Strings of Fate (Mistresses of Fate)

by Dore, Deirdre

  His dad had a lot of money in his wallet and in the van. Thousands of dollars were hidden in red coffee cans, along with bits of jewelry and things the girls had carried with them. Joe knew how much to the penny; he knew things like that; numbers were like strings; he saw them, ever-present and clear, each one matched with an occasion.

  He would buy a computer, he decided, maybe find a job working online. He didn’t think it would be difficult; he was very good with computers.

  So Joe ate his cheeseburger and made his plans, but every few minutes an image of the girl, of the black strings she’d pulled like worms from his father’s chest, crept back into his mind. He thought he could do that, he could take the strings, wear them. He thought maybe he was meant to do that, that it might make him better, like he was before. He didn’t want the black strings, though, nothing like his father’s. He wanted the beautiful ones, the ones that shone and curled and bubbled. And now he knew how to take them.

  5

  CHRIS’S TUESDAY-NIGHT yoga class wasn’t exactly a superfluity of young, lithe bodies bending to and fro like the reeds bordering a pond. Her regulars included the Four Senior Ladies of the Apocalypse, though that was not what they called themselves; Mr. Ward, who came to avoid his nagging wife now that he’d retired; the Triplets (three teenage girls with a weight problem); and Tavey and Raquel, when they were able to get away. Sometimes the nearby college students would come in, but usually during the day when they didn’t have class.

  Her yoga studio was actually an old ballet studio on the second floor of one of the redbrick downtown buildings in Fate. The building belonged to Tavey and had been owned by her family for years. She used the bottom floor for her dog boutique, Dog with Two Bones, and she rented the ballet studio and the third-floor apartment to Chris for what most people would consider a more-than-reasonable discount. The fact that Chris’s various jobs weren’t what most people considered stable, given that they didn’t provide a steady income—plus the matter of her father—made her a less-than-desirable tenant, so she was grateful for Tavey’s generosity.

  The only people in town who might have more trouble finding a landlord than Chris were the “witches”—Summer’s siblings and extended family. But despite the town’s wariness of them, they had actually begun to venture beyond their vast property in the wooded area on the outskirts of town. A few years after Summer disappeared, Summer’s older sister—Jane—had bought one of the vacant buildings in the main circle of town and had begun selling books on witchcraft, herbs, essential oils, and homeopathic remedies. No one was sure where she’d gotten the money. Before then, it had been rare for anyone from a witch family to leave their land. Summer had been the first child in any of the families to go to school, because of her blindness, but now all the children attended the Fate public schools.

  Some people in town hadn’t reacted too well to the change, and fights had ensued, but then Summer’s older brother John had married a Baptist woman from town and she’d managed to calm things down. Chris thought that the town’s reaction was ridiculous. After all, according to local legend the witch families had lived alongside the Cherokees well before the first recorded white settlers had ever come around.

  Unconsciously, Chris glanced at the Triplets: Datura, Schisandra, and Yarrow (their mother was slightly obsessed with Chinese herbs), who were pretty normal girls, considering their family. Their Aunt Jane—also known as Circe (good grief )—allowed the girls to attend Chris’s yoga class at their insistence. Aunt Jane was vehemently opposed to anything that involved Chris, but she acquiesced—for some strange reason—to the demands of the Triplets. The girls, who studied for an hour at the library before walking over to the yoga studio every week, always looked vaguely apologetic when they saw Chris, as if silently acknowledging that they listened to a litany of her flaws on a daily basis.

  “Okay, class, sunrise salutation, arms to the sky,” she instructed, showing the class the pose.

  Everyone followed her, some more awkwardly than others. Mr. Ward was surprisingly agile for a man his age; his form was perfect. The girls were self-conscious and awkward, though they were getting better each time they came to class. As for the Four Senior Ladies of the Apocalypse, they had condescended to putting their arms in the air, but that didn’t stop them from gossiping. She asked them every time for silence, but now they just ignored her, knowing she wasn’t going to kick them out. They were right; she was an absolute wimp, at least when it came to old women.

  “Breathe in through your nose, out of your nose, slow and steady.” She demonstrated, speaking slowly and quietly. It didn’t matter. Louise, the leader of the Senior Ladies, was still talking about the school fund-raiser taking place next Saturday and how she didn’t think it was right that it started at the same time as the Baptist church fund-raiser. Chris thought it was a pointed comment directed at the girls, whose mother, Agatha, was the former Baptist who’d defied her parents and married into the witch family. Chris had to hand it to her, she’d managed to upset the balance of Fate’s little universe and come out smelling like fresh biscuits. She was the mayor, which was pretty much like being the president of the United States in Fate. Most of the time, Aunt Jane took care of the girls.

  When class wrapped up fifty minutes later, Mr. Ward hurried out the door after a quick thank-you, trying to avoid the Senior Ladies—friends of his wife—while the older women continued to gossip as they gathered up their gear. The Triplets were sweating, though Chris hadn’t pushed them that hard. Lord knew they got enough pressure from everyone else.

  Chris approached them, wiping sweat that had gathered on her neck with a towel. “You did great, girls.”

  All three of them gave her identical doubtful looks from bright blue eyes, but their spokesperson, Yarrow, gave her a response after a brief, silent consultation with her sisters. Chris knew it was Yarrow because there was a small heart-shaped birthmark below the girl’s right ear. All three of them had a birthmark, each one unique, the only major discrepancy in their similarity.

  “Thank you, Miss Pascal.”

  Chris exhaled a frustrated breath . . . slowly, of course. She wished they would talk to her; she knew they talked to each other, she sometimes watched them walking to class from the studio windows. “Okay, then, see you Thursday.”

  They nodded, but then the oldest, Datura, whose birthmark looked like a bird in flight, stepped forward—reluctantly, if her expression was any indication. “Miss Pascal, you should be careful.”

  She had a slow, soft voice with a strange, almost musical cadence. Chris blinked. “Me? Why?”

  The girls looked at each other for a long moment—their eerie form of silent communication.

  “Someone is planning to kill you,” Datura continued, and shrugged.

  Chris felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She rubbed at it unobtrusively with her towel, wishing the girl hadn’t delivered the news as if she were predicting rain or warning everyone that the garbage man was running late.

  Chris decided to play it low-key. “Yeah, well, that happens sometimes. I tend to rub people the wrong way.”

  Identical frowns drew lines in between the girls’ rather too-prominent brows.

  “No,” Yarrow disagreed. “This is the first time anyone has wanted to kill you.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that. Dee Dee Streed wanted to murder me in sixth grade.”

  “We weren’t around then.”

  “Okay.” Chris nodded. “Guess you couldn’t have been expected to know about that one.”

  “No,” Yarrow agreed. “But we’re right about this.”

  Chris liked the girls, she really did, but this was a bit much. “How do you know?”

  The girls seemed worried; the silent one, Schisandra, tugged on the sleeve of Yarrow’s T-shirt. When Yarrow bent down, she whispered into her sister’s ear.

  A moment later, her
face perplexed, Yarrow nodded. “We can’t tell you how, Miss Pascal, we’re sorry. It would be bad for you if we did.”

  “Uh-huh,” Chris agreed doubtfully, but then her more charitable side kicked in. “All right. Well, any other advice? Walk on the left side of the street? Avoid tall, dark, and handsome men?” She wished she had that problem.

  “Avoid your boyfriend,” Yarrow offered helpfully.

  Chris nodded. “Okay, then. I’ll do that.”

  “Great.” The three of them looked pleased and relieved as they gathered up their yoga mats and water bottles and headed to the door that opened to the balcony, from which a wrought-iron staircase switched back down to the street—the girls didn’t like the stairwell that led down to a small lobby.

  Louise put a heavy hand on Chris’s shoulder, making her jump and turn on the old woman, who put a hand to her heart like the heroine of a 1950s movie. But since there was a small chance that the old biddy was actually having a heart attack, Chris settled back, watching the beady-eyed blue-hair warily—if she keeled over, Chris would have to live with the guilt, and she had more than enough of that on her plate already.

  “That was sweet, dear.”

  “What was?”

  “Not telling those girls you don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Yeah . . . sweet. That’s what I was being.”

  “Are you still making up those online boyfriends?”

  Great. High school humiliation never ended when you lived in the same small town all your life. “Yes, Mrs. Carlyle, I still make up boyfriends, just for other people.”

  “You should get a real job. Move to the big city and start fresh like Cora’s daughter.”

  Louise didn’t know as much as she thought she did about Cora’s daughter. Sam was her name, and she’d hired Chris to post fake messages to Facebook about her time in New York while she ran off with her boyfriend two counties over. But Chris didn’t judge. She just did what she was paid to do.

  “I don’t think so, Mrs. Carlyle, but thanks for the advice.”

  “It’s Summer, isn’t it?”

  Chris felt a small flutter of panic in the back of her skull, where the sorrow nested, waiting, just waiting, to emerge and peck at her. The need to stay in control made her voice flat and cold when she spoke to the old woman.

  “What about her?”

  “You can’t bear to leave her, can you? Not even after all these years.”

  Chris shifted her feet and stretched one arm across her body, her hands unconsciously clenched into fists. She released them, breathing out slowly.

  Louise, who looked slightly shamefaced in light of Chris’s agitation, waited expectantly, not guilty enough to leave well enough alone.

  “We haven’t found her, Mrs. Carlyle, not yet.”

  Her vehemence seemed to disturb the gossipy old bat, who huffed and joined her friends, whispering just loud enough for Chris to hear as they went out the door of the studio and began trooping down the stairwell.

  “She’s been dead all these years. Mark my words. Dead and gone.”

  Chris felt tears sting and began breathing, slowly and deeply, in through her nose and out of her nose like an excellent. Fucking. Yoga. Instructor. Calm. Calm. Calm. Damn it.

  6

  RYAN HELMER GLANCED up at the board where the faces of several women were pinned, along with their vital details, connections, the dates they’d been missing, and any other pertinent information. His ex-fiancée had never understood why he hated her scrapbooking hobby; the tiny cut-out pictures, neat hand-typed data—the organized cataloguing that went into the process of creating a scrapbook creeped him out. To be fair, he’d never told her that—he’d rarely told her anything about his work as an FBI agent—but as far as he was concerned, scrapbooking was a gentle cousin of the avocation performed by serial killers, stalkers, and homicide investigators.

  Though he’d never shared his feelings with anyone in the department, the truth was that Ryan would have been content never to work another serial murder case. He’d been in the FBI for two years when his first serial murder case landed on his desk; a woman from Texas had kidnapped and murdered young girls after spending years pretending they were her daughters. When that case was finished, he’d moved to Georgia, partly because he wanted some distance from his family, and partly because he never quite got over the horror of seeing those little girls’ bodies. He’d avoided anything even related to serial murders until two weeks ago, when he’d received a call from an acquaintance of his in the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, Investigator Tyler Downs.

  Downs had made the connection between a young woman named Amanda Hutchins, who was found naked in a ditch in a small town just outside of Rome, a town that didn’t have its own police force, and several other murders that had occurred in north Georgia over the past two years. Downs—no stranger to murder—had thought the precision of the cuts that had drained the blood from Amanda’s body bespoke practice, and he was right.

  Further investigation revealed several other women killed in precisely the same way, with the same pattern of cuts, though there appeared to be no pattern to the killer’s selection of women, which ranged in age, but most of the victims were in their twenties or thirties, of all races. At least, the murders they’d discovered so far.

  As soon as the task force was created, the media got wind of the case. When it was revealed that in several of the cases the man they suspected of murdering the women had been in communication with them through Facebook or online dating sites, the media had started calling him “the Boyfriend.” However, in each case the man had used a false identity to talk to the women. One profiler indicated that the language the man used ranged from awkward to charming, almost as if two different people had written it—which had led several members of the team to conclude that they might have two perpetrators.

  Yesterday, subpoenas to get the financial records from Facebook, Twitter, and over four different dating sites had just landed on Ryan Helmer’s desk when a call came in from a woman named Jane Arrowdale of Fate, Georgia, a small town in Cherokee County with a reputation for oddballs.

  She turned out to be one of the crazies, calling herself a member of a witch clan, but she did share one piece of information that Helmer felt was worth checking out, the name of a local woman, Christina Pascal, and her online “business.” For a fee, Ms. Pascal would create a fake persona and send emails, tweets, and posts according to her client’s specifications. This woman Jane claimed that Ms. Pascal was creating the personas that were being used to kill the victims.

  Ryan had spent the entire previous day and now this morning trying to find out more about Ms. Pascal and any connections she may have to the killer.

  “That Ms. Pascal?” The agent in charge of the task force, Scott Midaugh, dropped a packet of documents on Ryan’s desk and bent over to look at Ryan’s screen, where an image of Ms. Pascal’s driver’s license was on display. He whistled through his front teeth. “Pretty girl.”

  Ryan grunted. He supposed she was pretty. She had broad cheekbones and catlike yellow-gold eyes, with thick brown hair that tended to curl. She was slender according to her weight and fairly tall, at five-foot-eight. Pretty, however, didn’t make up for strange and obsessive. In Ryan’s admittedly conservative mind, this girl was a lunatic. She had several online businesses, including the one she used to invent people, and was on the board of directors of a nonprofit named Once Was Lost, which dedicated itself to finding the missing. The president was a local woman named Tavey Collins, whose family had long owned a great deal of land around Fate and the rest of north Georgia, and whose hounds were used to track the missing all over the country.

  Which meant, of course, that Collins had connections, and if Ms. Pascal was her friend, the FBI couldn’t just go beating down her door demanding answers.

  “What have you found out about her so far?” Midaugh p
ulled up a chair.

  Ryan rolled his shoulders; he felt like he’d been sitting at his desk for days; he’d done nothing but work and sleep. Broad-shouldered and tall, he generally worked standing up, as none of the desks felt big enough for him. But for this case he’d spent most of the time on the damn computer. He needed a run, but he didn’t want to let up now that he was on to something.

  “I’m still waiting for the results of the subpoena of her Internet activity to come back, but I think this girl is the key to finding this unsub. If she’s not directly involved, then she definitely has information that could be helpful.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Midaugh wanted to know. “We can head over to Fate today and have a conversation.”

  “She has connections.”

  “Ah.” Midaugh leaned back in his chair and waited expectantly for Ryan to elaborate.

  Ryan pushed his chair back far enough that he could stretch out his legs, tapping his pencil restlessly on his thigh. “Tyler Downs, the investigator who called the case in to us, knows her. He called me this morning when he found out I was looking into her as a connection to the killer. He went to high school with her.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said there is no way on God’s green earth she’s deliberately helping a serial killer.”

  “No way?”

  Ryan knew why Midaugh asked the question. Cops were hesitant to make blanket statements about what a person would and wouldn’t do—they just heard the same stories too many times, had seen too many people lose it and commit acts that their friends, families, acquaintances just couldn’t believe they’d done. Tyler Downs was a seasoned officer with an excellent reputation, even with the FBI. Ryan himself had worked with him on several cases; the guy’s opinion was worth taking into consideration.