CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Ana did not expect to sleep that night. Hers were not the sort of problems that could be helped by a good night's sleep anyway. But after a sink bath and an Easy Bake dinner, her troubles seemed less like the rampaging kaiju they had seemed to be when she'd been sitting in the grandstand watching the sheriff talk to his deputies while pointing at her, and more like the demon from It Follows. Still there, in other words, and not that damn far off even if it was relatively small and quiet. And to stretch a horror movie metaphor even further, as much a threat to her friends as it was to her.
In fact, if you thought about it a certain way, she'd all but guaranteed the sheriff would come here if he couldn't find her at home. She'd left a fresh set of tire tracks in the snow that lay over the steep access road leading to Freddy's after all, and even if he didn't notice which direction they'd turned in from, he'd notice there were no return tracks. He might not care while he thought he had a bigger fish to fry, but when she never answered her door, he'd leave pissed off and in a mood to punch downwards, and what better way to blow off some lawful evil steam than by stopping at Freddy's to see if there were some trespassing teens smoking on the loading dock? There he'd find her truck and maybe even notice the doors were different and one call to Faust would verify that he hadn't changed them, which set the legal dominoes up to gain access and discover everything else that was different about the pizzeria these days, including the animatronics themselves. This would give the sheriff so many actual charges to hold her on that he wouldn't even need to fake any to put her away, and when she got out of prison, the pizzeria would be empty and there was a damn good chance Stately Faust Manor would be too, and whether the animatronics were rotting away alive in storage somewhere or dismantled for scrap and melted down, she'd never have any way of knowing.
So yeah, she should leave. Nothing was more important than being there when that knock landed on her door. She knew that and still she didn't go. It wasn't the sheriff she was afraid of, but a shoebox full of whiskey at the bottom of the closet in her aunt's purple bedroom.
She didn't even want to drink, that was the thought that kept twisting in her guts. When the sheriff came knocking, the last thing she needed was him smelling booze on her breath. She knew that. It should have been easy to go home and just not drink. Why did she even call Bonnie in the first place? What did she think he was going to do from five miles away? Why did she always have to make her problems someone else's problems before she could deal with them?
No, she didn't think she'd sleep that night, but she did, dead men and dark thoughts notwithstanding, and although she dreamed of the Puppet bending over her with its broken smile to tuck her in, she woke to Freddy's paw on her shoulder. There was a breakfast muffin in the kitchen with her name literally on it and a few inches of fresh snow glittering in the pale peach light of dawn to remind her that even the worst places can be beautiful and even the worst nights end.
She drove up Coldslip and climbed the three steps onto her porch. She stared at the doors for a while. She opened them.
She was not immediately swallowed upstairs to begin a nightmarish orgy of drunken debauchery, but maybe only because there was something worse than a bottle of whisky waiting for her inside. Smack in the middle of the bottom riser of the grand stairwell, where she'd have to step over him to go up and where she knew damn well she had not stepped over him to come down, was Plushtrap. He had been positioned sitting up, arms and legs arranged around a slouching sheet of paper, like he was holding it for her.
"Oh, fuck you," sighed Ana, but went over to collect today's Bible Quotes For Sinnin' Folks.
It was a page from a coloring book. Specifically, it was a page from A Very Fazbear Christmas, probably torn from David's own copy upstairs, or maybe even from hers. She could dimly remember both of them getting one that year, whatever year that was. On one side was a count-the-dots that someone had, with some trial and error, worked out into a scribble of Captain Fox with his hook through the bow of a gift box. On the other side was a picture of the Fazbear Band wearing vaguely Victorian garb caroling beneath an old timey street lamp. Whoever had colored it in did a reasonably good job of staying in the lines, but they'd colored Bonnie robin's-egg blue instead of the real Bonnie's true lavender hue, so…not Bonnie at all, but Toy Bonnie. Two more figures had been added in, floating over Freddy's shoulder: one smiling purple blob and one stick figure with a mess of dark hair. The artist had helpfully labeled these ME and YO respectively, adding MARY CRISMUS in the same clumsy caps as the homecoming banner left on her aunt's bedroom wall earlier in the year.
She had to give credit where credit was due: this shit was ten thousand times more upsetting than a biblical burn on a postcard, and only in part because kid-art was inherently creepy. Someone had been in her house, not just darting in and out to drop the thing off, but really making themselves at fucking home here. They'd been upstairs, exploring until they found David's room and poking around in his stuff until they found the coloring book, flipping through it until they found the right picture, coloring it in, then posing the whole thing with Plushtrap…and then leaving. All that effort, all that time, and they didn't even slip it under her windshield wiper so they could hide in the bushes and fondle themselves waiting for her reaction.
Of course, they could still be in the house. Ana had a pretty good radar for being watched and she wasn't feeling it now, but on the flip side, she didn't feel entirely alone either. She never did, in this house.
So okay, first things first: Check for visitors. Ana glanced at the kitchen, weighing the comfort of a knife in her hand while she went looking for guests against the hypothetical hassle of explaining to a sheriff who was already side-eyeing her over one corpse that she'd stabbed someone else in self-defense. Weaponless, Ana took herself on a cautious tour through the house, beginning with the main halls, then the wings, then up to the second floor, where she did it again, and all the way up to the attic. Nothing out of place, nothing missing—not that there was much left to steal—and nothing left behind, apart from the note itself and some smudges in the foyer that might have been left by wet shoes the previous night. Or last week. Or last month.
She ended up where she'd begun, standing in the foyer with Plushtrap, staring at her new homecoming note. What was the end goal here anyway? Was she supposed to think David's ghost was haunting the house with a box of crayons and get so scared, she packed up and left? What kind of Scooby Doo bullshit was that? And for crying out loud, they'd been in David's room, they must have seen that he was way beyond the ham-fisted scribbling stage of artistic development, let alone the Mary Crismus crap. David struggled with spelling sometimes, sure, but he'd known how to spell 'you' since he was three. Whatever point her trespasser thought they were making, they failed on an epic scale. She wasn't scared; she was offended.
"And what do you have to say for yourself?" she asked Plushtrap disapprovingly. "You're supposed to be guarding the place when I'm not here."
Plushtrap did not react. He was, after all, just a toy. Freddy had said the old diner plushies couldn't move on their own, and although Freddy was known to fib on occasion, Foxy had laughed at her for even entertaining the possibility. Where Freddy's word of honor was not convincing, Foxy's sense of humor was.
She picked Plushtrap up, jostling the music box inside him into brief life, making him squirm unsettlingly in her grip as a few notes of music played, but only a few, and then he was still again. She carried him into the kitchen and set him on the counter while she pinned the drawing to the fridge with much the same vindictive spirit that had prompted her to frame so many postcards and hang them in the parlor. She started a pot of coffee going and, since she was here, did some cleaning, washing dishes she couldn't remember dirtying and throwing out rotten food she couldn't remember buying. So many tubs of gas station chicken, all with the discount sticker that probably meant they were already a day old and headed for the dumpster if stoned idiots like Ana didn't buy them. Gross. No wonder she didn't eat it.
Once she had that mess sorted out, she took Plushtrap upstairs and returned him to his chair at the end of the hall next to the attic stairs. She sat him up straight, gave him a pat on the head (his music box tinkled and his jaws snapped shut and slowly yawned open again), and on her way back downstairs, somehow ended up in David's room again. Looking for the coloring book the page had been stolen from, or so she told herself, but she didn't look that hard.
Seeing his room forever frozen in 1993 made it hard to see anything but his boy-sized clothes still hanging in the closet or kicked under the bed, his action figures suspended in the middle of some blood-chilling battle where Batman and Wolverine fought the Rancor (already chomping down on the Green Power Ranger), and his sports stuff haphazardly piled up under the shelf where Aunt Easter displayed his small collection of trophies. Looking around, it was easy to imagine the boy who'd lived here was just out playing in the yard or eating breakfast. Like he'd be back any minute, not been gone twenty years.
Ana's feet took her to David's desk. She sat in the creaking chair and touched the keyboard. Beneath the dust, he'd worn the keys smooth, typed the letters right off some of them. Her heart wanted to turn the computer on, see if she could find the last game he'd been playing or, more likely, the last game he'd been creating. She wondered where he was right now, if he was still making games or developing new tech, or if he maybe had his mother's eye for cameras and was in film. Or was he doing something completely different, pursuing interests developed long after he'd left her? Was he happy in his new life? Did he ever think about the old one? When he tucked his kids into bed at night, did he ever look around their rooms and think of this one and the unfinished way he'd left it? They must have taken him straight from school, not even giving him the chance to go home and pack. She couldn't imagine he'd leave without taking Foxy's sword or Freddy's hat.
Or her.
Fuck. This was doing nothing good for her mood this morning.
Ana opened up one of David's old spelling workbooks ("Mary Crismus, my ass," she muttered, reading the neat, unlined list of words like 'ingenious,' 'unmerciful' and 'survivor'), then closed it and stacked them all together. She cleared away some toys, a batting glove, a calcified Snickers bar, and picked up a few loose pens, only to stop and look at one of them more closely.
It was bigger than the other pens cluttering up David's desk, although still 'pen-sized' to her casual glance—the difference between a ballpoint and a whiteboard marker. No, what caught her attention wasn't its size, but its weight, as heavy in her hand as one of her tools. And cold, much colder than anything else she'd been touching, as if it were pulling winter right out of the air. Whatever it was, it had a rounded cap like a pen, but when she took it off, where there should have been a point, there was instead a flat, wide protrusion, almost like a screwdriver, only hollow…sort of. Holding it to the light, she could see glints of metal, like the micro-circuitry on the insides of the animatronics' bones, and maybe something more solid deeper in. No logo of any kind on any part of the thing, which ironically helped identify it. It was a Fazbear Entertainment original, all right, but what was it? It looked a little like a key, but she'd seen every inch of the animatronics' bodies, inside and out, and she was confident there was no corresponding lock. What did that leave?
Plenty. There had been a wealth of Faust's unique technology in his basement, prior to his decision to get rid of it. Maybe this was the ignition key to the Press or maybe the Hand Unit or even the automated washing station down there. She supposed it didn't matter anymore. And it was probably equally irrelevant, but now a new question arose: Why did David have it?
She could think of a couple answers. The simplest was that Faust had given it to him. He and Aunt Easter had been close once, the two sides of Metzger's coin, to use his own words, and he'd probably had David over at his house a lot when David was very young. Faust would have known how smart David was and wanted to encourage his curiosity. Whatever this thing was or how much it was worth, if David had wanted to play with it, Faust would have been happy to give it to him as a toy.
So that was one possibility. The other most likely being that it was a Fazbear-brand USB drive, from an age before the rest of the world invented them, probably holding a couple terabytes of Metzger's porn, and David had found it tucked away in some corner of the house, recognized it as something computer-related with his own unique Other-vision, and left it here after futilely trying to unlock its secrets with incompatible hardware.
She supposed if she really wanted to know, she could just take it back to Faust and ask him, but he had other things to worry about today and so did she. And after all these years, what did any of it matter anymore? Erik Metzger was dead, Aunt Easter probably was too, and David was grown up and far away and hopefully didn't remember anything about Mammon, not the abuse at the hands of his parents, not his useless little cousin and for sure not this.
Ana recapped the device, dropped it into the dinosaur cup with the rest of David's pens and pencils, and went back downstairs to wait for the sheriff.
It was a long wait.
She killed time as best she could, stashing her sleeping bag and air mattress out of sight so it didn't look quite so much like she was camping in the parlor of a house with a dozen empty bedrooms. And because the parlor was now empty, she went ahead and gave it a thorough cleaning. Since the sheriff still hadn't arrived by the time she finished, she heaved a mental shrug and went to the garage for some tools. If she was going to waste the whole day here, might as well get some real work done. If she really wanted to be useful, she'd pull out whatever nasty old carpets were still left behind and assess the condition of the hardwood underneath, but if there was any way to wedge the sheriff even further up her ass, it would be having a rolled-up human-sized carpet resting casually in the background when he came by for questioning, giving him a reason to ask to check it out, which put her in the position of either allowing him to enter her house, knowing he would be looking for something to hold against her, or refusing, knowing he'd turn that into cause to get a warrant so he could search the entire damn house, which was, in all likelihood, caked with the evidence of all of Metzger's murders. So yeah. No carpet was coming out today.
She settled for stripping wallpaper instead, pulling off rotting or otherwise ruined molding, filling cracks and holes, and generally sweating the hours away until she was too exhausted to do it anymore. When she let herself stop, the world outside the window had turned dark and it was snowing again. She poked listlessly through the kitchen, but found nothing she trusted enough to eat, so she drank a glass of water to feel full long enough to get to sleep and tucked herself into David's bed upstairs, fully dressed beneath his Spiderman blanket.
The pillow still smelled like his shampoo. The unwashed sheets still had the ghost of an eleven year old boy in their threads. The mattress crinkled under her weight, wrapped in plastic because David still sometimes wet the bed. An army of action figures watched with hostile painted eyes as she tossed around, trying to fit her grown-up body in a young boy's bed.
This was a mistake. She set her phone's alarm for five-thirty, knowing she wasn't going to sleep a wink, and no sooner had her eyes closed than the violins were going off in her ear.
She got up, stiff and a little shaky, and the first thing she did was go to the nearest front-facing window and peek out at the driveway. Fresh snow on the ground, almost up to the top of the bottom porch step, but no sheriff's truck in the driveway. She allowed herself a minute to fume, then got cleaned up and got to work.
It was almost noon when her phone finally buzzed. She pulled it out with a muttered, "Finally," only to see Everything k? from Freddy.
Idk, she replied, stealing a peek out the nearest window at what she could see of the driveway. Still just her own vehicles and nothing else, not even tracks in the snow. He never showed.
What does idk mean?
I don't know, she wrote and rolled her eyes immediately, thumbing at the phone icon to call him. As soon as he picked up, she said, "That's what it means, not that I don't actually know what it means. IDK stands for I don't know."
"I have a deep feed-forward neural net with over ten ecobytes of computational power for receiving, storing, analyzing, processing and applying information. I figured that out, Ana."
"And yet you had to be told what k meant. Listen, you can't be texting me about certain stuff," she told him as she made her way back to the kitchen to see if there was any coffee left. There wasn't. She started a new pot. "Even if you delete them, texts can be recovered and me talking about the sheriff investigating me can be interpreted a lot of ways. You can just call if you have something to ask me, although I still don't have a lot of answers."
A grunt. "If he hasn't come yet, maybe he isn't coming at all."
"Collecting evidence takes time and manufacturing it probably takes even longer. He might show up today or he might make me sweat a little longer, but guaranteed he hasn't forgotten me. Look on the bright side, big bear. This is as grounded as it gets. Stuck at home, nothing to do and I didn't even bring my tablet because I knew you wouldn't want me to have fun."
"If you wanted to have fun, you'd have brought your toolbox, not your tablet," he replied with somewhat uncanny accuracy, although he was apparently unaware that a person could own more than one set of tools. "Well…just come home as soon as you can. Have you got anything to eat up there?"
"Yeah," she lied. She could scrounge something up if she decided she was starving, although it wouldn't kill her to not eat for a day. Or two.
"All right. Call me if anything changes. Chica says hi," he sighed in answer to some urgent whispering at a short distance. "And can you pick up some more mixes if you go to town. And if not, she says that's fine and don't make a special trip, but don't listen to her. There isn't much in the cupboard here," he said as a distinctive creaking sound indicated he was looking at the shelves. "Once you've dealt with the sheriff, I give you permission to go shopping, although I expect you to pick up actual food and not just more of this garbage. I'm sure it's delicious," he told Chica, who had uttered an affronted protest, "but it's pure sugar and that's not what she needs right now. Don't fluff your feathers at me. I've been doing a lot of reading on foods that promote healing in the human body. In fact—Ana, write this down."
"Oh, am I about to get schooled on nutrition by a guy who hawks pizza for a living?"
"We had a salad bar. And speaking of salad, dark leafy greens are highly recommended for wound recovery. They are rich in polyphenol anti-oxidants and have anti-inflammatory and immune-supportive properties."
"Do you even know what any of that means?"
"Yes, it means you're bringing some home. When you go shopping, look for the following: Alfalfa, bok choy, kale, kelp—"
"Where are you getting this list?"
"I saved it. It's alphabetized, for your convenience. Kelp, mustard greens, parlsey—"
"Do you seriously expect me to sit down and eat a plate of parsley?"
"No, of course not. Parsley doesn't provide protein or omega-3s or glucoisolates, all of which are necessary to wound recovery. An ideal plate would contain tofu, spirulina, sardines, hemp seeds, goji berries and parsley."
"Equal portions, no doubt."
"It's called a balanced diet, Ana. Do some research."
As much as Ana would have loved to continue that conversation, a short bar of musical notes abruptly rang out, echoing in the empty hall.
"What was that?" Freddy asked warily.
"The doorbell," Ana sighed. "This is it. I'll call you if I'm arrested."
"Ana—"
"Make it quick, bear."
"I…" He vented hot air and frustration into the phone's mic, muttering, "Damn this town," and hung up.
Game face on, Ana went to answer the door, only to find herself face to not-the-sheriff's-face with a vaguely familiar teenaged girl.
"Hi?" Ana inquired.
"What's with the ostrich?" the girl asked, pointing past Ana's shoulder to a certain corner of the foyer where a number of items from the Warren Ranch were still waiting to find their forever-home inside the Metzger Mansion.
"Impulse purchase," said Ana, angling the door so it wasn't quite so wide open. "You know how it is. You're at the register, you see gum, you buy gum, even though you barely chew gum? It's like that, only with ostriches."
The girl pondered that and nodded. "Cool."
"Thanks. And…no offense, but who are you and what do you want?"
"Elves on Wheels," the girl said in a bored voice, giving a previously overlooked holiday gift bag in one hand a careful shake. Paper-wrapped jars inside tapped together.
"Oh." Ana took the bag, looking in at the selection of artisanal cake, cookie and brownie mixes. "I completely forgot."
"Yeah?" The girl snorted. "You're the first. Literally everyone else bitched me out for not being here earlier or not calling ahead to schedule a drop-off time or not stopping on the way to run their other errands. Like, really? This is not my job, lady. I'm only doing it because Mom won't let me have the car tonight if I don't. Typical. Her and her little girlfriends get paid, but it's always me and Johnny and Ella doing all the work. I don't even get gas money, but 'You better bring it back on Full if you want to borrow it again tonight!'" she finished in a sing-song imitation of ogrish parents everywhere.
The cadence of her voice (and the litany of complaints) plucked a stronger memory-thread than the face did.
"I met you at the Moorehead barbeque, didn't I?" Ana shifted the bag to her other arm and extended a hand. "Sorry, I'm blanking on your name. I'm Ana."
"Maddison. Two d's. And it's cool," she added, condescending to give Ana a shake. "There were a bunch of us there and it's not like you care who any of us are anyway. We're not your family, lucky you. Although you might as well be, as often as Mom talks about you. I swear she actually blames you because Uncle Jimmy moved away, like you had anything to do with that."
Ana wasn't about to get into what her role may or may not have been on that subject. Instead, she gave the flow of gossip a nudge with, "What have I done lately that's interesting enough to talk about?"
"Oh, you know. What you're doing, who you're going out with, how you're dressed. Especially how you're dressed." They both took a moment to observe Ana's jeans and t-shirt attire, then Maddison shrugged. "She said you looked like a hooker on Saturday."
"The shoes were a little over the top," Ana admitted. "But of everything that happened on Saturday night, why the hell is your mom talking about my dress?"
"Oh, you know how it is. Gotta show respect for the dead or whatever, so everybody's still pretending to be shocked and sad. Give it a week." She paused, badly feigning indifference, then gave up and said, "Did you see it?"
Ana nodded. "I was sitting in the grandstand, so…yeah, I had a flawless view. Where were you?"
Maddison scoffed and shook her head. "Out with my friends. The one time I actually successfully sneak away and this happens. Zach and Hunter were there, but they were on the other side of the building where the tree lot is? So they didn't see it. Ashleigh was with Mom and Dad, but she was on her phone and didn't even know what was going on until people were jumping up and running around, and she's so short, she couldn't even see…which…I guess is a good thing." A hint of human feeling slipped like a shadow across her teenaged cynicism. "She's kind of messed up over it anyway, even without seeing anything. Mom and Dad saw it, but Mom's taking her phone into her room whenever she wants to get into the good stuff, so all I hear about is stupid stuff like your dress, and all Dad says is there was an accident and he got mixed up in the lights. But my friend Allison? I tutor her in math? She didn't get a good look, but she says her brother was right up in the front and he says Shelly's pants were down and it was that thing when guys choke themselves while they're getting off, which doesn't surprise me because he was a perv, but nobody else is saying it, and Allison's brother is kind of a perv himself so I'm not sure I believe it anyway."
"Yeah, whatever else Shelly was doing that night, it wasn't that," Ana confirmed. "The lights were partially wrapped around his legs, so…yeah, towards the end, his pants were pulled down a little, but that was completely incidental."
"So you think it was an accident too, huh?"
"Probably," said Ana, leaving plenty of room for doubt. "I could see someone being upset, not watching where they were going, blundering into the tree and getting tangled up in the cords…but Shelly had to climb over that stupid chicken wire to get at it and somehow he did that without messing up the lights that were clipped to it. Did Allison's brother notice if the wire went all the way around or were they just in front?"
Maddison shrugged, which was an appropriate answer for anyone not connected to the crime (if it even was a crime), and one Ana couldn't exactly pick at without betraying her own inappropriate level of interest. This wasn't going to work and it probably said something unpleasant about her that she even considered interrogating a teenager in the first place. Ana mentally shelved her follow-up questions and pulled up a short list of polite goodbyes so she could close the door and get on with her day, and then Maddison said, "I know it wasn't an accident, though."
"Oh yeah?"
"It was suicide," the girl said with a kind of solemn mic-drop energy.
"I guess it could have been," Ana allowed, "but whether on purpose or by accident, I'd still like to know how he did it without messing with any of the lights but the ones he hung himself with. And besides, I'm sure your mom mentioned I was face-to-face with the guy that night. He was not giving off depression-vibes."
"He had problems, though. Serious ones."
"Like what?" Ana asked obediently.
"Like how everyone thought he was so rich. Owns his own business, does all the town contracts…and always has plenty to spend down at the Wagon Wheel. Don't ask me who told me that, but my friend Bucky? He works at the bank and he says Shelly came in last month and asked Bucky's boss about bankruptcy."
Ana was a lot less concerned about this information than the fact that some guy at the bank where she also had an account was apparently chatting people's private finances around, but it painted a pretty bleak picture, all right. "I knew jobs were slow, but it couldn't have been that bad."
"Oh, it's actually worse, because he'd put all his personal savings and stuff into the company accounts so he could keep the business going all summer, and then Big Paulie stole it all and ever since then, he's bouncing checks all over town. And the thing about bankruptcy that Bucky told me is, you only get to weasel out of paying your debts that way if you're still up to date on all your payments. Shelly's not, so they can still come after him and the real drama is? He mortgaged his house to be able to buy the business way back then, plus he took out this big loan, and there's this thing called a balloon payment? It's like, you have so many years to pay off the loan and whatever's left to pay off at the end of those years, you have to pay all at once? Well, Bucky says Shelly's time is up next year and he owes more now than the loan he originally took out. So he's broke but he can't declare bankruptcy, he's behind on all his bills and he's got to come up with, like, half a million dollars or whatever in less than a year, and my friend Kendra? She says when they looked at his computer at work, his bookmarks were basically nothing but porn and videos on how the people who burned down their homes and stuff for the insurance money got caught. So, like, they think he was planning to burn down the office. They're saying maybe he was the one who burned that one Freddy's down on Halloween, like for practice? And then he tried to get the job to clean it all up. Can you imagine? Trying to get paid for his own arson."
"And how does Kendra know what was on Shelly's computer at work?"
An over-casual, smirking shrug. "Kendra's boyfriend's brother is Deputy Small?"
After a token wrestle with her flimsy conscience, Ana swung the door wide open and stepped back, giving her guest a tempting peek at the Metzger mansion, in case her own notoriety wasn't enough of a lure. "You want to come in and warm up for a bit before you get back on the road? I can fix you up a cup of cocoa or tea or something? You guys can do tea right? I think I have a box of peppermint around here…somewhere."
"I smell coffee."
"Or coffee."
"My mom would kill me," Maddison said with a broad smile, kicking the snow off her boots and stepping inside.
Soon they were settled in the kitchen, tucked up together in the bay window to soak in what there was of the morning's sun with their coffee to warm their hands (Maddison took hers with a lot of cream and sugar and kept adding more whenever Ana politely looked away), not gossiping, but merely passing the time with a little chit-chat on various subjects of interest.
"Don't even get me started, I swear," Maddison said, not for the first time. "I mean, I don't know anything about his business, but I know he was a creep. This one time? I was walking home from school and he pulled over and says he'll give me a ride. So I'm like whatever, it's raining, and I get in, and when we get to my house, he says the reason he picked me up is because I was wearing this really cute white top? And when it got wet in the rain…" Maddison let that trail off, but spread her arms slightly and arched her back to put her chest, presently under several layers of winter clothes, on full display.
Ana's eyes narrowed.
"Yeah," said Maddison with an icy sniff. "He kept me there for I don't even know how long, telling me how my body is a temple and everyone was going to think I was loose and I didn't want to get good boys in trouble with temptations. Like, ew. And here's me, practically in tears, thinking I'm already in trouble and I don't even know what I did wrong. Like, I was twelve! I barely had anything to show in the first place and he's acting like I was stripping in the middle of the street with dollar bills up my butt crack." She huffed into her coffee cup. "And so many of my girlfriends could tell you stories. Like, I'm not saying he ever touched a girl, I never heard anything like that, but he sure never passed up an opportunity to tell one if her bra strap was showing. He was a creep. Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but it's true."
"Why would it hurt my feelings? I worked for him off and on, but I wouldn't say we were ever friends."
"Didn't you date for a while?"
Ana narrowly avoided blowing coffee out of her nose and managed to just choke on it for a minute instead. "No," she rasped eventually, wiping at her mouth with a napkin. "We did not date or anything else that would fall under the subheading of dating."
"Hey, I'm not judging," said Maddison with a wave meant to convey that even if she was seventeen, she was worldly beyond her years. "But it's not just my mom who says so."
"No offense, but I don't particularly care what your mom says or how many people agree with her. It doesn't make any of them right, it just makes them gullible and/or liars."
A little color touched the girl's cheek. "I didn't say I believed it."
"I don't expect you to believe it. You sat in a car with the man in a wet shirt. And I bet he adjusted his rearview when you got in, but he waited until you were home before he told you to cover up." She waited, watching the girl think about that. "You know, I was happy just to quit and walk away from him, but since it's just us two talking, there is a lot about the man I am not going to miss. He's like a sixty-year-old version of the fifteen-year-old boy whose girlfriend won't let him cop a feel, so he tells everyone in his class she gave him a blowjob instead."
Maddison snorted and nodded.
"He was an ass. Maybe not the worst guy who ever lived, but an ass for sure. Not to speak ill of the dead and all that," Ana added, getting up for more coffee and topping off the girl's mug while she was at it. "And not suggesting he deserved what he got. Nobody fucking deserves to go out like that."
Maddison leaned forward, eyes sparkling. "Was it really gory? You can tell me. I can keep a secret."
They talked for a while about the tree and the lights and the hanging, with the girl asking questions and Ana keeping the answers as brief and colorless as possible, closing it all off by saying, "I just have a hard time picturing somebody doing that to himself. What makes you so sure it wasn't an accident?"
"There was a note."
"The fuck you say," Ana blurted, genuinely startled for the first time in this entire conversation. As Maddison giggled, she hastily amended, "Sorry, I meant to say 'no kidding', but for real, you know for a fact there's a note?"
Maddison nodded, drinking more coffee she obviously didn't enjoy. "They found it at his house. Like, he'd dragged the table over and put it right in front of the door so it was the first thing you saw when you walked in. Still sitting in the typewriter," she added with an extra-special eye roll. "Who else but Shelly, right? My friend Sarah? Well, she's not my friend anymore, she's a huge snot, but her cousin's sister worked for Shelly like five years ago, when he was still using the typewriter in the office. Like, it's 2010 everywhere else in the world, but it's 1880 in Shellyland. She had to learn how to use one of those hand-things with the blue paper whenever anyone would pay for things with a credit card. Can you imagine?"
"Yeah, as a matter of fact, I can. They still had the old time-stamper on the wall when I was there," Ana told her. "With actual paper cards that you'd use to literally punch in and out of work. I only ever saw that shit in old cartoons before."
"That's Shelly. You should see his house, it looks like a junkyard or one of those hoarder shows because he never throws anything away. That's his retirement plan, he's going to fix it all up and sell it, all that stuff rotting and rusting in the yard with grass growing over it. Anyway, they find the note and Kendra says it talked about how, like, his wife is gone and he's not close with his kids…and it said one of them isn't even his," Maddison added with twinkle-eyed gravity. "I don't know anything about that. All the Shelton boys moved out before I was born, but when Mom hears that, she's going to shit kittens. Anyway, the note goes on all about how he's just alone and doesn't want to live anymore, and it ends with him saying everyone's forgotten him, so he'll make sure people remember the way he died and he'll see them at the Tree-Lighting."
"Huh," said Ana, leaning back in her chair. "That sounds like a suicide note, all right."
"Yeah and if you don't believe Kendra, the coroner says the same thing, and I know that for a fact because, I shouldn't say anything, but I had to drop something off at the Town Hall, and when I was there, Mrs. Rutter? You know who she is?"
"We've met," said Ana.
"Well, she came slamming out of her room and went into the sheriff's section, you know how it all is there, and I wasn't trying to listen, but I couldn't help it because she was loud and they were right there, you know? And apparently, the coroner was on the phone in her office trying to figure out why he hadn't gotten confirmation on the whatever, the death warrant or something, because I guess he can't go home without it. We don't have our own death-guy," Maddison added, "because the whole town could fit in a shoebox, so literally every time someone dies, someone has to come over from St. George and go, 'Yep! He's dead!' Anyway, so the coroner wants to close the file and the sheriff said he wasn't convinced it was suicide, and Mrs. Rutter's all, 'No one cares if you're convinced, you're not the coroner, and one call to the governor and you won't be the sheriff either, so sign the damn papers. We can't afford to attract attention right now.' And he's all, 'I was there and I say there are reasonable doubts,' and she's all, 'That's right, you were there, and if anything happened, it happened right under your nose, so if that's the story you want to run with, be my guest, but you're not going to do anything but waste your time and my money, and when it's all over, it'll still be a suicide, and the only one going to prison will be you after his lawyers are through with you.'"
"Whose lawyers?" Ana asked, knowing full well.
"County's, I guess. If their coroner says one thing and you say something else, there's going to be lawyers, right? They can't just leave the file open forever because your sheriff wants to be a dick. Anyway, he did the whole, 'I'm just doing my job,' thing, and she was not having it. She told him his job was what she said it was and if he didn't sign the effing papers, his job was going to be directing traffic down at the community center, and the sheriff told her to prance her fancy shoes back to the kitchen and cook some more books and it was a big thing," Maddison concluded with satisfaction. Her pocket buzzed. She took out her phone, made a face, texted rapidly, and repocketed it, saying, "I gotta go."
"Wait a minute, direct traffic at the community center?" Ana echoed, frowning. "Did they open the holiday fair again?"
Maddison laughed. "You thought they wouldn't? My friend Brenna? Her mom got a table there and she says it costs five hundred dollars to rent it and she was supposed to get it for three weekends and the whole week up to Christmas Eve, so if they try to close after just a few hours, she'd better get a refund, and they can't afford to refund everybody, so they'd better reopen." Her smirk faded into something uncertain. "A lot of people are talking about that, too. How the whole town is going broke and pretty soon, people will have to leave. Mom says it's nothing, but…"
Ana sipped her coffee.
"Anyway, I guess we'll see on Friday, but I bet they open. Everyone just wants to get back to normal. I mean, it'd be different if it really was an accident, but it was just some gross old creep checking himself out," she said with the kind of casual cruelty only teenagers and serial killers are capable of. "In a year, they'll all say he hung himself at Freddy's anyway, so why let him ruin it for everyone? Thanks for the coffee."
Ana walked her to the door, then stood for a while on the porch, long after the girl's tail-lights were gone, thinking. Then she finished the work she'd started, put away her tools, changed into clean clothes and slathered on some concealer, and got in the truck.
Freddy had told her it was all right to go shopping, but she took all the wrong turns that would have put her on the road to Hurricane. She did not go all the way to the community center, but she went close enough, and once she'd seen what she came to see, she pulled a sharp U-turn in the middle of an empty intersection against the light and drove back across town. Sooner or later, she'd have to make a real shopping trip, but she got what she needed for now at the gas station and then she went home.
"You were supposed to call," were Freddy's first words when he met her at the loading dock.
"If I got arrested," she reminded him. "I didn't. In fact, everything's all right on that front, believe it or not."
He grunted, scanning the parking lot like he expected a chain of red-and-blue lights to roar in on her heels. "Are you sure?"
"How sure do you need me to be? Because I could break into his office and check the case file—"
"So help me God, Ana, I will lock you in the freezer."
"Sarcasm, bear. Having successfully avoided getting railroaded for a crime I didn't commit, you'll be pleased to know I'm in no hurry to go out and commit actual crimes. Apart from the usual breaking and entering at Freddy's, I mean."
"You seem to be in a good mood," he said suspiciously, closing the door and locking it. "What happened?"
"Turns out—Where is everyone?" she asked, having reached the far end of the kitchen, where she could look out and see the dining room was as empty as a building abandoned for over a decade ought to be.
Freddy grunted again and came over to snoop through her grocery bags, no doubt on the pretext of helping her put things away. "Bonnie's in the office, rotting his CPU on video games. Chica's in her room, reading. I haven't seen Foxy, which most likely means he's in his cabin. If he's not, well, I have better things to do than play hide-and-seek with him. What is this?" he demanded. "I told you real food. Where's the parsley?"
"Wouldn't you believe it, they were all out."
He withdrew a dusty box of Pop Tarts and gave her the Look.
"It's made with real fruit filling. Fruit is healthy. Do you want to hear this or not?"
Freddy grumbled, digging out cookies, ramen cups and bags of chips and pointedly thumping them down on the counter instead of into her cupboard. "Munchie Bear is not pleased. Yes, I want to hear it."
"Well, according to the delivery girl I talked to this morning, they found a suicide note at Shelly's house and some other incriminating stuff at the office, so it looks like he definitely planned this out."
"Who is 'they'?"
"Her best friend's cousin's boyfriend…wait, no… Was it her cousin's sister's boyfriend…? Look, there's some degrees of separation here, but it ended with one of the deputies who was actually there, so it is legit. Give me one of those."
Freddy looked down into the grocery bag he had been holding, took out a Monster Ultra and slowly passed it over. "I'm well aware that I have what could be generously called a skeptical nature."
"I sense a but."
"But as much as these charges were, to put it lightly—"
"Horseshit?"
He grunted and went on, "—and as impeccable a source as someone's cousin's friend's romantic partner's delivery person surely is, it's the sheriff who has to be convinced."
"Ordinarily, I'd say you were right, but you have to remember that the sheriff doesn't have to be convinced I didn't do it. He knows I didn't do it. He just has to be convinced that trying to pin it on me anyway won't work. That's why the note is so important, because it doesn't just say Shelly was going to kill himself, it also specifically mentioned doing it at the Tree-Lighting, so now it almost doesn't even matter if we ever figure out how he did it, clearly he had a plan. So that's our smoking gun. Our insurance is that the county coroner signed off on suicide, I hear. A coroner's job isn't to investigate murders, it's just to determine a cause of death, so Zabrinsky could probably make a case anyway, owing to the freaking bizarre circumstances, but he can't claim there's no evidence of suicide when he's holding a suicide note reading I'm going to hang myself on the town tree during the Lighting Ceremony, love, Shelly. More to the point, arguing with the coroner's findings could be taken as a personal and professional attack against a guy with a whole lot more clout than Zabrinsky's got. Whatever he feels about me, he's not going to piss on the coroner's shoes."
"So it's really over."
"If not the war, at least this particular battle."
His head tipped. "And yet, something's still bothering you."
"I wish." She shook her head, then shrugged and boosted herself up onto the countertop. "A man died. I knew him, I worked with him. I can't honestly say I liked him, but there ought to be some kind of feeling there, right? I should be bothered, bear. Instead, I'm relieved. And a little pissed off because the whole thing was horseshit and I should never have been put in a position of having to be relieved that someone I knew I hadn't killed offed himself all along. But the thing that's really bothering me isn't that I'm not bothered, it's the fact that no one is. I took a drive down Main Street today. I don't know why. Morbid curiosity, I guess. And you know what I saw?"
It was a rhetorical question, but before she could answer herself, Freddy said, "Was the tree still there?"
She recoiled slightly, barking out a harsh, startled laugh. "How did you—?"
"I've lived here a long time," he reminded her. "I've had many opportunities to see how this town's people react…or don't react…to sudden, violent death."
"Oh, you have no idea. Not only is the tree still there, but it's all lit up again, twirling angel and all. The arms are bent. From the weight, I guess. And they just put it back on anyway like no one's going to know what those bent arms mean. I heard they're even going to open up the holiday fair again and I'm not even sure… Is that wrong? I can't really expect them to cancel Christmas because Shelly decided to hang himself on the town tree, but I don't expect them to plug it in again the next day, either!"
"At the risk of sounding callous," said Freddy, "life goes on."
"Not like this. Nowhere else but Mammon does life go on like this. Do you know how many times I've heard anyone mention Big Paulie after that first week or so?" She answered her own question by holding up one hand in the shape of a 0. "That's not normal, especially for the way Paulie died. It'll be like that for Shelly, too. He died right in front of me, in front of the whole damn town, and that should leave a fucking scar, but it won't. His wife is dead, his kids moved away, Hageman and Bisano and anyone else that's left on his crew will probably find other work in another town, and that's it. If he died in as much debt as people seem to think he did, the bank will seize his assets and auction all his shit off, and someone will buy up the empty office and probably bulldoze the lot. There'll be nothing left to remind people to miss him. So they won't."
Freddy grunted, studying her. "Will you?"
"I kind of have to, don't I?" She uttered a short laugh, shaking her head. "The nerve of that son of a bitch, after the things he said to me."
Freddy took off his hat and rubbed a fist across his forehead. "Ana," he said at last, with a kind of defeated sigh riding along with his words. "You are not responsible for the circumstances that led this man to take his life and it is not necessary that you grieve for him to atone for whatever sins the people of this town have appointed to you."
"I know that."
"Then why are you doing this to yourself? If, as you say, he planned his death and carried it out exactly as planned—and changed his mind," he said as Ana opened her mouth. "But that was not part of the plan and does not signify. The part he planned included stirring up as much anger and resentment against you as possible in his last moments so that people would continue to harass you long after he was gone. You owe him nothing."
"You know, for a bear who sings about forgiveness and friendship as often as you do—" Ana began.
"This man was not your friend," he interrupted. "As for forgiveness, all singing aside, when you are dealing with someone who truly doesn't believe they've done anything wrong, forgiveness is of limited value. Yes, by all means, let go of your grievances for your own wellbeing, but never forget that an abuser will continue to abuse you if you give them the chance. And don't roll your eyes at me. Has that man ever apologized or demonstrated one iota of remorse for his treatment of you?" Freddy gave her a few seconds to reflect on that, then said, "Have you any reason to think that would have changed, had he lived?"
"What," Ana asked innocently, "you don't think people can change?"
Freddy laughed a booming, scornful laugh that came to a sudden stop as a few thoughts visibly occurred to him. His eyes narrowed. "Of course I do."
"Of course you do, or why the hell would you ever let me stay here? The worst Shelly ever thought I did was sleep around, but I lie, I cheat, I steal, not to mention the years I've spent in Rider's stable, where I engaged in the full spectrum of crime, from passively exploiting addiction to actively digging holes in the desert. And you can't even say I've left it all behind me, can you? I've killed two people since you met me and I consider the fact that I haven't killed more a phenomenal lapse of judgment."
"Ana—"
"By anyone's metrics, I am the worst kind of person, but you still let me in because you believe that people can change. Even when you don't like them, even when you're mad at them, even when you don't want them around, you still believe in giving someone a chance to change, because that's who you are. And if you'd been there that night," she went on, pointing an accusing finger into his scowling face, "even if you'd heard what he said to me, if you'd seen him when he needed help, you'd have tried to save him, because that's who you are too!"
"Yes, I would have," he agreed, showing his teeth in something that was not entirely a smile. "Had I been there, I absolutely would have, disregarding all risk of exposure to myself. I would have ripped through the barrier, snapped the cords where they bound him, and carried him away alive from all those children who did not deserve to be introduced to death in that manner, and then, when we were alone, I would have taken enormous pleasure in knocking his selfish head right off his shoulders."
Like a tee-ball, Tim Ulster whispered from the shadows of her heart. Honestly, you'd laugh if you saw it. He hit her so hard, her body got stuck on his fist.
"Don't say that, Freddy," she said softly. "You're better than that."
His ears shifted, darkly amused. "Am I."
"Yes," she said and drove it home with a careful and very gentle punch to the center of his chest. "You are. All the shit-talking graffiti in the world doesn't change who you are and you're a good man, Freddy. Fuck this town, you're a good man."
He absorbed that without expression, then dismissed it with a grunt and said, "Are you staying tonight?"
"I have to, don't I? I'm grounded."
"No," he said and sighed. "No, you're not grounded. And I know…I know I can't keep you here forever, as much as I…" He fell quiet, but not silent; his speaker crackled with soft swells of static, rising and falling like breaths. "I wish things were different," he said at last. "For all the good wishing does. Are you staying?"
"Freddy, I want to…"
"I sense a but."
"But I've got to spend more time at the house. I get visitors when I'm away too long. Not to mention the work there is really getting away from me," she admitted, scowling. "It's like every time I leave, I forget what it looks like and every time I go back, I'm punched in the face all over again by what a huge fucking mess it is."
He frowned, his plastic eyes moving from point to injured point along her head and arm. "If I had breath, I know I'd be wasting it, but you should really take it easy for the foreseeable future."
"Easy doesn't mean you stop living, big bear. Light activity is important for the healing process. You should have learned that when you were reading about glucoisolates."
"My definition of light activity and yours are, I think, rather different." He scowled, then, in the tone of a man who suspects he already knows the answer, asked, "When are you going to start looking for another job?"
"I haven't thought about it yet," she told him, which was essentially true. There was no point in thinking about another job when she already knew there wouldn't be any in Mammon. And sure, the energy condenser in the basement meant there would always be power and running water at the pizzeria long after the grid here went down, and the animatronics themselves provided fast, reliable wifi hotspots, but while it was fun to fantasize about living off the power of friendship and whatever was in Faust's bank bag until the money ran out, she knew better. Faust had put it as plainly as a man with a dictionary for a brain could put it: He intended to erase Mammon, to the last brick of the last foundation and that definitely included the pizzerias. Once the people were gone, the buildings were next, then the parks and playgrounds, the roads and streetsigns and last of all, the bridge that used to connect Mammon to the rest of the world. There would be nothing left when he was done, nothing but the canyon and the desert and maybe a sign somewhere between this dead space and Hurricane that said No Warning.
She couldn't stay here. The town's clock was ticking down and Ana's was ticking away with it, whether she liked it or not.
"What is it?" Freddy asked, his plastic eyes narrowing as he peered beneath the surface of what she used to think was a pretty good poker face.
It felt wrong to keep this a secret. It felt worse to tell him, when she could only tell him it was coming, not when, and she knew there was nothing he could do about it. He'd managed to suspend their homing protocols for a couple weeks at Yoshi's, but that didn't mean he could do it indefinitely. Without some way to reprogram their Home position, they were stuck here. Just because she couldn't stay didn't mean there had to be some way for them to leave. And just because they couldn't leave didn't mean there had to be some way for her to stay. Sometimes, no matter how hard you tried to hold things together, families just broke apart.
Freddy's patience for prolonged silences came to a swift, predictable end. "Ana, talk to me. That's an order."
She laughed, then sighed and finally looked at him. "It's always something, bear, that's all. You get through one thing and there's already something else over the horizon, out of sight, just waiting for its turn to jump out at you, and there's nothing I can do about it except wait. And of course it's Christmas," she said and tried again to laugh, although it came out as little more than a short, strangled cough. "Of course it is. It's always Christmas when the shitball really starts rolling. You know, in my entire adult life, I have never had a regular Christmas, not even a boring one where you eat a turkey TV dinner and watch the fireplace channel. If I'm working, then that's what I'm doing, taking other people's shifts so they can be home with their families. The rest of the time? Shit, I'm getting beat up or making runs for Rider or burning garbage under an overpass so my toes don't fall off. I know I should be a grown-up about this, but it sucks, bear, it really sucks to know that other people get to have fun and hang lights and get their stocking stuffed and all I get to do is sit around and wait for the next bad thing to happen."
He grunted and glanced toward the doorway to the dining room, watching the camera splash light around the empty stage as it went about its mindless routine and probably reminding him of his own routine, interrupted here so that he could feign interest in her self-indulgent bitching.
"Sorry." Ana finished her drink, tossed the empty in the trash-box and shouldered her day pack. "I can see you want to get moving and I'm done anyway. Do me a favor and let the others know the good news when you see them."
"You're not leaving already?"
She grimaced. "If I stay for a little, I'll stay all night. If I stay all night, I'll stay all week. This is the problem, bear. You make it too damn easy for me to stay. But I'll be back," she promised, heading for the loading dock.
"Wait."
She did, bracing herself, but all he did was put the Pop Tarts and a couple Monsters back into one of the bags and give it to her.
"Don't tell me you have food at the house," he said gruffly. "We both know you're lying. And when I see you again, you had better come with real food or so help me, I'll go to the store myself."
"Fine, fine," she sighed. "Text me your list. Just don't get your bowtie in a twist when I discover they're out of kelp and I have to settle for peppermint swirl Oreos instead."
He nodded, but when she tried to turn away, he refused to release his grip on the bag and she had to wait, patient but puzzled, while he worked through a few things. At last, he said, "We've never had one either, you know."
"What? One what?"
"Christmas. Or Halloween or Easter or any of them. Holidays are nothing here but special decorations and temporary changes to the menu. We don't celebrate things, we make things more festive for the paying customers who do the real celebrating at home. To be honest, I'm not even sure what constitutes a 'regular' Christmas, but if you have something in mind—"
"No," she said quickly and laughed to prove it. "Seriously, I was just complaining to hear myself complain. You're not supposed to reward me for that, you're supposed to tell me no one wants to hear my bitch-mouth whining."
His eyes whined, the bright blue of them briefly eclipsed by black. "I'm not going to tell you that," he said in a calm, somewhat distracted tone of voice. "I'm telling you that the next bad thing is always coming, so why not hang some lights and…whatever else is involved. Good things can happen too, even in Mammon."
"Name one," she said dourly.
"You found us."
She had nothing to say to that.
"Think about it," he told her and finally released the bag. "And if you decide you'd like to do something, know that we will be happy to be part of it." He rested his hand briefly on her good shoulder, then left, only to catch at the doorjamb and lean back in with a severe stare and a pointing finger to add, "Three stipulations: No exterior decorations—"
"Oh come on, Freddy, I know better than that!"
"—no singing—"
"Darn, there goes my plan for a 12-hour loop of dogs barking Jingle Bells."
"—and absolutely no mistletoe."
She nodded, let him lean back out of the doorway, then loudly said, "So the Santa Bear costume is a go?"
"Four stipulations," he called back at her from the East Hall, still walking away.
"I guess I can work with that," Ana said to herself and left, grinning like an idiot. Even if nothing happened (and nothing would. What a waste of time and money! Holidays were for kids), it was still fun to pretend. Her first Christmas in twenty years…and their first, ever. No, nothing would come of it, but the possibility was still there, and that was just as good.
Well…maybe a tree…