“So I’ve been told,” I said.
“Sarcasm doesn’t count,” Ethan whispered.
“Shut it, Windy.”
“I’ll leave you folks alone for a bit to visit,” Judy said. She gave us a shared be-nice-to-her-or-you’ll-answer- to-me glare before leaving.
“What can I do for you young people?” Thelma asked. “I’m sure I don’t know you. Do I?”
“No, ma’am, we’ve never met,” Ethan said. He introduced us all again, this time using our first names, then sat down next to her. “We just wanted to chat a little, if that’s all right.”
“Don’t mind chatting, son, but my mind isn’t what it used to be.”
“We can take our time.”
“Oh, dear.” She stroked the tips of her gnarled fingers along the bandage covering Ethan’s left hand. “You went and hurt yourself, son.”
“It’s just a sprain. It’ll heal. Ma’am, up until ten years ago, you helped run the Joyful Song Orphanage here in Buffalo, didn’t you?”
Her eyes lit up, and her smile revealed quite a few missing teeth. “Oh, dear, yes, I did. All of those bright souls. I miss my kids so dearly. No one comes to visit me much.” She gave us each a suspicious look. “Say, weren’t none of you my kids?”
“No, we weren’t. I’m curious about one of the girls who lived at your orphanage, and I was hoping you’d remember her.”
“I’ll do my very best, son.”
Ethan showed Thelma the photo of the little girl on his tablet. “Do you remember her, Ms. Swenson?”
“Oh, you’re sweet, but you call me Thelma.” She squinted at the photo, and then a crumpling sadness sent her leaning back against her bench. “Oh, my, yes, I remember poor little Bethany. One of the few we lost. So tragic, losing that girl. Poisonous spider bite, they said at the hospital. Nothing could be done.”
“They said at the hospital?” I repeated.
“Yes, it’s what they said. I found little Bethany outside, convulsing on the ground. I scooped her up and drove her straight to the hospital myself. Thought she was having a seizure, even though it wasn’t in her medical history. I gave her to the doctors.” Her eyes glistened. “Never did see her again.”
“They didn’t let you see her after she died?” Ethan asked.
“No, and I raised holy hell about it, too, but I was shooed off. The state took care of her body, I suppose. So sad, to be treated like that.”
“Did you ever see a spider bite on her body?”
Thelma pressed her lips together while she thought, making the mass of wrinkles around them fall in together like a crater. “Not that I recall, but I was real panicked that day. I didn’t think to look.”
Next to me, Thatcher shifted his weight from one foot to the other, anger vibrating off him like a drumbeat. I could guess what he was so wound up about. Someone had probably sneaked into the orphanage and drugged Bethany into a seizure, and then whisked her right out of the hospital without anyone being the wiser. Children being treated like commodities to be acquired—it made me fucking sick.
“We fumigated the whole backyard for spiders right after,” Thelma continued. “No one else ever got bit, thank the Lord.”
“Thelma,” Ethan said, “do you know who Bethany’s parents were?”
“Not her mother, no. Her father gave her up to us the year before. Said he had no money, no home, no way to care for a child. All he’d say is her mother wasn’t around. The poor fellow was so scared.”
“Do you remember his name?”
She tapped her chin with one finger. “A funny name, if I recall. Two animals.”
I glanced at Ethan, wondering now if the old lady’s mind was starting to slip. Ethan ignored me and put a comforting hand on Thelma’s shoulder. “Take your time,” he said.
“A young lad, so skittish—oh, yes, Lionel. His name was Lionel Crow.”
Ethan typed that into his tablet, probably sending it straight to Marco. Bethany’s birth information was sealed, so score one for the dotty old lady.
A cool hand wrapped around mine, and I froze, everything going taut, my heart rate kicking up a few notches. I tried not to rip my hand away from Thelma’s firm grip, annoyed by the unexpected touch, and intrigued by the kindness in her eyes. She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite figure out.
“You lost your parents when you were young, too, honey,” Thelma said. Not a question, either. How the hell did she know that?
Goose bumps prickled across the back of my neck, and I shocked the shit out of myself by actually indulging her, instead of telling her to mind her own business. “I was almost nine when the Rangers adopted me,” I said.
She nodded slowly, gave my hand a gentle squeeze, then let go. “Sometimes adoption is a blessing.”
My stomach churned. “Yeah.” The look I shot Ethan was full of
“Just one last question, Thelma,” Ethan said. “Did Bethany ever have visitors at the orphanage? Or anyone who came asking about her?”
Thelma didn’t reply. Her gaze had gone distant, and she stared out at the garden like she’d never seen it before. We’d lost our audience to the thrill of petunias and rosebushes. We tried to say good-bye, but she didn’t seem to notice.
On the way back to the car, Ethan called HQ to report on our interview. Thatcher and I walked side by side, a matching pair of thunderclouds hovering over our heads. He was probably pissed about what amounted to the forceful kidnapping of a four-year-old. I was pissed at Thelma for poking into my personal life with her empathy and kind eyes. I didn’t like thinking about that part of my life, and my parents were no great loss to the human race. None of the other people from the compound I was raised in were, either.
Despite his personal anger, Thatcher still managed to look everywhere at once, taking in everything, from the walls of the facility to the landscaping on the edge of the parking lot. For fifteen years, he’d had nothing but the ruined ghost town of Manhattan to look at. His slice of nature had been contained within the borders of Central Park and a few other smaller parks around the island. Wide-open spaces with no skyscrapers or walls around them had to be a novelty.
By the time we reached the car, Marco had information on Lionel Crow, and Ethan put us on speaker so we could all huddle around and listen.
“Much of his history has been deleted,” Marco said, and the opening volley didn’t surprise any of us. “He is not Meta, as far as my research shows, and his date of death is two days before Bethany died. He was twenty- two, and heavily into alcohol and drugs, which may explain why he gave his daughter up for adoption.”
“Or he was hiding her from her mother,” I said. Thatcher glared at me. “What?”
“What?” Marco said.
“Not you, pal. How’d Crow die?”
“He drove while intoxicated and crashed into a tree at eighty miles an hour.”
“Ouch.”
“Indeed.”
“Was he associated with any known Metas?” Ethan asked.
“Yes,” Marco replied. “In fact, Crow attended high school with and was known to be attached to Alice Stiles.”
Alice Stiles—once also known as Mayhem.
Six
Ethan’s face pinched. He couldn’t hide the fact that at the name Alice Stiles, his mind had just gone right back to our final day in Central Park. We’d been running past several bronze statues when Mayhem started
