Читать книгу Menagerie - Rachel Vincent - Страница 20

Charity

When Charity Marlow’s phone rang at 12:04 a.m., she knew without even glancing at the caller ID that something was wrong. No one ever called in the middle of the night to say everything was fine.

Ten minutes after she hung up the phone, Charity had dressed, brushed her hair, and brewed a pot of coffee. The deputy who knocked on her door declined a travel cup, so she made him wait while she fixed one for herself because “questioning” sounded like the kind of ordeal that would require coherence on her part.

Coherence was the very least of what Charity Marlow owed her daughter, but it was all she had left to give.

On the way to the sheriff’s station, she sat in the passenger’s seat of the patrol car and sipped quietly from her cup, and not once during the drive across town did she ask why Delilah was in custody. Charity had been both waiting for and dreading that night’s phone call for nearly twenty-five years.

At the station, in a small room equipped with bright lights and cheap chairs, she sat across a small scarred table from Matthew Pennington, who’d held the title of sheriff for the past twelve years in spite of her consistent vote for whoever ran against him. Two armed deputies were stationed at the door, one on each side, and Charity saw no reason to pretend she didn’t understand their presence.

“I suppose you want a blood test,” she said before the sheriff could even open his mouth.

He nodded, but she read irritation in the stiff line of his jaw. Pennington liked to run the show. “We’ve got a phlebotomist from County General waiting for that very thing. Of course, you’d be saving us all a lot of time if you could just tell us what you and your daughter are.”

Charity set her travel cup on the table. “Sheriff, if I weren’t human, I wouldn’t exactly feel inspired to bare my soul to you and your gun-toting hee-haws.” She tossed a glance at the deputies beside the door, both of whom scowled at her. “But I am human, and your lab should be able to confirm that with little more than a microscope. And since you clearly know otherwise about Delilah... Well, I’d be just as interested as you are in what the lab has to say about her blood sample.”

Pennington leaned back and crossed thick arms over the brown button-up shirt stretched tight across his soft chest. “You’re telling me you don’t know what species your own daughter is?”

Charity nodded. “In fact, considering that you have her in custody, I’d guess you know more about her genetic origin than I do.”

“Well, you’d be wrong there.” Frustration deepened the sheriff’s voice even beyond the chain-smoker range. “I have her medical records. The blood test they ran at birth says she’s human.”

Charity nodded again, but made no comment.

“According to her record, she hasn’t had blood drawn since the day she was born.”

“I believe that’s accurate.”

“She’s never been sick?” Pennington leaned forward, arms folded over the table, and Charity winced at the acrid bite of cigarette smoke clinging to his uniform. “Not once in twenty-five years?”

“Every child gets sick at some point, Sheriff. But Delilah never had anything I couldn’t treat myself.”

“Because you’re an RN.”

Charity sat a little straighter in her hard plastic chair. “Actually, I’m a nurse practitioner.”

“That’s right,” the sheriff said, but she saw right through his sudden recollection of her employment history. “You finished your MSN when Delilah was three. Was that so that you could legally treat her yourself?”

“In fact, it was. And as her primary medical caregiver, I found no reason to run further blood tests on a perfectly healthy child.” Charity looked right into the sheriff’s eyes. “But I would be willing to tell you what I do know, if you’ll go first.”

The sheriff’s flustered flush was so bright that one of the deputies stepped forward to see if he was okay. Pennington waved the unspoken question off and glared at the woman seated across the table.

“What we know, Mrs. Marlow, is that your daughter got worked up during a tour of the menagerie this evening and turned into the kind of creature that should have been lookin’ outta one of those cages, instead of looking into ’em. She grabbed a carny by the head and sank her fingers into his skull, and when she finally released him, he turned his livestock prod up as far as it would go and rammed it into his own leg.”

Charity’s bold spirit—a thing of wide repute in Franklin County—faded like a blossom gone dry in the sun. She closed her eyes to hide her thoughts from the sheriff, and the face that flashed behind her eyelids belonged to a woman she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, but would never in her life forget.

“Lilah actually hurt someone?” More than two decades of secrets, lies, and guilt swelled within her as she examined every fear and doubt she’d ever had about the daughter she loved more than anything else in the world. More, even, than the husband whose heart had given out at the age of fifty-seven, beneath the burden of their secret. “I didn’t think she was even capable of violence.”

“Why don’t you tell us what you know?”

Charity crossed her arms over her favorite blue summer sweater and when she leaned back in her chair, a gray-streaked strand of straight brown hair fell over her ear.

“Keeping your secret can’t help her anymore, Mrs. Marlow,” Wayne Atherton said. “We can’t help her either, if we don’t know what she is.”

Unlike Pennington, Atherton truly seemed to want to help, so Charity cleared her throat and took a long sip of her coffee. “Almost twenty-five years ago, my six-week-old daughter disappeared from her crib.”

“You’re telling us that Delilah was kidnapped?” Pennington prompted after a moment of silence, but Charity only shook her head.

“I’m telling you that my daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped. Her middle name was Delilah, so that’s what I called the changeling left in her place.”

For one long moment, neither the sheriff nor his deputy spoke. Charity couldn’t even be sure they were breathing.

“Changeling.” Pennington seemed to be tasting the word, as if he might want to spit it back out. “So, you’re saying the fae took your baby and left a surrogate in its place? There hasn’t been a confirmed surrogate exchange since the reaping.” The sheriff laid both thick hands flat on the table between them. “Mrs. Marlow, are you telling us that your daughter is part of a second wave of attack?”

Atherton slipped quietly out of the room.

“No.” Charity set her coffee down and looked straight into the sheriff’s eyes, so that he couldn’t possibly mistake any part of her bearing or intent. “This is different. I don’t know what those little monsters were, but Delilah isn’t one of them.”

The sheriff crossed his arms above his belly. “How can you be sure? Does she look like Elizabeth?”

“I haven’t seen Elizabeth in twenty-five years, Sheriff, but as infants, they were identical.”

Pennington’s scraggly gray brows rose. “Sounds like a surrogate to me.”

“You’re wrong.” Charity lifted her cup in one unsteady hand and took a sip of the cooling coffee. Then she set the cup down and took a long, deep breath. “Delilah was sent to deliver pain, but not by instilling terror on a national scale like the surrogates. She was left in Elizabeth’s place to punish me. And I got exactly what I asked for.”

“What—”

Charity held up one hand and spoke over the sheriff. “Elizabeth was a beautiful child, but she had an ugly temper. She cried for days and nights on end. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I couldn’t think straight. One day, when she was six weeks old, I prayed that the Lord would take my brand-new baby girl—the center of my existence—and send me a quieter, happier child in her place.”

She pulled a tissue from the purse in her lap and dabbed at first one eye, then the other. “Now, it may be that a lot of women in my position do the same thing, and nothing comes of it. But I...” She leaned forward, and fresh tears fell from her eyes. “Well, Sheriff, I said my prayer out loud. And it wasn’t the Lord who heard me.”

“Who heard you?” the remaining deputy whispered.

Charity twisted in her chair to give him a censuring glance. “Believe it or not, Deputy, no one claimed credit for replacing my daughter with a more pleasant doppelgänger.” She turned back to the sheriff. “So I did some research and learned that I could get in touch with whoever took my daughter if I were to nurse the child for a week, then smear a bit of her blood on a mirror and state my own child’s name.” More inclined toward logic than superstition, Charity had thought the whole thing sounded gruesome and crazy, but the truth was that since the reaping, anything seemed possible. The sheriff eyed her doubtfully, but she continued. “It worked! A woman appeared to me in my bathroom mirror, holding Elizabeth from some room I’ve never seen before.”

“What did she say?” the deputy asked, and the sheriff scowled, but let the question stand.

“She said that in a year, if I had taken proper care of the changeling and still wanted my daughter back, Elizabeth would be returned to me.”

“This woman in the mirror?” The sheriff’s skepticism was fading beneath undeniable curiosity. “Did you get her name? Her species?”

“She wouldn’t tell me any of that. But she looked and sounded as human as Delilah did.”

“So what did you do?” Pennington said, and from across the table, Charity could see that though he held a pen, the notebook page in front of him was completely blank.

“We cared for Lilah as if she were our own. She was a delightful child. Happy and affectionate. We came to love her—I felt guilty for how much I loved her, when my own daughter was missing.” Charity folded her hands on the table and took a deep breath. “Then the one-year mark came and went, and Elizabeth never reappeared.”

“Did you try the blood-on-the-mirror trick again?” the sheriff asked.

Charity nodded. “Several times, but my summons went unanswered.”

“And you never got her back?” the deputy guessed, clearly transfixed by the story.

Pennington waved one hand to silence the deputy, and when he turned back to Charity, she met his gaze with tear-filled eyes. “No, I never got Elizabeth back,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and gave voice to a fear that had lived in her soul for twenty-five years, but had never before been spoken aloud.

“Sheriff, I think my Elizabeth was never returned because I loved Delilah more.”