by Ren Richards
‘We put Easter in counselling immediately, but I think – I think that was the wrong thing to do, because she shut down completely after that. And later that same year was when we found the wild rabbit head in the garden…’
She trailed off into silence, and the image hung suspended in the air.
‘Mrs Hamblin.’ Nell spoke gently. ‘Who killed the rabbit?’
Mrs Hamblin’s gaze was distant. She was still toying with her necklace and her hand had started to shake. ‘Autumn said it was Easter. Easter said it was Autumn.’ She looked at Nell and her eyes were pleading, as though she wanted Nell to confirm the truth for her. But all Mrs Hamblin said was, ‘I didn’t know which one to believe.’
8
NOW
Some mothers know what sort of person their child will grow up to be.
Nell saw the harried mothers outside of PS 198 on weekday afternoons at 2:15. It was the best public school in the tri-state area, its alumna moving on to Harvard, Juilliard or sometimes straight to Broadway. The children were barely children at all, Nell thought. They had schedules and tutors and they knew words like ‘deadline’ and ‘transcript’.
These miniature adults, dressed like flight attendant Barbies and I-need-to-speak-with-your-manager Kens, were trains on a set track. Nell would have liked to meet up with those children in ten years, in twenty. She would like to ask them if they were still stuck to that track, with all of the world’s tragedies blurring by like trees past the windows of their lives. Maybe there was something to that. Maybe it was a better way to live, only vaguely aware of how terrible life could be.
Reina was in preschool before she disappeared, and already Mrs Eddleton had prepared her for this sort of mini-adulthood. She wouldn’t have done well in this world, Nell thought.
Nell was sitting in a traffic jam caused by all the au pairs and mothers and full-time dads collecting their prodigies from school. There was a comforting efficacy to it, little wooden dolls in an old cuckoo clock.
But Reina had been the chaotic child, and given time, she would have been the one teachers called meetings about. She would have set fires and pushed and stolen little trophies she didn’t even really want.
Nell never said it out loud, but she had known her little girl. She had known the sort of person she would have grown up to be.
Her phone rang. Stopped in the gridlock anyway, Nell answered it. She set it to speaker and rested it in the cup holder. ‘I’m on my way,’ she said.
‘Drive faster,’ Lindsay said.
‘How’d it go with the insurance?’
‘They’re calling it theft and arson. I’m getting a new coupe. If you’re nice, I’ll let you drive it.’
‘Liar,’ Nell said.
‘Well, I’ll let you sit in it, even though you abandoned me to go on your ill-advised mission.’
Nell rolled her eyes. ‘I’m through the school traffic now. I’ll be there in two minutes.’ She pressed ‘end call’ before Lindsay could reply. She had resolved not to argue with her sister today, not even in the form of their playful bickering. She had barely slept, and there was still so much to untangle about what the mannequin in the car meant.
She was thinking about Matthew Cranlin, whose name hadn’t been a part of their lives for nearly seven years. Much like Reina and the Eddletons, he had been left behind in suburban Missouri. On the surface, it was easy to see why he had caught Lindsay’s eye. He was pretty in all the same ways that she was: sparkly-eyed and well-groomed.
Lindsay, twenty-one at the time, had constructed her appearance to give the impression of wealth. Matthew Cranlin had not only the appearance, he was the real deal. His parents had made some solid stock investments in IBM in the early nineties, and now they had more money than their multiple homes could contain.
It had been a Venus flytrap of a marriage, Lindsay’s first love. The first time she had felt glamorous and important. From Nell’s perspective, ‘love’ had been the wrong word. It had been an addiction. A foreign substance flooding her veins, making her hazy and heavy-lidded with lust until it all crashed to punishing wave after wave of pain.
Years later, when Robert came about, Nell had her suspicions about him as well. He was also pretty, also rich. It was clear that Lindsay had a type. But where Matthew had hidden Lindsay away, Robert had been an open book. He was from a large family, parents and siblings coming and going, carrying little nieces and nephews, kissing each other on the cheeks and planning Dirty Santa swaps for Christmas parties.
He never seemed impatient or angered by Nell’s presence, not even when she came to steal her sister away for entire afternoons. If it was late, and the sisters had downed one too many glasses of wine by the fire, he would get the spare blankets from the hall closet and make up one of the guest beds for Nell without being asked.
Those guest bedrooms were ultimately what undid the marriage. Not only was Robert a man who valued family, he also wanted to cultivate one of his own, little babies popping out of Lindsay like garden blossoms. They would attend private school, of course. Summers at the Cape (memories are important), non-GMO baby foods (no cancer and reproductive issues down the line for little Susie or Robert Jr.), BPA-free bottles and white-noise machines to ease the transition from womb to world.
Lindsay played along. Who knew, maybe she meant to go through with it. For a short while, he sold her on the idea of being one of those helicopter mommies you see at every dress rehearsal, mouthing the words and throwing jazz hands to their mortified child. She’d even gone so far as to let him assemble the crib.
But then, faced with the prospect of Diaper Genies and Pedialyte, she panicked.
Nell blamed herself for this. Because of what had happened to Reina, Lindsay knew that children were fleeting little things, like rainbows cast on the wall in a beam of late afternoon sun. She couldn’t sign on for that.
When Nell pulled up in front of the insurance agency, Lindsay was kerbside and she got into the car before Nell could put it in park. ‘How was your murder interview?’ she asked.
‘Fine,’ Nell said. ‘I have enough to draw up an outline. I’m going to email it to Jasper by the weekend.’ Outlines were the only organised thing Nell could produce. The rest of her life – her first drafts, her notes, her dresser and closet and kitchen sink – were all a helpless mess.
‘I googled myself last night,’ Nell confessed. She wasn’t sure why she blurted that out. She was tired and the loneliness of last night’s thoughts had grown unbearable.
‘Like your book reviews?’ Lindsay was rummaging through the glove box for a tissue. The late fall chill left her face perpetually leaking.
‘No,’ Nell said. ‘Like from before.’
Lindsay blew her nose. ‘From Missouri?’ Her voice was incredulous.
‘I wanted to see if there was anything new. There wasn’t.’
‘I’ve been thinking since yesterday,’ Lindsay said. ‘Maybe it would be cathartic to just tell Sebastian.’
‘Were they serving alcohol at the insurance agency?’
‘I’m serious. He loves you, Nell. And I don’t mean Hallmark card and flowers on your anniversary love. I mean he’s deliriously, stupidly, borderline psychotic in love with you. He might understand.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ Nell said. ‘He’ll understand. He’ll understand that I’m not what he thought.’
‘Yes you are,’ Lindsay said. ‘You’re way more honest with each other than I ever was with Robert. It’s a little disgusting how much you respect each other.’
It hurt to breathe. Nell was imagining what would happen if she told him. She didn’t expect that he would yell or even say something truthful about how heartless she was. Rather, she would wake up in the morning and find that he’d left her. All of his things removed from the closet and the bathroom vanity. Even the bougie espresso mugs he kept stacked by the Keurig – gone.
‘If this Easter lunatic gets out ahead of you and tells him, that’s worse. There’s s
omething redemptive about telling him yourself,’ Lindsay said. ‘Nell, you have a good thing with him. I don’t want to see you fuck it up.’
But Nell had already fucked it up. She fucked it up when she was eighteen years old, long before she even knew Sebastian. Long before she believed it was possible that someone would love her.
On particular sleepless nights, she tried to imagine Reina walking through the door of her apartment one day as though she’d always been there. But the image could never form. It fell apart, like the moment you realise you’re dreaming and wake yourself up.
Nell didn’t say anything for the rest of the drive, and Lindsay wisely decided not to push it.
There was a van parked outside of Lindsay’s house when they pulled up. Lindsay looked at her watch. ‘They’re early,’ she said.
‘Who?’ Nell asked.
‘I’m having security cameras installed. The insurance agent gave me a number and whoever stole my car is crazy if they think they’re pulling that shit twice.’
Lindsay sashayed to the van while Nell pulled into the driveway. Lindsay lived in a white-collar castle of a house, with high ceilings and skylights and a coffee maker that came to life when someone said the word ‘brew’.
It wasn’t Lindsay’s usual taste. Growing up in foster homes had left her rather like a cat; she favoured small, quiet spaces, all of her valuables in one place where she could see them.
While Lindsay dealt with the installation, Nell called Sebastian at work. He answered on the first ring.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How’d everything go?’
‘Lindsay’s fine. She’s getting a new car out of this, so she’s happy,’ Nell said. She hesitated to say much more than that. While she had given Bas nearly all of her secrets, she hadn’t been so generous with Lindsay’s. All Sebastian knew of Matthew Cranlin was that he was an asshole with no redeeming qualities, and the only acceptable thing to do was hope he contracted a venereal disease involving microscopic crawling things.
‘What about the mannequin?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Nell said. ‘She’s being really cagey about it, but she’s installing security cameras so at least she’s taking it seriously.’
‘Maybe we should do the same thing,’ Bas said. ‘This new book you’ve just finished – it’s going to be big, Nell. And there are a lot of weirdos out there. I worry.’
There were cameras in the apartment lobby, in addition to twenty-four-hour security, but Nell was still touched by his concern.
‘Lindsay is going to shoo me away if she suspects I’m staying over to babysit her, so I’m going to tell her you insisted on coming over for dinner tonight and making your famous lobster bisque. You won’t take no for an answer.’
‘Sounds like I’m being pretty obstinate,’ Bas said.
‘Very. I’m certainly not going to argue with you.’
‘I’ll be there at seven. I guess I’m going to swing by the store for lobster after work.’
‘Can’t wait,’ Nell said.
‘Gotta go, Nells. Love you.’
‘Love you.’
She’d been ending their phone calls with those two words for more than a year now, and they still felt alien to her. Like she was reading from a script, even though she happened to agree with her lines. She was still waiting for the day she could believe that this was her life. That her social worker wasn’t going to show up one morning without warning and tell her to go pack a bag, it’s over, there’s another family with a vacancy.
Sebastian showed up at exactly 7:00, a bag of groceries in each hand. Lindsay, curled on the leather sofa in front of the modular electric fireplace, lifted her iPad. She tapped the purple SECURITY ASSURE+ app. Ten squares appeared on the screen, with live views of her house. The driveway. The brick walkway framed by rose hedges and Japanese maples. The in-ground pool whose vinyl cover was filled with old rainwater and leaves. There was an aerial view of Sebastian on the landing with a grocery bag in either hand. He was in grey night vision, and when he glanced up at the camera his eyes flashed white, an animal in headlights.
‘It’s pretty fancy, right?’ Lindsay said, holding it up for Nell to see.
‘Very,’ Nell said, standing to answer the door. ‘You should angle one to spy on the neighbours.’
‘If I wanted to see white women get day drunk, I’d stand in front of a mirror,’ Lindsay said.
Nell was grateful for Sebastian’s presence. He had a congenial spirit. He knew how to be engaging without being overbearing, just the right amount of cringeworthy and witty. Nell and Lindsay sat on the counter on either side of the stove, watching him dump the lobsters into the boiling water. They waved their claws in languid panic. He closed the lid.
He was telling a story about his boss, Gerald, whose teenage daughter had recently gotten her driver’s licence. She took a turn with too much zeal and hit the bumper of a delivery truck. That truck, it turned out, was delivering printer supplies to Gerald’s office. Some comical kismet.
Lindsay smirked into her lime and seltzer. She was trying not to look troubled, but she couldn’t manage her usual boisterousness. Normally Lindsay loved to entertain. Two dinner guests or two hundred, her grandeur was always the same. But not tonight.
Nell knew it was because she’d brought up Matthew that afternoon. Even if Lindsay didn’t believe he had anything to do with this, just saying his name brought him back, like Bloody Mary in a bathroom mirror.
‘Show him the cameras,’ Nell said. New toys always improved Lindsay’s mood at least marginally. Though Lindsay never grew a sentimental attachment to inanimate objects – she could move without packing her old clothes and easily replace anything she broke – she was the upscale version of a hoarder. Instead of those emotionally damaged people surrounded by labyrinths of newspapers and coffee makers, she was emotionally damaged with six sets of hand-painted dishes, bathroom drawers filled with earrings and about a billion Swarovski figurines. God, those things were everywhere, casting rainbows all over the house. Cats, couples kissing, martini glasses filled with mini crystals meant to look like water.
This wasn’t even Lindsay’s only iPad. She had another upstairs in a desk drawer. She couldn’t find it one day and thought she might have left it at the yoga studio or in the park where she’d been using it to read one of her torrid romance novels. She drove to the Apple store that same day to replace it. Later, she found the old one where it had fallen behind the claw-foot tub when she fell asleep in the bath. She could have returned the new iPad, but, well, it was newer. Just like the old one, but rose gold rather than silver, and a clean slate with 128 gigabytes of internal flash memory.
That was the most beautiful thing about new electronic gadgets: the clean slate. A virtual world in which nothing had happened yet, like the first day of Earth.
Lindsay tapped at the screen now, and Sebastian leaned against the counter to look.
Nell drew her knee to her chin, watching them. There were many things she appreciated about Bas, not least of which being that even Lindsay could get along with him.
His finger hovered over the screen. ‘What’s that?’
‘The back yard.’
‘No. On that tree. Is that a – what is that?’
Nell squished between them to look at the screen. There in crisp black and white was the row of trees that sectioned Lindsay’s house from the house to her left. The night vision cast an oval of brightness that receded to black at the edges. One of the trees had something hanging from a branch, heavy and limp, rocking against the trunk on the next gust of wind.
They all seemed to realise what they were looking at in the same instant. They didn’t react. Not at first. Reactions made things true. Two women from a troubled upbringing and one man from a stable loving home still had that belief in common.
Lindsay was the first one to speak. ‘That wasn’t there the last time I checked the cameras.’
‘Are you sure?’ Nell said.
‘Yes I’m f
ucking sure,’ Lindsay exploded.
‘Okay,’ Sebastian said. ‘Okay. I’ll go look. Just turn on the floodlights and stay inside.’
They all should have stayed inside, in fact. Nell thought this, and yet she and Lindsay still followed him to the sliding glass doors that led to the back porch. A bamboo wind chime clacked and clattered like a round of applause in the darkness.
Lindsay switched on the light. On her iPad, the night vision switched to day for the little square of the back yard. They all looked at the screen rather than through the door at first. Hanging from the tree was a body, bound by the neck with a length of rope.
Lindsay let go of the iPad with a gasp and Sebastian reflexively caught it.
Nell made herself look away from the digital image and outside at the real thing.
‘It’s a mannequin.’ She said it even before she was sure. Her brain wasn’t completely allowing her to see the thing hanging from the tree, but once she’d said those words, her brain decided that it would be all right to go ahead and register it.
Nell slid the door open and marched across the deck and down the steps.
‘Nell!’ Bas was calling after her, but she didn’t stop walking. She didn’t stop because her true instinct was to run back inside and hide from this thing, and she knew that she couldn’t. She knew that this was some sort of message. That it was important and she couldn’t afford the luxury of fear.
The mannequin looked different to the one that had been pulled from Lindsay’s car. This one had a plastic gleam. A toothy smile was drawn in Sharpie over the red lips, forcing a gruesome grin onto a benign expression.
This one had a dark brown wig, cut to the shoulder in a mimicry of Nell’s hair. The eyes were dark and dead, staring into the city lights far in the distance.
Lindsay came up behind Nell and grabbed the thing, pulling at it. The rope had been loosely tied, and the mannequin fell to the ground, rigid, its arms bent as though receiving a gift.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ Bas said. ‘I’m calling the police.’