by Scott Hale
Police tape. White coats. Black hats. Gibbering mouths. Plastic sounds.
Detective Mills spots her. He cuts through the officers crammed around the crime scene. Framed in that patriotic, emergency glow, he comes to them with condolences and weak assurances.
Connor’s words. Black metal howlers in her forgotten fjords. Price Homes. A price on her home.
Mills is carrying an evidence bag. Inside, there’s a blood-splattered book. The blood is fresh enough that it pools in the corners. The book’s cover is lost to the red wash, but Linnéa’s seen it enough to know what it’s about.
It’s a book about faeries, and in particular, changelings.
Stephen is crying. He reaches for Linnéa, and she holds him until it hurts. Detective Mills gloves his hands, opens the bag, and flips to the front to show the inscription and Filipa’s name.
Something breaks inside Linnéa’s head. One eye goes dark, the other isn’t far behind. Something breaks inside Linnéa’s chest. She stumbles into Stephen and gulps for breaths that never make a difference.
A whirlwind of questions. The smell of metal and earth. The promises of lab tests and hopeful possibilities.
Eighty-five at five in the morning, and Linnéa is shivering. She looks at the bag and book inside, and the blood—the first contact she’s made with her daughter in over thirty days—and shakes her head.
“That’s not my daughter’s book!” she belts.
She has everyone’s attention. But all she wants is Stephen’s. The play must go on; he has to play his part.
“It’s not,” she repeats herself. “I swear to god it’s not.”
She thinks of Connor. She thinks of the truck always abandoned on the outskirts of Six Pillars. She thinks of grilling out on a Sunday morning, not a care in the world, because her world was small and only ten years old.
“That’s not her book. It’s in her room. I saw it. I saw it.”
Fevered, Linnéa swipes at the bag, but Mills is quick to pull it away.
“That’s not her blood.” She digs her claws into Stephen, puts her teeth to his cheek. “That’s not her blood. I know my daughter’s blood. That’s not her blood!”
White towels. Dark coffee. Thoughts of death in this Black Hour.
They are ushered away. They are offered a stay. Somewhere, anywhere, but everywhere is not there, not home, where they ought to be.
Backseat fabric that still smells faintly new. The rising sun coming through. Jittery dreams. Pothole reveries.
Stephen is a blur as he helps her out of the car. The world is a dark smear like the two on their bedroom ceiling. Across the way, Ellen and Richard Cross are running down their driveway, screaming about Darlene and how her bra and underwear had been found under the bridge to west Bedlam.
“Her photo,” Linnéa hears Ellen cry. “Church photo. Her… clothes were around it. Like… like a wreath.”
Richard is hitting things. Linnéa thinks he might be hitting Ellen. She knows fist on flesh. Stephen doesn’t say anything. Stephen doesn’t do anything.
He takes her inside, into their bedroom, and lays her below the black smears. She thinks of Price Homes as she peers into those two distant nebulas, and when she sees her daughter among the plastered stars, she knows what she has to do.
Linnéa and Stephen fall asleep with their eyes open, and do not wake again until Bethany Simmons is screaming bloody murder at their front door.
SUNDAYMONDAYTUESDAYWEDNESDAYTHURSDAYFRIDAYSATURDAY
Linnéa shot up out of bed, a wad of phlegm in her throat. She glanced over at Stephen and shook him until she was certain he wasn’t dead.
“Is that Bethany?” she croaked.
Stephen jumped to his feet. His legs gave out and he crashed into the wall. Pushing off it, he ran out of the room, Linnéa in tow.
In yesterday’s clothes, which were the clothes from before that, they rumbled down the stairs like repugnant tumbleweeds.
Reaching the landing, Linnéa retched. Her mouth tasted like stale coffee, and her insides were hot, almost sizzling. She made her eyes go wide until they righted themselves. She felt, and felt like she smelled, like microwave-nuked shit.
And then she remembered the junkyard and the book, and the blood inside the bag.
Stephen ripped open the front door.
Bethany jumped backwards, surprised. She took a second, and launched forward, bracing herself against the molding.
“Trent!” She caught her breath. “He barged into my house. He won’t leave! He has his fucking goddamn gun with him!”
Bethany became a blur of workout shorts and a crop top as she sped across their front yard, back to her own.
“Stephen, I…” Linnéa started.
But Stephen was already out the door, chasing after Bethany.
For a moment, the smell of rot left Linnéa’s nose, and in its place, there was Filipa. She was rose vanilla lotion. She was fabric softener and sugar; warm grass, old ink. She was here, somewhere, or maybe nearby. Linnéa breathed her in, held her in; locked her in, deep within. Filipa was here, in what needed to be done, in what was bound to come. Her little devil in the details.
Linnéa caught up with Stephen and hurried to Bethany’s house. Bethany was waiting for them by the garage door, already shakily chain smoking her way through the pack crumpled in her fist.
“Did you call the cops?” Stephen asked.
A piece of furniture exploded in the house against a wall.
Bethany screamed. Stephen ducked. Linnéa kept at it into the garage itself, passing like a pirate between the beached SUVs inside. Some deliberately applied mud broke off from them and rubbed into her jeans.
“Lin, hold on!” Stephen whisper-shouted.
Bethany dropped her still smoking smokes and went after Linnéa, who was now camped out by the door into the house.
Stephen met up with them. “Did you call the cops?”
Bethany shook her head.
“Why the hell not?”
“He’s just a drudge,” Bethany spat.
Linnéa cocked her head. Drudge? There was a word she hadn’t heard for awhile, and not one she expected to come out Bethany’s menthol-flavored mouth.
“We have to stay focused on the children. If the media finds out, they’ll eat it up. They’ll forget about Jimmy.”
“And Filipa,” Linnéa said.
“Yeah, and Ellen and Charles.” Bethany’s mouth twisted like the cinnamon roll it resembled. “I know.”
Stephen stumbled forward. Awake only ten minutes, and he was already crashing. “What happened? What’s Trent want?” He smiled at Linnéa to show he was okay. “Do you know what started this with him?”
“He heard about what they found at the junkyard. And Darlene’s stuff under the bridge.”
Stephen stared at Linnéa, the same way the waking wake to realize the dream they’d had was the nightmare they lived. Had he forgotten the book and the blood, too?
He kept it together as his words fell apart: “His… boy’s… belongings… were in Maidenwood… a f-few weeks backs.”
“He’s blaming me!” Bethany cried. “He’s pissed because they haven’t found anything of Jimmy’s! He thinks they’re sparing me!”
Connor’s warning of strangers visiting Bedlam darkened Linnéa’s gray matter. “Who’s sparing you?”
Bethany cocked her head back, chin to throat, like an offended ostrich. “Excuse me?”
The play would go on, and so Stephen took the lead: “Are you part of the Disciples of God, too?”
Bethany’s tongue pressed against her teeth and forked around them. “I dabble.” Then, good and pissed: “Trent’s in my house with a gun!”
Linnéa opened the door and hollered into the house, “Trent! It’s Lin! Stephen, too! Can we talk to you?”
No response.
“Why didn’t you call the cops, Beth?” Stephen asked.
“Why didn’t Ellen invite me over the other night?” Bethany snapped back.
Stephen held up his hand. “Where’s Todd?”
Linnéa slapped it down.
“West side,” Bethany said. “You know what? Fuck you two. I’ll get—”
At the top of his lungs, from the second floor, Trent boomed, “Alright.”
Bethany, instantly triumphant, tried to get through the door first, but Stephen barred her with his arm.
“Don’t,” he told her.
She let out a death rattle rasp.
Linnéa and Stephen went inside the house, crouched and covered with sweat. Thumping noises like tumbling bodies thudded from the laundry room to their left. Unlike the Crosses’ place, they’d been to the Simmonses’ a few times in the past, for dinners and bake sale bullshit. The decorations were different, but the layout was the same. It was always the same for all the Price Homes. Carbon copied corpses that could be carbon dated back to one uninspired board meeting where a bunch of bald men and bitch-faced women wondered what it might be like to have another comma or two on their paycheck.
“What’re we doing?” Stephen asked.
They moved away from the door to the garage to the kitchen.
“Getting more answers,” Linnéa said. “He knows something is up.”
“He has a gun.”
“Get behind me, then.”
She and Stephen went around the kitchen island. On top of it, in a bowl, rotting fruit had caved in upon itself.
There was a note on the fridge. A to-do list that read “Missing” and below that, a list of small items, like pots and pans, and underwear, and inspirational picture frames.
“You do the talking,” Linnéa said. “He likes you.”
“She didn’t call the police.”
“Something’s up with her, too.”
They slipped into the hallway, headed towards the front where the staircase was.
Before reaching it, Stephen grabbed Linnéa’s arm. “Are they all in on it?”
Linnéa conjured the smell of their daughter and said, repeating Bethany, “She dabbles.”
From the top of the staircase, Trent said, “That you?”
“Lin and Steve,” Stephen said, taking the lead, inches away from where the wall let out to the banister. “It’s just us.”
There was another thump, then tapping. The sound traveled down the stairs, one stair at a time, until—
A pistol rolled past the banister and hit the floor.
“Wasn’t loaded, anyways,” Trent said, still out of sight. “Just wanted to get in Jimmy’s room. She wouldn’t let me.”
Stephen scurried past the stairs, grabbed the pistol, flipped it over, and found no clip inside. He checked the chamber. No bullet there, either.
“Look at you, Army Boy,” Linnéa said. “Dad would be proud.”
Stephen turned the gun over in his hand. “It wasn’t Filipa’s blood.”
Linnéa shook her head. “Sure wasn’t.”
With that finally decided and Trent seemingly disarmed, they, high on the thrill and numbingly ill, hurried up the staircase.
Trent was waiting for them in the hall, one hand in the pocket of his cheap, cowpoke knockoff jeans, the other clutching a balled-up T-shirt. Reading his expression was like reading a rock’s—it simply wasn’t there. And if it was, you couldn’t see it. A thick, crimson paste clung to his lips and cheeks, and it dripped off his chin, down his neck, to where it created with a banded stain an image of a priest’s collar.
He’d been in the veins.
He started to dip back into the room beside him—Jimmy’s room—when he stopped himself and, holding out the balled T-shirt, said, “The dumb bitch. She did it on purpose.”
Trent threw the shirt at Stephen.
He caught it as if it were bomb and straightened it out.
It was a white T-shirt with three semi-exaggerated faces—Filipa’s, Darlene’s, and Jimmy’s—centered inside an ejaculation of color. It looked like something you could get done by an acne-wracked, would-be artist working for minimum wage during their summer break at an amusement park. Beneath the children’s faces floating in the rainbow regurgitation were the words “A Child in Every Home.”
Linnéa couldn’t help but laugh. “Son. Of. A. Bitch.”
“Flip it around,” Trent said.
Stephen did just that. On the back, there was a butchered, strung together quote from the bible that read: “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me… For the kingdom of God belongs to such as these…”; this was followed by Bethany’s own invention which read in bubble print: “Keep ‘em close, keep ‘em safe; keep the Faith.”
Rage and revulsion washed over Linnéa. She didn’t know if she should pitch a fit, or simply spit.
“She forgot Charles on purpose,” Trent said.
It was true: Resin’s boy had been spared the shirt, and that might’ve been for the best.
“Trent, you didn’t bust in here just because of this, did you?” Stephen asked.
Linnéa took the shirt out his hand and threw it over her shoulder down the stairs.
Trent wiped his mouth. “Found more in my yard, Steve.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
Trent shook his head. He started to speak, and then slipped into Jimmy’s room instead.
“What are you doing in there, man?” Stephen asked.
He and Linnéa crept towards the room together, bound at the hip by the worry they shared.
“I heard about what they found in the junkyard. I’m sorry,” Trent said to them.
“Appreciate that,” Linnéa said, “but it’s not what it seems.”
“All the same—”
She and Stephen filed into Jimmy Simmons’ room.
“—there’s you, and then Darlene, and… Charles’ things in the forest—”
Jimmy Simmons’ room had been ransacked. The bed had been flipped, and the closet turned inside out. A flat screen lay face-up on the floor, while the video game system against it hummed annoyingly as it tried to eject the disc tray. There were holes in the wall, too; bloody, crumbling craters that left the room looking like a decayed honeycomb. For all their random placement, the holes couldn’t have looked any more deliberate.
“—but where’s Jimmy in all of this?” Trent slouched, like a deflating balloon. “I thought he might be here. That fucking bitch never seemed all that broken up.”
He wiped his nose, cleared his throat. “I don’t get calls from the cops. I don’t get cards or well-wishes. I don’t get strangers in my home, leaving me clues. I wish they’d never found Charles’ things in Maidenwood. They might not have written him off if they hadn’t.
“You two have been coming and going at odd hours.” Trent’s tone changed. “There were the veins you came to me about—”
“Which you’ve been into,” Stephen said. “Did you find—”
“—and the break-in. And the coming and going. I saw you at Darlene’s, Linnéa.”
“We’re not hiding anything, Trent,” Stephen said. He shook the pistol in his hand. “What’s really going on here?”
“What do you think I’m trying to find out?”
Linnéa asked, “Did you ever do anything with the Disciples of God?”
“I heard her call me a drudge,” Trent said. “That’s what they call working class people like you and me. Drudges.”
“Why?” Stephen said.
“We’re a means to an end.” Trent went to hit a wall, but his fist fell short. “Got roped into going to one of their get-togethers a few years back. That’s the kind of shit they were spewing.” He grabbed his head. “Is that what this is about?”
“Where did you find the growths? Same place?” Stephen said.
Trent nodded.
“You see anything after eating them?”
“Yeah.”
“What… did you see?”
“Shapes. Ellen’s angels, I gu
ess.”
“Shadows,” Linnéa clarified.
Trent nodded. “They were all crowded around your house.”
Outside, a car peeled down the street. Linnéa went behind Stephen to the window.
“But they were all coming out of here. This house.”
Linnéa breathed on the glass. She wiped away the smudges Bethany had undoubtedly placed there fidgeting with the thing, trying to recreate the kidnapper’s point of entry.
“I understand why you wanted to come here,” Stephen said, doing his best Dario Onai impression.
Linnéa gasped. She turned away from the window, grabbed Stephen’s hand, and hauled him out of the room. He dropped the pistol, winced when it hit the ground.
“What’s wrong?” both he and Trent asked.
“The truck,” she said. “The Price Homes truck. It just took off down the street.”
As Linnéa and Stephen came out of Bethany’s home, so, too, did Bethany come out of theirs. Too caught up in the moment to ask what the hell she was doing, Stephen asked her to grab his keys off the table by the stairs. She nodded, smiling, and when she came back out with them, Linnéa and Stephen were already at the car, itching to go.
“Your phone went off,” she said, chucking Linnéa the keys. “It was Detective Mills. He said the blood on Filipa’s book wasn’t human. Isn’t that great?”
Great? It was the best goddamn, mother fucking thing Linnéa had heard in a long time.
She said, “Yeah,” got in the car and started it up.
“Hey,” Bethany said, closing the gap between her and them. “What about Trent?”
“He’s harmless,” Stephen said, and then waved her goodbye.
The truck didn’t have but a two or three minute head start on them, but where the hell had it gone?
Linnéa peeled her eyes and pressed her face to the glass. Six Pillars wasn’t a sprawling neighborhood, but a dense mass, like a dying star. Its pull pulled people in and seldom let them go. Intersections were cross-sections that gave telling glimpses into the cramped and wanting lives of this intergenerational hoosegow. At every stop sign, she had to stop and stare, and process, as a computer would, the cluttered chaos of their decayed suburbia. The background and foreground flattened; prospects fattened in the skewed perspective. Every driveway taunted, every garage door threatened; any car on the roadway, truck or not, made her heart pump something fierce. In every road, distant or near, she saw shadows and shapes and, with her mind, wrought them into something more. But they were never what she wanted; only distractions.