Arthur locks the car, and Anvi pulls up her sleeve to activate the flashlight on her Sheath. She can see the rain now, like a series of thin rents through the air. She wishes she’d worn a warmer coat; she keeps thinking that her years in Ithaca have given her an immunity to winter, forgetting that rain can be worse than snow. Snow-cold nips at you, but rain-cold seeps through your skin to the bone.
The driveway is a quagmire; their footsteps squelch through the mud as they walk side by side. Anvi’s light slices through the dark before them.
Their near accident. The intensity of the last week. Walking through the dark together. She dares to ask, “Why isn’t Linda’s last name Niequist?”
“She didn’t want it,” says Arthur.
The mud sucks at Anvi’s foot; she jiggles her boot free. “Really?”
“Her therapist helped her pick, not me, but Niequist was the first name on the list. She didn’t choose it.” He laughs a sad little laugh. “I’ve never felt so rejected in my life—and I’m about to be divorced for the second time.”
They reach the gate. A padlock shines against the rusty bars. Arthur must have had the property secured since Anvi and Linda were here. He taps his Sheath to the lock, then pushes the gate open.
“You don’t know why she picked Russell?” asks Anvi.
“I never asked. I was trying to support her decision.” He wobbles, then steadies, looking down. “Dammit.” His shoe is stuck in a particularly deep patch of mud, his socked foot dangling above it.
“I got it,” says Anvi. She crouches to retrieve the shoe, then hands it back to him.
“Thanks.” He slides it back on, then searches for a drier patch of land.
The house is a dim outline ahead. Now that they’re here, Anvi has a hard time imagining they might find Linda. The cold, the wet, the rubble—it’s unlivable.
And yet Linda lived here for twelve years, neglected by a mentally ill woman who never should have been left alone. Anvi wonders if Lorelei could even be held responsible for her actions—legally or morally—if she was still around. Where does one draw the line of responsibility when mental illness is involved? When exactly does normal human variation dip across a line into diagnosable disorder? And if Lorelei isn’t responsible for what happened within these walls, who is?
Arthur could have stopped her. The lab tech who gave her the embryos could have called the authorities, or at least said no. People at Lorelei’s now-defunct foundation must have recognized she needed help; any one of them could have stopped her—could have helped her.
But how far back do you go? Do you blame the volunteers who didn’t find Madeline in time? Do you blame Madeline herself—for storming off, for falling, for pulling the shard of wood out of her chest? There’s no need to even stop at Madeline. You could go back forever, finding fault. Anvi shifts her thoughts toward more worthwhile territory: finding a way to make things better moving forward.
To do that, they need to find Linda.
Anvi glances over at Arthur, picking his way through the mud. Linda’s lucky, so many have said. Lucky that he stepped up. Lucky that he is who he is. Just imagine if she’d gone from that awful childhood into the real world without the cushion of wealth.
Coddled, Arthur called his current wife.
“Does Linda have any sort of education?” asks Anvi. She angles her light along the ruts and ridges of the driveway’s curve.
“A GED. I made it a prerequisite for moving back out here.”
“Have you ever thought about having her get a job? Or go to college?”
“I haven’t been able to get her to show interest in anything,” says Arthur. “I’m pretty sure if I didn’t mandate excursions, she’d just sit in that apartment 24/7.” Anvi hears frustration in his voice. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “I’m doing my best. It was going okay until her therapist died. Everything since then has been…hard.”
“What happened to her therapist?”
“She was at Target and some asshole stormed in with a rifle,” says Arthur. “He was hunting his girlfriend, but he got eighteen other people instead.”
Fuck, thinks Anvi. There was a study not long ago that showed the average American was only two degrees removed from knowing someone who was injured in, killed in, or witness to a mass shooting. Anvi is now average. “Was that the one in Connecticut?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
She remembers that shooting. It was memorable for the sick jokes that followed. Target. She kicks a fallen branch out of her way, then it hits her: “She wasn’t the psychologist who saved the man and his baby, was she?”
“She was.”
The woman was everywhere for days—friends, family, and former patients all coming forward to tout her virtues and call for gun-control reform. But the shooter had stolen the gun from a cousin, and the political consensus seemed to be that stricter background checks couldn’t have stopped that. Or maybe that part was another shooting; Anvi isn’t sure. She cringes as she remembers a meme. The psychologist was a large woman, and it was about how overweight people could be heroes too. Trolls usurped it, of course, and turned it into something ugly.
“How old was Linda when it happened?” she asks.
“Fourteen. We couldn’t get her to see anyone else afterward. We couldn’t get her to talk about it at all.” Arthur sighs. “It was awful. When I told her, she attacked me.”
“What?” Anvi pivots toward him, and he flinches away from the light of her Sheath. “Sorry,” she says. “But…what?”
“It’s the only way I can think to put it,” says Arthur. “She was tiny, so I was able to restrain her pretty quickly, but she smashed a mirror with her elbow and cut herself pretty badly.” Anvi’s light is aimed at his thickly mudded shoes. Leather. Expensive. She tries to imagine a teenaged Linda flipping out and slicing her arm open on a shattered mirror. She thinks of Linda’s bloody feet and how Arthur’s shoes used to be flesh. “Claire and I took her in for stitches,” Arthur continues. “When we got back, we were too exhausted to clean up the blood. The next morning our cleaning lady came in and started screaming. She thought we’d all been murdered.”
The house rises up before them, a sodden, abandoned mass of shadows.
“The crazy thing,” says Arthur, “is I probably felt more comfortable with Linda then than I did at any point in the previous year and a half. It was the first time she acted anything like Maddy.”
Anvi shines her Sheath along the landing; the front door is boarded up again. Presumably whomever Arthur had install the lock on the gate took care of this too. “Did Maddy attack you often?”
Arthur chuckles. “No, but she sometimes gave me this look like she wanted to. Normal teenage stuff, I suppose, though—”
Crack.
The sharp sound echoes from the woods, like a firework exploding just out of sight.
Arthur’s hand shoots out, grabbing Anvi by the forearm.
They stand in silence for a long moment. It could have been a snapping branch, Anvi tells herself. It could have been a bear or an elk or any number of natural things. It could be Linda trying to scare them off.
Then Arthur says in a soft voice, “Go back to the car.”
“That was a gunshot.” She meant it as a question, but from his demeanor, she knows. A spasm of superstition runs through her: Is this because they were just talking about a shooting? Of course not, but some strange instinct thinks it must be—that part of being human that seeks cause and effect everywhere, that discards randomness to see a man’s face on the moon or the Virgin Mary in a potato chip.
“It’s probably a hunter,” says Arthur. “They used to trespass along the outskirts of our property all the time. But you should go back to the car, just in case.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to look for Linda.”
“Alone. In the dark. With trespassing hunters skulking around?”
“Anvi, please,” he says. She shakes her head and he adds, “What if the noise scared Nibbler?”
She almost laughs. “That’s low, Arthur.”
Crack.
This time Anvi doesn’t hear it as anything but a gunshot. Her pulse thrums: runrun-runrun.
“Turn off the light,” says Arthur.
Anvi does, knowing that Arthur can’t possibly believe the shots are from hunters. If he did, it would make sense to be as bright and loud as possible.
They stand together in the dark, silently waiting for their eyes to adjust. Anvi thinks of the drugstore where she and Linda stopped: The unfriendly air that was almost certainly because she’s brown. How such an atmosphere can still exist so close to a city as proudly progressive as Seattle. How badly she doesn’t want to run into an armed local in these woods.
Runrun-runrun.
She shouldn’t talk. She should just wait. But nervous energy is coursing through her, and Anvi finds she can’t stay still and quiet both. “When was the last time you were here?” she whispers.
Arthur glances at her, then whispers back, “When I flew out to get Maddy.” The briefest pause, then, flustered, “Linda. When I flew out to get Linda.” Anvi’s heart aches for Arthur and Linda both.
“It must be—”
“Shh.”
Anvi clamps her mouth shut, listening hard. All she can hear is the wind and the rain. Her eyes have adjusted enough that she can distinguish individual trees, and she can see the worry in Arthur’s posture. But there could be a person standing a hundred feet away, and she wouldn’t notice. They could be surrounded, and she wouldn’t notice.
Rustling in the distance. A branch snapping.
Anvi edges closer to Arthur. It’s just an animal, she tells herself. Then she remembers they’re looking for a person. She should want the sounds to be a person—to be Linda. But the gunshots are still echoing through her mind and she desperately wants whatever’s making the sounds to go away.
And then the rustling’s gone. She feels Arthur relax beside her.
“I thought I heard someone,” he says. “But it might have been my imagination.”
Anvi almost tells him it wasn’t, but she’s suddenly no longer certain what she heard. “It’s so hard to be sure in the rain,” she says.
“Is there any way I can convince you to go back to the car?”
She wishes she was back with Nibbler, doors locked, scratching the hard nub of his brow—but she can’t leave Arthur here alone.
“No,” she says. “Let’s check out the back.”