My days are achy and hot. Wearing my dad’s work vest, sleeping on the couch in the indent left by his body weight, sorting his belongings, making coffee that tastes like scorched grounds in the crappy drip machine: I feel as if I’m slowly slipping into my father, becoming him, bringing him back to life.
The only other company I have, besides TJ, is the mailman, who knocks on the door to tell me he can’t get anything in the mailbox because it hasn’t been emptied in two weeks. There isn’t any more to say, but still I find myself trying to delay his departure.
“What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever had to deliver?”
He hardly blinks. “I don’t open the mail, ma’am. That’s a federal crime.”
“You must have some idea, though,” I persist. “Bloody hearts gift-wrapped for exes, exploding glitter bombs, anything like that?”
He glances at the beer in my hand.
“Forget it,” I say. “Dumb question.”
“Nah. I’m just thinking. Trying to remember,” he says. “Every Christmas some of the kids send letters to the North Pole. I get letters to the tooth fairy, too.”
I wish I hadn’t asked. Loneliness turns from an ache to a hard punch. I think of all those rose-cheeked children, all those families at their dining room tables making wish lists: snowglobes of normalcy.
The mailman lifts his cap to palm some sweat off his hairline. “I once knew a widower kept sending his wife letters,” he adds. “A few months after the funeral the letters started coming. He’d leave one for me every day. No address, just a name and Rome, Italy. He’d convinced himself that she’d run off with somebody else. He told me she always wanted to go to Rome.” He shakes his head, plays with the buttons on his uniform with stained fingers. “He wrote her every day until he died, begging her to come back. Funny, isn’t it? He’d rather she had an affair. He wanted her alive, even if it meant she’d done him wrong.” He shakes his head.
“Funny,” I echo.
He nods and turns back to his truck.
I stand there for a while, looking out over nothing, leaving sweat prints on my father’s mail, thinking about that old man sending letters to his dead wife, thinking about Misha and Frank Mitchell, everyone insisting Kaycee had run away. Maybe Condor was right—maybe it wasn’t so much a lie as it was wishful thinking. Maybe they just wanted to believe she’d escaped.
Wanted to believe they’d let her.
My father’s mail is all coupons and junk mail, plus a flyer—obviously recent—calling for residents to show up to a town meeting about the water crisis. I’m about to chuck all of it when a manila envelope slides out from between a wedge of leaflets and skitters across the floor.
There’s no address, only a name marked in neat Sharpie: Ms. Abigail Williams.
As I reach for it, my whole body seems to pour down into my arm, into my fingers fumbling off the tape keeping it closed. Instinct. Premonition.
Inside, there is no note, only a dozen Polaroid photographs, all of high school girls. High school girls topless, posing, making kissy faces despite the obvious drunken blur of their eyes. Girls unconscious on couches, legs splayed so their underwear is visible. One naked, entirely, her face obscured by the glare of a flash.
Sophie Nantes is in one of the pictures, her skirt hitched to her waist, hair catching in smeary lipgloss, eyes half-lidded from alcohol. I sort through the photographs carefully, more than once, even though it turns my stomach.
Apart from Sophie Nantes and a girl I identify as one of the friends who tailed her in Tatum’s hospital room, I recognize three other faces.
All of them have pictures hanging in the new community center.
Five girls, all of them the new bright stars of Optimal’s youth scholarships, hand-selected by the vice principal of Barrens High School.
Chapter Forty
Lilian McMann looks surprised to see me, though I called to let her know I was coming. Or maybe she’s just surprised by how bad I look. Catching sight of myself in the mirror mounted behind the reception desk, I get a sudden thrill of the unfamiliar: a girl with hollow eyes, blue-tinged skin. A stranger who bears only a passing resemblance to the reflection I remember.
It probably doesn’t help that I’m still wearing a pair of paint-splattered jeans and my dad’s work vest.
“Come in,” she says. “Can I get you anything? A water? Tea?”
I accept a water. I’m still a little buzzy from the beer, and I need to clear my head, need to focus. As soon as she sits down again, I get right to the point. “I’d like to talk to your daughter about what happened to her before you left IDEM,” I say, and she freezes with her water bottle halfway to her mouth. “I need to ask her about the messages she received, and about whether she knows of anyone else—any other girls—who were targeted.”
She lowers her water without drinking. For a moment she sits there in silence, and I’m worried she’ll say no. But she simply says, “You believe me, then? You think she was targeted deliberately?”
“I think Optimal has been using girls. I think they’ve been using them for entertainment. For bribes. They’ve been trading pictures, for sure. But I’ve heard rumors of parties, too, that some of the girls attended as part of the scholarship program.” I can’t think about what might have happened to them when the camera lens was turned away. “That’s how Optimal got so many people to protect them. It wasn’t just money. It was girls. Everyone is implicated. Not bribery.” I swallow. “Blackmail.”
For a long time, Lilian sits in silence, gripping her water tightly. And now, in the silence, I can hear my heart beating. I’m worried she won’t believe me.
“How?” she asks finally.
“I think Misha Jennings, the vice principal, got the idea from her friend Kaycee Mitchell, ten years ago,” I say. “It was a game she and her friends played when they were in high school—a very sick game they invented. They preyed on younger girls, underclassmen, people who wanted to belong. Invited them to parties, got them drunk, convinced them to pose. Then they ransomed the photos back, or threatened to release them.”
I can hardly stand to look at Lilian. Her face is cold and tight and furious, and I can’t help but feel she’s blaming me—for bringing the news, for failing to stop it. “But the photos were never returned. I understand that it might sound crazy, but I think that through Kaycee’s father, they found a revenue stream and exploited it. Some Optimal execs were hunting around for young girls.”