Daughters of Arkham

by Justin Robinson

  But what did the Thorndikes have to fear in Arkham?

  Sindy snorted. Nothing more than the Endicotts, and yet her own mother was a security freak. Probably her dad had made her mom paranoid. He wasn’t there to look after them all the time, so he made sure they had the best cameras and motion detectors available. Sindy wanted to talk to him about the money problem, but it had to wait until he was home from Europe.

  Nate’s bike was leaning against the wall near the side gate. She’d know it anywhere, with the industrial basket on the back, reinforced handlebars, and Star Wars stickers on the body. She sighed. She didn’t want Nate around for the reunion. She could tell Abby she needed to speak to her alone, and Abby would get him to leave. He’d do whatever Abby wanted anyway.

  Sindy went to the front door and knocked, her stomach buzzing.

  Bertram answered the door. His normally impassive expression brightened to a pleasant, if reserved, smile. “Miss Endicott. So lovely to see you.”

  Sindy had always liked Bertram. It might have been because her own family’s man was similar, or it might have been because of his impeccable manners. It helped that she’d always thought he was fond of her.

  “Is Abby home?”

  “I am not entirely certain. If you would like to retire to the lounge, I would be pleased to find out. May I take your coat?”

  She smiled at Bertram and allowed him to lift the heavy coat from her shoulders. She unwound her scarf and handed that over as well.

  The lounge was a wide-open room full of overstuffed chairs, a sofa, and several end tables, each with a crystal ashtray. There were a few bookcases along the walls, each laden with a standard array of antique books. Sindy was fairly certain that there was a store somewhere that sold the same collection to every wealthy woman who wanted to appear cultured. She had the same set in a similar-looking room at her house, and she could reliably identify each book from twenty feet. Moby Dick, Treasure Island, The Red Badge of Courage… She’d never read any of them until this year when they all popped up on her syllabus. Maybe that was how they’d been chosen for decoration in the first place.

  Sindy picked one of the softer chairs and waited.

  A few minutes later Bertram returned to the room with a mug on a tray. It was topped with fluffy whipped cream. “I took the liberty of preparing some cocoa, Miss Endicott. You look chilled.”

  “Thank you,” she said, accepting the mug.

  “It’s very hot, so give it some time.”

  He wasn’t exaggerating. She put it down on a coaster while the cream melted into the chocolate.

  “Miss Thorndike is not at home, but her grandmother, Mrs. Thorndike, would like to speak to you. If you would wait here, she will be along presently.”

  “Um. Uh. Okay?”

  Bertram vanished through the door. If Abby wasn’t here, then what was Nate doing here?

  Hester Thorndike entered the room and Sindy forgot about Nate. She had to consciously resist the urge to stand and curtsey. She half-rose anyway, but Hester held out a skinny hand. She might as well have put it directly on Sindy’s shoulder.

  “Please, dear. No need for that.”

  Hester Thorndike scared most people, but not Sindy. Hester had always been kind to her.

  “Hello, Mrs. Thorndike.”

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I was coming over to see Abby, but Bertram says she’s out?”

  “Is she? I’m afraid she doesn’t tell me when she comes and goes. I imagine that you tell your mother, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” No, she didn’t, but she wasn’t going to say that to Hester.

  “Of course you do. Of course. You look troubled, dear. Not like you do when you usually come over.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess.”

  “It’s weighing on you.”

  “I was coming over to say I was sorry.”

  “That’s very big of you. It shows grace and character. It’s too rare a quality, especially these days.” Hester said ‘these days’ with the resentment of age.

  “Thank you.”

  “Whatever did you do to warrant an apology? I find these things are most often two-sided affairs, but one has to take the leap and apologize for the mending to occur.”

  “It’s silly. I mean, especially with the baby and all.”

  “Baby?” Hester said. Her tone was so airy, Sindy missed the keen interest hidden beneath it.

  “Abby’s baby.”

  “Oh yes. Of course,” Hester said, and Sindy knew this was the first she’d heard of it. She wondered if she’d just gotten her friend into deeper trouble. She hid her dismay as best she could.

  “Um. Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

  “Nonsense, Sincere. You have always been a sister to Abigail. And soon, you will be sisters in a more concrete sense when the two of you are ushered into the Daughters of Arkham.”

  “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  “Nor should you. You have a few more months of being a girl. You should enjoy them while you can. When the time is right… When do you turn fifteen, dear?”

  “April 7th.”

  “April 7th,” Hester said, as if she were pleased it was that date and no other. “Just around the corner. Not even a month after our own Abigail.”

  Sindy nodded, and covered the fact that she had no idea of what to say with a sip of cocoa.

  Fortunately, Hester didn’t seem to need prompting. She went on, “I’ve been looking forward to your induction for some time, Sincere. You always struck me as a young lady with a rare combination of intelligence and charm. That would be such a boon for us. Who knows? Someday you may find yourself at the head of our little group.”

  “The head? I always thought, you know, Abby…”

  “With very few exceptions, Thorndike women have always been leaders, it’s true. You might be one of those exceptions. I don’t believe there is anywhere a young woman like you could not go.”

  Sindy glowed. She didn’t want to let on how much Hester was affecting her with this praise, but the truth was Sindy had never heard anything of the sort. Her parents said nice things to her, of course, but nothing like this. They didn’t believe she could be president, but Hester Thorndike did. More importantly, she thought that Sindy could head of the Daughters of Arkham, an organization much more exclusive than the presidency. “Thank you,” she muttered into her hot chocolate.

  “Tell me, dear. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  The heat in her cheeks returned. “I guess so.”

  “Which is it? Either you know or you don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “And what is this lucky boy’s name?”

  “Eleazar Grant.”

  Sindy expected to see the light die in Hester’s eyes when she heard that the great hope for the Daughters of Arkham was dating a Grant, and not a Coffin, Hanshaw, Knowles, or Barker. On the contrary, Hester offered the most genuine smile Sindy had seen from her yet. There was a knowing gleam in her eyes. “Eleazar Grant. A good boy from everything I have heard. Very polite.”

  “Yes.”

  “Although I don’t imagine his politeness was what seduced you. Oh, I was young once, too. Well, he is a lovely match. Just lovely.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Thorndike.”

  “You are still taking your iron supplement?”

  “Of course. My mother makes sure, every morning.”

  “Good, good. If our ancestors knew what this water does, perhaps they wouldn’t have settled here.”

  “Then there wouldn’t be any Daughters of Arkham.”

  “You know, when I was little girl, we had a folktale…” She chuckled as though she was about to dismiss the memory, but Sindy saw something else in the old woman. “If you wanted a boy to be yours forever, you had to feed him a single drop of your blood in a cake.”

  “Blood?” Sindy was repulsed by the idea, but an electric trill went through her limbs. It was the same jittery, lovely feeling she go
t when she’d first kissed a boy.

  “Mm-hmm. Just a little drop of blood baked right into a cake. You would, of course, have to bake the cake yourself.”

  The trill should have stopped, but it didn’t. It sang through her body. She began feeling pleasantly warm, from the core of her out to her fingertips. The room had snapped into perfect clarity. When she sipped at her hot chocolate, her tongue easily separated the dark, buttery, round flavors of the chocolate from the claws of the cream. “Did you ever do it?”

  “I don’t know a single girl who didn’t try it once.”

  “What happened?”

  “He married me and we had Constance,” Hester said, smiling.

  Sindy’s belly lurched again at the thought of marrying Eleazar. She had nothing against him; she liked him a lot—but she was young. They were still young. Still… Was the blood-in-the-cake thing really something that worked? Was this a secret that Hester Thorndike was imparting on her heir apparent? Was that what she was?

  “I hope I haven’t kept you too long, dear.”

  “Oh no. Nothing like that. Thank you for talking to me.”

  “My pleasure, as always. Please, finish your hot chocolate, but excuse me. I have a few matters to attend to.”

  Sindy rose when Hester did, and watched as the old woman left the room. She finished her drink, barely noticing it as she stared at one of the bookcases. All she could think about was her conversation with Hester. Just a single drop of blood into a cake. What an odd thing to say. Even odder if it wasn’t true.

  Sindy left a little while later. Bertram helped her with her coat and scarf, and she went back out into the cold. When she passed the wall, she didn’t see Nate’s bike. She had completely forgotten it had been there before. Nothing could have turned her attention away from this strange, delicious secret she had been given.

  33

  The Trail

  nate couldn’t stop thinking about Halloween. Abby hadn’t mentioned anything about a party or about going anywhere, and Nate never asked her, but the mystery still tugged at him. He assumed that the man in Abby’s hallway was connected to her lie in some way, but he couldn’t piece together how.

  He tried to break things down logically. It would be easy to chalk everything up to some unknowable mystery, like the Bermuda Triangle or UFO abductions, but he knew that just because something might lack an obvious explanation, that didn’t mean an explanation didn’t exist.

  He started with what he knew to be indisputable facts and proceeded from there.

  One: The Daughters of Arkham claimed to have a Halloween party at Harwich Hall every year from dusk to around midnight.

  Two: There had been enough cars outside to indicate that said party had in fact occurred, and had been well-attended.

  Three: The house had either been empty, or everyone who had come for the party had been extremely quiet in one section of the house. Nate could not imagine that particular group of women being perfectly silent for the duration of his visit into Harwich Hall. This wasn’t so much an indisputable fact as it was an assumption based on his life experience, but Nate was comfortable making that leap.

  The most logical answer was probably that everyone gathered at Harwich Hall before heading somewhere else on foot. Fortunately, he knew the grounds of Harwich Hall better than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of his father.

  The house sat on a small rise. The lawn extended to the east and north. The southern side faced the road, and was mostly dominated by the wide gravel driveway. A stone wall and hedges ringed the property, and disappeared into the trees on that encroached on the western side of the estate, past the old oak tree. Beyond the wall, the forest became dense very quickly. Nate and Abby had been forbidden from playing back there as kids, but it hadn’t stopped them.

  What very few people knew was that there was a section of the wall along the northern edge of the property that had crumbled away. Weather and time had taken a V-shaped bite out of the stones. The gap was mostly hidden by tangled, thorny hedges. He and Abby had used it as access point into the forest when they were much younger, but they hadn’t used it in many years.

  Nate reasoned that if he knew about that gap, Constance and Hester probably did, too. If they’d led that many people across the lawn and into the forest, there would be some kind of evidence. Trampled grass, some balding patches, maybe some broken twigs and logs… It wouldn’t be easy to spot after a week, but he had a lot of experience with the subtleties of the lawn at Abby’s house.

  He biked over to Harwich Hall in the early afternoon on Saturday. He hurried. The sweat formed a layer under his clothes even as the chill air scoured his face. He put his bike by the gate out of habit, and a bolt of fear pierced him as he crept onto the estate. He had no idea who was home, and he didn’t want to have to explain what he was doing here. He couldn’t see any cars from his vantage point, but for all he knew, the house was packed and everyone—including the silhouette that had become a regular fixture in his nightmares—was waiting by the windows.

  He hugged the edge of the property, taking the long way around. I’m seeking cover, he told himself. It was true that the other way was more exposed, but really, he didn’t want to pass by the window of the eastern wing, where he’d seen that silhouette.

  Harwich Hall was barely visible as he passed amongst the birch trees. He crossed the driveway near the garage. It was a large white building that had likely once been a coach house. The doors were closed, so he had no idea how many of their cars were in there. The Thorndikes had three in total. To Nate, that was a crazy extravagance. His family had one, his father’s ragged old truck. Arkham was small enough that you could get most places on foot, and a family really only needed one vehicle. Hester barely ever left home, and Abby couldn’t even drive, but there were still three cars lined up behind those white doors.

  They probably had a rich person reason for all those cars, Nate thought. Rich people always had a perfectly logical reason why they needed so many things. They didn’t know that everyone else just made do with what they had.

  The trees thinned out and the terrain rose as he got closer to the back of the house. The wall followed the hill in order to mark the property line, but there was no easy path alongside it. Nate couldn’t imagine a bunch of society people hiking up in that direction, and their stiletto heels would have aerated the entire hill. No, if they’d gone anywhere, it would have been across the backyard and through the V-shaped crack in the wall. If the Daughters had gone that way, their path would have become a muddy swath ten feet wide. He wasn’t going to miss that. No one could.

  He rounded the house and looked out at the oak tree with the swing. Seeing their tree made him want to call Abby and tell her what he was doing. He was certain that if he did, she would come clean with him. Who knew, she might even be impressed with his acumen.

  He couldn’t. This was his alone to solve.

  Harwich Hall’s back yard had a few gently rolling hills, like the swells of a mostly calm sea. He mapped out the most likely route that the Daughters would have taken, and went from the back of the ballroom between the two nearest hills and then directly to the hole in the wall.

  He did not find what he was hoping for. There was no wide, muddy track. There were no footprints perfectly preserved in the chilled dirt. As for trampling, it was difficult to tell. The grass was beginning to die, hibernating until its rebirth in March. Abby’s birthday, he reminded himself. The world celebrated her birth by coming alive again—a stupid thought he’d never had the courage to share with her, though it had been on his lips for several years.

  There had to be something here. There just had to. Nate started at the edge of the hole, then backtracked toward the house, taking a slightly different route each time. He found nothing. Soon, he started taking paths that were only direct in the loosest definition of the term.

  Finally, as he was beginning to think there might actually be nothing to find, he squeezed through the hole
in the wall. He winced as the nearby brambles raked his skin. He didn’t think that society women would be up for this sort of thing. Drawing blood hardly seemed their speed, but he had come this far. He needed to check every possibility.

  The ground behind the wall was rugged. It dipped down into a dry creek bed before it rose up into the hills. Narrow trails used by foxes, rabbits, deer and other animals snaked off into the woods. And coyotes, Nate reminded himself. There were coyotes in those woods. Not many, but it wasn’t like it was the number of them that would be the problem if any found him. There had been no documented attacks in Arkham for years and years, but that didn’t keep Nate from worrying. There were bears, too. Bears were an even bigger problem. Usually, they were only trouble for the hunters foolish enough to think they could bag one, but who was to say that there wasn’t an angry bear with an ass full of buckshot wandering around these woods looking for revenge?

  Nate could feel his anxiety spiraling out of control. He struggled to clamp it down. The deep woods around Arkham had a fearsome reputation going back to the colonial days. Back then, these woods really had been a dangerous places filled with mysteries.

  He scanned the difficult terrain, looking for the telltale footprints of a passing party. If they came this way, they did it in heels, he reminded himself. He could barely climb the slopes in his sneakers; he didn’t think the collected ladies of the Daughters of Arkham would have a much better shot in their silly, useless shoes.

  The creek bed was deeply-sloped, narrow, and full of sharp rocks that protruded from the dried-up embankment. Anyone who tried that path would only have shredded ankles to show for it. There was no place Nate could see that a bunch of society women could have left the Thorndike estate without leaving a trail.