Hester settled into her chair. It was hers because no one else was allowed into it. It was high-backed, imperious, and commanded a view of the entire room, as though she was sitting at the head of an unseen table. Hester steepled her fingers and waited.
Constance settled into a chair across from her. She kept her knees together as she had been taught, presenting an appealing silhouette to her audience. She folded her hands in her lap and angled her shoulders just so. She could not have sat any other way, even in this moment of stress.
“Were you going to tell me?” Hester asked.
“There was no reason to tell you.”
“Then the answer to that question is ‘no.’ I’ll not have you dissemble under my own roof, Constance.”
“Yes, mother.”
“You were not going to tell me because Abigail was not ruined unless her condition became common knowledge.”
“Yes, mother.”
“You should have told me.” Hester sighed. “Still, I would have told you to do precisely what you did.”
Constance looked at her mother in surprise.
“Silly girl. After all we’ve done for her, she wants to spoil it all on the eve of her induction. The level of ingratitude staggers me.”
“Mother… The abor-procedure… failed.”
“Failed? What do you mean failed? Did you take her to,” Hester searched for the name, “Eve Collins?”
“I took her to Evelyn Collins,” Constance corrected her without correcting her, as she’d been taught. “And then… something happened.” She explained everything as best she could to Hester. They both were frustrated with how little they knew.
“So, she is still with child?” Hester asked at the end.
“Yes, mother.”
“And who is the…” Hester couldn’t bear to say the word “father.” Constance couldn’t blame her.
“She doesn’t know.”
“Doesn’t know? Has the apple fallen so far from the tree?”
Constance swallowed. “She says it is either Bryce Coffin or Nathaniel Baxter.”
“Bryce Coffin? He’s dead.”
“No, his son. Bryce Coffin IV.”
“Oh. How is that even possible? She has been taking her supplement, correct?”
Constance nodded.
“We need to find out what’s wrong, then. This situation… I don’t like it.”
“We could try another procedure?”
Hester shook her head. “And lose another physician? I think not. No, we need to observe this and determine who is so invested in young Abigail’s child. When we learn that, we will know what to do next.”
Constance wanted to scream. She wanted to tell her mother that Abby was her daughter. She couldn’t use the girl as bait. It was monstrous. Instead, she murmured, “Yes, mother.”
36
The Report
Abby saw the article on the website of the Arkham Post. It wasn’t even on the front page; it was nestled in a link near the bottom of a page normally reserved for unimportant local news, like an award-winning pumpkin or an announcement about road maintenance: Three Slain at Arkham Clinic.
She clicked on the link. The article was bare bones, more like a police report than a homicide story. It named the three victims-Dr. Evelyn Collins, Karen Dubois, and Darla Munson-and stated that an unknown person or persons had committed the crime. It claimed that there were no witnesses since the clinic had been free of visitors.
She scrolled back up to look at the title again. Three Slain at Arkham Clinic, by Stephanie Hill. Abby recognized the name. She was one of Constance’s friends. She was a Daughter of Arkham.
Abby had to turn from the computer for a moment. How much influence did her mother have?
She knew she was going to see those bodies in her mind for a long time whenever she closed her eyes. Dr. Collins-her mouth formed into a grotesque rictus, her eyes popped out in fear, the terrible wound in her throat…
She returned to the article, and found no more answers. It hinted that police were concentrating on “drifters” who had recently arrived in Arkham, which could have meant anything from ‘the homeless’ to ‘someone looking for a new direction.’
The article didn’t mention Abby or her mother. Abby remembered her mother on the phone with the Chief of Police, her slender, pale, fingers stroking the pin on her lapel as if it were a genie’s bottle, waiting to grant her every wish.
When Abby went downstairs to join Hester and Constance for breakfast, she looked at her mother and grandmother with newfound horror. They sat there eating their breakfast as if the world had not gone insane, as if the police department and the Arkham Post had not bent to her mother’s will just a few days ago.
“Above all else… sisterhood,” Abby whispered.
The four-hundred-year-old motto of the Daughters of Arkham had never sounded so menacing.
37
The Hidden Door
As usual, many town luminaries were invited to Harwich Hall for Thanksgiving dinner. Stephanie Hill, the woman who had written the deceitful newspaper article, attended. So did Chief Robert Stone. All the conspirators sat down together to eat turkey and be thankful.
Abby made herself as much of a ghost as she could. She bolted her food and vanished to her room, letting the adults talk about adult things. She wondered if her mother and the others would go off together to discuss their cover-up. How many others were complicit in the event?
She looked over at the dollhouse, the miniature Harwich Hall on its specially-built table. The mold had begun to peek out between the seams of wall and house. She sighed. She knew she should clean it, but she didn’t have the will to get up and do it.
Instead, she opened up her laptop and found Nate online.
hey, she said to him.
Hey back.
u around sat???
I can be.
come over after lunch
You want to talk? I’m free now. Veronica’s having a concert in the living room.
no… face 2 face
Got it. See you at school tomorrow?
yAA~*~
They didn’t speak in detail at school, and Abby was as quiet as she could be. She had taken to wearing lumpy sweaters. She wasn’t showing yet, but she was convinced the first signs had begun because her stomach now pooched out a little above her underwear. She folded her arms across her belly, both hugging and hiding. Her rational mind might insist that no one noticed, but that didn’t stop her from believing that every eye had already witnessed her shame. It was easy to be inconspicuous, though. Bryce was almost too loud at lunch. He made too many jokes, acted a little too aloof. Abby saw the pain in his eyes but she didn’t know what was causing it. If she asked, she knew she’d only get a joke in response.
Sindy spent all of her time with Eleazar. Abby did her best not to look at them. Sindy seemed a bit more hesitant in their public displays, but Eleazar had not cooled. He spent most of this time staring at Sindy or nuzzling her. To Abby, it looked like an animal playing with its food.
She’d seen the wounds on the throats of the women killed at the clinic. In her mind, she imagined those wounds on Sindy as well. It was enough to make her want to vomit. She avoided the pair for the rest of the day.
Nate said hi, but he was distant as well. All of Abby’s immediate social group had become locked in their own little worlds and it seemed like nothing was going to change that. She wanted to shout at all of them, but it wasn’t like she had a leg to stand on. This had started with her.
She chatted briefly with Nate on Friday, but spent most of her evening on homework, and then TV. On Fridays, she was allowed to watch as much as she liked. It was a tradition Constance probably thought of as horribly indulgent. Hester never approved and still referred to the television as the “idiot box,” even though it was hardly box-shaped anymore. Abby just wanted an escape from what was going on in Arkham, no matter how brief.
She spent Saturday morning reading and pacing t
he house. She should have told Nate to come in the morning, but she wanted to be alone. Hester had a monthly engagement with the elder members of the Daughters. A bridge game, she said, though Abby was beginning to doubt that was the truth. Constance had made plans for a shopping trip to Boston. Someone (Constance refused to elaborate) would be around to pick her up at eleven. Abby was not at all surprised when that someone turned out to be Chief Robert Stone, off-duty and almost dashing in a new suit.
Abby watched them leave. Constance was not a nun, though she did not have dates-or, as she put it, “entertain admirers”-very often. When she was much younger, Abby had thought that one of those admirers would become her new father. Now she had no such illusions, and felt better for it.
The house was empty as she waited for Nate’s arrival. Her eagerness must have sharpened her senses, because she heard the side gate squeak. She ran to her bedroom window and saw Nate through the branches of the maple tree outside her window, coming up the path toward the front door. It felt like a moment of mental connection, because as soon as she saw him, he looked up at her and waved.
It was silly, but that tiny gesture comforted her. No matter what else happened, Nate would be there.
She met him at the front door, but their greeting was strained and discordant. There were too many big things to say and there had not been nearly enough of the saying. The unsaid words created a gulf between them. They stood there for a moment, looking at each other. The warm feeling of being connected had vanished.
“Come on,” she said as she turned to go upstairs.
He hesitated. Abby couldn’t imagine why. He had been up to her room many times before without issue, and it was the only place in the house they could safely speak in private. In her most paranoid moments, she sometimes believed her mother had hidden nanny cams in the halls. She didn’t truly believe Constance would go through with it, but at the same time, she didn’t not believe it either. Her room was the best place to talk.
Nate’s footsteps stuttered as he followed her. Outside her room, Abby glanced toward the window, expecting the dark silhouette to be lurking there again. The hall was empty.
She opened the door to her bedroom and threw herself onto the bed. Nate smiled at her from the doorway. It was a fleeting, sad smile, a final bloom in autumn. Instead of taking his customary place beside her, he sat down in the chair by her desk. Abby felt a knot in her stomach. For a moment, she couldn’t look at him. They sat there in silence; one waiting, and the other working up the courage to speak.
“I tried to have an abortion,” she said.
Nate straightened up, though he did not look surprised. She began to describe the procedure, feeling the need to let him into that experience, but the more she talked, the more he frowned. Finally, she said, “What?”
“None of that was necessary.”
“What?”
“Well, you got… pregnant,” Nate still found it difficult to say the word, “at the very end of September. So you’re at the most eight weeks now. You can terminate a pregnancy that early with medication.”
“How do you know this?”
Nate blushed. “When you told me you were pregnant, I read up.”
Warmth spread through Abby’s chest. Of course he had. Even though he could barely say the word ‘pregnant,’ he wanted to be as informed as possible in case she needed him. She fought back tears of affection and guilt. She didn’t deserve him. A cold suspicion chased that thought away. “What were they doing then?”
“That IV was probably the drug. The other sounds like an ultrasound, though what they expected to see this early, I don’t know. They might have been checking to see if you had some other kind of abdominal condition. Or if you had a false positive.”
“She did ask whether I was sure I was pregnant.”
A faint hope lit Nate’s eyes. Abby shook her head and shivered. She wasn’t sure of many things right now, but she was certain about her pregnancy.
“That’s not all, is it?”
She took a deep breath and told him the rest of the story. She omitted nothing. This time, Nate was surprised. More than that, he was horrified. He had heard of the murders at the clinic, but he’d had no idea she had been there when they had happened. He had also heard the rumors that bounced from lip to lip over the digital fences of the community. People said it’d been a killer, but someone from the cloudy part of the world everyone referred to as ‘outside.’
“It wasn’t a killer,” she said. “At least not like they’re saying. It wasn’t a drifter, or even a person.” She clutched a stuffed bear to her chest and rocked back and forth. “I felt something and I know. I don’t know how I know but I do, Nate. And whatever it was that I felt had everything to do with those murders. What kind of homicidal drifter walks in, kills three people, and then leaves me and my mom untouched?”
Abby blinked and took note of her surroundings. She was in her room. She was in a safe place. She wasn’t back in Room B. She set down her bear and grabbed her laptop to show Nate the stories. There was the original, and then a follow-up about the investigation. Both articles claimed that the police were closing in on the perpetrator.
Nate shook his head. “Your mother did all this?”
“The cover-up? Yeah. She didn’t even hesitate.” Abby felt foolish saying ‘cover-up’ but she couldn’t think of any other way to describe it.
“One phone call to the Chief of Police.”
“And, both he and the reporter were here for Thanksgiving. Plus, she’s out with him now.”
“Out? You mean out-out?”
Abby nodded.
“That is weird.” Nate shifted in his chair and adjusted his shirt. “Can I tell you a story now?”
“Of course.”
She searched Nate’s face. She knew every detail; she’d seen the shape of it change as he grew up. It was still round with youth. If he took after his father at all, it wasn’t going to get much more angular. She saw the shame in the way he watched the floor, the fear in the tightness of his lips, and something deeper and more dreadful she couldn’t name.
Her heart turned icy when he began to tell his story. He had come over on Halloween with Flutternutters for her phantom illness-while she had been away, dancing with Bryce-and there had been no one in the house. She couldn’t believe it. “It was so weird,” he said. “Unless everyone was hiding someplace, there was no party here.”
“But I saw it,” she said.
“Saw what?”
She felt her cheeks getting hot. “When I got home, they were cleaning up from it.”
“You weren’t here?”
She shook her head. “I went to Bryce’s party.”
“Oh.” His voice broke so subtly that she might not have noticed if she were anyone else.
“I’m sorry, Nate. It was a last minute thing. I didn’t know what to tell you.”
Nate shrugged. “It’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine. Abby didn’t know if it ever would be.
She watched Nate shake it off as he started telling his story. His voice transitioned into a deeper, dreamy timbre as he recalled the events of that evening. He stuttered once, making brief, sheepish eye contact with her when he described how he’d entered the house. There had been no one there, except for the shape in the upstairs hall.
Abby swallowed. “Where in the upstairs hall?”
“By the window. I could only see a silhouette.”
Abby’s voice was a hushed whisper. “I’ve seen it too.”
Nate’s eyes went wide. “What is it?”
Abby shrugged. “When I saw it, it was just a shape. Nothing at all. Some shadows.”
“I didn’t see much else before I took off. I’ve never run so fast.” Nate said. “So I never found anyone.”
“You said the house was empty. There was nothing to find.”
“No. There has to be. All the cars were here. If they were meeting somewhere else, the cars would be at whatever that place was. There’s
no trail out back, and there’s no way through the woods from your backyard. You think those ladies went hiking in their nice dresses?”
“So what do you think?”
“Harwich Hall is old. It predates the Revolution. A lot of those old buildings had secret rooms. Safe houses, storerooms, that kind of thing, for the Continentals.”
“You think that this house has a secret room,” Abby said.
“When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“Is that… Spock?”
Nate smiled a little. “Spock quoting Sherlock Holmes, actually. Ten points to Gryffindor. Good effort.”
Abby smiled back. “But what if they brought their cars here, then had their drivers go to a second place with their other cars? Everybody in the Daughters of Arkham has more than one, I think.”
“Oh.” Nate looked at the floor. He hadn’t even considered that option. Rich people… Then, even brighter, he said, “Then why lie? Why here? Why create a situation that can be disproved by one person who comes to crash a five-hour-long party?” He got up and went to her dollhouse. “How accurate is this?”
“It’s supposed to be perfect.”
Nate opened the dollhouse, and Abby gasped. The patch of mold inside had grown into a furry green-grey coating over the kitchen and several neighboring rooms. Nate recoiled from it as well. “You should…”
“I know.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
He looked over the rooms one by one, comparing the outline of the building from the inside and the outside. After a moment, he snapped his fingers. “Of course. That would make the most sense.” He closed the house back up and wiped his hands on his pants. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To the one place in here that’s not in there. The basement.”
“The basement?”
“Cellar. Whatever. You have one of those?”
“Sure. I’m not supposed to go down there.”
Nate nodded as though this proved everything.
Mother of Crows Page 18
