The Broken Ones

by Ren Richards

  ‘No.’ Lindsay shook her head. Her breaths were coming in hitches. Her eyes glistened, and she looked like she was about to cry. ‘No, we’re not calling the police.’

  Nell grabbed her sister by the hands and reeled her a step closer. ‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘We have to.’

  Lindsay didn’t say anything more. She only shook her head. Her entire body was trembling. It was so rare for her to be the one who came undone. It was a rule that one had to hold it together when the other couldn’t, and so Nell was the calm one. The practical one. ‘Let Sebastian call them,’ she said. ‘We’ll go and look at the security footage, okay? It must have picked something up.’

  An alarm wailed from inside the house. Nell’s heart leapt. She remembered the lobster pot on the stove, and ran for the kitchen. The pot had boiled over, angry steam rising up from the burners as they were doused with water. She clicked the burner off and waved an oven mitt in front of the smoke detector until the shrill beeping stopped.

  She heard Sebastian talking on the phone, still out on the porch.

  Lindsay was in the kitchen now too. She opened the cabinet doors and grabbed the wrench she kept between the dishes, brandishing it. Anywhere Lindsay had ever lived was filled with weapons. Hammers under the mattress, bread knives behind the toilet tank.

  ‘Linds?’ Nell moved closer to her. ‘Is this something Matthew could be doing?’

  Lindsay wiped a tear from her eye with her trembling palm. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Because you never let me call the police when he—’

  ‘It’s not fucking him, okay?’ Lindsay said.

  ‘Okay,’ Nell said. ‘Okay.’

  Nell trusted her sister more than anyone. More than Sebastian, more than herself. They both understood the importance of being honest with each other.

  Still, Nell recalled a time when Lindsay had not been honest. When she’d covered for her husband. When she’d lied for him.

  9

  NOW

  Police lights flashed through the cream-coloured curtains, flooding the living room in red and blue.

  Lindsay squirmed as though her grey yoga pants were filled with bees. She hated the police almost as much as Nell did. When Reina disappeared ten years ago, the entire family fell prey to the constant scrutiny of police. Even Lindsay, sequestered as she was on the island of her marriage. They were all interrogated over and over again. When a child disappears, someone has to be the villain. With the world watching, the police can’t step up to a podium empty-handed.

  The police could have written novels themselves, Nell thought, the way they came up with wild retellings of what had happened that day. The sister kidnapped her niece and sold her to sex traders. The mother got overzealous with corporal punishment and was too afraid to call for help, so she let her child die. Maybe she buried her alive. It was the father; he had a new girlfriend and he didn’t want to be tied down. It was the grandparents.

  It didn’t matter whether any of this was true. If someone in a police uniform says it, enough people will believe.

  While Lindsay was showing the officer the footage on her iPad, the doorbell rang. Nell answered the door before it occurred to her that she should be more cautious. Whoever hanged the mannequin in the back yard had done so recently; Lindsay had been happily toying with her new surveillance system before Sebastian arrived, and it would have been hard to miss a life-sized mannequin hanging from a tree if it had been there.

  Only now was Nell thinking of this: someone had done this. Someone was still out there. Someone knew where both she and Lindsay lived. Given Nell’s profession, this should have occurred to her much sooner, but the backyard discovery had robbed her of the clarity she possessed when facing her laptop. Her mind was scattered, chipped and cracked.

  There was a middle-aged woman standing on the doorstep, a manicured hand to her chest. She reeked of perfume; something that cost three figures but smelled like it had been rubbed onto her pulse points from a magazine sample. She wore a lemon-yellow cardigan and a string of pearls around her neck.

  ‘Oh, hello.’ She blinked at Nell. ‘I’ve seen you here and there, but I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.’ She held out a hand. ‘I’m Lindsay’s neighbour, Mrs Porter. I live just over there.’ She pointed across the street, to yet another in the valley of identical McMansions.

  While it was true they hadn’t formally met, Nell knew all about this neighbour – and many others. Mrs Porter was the one with all the birdfeeders and the binoculars that she insisted were strictly for birdwatching. And she hated cats, especially the Sellers’ tabby, who waited in her hedges to pounce on the sparrows at the feeders.

  ‘I saw the police cars and I just wanted to make sure everything was all right.’ Mrs Porter pushed past Nell and glided into the foyer with all the poise of a Disney princess meeting her prince at the ball.

  Lindsay was rubbing her brow with her thumb and forefinger. ‘Yeah.’ Her tone was snappy. ‘Everything is fine, Mrs Porter.’

  ‘Ma’am, it would be best if you left and let us do our job,’ one of the officers said.

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Mrs Porter waggled her fingers at Lindsay in goodbye. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, sweetie. So glad you’re safe.’

  Nell watched the woman leave. She returned to a small crowd of neighbours who had gathered on her own lawn; she greeted them with her arms out, a gesture that said, ‘I tried.’

  A third officer descended the staircase. ‘The house is clear,’ he said. ‘No evidence that anyone’s tried to break in. Anything on the security cameras?’

  ‘It’s supposed to start recording when it detects motion,’ Lindsay said. She was scrolling through the list of recorded incidents – Sebastian arriving with dinner at 7:00, Nell opening the door. An aggressive gust of wind bending the branches at 7:15. The camera did pick up the mannequin at 7:45, swaying when the wind blew, but there was nothing before that. Nell had already gone through the footage while they were waiting for the police to arrive.

  There had to be something. Nell had even tapped the recycle bin option to make sure nothing had been accidentally deleted. But there was a solid thirty minutes in which nothing had tripped the motion sensors on any of the cameras. There was no evidence of anyone fleeing the property either.

  ‘We’ll need to take this.’ The officer who had been speaking to Lindsay was now taking the iPad from her hands. ‘We’ll be in touch tomorrow. If you feel unsafe in the house, is there someplace you can stay tonight?’

  ‘She’ll stay with us,’ Nell said.

  Lindsay didn’t argue. She had regained some of her composure now, but even if she didn’t look frightened, Nell knew that she was. She had the sudden thought that she was never going to let Lindsay out of her sight again. They would live the rest of their lives sitting in the same chairs, riding in the same cars, going to the same places, just like Easter and Autumn before a surgeon tore their single life into two separate ones.

  After the police had gone, the first thing Lindsay did was reach under the couch cushions, fishing around until she found what she was looking for. She held up an old hammer, rust-worn with splotches of white and blue paint on its handle. ‘Here.’ She handed it to Nell. ‘Keep this in your purse. You never know.’ She was all at once too busy to keep still. ‘I guess I should pack a few things, huh?’ She breezed through the foyer, under the gaudy copper chandelier with Swarovski drippings, up the staircase and towards her bedroom. Nell followed, and she sat on the bed as Lindsay opened the double doors of her massive closet.

  Robert’s alimony checks paid for all of these things. Lindsay had become a serial divorcer by trade. She had never worked a day in her life, and yet somehow she’d always found money. In foster care she stole or connived, hoarding singles and fives in her bra and underwear, never letting it out of her reach. She was so afraid of being left with nothing, no way to care for herself or the sister who had
been left in her charge. This was how she survived.

  ‘Don’t start with me,’ Lindsay said, and knelt to pull the suitcase out from under the bed. ‘I already told you, this isn’t the sort of thing Matthew would do. And anyway, he’s in Missouri. What’s he going to do – drive all the way up to the Rockhollow suburbs with a trunk full of shop mannequins just to scare me? For what?’

  Nell had to admit that it didn’t make sense. Matthew was an impulsive sort of monster. He didn’t run a long game with his rage. One minute he was taciturn and the next his face was red and the veins bulged out of his neck. He didn’t have the patience or the attention span to plan his attacks. They just came before you could duck.

  ‘What about Robert?’ Nell said.

  ‘He wouldn’t be able to come up with something like this,’ Lindsay said. ‘He didn’t even watch scary movies.’

  ‘Well, there has to be someone who’s pissed off at you,’ Nell said, exasperated. ‘Mannequins don’t drive cars or hang themselves.’

  ‘Why does it have to be my fault?’ Lindsay said. ‘What about you? You’re the one who just made a million dollars trying to humanise a baby killer. How many people read that press release? That’s bound to piss a few people off.’

  Lindsay had a point and Nell knew it, no matter how she wished it weren’t so. Nell wanted to believe that this was some sort of vicious prank. A spurned ex-lover from Lindsay’s substantial list, or an uppity yoga wife whom Lindsay had flipped off in traffic. Anything that could be solved by drawing up a flowchart of possible suspects.

  But if whoever was doing this was trying to prove something to Nell, that opened an ugly chasm of possibilities. Strangers she had never met, people who had seen the swamp. There was no telling how many people had read it, or who they were, or what they were capable of.

  10

  THEN

  Five months after Reina was born, the Eddletons came to see her for the first time. It was December, and the hiss of the radiator had lulled the baby to sleep, for which Lindsay’s neighbours were undoubtedly grateful.

  Nell had been trying to take a nap herself, but when Lindsay opened the door to let the Eddletons in, Nell sat upright and attempted to fix her hair, combing her fingers through a crusty substance that was probably baby vomit. Lindsay had taken to calling the baby ‘Demon’, spoken without affection. Worse than the havoc her new niece brought to the apartment was the effect she had on her sister. ‘Little Demon tried to kill you on her way out, and she won’t rest until she’s finished the job,’ Lindsay had muttered that very morning when she found Nell huddled on the bathroom floor, too spent even to cry.

  Ethan stood a pace behind his parents with his eyes downcast. His dark scraggly hair covered the top half of his eyes, but he gave Nell an apologetic frown.

  Nell had only met Mr and Mrs Eddleton once before, in the early morning hours. She’d been hopping down the stairs of their five thousand square foot home, wrestling to get into her left shoe. They hadn’t been horribly impressed with her then, but at least she had looked pretty, and her clothes and hair had been clean.

  Mrs Eddleton floated into Lindsay’s apartment like an apparition, her violet crepe skirts rustling and full of whispers. Her matching coat was trimmed in a soft grey fur that Nell knew to be wolf. Mr Eddleton was a hunter, Ethan had said, and he had the pelts fashioned into presents for his wife.

  With one look around the tiny apartment, Mrs Eddleton’s wrinkled nose said what her mouth didn’t: that her son had ruined his life by merging his DNA with such an unfortunate specimen. Newly fifteen, Nell was no wiser, no more assured and no more employable than she had been when she first peed on the stick.

  But Mrs Eddleton’s disdain lessened when she peered over the crib. Nell imagined this was the face she would make when considering melons in the grocery store. ‘May I?’ Mrs Eddleton asked. Without waiting for permission, she lifted the sleeping infant into her arms.

  The baby awoke with a screech, but when Mrs Eddleton stuck her acrylic French-manicured nail in the baby’s mouth, the baby stopped and looked at her curiously.

  Nell hadn’t seen Ethan since that day at the hospital, but now she was reminded of how much the baby looked like him. The same dark eyes, with heavy lashes and just a bit of a blue undertone in the irises. The black hair and pale skin.

  Nell hated the way Mr and Mrs Eddleton looked at her, but Mrs Eddleton in particular. She hated that she was better than her circumstance, that she was smart and that she had been reading Voltaire before this baby stole every moment of silence from her life, and that there was nothing she could do or say to prove it. Nobody would see her mind – much less that she had one. They would see her carting around this screaming little thing she had brought into her life and the mess it had made of everything.

  ‘Reina is an unusual name,’ Mrs Eddleton said.

  Reina. It meant ‘queen’. The baby had looked like a queen when it came out of her, Nell had thought. Bloody and thrashing and fierce. She had wanted for her daughter to always have that ferocity; she was going to need it in a world that didn’t hand her any certainties.

  ‘We’d like to take her,’ Mrs Eddleton burst out.

  ‘Mindy—’ Mr Eddleton said.

  ‘It’s a bit late, but if we apply now we could reserve a spot at a good preschool.’

  Nell did not know why the Eddletons had come around after so much time and were now making such a demand. A good mother would be outraged. A good mother would take her baby out of those meddlesome arms and say that her child’s place was with her, that anything her baby needed she would provide.

  But she also saw the bubble in the ceiling where water from the upstairs apartment was leaking. She heard what could have been a car backfiring or a gunshot outside, a sound that had become so familiar she never flinched. And she felt the drought of days without sleep. She saw a little queen being offered the promise of something better. And she heard the silence the baby’s absence would bring. All the books she could read in that silence. The writing she could do. The uninterrupted thinking.

  For just a moment she could imagine it. A glorious, perfect silence, in which she could be something – anything – but somebody’s mother.

  ‘You’re welcome to stay overnight as well,’ Mrs Eddleton said, with obvious difficulty. ‘I understand—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Nell said. ‘It’s all right. You can take her.’

  11

  NOW

  When Oleg met Nell that afternoon at a downtown café, he was wearing a brown mohair sweater with a red scarf. The perfect image of a gloomy autumn day.

  Nell’s stomach was in knots, fluttering in that frantic way she experienced whenever she googled old news clips from her past. This was only her second time meeting the twins’ brother, and she was embarrassed to look such a mess.

  ‘You look tired,’ Oleg said. ‘You haven’t slept?’

  She steeped her tea, dark amber blooming in the steamy water. ‘My sister would say it’s rude to comment on a lady’s appearance.’

  ‘Is it?’ he said. ‘My apologies. You should say something about mine to make it even.’

  Nell smirked. He pointed at himself with both hands to emphasise that he was serious. ‘Go on. One thing.’

  You look like your sisters, Nell thought. Though he was five years their senior, his face had less of an edge. He appeared more youthful, and his eyes had a starry quality to them. He had enviably soft-looking skin, and a flush across his cheeks and nose where the wind had bitten him.

  Still, Nell felt obligated to say something critical. It clearly meant a lot to him. ‘You’re very tall,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, yes.’ He took a sip of his latte, holding the cup by the brim with the fingertips of either hand. ‘Like a telephone pole, I suppose.’

  People had often remarked that Nell and Lindsay were nothing like sisters. When they went out together, they would hear things like ‘When your friend returns from the restroom, will she be orderin
g more wine?’ or ‘Is your friend single?’

  Now that Nell had met Easter, despite their resemblance she wouldn’t have assumed that Oleg was her brother.

  ‘So you’ve met Mom Esther,’ he said.

  He was referring to Mrs Hamblin. Nell nodded.

  ‘I think she liked you,’ he said.

  ‘Did she?’ Nell let out a nervous laugh. ‘I was worried I’d scared her off.’

  ‘She called me last night. She wanted to know if you were going ahead with the book.’

  ‘I’d like to,’ Nell said. A pause. ‘I’m going to be honest in what I write about your family, but you may not like everything I have to say.’

  ‘I would go along with whatever Easter decided to do. It’s her story, after all,’ he said. ‘I’m glad that she picked you. You’re…’ he paused, trying to find the right word. ‘Objective.’

  ‘That’s important to me, yes.’

  Easter was going to be a challenge, not because she was delusional, but because she was clearly a liar. She judged people on whether they believed her stories. Oleg would be Nell’s way to fill in the gaps. And there was another obvious gap.

  ‘Oleg.’ Nell met his gaze. ‘You’ve said a lot about Easter, but not very much about Autumn.’

  ‘Haven’t I?’ he said. ‘I suppose I spend so much time thinking about her, I don’t keep track of what I say out loud. She’s just always there.’

  ‘I’d love it if you could tell me about her,’ Nell said.

  He nodded. ‘She loved the music here. Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica. I don’t know how she could stand it. It’s all noise to me. And she loved going to the cinema. She loved dance clubs, too – anything loud.’

  Nell knew the journalistic stages of a murdered woman. First, newspapers sought to appease the morbid curiosity. There were grim details about where the body was found, whether it had been wearing clothes, whether there were signs of sexual assault, if she had any suspicious lovers. Later, when all of this had been exhausted, the desperate public wanted to be taken back in time. Who had she been? What were her dreams? How did she fill her days? Was she anything like me?