Warnings: Some angst. Generally dark topics.
A/N: I guess I'm on a roll.
….
This was just…odd.
Jennifer sat on the couch, poring over the file. Looking through it again.
She read all of Penny's medical records. Drug abuse. Delusional psychosis. Narcissistic personality disorder. Sounded about right.
She even read through all the lists of her medications, her lab work, her exams, physical and psychological. Penelope Fleck was a perfectly healthy woman, besides her mental illnesses.
Why had Arthur been taking care of her? Jennifer recalled him saying she had a stroke a few years ago, but she knew he'd been looking after her for longer than that.
She turned to another section in the file. The one with the adoption papers. Certified. Telling her Arthur had been some unknown, anonymous child. Abandoned at the Gotham Orphanage.
It appears they had tried to take Arthur away from Penny at one point. Around the time she was admitted against her will.
Jennifer turned to the next section. The section with multiple newspaper clippings about a negligent mother and her abusive boyfriend, and the little boy who was regularly beaten, tied by rope to a radiator, allowed to starve. Worse. She'd read about that in Penny's psychological exams, too. There were photos of the two of them, maybe taken by police, where they wore cuts, bruises. Some of them bad.
Jennifer couldn't stop crying for several minutes. Her heart hurt for both of them.
She was starting to understand. Really understand.
But there was so much more that didn't make sense. Why on earth would the woman's medical file have all these newspaper clippings, photos—would it have anything to do with Arthur at all, really?
The whole thing felt too…convenient. Like it was filled with exactly everything needed to convince anyone looking at it that exactly one state of events was the truth.
The files Jennifer pored over at work would have newspaper articles, photos, declarations, certificates, proof. But they were collections of evidence, trying to make a case, one way or the other, about someone's negligence or guilt.
Maybe the more horrible parts of it were assembled there to try and shock Penny into realizing the truth at one point. To make a case against her. It certainly seemed like enough reason to take custody of Arthur away from her.
So why wasn't he taken away? Jennifer had seen enough random records–report cards, bills, other miscellaneous health records–over the last few days, and was told enough by Arthur himself, to know he had always been with her. Penny Fleck. The unstable, unmarried woman they never would have given a child to in the first place.
What the fuck had really happened?
…..
She could hear the laughing, occasionally, during the night. She wondered at one point if she was imagining it. If the laughing wasn't coming from inside her head. After her parents passed, for months she could swear she could hear her mother calling for her in the mornings from downstairs.
Jennifer shut her eyes quickly. She hadn't lost Arthur yet–she hoped. She just didn't feel safe being along in the same room as her boyfriend, was all.
Maybe if she gave him a day or two. His finding that file was doubtless like a sledgehammer to his fragile mental state.
But would he be any better? Were those sort of revelations something one could just sleep off?
She pushed the thought away. Pushed all of it away. Things would be fine. Everything would be fine….
…..
Once again, Jennifer stopped at Arthur's door upon arriving home from work. She hadn't called around her usual time to let him know when she'd be home. She hadn't wanted to know at that time, but curiosity and anxiety were eating away at her by the time the sagging elevator of their old building had brought her up to their floor.
She knocked. No answer.
Same thing when she knocked again, a little harder.
It didn't sound or feel like anyone alive was inside.
Her hand came up, wrapped around the door handle. She tried it, but it was locked. She thought briefly of forcing it. Maybe slipping a bobby pin from her put-up hair and sticking it into the lock…. But she chased those thoughts away.
Jennifer let another night pass without trying to reach out to him.
She sat watching MTV on the couch that Saturday. Her phone rang.
"Hi there dear, how are you?" Nancy said.
"Meh," was all Jennifer gave in response.
"That good, huh? How…is Arthur doing?"
Jennifer paused. "We're…sort of taking a break, I guess." God, that felt trite, but she didn't know how else to describe the current situation.
"Uh huh. So, have you seen him in the past day or so? He isn't there now, is he?"
Her friend's questions were odd, unnerving. "…No…. Why do you ask?"
"You don't know, do you? He hasn't told you?"
"Told me what?"
"Penny Fleck died yesterday."
Jennifer's hand went up to cover her mouth. A beat. "Oh my God," she whispered into the phone's receiver.
"Mmm hmm. Around 2 PM. A candy striper came in to check in on her and found her not breathing."
"Why…why are you telling me this, Nance?"
"Well, we haven't been able to contact her next of kin. Arthur, obviously. Left messages, but…. It is a little strange, because about an hour before Penny was found he was seen coming in to visit her."
Jennifer absorbed all that. Mulled over it. "Wait, do you think he saw her die?" she wondered aloud.
There was an unsettling silence on Nancy's end.
"Nance?"
"I'm just…. Last I checked on her yesterday, Penny was improving. Got her appetite back. Was even talking a bit."
"What are you trying to say Nancy?"
Nancy sighed heavily into the phone. "I don't know. I guess just trying to figure out where her son is. If you see him–"
"I don't know," Jennifer mumbled.
"I guess it's not too pressing. Penny had all her arrangements made before she died, apparently. They've already released her body to the funeral home."
Jennifer considered that.
"Do you happen to know what funeral home the hospital released her body to?"
"I…can't just release that information to anybody, even if I had it. Only family."
"Well, it's a good thing I'm the girlfriend, then, isn't it?" Jennifer pointed out, referring back to the time she went to Gotham General to retrieve Arthur after he had been attacked and that title was prematurely bestowed upon her.
Nancy sighed again. "I knew I was gonna pay for that one day. Fine. I'll see what I can do. But here's a novel idea, how about actually talking to your boyfriend and find out from the horse's mouth what's going on, hmm?"
"I wish it were that easy," Jennifer breathed. "Just let me know when you can."
Within an hour Nancy called her back. Palmer & Son's Funeral Home on Landry Street had Penny. She jotted it down on the notepad with its curling sheets that was tacked onto the wall near her phone.
"Thanks Nance. I owe you one."
"Just…be careful, huh?" Nancy didn't elaborate and Jennifer didn't ask.
She got out her phone book, found the number for the funeral home.
"Um, hi, yes," she said after a glum, monotone voice greeted her automatically after picking up her call. "I've heard that a family friend just died, and I was calling to see when her funeral services would be?"
"Name of the deceased?" the voice inquired.
"Penelope Fleck?"
She heard the wheels of a chair squeak, some rustling papers. "Oh yes, here it is. Her son came earlier today to see about the arrangements. No funeral. Graveside services and burial are scheduled for tomorrow at 11 o'clock AM."
Tomorrow? Damn that was quick. "What cemetery?"
"Gotham Cemetery. Section D2."
"Wh–what's D2?" Jennifer asked, feeling a bit stupid.
"Pauper's field, Ma'am."
…..
She'd hoped there would be a funeral. Not for Penny's sake. She felt it would possibly be a good catharsis for Arthur. A chance to say good bye and really process what was happening. For herself, it would be a chance to talk to him in a public place, where she'd feel a bit…safer. In theory.
As it was, by the time she'd arrived at Gotham Cemetery and finally spotted Arthur among the sea of headstones in their pauper's field, a Catholic priest and someone else in black where giving their final condolences before leaving Arthur alone at his mother's grave site.
Jennifer watched him carefully for some moments, standing at a distance at which she didn't think he'd see her. He was dressed in his full rust-red suit. Probably the only nice outfit he owned.
He just stared down at the grave for a long time. Eventually she thought she could see him talking to himself, or maybe Penny. Then the Laugh appeared. But something was different. He wasn't holding it back. Not really.
Even from her distance, she thought she could see a smile form and stay on his lips, as he slowly looked up. Right in her direction.
Jennifer moved further back behind the tree she was standing next to. Peeking out just enough to keep an eye on him.
She suddenly felt silly. Nancy's words from yesterday came to mind. "Just talk to your boyfriend and find out from the horse's mouth what's going on."
But she couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right. A gut feeling that she needed to stay away.
Yet she couldn't tell with 100% certainty whether that was a genuine gut feeling, or her anxiety working in overdrive. Her thoughts, inclinations, bounced back and forth, like a ball in a tennis match.
She was close to stepping out from behind her tree and approaching Arthur when she spotted a Crown Vic with police lights on top pull up near him. It was those two detectives from the other day, the two men who questioned whether she knew Arthur.
Jennifer receded further back into the shadowy shade of the cemetery's trees. She looked down at herself, dressed in a nice black blouse, skirt, heels, and overcoat. Hair up. Would they buy that she and Arthur had become friends, much less lovers, in the two weeks or so since she'd talked to them, to the extent that she'd be with him at his mother's grave site?
They talked with Arthur for a few minutes, but Jennifer was too far away to hear any of what was being said. Why were they here at all?
Arthur seemed to brush them off before heading in the opposite direction–more or less in her direction.
She shoved her hands into the pockets of her overcoat as she turned and hurriedly walked away.