They found twenty-three pounds of tapeworm in Margaret’s stomach. The longest measured thirty-three feet. Her doctor had never suspected tapeworms to be the cause of her illness, so while Margaret had been screened for everything from leukemia to anorexia, they’d been missed. The creatures had been feeding off her for weeks, reproducing in her guts, which were now a seething nest of Taennia saginata.
Riley’s license was suspended, so Abby had driven them to the hospital. In the churn of parents, and doctors, and purgatives, and consultants, and nurses swirling through Margaret’s tenth-floor room, they sort of forgot about her in the corner. Which meant that Abby was still there, along with Mr. and Mrs. Middleton, Riley, and Margaret’s other three brothers, Hoyt, Ashley, and Saluda, when the doctor told them what had happened.
Margaret had eaten tapeworm eggs. A lot of them. It was a common weight loss scheme. Advertisements in the backs of magazines called them a “fast and natural solution to your slimming needs.” You sent the company a check or money order, and they would mail you a plastic canister of eggs. They looked like chalky powder. You mixed it with water to form a thick milkshake. Then you drank it down. You were supposed to drink one milkshake and give it time to work. If Margaret had drunk more than one, it could be dangerous. Even two could be life-threatening.
The doctors wanted to know how many she’d consumed. And where she had gotten the idea. Did she know how dangerous it was? Did she know she could have died? But they couldn’t ask Margaret anything because she’d been sedated the minute she arrived at the hospital. It was the only way to make her stop screaming.
But Abby knew.
Tonight She Comes
Abby drove home, rising and falling over the bridges, and locked herself in her bedroom. She pulled the daybook from the back of her closet, where she’d hidden it, and turned the pages. Everything was there. Passages from The Song of Solomon (“Like a lily among the thorns, So is my darling among the maidens. Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest . . .”). Father Morgan’s signature written in long columns, the forgery getting sharper with each line. Pictures slashed with red and black markers showing a nude figure on top of the bell tower, a girl with worms coming from her mouth, dogs surrounding another girl and tearing her to shreds.
She hunted through her desk, found the faculty directory, and dialed Father Morgan’s number. It rang ten times, eleven, twelve. Finally, a man answered.
“Father Morgan?” Abby said.
“Who is this?” the man asked.
“I’m one of his students,” Abby said. “I need to speak to him.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Please,” Abby said. “Tell him I’m Abby Rivers. Ask him if he’ll talk to me. Just ask him.”
A thunk as the phone was set down, followed by a long silence. Finally, someone picked up the receiver.
“Abby,” Father Morgan said, and he sounded very tired. “I’m no longer teaching at Albemarle, but I have the number for the chaplain who’s filling in for me.”
“Something’s wrong with Gretchen,” Abby said.
“That’s not something I can help you with,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t have any contact with students.”
“I have her daybook,” Abby raced ahead. “She practiced forging your name. I saw her giving those notes to Glee. She did it.”
There was a pause and then Father Morgan spoke, sounding even more exhausted.
“I’m sorry, Abby,” he said. “But I think it’s best if I just move on.”
“This has to stop!” Abby said. “She gave tapeworm eggs to Margaret, she got Wallace Stoney drunk, she forged those notes to Glee. All of it’s written down in her daybook. She’s been planning this for weeks, and unless you stop her she’s going to keep doing more things. Worse things.”
“Abby . . . ,” Father Morgan began.
“Please believe me,” Abby said. “You have to give it to someone. Major will think I made it up. But you could give it to someone in charge.”
“Hold on a minute,” Father Morgan said. “Don’t hang up.”
Abby heard fabric scraping as he pressed the receiver to his sweater and spoke to someone in the room. Their voices rose and then grew louder, talking over each other, but they were too muffled for Abby to make out what they were saying. When Father Morgan returned to the phone, his voice sounded stronger.
“This is all in Gretchen Lang’s daybook?” he asked. “You’re sure it’s hers?”
Abby nodded, and then realized she was on the phone.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“I need to look at it,” Father Morgan said. “And I think it should be with your parents. Is your mother home now?”
“She’s back in the morning,” Abby said.
“All right,” Father Morgan said. “First thing in the morning I’ll be at your house, and I’m bringing a friend. He’ll look at the book, and if it is what you say it is, then you’ll need to call in sick from school, and we’ll need to go to the police.”
“The police?” Abby said, and she couldn’t help feeling like she’d betrayed Gretchen. She had to remind herself that Gretchen was no longer her friend.
“These are serious crimes,” Father Morgan said. “There will be serious consequences.”
After they hung up, Abby couldn’t sleep. She turned on the TV, but Moonlighting felt loud and coarse and obvious, so she switched it off and put on No Jacket Required, letting Phil Collins’s soft, reassuring voice fill the room while she sat on her bed, the daybook at the other end. She was exhausted and relieved and scared, and her veins hummed with adrenaline, and then they ran empty and she pulled Geoffrey the Giraffe and Cabbage Head into her lap and laid her head against the wall and slept.
In her dream she wasn’t alone anymore. In her dream, nothing had happened that couldn’t be fixed. In her dream, everything was back to the way it was and she and Gretchen were driving out to Wadmalaw to go waterskiing with Margaret and Glee, and they had a case of Busch in the Bunny’s trunk, and George Michael was on the radio, and the wind was in their hair and nothing smelled like United Colors of Benetton and she looked over and smiled and Gretchen smiled back, but there was a roach on her face, sitting on one cheek, and when Gretchen opened her mouth she said, “Hi! I’m Mickey!” and Abby told her to stop doing that, and Gretchen did it again and again until Abby opened her eyes and her light was still on and her phone was ringing.
“Hi! I’m Mickey!” it chirped. “Hi! I’m Mickey!”
She looked at her digital clock: 11:06. Abby snatched the phone off the cradle and heard a great, roaring wall of black static.
“Abby?” Gretchen said over the long-distance lines.
“Gretchen!” Abby shouted. “I’m doing it. Tomorrow. I’m going to make it stop.”
The static cut out and the phone line was a vast gulf of darkness.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Gretchen said, her voice swimming up out of the void. “You shouldn’t have told.”
“This has to stop,” Abby said. “She’s hurting everyone!”
“You’d better lock up all your windows and close all your doors,” Gretchen echoed on the line. “She’s coming.”
The urgency in Gretchen’s staticky voice alarmed Abby but she shook her head.
“No one’s coming,” she said.
“You don’t understand . . . ,” Gretchen began.
“I’m sick and tired of people telling me what I don’t understand,” Abby yelled at the phone. “This is over! It’s ending!”
“It’s over,” Gretchen moaned down the phone line. “It’s too late.”
Abby’s bedroom door swung open to reveal Gretchen standing there holding a shopping bag and grinning.
“Hi, Abby-Normal,” she said.
“It’s too late, it’s too late, it’s too late,” sing-songed the voice on the phone.
“Is that little ghost still talking?” Gretchen asked.
She set her brown paper shopping bag next to the door, then she took the phone from Abby and hung it back on Mickey’s arm with a terminal, plastic clack. Instinctively, Abby slid off her bed and stood up.
“I think it’s bad luck to talk to yourself, don’t you?” Gretchen asked.