“Responsibilities,” she slurred. Her head nodded a bit. Just like that, the power of the moment was gone. Bryce was once again looking at a woman who was barely skin and bones because she was often too drunk or high to remember to eat. “We do things we don’t want to do because we have to. We have to.” She repeated that once more, like an incantation.
The doorbell chimed. In other parts of the house, he never would have heard it. It only sounded near the front and in the servants’ quarters where Harcourt could deal with it. He entered the dining room and said, “Madam, your guests have arrived.”
“Send them in,” she said.
Harcourt made a quick gesture and one of the maids came in, removing the now empty vodka bottle. A moment later, Harcourt came into the room and announced, “Patience and Ophelia Thomas.”
Bryce’s head snapped around. The Thomases were wealthy, although not in the same league as the Coffins, and he knew Ophelia. She was a curvy girl, teetering on chubby, pretty and full-faced. Her hair was her best feature, long, and glossy chestnut, setting off her hazel eyes. They were in the same grade and they’d gone to the same school since kindergarten but they weren’t friends. They weren’t even friendly. She was a bookworm, a band geek, a nerd. If there was some strange obsession, she had it. In elementary school, she had been all about sparkly vampires. She and her friends had put on white pancake makeup and dark eyeliner. Now it was something else, Bryce thought maybe police in England or someplace, since every item of clothing Ophelia owned had a blue police box on it.
The only jewelry Ophelia wore today was the lapel pin that signified her membership in the Daughters. A matching pin graced the left side of her mother’s ample bosom.
Marianne Coffin got up from her chair and airily embraced Patience Thomas. Patience was a large woman who had succumbed to her genetics long ago. Her features had almost been completely devoured by fragrant, pillowy rolls of flesh. His Mother turned to him.
“Bryce, won’t you say hello to Ophelia?”
“Yeah, hi. What’s going on here?”
“Hi Bryce,” Ophelia said, glancing at him from under her eyelashes.
“Offer the young lady a chair. Or something to drink,” Marianne said.
“We’re out of vodka.”
“Bryce!”
Bryce sighed. “Sit down. If you want anything to drink, we have a trained monkey around here somewhere.”
Ophelia giggled at “trained monkey” and sat down.
Marianne took her place at the head of the table. Patience sat at her right hand. It reminded Bryce of some kind of WASP mafia meeting.
“Sit down, Bryce,” Marianne said. Her voice had sharpened up; she was hiding her slurring very well. It was possible Patience hadn’t noticed. Then again, the Coffin fortune bought a whole lot of looking the other way.
“Actually I was about to—”
“Sit down!”
The room went as cold and silent as a knife. Bryce picked a seat far away from them and slid into it.
“Now,” said Marianne, “I suppose we should acquaint these two.”
“Agreed,” Patience said. “Let’s see. Ophelia plays the French horn. Her favorite subject is math.”
“Algebra,” Ophelia amended.
“Bryce…” Marianne trailed off, trying to think of something to say.
A huge grin split Bryce’s face. He leaned back in his chair. “Go on, mother. Tell them all about me.”
Marianne offered him a brittle smile. “How about you do that?”
“Sure thing. Well, I don’t play any instruments, but I do play the victim from time to time. My favorite subject is myself, followed closely by women’s studies. I really enjoy drinking but only alone and in my underpants. I also enjoy some good, old-fashioned, hardcore, German pornog—”
“He has a sense of humor,” Marianne said.
“Boys will be boys,” Patience agreed.
Ophelia continued to stare at him. She only looked away when he looked right at her and widened his eyes, as if to demand, What?
“Tell me more about Ophelia,” Marianne said, and Patience started rattling off her daughter’s accomplishments like she was reading a resume. Honors classes, Dean’s list, awards and the like. Bryce completely zoned out until he heard a very chilling phrase.
“And the last name?” Marianne asked.
“Oh, of course. We’re not attached.”
Bryce blinked. Last name? His mind chased the whole event from beginning to end. A fix up. This was a fix up! From his mother? He looked at all three women in turn. Ophelia averted her gaze. This was exactly what he thought it was.
Marianne and Patience continued to talk. Ophelia continued to steal looks at Bryce.
A plan crystallized in his head.
“I have a question,” he said.
They looked at him in confusion. He wasn’t supposed to talk. That wasn’t his role in this little affair. “Question?” Patience said, testing the word as though she didn’t understand what it was supposed to mean in this context.
“Yes, Mrs. Thomas. A question. If you are going to marry me off to your daughter here, I feel I’m entitled to know a few things.” Bryce leaned forward, steepling his fingers with great seriousness. “I’m just wondering if you’re poor, blind, or just plain lazy.”
Ophelia and Patience gasped.
“Because I can’t think of any good reason why an affluent woman with fully functional eyes would allow herself to get so… Uh, is ‘grandiose’ an okay word? I’m trying to be tactful here.”
“Bryce.” Marianne’s voice was a warning.
“Come on, Mom. Even you have to admit that there’s no excuse for rich people to be fat. There’s surgery, dieticians, personal chefs… Hell, she can afford to hire someone to follow her around all day and slap the fork right out of her hand. If I’m going to join this family in holy fatrimony, I want to know what kind of battles I’ll be fighting.”
“Bryce, you cut it out this instant,” Marianne said.
Bryce couldn’t have stopped if he tried. He felt the insults welling up inside of him, and they were too therapeutic not to spit in the faces of the three women at the table. He didn’t look at Ophelia or his mother. He focused on Patience. She was the one who could make all of this go away. How much humiliation was she willing to endure for a chance at the Coffin fortune?
“How could you?”
“So which is it? I like to know what my money is buying. I need to know if my girl here is going to maintain this buxom, curvy thing she’s got going on, or if she’s going to follow in your footsteps and pull a full-on marshmallow.”
Patience Thomas rose from her seat, and Bryce realized he’d said too much, too soon. He could have dragged this out for a while and had some real fun with it.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you, Marianne,” Patience said. “We’ll return at a later time.”
“Don’t go. He’s like this sometimes.”
“Mother dear is just throwing out guesses. This is the longest we’ve been in the same room together since, what, birth?”
“I’m sure he is, but I have another engagement. Ophelia?”
Ophelia got up to join her mother. She was crying. For a moment, Bryce felt badly about that, but she was in on this thing, too.
“Mrs. Thomas!” he said, standing from his seat as though he intended to escort them to the door. “If we need to get ahold of you, did you leave a phone number, or should we just light the “hot” sign in our window?”
The Thomases went out. Marianne followed them, wringing her hands. Bryce smirked and left the room. Chances were that his mother would want to see him later to chew him out. Two visits in one day! He had to hit Google, make sure there wasn’t an eclipse tonight, or any other sign of the impending apocalypse.
No sweat, though. He could easily avoid her. By the time he saw her again, she would have drowned this memory along with all her others.
31
The Dreaded Conversation
the internet said she would be showing between twelve and sixteen weeks. Abby assumed those estimates were intended for grown women, so she mentally shaved a couple weeks off. She was still too slender and lanky to hide much of anything on her body, much less a baby.
Soon, she had to make a choice.
She didn’t know what she was going to do. She barely understood her options. Her mother would know, though. Constance was always certain.
Abby had learned a lesson from Sindy: finding out was much worse than being told. She had to tell her mother. Abby figured that she would be screamed at, grounded for at least a year, and God knows what else. Postponing the conversation would only make the punishment worse.
It was one thing to know that, and quite another to do anything about it.
Abby sat on her bed, psyching herself up. She imagined she could hear her mother walking around downstairs, but that was all in her mind. Constance Thorndike was physically incapable of taking a heavy step. If she was moving at all, she used a light-footed glide, barely touching the ground at all.
Abby was having very little luck convincing herself that some punishment now was preferable to all the punishment later. Even with the cold, hard evidence of Sindy’s reaction staring her in the face, it was slow going. It would be so easy to just… deal with this later. She still had maybe a month or more of normalcy. She could get away with it.
Her stomach had knotted up. Unlike the pain she had felt in her two, recent, strange experiences—the shape in the hall and the ghostly gallows—this felt like anxiety. It was the kind that made her want to crawl under her blankets until it passed.
Abby stood up. She didn’t think about it. She just left her room and went looking for her mother. She refused to think about the purpose of her quest. She wasn’t going to have a difficult talk with her mother, oh no. She was just looking around the house. Nothing to see. Nothing to be worried about.
It started getting difficult when she couldn’t immediately find her mother. Abby searched room after room and began to lose her grasp on the self-delusion necessary to continue. She did her best not to allow her doubts to take root and pushed forward to scour the house. Why did the damned house have to be so big? They used maybe a third of it. Entire wings did nothing but collect dust.
Abby finally found her mother in a large, airy room overlooking the backyard. Constance was arranging fresh-cut flowers on a huge, stately-looking table that her mother called a workbench. The bouquet should have been indecently bright, but the autumn sky had sucked the color right out of it.
“Mom?” Abby felt like she was yelling. When Constance didn’t look toward her, she realized she had barely made a sound. She tried again. “Mom?”
Constance turned, holding some clippers in her hands. She looked like she had just stepped from the pages of a magazine, even in her gardening gloves. “Yes, dear?”
“Um. I need to tell you something.”
Constance frowned for an instant before adopting her normal, serene expression. “What is it?”
Abby went to sit down in a padded wicker chair. It was the only even faintly whimsical thing in the entire house. Constance took off her gloves, set them aside with the clippers. Her frown returned as the silence stretched between them.
“Oh, Abby,” she said. “You’re beginning to worry me.”
“I’m pregnant.” Abby stared at the floor between her feet.
“What?”
Abby shut her eyes. She didn’t want to say it again, but she did anyway. She waited for the inevitable yelling. They would probably be able to hear it at the Academy. Wouldn’t that be fun gossip to hear in the halls on Monday?
“Does anyone else know?” Constance asked. Her voice had dropped nearly an octave.
Abby shook her head. It was a necessary lie. Nate knew and Sindy knew, and so did whoever they had told. Nate would take the secret to his grave, but Sindy… Sindy might tell her new boyfriend.
“What about the father?”
Abby shrugged.
“Abigail, I need more than a shrug. I don’t know what that means.”
“It means the father doesn’t know.”
Constance nodded. “And who is the father?”
“I don’t know.”
“Abigail Thorndike!”
“It’s not like that. I… was at the carnival. And people were drinking.”
“Were you drunk? Is that how this happened?”
“No. I didn’t touch a drop. I swear, Mom. I just— was feeling sick all night and I had this pounding headache… and I don’t remember anything that happened.”
“Were you drugged? By one of those… carnies?”
Abby shook her head again. “No. I don’t think so.”
“I don’t need thinking, Abigail. I need facts.”
“I only shared food with Nate and Sindy. They were both fine.”
“That doesn’t mean you couldn’t have been attacked. Someone could have drugged you, and…” Constance paused. Nearly stuttering, she went on, “…taken advantage of your condition.”
Abby considered this. Was that possible? She backtracked through that evening, remembering everything she had eaten or drank. Sindy said she’d been waiting for everyone outside the funhouse. Surely someone would have noticed if she had seemed out of sorts. Then she’d gone with the group down to the Lodge and then had gone off into the woods with someone that Sindy said was either Bryce or Nate. If anything had happened, it had probably been there… and not in the funhouse.
Thinking of the funhouse sent a stab of pain through Abby’s head and stomach. She winced and held her side. Her mother didn’t seem to notice. Constance paced around the room.
“This is important. I need you to answer me.”
“No, Mom. I don’t think there was a chance for anyone to drug me.”
“All right, fine. Are you certain you are pregnant?”
“I guess so. I took a test—”
Constance’s head whipped around. “Purchased from where?”
“I got it in Middleton. The test was positive. But no one else knows but you and me.”
“All right, good.” Constance’s voice returned to its usual lightness, a perfect match to her gliding tread.
Abby looked up at her mother in confusion, blinking tears away. This was where the yelling should have started, but Constance just stood there in the middle of the room, thinking. She had the same look as someone considering what to make for dinner.
“You are taking your iron supplement, aren’t you?” Constance asked.
“Uh… Yeah. Of course,” Abby said. She had taken it just that morning, in front of both her mother and grandmother.
“Pregnancies can drain the iron right from your blood,” Constance said. Then, abruptly, “If you had to guess who the father might be, who would you say?”
“I don’t know. I guess either Nate or Bryce Coffin.”
Constance smiled. “Let’s hope it’s young master Coffin, then.”
“I’m so sorry, Mom.”
Constance waved it away. “Your grandmother won’t be thrilled, but nothing has been done that can’t be undone.”
“Undone?”
“I’ll make an appointment with Dr. Collins.” Dr. Evelyn Collins was one of Constance’s close friends, present at every Daughters of Arkham function.
“An appointment?”
“To get this taken care of, dear. It will be very quick, very discreet, and no one need ever know.”
32
A Single Drop of Blood
sindy had to talk to Abby. She hadn’t spoken to her in almost two weeks, and it was time to end the freeze-out. She understood now that Abby had lied because she was scared. It hurt that she’d reached out to Nate first, but it wasn’t the end of the world… and Abby really needed support. She kept texting and IMing Sindy with different versions of the same apology, or she’d write freaked-out accounts of what was happening to her body. Every message from Abby that she ignor
ed made her feel more and more guilty. The problem with this kind of fight, though, was that it was so much easier to start one than it was to finish one.
She set out for Abby’s house on Saturday afternoon. The walk from the Endicott place over to Harwich Hall wasn’t long, but she disliked being out in the chill late-autumn weather. Probably it was a kind of penance. She’d made Abby suffer for very little, so it was her turn to do the same.
On the walk, her thoughts continually wandered to Eleazar Grant. She hadn’t really been looking for a boyfriend, but there he was. They’d only been dating for a couple of weeks or so—the same period of time she had been giving Abby the silent treatment—but it was going well. She was learning all sorts of things about him. She knew now that he hated his nickname as much as she did, and in exchange for the secret, she’d granted him the privilege to call him Sincere, though she hated her full name as much as he hated his nickname. He acted like some brooding rebel to the rest of the world, but when he was with her, he lived to do nice things for her. Whenever she wanted something, he was more than happy to oblige.
The Grants weren’t old money like the Endicotts or the Thorndikes, but they were well-off. Eleazar lived with his father and brother in a decent-sized house that butted up against the north side foothills. All three of them had those odd Biblical names that were so popular in the nicer parts of Arkham. Sindy hadn’t told her mother that she was dating Eleazar, and she suspected she was in for a lecture about how he wasn’t appropriate—that meant rich enough—for an Endicott woman. She’d deal with that if and when her mother found out. Maybe she could throw Eleazar in her mother’s face as an “option” for their money trouble.
Eleazar didn’t matter right now, pretty as he was. It was more important to make up with Abby. Best friends shouldn’t be apart. It was against the natural order of things.
Sindy turned the corner, coming up alongside the stone wall that blocked the Thorndike property from the road. It had stood there unchanged since Colonial times, the only security that protected the estate. The Endicotts, who owned considerably less, had state-of-the-art cameras and a wall specifically designed to be unclimbable.
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