“No, thank you,” she said, looking confused. “I’m on a diet.”
Sloane snorted audibly. “You don’t need to be on a diet. You’re already going to blow away in a stiff wind.”
“My body is my business, Agent Winters,” said Demi. Her tone was cold. That was a bit of a surprise. Our newest team member rarely stood up to Sloane, preferring to make herself as small a target as possible. We all tensed, waiting for the explosion that would follow.
And then, against all odds, Sloane smiled. “That’s true. What you do or do not put into your body is none of my concern. My apologies, Agent Santos.” She turned back to her computer, leaving the rest of us gaping.
I grabbed Jeff’s shoulder. “Kitchen,” I said. “Now.”
#
We didn’t talk until we were far enough away from the bullpen that I was confident of not being overheard. “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.
Jeff frowned. “That’s rather blunt, don’t you think?”
“She’s been acting strange since she came in, and not in a good way,” I said. “Is she all right? Should we be looking for an ensnarled narrative?”
“I don’t think so,” said Jeff. “She shouldn’t be able to get caught in a secondary story as long as she’s in abeyance—not the way that you or I could. She’s probably just having a bad day. It happens to the best of us. I’ve even seen it happen to you.”
“Most of us don’t have the potential to do as much damage as she could.”
Jeff sighed. “Henry. You know as well as I do that any one of us could do a great deal of damage if we set our minds to it. Demi is the human equivalent of a nuclear bomb. I could cripple the power grid for this entire coast. You could—”
“Rally the squirrels of the world to my defense,” I finished sourly. “So you’re sure she’s all right? This is normal?”
“There is no normal in our line of work, my dear Henry,” said Jeff. “Sloane is normal for Sloane. That’s as much as we can ask for.”
I cast an uneasy glance down the hall toward the bullpen. “I hope you’re right,” I said.
Jeff put a hand on my arm. “Believe me, so do I.”
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)
Status: ACTIVE
The others were busy with their computers, with their ordinary little problems in their ordinary little lives. Sloane glanced between them, making sure that neither was looking her way. Henrietta and Jeff were gone. This was her best chance.
Quickly, she typed a new search into her browser. The first link was for a chemistry supply company. She added items to her cart with the quick, easy swipes of a practiced Internet shopper, and barely even noticed the tears that were running down her cheeks. They offered overnight shipping on sodium cyanide. That was a nice bonus.
Her headache was completely gone by the time she clicked the checkout button.
Episode 5
Cruel Sister
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 510A (“Cinderella”)
Status: CONCLUDING
Jenna bent over the stove, trying to ignore the aching in her feet and the burning in her eyes from the sweat that trickled down her forehead. If she could just get dinner on the table before her stepmother started yelling at her again, she’d consider this day a win. Maybe her standards for “victory” were lower than they could have been, but she had to take her happy endings where she could. They sure weren’t thick on the ground anymore.
When she’d been younger, right after her mother …
No. This wasn’t the time for dwelling, not if she wanted to get dinner on the table.
When she’d been younger, her father had sent her to see a therapist who specialized in grief counseling for preteens. Jenna had been resistant at first, until she realized that having a therapist gave her the one thing that was more valuable than gold or diamonds: someone who listened. Ms. Brooke was paid to pay attention to the emotionally damaged children who clogged her waiting room, and yet somehow, whenever Jenna had been alone with her, she felt like the doctor was only interested in what she had to say. It helped her believe that things were going to be okay. Somehow, someday, things were going to be okay.
It was Ms. Brooke who’d taught her to treasure the little things, what she called the “street pennies” of daily life. “‘Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck,’” was one of Ms. Brooke’s favorite sayings. “It doesn’t have to be literal,” she had said. “Every good thing you find, no matter how small, is a penny for you to put in your pocket. Gather them close, and treasure them. Someday you’ll have a future where you feel rich enough, emotionally, to spend them freely.”
Jenna couldn’t really imagine that future on a daily basis—it was too tiring—but she could allow herself to think about it sometimes, in moments like these, where she had a simple chore to finish and just enough space to breathe.
She was so focused on stirring the pan of beef and onions sizzling in front of her that she didn’t hear the kitchen door swing open or the sound of footsteps on the floor. “Jenna?” said a voice from behind her. “Mama wanted me to come and see how dinner was coming.”
“Elise!” Jenna jumped and turned at the same time, clutching the spatula to her chest. Her elbow hit the edge of the pan, sending it, and its contents, crashing to the floor. Hot grease splattered her ankles and calves. Jenna didn’t cry out. It was hard, but learning to swallow her pain had been necessary if she wanted to survive.
Her stepsister’s eyes went very wide, making her look almost comical for a moment. “Oh, God, Jenna, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean for you to—are you all right?” Elise dropped into a crouch before Jenna could recover her senses enough to respond, and started scraping the ruined meat back into the pan. “Your poor legs …”
“Elise, please.” Jenna knelt awkwardly on the grease-covered floor, trying to push her stepsister away without actually touching her. “You have to get out of here or we’re both going to get into trouble. You can’t … you can’t be in here.”
Elise stopped scraping and sat back, looking sadly at Jenna. “We’ve really treated you horribly, haven’t we? Me, Mama, Camille … how can you stand us?”
“You’re my family,” said Jenna simply. “I don’t have anyone else in the world.”
That answer seemed to make up Elise’s mind for her, somehow. She nodded once as she stood, holding her hands out for Jenna to take. “Go to your room, wipe that crap off your legs, and put some clean clothes on before Mama sees you and yells at you for looking like a common ragamuffin.”
Jenna took her stepsister’s hands automatically, allowing herself to be tugged from the floor, and asked, “Are you trying to get me into trouble? I need to finish fixing dinner.”
“Don’t worry about it. I can start a new pan of beef and have it ready to go by the time you get back. Then I’ll just tell Mama I wanted to snatch some cheese slices before we ate, and she’ll be so busy yelling at me for spoiling my appetite that she won’t notice that you’ve changed your clothes. Camille and I do that sort of thing all the time.” Elise spoke with calm, easy certainty, like she had no doubt that her plan would work.
“But …” Jenna frowned, searching her stepsister’s face for signs of treachery. “Why are you being so nice to me? You hate me.” That wasn’t strictly true. Out of the three of them—Elise, Camille, and the eponymous “Mama”—Elise had always been the nicest, like she somehow understood how much Jenna had suffered since the loss of her biological family. And maybe she did understand, on some level. Elise was also the older of Jenna’s two stepsisters. Maybe she remembered her own father, and how she’d felt after he died.
“I don’t hate you,” said Elise gently. “I just don’t like looking at you. You remind me too much of what could have happened to me.”
The honesty of Elise’s words was staggering. Jenna stared at her for a moment more before she decided to take the risk. “Thank you,�
�� she said. “I’ll be right back.” She turned and ran out of the room before her stepsister could change her mind. The sound of her bedroom door slamming came a few seconds later.
Elise stayed where she was, counting slowly downward from ten. When Jenna didn’t return, she smiled. It was a dark, wickedly pleased expression, and if Jenna had seen it, all doubts about her stepsister’s motivations would have fallen away on the spot. “Yes, dear sister,” Elise purred, as she sashayed her way across the room to the fridge. She was vamping it up for an audience of dust bunnies and spilled onions, but that didn’t matter. Some of the greatest scenes in cinema history had been focused on a single actress, emoting her heart out for the camera’s unquestioning eye.
The second pack of ground beef was on the second shelf of the fridge. It was clearly a sign: the rat poison had been on the second shelf of the hallway closet.
Humming to herself, Elise turned and walked back to the stove. It was time to start fixing dinner.
#
Four years later …
We arrived at the Marlowe residence ten minutes after Piotr called us with the details. Unfortunately, that put us half an hour behind the local police. They had been called by a neighbor reporting a strange smell coming from the house—one that was bad enough to have crept over the fence into the next yard over. Pretty scary stuff, although not that surprising if you’ve ever been in the vicinity of a dead body. The bacteria that break down human tissue after death are some pretty powerful things. The smell of decay hit us as soon as we stepped out of the van.
Demi, who had never been near a dead body before, went pale and clapped a hand over her nose. “What is that?” Her voice was muffled by her hand, but that wasn’t enough to conceal the way it quavered and wobbled at the end of her question.
“According to the police report, it’s the Marlowe family,” said Jeff, sliding out of the van. His copy of the Index was open on his arm, and his eyes were fixed on the page, considering and rejecting possibilities faster than I could even read. “Mother, two daughters, all found in the living room by the officers who answered the initial call. According to what they’ve filed so far, the Marlowes have been dead for at least a week. No one reported any of them missing.”
“What Agent Davis isn’t telling you is that we don’t officially have any of this information yet, since he acquired it through illegal means,” said Andy gruffly. He walked around the van to stand beside me. “How do you want to play this, Henry? They haven’t called us in.”
“They never call us in,” I said, with a shrug. The front door was standing open to allow the police easy access as they came and went. No one was looking our way yet, but they would be soon. When a big black van that clearly belonged to the government pulls up in front of your crime scene and starts spilling out feds, you notice. “We’re going to play this straight.”
Andy looked dubious. “Are you sure about that?”
“I’m the senior agent,” I said, and removed my badge from the pocket where it normally sat unused, replaced in the field by a dozen fakes that would play better with the public than the reality of the department I worked for. “Come on. Let’s go say hello to the people we’re replacing.”
#
The officer in charge of the crime scene was named Troy, and we’d worked with him before. That was something of a relief. People don’t always appreciate our butting in on their crime scenes, especially when we start talking about the staying power of fairy tales and how much the Brothers Grimm got right. Officer Nicholas Troy was one of those men who had either had an early encounter with the narrative and then blessedly managed to forget about it—more common than most people like to think—or he was just extremely open-minded, especially when it came to people who were willing to take complicated cases off the shoulders of his perpetually overworked and understaffed department.
Even with all that, he still frowned when he saw us coming across the lawn, following a junior officer who was less familiar with who we were and what our presence meant. “This is another of your special serial cases, Marchen?” he demanded, turning toward us. “I didn’t see anything that would indicate that it was one of yours, or I wouldn’t have let my men go inside in the first place.”
His words were less rude than they seemed on the surface. Troy had been around long enough to know that sometimes the narrative can be contagious, grabbing onto whatever hosts it can find and not letting go. “Sometimes they can be subtle,” I said. “You remember Agents Robinson and Davis?”
“Hello,” said Jeff.
“Hey,” said Andy.
“And this is Agent Santos.” I indicated Demi, who still looked like she was about to toss her cookies at the earliest available opportunity. “She’s our trainee, so please forgive her if she throws up on your shoes.”
Officer Troy took a healthy step backward. “Where’s your bitchy psycho girl?”
“You mean Agent Winters?” He nodded. I shook my head. “She’s not feeling well. We left her at the office to monitor the situation from a safe distance.”
“I had no idea she could get sick,” said Officer Troy. “I would’ve thought she’d scare any virus that got too close to her.”
“That’s entirely possible,” said Jeff, finally looking up from his copy of the Index. He sounded completely serious, which made me wonder whether or not he was joking. It was sometimes hard to tell with Jeff. “May we see the bodies, please?”
Officer Troy looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure that’s the best idea.”
“This is our crime scene now,” I said. “If you have someone escort us inside, you can take your people and leave.”
Maybe it was the thought of getting away from the stench, which was permeating everything it touched with a layer of decay that would take weeks to scrape off. Maybe it was just an understanding of the chain of command. Whatever the reason, Officer Troy sighed and said, “All right. I’ll take you in myself.”
I smiled thinly. “Thank you.”
#
Demi did better than I had expected her to: she made it all the way into the living room, into the meat of the stink—pun intended—before she turned and ran for the yard. The sound of retching followed shortly after. Andy walked back to the door and stuck his head out for a moment before turning and walking back to the rest of us.
“She’s tossing her cookies in the bushes,” he said. “Nothing’s been compromised.”
“Except the hedge,” added Jeff helpfully. Maybe he could joke.
“Good for us, if not for the hedge,” I said. In situations like this, I was actually grateful for my dead-white skin tone. You can’t go pale when you have no color in your cheeks. “Officer Troy, if you would walk us through the scene?”
“This is it,” he said, gesturing to the horror show that occupied the living room. “We were starting an examination of the kitchen when you all showed up. If you’d been ten minutes later, we might have more that we could tell you. As things stand, this is your problem now.” He sounded half-smug and half-relieved. This becoming our problem meant that he could walk away from it without feeling like he was leaving his job undone.
“Ah,” I said. “Well, then, you can consider the handover complete.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Please notify the department if you find anything which might indicate that this case is somehow relevant to the real world.” And just like that, he was gone, turning and rushing out the door without a word of farewell. I couldn’t blame him. If I’d been given the chance to run away from the narrative—let alone three gruesomely decayed bodies—I would have taken it a thousand times over.
But that chance was never made available to me, and here and now, I had things I needed to do. Pushing away the faint resentment that Officer Troy’s flight left in its wake, I turned my attention to the crime scene in front of me.
“Names, Jeff?”
“Christina Marlowe, age thirty-nine. She’s a widow twice over, with two daughters by her first
husband. She married Michael Marlowe five years ago; he already had a daughter, one …” Jeff turned a page in his copy of the Index. “Heather Marlowe. Christina formally adopted Heather three years ago. Michael was killed in a car accident six months later, and Christina became sole guardian of all three girls.”
“So a new mother arrives on the scene with two little girls and manages to be left holding the whole package when she loses her husband.” I snorted, and promptly regretted it as the action required me to take another lungful of the room’s putrid air. “This is a familiar story.”
“Explains the bodies, too,” said Andy, stepping further away from the door. “Been a while since we’ve had a homicidal Cinderella. But it happens.”
“Unfortunately, yes.” Being Cinderella in the most traditional sense means taking endless servings of shit with a smile on your face and a song on your lips. It means believing that the world is an intrinsically good place, and that you are an intrinsically good person, while spending every day in squalor and suffering. Some Cinderellas rise above it and become the inspirational platitudes who get immortalized in fairy tales. They’re triumphs of the narrative, people who are more story than self. Those are the rare ones. More commit suicide, slitting their wrists in bathtubs full of water—because even in death, your average Cinderella is dedicated to keeping things neat—or drinking nightcaps made from hemlock and bleach.
And some, a rare few, decide that they’ve had enough. It’s easy for a girl who works in the kitchen to get her hands on a carving knife, and there are a surprising number of common household poisons that won’t change the flavor of food. A Cinderella who decides to take the story into her own hands can do an awful lot of damage.
An awful lot of damage had certainly been done here.
There were three bodies, all female, one older than the others, if clothing and size could be believed. The older woman was sitting in an armchair with a good angle on the television, a TV tray on her lap with a plate of moldy, half-eaten food. This Cinderella hadn’t bothered cleaning up after herself. The two smaller figures were together on the couch, with standing wooden trays in front of them. All three women had been dead for quite some time, and while it had taken the human neighbors a while to catch on, the neighborhood flies had been much quicker on the draw. The faces of all three bodies boiled with maggots, their fat white bodies glistening in the light.
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