XGeneration (Book 5): Cry Little Sister

by Brad Magnarella

  Are you okay? Janis thought toward them. She didn’t know what else to do.

  For a terrifying moment, the buzzing reared up. Then it fell, becoming muted.

  It was her idea to come back here, Chastity said, still staring down at her double. Her idea to do the bad things. She said these people were the reason I am the way I am. The reason I have no friends.

  To Janis, she sounded like the same girl she had come to know through her exploration of Markus’s thoughts. Lonely and withdrawn, a girl who valued whatever connections she could make with others, however solid or tenuous, above everything else.

  She cared about me, Chastity said sadly. And now she’s gone.

  “Your father cares about you,” Janis said, forming the thought as she spoke.

  Chastity raised her face as a knife blade appeared between the latch bolt and strike plate of the bedroom door. The door swung open. Mr. Snyder stepped into the room in a pair of muddy overalls and a thick gray sweater.

  “I do, baby,” he said.

  His blue eyes glistened from a dark, leathery face and wooly beard. He sheathed the knife in his belt and opened his arms to his daughter. With clear eyes, Chastity looked from him to Janis and back.

  “She came to help us,” Mr. Snyder explained, Chastity reading the words on her father’s moving mouth. “She’s going to help us get our life back. We won’t have to run no more.”

  Janis could feel how badly Mr. Snyder wanted to believe what Janis had told him in the woods. He was exhausted. Janis caught glimpses of his years on the run. Taking work in the slaughterhouses, teaching his daughter the trade when she was old enough. And as the years ground on, watching her sickness claim her—at first outwardly, then inwardly—transforming the angel he had known into something brooding and demonic. By then, the two of them had settled in a quiet town in Colorado, the closest place to a home they had known since Murder Creek. But when the slaughterhouse supervisor suffered a massive stroke after berating Mr. Snyder, the whispers began: the strange girl had done something to him. And Mr. Snyder found himself running with her again. Only now she was setting the course. South and east. Back to the place they had been driven from. The place they had been wronged.

  Chastity turned from her father’s words to take another look at her double: the manifestation of her fear and anger, the part that had taken her over. It was a phenomenon Janis knew something about.

  But Chastity’s double was no longer there. The foam that had molded her screaming face was collapsing. When Janis trained her focus on the astral plane, she found the ochre-colored energy dispersing, fading out.

  “Come here, sweetheart,” Mr. Snyder said.

  Chastity’s placid face crimped and then crumpled. She collapsed into her fathers huge arms. He held her against him and talked in a shushing voice as he patted her back. It was the low voice Cassie would have heard the day she happened upon his tent.

  Thank you, he mouthed to Janis over his daughter’s head.

  “You … you’re under arrest,” Chief McDermott called hoarsely from the bed.

  The handkerchief still clutched to his throat had soaked through. His face was ashen. Janis needed to get help for him right away. She reached for her watch before remembering she and Scott had had the brilliant idea of leaving them at the house so they couldn’t be tracked.

  “Stay here, sir,” she said. “You’re too weak. I’m going to call Detective Buckner.”

  She coaxed Mr. Snyder and his daughter from the room and onto a couch in the den. In a nearby office, Janis found a telephone. She dialed nine-one-one. When the dispatcher answered, she asked for Detective Buckner.

  Moments later he picked up. “Buckner speaking.”

  “Is Scott there yet?”

  “Is this Janis? No … I haven’t seen him tonight.”

  I’m going to cut through the amusement park and make a run for it. Worry shot through her.

  “Listen to me carefully, Detective. I need you to contact the other agents, have them send a team to Chief McDermott’s house. Tell them we have a possible Special on site, and a police chief in need of immediate blood. He’s hanging on, but his throat’s been lacerated.”

  “Agents? Special? What in the world are you—”

  “Cut the crap,” Janis said. “I know you’re one of ours.”

  Following a lengthy silence, Detective Buckner said, “Go ahead.”

  “I need you to do one more thing.”

  Scott’s only contact with the ground were the hairs that hung from the top of his inverted head. He had become wedged in the arms of the turnstile, his own arms pinned to his sides. He kicked desperately but only managed to descend another inch. Grunting, he craned his neck.

  A pair of legs clad in dark pants stood beyond the turnstile. Scott’s straining eyes reached up to the aimed gun. A small-caliber pistol. It wavered a little, as though deciding where to plant the lethal shot.

  “You—you’ve got the wrong person,” Scott insisted.

  The man crouched slightly, and Scott could see he was trying to line up a shot with his chest.

  “Look, look,” Scott said quickly, trying to angle himself away, “we’re not doing anything to jeopardize David and the others’ release from prison. If anything, we’re helping them. This time next week they’ll be out, I promise.” During his second flight through the woods, he had decided that his pursuer could only be David’s contact on the outside.

  “And that’s a problem,” the person said.

  Scott’s mind did a double take. The voice was not at all what he had been expecting. It was older and refined, for one. And it belonged to a woman.

  “Who in the hell are you?” Scott asked.

  “Someone with interests to protect.”

  Scott could tell by the distractedness of her voice she was still hunting for a clean shot. The turnstile was making the job difficult. But her answer had filled in an important hole. In some way, shape, or form, she was connected to the Rourke Pharmaceuticals experiments.

  “Is that why you stole the records from Dr. Fields’s office?” Scott asked.

  He was trying to buy whatever seconds he could, hoping the lit-up Ferris Wheel would do its job.

  “I stole nothing,” the woman said. “That information is proprietary.”

  “And slashed our tires?” Scott added. “And … and … painted the red X on our door.”

  “You were sticking your noses in places they didn’t belong. At least you had the courtesy of a warning. Two of them. I didn’t have to do that, you know. Someone could have seen me.”

  “We did see you,” Scott lied. “Cutting our tires. We told people.”

  “If you had seen me, then you wouldn’t have to ask who I was.”

  Wouldn’t have to ask who she was?

  Inverted, his head pounding with blood, Scott had an epiphany, a brilliant ah-ha moment that, despite everything else, stretched his lips upward. Like a giant puzzle piece snapping into place, he knew exactly who she was.

  “You’re—”

  The pistol flashed.

  Scott had read somewhere that being shot was like being torn into by a meat hook. But all he felt was a spanking pain, deep in his right ear.

  He squinted his eyes open, surprised he could still see. The Ferris Wheel lights glowed softly against the closest metal arm to his face. First red, then yellow, then blue. The effect was oddly mesmerizing. Scott had a hard time pulling his gaze away. When he did, a kneeling woman grew into his field of vision. On the cement out in front of her lay a smoking pistol.

  Scott, are you all right?

  Janis? Scott’s lower lip trembled and for a moment he thought he was going to lose it. He could feel her presence. Not physically, but astrally. What he had mistaken for a gunshot wound had been the deafening bang of a backfiring gun. God, I could kiss you, he thought.

  No, that will be me kissing you. But that’ll have to wait for the rest of me to get there. In the meantime…

  A vibrat
ing force drew Scott from the turnstile and set him on his feet, one foot bare and blood-stained, the other wrapped in a filthy sock. He used his socked foot to scoot the pistol out of the woman’s reach. She didn’t paw after it. Her head was bowed over the hand clutched to her chest. Beyond the echo chamber between Scott’s ringing ears, he could just make out her shrill cries.

  Scott limped forward until he was standing over her. He tilted his head. Did he know who she was? He seized the knotted end of a black length of pantyhose that covered her head and drew it away. Dull blond sheaves of hair spilled onto the shoulders of her jacket.

  Is that…? Janis started to ask.

  A white spotlight hit the woman’s up-tilting face. She wasn’t made up as she had been in the family portrait or on the afternoon of the town meeting, but Scott recognized the mayor’s wife.

  “Put your hands where I can see them!” Detective Buckner called from his cruiser. Scott hadn’t heard him arrive, thanks to his partial deafness, but the detective had driven right up to the ticket booth.

  Mrs. Walpole squinted from the spotlight up to Scott. Horror distorted her attractive features, reminding Scott of an exhibit in a nightmarish wax museum. Her lips pulled back from perfect white teeth and an inhuman scream. She lunged at Scott, fully meaning to kill him, Scott had little doubt.

  He backpedaled, but Detective Buckner was there to restrain her. With two hard wrenches, he pinned her arms behind her and cuffed her wrists. As he dragged Mrs. Walpole to her feet, his stern face met Scott’s. Something passed between them, an acknowledgement.

  He’s saying, good job, Champion, Janis informed him.

  Scott nodded back.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” the detective told Mrs. Walpole as he steered her staggering body toward his police cruiser. “Anything you say can and will be used against you…”

  28

  Late the next morning

  Detective Buckner took another slow sip of Mrs. Spruel’s coffee. He had stopped by to drop off Scott’s pack and, Janis guessed, to take a little break from his work. From the puffiness around his eyes, Janis could see he had been up all night. She and Scott had managed a few hours of sleep after giving their accounts and statements and having their banged-up parts tended to.

  “The good mayor’s wife,” Detective Buckner said in a reflective, doesn’t-that-beat-all kind of way.

  “And the former mayor’s daughter,” Janis reminded him. That was the piece she and Scott had missed. Of course they had never thought to check her maiden name, which was Hoppenfield—the name of the mayor at the time of the radiation experiments. It wasn’t until Janis saw who was trying to kill Scott that things clicked into place. A probe of Mrs. Walpole’s thoughts rounded out the story.

  “Well, you were right,” Detective Buckner told Janis, following another sip. “We went back through the evidence on that ’57 murder. Other sets of fingerprints had been lifted from the shotgun. The evidence was filed at the time but never processed. McDermott and the detectives figured they belonged to family members, and the case against Mr. Snyder looked straightforward enough. Plus, they were getting pressure from the mayor’s office to clear it.”

  Janis rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I wonder why.”

  “And one of those sets belonged to Mrs. Walpole?” Scott said. His sprained left ankle was bandaged and propped on a neighboring chair at the kitchen table, the pads of his toes plump and blue-tinged. Behind him, Mrs. Spruel bustled past, carrying another box out to the car.

  “Perfect match,” the detective replied.

  “Mrs. Walpole was born into spoiled privilege,” Janis explained. An even clearer narrative had assembled itself in her mind while she slept. “She had a nanny at her beck and call, an outfit for every day of the year, a playroom full of those giant, hand-crafted dollhouses that cost a fortune, a pony on her tenth birthday. You get the picture. Somehow or another, she was with her father on the night he went to talk to the Snyders. While he was using persuasion or threats or some combination of the two to keep them quiet about their daughter’s illness, his own fifteen-year-old daughter wandered the house. She had seen plenty of shacks from the road, but had never been inside of one. She went room to room, poring over every dirty, disheveled detail in horrified fascination. She touched nothing. She saw poverty as a black plague that could infect her.”

  “But it was how she learned that Mr. Snyder kept his shotgun under the bed,” Scott said.

  Janis nodded. “And when she left with her father, she saw how upset he was. In the backseat of their chauffeured car, he grumbled about how the Snyders would get him thrown from office and maybe even imprisoned. ‘And if that happens, you can forget about all of this,’ he said, sort of flipping up one of the silk ribbons in her hair. ‘You and your mother will be living like them,’ he said, cutting his eyes back to the shack. ‘If you’re lucky.’”

  “And she wanted to make sure that didn’t happen,” Detective Buckner concluded.

  “Right. She decided to punish them, just like she would punish her dolls when they misbehaved. She had an uncle who used to take her on pheasant shoots, so she knew how to handle a shotgun. She crawled in through a window, retrieved the gun, and found Mrs. Snyder in the kitchen.” Janis could feel the depth of the young woman’s hatred, not just toward the Snyder’s, who were threatening her privilege, but for all things poor. “I think she had intended to kill the whole family. It was pure luck that Mr. Snyder and Chastity were out. Otherwise, they would have met the same fate. The idea to frame Mr. Snyder by setting out the beer cans came to her late.”

  “Say,” Scott said, an idea lighting up his eyes, “do you think those doll heads in the bucket at the Purple Dragon were from her collection?”

  Janis squinted at him. How is that even relevant?

  “With her family riches safe,” Detective Buckner said, “her next priority would have been to ensure that the money coming through the mayor’s office—kickbacks from contractors and then the substantial payments from Rourke—would continue to end up in her pockets.”

  “Her father explained the ins and outs of the office to her when she turned eighteen,” Janis said. “He sent her off to college with the directive to marry someone who could be groomed to succeed him in the mayor’s office—or what they had come to consider the family business.”

  “Enter Mr. Walpole,” Scott said.

  Mrs. Spruel, who was passing through the room again, scowled at the name.

  “Mayor Hoppenfield passed away in 1980,” Janis said. “Later that year, Mr. Walpole—who had double majored in accounting and public relations—won the special election in a landslide. Which meant Mrs. Walpole became the power behind the throne.”

  “I’d seen hints of it,” Detective Buckner mused, rotating his mug on the table, “but the family concealed her role well. The sad thing is, I think Mr. Walpole really did have some ambitions to improve the town. The boardwalk, for example. But when it fell into financial trouble, his wife refused to let him dip into the Rourke money. She wanted to run that tap for as long and as hard as she could.”

  “And part of that meant keeping Dr. Fields on the payroll and David and his friends on a payment plan,” Scott said, adjusting his leg on the chair.

  “Which was why, after Dr. Fields’s murder,” Detective Buckner continued, “Mrs. Walpole needed to put those medical records in a safe place until she could vet a new pediatrician. Someone who would go along with the program. Which reminds me. We found those files right where you said they’d be.”

  “Behind the family portrait?” Janis asked.

  The detective nodded. “He had a safe back there.”

  Janis remembered the day she and Scott had accompanied Scott’s mother to the mayor’s office. Remembered the way Mayor Walpole had spazzed out when Scott reached up to touch the portrait.

  “So, what does this mean for everyone?” Janis asked, the backs of her eyes starting to burn with fatigue.

  “Well, it’
s all yet to play out,” the detective said, “but I can tell you a few things. Mr. Snyder will be exonerated of his wife’s murder. Mrs. Walpole will be charged with the crime, as well as for last night’s attempted murder on Scott. She knew you had been digging into the library archives and talking to former subjects. She feared you’d eventually connect the dots back to the mayor’s office. In any case, once investigators finish digging through all the financial data, Mr. and Mrs. Walpole will no doubt be charged with embezzlement and other improprieties. With good behavior, Mr. Walpole could be out in four or five. Mrs. Walpole on the other hand?” He whistled through his teeth and shook his head.

  “And this thing with Rourke Pharmaceuticals?” Janis asked.

  “They don’t exist,” the detective said plainly.

  Janis stared at him.

  “All that money had to have come from somewhere,” Scott said.

  The detective shrugged. “It doesn’t mean there’s a trail back to the source. Rourke was probably a dummy company attached to a larger, more powerful organization. One that knows the ins and outs of moving money without leaving fingerprints. Whatever tentacle they had poking into Murder Creek is gone.”

  Janis remained dumbfounded. She thought of David and his friends, deliberately poisoned by a company that Detective Buckner was telling her didn’t exist. Had never existed. She thought of Chastity. She saw the sad, fragile creature crying in her father’s arms.

  “What’s going to happen to her?” Janis asked.

  “The daughter? The Program has taken her somewhere safe for assessment,” Detective Buckner replied. “But no matter the outcome, I understand she and her father will be taken care of.”

  “Will anything happen to her for Dr. Fields?” she asked.

  “That vile man? Not on my watch.”

  “And her attempted murder of Chief McDermott?”