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“There’s a little light scarring. But it’s nearly healed. We’ll have you back in a week’s time for another examination, but if you’re feeling okay in yourself…?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then I think you’re good.”
The doctor smiles brightly at her and then says, “It’s amazing what you’ve done. I mean, just incredible. It’s been an honor to treat you.”
Jessica grimaces slightly. “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure I feel that way.”
Jessica leaves the hospital a short while later and walks slowly back to her apartment. She feels beat-up and broken. All of her aches. She wants nothing more than to walk into a bar, pull out a stool, sit on it, and order shot after shot until she’s comatose. But she still has work to do. The case is not over yet.
Malcolm arrives shortly after she gets back to her office. He looks a little shell-shocked, his skin slightly sallow beneath the peroxide hair that gleams too white.
“Malcolm,” she says, “how are you?”
“I’m okay.” He looks drained and punished.
“What can I do for you?”
“Well, I mainly came to get paid.”
“Wow. Blunt. But yeah. Sure. What did we say?”
“We didn’t. But I’m happy with a couple hundred.”
She nods. He helped save her life and the lives of Grace, Amina, and Audrey. It seems like a good deal. “Sure,” she says. “I can PayPal it to you?”
“Yeah, cash would be better. My mom’s got my phone until this is all sorted out. So, yeah.”
Jessica sighs again. “I’m really sorry, Malcolm. I shouldn’t have let you get involved in this. It was a bad idea. I put you in too much danger and I’m telling you, here and now, that I won’t be employing your services again. Not because you’re not good, but because you need to stay safe and get yourself to college. So consider yourself retired from private investigations.”
“Yeah, I don’t think my mom would have let me come back anyway. But it’s been, genuinely, the most incredible experience of my life.”
Jessica raises an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. Seriously. And I wanna thank you for allowing me to be a part of it. I’ve learned so much. Including, yeah”—he smiles wryly—“my limitations, I guess. I really thought I had Fox Randall wrapped around my finger, y’know, but turns out that I’m not as good at subterfuge as I thought I was. So…”
Jessica looks at him, fondly. “That’s not true,” she says. “Please don’t take anything bad away from this. You need to keep hold of your self-assuredness. It’ll take you a long way.”
Malcolm smiles again. “That’s praise indeed, coming from you.” He drops his gaze to the desk and then back up to Jessica. His eyes are soft and a flush rises through his cheeks. “You are the greatest human being I have ever known. It has been an honor and a privilege to work alongside you.” He holds out his hand to her. “Thank you, Jessica.”
Jessica blinks. “Oh,” she says, “sure.” Then she takes his hand and shakes it. “Now get outta here,” she says teasingly.
Malcolm gives her a small bow and leaves.
FORTY-SEVEN
Every screen that Jessica passes over the next few days has rolling news coverage of the Miranda app story. Talking heads and technology experts fill the screens with more questions about what sort of science and technology was involved, how did it happen, what does it mean for the future of the smartphone, for the future of the world? Should children be allowed to have smartphones? Should anyone be allowed to have smartphones? Should they be banned?
The children themselves are fine. From the moment that Amina and Audrey were released from stasis in the canister in Sebastian’s cellar, the effects of the app were stopped and reversed. But questions are now being asked about the meaning of happiness, about the pressures that young people exist under these days, the unattainable images they are bombarded with every second of every day—and now even their own images when used under a filter in an app—imagine, said commentators, living under the pressure of being able to see what you would look like if you were perfect.
Away from the mainstream media, social media and its cousins are fixated on the dark underbelly of the story: the freaky family comprised of a serial killer, a witch, and a genius savant using quantum physics to turn two innocent girls into modern-day portraits of Dorian Gray, all juxtaposed against the glossy visage of Polly Devereux in a turned-up collar and oversized sunglasses, looking like a Real Housewife of somewhere or other. Reddit is overrun with threads about the so-called Freaky Family, and the stories keep coming about homeless people who went missing, playdates that resulted in memory loss, sightings of strange paraphernalia, weird interludes, creepy vibes, a sense that something was off.
And then the rest of the story breaks.
Jessica is lying on her couch eating oatmeal when it happens. She sits bolt upright, puts down the oatmeal, and grips her phone with both hands as she scrolls through the news reports.
Two sets of human remains were alongside Amina and Audrey in the underground cell beneath Sebastian’s house. One set has just been identified as belonging to Debra Phipps, the real Debra Phipps, the eighty-four-year-old owner of the Old Farmhouse, who lived there alone for nearly fifty years before her home was taken over by Polly and her family. Her cause of death has not yet been established, but Jessica remembers what Arthur Simms told them about vessels and receptacles and how an “old” receptacle had not been powerful enough to contain the force they were attempting to absorb.
