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“Yeah. They have a limit on that. But not for everybody.”
“Then who for?”
She smiles. Not yet. Not yet.
“Thanks for coming,” says Luke. “I’ve been missing you.”
“You have?”
“Yeah. I really have. And I want to say that I should tell ya that over the last couple of months I seem to…I seem to be thinking about you a lot. More than I was admitting to myself, you know what I mean?”
Jessica nods, her breath held.
“And I know you and me, we are just how we are with each other…. I just wanted to tell you that I’m here. And I’m, well, I’m here. If you…I don’t know. I just think about you, a lot.”
Jessica laughs dryly. “You like me?”
Luke laughs too, and nods. “Yeah,” he says.
“Like me like me?”
“We in high school now?” He throws her a playful sideways look.
Jessica takes in a hard breath and then lets it out again. “I’m pregnant.”
Luke doesn’t respond.
“It’s yours,” she says. “And that’s…that’s what I came here to tell you. And that’s…yeah.”
Luke still doesn’t respond, and Jessica’s heart races sickeningly with the thought of her unborn child being rejected by the man that she loves.
Finally he glances up at her. “Do you want it?”
She sighs. “Very very very much.”
And then Luke’s face opens, a smile subsumes every part of it, his eyes sparkle.
“All right, then,” he says, taking her hands in his. “All right, then. New chapter.”
ONE YEAR LATER
THE PULSE
Staff Writer: Jessica Jones
Three weeks ago, at the Old Bailey in London, UK, Polly Devereux, 32, was sentenced to thirty-eight years in prison without parole for the murders of Debra Phipps, 84, of the Old Farmhouse in Barton Wallop, and the abduction, false imprisonment, and attempted murders of Grace Partridge, Amina Sultanov, and Audrey Hill-Lock, all now 17. A year ago, I was working as an undercover private investigator on a case involving two New York teenagers who’d returned from their summer in the UK acting and looking like different people.
At first I thought I was looking at nothing more than a Summer I Turned Pretty–style glow-up, but soon it became clear that something very strange was afoot, when I heard Fox Randall’s skin cracking and him intoning the name Miranda into the empty spaces of an uptown dinery in Manhattan. I immediately agreed to take on the investigation.
My time in the UK led me to a rambling farmhouse in the Essex countryside, the house where Sebastian Randall, father to the Randall twins, told me his children had spent nearly all their time that summer. Randall was an unassuming man, a little bit of a dreamer, scared of spiders and ghosts, often talking about a secret girlfriend, who was also helping him to renovate his house. Little did I know that on that very first meeting with Randall I had already been given nearly all the answers to the mystery I was being paid to solve. For there, even as my hands caressed the newly laid concrete floor of his cellar and I wondered at the holes drilled there, even as I listened to Sebastian Randall tell me about the super-powered water pump this secret girlfriend had gotten installed for him down there, just below my feet two young girls were trapped in a kind of hell that even the most ardent horror movie fan could barely envisage: wired up, drugged up, engineered into human receptacles for darkness and misery.
At that point, as I stood in Sebastian Randall’s cellar assuring him that there were no spiders down there, Amina and Audrey, the so-called Dorian Gray Girls, were absorbing the imperfections of a handful of early adopters of Devereux’s as yet unlaunched app. But this was just the very beginning of the journey. Devereux used Fox Randall’s love for Grace Partridge (who he knew only as “Belle”) as a way to control him, sending him emails purporting to be from “Belle,” beseeching him to do everything she asked him to do, including spreading the word about the Miranda app and making sure flyers were posted in nearly every school bathroom in the city. Within weeks of the Randall twins’ return to New York, Devereux and her partner in crime, Arthur Simms, were themselves on their way to America, and Amina and Audrey were hours away from being entirely subsumed, their consciousnesses and physical forms about to be overwhelmed by the insecurities and perceived “defects” of two thousand or more children in Central Park.
As it is, the girls are still a long way from recovering from their yearslong ordeal, and who knows if they ever will entirely. But as Devereux commences her sentence (Arthur Simms is due to be sentenced next month), we are only just beginning to understand the processes that underpinned the events of last year. In order to do so, we need to go right back in time to the summer of 1986, when a beautiful young British woman named Ophelia Simms entered a bar in a Harlem backstreet and started making small talk with the bartender, a soft-spoken man named John Warshaw, who had a fondness for blood.
I spoke to Ophelia in a Zoom call last week from the prison in Essex, where she has been held for the past year. She looked old, much older than the smooth-skinned woman I remembered from my time in Barton Wallop.
“This is what I look like without the cream,” she says, referring to the special unguents and serums that she and Warshaw used to cook up together to keep her looking less than her two hundred plus years. “It’s fine. I only wanted to look good for him. Once he was gone, I didn’t really care anymore.”
