The Rust Maidens Read online

  My vision pinwheeled at the edges, and I realized I wasn’t breathing. I choked in a mouthful of air, but it almost didn’t help. It didn’t change anything. I was still here where I didn’t belong.

  My mother moved away from me, a thousand miles it seemed, and she was back in the house before I could say a word, the screen door slamming shut like a goodbye.

  I couldn’t go back inside. Not to where no one welcomed me.

  My feet heavy, I started down the stairs, but there was a figure up ahead in my path.

  Adrian. Standing right in my way.

  “Phoebe,” he said, my name sounding all wrong. He said it almost as a question.

  I hesitated, my body seizing up at the sight of him. For an instant, a familiar longing ached inside me, left over from that night. His skin against mine, scents mingled together. An escape.

  He took a step toward me, slowly, unsure of himself.

  “Don’t,” I said. Everything in me quivered with rage, and I was convinced if he reached out to touch me, I would take his hand and never let it go, not until I’d crushed every bone in his fingers to dust.

  He sensed this in me. He was smart enough to know this much.

  “It wasn’t my plan,” he said.

  I scoffed. “But you didn’t argue, did you?”

  “It’s not my job to argue.”

  It wasn’t his job to be decent, either.

  “How do you even expect them to get them out?” I asked. “It’s not like they’ll come to the door if you knock.”

  He wouldn’t look at me. “We’re bringing in equipment,” he said. “They’ll dismantle the house if needed.”

  “Like what? A wrecking ball? Bulldozers?” I stared at him, half-dizzy with fear. “You don’t know where they’re hiding. You take apart the house, and you could kill them.”

  He said nothing. Because he knew I was right. We stood in silence, as I gathered the courage to ask.

  “When?”

  He gulped down a breath. “First thing Monday.”

  Tomorrow. This was all going to happen tomorrow. Less than twenty-four hours until Jacqueline was lost to me, maybe forever. Probably forever.

  “It might be better this way,” Adrian said, his voice insistent, like he was trying to convince himself. “There are better facilities outside of Cleveland, Phoebe. The doctors elsewhere might be able to help the girls.”

  Or they might be better able to dissect them and stuff the leftovers in glass jars on a shelf.

  Adrian kept talking, but I couldn’t listen. So I ran. Like a child, I turned away and fled. As if that was enough. As if that was an answer.

  And I didn’t stop. Down the sidewalk, past the sagging rooms for rent signs and the always-gawking faces peering out through Venetian blinds. Everyone readying themselves for Sunday sermon, but never too busy to watch.

  But they weren’t the ones I wanted. I needed to warn the girls.

  Around the back of the mansion, at the porch I left only minutes ago, I pounded on the door.

  “Jacqueline!” My voice split in two. “Dawn, Lisa! Anyone!”

  I seized up, hopeful I would hear something on the other side. But there was nothing. That couldn’t stop me, though.

  “They’re coming,” I said. “They’ll be here tomorrow. You have to get out. Before it’s too late.”

  I listened and waited. A flutter inside, but not enough to be sure they’d heard, or if anyone was there at all.

  This was probably for nothing, just like everything else I’d tried. I drooped against the door, pretending I could stay here forever, but that was my problem. I never wanted to admit defeat or accept change. I thought I could hold my breath, and everything would be okay.

  Finally, I cobbled myself together enough to drag my body home. But not home. I wouldn’t go inside and disturb my parents. They’d had enough of me to last a lifetime.

  Up in the treehouse, the butterflies danced around me. I cooed at them and called out the names I’d given them. I told them I loved them too. They probably didn’t understand, but that was okay. Then I peeled the plastic off the windows. This late in the season, they no longer needed to stay, so they didn’t. One by one, they ventured out of the treehouse and into the sunlight.

  “Goodbye,” I whispered.

  There they went, a ballet of insects fluttering away. My whole life, vanishing.

  “Phoebe?” My mother’s voice. “Could you come here?”

  “Yes,” I said, and climbed down the rope ladder.

  My mother stood beside me, and for the first time that whole summer, she looked right in my eyes, not flinching away at the sight of me. “We’re going to church together,” she said. “As a family. Just for today.”

  She was asking me for something. A request, not a demand. After everything, I couldn’t bear to disappoint her again. Besides, where else was I needed?

  My father was waiting for us in the living room.

  “Ready?” he asked, and I nodded.

  We didn’t take a car. Instead, my parents and I walked like defeated soldiers to the church. We didn’t speak. We didn’t look at each other. We went because it was expected of us.

  Everyone had become good at doing what was expected. We stood in line outside and watched as the other worshippers went in ahead of us without a complaint: the doctor and his wife, Aunt Betty with her pursed lips, Kathleen just a few paces in front of us, her head down.

  A babble to my left, and I turned in time to see Eleanor spirited inside, cradled in the arms of Clint. The arms of the enemy. As though we weren’t all enemies now.

  And there, greeting the parishioners inside the door, was perhaps the best pretender of all. The preacher, smiling as though everything was normal, his face frozen in faux cheer, never belying the truth: that his only daughter was lost to him, and it was all his fault. This was all our fault, a neighborhood of fools.

  His wife stood next to him, no smile, her hair grayer than I remembered it.

  The sermon started at nine on the dot, and today was all about tolerance and kindness and every other maudlin topic. We were going to keep on as if nothing had changed. The girls got sick, the girls transformed, the girls were liable to evaporate into rust at midnight, our own grotesque Cinderellas, and we would just keep showing up on Sunday morning and praying and pretending nothing ever happened. But something had happened. Our lives had been ripped away from us, and we were too craven to admit it.

  The sermon droned on, all eyes set on the pulpit. Set on nothing at all.

  “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy—”

  The preacher’s voice, so inconsequential.

  “—peace, patience, kindness—”

  He’d never stop speaking, and they’d never stop listening. His even tenor glided over the final words. “—goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

  Then my own voice, echoing to the steeple. “Hypocrites.”

  I was out of the pew and in the aisle now. I didn’t remember taking the steps to get here, but the weight of my fury must have forced me forward, out of my seat and into the open. The organist leaned against a key in surprise before the instrument tinkled abruptly to silence, and the choir seized up, their mouths twisted in a ludicrous hymn that no one could hear.

  “How could you?” I asked no one in particular. Or perhaps asked myself. “They need us. They’ve always needed us. But we didn’t hear them.”

  All around me, heads drooped in shame. They knew I was right, these parents who loved their daughters, even if they did it all wrong.

  I did have one unlikely ally, however. Across the room, someone else was standing up too. Adrian, trying to join me in my protest, trying to pretend he could make it right.

  I shot him a glare that forced him back a step. Good. I didn’t need him on my side. Not now, not when it was clear that his allegiances were as soft and useless as an undercooked egg.

  The faces around me, once familiar, were all slack-jawed and twisted now
.

  “We have to help them,” I said, and a thorn twisted deep inside me.

  Them. The girls. The Rust Maidens. This was what we did. We stripped them of who they were. Everything about them, from the very start of this, was always impersonal. A snarl of generic files from the government. A mess of inoperable figures from the doctors’ office. A curse on the lips of our fathers. All of us lumping the five of them together, because it was easier that way.

  No. Not right now. Not to me. Not ever again.

  My gaze searched the pews until I found Doctor Ross. Then I moved toward him. Just one step, just enough.

  “Violet,” I said, and though her father turned away at the sound of her name, it didn’t matter. He heard me. He heard her.

  A babble toward the back. Clint holding Eleanor, his face impassive, even bored. I glared at him until I caught his eye, and he sat frozen under my stare.

  “Dawn,” I said, and this one almost made me sob. This girl I’d hated. This girl I’d helped to condemn with the rest of the neighborhood.

  Kathleen, so near that I could almost touch her. Her jaw set, she knew who was next.

  “Lisa,” I said, remembering that first night. The way Jacqueline and I had turned away because we didn’t know what else to do. Maybe it was too late to stop this even then, but I’d never know that for sure. That choice had slipped away from me without my ever knowing it.

  The preacher was straight in front of me, wanting to stop me, wanting to do something other than be the useless dupe he always was. I moved toward him and had to hold myself back from hurting him. But I did hurt him, with just one word.

  “Helena.”

  She wouldn’t be forgotten, even if he wanted to.

  And Aunt Betty, next to my father. Always so close to me, yet a world away. Her eyes swirled with rage, acrylic nails digging into the pew. But I wouldn’t stop, not until I said it.

  “Jacqueline.”

  My eyes blurred, but I couldn’t let the congregation see it. I couldn’t let them witness me fall to pieces.

  With my heart in my throat, I turned and marched away, toward the double doors in the back. Toward the closest thing to freedom I could come by these days—someplace away from here.

  In this, I expected to be alone. I wasn’t. The rush of movement behind me was a whirlwind, the brush of Sunday lace against the slick of the pews, and the squeaks of newly shined shoes on the hardwood floors. Everything was moving at once. My knees weak, I bit down hard and didn’t look back. All the resolve in me would melt to nothing if I didn’t keep going.

  When I was on the lawn, the grass wet with humidity, I finally glanced over my shoulder. Adrian had followed me, as had Kathleen. My parents came as well, and other parents too. Helena’s mother, and behind her, half the congregation was leaving the church.

  I wasn’t the only one on the girls’ side. I was just the only one brave enough to say it aloud. The one who said it first.

  We could still help them. If we were together in this, we could prove to the girls that they didn’t have to hide. Jacqueline might not be lost to me yet.

  I started toward the mansion, but Adrian caught up with me first.

  “We have until tomorrow,” he said. “If you could reach them before then, I can request an extension.”

  I nodded and wondered if it wasn’t too late.

  But then Kathleen was suddenly standing with us too, pink-faced and breathless. “They’re coming.”

  I stared at her. “Who is?”

  She shuddered. “The rest of the neighbors. The ones who didn’t walk out with us. They blame the girls.”

  “For what?” I asked, my hands twisted into fists.

  “For everything,” she said. “Especially the mill closing. And they aren’t waiting any longer. They’re getting them out of the mansion today. By any means necessary.”

  I choked down a breath. “Who’s saying this?”

  “Your aunt.” Kathleen looked at me, so much sorrier than I even knew she could be. “It’s Betty, Phoebe. She’s the one leading them.”

  Of course she was. I turned back toward the end of the street. Here she came, commanding a horde right down the middle of the road, not caring if traffic needed to pass. What they wanted was all that mattered now. These concerned neighbors, and the last of the tourists, too. Jeffers and Godfrey at the tail end, their dark glasses obscuring their eyes, the same as when they’d arrived.

  I held my breath and watched them in their chevron formation.

  One that was moving straight for the mansion.

  EIGHTEEN

  The two factions had formed. The neighbors who were with us, and those who were against us, the ones who wanted to extract the girls against their will, as though it would be easy, no different than peeling worms off the asphalt. We met at the end of Denton Street, in front of the mansion the girls called home. Along with Adrian and Kathleen, I huddled with my parents and Helena’s mother, who did her best to comfort the half of the congregation that had followed her. But that wasn’t easy, especially when her own husband was against us.

  Flanked by the smattering of followers he had left, the preacher parted the crowd and went after his wife, seizing her gruffly by the arm.

  “Go home, Rachel,” he said to her, almost cooing the words as he tightened his grip on her. “Take your pill and sleep it off.”

  She jerked away from him and laughed in his face. “I warned you it would come to this,” she said. “I told you I’d choose her.”

  The preacher’s wife, lonely and missing Helena, all the while quietly crafting her own rebellion. I imagined her hand at midnight, holding a bottle of red spray paint at the abandoned mill. After all, who else would expect us to pray for the girls?

  Nearby, Betty was pleading with my father.

  “You can’t do this,” she said. “You can’t think it’s okay to leave them in there.”

  “And you can’t honestly think it’s okay to go after them like this.” My father shook his head and pulled my mother and me closer to him. “Betty, this isn’t the right way.”

  She fell back a step, and her face went gray. That was it, the thing that injured her worst of all. My father finally choosing sides, and not choosing her.

  Something in her eyes went wild, and Aunt Betty sneered at me. “Whatever happens now,” she seethed, “it’s on you, Phoebe. You’re the one who led them here. Now you’ll watch as we get them out.”

  She turned away and marched toward the mansion. At least a dozen parents followed her. They traced the front of the property, kicking at the mortared stone, testing it for weaknesses, convinced their collective willpower was enough to bring it down. And they were probably right. This place was as decayed as the girls, and given the shape it was in, it wasn’t safe to be standing even this close.

  “Please don’t,” I said, and rushed at them, flailing and shoving and doing my best to break through their blockade, to stop them from whatever they were planning. But there were too many of them. They just pushed me back toward the street.

  “We have to do something,” I said to Adrian.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what will help at this point.”

  “Please try,” I said. “We don’t have much time.”

  He nodded and slipped away from me, his body cutting through the crowd like a knife. Toward the front of the mansion. Toward where Jeffers and Godfrey had joined the others, still clad in those dark glasses.

  I moved closer too, straining to hear their voices.

  “This is getting out of hand,” Adrian said. “We have to stop them.”

  But Jeffers and Godfrey shook their heads.

  “We need to get the girls out,” one of them said. “If their parents do that part for us, all the better.”

  Adrian moved forward another step. “The crowd could kill them.”

  Jeffers or Godfrey—or maybe it was both—shrugged. “For all we know, they might already be dead. We’ve got our orders. Take them back
to DC in the morning, whatever condition they’re in.”

  Adrian’s shoulders broadened. “I don’t care about orders. I won’t risk hurting them.”

  Jeffers and Godfrey smiled, their faces sharpening with shadows. “Then you won’t be an agent anymore.”

  It was a flurry of movement now, words lobbed back and forth, and a fist thrown this way and that. Adrian struck one of them—probably Jeffers—in the face, and Godfrey retaliated. Only he shoved Adrian farther into the crowd, knocking a tourist over. Cursing and spitting, the tourist scrambled to his feet and returned the favor, throwing a punch at whoever was nearest. A father, it looked like. Maybe Doctor Ross, I couldn’t tell. Whoever it was, he heaved the tourist out of his path and into a circle of housewives.

  Then it all tore loose. Thrashing arms and high-pitched screams and everyone fighting each other. Mothers who’d always agreed, or at least mostly agreed, now spitting and clawing and punching the same as their husbands. Tourists with no grudges, who didn’t even know each other, coming away with bloodied knuckles and bruised eyes.

  Nearby, a stranger grabbed a fistful of my hair, and my mother pried the man off me, only for someone to grab hold of her and pull her away. My father went after her, and yanked the person off my mother, but the two of them had already crashed away from me like a lifeboat in the fog.

  “Phoebe,” my mother called, but she was too far across the dozens of empty faces for me to reach.

  In the middle of it all, Jeffers and Godfrey had Adrian pinned on the cement and were trying to handcuff him. They’d already taken his badge. He was nothing to them now. But too many bodies crashed together around them, and they couldn’t quite keep hold of him.

  When the preacher smashed into them, kicking Jeffers just for the fun of it, Adrian broke away. In the uproar, they didn’t chase him down. There was enough else to keep them occupied. They tried to pull the tourists and fathers and mothers off each other, but they were only two agents, and not very good ones at that.