The Retribution of Mara Dyer

  “If you insist.” I shrugged. “But Dumbledore is more dead.”

  “Point,” Daniel acknowledged.

  “You’re neither, actually.” Jamie looked up from a file he was reading. “You’re a muggle—”

  “Hey, now.”

  “Which makes you Giles.”

  Daniel considered it for a moment. “I’ll take it.”

  “Good. Now, Mara?” Jamie batted his eyelashes and handed me a stack of files. “Get reading.”

  Stella and Daniel roamed the stacks and made their list, coming back periodically to dump file folders bursting with paper onto the drafting table. Jamie and I sat in that dim room, crouched and hunched over hundreds, thousands of pages of records, emails, transcripts, everything. I sucked down the information until I was saturated with it, until my fingers were sore from paper cuts and my brain sloshed with mostly irrelevant details. I seemed to have gotten the pile of crap containing the most mundane bits of Kells’s early life—notes from her kindergarten teacher, her fourth-grade science project, et cetera. I idly wondered why they—whoever they were—bothered collecting this shit, but the truth was, I didn’t really care. I was hungry for answers, starving for them, and they were here, somewhere under this roof, and I would find them.

  “Mara,” Jamie said quietly. “Come look at this.”

  Or they would find me.

  Jamie handed me a thick file folder, already opened. “Don’t lose my place.”

  I glanced down at the pages. Medical records, they looked like. There were hospital admissions, discharges, prescriptions, and more records of visits to—

  “The Obstetrics and Gynecology Department,” I said aloud, and rechecked the name at the top of the page.

  Kells, Deborah S.

  “ ‘Patient conceived intrauterine pregnancy. Patient experienced miscarriage. Required termination.’ ”

  “I counted six miscarriages in there so far,” Jamie said. “Then I skipped ahead. She was diagnosed with idiopathic infertility—they didn’t know what was causing it.”

  “So . . .”

  Jamie shrugged. “I don’t know what it means exactly. We need more.”

  I looked at the dates of the records—1991, 1992, 1993. And that was just in this folder.

  “Should we skip ahead?” Jamie asked.

  “To when?”

  “I want to know how she ended up working at Horizons.”

  Jamie was right. Without fully realizing it, we’d been reading her file to find the answer to just one question: Why? Why had she brought us there? Why had she tortured us? If there was a reason, it wouldn’t be in her kindergarten records. We needed to find out how she’d found out about Horizons in the first place. And who had recruited her.

  Jamie rifled through some of the other folders and picked up small little envelopes with discs in them. “CDs?” He turned them over. “No. DVDs,” he said. “ ‘DSK Interviews 11-3-1999, 10-2-1999, 09-2-1999 . . . What the . . . ?”

  “DSK,” I said. “Deborah Susan Kells.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Right. How far do you think these go back?”

  I dipped my hands into the file folder Jamie had found them in. There were dozens. “To ’98, I think.”

  Jamie stood and looked in another folder. “There’s ’96 and ’97 in here.”

  We kept looking through folder after folder and eventually realized that the earliest DVDs were from 1994, beginning not long after the medical records ended.

  “I’m kind of dying to watch these,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  “They’re set at around the same time every month—some kind of experiment, maybe?” That would fit with what we knew about her. Maybe Dr. Kells’s first test subject had been herself.

  “Maybe.”

  “We should bring them with us.”

  “All of them?”

  I gestured to the room. “Well, we can’t watch them here.”

  Jamie stood and opened the door, then turned to me. “Should we go look for more?”

  We should. “I want to see how many there are. And if there are any from this year.” She might have talked about us. She might have talked about me.

  Just as we gathered up some of the files and left the stuffy little room, we ran into Daniel and Stella.

  Daniel took a dramatic step back. “What’s up?”

  “We found something,” I said, and then Jamie began to talk.

  40

  WOW,” DANIEL SAID AS HE walked into the brownstone. “What does your aunt do?”

  “Teacher,” Jamie said. “She made intelligent real estate decisions.”

  “That she did.”

  “I’m hungry,” Stella announced. “Anyone else?”

  “Starving,” I said, realizing it just then. We hadn’t eaten anything the whole day.

  “Should we order in?” she asked.

  Daniel shook his head.“The less attention we attract, the better.”

  He was right, so we managed to scrounge together a meal out of the junk we’d bought at the bodega down the street. Daniel divvied up the file folders between us and, taskmaster that he was, told us to get reading. But I wanted to watch the videos first.

  Daniel dug his heels in. “We’ll get more done if we split up the work.”

  “Split it up however you want,” I told him. “But I’m calling the interviews.”

  “I want to watch too,” Jamie said.

  Daniel looked at Stella, who held up her hands in defeat. “We bought popcorn,” she said. “Should I make popcorn?”

  “This isn’t movie night,” Daniel grumbled.

  I couldn’t help my smile. “Yes,” I told Stella. And then, to complete the picture, Jamie fetched blankets and tossed them at us. “Where do you want to start?” Jamie asked me as Stella walked in with a bowl of popcorn.

  “What’s the first one we’ve got?”

  Jamie shuffled the little DVD envelopes and announced, “January eighth, 1994.”

  “That one, then.”

  Jamie dutifully popped the DVD into his aunt’s Xbox (I very much wanted to meet this aunt), turned out the lights, and plopped down in an armchair.

  There was static at first, and then it cleared to reveal a very young-looking Dr. Kells sitting at a small card table in front of a pea-green-and-off-white-striped wall. It looked familiar. After a moment I realized why.

  It was the room from the video of her I’d seen in the Horizons Testing Facility, the one she’d used to trick me into searching for her, so she could lure me into the containment room. It had been there since 1994.

  “State your name for the record,” a male voice said. I didn’t recognize it.

  “Is this a deposition?” Daniel asked. I shushed him.

  “Deborah Susan Kells.”

  “Have you ever gone by any other name?”

  “My maiden name,” Dr. Kells said.

  “And what is that?”

  “Lowe.”

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  “No fucking way,” Jamie said.

  It wasn’t possible. I’d met Jude and Claire’s parents. I’d seen them at the funeral and memorial service. I’d—

  “What is your date of birth?”

  “Wait, someone pause this, we must discuss,” Jamie said as Dr. Kells started to recite what sounded like addresses.

  “Where’s the remote? Fuck!”

  “Degrees conferred?”

  “I was awarded a PhD in genetics from Harvard, and my first postdoc appointment was at—”

  Dr. Kells paused midword. Jamie left his hand extended while pointing at the television. “So okay,” he said. “Deborah Susan Lowe. As in—”

  “Jude Lowe,” Daniel said.

  “What the fuck, guys,” I said. “What. The. Fuck.”

  Jamie looked taken aback. “Who would marry that bitch?”

  “I’ve met Jude and Claire’s mother, though,” I said thinly. “I’ve met her and their dad. And I went to their
house.”  Then I remembered something—something Noah had said. “But . . . it wasn’t their house.”

  Daniel cocked his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Noah went there before Horizons,” I said. “Before . . .” I held up my wrists. Daniel flinched as if I’d hit him.

  “To Laurelton? Seriously?”

  I nodded. “To try to find Jude’s parents, to see if they knew anything, when we thought he was hunting me. But they weren’t there,” I said. “Jude’s parents, I mean. The people who answered the door said they’d owned the house for the past eighteen years. Noah thought I’d given him the wrong address.”

  “So okay.” Stella held up a finger. “If the people you thought were his parents weren’t really his parents,” Stella said, “who were they?”

  “Jesus, how far does this go back?” Jamie looked nervous.

  “Jude and Claire moved to Laurelton a year before they died,” I said. “Claire was in my grade, but Jude—”

  “Was in mine,” Daniel said.

  “Did you know him?” Stella asked.

  “Not well,” my brother said uncomfortably. “I should have. Maybe if I’d known him better, I could’ve—”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Even you wouldn’t have guessed this.”

  “What, though?” Jamie asked. “I mean, we were just looking at pages of records of miscarried pregnancies. You think she’s his mother?”

  I thought back to every interaction I’d had with Dr. Kells, rifling through my memories for a clue, a hint, anything. But every time I’d talked to her, she’d been dispassionate. Clinical.

  Except for the last time, anyway.

  “Lowe isn’t really an uncommon name,” Jamie said.

  We all looked at him.

  “Maybe it’s a coincidence?” he asked meekly.

  I leaned forward. “You’re not serious.”

  “I don’t know!” he admitted. “Maybe they’re related but she’s not their mother? We’ve barely even watched five minutes of this.”

  He had a point. “We’re going to have to marathon them.”

  “There are hundreds,” Stella said.

  Jamie rubbed his forehead. “And they’re not exactly The Lord of the Rings.”

  “Well, we’re not exactly the fucking Fellowship,” I said. “Unless anyone here can think of a shortcut, you should probably press play.”

  “Wait.” Daniel stood up. He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with five spiral notebooks, which he must have bought at the bodega. He tossed one to each of us.

  “No pens?” I asked.

  Daniel threw a box of pens at me, and then the five of us got to work.

  By five a.m., we’d barely scratched the surface of Dr. Kells: The Early Years. We broke to sleep—or nap, really, since Daniel had us up by ten to begin again. We were afraid to divide the work—what if one of us noticed something that the rest of us didn’t? So we watched them all together, Stella and Daniel skimming through files that seemed to correspond with the months and times Kells was interviewed, though each file wasn’t properly labeled or dated. The sequence 18213 was a cipher, and we needed to use it to find the files we wanted. Jamie was inordinately good at it, so he did the code-breaking. Daniel and Stella hunted for the files in the stacks, and they brought them back to me to read. This is what we learned:

  Dr. Kells was a carrier of G1821. She never manifested, though. That’s a thing that can happen, apparently, an interesting little factoid that Daniel made much of. Manifestation was like cancer, kind of. There’s a gene involved, but there are also environmental triggers, so even if you have the marker for the condition, you might still be safe if nothing switches the gene on.

  Which brought us to the second thing we learned, though we kind of already knew it—Kells was obsessed with finding a way to correct “the anomaly,” having blamed it for her infertility. As we watched her interviews, we heard her mention working with a man—a pharmacologist, Daniel guessed—to develop different drugs to counteract the effects of the gene, to switch off its effects, whether a carrier had manifested or not. But nothing worked . . . on her, at least. So she wanted to see if drugs worked on anyone else. But she couldn’t jump through the appropriate hoops to be able to do human trials on women who were trying to become pregnant who might have been carriers too. Couples undergoing infertility treatment tended to be wealthy, which meant Congress cared about them.

  No one cared about foster kids, though, so Kells became a foster parent. Once I realized what I was looking for, I began to find records for A. and B. Lowe, C. and D. Lowe, E. and F. Lowe, and G. and H. Lowe. All identical twins. All boys. All dead.

  And they’d all been under her care. They died at different ages, with different symptoms, but all culminating in a fever and “death arising from natural causes,” according to the medical examiners’ reports in each of their files. My heart hurt as I looked at the pictures of them; Abraham at eight months old, teething on a green plastic stegosaurus he held with two hands up to his mouth; Benjamin, who lived a year longer than his twin, squatting on two chubby legs as he pushed a toy fire truck; Christopher, dead at two, shirtless in his picture as he stuck his tongue out at the camera; David, his twin, three at his time of death, wearing a little suit, surrounded by ducks in a park; Ethan, four when he was placed into foster care, four and a half when he died; and his twin, Frederick, five when he died, four in the picture with Ethan, their little arms around each other’s shoulders; Garrett, six, legs splayed out over the back of a shaggy, bored-looking pony, with his twin, Henry, holding the halter. Garrett almost made it to seven. Henry died on his seventh birthday.

  And then a picture of a little eight-year-old boy with a too-wide grin and a missing front tooth, a spray of freckles across his nose and a dimple in his cheek as he smiled beneath a too-big Patriots cap tilted haphazardly on his nearly white-blond head.

  Subject nine: Jude Lowe.

  41

  JUDE AND CLAIRE LOWE, PAIR five. Fraternal twins. “Artificially induced at age eight,” according to their files, their real files, which meant that was when they were injected with whatever version of whatever drug Kells was working on then to cause the symptoms of G1821.

  “Wait a second,” Jamie said, looking up from the files. ““What happened to I. Lowe?”

  “There is no I.”

  Jamie snapped his fingers. “Exactly.”

  Stella just shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t like any boys’ names that started with I?”

  “Like ‘Ignatius’?” Daniel chimed in.

  “Or ‘Ira,’ ” I said.

  “Which brings up another point,” Jamie said, and bit his thumbnail. “These weren’t the kids’ real names. They couldn’t have been. They would have all had names on their birth certificates.”

  “I didn’t see any birth certificates in the files,” I said. Only death certificates. “Their medical records use the aliases or whatever, though.”

  “So Kells must have renamed them—but how do you get a six- or seven-year-old to accept a new name?”

  “And lie to doctors and nurses about it?” I asked. I thought about the files I’d thumbed through, but no hospital names stood out. “Give me that,” I said to Jamie, and he handed me one of the files. F. Lowe. Frederick.

  “These records are from Mount Tom Hospital. Someone Google it.”

  Daniel did. “Doesn’t exist.” He paused. “So are these records even real?”

  “I think they are,” Stella said. “I mean, why fabricate someone’s entire medical history? Especially if you’re not even using that person’s real name?”

  A thought dawned on me. “It’s another layer of protection,” I said. “The names were changed, the places and dates—none of it’s real. If it were, it would make the children, and what happened to them, too easy to actually find. But I think Stella’s right, that what’s actually reported there is real. The symptoms, the treatment, the consequences. I mean, we saw the archives. Th
e real files, with the kids’ real names, might be in there somewhere, but without knowing what they are, no one would ever find them.”

  Daniel nodded slowly. “So none of this can be used as evidence,” he said quietly. “Kells was a real person with a real identity, and once you have an identity, it’s not easy to shake. If anyone traced her history and found the archives, like we did, and tried to report this stuff, like I want to, these would just look like the fictional records from fictional kids that never existed.”

  “Smart,” Jamie said.

  Very.

  “But how would she be allowed to foster so many kids? Especially when they kept dying on her?” Stella asked.

  “The same way she had the resources to find us,” I said. “And to experiment on us, and to do all of this research—”

  “Plus,” Jamie said, “bad shit happens to kids in foster care all the time.”

  I looked at Kells’s frozen image on the screen, and pressed play.

  “J. woke up two days after induction complaining of sickness. The thermometer showed a fever of 99.6. I’m hopeful that this is just a normal cold, or flu, since the others presented with temperatures above 101 before they expired.”

  “Expired? Damn, that’s cold,” Jamie said.

  “Claire seems fine, anyway,” Kells continued, looking perfectly calm, not worried at all.

  “Fast forward,” Jamie said, and I did.

  Kells looked tense and worried now. “J. has developed the fever. Same symptoms as the others, mostly, but with a few key differences. He seems disoriented. I’ve caught him speaking in the third person, to himself, and occasionally to me. He has asked to see Claire, but I don’t want to frighten her. I need her amenable and willing to endure future testing, particularly if Jude expires like the rest.”

  I stopped the DVD. “Claire was in my grade,” I said to no one in particular.

  “And Jude was in mine,” Daniel said.

  Stella picked up the pile of papers on the table. “But it says they were fraternal twins. Pair five.”

  I nodded.

  “Why lie?” I asked.

  I pressed play, but Dr. Kells had switched the focus of her interview, or recording, or whatever this was, to a discussion of the properties of Amylethe. Daniel and Stella kept watching as Jamie and I picked out the DVDs with the months and dates that corresponded to medical events in Jude’s file. When this DVD finished, we put the next one in.