“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 had 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.
collection.
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.
The guard sat Koons down and shackled his hands to the top of the table. Underneath, Abby could hear the clinking of the chains around his ankles. The guard moved to the doorway, and Abby knew it would be pointless to ask for privacy. It was crazy to even allow a fourteen year old girl to talk to an accused murderer. Leaving them alone together was not going to happen.
“Duncan Koons? My name is Abigail Thorndike.”
“I know who you are,” Koons said, his gaze playing over the table in front of him, and only flitting upward when he thought Abby wasn’t looking.
“I need to talk to you.”
“My trial is going to start next week.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I had to talk to you.”
“I didn’t appreciate your letters. They were very rude.”
“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Koons. The polite ones didn’t get your attention, so I had to be more direct.”
“Rude.”
“Mr. Koons, I know that you didn’t commit these crimes.”
“Yes, I did,” he said as quickly as he could.
“No, you didn’t. You aren’t guilty of any of this.”
Koons still refused to look at her directly. “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but I’m guilty, and I plan to tell the judge that. I have to pay my debt to society.”
Abby frowned. “You’re not listening to me. I know for a fact that you were not at the clinic. I know you didn’t kill Dr. Collins or any of the others. You’re about to plead guilty to a crime you didn’t commit.”
“I did it.”
“No, you did not! And I don’t care who I have to tell, I’m going to make sure you don’t pay for something you didn’t do!”
Koons worried at his bottom lip with his tiny baby teeth. “Please don’t,” he whispered.
“What?”
“Don’t!” It came out as a sob. He finally looked at Abby, and she had never seen such naked fear in the eyes of another human being. “You can’t do it, Miss Thorndike. Please! You can’t tell anyone! I did it! I killed them! I murdered those people! If they let me out I’ll, I’ll kill more! I’ll kill everyone!”
He tried to lurch to his feet, but the chains yanked him back down. His face had turned purple-red. Tendons sprang up like bridge cables along his neck. He screamed with the desperation of a damned man.
Despite herself, Abby jumped away, falling onto the floor. The guard was on Koons in an instant, though there was no way the little man was going anywhere. He kept screaming.
“I was there! I was at the clinic! I killed everybody! I killed the doctor! I killed the nurses! I killed the security guards! I killed the patients! You can’t let me out! I’m a monster! I’m a killer! I’m a killer!”
He kept repeating himself over and over as Abby grabbed her things and ran out of the building. She could still hear his voice echoing in her ears as she stood outside, surrounded by the chilling mist of her own breath. She knew that man wasn’t telling the truth. He was beyond terrified, but she could
n’t get him to accept her help. There had to be another way.
Abby’s eyes were drawn to the telephone booth just outside the station. It was a rarity, even in conservative, old-fashioned Arkham. She supposed that anyone dealing with the local jail might not have access to a cellphone. But the anachronism of the phone booth wasn’t what held her gaze. It was the blue, plastic-bound phone directory dangling from the bottom of the booth by a metal chain.
53
The Missing Man
“There he is,” Bryce said.
“Which?” Sindy asked. She rose up on her tiptoes, leaning this way and that in an effort to see through the crowd of people out in front of Middleton Community Theater.
“Him.” Bryce pointed. “Beige jacket.” He indicated a fire hydrant of a man bundled up in a padded winter coat with a fleecy hood. The man wore a knit cap which made him hard to recognize. Now Sindy saw his face and the occasional flash of his easy grin. He had the darkest skin she had ever seen.
“What’s his name again?”
Bryce pulled a sheet of paper out of the manila envelope in his lap. “Burton Lamar Fell. Darling of the community theater scene. Says here he’s played Tevye seventeen times. Don’t know why that’s important.”
“Tail him,” she said.
“Really? Just like that?”
“Just tail him!”
“Sure thing, Starsky.” Bryce shook his head and started the car again. The engine hummed softly as he pulled out onto the white-frosted street.
“He’s getting into a car.” It was a burgundy Subaru about a block from the door of the theater. He waved to his friends and then shut the door. A moment later, the Subaru’s headlights came on.
Bryce hesitated in the road, driving as slowly as he could.
“Speed up, or he’s going to be suspicious!”
“If I speed up, I’m going to go past him,” Bryce muttered.
Mother of Crows Page 24
