Part 20

IN A MYSTICAL WAY

In her basement room at the Home, Kim prepared for another interview. Looking professional in a white dress-shirt, and a black blazer with matching slacks, she gathered her notebook and pen, though she still had about 10 minutes to spare. Her radio was playing, and a special bulletin alerted the Los Angeles Area to be on the lookout for a missing person. When she heard this phrase, missing person, it stirred up an instinctual response which brought her back to a different place and time…

. . .

Two Christmases ago, on the night of the party, Kim stood in front of Edward's mansion, addressing dozens of her neighbors, who had climbed the mountain in pursuit of him. Jim's fresh corpse, bloodied by Edward, lay on the ground between her and the crowd. Kim had also been bloodied; a wound on her shoulder had painted the sleeve of her white party dress a dramatic red. The worst had happened, that much was sure, but Edward's fate was unclear.

"Is he in there?", George Monroe asked with trepidation.
"He's dead.", Kim told them, trying to remain calm. "The roof caved in on him. They killed each other. You can see for yourselves."

She held up a disembodied scissorhand. As she'd watched the neighbors close in, her plan was to tell them Edward died, yet worried they wouldn't believe her. On her way from the attic to the mansion's front door, she'd passed by the Inventor's long-dormant laboratory. Quickly glancing at a shelf containing spare hands, she spied the empirical evidence needed to sell her story.

The neighbors grew stony. Jaws dropped. They glanced uneasily at one another. "I'm going home...", Helen announced. One by one, everyone followed her. Joyce, George's wife, stayed focused on Kim for a while as she walked away. Kim was very wary of Joyce, ever since Edward had casually mentioned she'd shown him "the back room where she took all of her clothes off", and she stood like a sentinel, guarding Edward's purity, guarding his integrity, guarding his secret, as Joyce descended out of sight.

Kim glanced back up at the shattered attic window, but she didn't see Edward. There was nothing she wanted to do more at this moment than to walk back into the house and nurture him with affirming words, to hold him and kiss him again...and more than that, to be kissed by him. But this would give him away, so after a few moments, she followed Joyce without saying a word. After all that people had done to him, her hope was that Edward recognized how loveable, and loved, he really was.

. . .

Once everyone was home, the police sirens returned to the neighborhood. This time it was an entire squad of vehicles, including a crisis unit van. Naturally, the Boggs' house was their first stop. Officer Richard Allen, who'd shown great sympathy for Edward in the aftermath of the robbery, after learning he'd lived the life of an unguided orphan, spoke with Kim.

They were alone in her front yard, Peg and Bill having driven Kevin to an emergency room to treat his facial cuts. She repeated her story, that Edward and Jim had killed each other. Acting on her statement, the crisis van drove up the mansion's driveway, expecting to obtain two bodies for the morgue.

Their expectations weren't met. Officer Allen had no choice but to interrogate Kim.
"Ms. Boggs, my squad's running the mansion down. They looked through the rubble where the roof fell. They didn't find a second body. Is there something you'd like to tell me?"
Kim, almost panicking, surrendered on the spot, and gave a rapid-fire explanation: "You drove off and my neighbors all went up the hill. There were so many of them, I think I counted 30. It was like a lynch mob. That's what Edward was up against. He's not actually dead, and he did kill Jim, but it was self-defense. I think he'd be done for if the neighbors went in the house. They seemed like they were ready to do something drastic. Jim's gun is still up there, he fired two shots. The second shot hit the roof, that's why it's broken."
"If Edward isn't dead, where is he?"
"The last time I saw him was in the attic. He was just standing there. If he's not there, I don't know where he went."

Officer Allen radioed his subordinates: "Update: suspect is not deceased. Repeat, suspect is not deceased. Location unknown. Proceed with caution."
"10-4", someone radioed back.
Turning back to Kim, he ordered: "I need you to come with me."

Kim was driven to the police department, where she was given a lie detector test about the night's events. She passed easily, Edward's death being the only untruth she'd told.

Added to her testimony was the recovery of the handgun Jim had shot Edward with. A forensic analysis showed the DNA taken from Jim's blood was a "very probable" match with the DNA contained in fingerprints on the gun. The gun was also two bullets short of being fully loaded, which corroborated Kim's story. After deliberation, the police released her from their custody.

. . .

Throughout the ordeal, Officer Allen's partiality to Edward didn't waver. Connecting the robbery to the killing, he understood that Jim had been out to get him. But now there was a new problem: Edward had completely disappeared.

In the coming days, the mansion was searched several times, and no trace of Edward was found. Using non-disclosure agreements to prevent anyone from discovering that Edward almost certainly wasn't dead, Officer Allen expanded the search to adjacent neighborhoods and shopping centers, to the swamps outside the suburban sprawl, and even to the towns and cities nearby. The goal, if Edward could be located, was to send him to a very distant, sparsely populated area, via the witness protection program, somewhere he could have contact with other humans if he wanted, while remaining undisturbed and free.

As Christmas came and went, the neighborhood devoted itself to recovery. "The sooner we can forget the whole thing, the better off we'll be.", Helen said during this time. She had the luxury of forgetting; Kim could never forget.

Star-crossed with a lover whose whereabouts and security couldn't be established, a ground zero spectator of man's inhumanity to man, abandoned and shunned by neighbors she once considered friends, she was battered, broken and bereaved throughout January. She compared it to being at the mercy of winter after a ruined harvest, or trekking barefoot over an unending path of thorns. The souls of most people she interacted with seemed dead, skeletons with raw meat and skin draped over them in hideous parodies of authentic personhood.

One day, when the depression and grief sank her to a nadir, Kim wearily struggled out of bed, and did the only thing she could: she said a prayer for Edward. It lightened her burden, though it was still very heavy. As the days passed, she'd continue this prayer, and each day, the burden lifted a bit more.

On the 5th day, the sky grew overcast in the afternoon, the mercury dove below freezing, and at sundown, the typically humid, tropical Florida Gulf Coast would receive snow akin to Maine or Minnesota.

Climatologists couldn't explain it. There was nothing in their predictive models to suggest these changes. The phenomenon continued for three nights, and Kim felt the pain in her heart decrease to a manageable melancholy. Watching the snow fall, flake by flake, she began to understand something, in a mystical way: "Edward is safe, wherever he is. If he weren't safe, it wouldn't be snowing."

As her broken spirit mended, stitch by stitch, she found it easier to focus on her last semester of high school coursework, and to send applications to universities. Still, she wondered, where was he? Would they ever meet again?

This was Kim's frame of mind when she ascended the basement stairs to interview Gemma, aged 15, the youngest person in the Home. She was looking forward to this interview, if only to satiate her curiosity. They hadn't spoken to each other much before, and aside from Kim, Gemma was the only one there who made no advertisement of any peculiarity she may have had. She seemed absolutely regular. Not only that, but Kim ascertained that if she'd gone to her high school, Gemma would probably be one of the more popular students there. Of course, Edward had shown that peculiarity was sometimes an asset in becoming popular…

"Why do you think you're peculiar?"
"I don't think I am, I know I am!" She was up-tempo and sanguine.
"Okay…how do you know you are?"

Gemma dimmed her voice:
"Because I'm lucky."
"You're lucky? In what way?"
"Freaky things have happened to me, things only luck can explain."
"That's very interesting, can you tell me more?"
"Okay, I come from a family of five. And sometimes to make decisions, y'know, like where we should go eat, we would draw straws. So you'd think there's a 1 in 5 chance I'd win, right? Well, we drew straws pretty often and I won about half the time. So for a while I thought maybe my parents rigged it so I'd win more often. I mean I have two brothers. Maybe they were going easy on me 'cause I'm a girl. But then in 6th grade, my teacher would let us play Bingo if we got finished with our lessons early…I won so often that my teacher actually made me stop playing so the other kids would have a chance. I mean obviously my parents weren't there to rig anything."
"Wow. …I'd guess other lucky things happened since then?"
"Yeah. My parents started playing the lottery. They'd buy one ticket a week, and they let me choose which ticket to buy. Seven weeks in, they picked a ticket worth $500,000."

Kim was awestruck and somewhat frightened. What was this girl capable of, exactly?

Gemma seemed frightened too. "Actually, Kim? Could you please leave that out the interview? I shouldn't have blabbed about that…"
"Sure, no worries!" Kim added a note to opaquely reword her answer.

"You're the youngest person in this Home, Gemma. How did you learn about it, and why'd you come to live here?"
"My parents actually know Dr. Ravenscroft. I'm from Connecticut originally. He and my parents worked at the same institution there, helping psych ward patients. They kept in touch over the years, that's another way luck has helped me."

Kim smiled at Gemma. Hearing stories of people working directly with the downtrodden always warmed her heart.

"As for why I'm here? Well, my parents think that luck can be spread to other people. And if you have a house full of people who are…a little strange, you'd be doing so much good for them. If my parents are right. The other thing is, I told some people 'I'm lucky', when I should've kept it to myself, and they started bullying me. They thought I was bragging. Can you tell this is kind of a bad habit for me?"
"Oh no, I'm sorry you were bullied!", Kim consoled. She'd usually had the opposite problem, wrongly keeping things to herself when she needed to raise her voice.
"Yeah, they wanted to, you know, give me a fresh start."
"What else can you tell me about luck?"
"That it's not a skill. I just want everyone to know, I'm not like some super-talented person. I didn't ask for this, it just happened to me. People who work hard to develop a skill, they're the ones I really admire."
"It keeps you humble..."
"Right. Although I still want to use what I've been given. I want to help the mentally ill when I'm older. I could fundraise to get them resources. Once I'm old enough to go to casinos, I could make a killing on roulette, and all that I earn would go to them."
Kim loved Gemma's boldness. "That's a clever idea! And I think it would work as long as you never went to the same casino twice!"

. . .

After the formal portion of the interview had been carried out, Kim and Gemma continued talking. The two bonded easily.

"I think Edward's wicked cool", Gemma confessed. "There's so much you can't do with scissors for hands, but he just focuses on the situations where he has the advantage…and you can tell how much he's practiced to get the level of skill he has! Compared to him I'm lazy, hah. I've got a lot to learn from him."
"Yeah…Edward became my boyfriend over a year ago…", Kim said in a subtle, dreamy tone. "People did something really terrible to him, and he had to hide for his life, so we couldn't be together. I was crushed. I didn't think I'd ever see him again. And then a few months ago, I learned he'd escaped and didn't have to hide anymore…so we reunited."

"That story is amazing! Maybe it's like a match made in heaven?"
"I really hope it is, it's been that way so far." Kim glanced at the clock. "Anyways, Dr. Ravenscroft needs to meet with me at 3:00 and edit the interview. I should get going. It was nice to finally talk to you!"
"Yeah, same here!"
They shook hands. Kim headed down the hall to the office, whilst Gemma returned to her second story bedroom.

"Oh, and Kim?"
Kim turned back to look at her. "Yeah?"
Gemma's face carried so many simultaneous emotions that Kim couldn't define, or even count them all.
"You're luckier than I am. I just thought you should know that."
"I am? …well maybe if you say so…"
"I know so. Anyways, I'll see you later." She walked up to the landing of the staircase, turned a corner and was out of sight.