The Devil's Alphabet (36 page)

“Yeah, hon?”

She was silent for a long time.

“Are you crying, Rainy?”

She sighed. “No. I have trouble crying.”

“Me too.”

“I sure want to, though.”

Another long moment passed, and then she said, “My mom did some bad things.”

Rainy couldn’t use the A-word more than once, it seemed.

“I know it’s hard to understand,” Pax said. “Some things aren’t black and white. Your mom wasn’t against children—she
wasn’t against you. She just believed that a woman has a right to choose when—”

“She killed her baby, Paxton. My little sister.”

“Oh, hon,” he said sadly. Rainy was the stronger of the two sisters, but this had obviously been eating at her, too. “Your mom wasn’t a bad person. It’s just that some people believe that a fetus isn’t …” Isn’t what? He wasn’t prepared to have this conversation. “Maybe when you’re older you’ll understand.”

“She talked about giving all the girls pills. She said they ought to put it in the water.”

“She didn’t mean that.”

“Mom didn’t say anything she didn’t mean. Everyone knew that.”

“Okay, you may be right on that one.” He put a hand through the rails and squeezed her calf. “But those girls at the Co-op, they’re getting pregnant without
having
a choice. Your mom wanted to protect them.”

“No, she wanted
her
choice. The white-scarf girls
want
their babies, Paxton.”

“But they’re just girls. They’re not old enough to make that decision. And when they do get pregnant, of course they want to keep the babies. It’s hormones, it’s—”

“It’s not just hormones!”

“Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. But someday you’ll understand that even good people can do things that seem wrong. Bad things. Sometimes they have to.”

“She was going to
keep
doing them, Paxton. She was going to keep killing the children. Mom and the reverend.”

“Rainy, no. I don’t know what you heard, or thought you heard—”

“I can prove it.” She started to climb out of the bed. “It’s in my backpack.”

“Hold on, what’s in your backpack?”

“Just get it.”

He went out of the room, found the big nylon bag in the kitchen, and brought it back to the room.

Rainy searched through it for a few moments, unzipping pockets, then said, “Here.” She pressed something into his hand. “Reverend Hooke gave these to my mom.”

It was a pill bottle. It was too dark to make out the label. “What is this, Rainy?”

“Mifeprex is what it says on the label,” the girl said. “Mom called it something with a number. It’s an abortion pill.”

He blinked. “RU-486?”

“That’s it.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. After a moment Rainy said, “I heard Mom talking to Hooke on the phone about it. She asked the reverend for them.”

“Maybe you misunderstood what—”

“I’m not stupid, Paxton.”

“But who were they for?” He still didn’t believe that she’d heard correctly. “One of the white-scarf girls?” Or Jo, he thought, though he didn’t say that aloud.

After a moment of silence Rainy said, “I didn’t hear who it was for.”

“Okay, when was this? How long ago?”

“Paxton, it was the night she died.”

“What?”

“She called the reverend after we went to bed that night.”

Pax pressed his forehead against the wooden frame. “Did you tell anyone this?” he asked. “The police, or Deke?”

“We were too scared. If Mom and the reverend were doing this, then who knows—”

“Jesus, Rainy!” He kept his volume down for Sandra’s sake, but his anger was clear. “You should have told someone.”

He immediately regretted yelling at her. Of course they’d been afraid. What trusted authority figure would turn out to be the next monster?
Baby-killer
. The most depraved criminal a beta girl could imagine. No wonder the only people the twins trusted were each other. And maybe—now—Pax.

“Don’t worry,” Pax said. “I promise to take care of everything. In the morning I’ll … well, we’ll think of something.” He found her face in the dark and kissed her on the smooth top of her head. “The point is, you’re not alone in this anymore. We’re a team, right? A club.”

Pax had belonged to only one club in his life. As the only remaining member, he granted himself the power to silently induct them on the spot—they’d already met the organization’s membership requirements.

He closed the bedroom door, thinking, Welcome to the Switchcreek Orphan Society, girls.

He sat in the book-lined living room with the computer open on his lap, its screen washing his face with cold light. He thought of unwanted pregnancies and chemical abortions, secret passwords and suicide notes, corruption and embezzlement and blackmail. Deke had said Jo had figured out what Rhonda was doing. The proof might be right under his fingertips. He pecked at the keyboard, typing random words into the password box, watching the machine instantly reject each one.

The vintage sat heavy in his pocket like a tiny bomb.

Instead he picked up the bottle Rainy had given him. The label was muddy and the ink smudged, but he’d been able to decipher the important details: the patient was Elsa Hooke; the prescribing doctor was Dr. Fraelich, Marla; and the three tablets were for something called “Mifeprex (Mifepristone)”—neither of which he’d ever heard of. The tablets came in large 200-milligram doses, and all three were still in the bottle. The prescription had expired more than six months ago.

Jo had known that the reverend had the pills and hadn’t used them. He thought of Jo sitting in this room when she realized that her body had betrayed her again, that it had once again manufactured a fertilized egg like a tumor—unwanted, unearned, and unasked-for. The idea of three such invasions in a dozen years horrified him.

He put the medicine bottle into his pocket—and look, here was the vial of vintage.

He held the tube in his hand, turning it. He decided to empty the vial into the toilet. Later he resolved to take one sip and then throw the rest away. Sometime after that he committed to a new life: In the morning he’d return to his house, empty the freezer, and call his father to tell him he’d never be able to visit in person again.

Then, as morning approached, he thought, One last drink. A toast to my new life.

He removed the cap and kissed the lip of the vial, small mouth to his larger one. He tipped the tube higher and held it until he could no longer feel the thick drops on his tongue.

Even after it was empty he couldn’t let it go. He sat on the couch for a long time, turning the empty thing in one hand while he typed nonsense words and strings of numbers and every Bowie lyric he could think of.

The wind picked up, setting the back door to knock against the frame like a cranky child. Finally he set aside the laptop and walked to the kitchen. He started to close the door but instead opened it wider. The cold breeze felt good against his face. It was 6:00 a.m., still an hour before dawn, but the blanket of clouds had begun to thin. The huge tree, still bulky with leaves, held back a charcoal gray sky.

He sensed someone behind him and turned. She leaned in the kitchen doorway, her arms folded across her chest. She was dressed for warmer weather: a white wife-beater T-shirt, khaki shorts, bare feet. Her skin shone, a glaze of dark raspberry.

“Hey, Jo,” he said.

She smiled, turned, and walked into the living room. She looked at the laptop.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been trying to violate your privacy. Haven’t had much luck, though.”

She tilted her head and smiled.

He said, “So what’s the password, Jo?”

And then he knew. As surely as if she’d spoken it aloud.

He sat down and put the computer on his knees. He was such an idiot. There was only one possible password. And if it didn’t open the laptop he’d chuck the thing out the window.

He typed three letters—SOS—and tapped return.

The password dialog box blinked away, and a screen full of icons replaced it.

“Switchcreek Orphan Society,” he said. Jo pursed her lips, silently laughing.

He opened a folder on the hard drive just to see if he could. “You care to tell me where you left your suicide note?”

She shook her head. He didn’t know whether that meant she hadn’t left one or didn’t want him to read it.

“I can look at this later,” he said. “Right now I want to—”

He noticed a folder on the desktop named “RM” and forgot what he was going to say. He clicked on it and saw a long list of word processor documents, spreadsheets, scanned images, as well as a dozen subfolders. The names “Rhonda” and “Mapes” and “RM” were on most of them. He clicked on a folder at random—Tema2007—then opened an image named MedFund2007Page01.tiff. It was a scan of a complicated form from the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency—some kind of payment for medical services. Dr. Fraelich’s name was near the top, and he wasn’t surprised to see Rhonda’s name right after it. The dollar amount was for over a million dollars—$1,100,022.00 to be exact. And there were a dozen more forms just in this one folder.

If he was going to understand what the form meant he’d have to go through all these documents, look for any notes from Jo herself. But he was pretty sure it wouldn’t paint Rhonda in a positive light.

He shook his head, amazed. “How much did you have on her, Jo?” He looked up and she was walking away from him, toward the back door. He set aside the laptop and hurried after her.

She walked out into the backyard. Her hand trailed across the trunk of the huge oak, but she didn’t glance up. He almost caught up to her as she entered the trees at the edge of the yard.

The faint light from the sky vanished. She was only a few feet ahead of him, but he could barely see her pale T-shirt against her dark shoulders. They went uphill, Jo moving quickly and noiselessly, Pax stumbling over roots and rocks, cursing, jogging to catch up with his hands held out in front of him to warn him of tree trunks.

After ten, fifteen minutes they stepped out into a clearing like a basin of moonlight.

Jo turned to look at him. Her eyes gleamed. Her shirt seemed to glow.

He looked around. The path continued on the other side of the clearing, heading back down into the valley, toward the Whitmer farm and the Co-op.

At the high edge of the clearing was a makeshift bench made from three logs. Jo sat down and held out a hand. He sat next to her and she warmed his hand in hers. They stared out at the silvery grass, the dark woods. He knew she was a figment of his imagination, a chemical dream like all the other vintage-prompted hallucinations. He didn’t care.

“I’m sorry, Jo,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

She said nothing. That was all right. The heat of her skin against his was enough.

Above them the gray sky took on indigo hues. Color seeped into the air, painted the grass with faint greens and yellows, rusted the leaves at the edge of the clearing.

Jo looked at him, then looked back at the bushes behind her. He followed her gaze but didn’t see anything. He stood, stared up the slope into the trees. They were still a half hour’s hike from the top of Mount Clyburn.

“I don’t know what you want me to see,” he said to her. He moved behind the bench, still peering into the woods, and his foot came down on something round and hard.

He reached down into the long grass and picked up a metal flashlight streaked with mud. Jo’s flashlight, he decided. He clicked the button, and the light snapped on. After months in the woods, the batteries were still good.

She looked up at him over her shoulder, her gaze steady.
She’d come here that night, he realized. She’d left the house after the girls were in bed, then made her way up to this place, following the flashlight. She’d sat on this bench, waiting.

And this is where she died.

He clicked off the light and came around to the front of the bench and kneeled in front of her, instantly wetting his knees.

“Who was here, Jo? Who did you meet? Was it the reverend?”

She gazed down at him with oil-black eyes. Then she smiled—a very un-beta smile that summoned the girl she’d been—and then rapped her knuckles against his forehead: tock, tock. Figure it out, knucklehead.

He stood up, looked back the way they’d come, then at the path that led down to the farm, the Co-op. This clearing was the halfway point. He started down the slope, then realized that Jo wasn’t following.

He looked back. She sat on the bench, her eyes on him. She was going no farther.

He lifted a hand. He knew that she wasn’t really there, but he was nevertheless reluctant to leave her behind. Yet again.

She nodded toward the woods behind him. Finally he turned and started down.

“M
AYOR?” ESTHER SAID.
“A couple of them stormtroopers to see you.” The charlie woman looked nervous. Until a few days ago she’d been just the elementary school’s cook, and then Rhonda had promoted her to administrative assistant to the mayor. Mostly that meant answering the phones.

“Just a second, Esther,” Rhonda said. She loaded another ream of paper into the photocopier and slammed the door. Full circle, she thought. Here it was the crack o’ dawn and she was working the copy machine like she’d never stopped being church secretary. Harlan never used to write his sermons until the last minute—couldn’t even tell her the scripture he’d be using until Saturday night—so she used to have to come in early on Sundays to type up the programs and run them off.

Rhonda had commandeered the elementary school for her quarantine headquarters because it had the most phones, computers, and photocopiers—and because nobody was using it. School had been canceled because almost all the teachers lived outside of Switchcreek. She’d have to do something about that, eventually. Idle children equaled insane parents.

Rhonda picked up one of the finished copies and turned to Doctor Fraelich, who was tapping at a computer. “You’re sure Dr. Preisswerk got this to the newspaper?” Rhonda asked.

“Eric met with them yesterday—it’s definitely going out this morning.” The doctor looked haggard from lack of sleep. Well, join the club, Rhonda thought.