“If our Cinderella did this, she’s got a good head start on us by now,” said Jeff. “She could be anywhere.”
“If our Cinderella did this, we’re finished,” I said. “I won’t say that these women would have deserved to die under normal circumstances, but if they pushed a five-ten-a into going homicidal, they probably did something unforgivable. She’s already paid for this crime in advance.”
Footsteps behind me announced the return of our youngest team member. I turned to see Demi standing in the doorway, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, before any of us could say anything. “All the houses on this block look alike. I didn’t realize I knew these people until I saw the living room, and then I realized that if the Marlowes were dead, that meant Heather and Emily were dead, and that’s just not fair. Not after everything else they’ve been through.”
I frowned. “What do you mean, that meant Heather was dead? Heather’s the one who fits the five-ten-a profile. She’s our Cinderella. Wicked stepmother, two wicked stepsisters …”
“But she doesn’t have two stepsisters anymore,” said Demi.
Jeff put his hand up. “Hang on. Demi, what do you mean, ‘after everything else they’ve been through’? Are you talking about Michael Marlowe’s death?”
“No. I mean, yes, but not exactly.” Demi stole a glance at the couch, blanched, and looked away again. “Heather used to have two stepsisters, until Jamie disappeared two years ago. It was all over the school. That was my senior year—she was a year behind me, and we were in band together. They never did find her.”
“Wait.” I looked at the bodies again. One adult, two teens. “Jamie would have to have been one of Christina’s biological daughters. Jeff, are there any variations with just one Wicked Stepsister?”
“A few,” he said slowly, “but they all have other conditions. This setup is pure Western Cinderella, which is the strongest form of the narrative in the modern American psyche. I don’t think you could pull off a strict five-ten-a with only one Wicked Stepsister.”
“Jamie and Emily weren’t wicked to Heather,” protested Demi. “They actually seemed to like her okay. Heather liked clothes and boys, which meant she had something in common with Jamie, and Emily liked being left alone to read. I think she was grateful to have someone to distract her sister once in a while.”
I turned to look at the scene in front of me one more time, trying to push away my preconceptions, all the little tropes and touches that came with being absolutely sure of the fairy tale trying to unfold around me. Three bodies: a woman and her two daughters. All were dressed in equally nice clothing—not too fancy, but not shabby, either—none of the rags and tatters that we expected from a Cinderella. The plates of food were too maggot-eaten and decayed for me to tell what they had originally contained, but they all looked equally full. No one was getting shorted or denied her fair portion.
“Demi, you said you’d been here before,” I said. “Where are the bedrooms?”
“Down the hall,” Demi said. “Why?”
“Just a thought. Andy, you and Demi stay here, start photographing the scene. Jeff, you’re with me.” I gestured for the wiry archivist to follow as I started in the direction Demi had indicated.
My team has been working with me for long enough that no one questioned my instructions. Jeff fell in, and together we walked out of the living room, into the part of the house that had been touched only by dust, and not yet by decay. Behind us, the whir of Andy’s camera started up. He’d photograph everything, even the things that never deserved to be recorded on film, because you never knew what a photograph might reveal that the eye would miss. His pictures would help as we began the hard task of figuring out what actually happened.
I hate cases like these, where we wind up taking over for the police instead of making it so that the police never have to get involved at all. The narrative was definitely at work here—I could smell it, under the reek of rotting human flesh—but I couldn’t see the shape of it. Not clearly, not yet.
But I would. Jeff beside me, I walked on.
#
It was a good-sized house: big enough that all three girls had been able to have their own rooms, rather than being forced to share. But being big enough didn’t always mean anything—I’ve been in mansions where the Cinderellas were forced into repurposed pantries or the back of laundry rooms.
There was none of that here. Heather’s room was just as large as Emily and Jamie’s rooms, and was decorated with the same mixture of nostalgia and rebellion. They were all teenagers, and they had their own ideas about appropriate décor, but I couldn’t look at Heather’s room and honestly say that she had been in any way neglected. If anything, she’d been a little bit spoiled. They all had.
Jamie’s room was like something out of a model home. Everything was put away. The clothes were folded and the bed was made … and there was a thin layer of dust over the whole place, like it had been closed off and left as a memorial to a girl who was never coming home. I stood there looking at it for a long while, thoughtful and a little sad. Whatever happened to Jamie, she lost her home and family, and they lost her. That was as much as a tragedy as what was being documented in the living room right now.
A hand touched my elbow. I turned to see Jeff standing there, frowning. “I think I may have found something,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. I closed Jamie’s bedroom door behind me as I turned to follow him. Let her shrine endure for just a little longer. The cleaners and the estate sales and the realtors would tear it down soon enough. That’s what happens to all our private family churches, eventually. The real world can’t let them stay.
Jeff led me to the door at the end of the hall: the master bedroom. Christina had apparently never redecorated after Michael’s death. There were still little touches that clearly indicated the involvement of another person. They were small—a lamp here, a bedside table there—and that was what made me believe that she had never truly moved on from her husband’s loss. Unlike most women who got pulled into the Cinderella stories of their stepdaughters, she had truly loved him. The narrative should never have been able to find a foothold here.
“Smell that?” Jeff asked.
I sniffed the air. This far from the living room, the smell of decay was virtually absent, and I was able to pick up a faint, lingering sweetness. “Perfume?” I guessed.
“Mmm-hmm.” Jeff walked to the dresser, where he picked up a bottle. “She seems to have been devoted to a specific brand—Blue Wishes. It has a very distinctive scent. Neither of the girls would have been likely to wear this. It’s too old for them. They would have thought of it as ‘mom perfume,’ and steered clear.”
“All right,” I said. “So a woman’s bedroom smells like her perfume. Is that so unusual? I think most women’s bedrooms probably smell like their perfume.”
“Does yours?” asked Jeff.
I raised an eyebrow. “No,” I said. “My bedroom smells like apples and snow. Thanks for asking.” He had the decency to redden. “Now what is it that you wanted to show me in here?”
“Come on.” He gestured for me to follow him again, this time to the closet on the far side of the room. It was big—bigger than the bedrooms I’ve seen some Cinderellas forced into—with shutter-style doors that allowed the clothes inside to “breathe” even when closed politely away from the public eye. The shutter on the left was standing open. Jeff moved to stand beside it, gesturing for me to take a look inside.
A small nest of bedding and pillows had been created on the floor of the closet, incorporating clothes pulled down from the nearest hangers. The smell of Christina’s Blue Wishes perfume pervaded the air, rendered strong and cloying by the confined space. I pulled my head out of the closet, giving Jeff a curious look.
He shook his head. “She’s been sleeping in there for at least a week; maybe longer, if she hasn’t been dousing herself in that perfume. She might have been. There are dirt stains on t
he pillows, and there’s blood smeared on the sheets. I don’t think she was being allowed to shower.”
I looked at him for a moment, rolling this new information over in my head as I tried to make sense of it. “So our prospective Cinderella is one of the bodies, and our likely Wicked Stepmother was being held prisoner in her own home. Okay … why?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeff, looking disturbed. “But I think we need to get Sloane over here. Something’s missing, and she has a perspective that none us can actually share.”
I nodded slowly. “All right,” I said. “I’ll call the office.”
#
The cleanup team arrived about twenty minutes later and boiled out of their van with unhappy expressions on their faces that had nothing to do with the murder scene they were about to start sanitizing. The explanation for their unhappiness climbed out of the back of the van after them and sauntered across the lawn, somehow managing to look like she was clomping down a runway when she was actually walking on muddy grass while wearing platform heels. Her mouth was set in a line of firm disapproval. Sloane’s eyes narrowed as she considered the front of the house.
The rest of us were waiting on the porch, as much to get away from the smell as to meet her. Jeff straightened, saying, “Ah, Sloane—”
“Can it, cobbler,” she snarled, and clomped right on past him, into the death-scented living room.
Slowly—and in my case at least, afraid of the explosion that was almost sure to follow—the four of us leaned around and looked through the open door. Sloane was standing in the center of the living room, her arms hanging loosely at her sides, considering the scene. She was moving her head in small, birdlike jerks, taking in one thing after another. Finally, she turned and clomped toward the larger of the three bodies, stopping in front of what had once been Christina Marlowe. Bending close, she took a deep breath.
Demi gagged beside me, clapping a hand over her mouth and turning away. I put a hand on her back, hopefully providing a little comfort, but I didn’t try to get her to turn back around. I had a pretty decent idea of what was about to happen, and it wasn’t anything that Demi needed to see.
Sloane picked up the dead woman’s spoon, lying on the tray next to her curled, maggot-covered fingers, and shoved it through the crust of mold that had formed on her plate, scooping up a healthy portion of whatever Christina had been eating right before she died. Sloane raised the spoon, studying its contents, which continued to pulse a little as the maggots she had collected along with her target writhed in dismay. Then she brought it closer to her face, sniffing once again.
Dropping the spoon back onto the plate, Sloane turned and clomped back to the doorway. “These people were poisoned,” she said. “That’s the good news.”
“How is that good news?” demanded Andy. “I don’t know if you noticed, but three people are dead in there.”
Sloane waved her hand dismissively. “People die every day. Somebody died while you were thinking of that pithy comeback. Dying is amateur hour.”
“If that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?” I asked, trying to keep us on track—or at least keep us from turning on each other. Sloane was in a clompy mood, and that meant her temper, never the most reliable of things, was on a hair trigger.
“The killer used cyanide mixed with applesauce. You can’t really tell unless you break through the gunk that’s growing on the plates, but all that’s in there is applesauce.” Sloane shook her head. “This was a fairy tale murder. Are we looking at a five-ten-a?”
“We would be, except that our potential Cinderella is one of the bodies in there. Unless this was a murder-suicide, she didn’t do it. And there’s more.” I took my hand off Demi’s back, folding my arms in front of my chest. “The stepmother was sleeping in her closet. For at least a week, according to Jeff; maybe longer.”
“That’s messed up,” said Andy.
Sloane didn’t say anything. She just looked at me, a calculating expression in her kohl-rimmed eyes. Finally, after the silence had stretched out for long enough to become uncomfortable, she said two words: “Show me.”
#
Everyone piled into Christina’s bedroom this time: Andy because he wanted to see the closet, Demi because she didn’t want to be left alone with the bodies. We hung back, letting Sloane explore the room in her own way.
She went to the closet first, and just stood there for several minutes, looking down on the tangled nest of bedding. Finally, she crouched and flipped over the pillow, studying the floor beneath it. “Two weeks,” she said. “Maybe three. No longer than that. She’d have been shifting around in the closet if she’d tried to go longer, and that would have fucked up the carpet in here.”
None of us asked her how she knew. In cases like this one, Sloane was our subject matter expert on tales involving wicked relatives. We’d allow the cleaning team to do a full forensic analysis of the place as soon as we cleared out, but we knew their findings would confirm Sloane’s deductions. She was as lost as the rest of us when we were chasing a Little Mermaid or a Match Girl, but put us in a house with a Cinderella or a Snow White and the world was hers to unravel.
The narrative never does any of us any favors, even though it can sometimes seem that way in the short run. But I sometimes feel like Sloane got even fewer favors than the rest of us. She sees darkness everywhere she goes. She’s not capable of looking away.
Sloane crossed to the bed, stopping next to it and cocking her head as she considered the fold of the covers, the position of the pillows. She pulled down the duvet, peering at the mattress for a moment before she turned around and said, “We’ve got a problem.”
“The dire pronouncements are getting old,” said Andy.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“Someone was sleeping in our Wicked Stepmother’s bed—someone who wasn’t the stepmother, and wasn’t either of her daughters.” Sloane gestured toward the bed, continuing, “Someone with red hair. Christina was a blonde, one of the daughters was brunette, and the other was blonde like her mother.” She narrowed her eyes at Andy and added, “There are pictures in the hall if you don’t believe me.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, Sloane,” he said defensively. “This just seems like a pretty big jump to make.”
“Not that big of a jump,” said Jeff. He sounded … frightened. I turned to look at him, frowning.
“Jeff? You know something that you’d like to share with the rest of the team?”
“We were never sure that it was really a matter of the narrative expressing itself, and not just some random human behavior. That’s why it never made it outside of the Archive.”
“Except for when you consulted with me,” said Sloane. “You tell them or I will.”
“Jeff?” I repeated.
Our resident archivist sighed, turning to fully face me, and said, “We had a confirmed five-ten-a in Manhattan about four years ago. The local field team was dispatched to deal with it, and they got there when the story should have been fully manifested. What they found was … was a horror show.”
“Many fairy tales are,” I said. “We’re standing in a dead woman’s bedroom. What did the field team find, Agent Davis?”
Using Jeff’s title seemed to help him center himself. He took a deep breath, straightened, and said, “The stepmother was dead, as was the prospective Cinderella and one of the two stepsisters. The other stepsister, Elise Walton, was gone. The incident was recorded as a five-ten-a gone wrong, turned murder-suicide, like some of them do, and it got filed as part of the overall five-ten-a record.”
“Only about a year later, we got another narrative pop with the same attributes, or at least really similar ones,” said Sloane, picking up the story. “There was a potential five-ten-a in Houston that was flagged as resolved when one of the stepsisters was killed in a car accident. That didn’t stop the survivors from being poisoned at their dining room table, with cyanide mixed in applesauce.”
“There have been two more killings that fit this profile since then,” said Jeff. “They were both in different cities; they both involved unmanifested five-ten-a narratives.”
“And let me guess,” I said. “The Bureau—and the Bureau cleanup crew—got involved on every one of those calls, didn’t we?”
Jeff nodded. “It’s standard procedure. We don’t want a repeat of what happened in seventy-two.”
“Um,” said Demi. “What happened in seventy-two?”
“There was a rash of killings connected to a memetic incursion gone wrong—a Snow White who didn’t manifest the way that she was supposed to,” I said. “The media got hold of it before it could be properly handled. Dubbed them ‘the fairy tale murders.’ We lost half our funding over that incident, and the Snow White in question wound up getting arrested for her crimes.”
“Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when you kill people?” asked Demi.
She sounded so lost that I felt briefly guilty for dragging her into all of this. I pushed the feeling aside. This was neither the time nor the place, and Demi’s story had been sealed long before I forced her into activation. “She killed eight more people while she was in prison, before we could get someone into her cell and take care of her. It was a mess, in every sense of the word, and it must never happen again.”
The Snow White’s name had been Adrianna. She’d looked enough like me that we could have been sisters, because all Snow Whites are sisters, somewhere deep inside the story. They made me recite her history while I was in school, drumming the failure that she represented deep into the marrow of my bones. Never again. Other stories could turn sour, but not mine: never again.
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