Girl One(23)

I exchanged looks with Tom, my head thrumming.

“Margaret didn’t care what kind of damage she caused. I saw what she did to Patricia. She would’ve done the same to me if she’d cared enough to hurt me.” Deb’s gaze had shifted weight. She wasn’t looking at me the way she’d look at a stranger. She was speaking directly to my mother.

“Margaret knew you before Dr. Bellanger?” Tom asked. I was grateful to him—I didn’t trust myself to talk—but I was also irritated, suddenly aware of Tom absorbing all this information right alongside me. “Because my impression was that Dr. Bellanger put out a call for volunteers and you ladies only met each other through him,” Tom continued. “Is that correct?”

Deb didn’t even look at him, keeping her eyes locked on mine. “What I’m saying is that Dr. Bellanger takes the blame, but everything about that place can be traced right back to Margaret Morrow. She made Patricia set aside the land for the Homestead. She recruited the women to the commune. She wrote the letter to Dr. Bellanger. She brought us all together, and then she broke the whole thing apart. I hope she’s down on her knees thanking God for my positivity every night, because there’s a lot I could say that she wouldn’t like. Not one fucking bit.”

Bonnie was leaning forward, riveted, eyes shining, her pearly bra strap slipping down her upper arm.

“Patricia?” I repeated. “The Homestead was on her land?” I tried to picture Patricia Bishop, her small serious face, at least a head shorter than the other women in the group photos. I knew she still lived in Vermont, the only one of the surviving eight to do so, but I hadn’t realized that she had any claim to the Homestead land itself.

“Margaret hurt everybody,” Deb went on. “Not just Patricia. Not just us girls at the Homestead. Bellanger’s real family—Marianne, poor little Junior and Bobby. They were abandoned when she lured Dr. Bellanger over to us. Margaret didn’t give them a single thought. They were just collateral damage to her.”

The chandelier’s lighting looked soft and forgiving from a distance, but now that I was positioned beneath the glare, the lights burned against my skin. “My mother only learned about Bellanger when he called for test subjects.” I clung to the story I knew. The one that had been repeated again and again and again, in everything from a sleazy made-for-TV movie to formal scholarly articles. “He recruited the nine of you. He created the Homestead. My mother didn’t even—she couldn’t have known about him, or about—she would have told me—”

“Are you sure?” Deb said. “Because lying is just what Margaret does. I’m sure she wouldn’t want her own daughter to know about what she really did.”

I breathed deeply, steadying myself, giddy with shock.

“Does this mean that Margaret Morrow was already interested in the idea of virgin birth?” Tom asked.

You’re descended from the guinea pig, not the scientist. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“No, you don’t,” Deb said, voice suddenly tired. “No more from me. I’ve said too much. Get out of here. And don’t even think about sharing any of this. Consider it off the record. Or I’ll have my lawyers on you so fucking quickly that you won’t know what’s happening.”

I opened my eyes, vision starred over for a second. “Did my mother contact you recently?” I asked, grasping for the original reason I’d come here. Nothing about my mother’s past would matter until I could ask her about it directly.

“You’re leaving, or I’m calling the cops—”

“Was she asking about Fiona?” I pressed.

Bonnie stood abruptly. “You need to tell her, Mommy.” Deb and I turned, equally startled. Color rushed to Bonnie’s cheeks, rough red splotches beneath the pastel blush. Wildflowers springing up inside a cultivated garden. “If you were missing and I came to somebody for help, wouldn’t you want them to help me?”

“I wouldn’t be in this situation at all,” Deb said.

“Mommy, there are a lot of things that you don’t say,” Bonnie said. “But there are things that I don’t say either. Things that we both want to stay quiet.”

Deb’s face tightened. She sucked an inhale through her nose.

“Tell her,” Bonnie said.

Whatever passed between the two of them, Deb lost: she broke her gaze, turned back to me. “Margaret has been here,” she said, each word cold and grudging.

“She has?” Instantly, I was focused. “When?”

“A month ago? I didn’t keep track. It’s not a cherished memory, let me say that much. She gave me a goddamn fright, banging on the gates until I let her in. That woman hid away for years, too stuck-up to agree to any media appearances, and then she came here making a scene? No. I wouldn’t stand for it. I wouldn’t be pulled back into her bullshit.”

I tried to imagine this, electrified by the immediacy of it. My mother, right out there, rattling those big imposing gates, refusing to be turned away.

“I let her onto the grounds to keep her from alerting the whole neighborhood, but it was a short visit. She was rambling on and on about Fiona. Resurrecting dead dreams that nobody needs. Your mother is a very sick woman, Josie. When I heard that there’d been a fire? That she’d vanished into the night? I thought…”