Jeffrey’s mother reportedly told the children to stop playing inside and get outside into the sunshine. With Harry Potter still on their minds, Jeffrey and two friends were running around his house with cap guns for the Muggles and wands for the wizards. At 1:26 p.m., a white police officer name Roy Carman pulled up to their house rapidly, removed a Glock 17 nine-millimeter pistol, and shot Jeffrey twice in the chest and once in the head. The other two children, Peter Macintyre and Buddy Sandler, were uninjured. Peter ran away. Buddy stood and screamed for twenty minutes no matter what the second officer tried. News reports following the case explained that both boys were in psychological counseling and suffering from “severe trauma.” Their parents all said both children now wet their beds, were afraid to go outside, could no longer sleep alone, were terrified of death and authority, and were no longer able to focus at school.
Peter and Buddy were white. Jeffrey was black. He is survived by his parents and two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Marjorie, and they too are broken.
This was two months ago, in June. It was two weeks ago that Marcus disappeared after writing his cryptic letter, and two weeks ago that Lydia died. That is also, Sigrid learns, when the grand jury concluded there were no grounds for Roy Carman to stand trial for Jeffrey’s death.
The final folder is IDEAS. There is a single text file called “The Future.” She opens it and finds it empty.
American Horror
After an hour with the material Sigrid sensed she was losing her focus and capacity to reason so decided to take a short nap.
Now, on waking, she is surrounded by a pitch darkness. The disco beats from the living room have become muffled TV voices punctuated by atmospheric music. She raises her left arm into a defensive position to see her wristwatch, but the toxic glow from the hands refuses to arrange them into readable lines and she gives up, deciding it doesn’t much matter how long it’s been anyway.
Usually, after a power nap, Sigrid experiences a moment of grogginess that makes way for strength and mental acuity.
This time is not like the other times.
The skin on her face feels as though it has slid off her skull and collected into pink and tacky puddles around the pillow she has fallen through on her way to China. No hangover, no regret, no bitter memory has left her this exhausted. No soldier she has ever listened to over the years; no parent of triplets; no caveman awakened from a block of ice has ever felt this tired.
At the corner of her eye, Sigrid can almost make out a thin line of blue light through the curtains proving that there is, still, a world beyond her headache. A land where there might be perambulating life with motive and will.
Sigrid tries to make a deliberate noise. What emerges from her chest, like a breath from an awakened Egyptian mummy, is a minor groan in the key of B.
She’ll try again in a minute.
She had dreamed of her mother and can’t think of why. Her mother, Astrid, was outside the farmhouse wearing rubber boots with images of Paddington Bear painted on their sides. She was washing the family car with Marcus. They were each using massive sponges dipped into warm and soapy water and splashing them onto the glimmering paint that sparkled a navy blue in the sun. Sigrid must have been about five in the dream and Marcus the same age as Jeffrey Simmons. He was barefoot and his jeans rolled to his knees. After working the side of the car he kneeled by the fender and lathered the chrome around the headlights until they shined as though from an inner happiness only made warmer by the sun. Marcus smiled at his mother and she smiled at him. Astrid’s hair was in a ponytail, tied with a green band. She was slender—more slender than Sigrid would ever become except in her late teens—and her cheekbones were more pronounced. She had a look that others might have considered very beautiful had she been worked on by teams of makeup artists and fashion consultants and colorists. But here, in their village, she was plain and blond and familiar.
Astrid had been scrubbing a fender when she stopped washing and turned still and grave. She looked at Sigrid with a neediness parents do not expose to their children. In a growled whisper she said, “My son. Is he OK?”
Sigrid looked for Marcus by the car and could no longer see him. All trace of him—the bucket, the sponge, the water that had collected into a puddle at his feet—was gone.
“I don’t know, Mommy,” she answered.
That’s when she woke up. She remembers this now and wishes she hadn’t.
The distress it causes her, however, releases a minute drip of adrenaline that permits her to lean over to the bedside table, work her right hand up the tapered base of the lamp, around the harp holder, and find the switch on the socket.
She turns it twice with a click click, hoping the room will come into view, but it doesn’t because her eyelashes have
