Come Little Children (26 page)

“Excuse me?”

“You know”—he flickered a lazy eyelid—“check in on your friends and see how they’re feeling. Sooner you start, the better too.”

“Doing what, exactly?”

“Asking questions. Checking temperatures. Worming a finger up their ass cheeks. Hell, I don’t know what you do, just do it soon.”

Camilla was completely lost and her face must have shown it.

“Je
sus
. Why’d I ask the cute one first? Fetch another freak, will ya?”

“They’re not—” She was a split second away from shouting “freaks!” when she glimpsed something over Mick’s shoulder that made her stop. It was the white funeral van, visible through the parlor’s window, and it was blazing between the front gates and up the yard at top speed.

Not now
, she thought, biting her lip.
I need more time to figure out what’s going on
.

Without another word, Camilla pivoted and rushed out of the parlor, dropping her deportment with Mick midconversation. She ran past the reception desk in the rotunda and out the front corridor, opening the entranceway just as Peter came bounding up the porch steps.

“Camilla! What’s going on? We saw the police car and—”

“Everything’s fine,” she said, stepping out of the funeral home and pulling the door closed behind her. An icy blast of wind ruffled her skirt and sent a frigid prickle up her thighs. “Mick slithered by to ask about the Corys. He’s just leaving.”

“The Corys?”

“Their daughters. Curly hair, blonde—”

“C’mon”—he touched her bare arms—“get back inside. You’re not even wearing a coat.”

Camilla was planted to the spot. She couldn’t explain to herself why, exactly, she had rushed to stop Peter from entering the house, other than to chalk it up to a gut feeling.
I need more details before anyone talks to anybody
. Like her college lab partner, Vickie, used to say:
If you’ve got a pot of lies boiling on the stove, the last thing you need is for someone to walk by and start sniffing around for rotten ingredients
.

Suddenly there was a slam of a door and Lucas was barreling up from the van, which was now parked at the front of the driveway. Peter must have hopped out while it had still been moving.

“Mick the Prick?”

Peter nodded over his shoulder. As Lucas sloshed through the snow and up the veranda, Camilla saw that Brutus was still clambering out of the funeral van in the background, a mile behind both his nephews.

She put both hands up defensively. “I told you, it’s nothing to do with us. He’s just leaving.”

Lucas hopped up the final step and landed beside Peter, sending a thin layer of snowflakes scattering around his boots. “It’s
always
something to do with us,” he sniffed.

“No. It’s the Cory girls,” Camilla reiterated. “They’re missing. They disappeared sometime last night or this morning.”

Peter and Lucas shared a concerned look.

“How long have they been gone?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe twelve, fifteen hours.”

“What else did he say?”

“Nothing really.” She hesitated.
Why are they staring at me like that?
“He wondered if we saw anything strange at the party yesterday. I told him no.”

“That’s it?” Lucas pressed.

She nodded. That wasn’t
entirely
it, but that was the gist of it.
Figure out little bits at a time. Keep the heat down; don’t let the pot boil over
.

Peter’s stance relaxed a little, like a soldier easing off a salute. “They must have a lead, then,” he said. “Or a pretty good idea of where to look.”

Camilla swallowed a lump in her throat. She specifically remembered Mick saying that the station had
no suspects, no nothin’
.

“I still don’t like the smell of greaseball around here,” Lucas grumbled. “I better have a talk with him.”

“No,” Camilla said with surprising volume. “We—we don’t need to start a fight.”

“You’re right. We need to end one.”

“Stop.” Peter put a hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “If she says he’s not here about the others, then please, let it go.”

“Others?” Camilla frowned. “What others?”

“The families we’ve helped.” It was so cold that Peter’s teeth started chattering. “When serious sh-shit like this happens—missing people, suspicious fires, whatever—the cops usually come here first. They want us to check on the kids we’ve brought back to make sure nothing’s g-gone wrong.”

The pieces clicked with a crisp mental
snap!

Mick’s cryptic wording made total sense now.
“Civic duties” is slang for “check to see that your Frankenstein’s monsters aren’t murdering the villagers.”
The gears in Camilla’s mind were cranking like the cogs of the world’s biggest clock tower.

“You said he was asking about the party, right?” Peter clarified. “Just the party?”

Camilla looked at Peter first, then Lucas, then back to Peter.
Your gut was right
, she thought.
Don’t let them in. You can handle it—you have to handle it, for Abby’s sake—just get them out of here, quick
.

“Yes. That’s all.”

“What’s the verdict!” Brutus shouted. He was still down at the van. “Do we have a problem, or can we get back to work? My shadow’s freezing to the sidewalk here.”

Lucas narrowed his gaze until his eyelids were nothing but tiny slits. Camilla could almost see the words
something’s not right
scrawled across his corneas.

“C’mon”—Peter put a hand on his brother’s shoulder—“let’s skip the Prick today.”

“Well!” Brutus shouted again. “Problems?”

“Just a rat in the house,” Peter hollered. “We’ll feel better after it scurries away.”

Lucas gulped. After a second he nodded complacently and the two brothers started down the porch.

Camilla shivered as another breeze blew by, sinking into her pores as deep as the knives that were twisting into her stomach from having to tell lie on top of lie on top of lie. She slipped into the house again and peeked through the window beside the door, watching as the van roared back to life and dug eagerly into four-wheel drive on its way to the warm garage.

Back in the south parlor, Mick had his nose pressed against a row of encyclopedias. One of his long, uncut fingernails tapped the spine of the second volume—a golden
B
embossed on the side—and he grinned, most likely picturing the section on breasts or buttocks or bisexuals. “Good letter, B,” he mumbled before taking his hand away and turning back to the room.

“Oh.” Mick sucked in a quick breath. “Howdy, stranger. How long have you been here?”

Across the parlor Abigail was sitting squarely on a plush purple chair that was big enough to swallow her in its enormous
cushions. Her ivory tights seesawed off the edge of her seat—back and forth, back and forth—as she flipped through a tattered version of Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol: 1982 Pop-up Edition
. The book was warped from being kept too close to a window or crammed into different spaces over the years, but Abigail cradled the hardcover carefully on her lap and turned each spread with increasing fascination: Jacob Marley’s chains snaked across the paper, then Christmas Past flew up from the spine, then the Cratchits’ appeared at their dinner table.

“You’re Peter and Camilla’s, aren’t you?” Mick asked.

Abigail didn’t respond. She didn’t even look up; she simply flipped through her picture book, entranced, as Ebenezer’s specters reached off their cardstock pages and soared toward her.

“Abigail? Is that it?”

Still nothing.

“Well, Abigail, I’ve got a…a problem I could use some help with, OK? You know the Cory twins, right?”

Abigail’s hands kept turning pages. Charles Dickens had her attention, not Mick “The Prick” Logan.

Mick crossed his arms. “Remember now, I’m law enforcement. You know what that means? That means you’ve gotta tell me the truth, all right, or you and your mommy could get in some pretty big trouble. You don’t want to be in trouble, do you?”

Silence.

“All I need to know is if the Cory girls said something to you yesterday. Maybe something they didn’t want their mom and dad to hear, OK? How about it? Anything strange?”

Abigail flipped another page and then looked straight up. She stared across the room and shook her head, once to the left,
once to the right, and then back to center before looking down again.

“You’re sure? Abigail?”

From outside the room, Camilla’s flats could be heard pattering on their way to the parlor. Mick turned around in time to see her reappear in the doorway. “Oh good,” he said. “Maybe you can get some answers out of her.”

“Out of who…?” Camilla said before spotting Abigail on the chair. Her muscles tensed.
How long have they been talking?
But she kept her posture relaxed and tried crossing the room as casually as possible. When she got to Abigail, she ran her fingers through her daughter’s hair.

“She’s a tight-lipped kid,” Mick grunted, “just like the rest of you frea—family.”

“Good girl.” Camilla patted Abigail on the head. She leaned over and whispered, “Don’t talk to strangers, especially ones with moustaches like that.”

Mick frowned when the seven-year-old cracked a smile and giggled at whatever her mom had said.

“All right,” he announced, puffing his chest. “No more games, girls. Before I leave I need to know all the Cory details you’re aware of. Anything at all. Were they going somewhere last night? This morning? What about strangers? Did you see anyone you didn’t recognize at the party?”

Abigail looked at her mom for approval to speak, and for a split second Camilla thought about saying no. She wanted to scoop her up and take her away from the interrogation, but that would have seemed even more suspicious, so she pursed her lips and nodded back.

Abigail looked directly at Officer Logan. “No.”

“No?”

“No,” she repeated. She patted Camilla’s leg and whispered, “Can I go read somewhere else now? He’s really irritating.”

“Don’t worry.” Mick sneered. “I’m out of here.” He cinched his coat’s zipper up to his greasy neck hairs and headed for the parlor door. “Will you tell your family what I said? About their duties?”

“Of course,” Camilla answered. But as she watched him leave the house and get into his cruiser, she knew she had no intention of telling the others. Not yet. Even though she understood as little as Mick—or anyone else on the police force—about the situation he was referring to, she had to keep it to herself.
Call it a gut feeling that these are
my
civic duties and no one else’s
.

All it was, really, was due diligence. She had only one reservation—one question—that stood out as she adjusted her gaze in the parlor window to focus on the translucent reflection of Abigail curled up in the plush chair, reading her pop-up book under the buttery lamplight.

If something’s wrong with one of the children
, she thought,
how will I know it when I see it?

20

1989

S
ince December had come along and wrapped the Yukon in an icy straitjacket, the town’s winter-related deaths were in full swing. And what the
Midnight Sun
’s growing list of obituaries referred to as bouts of pneumonia, unfortunate slips on the ice, and tragic highway accidents, the Vincents’ ledgers credited only as revenue. Lots and lots of revenue.

The continuous stream of work meant Camilla didn’t have time to think about (let alone
act
upon) what Mick had asked her to do. It had been three days since he came by and requested she make sure that the children the Vincents had brought back to life weren’t involved in the disappearance of the Cory sisters, but it was January now and there were no signs of work slowing down. She would have to do it at night when the rest of the family was busy. Thankfully—if all went well—it wouldn’t take too long; only three children had been resurrected in the time that she had worked there (including Todd, the teenager she had accidentally tripped over the catwalk at the
Midnight Sun
), and finding their records, including names, addresses, and phone numbers, had been easy. Now was the difficult part: showing
up on the revenants’ doorsteps with no preparation, no backup plan, and no clue what to look for.

The right timing arrived Wednesday night.

Stepping into the rotunda, Camilla’s fuzzy wool socks barely crackled the floorboards. She was already wearing her Winchester fleece coat with three sweaters layered underneath, and a billowing hood-and-neck-warmer combination that resembled a squire’s liripipe. She could hear chatting and laughter coming from the north parlor, and as she glided over the hardwood, she couldn’t help but peek inside to snag a glimpse of what she was missing out on.

The Vincents were scattered around the room and surrounded by hand-carved board games and bowls of snacks, both sweet and salty. By the look of the scoreboard, Lucas and Jasper were on their third round of backgammon, while Moira, Laura, and Abigail sat around a circle completing a five-hundred-piece puzzle and Brutus reclined in the background, polishing off his third Guinness according to the collection of empties resting near his feet. Classical music wafted from invisible speakers hidden around the room, and even though the fireplace was tucked around the corner from the rotunda, the flames could be seen twisting and curling in the reflection of the opposite window.

From that brief tableau, a feeling of warmth tingled through Camilla’s nervous system. The Vincent manor—which to most people was nothing but cold walls concealing death and secrets—had moments when life seemed perfectly normal. Idyllic, almost. Dinners, Christmases, game nights. All the things she didn’t have when she was growing up in a godforsaken trailer park with an alcoholic father and a fucked-up mom. She watched Abigail slide a puzzle piece around the table and got a sudden urge to rip off her jacket and cuddle up with her
daughter side-by-side in the warmth of the firelight. But she knew she couldn’t—not tonight.

Tonight I have civic duties to attend to
.

Camilla walked off through the entrance hall. Just as she reached for the handle, the door swung open and Peter came bursting in from the veranda.