“You know your fire patterns.”
“A hobby of mine,” I said, but the joke didn’t have any energy behind it. Surrounded as we were by the pervasive smell of the smoke, the fire of 1977 felt too immediate. That fire had managed to take everything important from me, cutting short Dr. Bellanger’s life, leaving his eight living creations abandoned and bereft. Not to mention snuffing out all the other sisters I could’ve had, hundreds or thousands who would’ve been born by now, instead burned along with Bellanger’s irreplaceable mind.
I dropped onto the bottom step of the staircase and flipped through the notebook pages. Faces and headlines skimming by. Death and scandal, scandal and loss. And those notes that didn’t make any sense. I spotted birds scribbled haphazardly in the margins, and my stomach lurched at the thought of that bird out on the lawn. Tom seemed distracted, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He stood there with his camera clenched in both hands.
“You’re pretty much the only person she’s talked to for the past year, and even you don’t know anything,” I said, but then I trailed off. Through the kitchen window, above the sink full of dirty dishes, I had a view of the street outside my house. Headlights. That car was back, the maroon sedan from earlier, driving by slowly.
“Hold on,” Tom said. “I’m not the only person. Your mother was talking to other people about Fiona.”
“Other journalists, you mean?” I asked, shifting my attention back to him.
He looked at me like he thought I might be kidding. “She was talking to the other Homesteaders.”
I had to take a second, the sedan already half forgotten in the face of this bigger revelation. “No, she wasn’t,” I said automatically, even though it made sense. Why else would she have been compiling that list? “She never would’ve done that. Never.”
“I got the impression that your mom wasn’t exactly friendly with the others?” Tom asked.
“Yeah, you could say that. Not a visit, not a letter, not even a phone call.”
“But you’ve gotten in touch with them yourself?”
I bristled. Most people assumed I’d had time to seek out the other Girls, that we were all good friends, sharing reminiscences of our bizarre babyhoods. “No,” I admitted, terse. “I’ve been busy.” The acceptance to the University of Chicago had triggered the busiest stage of my life. I’d hoped that the flurry of news pieces—“Josephine Morrow, First Human ‘Virgin Birth,’ Follows in Her Creator’s Footsteps!”—would lead to calls or letters from the others, some congratulations. So far, only silence.
“Sure,” Tom said, “I know how busy you’ve been. Totally understandable.”
“I wasn’t asking for approval, Tom,” I said.
He shrugged, held up his hands, Mea culpa.
“I can’t believe my mother got in touch with them, though, it’s just—” I stopped myself. It was too bizarre to be sitting here talking to a reporter about my mother’s personal habits. If I was going to track down my mother, I had to quit imagining the woman I’d left behind a year ago. I needed to track down this newer version, the one who’d apparently turned into a crazed sleuth before vanishing in a puff of smoke and flame. “Did she just call the others?” I asked instead, focusing. “Or did she actually visit?”
“She mentioned visiting some of them, yeah.”
The newspapers had noted my mother’s long absences from work. And I’d seen the disrepair of the house. The overgrown lawn, the piled-up mail. She hadn’t been hiding inside. She’d been gone entirely. Out of town. Something nobody in Coeur du Lac would ever suspect of her.
“When I heard about the fire,” Tom went on, “my first thought was that Margaret had gone to one of the others. It just makes sense.”
The idea was exhilarating, but I had to think this through carefully. “The Chevy’s still in the garage.”
“Okay. Doesn’t necessarily mean anything. How’d you get here? I didn’t see a car out front. Maybe she left some other way.”
My mother—not vanished, but rearranged. Optimism flared in me, hot and bright, and I didn’t fight it. Maybe this didn’t have to be so complicated. I could reconnect with a few of the other Homesteaders and find my mother at the same time. Figure out whatever she’d wanted to say about Fiona.
Tom watched me flip to the list. “Your mom mentioned Emily French by name,” he offered. “She was considering visiting her when we talked.”