“I apologize for that display,” she said.
“You don’t have to apologize,” said Zoe. “I’m famous for my displays. My displays have fans around the world.”
Someday, she was going to have to figure out if blurting weird stuff in awkward moments was a character flaw.
They stood a moment, neither knowing what came next. Ripper’s eyes darted around, as if a bounty hunter might suddenly appear from any direction. Zoe remembered her saying that they always came at night. She tried not to hope for X. Despite Ripper’s assurances, the chances of the lords sending him seemed impossibly small.
“Do you see something?” Zoe asked.
“No,” said Ripper. “I do not.”
Zoe wasn’t ready to give up on finding the asylum. Ripper had been there when Zoe confronted her runaway father. She had put an arm around Zoe—whispered to her and consoled her—less than two minutes after they met. Facing her dad had been scary, humiliating, more painful than anything Zoe had ever experienced. But she was glad she had done it. It freed her somehow. It made her heart feel less like a lead weight in her chest.
She wanted Ripper to know that kind of relief.
“Look, you met my mom, right?” she said. “Did you notice her fake tattoo? Above her ankle?”
“I do not recall her ankle, no,” said Ripper.
“Okay, so she’s obsessed with this tattoo—she has a whole stack of them in a drawer,” said Zoe. “It says, ‘The Only Way Out Is Through.’ I think that applies to this situation. Also to cake.”
Yeah, the blurting thing probably was a character flaw.
“Explain,” said Ripper.
“I think you can do this,” said Zoe. “I think you can see this Cropsey place.”
“And I assure you I cannot,” said Ripper.
“Can.”
“Cannot.”
“X and I used to argue like this,” said Zoe. “I always wore him down. I’ll wear you down, too.”
“Will not,” said Ripper.
But she smiled.
Zoe looked again at her phone, and found the asylum within seconds.
“It’s only a mile away—what’s left of it,” she said. “I’m going to go see Belinda. Are you going to make me go alone?”
The sun, sinking behind them, lit up Ripper’s ravaged dress. Zoe would never get over how lovely, and unlikely, the woman was. Even now, even in distress, she looked gorgeous, just raw around the eyes.
“Show me the way, you obstinate thing,” Ripper said finally.
Zoe beamed. She took off her black button-down sweater and handed it to Ripper.
“Put this on,” she said. “It’ll make you look less like a crazy dead person.”
Ripper didn’t want to know anything about Cropsey until they got there, so Zoe read a history of the place to herself as they walked through the trees and toward the ocean. She read about why Cropsey was shut down and about the celebrations in town on the day its doors were closed. She even found—in a graduate student’s thesis—an alphabetical list of every patient who’d ever walked, or been dragged, inside, including nine-year-old Belinda Popplewell-Heath. There were a dozen words about Belinda’s diagnosis, life, and death. Reading them, Zoe felt a chill spread through her. She wished she could protect Ripper from the details forever.
Zoe checked the map on her phone as they continued. The blue dot representing her and Ripper pulsed like a heartbeat.
“We’re close,” she said.
Ripper, trailing behind, breathed in sharply. Zoe saw her peer back through the trees.
“Do you see something now?” she said.
“I do not,” said Ripper.
Zoe and Ripper exited the woods and stopped at the top of a scruffy brown hill, which tumbled down to a busy road. The sky was darkening—turning black, like ink soaking through cloth. The first handful of stars hovered over the ocean.
They crossed the road to a wide driveway that dipped toward the water. As Zoe led Ripper through a pair of brick columns, she saw the rusty hinges that used to anchor the asylum’s gates, and a faded patch on the brickwork where a sign must have hung. It’d been in the shape of a family crest, as if Cropsey had been a place to be proud of.
Zoe looked to see if Ripper had noticed the remnants of the asylum. She had. In her nervousness, Ripper had begun tearing at her fingernails again—she’d bloodied the nail on her left ring-finger. Zoe gripped her arm.
“Don’t,” she said. “You promised Jonah you wouldn’t mess with your nails if he didn’t bite his.”
Ripper glowered, then nodded reluctantly.
“I remember,” she said.
They trudged up the drive in the dark. Hedges loomed like walls on either side, and the silence was so complete that even tiny, incidental sounds, like the crunch of their shoes on the gravel, seemed ominous.
“Tell me about Belinda,” said Zoe. “Not how she died—how she lived.”
“Oh, she was a box of fireworks, that girl,” Ripper said. “Plump and mischievous. Curly-haired. Beautiful, though it annoyed her to hear it. She used to say, ‘I’m only beautiful because you are, Mother—and it is very tedious to be complimented for something I had no part in!’ She was always in motion, always up to something. She used to somersault on the carpet, then stagger around dizzily, knocking over vases.”
“Jonah would have loved her,” said Zoe.
“Yes,” Ripper said quietly. “They’d have been a pair of bandits.” She paused. “I’ve missed my children for nearly two centuries. If I hadn’t already been dead, it would have killed me. Then—just when I thought I had subdued the pain the tiniest bit—Regent appeared at my cell, and introduced me to a ten-year-old boy.”
“X,” said Zoe.
“Yes,” said Ripper.
Yet again, she looked back to see if they were being followed.
Zoe wanted to ask what X had been like as a child, but knew it’d be selfish. And truthfully, she could imagine X at ten perfectly: kind, watchful, sad, convinced he must be broken or wicked in some way because he’d been born in the Lowlands. Still, she wondered what he wore, if he ever laughed, if Ripper brushed his hair, even with her fingers. It was hard not to ask.
“I loved X with all that was left of my heart,” said Ripper. “I still remember him releasing Regent’s hand and reaching his pink palm out to me that very first time. I never told him this, but he awakened such piercing memories of Alfie and Belinda that I cannot claim to have truly slept since.”
The hedges fell away, and the road arrived at an enormous lawn.
Ripper squinted into the distance.
“What, I wonder, is that?” she said.
A crumbling brick tower stood alone in the grass. Cracks ran down it like veins.
“That,” said Zoe, “is all that’s left of the Cropsey Asylum for the Whatever and Whatever.”
Her words floated toward the ocean. She couldn’t think of anything to say that would help Ripper now.
The tower was lit by a spotlight, which illuminated every fracture in the brick. Ripper motioned for Zoe to stay behind, and went forward alone. Zoe sank into the dead grass.
Ripper moved slowly. It was as if the tower were pushing back at her, trying to keep her away.
There was a plaque at the base of the monument.
Zoe knew roughly what it would say. There was no protecting Ripper from the truth.
Cropsey had been a horror—a place where patients were neglected, abused, experimented on, left in their own filth. The tower itself had had two purposes. It was used as a chute to drop the bodies of dead patients down and as a chimney for when the orderlies had collected enough corpses to burn.
Zoe watched as Ripper read the plaque. She watched as her shoulders sagged and as she fell on her knees and cried. All the tears Ripper had been forcing back burst out at once, like windows blasting out of a building. She tore at her gold dress. The spotlight threw her shadow at the tower, five stories tall.
When Ripper finally staggered back toward Zoe, her hair had fallen loose and spilled down her face. Her eyes looked feral.
Zoe had never been scared of Ripper.
She was now.
“What did your little machine tell you about my Belinda?” Ripper asked, her voice dark and hard.