Girl One(8)

“I’ve written a lot about the Homestead over the years. It’s not like I’m going to win a Pulitzer, but it caught your mother’s eye.” A spark of defiance when he said this.

“You never interviewed me,” I pointed out.

“Not for lack of trying. I called your house when you were accepted to the University of Chicago and left my info, just in case. In fact,” he said slowly, “maybe that’s where your mother got my number. From your machine.”

I watched him put the pieces together, his expression deflating. The possibility that my mother had reached out to him because of sheer coincidence, and not because she’d loved his work. My mother could do that to you. Pop the bubble of your ego. I could’ve warned him.

“So did you say you’d work with her?” I pressed.

“Of fucking course,” Tom said. “Pardon my French. But after that first conversation, she never called back. I waited every day. I followed up a few times, but she never responded. It was like that call never even happened. Then I saw the fire on the news and … here we are.”

The dark house. The damp rooms that still held a shadow of heat. “Here we are,” I repeated. “Okay. Must’ve been a big disappointment. I mean, my mom says she’ll work with you, then she vanishes on you? Did you ever come by the house? Maybe try a little too hard to get in touch?”

He blinked, his expression passing through wounded surprise and into a stony hurt. “No. Of course not. I wouldn’t do that, I respected her privacy. I’m not a—I wouldn’t do that.”

“All right,” I said, letting my doubt hang there. “If you say so.”

“Hey, I’m only here to help you find your mom,” Tom said. “That’s it. If you don’t want me here, just say so.”

I hesitated. I was surprised by how reluctant I was to see him go; he was my only connection to my mother right now. “You really don’t have any idea why my mother was interested in Fiona?”

“Not a clue. Your mother was careful. She wasn’t going to give me anything until she was good and ready.”

“She’s always been skilled at withholding.” I sighed and pushed my hair off my face. “Whatever it is, it must be big. Because I’ve had a lot of time to sit around this house waiting for you, and … I’m pretty sure this fire wasn’t an accident.”

He lifted his eyebrows, gave a low whistle. “Big claim. How do you figure?”

“My mom was terrified of fire. For obvious reasons, right? She unplugged the lamps and the coffee maker every night before she went to sleep. She never used a space heater or lit a candle. Ever. I know they’ll try to pass this off as an accident, but it wasn’t.”

“I’m sure the police will take it seriously.”

“You want to bet? The local chief of police hasn’t taken anything seriously since we moved here. He’s only equipped for the occasional domestic dispute or—or a cat stuck up a tree. This is way outside of his usual expertise.”

He nodded slowly. “Do you have any enemies around town?”

I laughed, swift and bitter. “Yeah, you could say that.” There’d been graffiti. Kids who’d follow me home yelling names at me. Freak, monster, devil baby, whatever. Someone once smashed a bunch of test tubes in front of our house on Halloween. “But I don’t think this was vandalism,” I said. “There’s no V pattern. The geometry is all off. A fire will extend upwards from the point where it was set”—I sketched this out with my hands, broad sweeps—“but this fire doesn’t have a pattern. It’s like it started everywhere at once.” Uneasy, I remembered that bird with its one singed wing.

“You know your fire patterns.”

“A hobby of mine,” I said, but the joke didn’t have any energy behind it. Surrounded as we were by the pervasive smell of the smoke, the fire of 1977 felt too immediate. That fire had managed to take everything important from me, cutting short Dr. Bellanger’s life, leaving his eight living creations abandoned and bereft. Not to mention snuffing out all the other sisters I could’ve had, hundreds or thousands who would’ve been born by now, instead burned along with Bellanger’s irreplaceable mind.

I dropped onto the bottom step of the staircase and flipped through the notebook pages. Faces and headlines skimming by. Death and scandal, scandal and loss. And those notes that didn’t make any sense. I spotted birds scribbled haphazardly in the margins, and my stomach lurched at the thought of that bird out on the lawn. Tom seemed distracted, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He stood there with his camera clenched in both hands.

“You’re pretty much the only person she’s talked to for the past year, and even you don’t know anything,” I said, but then I trailed off. Through the kitchen window, above the sink full of dirty dishes, I had a view of the street outside my house. Headlights. That car was back, the maroon sedan from earlier, driving by slowly.

“Hold on,” Tom said. “I’m not the only person. Your mother was talking to other people about Fiona.”

“Other journalists, you mean?” I asked, shifting my attention back to him.

He looked at me like he thought I might be kidding. “She was talking to the other Homesteaders.”

I had to take a second, the sedan already half forgotten in the face of this bigger revelation. “No, she wasn’t,” I said automatically, even though it made sense. Why else would she have been compiling that list? “She never would’ve done that. Never.”