by JL Bryan
“Well...”
“You don't think they would figure it out?”
“They wouldn't allow it if I told them. I'm just trying to do what will work for us now.”
“And what about the future?”
“Why are you freaking out?”
“Because you act like you have it all settled for us, but you don't. What am I supposed to do, hide when your parents visit? Do I just live out of a suitcase the whole time? What’s your plan?”
“We'll deal with it.”
Jenny finally asked the question that had been eating at her, ever since her talks with Darcy Metcalf. “Do we have a future, Seth? If your parents are so against us being together?”
“I can handle my parents.” Seth took her hand and towed her close to him. He tried to kiss her, but she dodged it.
“Oh, yeah.” Jenny swam back from him. “Like you handled them when they told you what school to go to, and what to study, and every big decision you've ever made about anything.”
“Come on, Jenny. I love you. I'll take care of everything.”
“I don't think I believe you,” Jenny said. “I'll think you'll do what you're told, eventually. And where does that leave me? You want me to build the rest of my life around you...until it gets inconvenient for you. And you can move on to some girl your parents want you to marry.”
“That's not true!”
“Prove it,” Jenny said.
“I can't show you the future. We're together today. Tomorrow, next year, we'll keep finding ways to be together.”
“That's what you say.”
“What the hell do you want me to say, Jenny? What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing,” Jenny said. “You have fun with Darcy this weekend. And all your little pals from Grayson Academy.”
Jenny swam away from him, toward the rocky shore. The night was growing a little cold.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Where are you going?” Darcy's mom asked.
Ashleigh was packing Darcy's suitcase. The clothes all seemed unreasonably big to her, especially the underwear. But that was the crappy body she inhabited.
“I'm just going on a little weekend trip,” Ashleigh said.
“A trip? Where?”
“The beach.”
“With who?”
“Just some friends.” Ashleigh zipped up the suitcase.
“Morris!” Darcy's mom screamed toward the living room. “Morris!”
“What now?” Darcy's dad yelled back.
“Darcy says she's going to the beach for the weekend! With friends!” Her voice grew shrill.
“Like hell she is!” Darcy's dad wheeled from the living room to the hall. He glowered at the sight of Darcy's suitcase. “I didn't give you permission to go nowhere!”
“I'm eighteen years old. I'm a high school graduate. I can go on a trip if I want.”
“Who the hell put that idea in your head?” Darcy's dad yelled.
“The United States Constitution,” Ashleigh said. “Look, it's no big deal. I just need a vacation.”
“All you need is a job!” Darcy's dad said. “How the hell you gonna pay for a vacation?”
“Yeah, how?” Darcy's mom asked.
“Seth's paying,” Ashleigh said. “For everybody.”
“Seth?” Darcy's dad asked. “You don't mean Seth Barrett?”
“That's the one,” Ashleigh said.
“Who else is going?” Darcy's mom asked.
“Um...”
“Not those two you've been running around with, I hope,” Darcy's mom asked. “I don't trust them.”
“Mom, Tommy is Ashleigh Goodling's cousin. How bad can he be?”
“But he's always with that Mexican girl,” Darcy's dad said. “I never thought I'd live to see the day, my little girl running around with Mexicans.”
“Don't be racist, Dad.” Ashleigh pushed by them, walking towards the front door. She had no intention of ever coming back.
“Don't you pull that politically correct horseshit on me!” Darcy's dad wheeled after her, and Darcy's mom trailed behind him. “I ain't no racist, but Mexicans are filthy, weird people! Chuck O' Flannery did a whole show about it! Diseased welfare-suckers, taking up our jobs and our schools.”
“What job?” Ashleigh snapped. “You don't work. You live on welfare.”
“You take that back!” Darcy's dad shouted. “I ain't on welfare, I'm on disability! I can't get no welding job when I ain’t got no foot!” He jabbed one sausage-shaped finger at his missing foot, in case she just hadn’t noticed yet.
Ashleigh watched out the window, gripping the suitcase tight.
“I know what this is about,” Darcy's mom said. “You're going to the beach so you can have sex with those boys.”
“Yeah, that's right,” Ashleigh said. “Gang-banging the fat pregnant chick is every boy's fantasy.”
“Don't use language like that under my roof!” Darcy's dad said.
Mercifully, Seth's blue Audi convertible pulled into the driveway.
“Seth's here,” Darcy said. “I'll see y'all Monday.”
“Don't you go sinning!” Darcy's mom said.
“But I am,” Ashleigh said. “I'm gonna have sex with Seth, and I'm going to let him stick it in my ass, too. Because that's where I like it. Right in the butthole.”
Darcy's mom gasped and covered her mouth.
Ashleigh flung open the front door, and Darcy's dad wheeled out after her. She ran down the front porch steps two at a time.
“Darcy Hortence Metcalf, you come back here now!” he screamed. His face was bright crimson.
Ashleigh gave him the finger as she ran to Seth's car.
“What's going on?” Seth asked from the driver's seat. “Everything okay?”
She dropped the suitcase into the back seat, then climbed in beside him.
“My dad's just being a total lame-o,” Ashleigh said. “I can't leave without him yelling at me.”
“Darcy, you come here!” Darcy's dad screamed from the porch.
“He just wants to yell at me for getting pregnant, for the millionth time,” Ashleigh said. “Drive, drive, drive. Get me the hell out of here.”
“Okay...” Seth backed out of the driveway, and they left Darcy's parents glaring at them from the front porch.
“You sure everything's okay?” Seth asked. “Your parents look pissed.”
“We just had an argument,” Ashleigh said. “Like we do every day. No big whoop.”
Ashleigh lay back in the passenger seat and let the wind blow through her hair. It was a gorgeous Friday evening, with the purple sunset behind them and the night ahead. Orientation began early on Saturday morning, and Seth wasn't a fan of getting out of bed before dawn on Saturday to drive two hours to Charleston, so they were staying in a hotel tonight and tomorrow night.
Ashleigh had been as insistent as she could, without breaking character, that they stay at the Mandrake House, a narrow five-story mansion with a few rooms on each floor. Tommy had already rented a room on the top floor, and Esmeralda would be driving Ashleigh's Jeep to Charleston to join them.
Seth and Ashleigh were staying two floors below Tommy and Esmeralda, which would make things very convenient.
“I wish Jenny was coming with us,” Seth said.
“Me, too,” Darcy said. In fact, she had advised Jenny not to go. She'd suggested that if Jenny didn't go, Seth would have to imagine life in Charleston without her, and might decide being with Jenny was more important than making his parents happy. “I really like hanging out with her.”
“Yeah, Jenny's great.” A smile appeared on his lips, and a distant look in his eyes.
Ashleigh wanted to slap him, and then rake her nails back and forth across his face, and then stomp on his dick a thousand times. He had dropped her practically overnight once he started hanging out with Jenny. This infuriated Ashleigh, not just because she'd been tossed out like an old sock, but because she couldn't stand not being in control.<
br />
“Do you ever think about Ashleigh?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“It's weird how she just disappeared like that,” Darcy said. “Like presto-change-o, huh?”
Seth looked at her from the corner of his eye, and his forehead wrinkled. He was probably struggling to think of what to say. “Yeah...A lot of people disappeared.”
“But you were with Ashleigh forever,” Darcy said. “Don't you miss her at all? I mean, if I was a guy, I'd totally want to be with her.”
“She wasn't as nice as she acted,” Seth said.
“Really?”
“She could be mean,” Seth said. “Manipulative.”
“Manipulative? Ashleigh?”
“I know you miss her, Darcy, but she was really kind of an evil bitch. She tried to kill me, but she screwed that up, too.”
Ashleigh snarled, but she fought it until it was a simple frown. “But everybody loved her.”
“Sometimes everybody’s wrong,” Seth said.
Ashleigh looked into the darkness ahead and tried not to snap. She couldn’t stand to hear herself talked about that way.
They turned off Esther Bridge Road onto Highway 63, the road that would take them all the way to Charleston.
Ashleigh had always liked riding in Seth's car, the expensive blue convertible that advertised you were somebody of value and quality. Too bad this would be the last time.
Friday afternoon, Heather got a visit at her office from Chantella Williams, a senior investigator with Homeland Security. The investigator laid a black file folder on her desk.
“This is everything you asked for.” Williams opened the folder. The first page showed a birth certificate for Maurice Goodling. “Maurice Goodling. Deceased in 2006, cirrhosis of the liver. Last known address, a Catholic mission in Memphis.” She turned the page over. The next one showed a snapshot of a withered homeless man’s corpse.
“That can’t be right,” Heather said.
“Looks like your Maurice Goodling is guilty of identity fraud,” Williams said.
“Oh!” Heather reached toward her keyboard. “Then I need to check—”
“Non-residents of Fallen Oak among the infected deceased,” Williams said. “You’ll find two: Waylon Humphries and Ruby McGussin. Wanted for six kinds of fraud in three states.” She turned the page, revealing police mugshots of a thuggish-looking young man with a mullet and moustache, and then a young woman with huge hairsprayed bangs and a death’s head moth tattoo on her shoulder.
If Heather squinted, she could just barely see them as the smiling, conservative-looking Dr. and Mrs. Goodling featured on the Fallen Oak Baptist Church website.
“You’ve had their bodies the whole time,” Williams said.
“What about—”
“No sign of the daughter.”
“You’ve done a lot of my work for me,” Heather said.
“Are you kidding? After that lab test you sent up earlier this week, this thing got prioritized. A lot of people still want to know what happened at Fallen Oak. Now it’s my turn to hear what you know about it. And what you speculate, too.”
“What about Jenny Morton?” Heather asked. “Did we look into her background?”
“Far as we can tell, she’s never been to a doctor,” Williams said. “No medical records. Home birth. Mother disappeared soon after.”
“Disappeared?”
“Could be post-partum depression, runs off…”
“Is it possible she died?” Heather asked.
“No death certificate anywhere. Just disappeared.”
“What about her father?”
“Local handyman, no steady job. Living on old family land, old little house. There’s not much to Jenny, either, judging by her school records. No discipline issues. No extracurricular activities. Good student, but she only got a general diploma. Seems like she was pretty invisible. What do you know about the girl?”
“She might be an immune carrier of the disease,” Heather said. “She suffers occasional breakouts of the symptoms, but no long-term damage, as far as anyone knows. Some people think she can infect others at will, or at least chooses to do it maliciously.”
“That’s horrible,” Williams said.
“It may be that something triggered a major flare-up that night,” Heather said. “She infected a lot of people at once. But I still can’t understand how it works. She catalyzes a fatal reaction, but she doesn’t leave any biochemical trace. Nothing viral, nothing bacterial…at this point, it could be little demons with pitchforks.”
“Sounds like a perfect weapon,” Williams said. “We have to be careful approaching her.”
“Are we approaching her?” Heather asked. “How? When?”
“That is under development,” Williams said. “But you’re going to be part of it.”
“I’ll have to clear it with Schwartzman—”
“Consider it cleared with Schwartzman, and with anybody you might be tempted to clear it with. We’re moving into a high threat level area here.”
“Okay,” Heather said. “Let’s have a closer look at Jenny Morton.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
South Battery, the street in front of the Mandrake House, was blocked off for the festival, so they had to park at a garage a few blocks north of it and walk to the hotel.
“Isn’t this so exciting?” Darcy asked. They walked down Meeting Street under a canopy of ancient trees. High stone walls shielded old mansions from the sidewalk, and Seth could only see their upper balconies and the chimneys.
“I hope we can find the place,” Seth said.
“Don’t worry, I know just what we need to do,” Darcy told him.
They walked toward the sound of pulsing music near the harbor. Parliament-Funkadelic was playing. All around Seth and Darcy, clumps of young people walked along the sidewalk or right down the middle of the street, teenagers and college students drawn like moths towards the flickering lights of the weekend-long festival.
They reached Battery and turned left. The crowd was thick here now, and got much thicker across the street at the public park, which looked out onto the harbor. The band was playing somewhere inside the park, past the temporary stalls hawking beer and deep-fried food products, past the cluster of little old ladies protesting the festival with posterboard signs.
The Mandrake House hotel looked like some old Greek temple, with arches and Corinthian columns, and balconies curving out on every floor. The brick steps leading up the front porch were as wide as the house itself. Purple wisteria hung from the gnarled limbs of the old trees surrounding it.
“Oh, it’s just like I remember,” Darcy said. “I even got us the same room my family stayed in. Two bedrooms, with a little sitting room and a huge balcony.”
“That’s great,” Seth said. He’d let Darcy make their reservations, so he wasn’t too sure how much this was costing him. Darcy was at a rough time in her life, though, being pregnant and then giving the baby up for adoption so she could go to college. Seth’s dad might yell at him about the credit card bill, but so what?
The clerk was a woman in her forties or fifties who looked at them suspiciously, until Seth touched her arm and healed any little aches or pains she might have had. Then she smiled and flirted with him while she showed them to their suite.
“Each item of furniture you see is a genuine Southern antique,” the lady explained. “Most of them antebellum. But your bathroom is one hundred and two percent modern. The shower has a heating-stone floor, and it’s big enough for two.” She winked at Seth and giggled.
“Okay, thanks,” Seth said. He tipped the lady, as well as the big quiet bellman who’d carried up their suitcases, and the hotel employees finally left.
“Whew! I’m pooped.” Darcy sat on the couch in the sitting room. She looked out the huge glass doors to the park and the dancing crowd outside.
“You really picked a great place.” Seth pushed open the wide glass door to the balcony, letting in a r
ush of summer moonlight, music and salty ocean air. “We could watch the whole concert from right here. I’m amazed they had a room.”
“I guess anything can be arranged,” Darcy said.
Seth looked at her, curious. That wasn’t a very Darcy thing to say, unless Darcy had copied it from Ashleigh. Then he got distracted by his Blackberry phone playing a sample of Dr. Dre. Wooly was calling.
“Hey, man,” Wooly said. “Got your text. Where you at?”
“It’s called the Mandrake House. It’s on Battery, right across from the park.”
“Holy crap, we’re like a block from there. We’ll be there in a second. Hope you’re ready to get waaaayy-sted!” Wooly sang the last word.
Wooly arrived with Steven Hunter (whom Wooly called “Skunker”) and Adam Branderford (“Aces”), both guys who’d gone to Grayson. Adam had just finished his first year at Charleston, and his first year as a Sigma Alpha brother.
“What’s up?” Wooly pounced on Seth, knocking him to the couch and scrubbing his head with his knuckles. “Who’s ready to slurp up the mad titty-tang tonight, huh, bro?”
“All right, enough, man,” Seth said. He shook Wooly loose and greeted the other, calmer guys.
“Let’s get crunk, stunk and locked in the trunk.” Wooly unscrewed a thermos, sucked down a shot of vodka, and passed it to Steve. Darcy walked from her bedroom out to the sitting room, and Wooly’s eyes widened when he saw the pregnant girl. “Oh, whoa, the record stops,” Wooly said. “Hey, Seth? Is this your girlfriend?”
“No, this is Darcy,” Seth said. “She’s down here for orientation. Just a friend. Darcy, this is Wooly, Steven, and Adam—”
“Okay, good,” Wooly said. “Because I was about to say, Seth, dude, you gotta wear a helmet when you play ball. Anyway, we gotta roll, because we got some very non-pregnant bitches waiting out there. Darcy, nice to meet you, Seth…” Wooly made clicking sounds with his tongue while pointing back over his shoulder at the door.
“Darcy’s coming with us,” Seth said.
“He said what?” Wooly asked the other two guys.
“No, it’s okay,” Darcy said. “My feet are killing me. I’m just gonna hang out here, you know, find a nice place to read a book.”
