It was a good day for a party. The lawns were crusted in fluffy snow. The patios in the back had been cleaned, and two jacuzzis were bubbling away, exhaling a thick mist into the air. Bryce’s friends had packed into them with drinks. As much as Bryce tried, he kept running down his list of dead dads when he looked out the window at each of his friends. He should have just been happy to look at the different (but equally appealing) ways that Charity Duckworth and Hope Cheeseman filled out their bathing suits, but every time he did, he thought, Cornelius Duckworth, heart attack. Barrett Cheeseman, fell from a bell tower.
Other people had stayed in the house, either too self-conscious or too nervous to try the water. They were enjoying Bryce’s video games, drinking soda—some spiked, others not—and talking, laughing, or kissing.
He looked over the party and it happened again.
Raymond Knowles: racing accident. William Baylor: car accident. Michael Endicott: alive, but unseen.
Sindy was sitting on a couch with Abby. She was clearly dressed for the party. Bryce could see the strings of a bikini snaking up out of her shirt and around the back of her neck. Abby was still bundled up in a shapeless sweater, looking like she was ready for a night outdoors around a trashcan fire eating hobo chili. Bryce had the thermostat cranked up. It felt like summer in the house.
Abby was one of the few people that he hadn’t gotten around to interviewing yet. He wasn’t sure why he kept delaying it. She was an underclassman, so it wasn’t like he she might judge him. It was just… He didn’t mind asking anyone else, but when he thought of asking Abby the same questions, it seemed insensitive and rude. Maybe it came down to how they’d met and those brief, terrifying few days when he thought he’d knocked her up. He didn’t know.
What he did know was that he cared what Abby thought of him, and that felt strange.
He wandered over to join the two of them. Sindy beamed; Abby blushed and looked away. “Glad you two could make it,” he said.
“Yeah, thanks for inviting us,” Sindy said.
Abby mumbled something, but Bryce didn’t catch it over the music.
“I was worried… what with, you know,” Bryce said, nodding in the general direction of where he’d last seen Eleazar in the back hot-tub. Any excuse to swim, that guy.
Sindy followed the nod. “Oh, yeah. No, it’s okay. We had a good talk.”
“Eh, I don’t really care. So long as you two show up.” He raised his cup to them and took a drink. “Can I get you something?”
“Nope! Actually, I was just going to go outside,” Sindy said with a glance to Abby.
“The water should be nice and warm.”
Sindy pulled off her shirt, kicked off her shorts, and shook her hair out as if posing for a swimsuit catalogue. Bryce couldn’t tell if she did things like that on purpose or not, but he did manage the herculean task of keeping his eyes locked on Abby. Sindy left the two of them and went to the door, swearing loudly when she opened it to the gusty air. The others called for her to jump in and cheered when she did.
Bryce turned to Abby. “You planning to join her?”
“No. It’s too cold.”
“It’s fine once you get in the water.”
“I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”
Baiting words about skinny dipping came to mind; you could always disguise that as charm or as a joke. But just as he couldn’t bring himself to ask her about her father, he also had a hard time treating her as a sex object. What the hell was this girl doing to him?
“Are you feeling okay?”
“What?”
“Aren’t you suffocating in that sweater?”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess it is getting warm.” He stared at her. She stared back, then slowly, she began to take her sweater off. She looked very uncomfortable, and he almost told her to leave it on. He didn’t want to shame her or anything. As he opened his mouth, the words died in his throat.
He wasn’t sure why the detail registered. In some ways, it was like the whole thing with the missing fathers. There was no reason to see it until it was pointed out, and then he couldn’t unsee it. Maybe it was because Abby had hid it so well. Maybe he had just refused to see the truth. When Bryce pictured Abby (which he did more often than he liked to admit), he imagined a pretty, slender, red-haired girl with glittering eyes. She would never reach her mother’s Amazonian proportions; she didn’t have the frame for that, but he believed she would only become lovelier over the next few years.
What he saw today though was not the advance toward maturity he had been imagining.
Abby’s face was fuller. He hadn’t noticed that even though she was right in front of him. Her breasts had filled out, too—not that she had been flat before, but…
Her stomach.
It was round. She had a round stomach.
Not a flabby round from holiday excess or stress-eating. This was… a very distinct, very specific kind of round. His brain clicked from one track to the other, struggling to make the connections. Finally, there was a snap of clarity that moved faster than the part of his brain that controlled his mouth.
“Holy sh… Abby, you’re pregnant?”
A few heads whipped around. Abby yanked her sweater back over her head and jumped up. Her cheeks burned as she fled the room. Bryce was motionless, still trying to process all that he’d seen. He heard some murmuring and he had a brief thought about how long it would take for word of this moment to reach the other side of the house. Then his body kicked into gear and he sprinted after Abby.
He caught up to her a few rooms over. She was cutting through a sitting room lined with bizarre, tribal-looking mannequins. “Abby, wait!”
She turned. He could see the tears filling her eyes. She sniffled, removed her glasses, and passed her sleeve over her face. “What?”
“Are you pregnant?”
Abby was silent. Then she nodded.
“You lied to me?”
Another moment of silence. Another tear tumbled down her bright red cheek. Another slight nod.
“Is it mine?” Bryce was nervous to even ask. He had managed to forget the worrisome blankness of the carnival while he dealt with the mystery of the missing fathers, but it all rushed back in an instant. He felt consumed by that yawning emptiness again. Images flashed through his fragmented memory. None of them made sense.
“I don’t know,” Abby whispered.
“You don’t know? You don’t know. Well, that’s just great. What am I supposed to do here?”
“Nothing.” Her back stiffened. “I didn’t ask you to do anything.”
This only made Bryce more frustrated. What right did she have to act imperious about this? She was the one who lied. “Do you even know what you’re going to do with it?”
She shrugged. Tears streamed steadily down her face, and she continued to brush them away. Bryce thought that he was becoming quite adept at making girls cry. He’d felt guilty about lashing out at Ophelia instead of his mother, and that was a girl he only cared about in passing. This was Abby. She… she mattered. Under any other circumstance, Bryce would have done almost anything to keep her from crying.
Right now, he felt each one of her tears was owed to him. He crossed his arms so they wouldn’t betray him. He needed to suppress any urge to hold her.
“Why did you lie to me, Abby?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. We were getting along, and I thought…”
“What? That I wouldn’t notice when you waddled into the cafeteria? That I wouldn’t notice if you started carrying around a kid with my mother’s nose? What part of this did you think was going to work out?”
The words flew out of his mouth like an assault. She flinched and bit her lip, but she didn’t lower her eyes—those goddamned Thorndike eyes.
“I don’t know. I just wanted you to—I wanted to keep being a part of…”
“Part of what? The cool crowd? There is no cool crowd, Abby. It’s a bunch of freeloaders that like to use my house because
my mother doesn’t care what I do with it. If I was poor, none of these people would be here. Why do you think no one hangs out with your little dork friend, Nate?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t talk about him that way.”
He laughed. “You really think you get to lecture me on social grace after what you’ve done? You’ve got a lot of nerve. But I guess you come by it honestly. I’m tired of you and your precious ‘Daughters’ acting like no one else matters.”
She tried to speak again but he trampled her, speaking louder and faster and more evenly than she could.
“If you wanted an invitation here, all you had to do was show up just like the rest of them. The joke’s on me, though. I thought you were different. I figured if anyone knew what it was like to not to have a real friend in the world, it would be a Thorndike. If anyone can understand what it feels like to be alone in a goddamned house full of people, it might be you!”
He paused. His breath came short. Abby could barely look at him. Her eyelashes were webbed together with tears, but she hadn’t broken. Not yet.
“Turns out I was right,” he said, “You’re not like the others.”
He spat the words out through his teeth.
“You’re so much worse.”
The sob those words wrenched from her body barely sounded human. Abby nearly doubled over with the force of her pain. Bryce felt a glorious, spiteful moment of victory, and then the weight of the moment sank in. He wanted to take everything back. He wanted to apologize, just so she would never cry like this again. But he didn’t.
He stood there and let her cry her heart out because he believed he was right.
Abby fled Coffin Manor and Bryce returned to his guests. He put on best false face, not that anyone would bother to look any deeper, and spent the next several hours drinking himself into unconsciousness.
52
Duncan Koons
abby didn’t sleep after her confrontation with Bryce. She sat awake in bed all night. She was angry with Bryce for being so hateful. She was angry with herself for telling that stupid, hopeless lie. She was sad and alone and heartbroken for ruining any chance she’d had with Bryce, and even sadder that she still cared about him after the way he had spoken to her. She was sure all of this was exacerbated by the steady streams of hormones and low-grade terror pumping through her body.
She slept better over the next week, but she couldn’t shake the memory of the look on his face as he tore into her. She started to understand the part she’d played in upsetting him. She’d been super insensitive, but it never occurred to her that she was capable of hurting him. In retrospect, she could see the naked pain in Bryce’s eyes.
She didn’t have a solution to the situation, so she drowned her sorrows in schoolwork. It made it easier to ignore the quiet but persistent rumors about her condition that had started to circulate since Bryce’s party. Enough people had heard Bryce’s initial outburst to lend the rumor some weight. It hadn’t reached critical mass yet, as Abby was hardly the only girl in school wearing big sweaters, but she was on borrowed time and she knew it.
Just like Duncan Koons.
Abby hadn’t forgotten her private oath to save him. His trial date loomed over her, and she knew he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Abby couldn’t control much in her universe, but she could save Koons.
As brave as it was in principle, Abby was finding it a lot more difficult in practice. She had no authority to look at the case files. Going to the clinic to see the crime scene wouldn’t help; she’d already seen it. No one working on the case would so much as return her calls. That left her with only a single avenue of investigation: Koons himself.
She didn’t think the Daughters of Arkham had the manpower to scan every piece of mail that passed through the city, so she decided to write him a letter. She hadn’t written an actual letter since she was very little, and that had been addressed to Santa Claus. She did her research and found that Koons was being kept in the local jail, held without bail. She sent him as direct and polite a letter as she could.
Dear Mr. Koons,
My name is Abigail Thorndike. I know you are innocent of the crimes you have been charged with. I would like to do everything I can to help prove your innocence. Please write me back as soon as you can.
Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Abby signed her name at the bottom. She even modified her signature a little bit, just to distance herself from the big looping handwriting that she felt appeared girlish and immature.
She checked the mail for weeks, excited whenever she saw the collection on the table beneath the mail slot, but every time there was nothing.
Two weeks later, she wrote him again. A week after that, she wrote him again.
And again.
And again.
Each letter grew more insistent than the last, and soon she was not asking for a letter, she was demanding a visit. Her last letter was openly hostile. She felt badly. She wanted to help him. How was he not getting that?
Her phone buzzed one afternoon with a number she did not recognize. “Hello?”
“Abigail Thorndike?” The voice on the other end was female and officious, only one step away from a robotic monotone.
“Yes?”
“This is Officer Jarvis at the Arkham County Jail. Mr. Duncan Koons has cleared you for visitation rights.”
“He has? I mean, of course he has.”
“What is your relationship with Mr. Koons?”
“Uh… Well, I don’t know him. But I’m writing an article for the school newspaper.”
“I see. As you’re a minor, I will need to get permission from your parent or guardian for this visit.”
Abby took a stab in the dark. “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary… Officer Jarvis, was it?” Abby lowered her voice a bit as she often heard her mother do when asserting her authority. “My mother, Constance, is a busy woman, and she doesn’t like to be interrupted with bureaucratic details. She was the one who wanted me on the school paper. She thought it would look good on my college applications. But if you insist, I’ll go ahead and disturb her. She’s not far, just in the other room with my grandmother…”
“Right! Yes, of course. I’m sorry, Ms. Thorndike, it’s just a formality, and I don’t see a reason to disturb your mother or your grandmother. When she sees the article, please let them know that Officer Dana Jarvis helped out.”
“I will definitely do that, Officer Jarvis. Thank you so much for your help.”
“You’re very welcome. When will you be visiting Mr. Koons?”
“What availability do you have next Saturday”
“Visiting hours are from eleven to noon, but if that doesn’t work for you…”
“No, that window will work just fine. Thank you again, Office Jarvis.”
Abby dressed as conservatively as possible the day of the visit—not that it was difficult for her, as pretty much everything she owned was conservative. She went with the thickest tights she had, and a skirt that hung past her knees. She put on her now-usual baggy sweater, and bound up her hair in a tight ponytail. Her librarian glasses were the perfect finishing touch.
She brought along her computer, as well as a pen and pad of paper to complete her cover story. They let her through the metal detectors with only a cursory wand wave. She wondered what kind of havoc she could wreak if she wanted to. With enough bluster, she might even be able to walk out of here with Duncan Koons! Using her mother’s authority to free the man that she had helped put in jail would be a deliciously ironic twist to this whole mess. She kept that idea in her back pocket in case Koons continued to be stubborn.
The Arkham County Jail was nothing to worry about. Unlike the places she had seen on television, she wasn’t paraded down a hall of jeering convicts. There were barely any people in the cells. It wasn’t like Arkham had any crime waves to speak of. The actual jail was just a few monkey cages tucked in the
back of the building, but the metal detector and computer systems were state of the art. They felt out of place in the old brick building. The money for the upgrades had come from a rather large check from the Thorndike family a few years ago. “A small price to pay for our security,” Constance had said at the time. Abby passed a plaque declaring that the visitation room was made possible by the generosity of Constance Thorndike. She peered down a hall and could make out two shapes in the cells. One of them she recognized as the town drunk, Mr. Gage, sleeping off another bender. She assumed the other one was Koons. The visiting room was a tiny concrete box with a single table and two stools bolted to the floor.
Abby went to the table and sat down, placing her pen and pad in front of her. She also pulled out a digital recording device she’d impulsively purchased to better sell her alibi as the hard-charging student journalist. As the minutes ticked by, the doubts began to rattle through her head. This was a direct challenge to her mother’s authority and she was deep into uncharted waters. Constance wouldn’t take this well if she found out.
Hester would take it far worse.
She considered getting up and leaving everything in her mother’s hands. She was only fourteen, after all. In any just world, she would have at least four more years of running to Mommy to clean up her messes. But then she thought about Koons going to prison for the rest of his life. Not this dinky little penalty box, but a legitimate penitentiary populated with actual criminals. She couldn’t leave. She was the only one who could help him.
The door on the other side of the room opened, and a burly guard escorted Koons into the room. Koons wore a bright orange jumpsuit and a morose expression. He had lost weight in jail. His baby face had thinned out. His blue eyes were watery and twitched to every corner of the room before settling on Abby. He kept muttering to himself under his breath, giving Abby glimpses of a tongue and teeth that would have been more at home on a child. He was a short man, only a few inches over Abby’s modest height. When she looked in his eyes, she saw nothing but naked terror.
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