as she stared at the ceiling. And when she had been finally able to drift off into something approximating sleep, she’d had nightmares. Horrible nightmares of death and destruction, explosions and fire…Ginny woke each time shaking and sweating in her bed, almost afraid to go back to sleep.

  This can’t be happening. This can’t be…none of thiscan be true, there has to be some logical explanation for all of this that has nothing to do with God and the devil.

  And what role does Joyce Davenport play in all of this? Why Joyce?

  Sue had told her about her meetings with Joyce Davenport. In some ways, that was the oddest part. But at least on that score, Ginny had little reason to disbelieve. Joyce Davenport in league with the devil? Now that she could believe.

  Is Sue’s story true, or is she mentally unbalanced? Could she somehow be in cahoots with Bernadette to cash in on some kind of mass hysteria?

  No. At the very least, Ginny felt certain, Sue believed every word of her story.

  Two days before Sue’s arrival, Dean Gregory had called Ginny. When she’d seen the Lebanon area code on her caller ID, she’d thought, What the hell is he calling me for? She’d debated not answering, just letting the voice mail pick up, but finally, curiosity got the better of her. Hearing Gregory’s voice was unsettling enough, but the purpose of his call—to let her know that Sue Barlow was missing, had she heard from her?—was even more disturbing.

  “Not another girl,” Ginny had said. “What is going on?”

  “We’re all very worried, Ginny. Have you heard from her?”

  “Of course not,” Ginny said. At that point, she hadn’t gotten any of Sue’s e-mails. “Why would she contact me?”

  “She was in one of your classes. She had a final to hand in to you.”

  This was true. But Ginny sensed the dean suspected more.

  “She is a very special student, with very special needs,” Gregory told her. At the time, Ginny had thought he meant Sue was the granddaughter of an important school benefactor. Now she wondered.

  Could it be true? Was the girl sleeping upstairs really—

  Ginny heard a bang. She jumped, her heart suddenly pounding in her ears. It was a shutter outside the window, blown loose by the wind. She relaxed in her chair, surprised at how jittery she was.

  Dean Gregory…might he be in fact far more nefarious than she’d ever dreamed?

  If Ginny had thought she’d put Wilbourne behind her, here it all was, right back with her. So much for her great plan to renew her mind and body and career. Since returning to Hammond two weeks ago, Ginny had structured her life into a healthy daily routine. Every morning, she ate fresh fruit and granola for breakfast before a vigorous workout at the gym. Three days a week, she rode the stationary bicycle; two mornings a week, she sweated through a yoga class. After showering, she worked for several hours, reviewing her notes and writing. The book was coming along even faster than she could have hoped. One night, while having her usual glass of wine, she’d looked at her notes and was amazed at how fast she was writing. It’s almost like God wants me to write this book.

  That thought had come from nowhere. Ginny laughed out loud. God and His Mother both. At the rate she was going, she would not only finish by her deadline, she’d beat it by several months. And the work is good, probably the best I’ve ever done—and that only motivated her even further.

  And then Sue Barlow had shown up at her front door.

  If I didn’t know her from class, if she were someone I’d never met before, I would think she was completely deranged.

  But is Bernadette deSalis deranged? Is Father Ortiz?

  Ginny sat down at her kitchen
table and poured herself more coffee.

  She hadn’t called Sue’s grandparents. Sue had begged her not to—and so far, she’d acceded to her wishes. If her story is true—Good Lord, her grandparents are the last people in the world I should let know anything. But as a parent—as someone who’d been a parent—Ginny also empathized with the grandparents. They must be worried sick—if Sue’s story wasn’t true.

  She rubbed her eyes and sighed. The truth is, Ginny, if you’d not had that talk with Father Ortiz right before Thanksgiving, you’d think Sue was completely insane. You would have called her grandparents, you would have called the police, you would have called anyone and everyone who could get her the kind of help she needs.

  And maybe it was just too easy to believe that there was something evil going on at Wilbourne College. That was a personal reaction that Ginny needed to separate from Sue’s story.

  She stood, suddenly motivated, and walked into her office. Treat Sue’s story, she told herself, like it’s a Virgin sighting for your book. Consider it rationally and objectively without emotion.

  From the top drawer of her desk she removed a spiral notebook and a pen. Sitting down, she opened the notebook and stared down at the blank page. Across the top she wrote, “IF SHE IS TELLING THE TRUTH.” Ginny sat for a moment, worrying the end of the pen in her mouth. Then she continued writing.

  58

  Upstairs, Sue tossed in the bed, a prisoner of terrifying dreams.

  Billy was beckoning to her from one side of a bridge. Joyce Davenport stood on the other. The bridge was falling and Sue had only time enough to make a quick sprint to safety before it plunged into the chasm below. But which side was closest? Toward whom should she jump?

  She sat up in bed. Where was she?

  Dr. Marshall’s house, she thought. I made it.

  Images from the past few weeks kept rattling through her mind as she tried to get back to sleep.

  Wandering around Times Square after her meeting with Joyce…pulling out her cell phone to call Billy…but snapping the phone shut every time.