They all nod like this is the best idea ever. Darby wants to ask all the wrong questions, like if anyone knows what killed Miss Ollie—a gun, a knife, strangulation. She wants to ask who called Miss Ollie’s parents and if they screamed when they found out. She wants to know if Miss Ollie secretly did drugs or had a lot of sex.
“Where’s Rhea?” she murmurs to Mary Beth.
“She wasn’t answering her phone.” Which is pretty par-for-the-course Rhea behavior, so at least one thing is normal.
“She really should be here,” muses Mary Beth absently. “We need to be in community.”
“Yes, well.” Darby shrugs. Rhea’s a bit of a lone wolf, which is why she and Mary Beth don’t always get along. Darby understands both sides, probably because she’s got Griff and he hates people, so it evens out.
Chelsea Sawyer twists the top off an applesauce pouch for Lincoln. Less than ten minutes in and the snacks have already started flowing.
“I called my therapist yesterday,” says Roxy, one of the younger moms, with too much filler in her lips and a husband who’s some kind of surgeon with vanity plates on his Porsche. “She said they’re probably too young to really understand and that we only have to explain as much as we want to. It’s perfectly fine if we prefer to make something up.”
“Like say Miss Ollie went to the farm?” asks Darby.
“Exactly.” Roxy tousles her hair with long acrylic nails, which make a satisfying scratching noise against her scalp.
“Okay.” Darby tries not to let on that she thinks this is a stupid suggestion, no offense to Roxy’s therapist. “But I think that’s ignoring the fact that they were there.” She looks around to the other mothers for support. “There’s a certain amount of time that is completely unaccounted for. We don’t know what happened, what they witnessed. Miss Ollie was murdered literal steps away from her classroom. You’re telling me you don’t think any of them saw anything relevant?”
She leaves out her own whereabouts and whether she might have seen something relevant because that’s not really what this is about right now. Is it?
The beautiful Charlotte Higsby, who has probably never once raised her voice at her children, shifts her weight between her bony ass cheeks. “Don’t you think one of the kids would have said something by now? They’re four. They aren’t exactly known for their secret-keeping skills.”
“That’s true.” Darby sits on her side of the picnic bench with bad posture. Something weird is happening amongst the women gathered here. They’re both very upset and also trying to seem very upset. You wouldn’t think the second would need to be true when the first is, and yet she, too, feels the pressure to perform this unfamiliar ritual properly. She would even welcome a few tears, if they were to flow.
Zeke comes over to hang on his mother, tugging on her arm, asking her to come push him on the tire swing. Mommy, mommy, mommy. Darby watches Megan’s body lurch as she strains against the forty-odd pounds of her son. Not right now, maybe later. I would love to play with you, sweetie. Grown-ups are talking. Her whole voice changes. Darby watches, wondering if this is how Megan sounds when she and Zeke are alone or if this is just the parent she is when she has an audience.
“This is just awful,” says Chelsea. “Genuinely awful. I can’t believe how awful, and it’s going to get worse. Robin says there’s bound to be media coverage. She was so young and—”
“The kids,” says Bex’s mother, Lena.
“What about them?” asks Charlotte.
Lena’s eyes travel over all of their faces. “They’re biting,” Lena prompts. “Oh, come on. I know I’m not the only one. The … licking blood. They’re drinking it now, more or less.”
Darby had no intention of discussing what she’d done the night before, the way she closed her eyes and let Lola open up the wounds on her hand, the mix of disgust and perverse pleasure that her pain calmed her daughter, that it worked—what was that?
“The dads have a text chain,” says Darby. She watches her son climb the slide while Lola jumps out from underneath it and makes him giggle. Why won’t she play with kids her own age? Normally, she would commiserate with Griff, give him a play-by-play of what their daughter did and didn’t do on the playground, but not today, she won’t tell him a thing.
Yes, the other moms know about the text chain. Yes, they all find it annoying.
“I talked to Miss Ollie before,” Megan says, as if the “before” time frame isn’t obvious. “And she mentioned a thing I’d never heard of because, you know—because of what happened with Zeke and Bodhi Anderson and how it all played out.”
Go, Megan says to Zeke with her eyes, stopping him before he sets foot again on the concrete slab where the picnic benches live. Play.
“Renfield’s syndrome?” Darby is shocked to hear Mary Beth speak up, a small but discernible quiver in her voice.
“Yes!” says Megan. “That’s it. Pediatric Renfield’s syndrome. I’m not saying I buy it necessarily…” After that, Megan explains the gist of the condition as Miss Ollie explained it to her; none of which has been mentioned even in passing by Lola’s pediatrician, so what is Darby to make of that? On the one hand, Dr. Meckler was dismissive of Darby’s best mom instincts. On the other, Dr. Meckler’s version was much simpler.
Roxy shivers. “That sounds sick, like, seriously disturbed.”
“It makes sense to me.” God, Darby will say almost anything to contradict someone she doesn’t like; she will even say that it makes perfect sense that small children would want to suck blood. Even hers.
“I don’t know what we should do,” says Lena. “I’m at a loss. I’m crushed over what happened to Miss Ollie, of course.” Of course, they all agree. “But our kids. I don’t want our kids to be psychologically damaged once the press sinks their teeth—sorry—into all of this. That’s our responsibility.”
“And we have to keep them safe,” Charlotte continues. “We have to be realistic about who might have done this. Someone with access. A staff member, a teacher, a boyfriend, a parent. Which means our kids might have been exposed to violent behavior, and not just yesterday.”
Darby is suddenly very aware of the stillness of the air, which feels as though it’s sitting on her skin, like hot breath on the back of her neck. She’s having trouble breathing. She needs a stiff breeze, or a stiff drink, preferably both. Maybe it was a mistake coming here to speak with the other moms. A parent, Charlotte said.
“Darby.” Mary Beth puts her hand over her knee. Not helping matters. “I can’t believe I’m only just thinking of this. You could help us.” No one is more surprised by this news than Darby, who isn’t exactly what one would call the “likely candidate.” She tries gingerly to scoot away from Mary Beth’s hand; the touch of skin on skin is making her woozy. “You could help us to navigate all of this. Darby was in PR and now she’s a crisis manager,” she explains to the group, which doesn’t seem all that comforted by the news. She hears Mary Beth’s voice coming from far away. “And this is a crisis.”