Fortunately, Fell did not seem to notice the red BMW shadowing him. Sindy thought he drove normally, though she had no frame of reference for him. They followed him from the relative bustle of the community theater to a sleepy suburban enclave of twisted streets, large lots, and pretty (if slightly rundown) houses. It reminded Sindy of Nate’s neighborhood. She’d never understood why anyone would want to live in such an awful, tangled-up place. She tried to picture Michael Endicott living somewhere like this when, thirty minutes away, he had a palatial home with his wife and children.
It didn’t add up.
Fell pulled into the driveway of a house that probably used to be white. He got out.
“Pull over. Pull over!”
Bryce obeyed her. The car hadn’t come to a complete stop before Sindy threw open the door and went charging across Fell’s snow-encrusted lawn.
“Mr. Fell? Mr. Fell?” Sindy shouted as she ran.
Confused, Fell turned around. He held his mail in his hands.
“Yes? Can I help you?”
“Do you know who I am?”
“I’m sorry, young lady, I don’t. What’s this about?”
Sindy stopped. “My name is Sincere Endicott. Sindy.”
It was like watching an explosion in slow-motion. First there was the frown, the contracting of everything into a confused ball. Her name was out of context. He could not place it. Then he did, and it exploded in light over his features. Then, as the debris was falling, everything turned to shock and appalling fear.
“You… you’re not supposed to be here.”
“Do you know my father, Mr. Fell?”
She heard Bryce’s car door slam and his footsteps crunching over the thin layer of snow.
“No. I don’t know your father.”
She was colder inside than out. “Why do you call me every Christmas?”
Fell did not seem to be aware of anything else anymore; it was as though they were the only two people in the world. Sindy locked eyes with him to keep from drowning, but she knew that this secret, this answer to her question, would throw her into an angry sea. Her obvious despair forced him to answer.
“I was hired to do it. Thirteen years ago.”
When I was one. Just one year old, she thought. She imagined herself on the phone, talking to this man, Burton Fell, thinking he was her father, saying ‘dada’ to him.
“Hired?”
“I’m sorry, Sindy,” he said.
“Don’t!” she spat on the back of a rage-choked sob. “Don’t say my name!” She felt her tears, like crystal, on her cheeks.
Fell flinched. “I’m sorry, Miss Endicott. There was an ad in one of the job sheets. Easy gig, long-term, paid on time. I called the number and they auditioned me on the phone.”
“Who did you talk to?” Bryce asked behind her. Sindy was grateful that he’d spoken up. Her throat was burning with unvoiced sobs. She could barely breathe.
“A woman. She said her name was Mrs. Smith.” He looked at Sindy, and she watched his face crumble again at the sight of her. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone. Then it kept going, and I just thought…”
“You still get paid?” Bryce asked.
He nodded. “I have one of the checks.”
“Can you get it?”
Fell nodded and backed away from them as though he almost scared of the two kids on his lawn. He went into his house. Bryce put an arm around Sindy and she fell into the crook of his body.
“You okay?” he asked. He knew the answer was no.
“I can’t believe this. I never thought…”
“I know. None of us did.”
Bryce was right. The fathers of Arkham were gone, leaving the Daughters in their wake.
Above all else… sisterhood.
Fell emerged, clutching a check. “Here. Take it. It’s yours. I don’t need it.” He turned to Sindy, but words failed him.
She had nothing to say, either. She and Bryce took the check back to the car. Fell stayed on his porch for a moment, then Sindy watched him sit down to cradle his head in his hands. His shoulders began to shake. A bright flame of anger blazed in Sindy’s chest. She hoped he felt at least a fraction of the pain he caused.
Bryce studied the check. “It’s a holding company. I’ve never heard of it. It looks like they have a PO box in Arkham.”
She took the check and looked at it. Five thousand dollars. That was the price of a phone call. One hundred and thirty thousand dollars over the course of thirteen years to lie to Sindy about her father’s life and death. She wiped away more tears. She tried to burn away the sadness with her rage. In a thick voice, she said, “We’re going to find out who uses that PO box.”
54
The Great Arkham Fire
The Great Arkham Fire of 1801 was one of those events that everyone in town knew. It was taught in elementary school, usually when the town’s history was being laid out for a new generation of eager young minds. Like much history taught at the primary level, a lot of it consisted of local legends, elevated into fact by the simple act of repetition. Nate Baxter realized that he actually knew very little about the fire. It was an event that every Arkhamite would have greeted with a knowledgeable nod, but when it came time to discuss specifics, they would have faltered and leaned on generalities.
The Fire was an easy, catch-all excuse for the destruction of some of the town’s historical buildings. The biggest losses had been the main public house and a large swath of residences.
Nate did not see a direct connection between the hangings and the fire, but he took it upon himself to find out. They were suspicious. An angry mob one month, and a huge fire only a few months later? There had to be some kind of connection there, even if there was no evidence for one on the surface.
He returned to the Arkham Public Library to peruse the digital newspapers. References to the Fire were abundant. At the time, it had been considered a horrible disaster. It continued to be the metric for misfortune in the town all the way until the Second World War. By then, anything so provincial had gone out of style.
Nate decided to start at the beginning. The Great Arkham Fire had burned from September 30th to October 2nd, so he started with September’s issue. There was nothing there. He scolded himself: Remember that the fire didn’t start until the evening.
Sure enough, the October 1st edition of the paper was full of news. Most of it was confused and scattered. The story didn’t start to make any kind of cohesive sense until the October 7th edition. Nate read through everything he could find, making notes along the way to sketch out some kind of story.
In the beginning, the authorities had believed a lantern had been knocked over near the town’s grain silo, which had shortly turned into a blazing inferno that had rained flakes of glowing wheat for miles. Later, it was believed the fire was a deliberate act of sabotage by royalists. Nate frowned at this. It was about twenty years too late, or ten years too early, for any royalists to be burning things in Arkham. Yet, he saw the same hysteria in the articles that could be found in World War II-era pieces on the Japanese, or modern stories about Middle Eastern terrorists.
He continued reading. The trio of royalists were arrested about two weeks after the Fire was finally put out. After a quick trial, all three men were hanged. Nate frowned as he saw the names. Two had no meaning for him-Luther Hobbes and Israel Thaw. It was the third name that gave him pause.
Josiah Baxter.
He didn’t realize he was staring at the page until he felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw that it was a text from Abby.
need a ride plz??
Nate took one last look at article. That was his surname on the screen, and he didn’t know of any other Baxters in Arkham. It gave him a cold feeling in his chest. It took him multiple tries to send even the simplest of messages in return.
Of course. OMW.
He tucked his pen and pad away and left for Abby’s house.
55
The Condemned Man
&nbs
p; Abby waited at the end of her driveway. She spotted Nate as he pedaled up the street, and stood up to wave as he got close. He turned off the road and came to a stop. “Hey, Abs,” he said dully. “Where to?”
“Brookside,” she said.
“Brookside? Getting too rich to make your own meth?”
“No. We’re going to Duncan Koons’ house.”
Nate cocked his head as he looked at her. “His house? I thought he was a drifter.”
“No.” Abby pulled a folded piece of yellow paper from her coat pocket and held it out to Nate. “His sister has a house here in Arkham.”
Nate took the torn directory page and looked it over. Where had Abby found a phone book? Did they even make those, anymore? “That is super weird,” he said. “But I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess. I found some weird things, too.”
“What kind of things?”
He told her about his research on the Great Arkham Fire and the church of Snake Handlers. He mentioned the three men who were hanged on the green, and Abby felt a now-familiar pain in her belly. She had seen those men hanged. One of them might have been Nate’s ancestor.
“Our town is a little stranger than we thought,” she said.
“Yeah, no kidding. So, you want to go see where Koons lived?”
“He’s probably living in his sister’s guest rooms or something.”
Nate laughed.
“What?”
“No one in Brookside has a guest room, Abby. They barely have cellars. He’s probably living in some shack on the back of the property. You remember Albert Jones?”
She shook her head, then slowly nodded. “Oh, right.”
Albert Jones was one of Nate’s friends, a perpetually grubby boy with an interest in fireworks and explosives. Nate and Albert had been close when they were younger, and they’d often gotten themselves into trouble. She remembered seeing him with some scrapes and bruises but anytime Abby thought to bring it up, Nate had brushed it off. It was the one part of his life that he kept separate from her. It had bothered Abby, but he and Albert had drifted apart as Nate’s grades put him on the path to college and Albert’s hobbies put him on the path to juvie.
“Albert had this uncle who had one of those kinds of things going. Just about every house down there has some weird shack out back with a relative or three.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“Why would you?” Nate shrugged.
He hadn’t meant anything by it, but the words stung. Abby felt sheltered, and worse, young. She was unprepared for this, and here she was, playing detective in a murder case that everyone in town wanted to just go away. Nate was right, though. She had never been to Brookside. Before she’d discovered that Koons had family there, she’d never planned to. It was ten minutes from her front door, but that didn’t matter. She would have never gone.
“Can you give me a ride down there?”
“Yeah, of course,” he said, patting the padded handlebars of his bike. She had ridden on them so many times before that she jumped up without thinking and instantly found that her belly threw off her equilibrium. She slipped. Her shin scraped across the rubber tire.
Nate lurched forward reflexively. “Ah, jeez! Are you okay?” He frowned as she checked her leg. “Yeah. Didn’t think about this part.”
“What?”
“Should I really be putting a pregnant girl on my bike?”
She glared at him. “I’m asking you to, and since I’m the pregnant girl in question, I think it’s okay.”
Nate held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I don’t want to start a whole thing.”
Abby shot him another glare. It took her three tries before she was settled on the handlebars, and she had to lean back so far to keep her balance that she was practically resting against Nate’s chest. She probably could have whispered in his ear just by craning her neck.
Nate started up, wobbling a bit as he got used to the new weight. They cruised down the hill toward the center of town. Abby’s knuckles went white as she gripped the handlebars. They dug into her butt, despite the padding Nate had wrapped around them for this very purpose. The wind whipped over her face and into her hair. She felt Nate brush it aside, but when she shouted an apology, she couldn’t even hear his murmured response. Her heart thudded loudly in her chest, but it was a fun feeling. A roller coaster heartbeat. Despite the strange nature of the errand and their unknown destination, riding with Nate felt good and right.
As they passed the green, she half-expected to see the spectral gallows there again. Everything was bare, covered with the dwindling snow of the coming spring. She felt grateful. Now that she knew the identity of one of the men, it was harder to dismiss as a daydream. It was real and it had happened. The momentum of the bike carried them effortlessly toward the turnoff that would take them across Endicott Bridge to Brookside.
The bridge was named for Clara Endicott, one of Sindy’s ancestors. At one time, it had been the only way out of Arkham. Back then, Brookside had been little more than a hobo camp, but as the town grew larger, people had built actual houses over there and it was simply absorbed into Arkham as an official neighborhood.
The irony was that Brookside was like Arkham Hills-Abby’s neighborhood-in one way: it was not laid out at all. Really, only Maple Park had been put into place with any thought for the future. The first settlers had taken their plots of land and built their houses in the hills wherever they liked. The hobos and migrants of Brookside had taken a similar approach to suburban planning. Streets wound around at random and dead ended into small bluffs. Abby had started out with a clear map in her mind to where the Koons family lived, but quickly realized that her internal GPS wasn’t showing every side road and dirt track that made this place up.
The streets were quiet as she and Nate pedaled around in search of the Koons house. They might as well have been the last people on earth. The only sound was the squeak of the bike’s gears and the whistle of the sullen wind through the bare trees. All of the houses they passed were one-story. Many of them looked to be one room, as well. Through the trees and the ugly yellow bushes in the yards, Abby could make out shacks at the back of many properties, just like Nate had said. She shivered, thinking of living in one of those places.
The Koons address was a shotgun house built along the street. Trees squeezed in on either side of it, as though nature itself wanted to get the people out of there.
“Here,” she said.
Nate pulled over, and Abby attempted to jump down. She forgot about her belly again, and promptly pitched over on her hands and knees. She cursed.
“Crap,” Nate said, hopping off his bike to help her up. She hissed with pain, wanting to rub her palms on her shirt though she knew that was exactly the wrong thing to do. Her tights were torn at the knees.
“You okay?” Nate asked her.
“Yeah, I’m fine. That was stupid of me.”
“Me too. I’m sorry, I forgot.”
“For a minute there, I did too.”
They stood on the sidewalk looking up at the house. Abby had expected Sally Koons to come out to meet the two teenagers on her porch. Instead, the place looked deserted.
“Maybe no one’s home.”
Abby went to knock on the side of the screen door. It sent back a hollow echo. She waited. There was no answer. She knocked again. After a shorter wait, she knocked again, harder this time.
The front door of the next house over opened and a woman poked her head out. She was a withered nut of a woman, beaten down by a hard life. When she looked at Abby and Nate, it was with open suspicion. “Sally ain’t here,” she said.
“Do you know when she’ll be back?” Abby asked.
At the same time, another house opened up. This time, a croatan stepped out onto his porch. He watched her from across the street. As she turned to glance at him, Abby instinctively felt this one knew that she knew he wasn’t human.
She turned back to the woman, who said, “Don’t think she’ll ev
er come back.”
More doorways began to open up. The street was coming to life. Like an immune system, it had waited for invaders and was now marshalling its defenses. There were humans and there were Crows. The humans remained partly inside, nervously using their doors as protection. The croatan strode out to their stoops and glared at the interlopers with undisguised hostility. Abby saw Nate tense, though he could not know the true nature of the threat.
“What do you mean?” Abby asked.
“She moved out.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep. I’m sure.”
Abby looked at the door.
“Abby, it’s time to go.”
She ignored him. She felt a twist in her belly, those familiar pains that came with revelation, and she encouraged them. It was like trying to flex a muscle she didn’t know she had. There was nothing to grip onto, but the more she looked at the door, the more the pain increased, like the burner of a stove slowly cranked higher and higher.
A faint scent of perfume came to life and floated towards Abby.
She startled with recollection. She knew that scent. It was the smell of discipline and judgment that wafted through the corridors of Harwich Hall.
Hester Thorndike had been there.
The smell continued to build. It was becoming overpowering, as if she were being strangled in her grandmother’s embrace.
“What happened?” Abby asked. She could not tear her eyes away from the door, even as the exquisite agony tore into her middle.
“Sally came into some money. Moved away. Can’t hardly blame her.”
Abby turned then, and saw more doors opening. The Crows outside had advanced almost to the sidewalk. It felt like she and Nate were in the process of being hemmed in.
“Now, Abby.” Nate said. She looked at her friend and saw something foreign in his face. It was… hard. He almost looked angry. His eyes were narrow and they darted left and right, trying to see everything at once. He stood as tall as he could, his shoulders squared. There was a slight tilt to his head.
“Yeah. Okay. Let’s go.”
Nate put his hand on her elbow and escorted her down the stairs. She felt him holding her to his casual pace as they walked to his bicycle.
Mother of Crows Page 25
