The Shining Girls A Novel

Harper

13 JUNE 1993

The flash is blinding. The force spins him into the wall.

Harper touches the hole in his shirt where a dark stain is congealing. First it feels blank. Then the pain comes, every nerve along the trajectory of the hole the bullet bored through him lighting up at the same time. He tries to laugh, but his breathing is wet and wheezing as his lung starts filling with blood. ‘You can’t,’ he says.

‘Really?’ She looks beautiful, Harper thinks, lips pulled back to show her teeth, eyes bright, her hair like a halo around her head. Shining.

She pulls the trigger again, blinking involuntarily at the crack. And again and again. And again. Until the chamber clicks. The detonations in his body register only dimly, as if he is already peeling away.

Then she throws the gun at him in frustration and falls onto her knees and buries her face in her hands.

Should have finished me, you stupid cunt, he thinks. He tries to move towards her, but his body won’t respond.

His perspective is skewed, distorted at an obtuse angle. The whole scene is laid out beneath him, as if he is falling up and away from it.

The girl with her shoulders shaking, as the flames lick up from the tangle of chair and curtains and totems, spewing a black, chemical smoke.

The big man lying on the floorboards, swallowing hard, his eyes closed, holding his stomach and his chest, blood running between his fingers.

Harper can see himself standing against the wall. How can he see outside of himself? He is looking down on everything, as if he is wedged high against the ceiling, but still tethered to the lump of flesh with his face below.

Harper sees Harper’s legs go slack. His body starts sliding down the surface of the wall. The back of his head smears dark globs of blood and brain over the cream wallpaper.

He feels the connection slip. And then it snaps.

He howls in disbelief, clawing to get back down. But he has no hands to grasp. He is a dead thing. So much meat on the floor.

He stretches out, reaching for anything.

And finds the House.

Floorboards instead of bones. Walls instead of flesh.

He can pull it back. Start again. Undo this. The heat of the flames and the choking smoke and the howling fury.

It’s not so much a possession as an infection.

The House was always his.

Always him.





Kirby

13 JUNE 1993

The room is getting hot. The smoke gets in through the sobs, catches in her lungs. She could just die here. Keep her eyes closed. Not get up ever again. It would be easy. Asphyxiation would kill her before the flames reached her. She could just breathe deep. Let it go. It’s done.

Something is pawing at her hand, insistently. Like a dog.

She doesn’t want to, but she opens her eyes to see Dan, squeezing her hand. He’s on his knees, hunched over. His fingers are slick with blood.

‘Little help?’ he rasps.

‘Oh God.’ She’s still shaking, crying and coughing. She throws her arms around him and he winces.

‘Ow.’

‘Hang on. I need your jacket.’ She helps him out of it and ties it around his waist as tightly as she can against the wound. It starts soaking through even before she’s finished. She can’t think about that. She crawls under his arm, braces against the floor and hefts up. He’s too heavy, she can’t lift him. Her boot skids in his blood.

‘Careful, f*ck.’ He’s gone horribly pale.

‘Okay.’ She says. ‘Like this,’ she rounds her shoulders so she takes on most of his weight, holding him up and shuffling forward. The fire crackles at their backs, jumping up the walls hungrily. The paper blackens and warps, wisps of smoke curling upwards.

And God help her, she can still feel him here.

They half-crawl, half-fall towards the doorway. She balances precariously and sweeps her foot out to kick the door closed on the ice and snow outside.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Trying to get home.’ She helps him onto all fours. ‘Hold on for another second. One more second.’

‘I liked kissing you,’ Dan says, his voice cracking.

‘Don’t talk.’

‘I don’t know if I’m as strong as you.’

‘If you want to kiss me again, then shut the f*ck up and stop bleeding to death,’ she snaps.

‘Okay,’ Dan gasps, smiling weakly, and then more steadily, ‘Okay.’

Kirby takes a breath and opens the door onto a summer’s night full of police sirens and flashing lights.





POSTSCRIPT


Bartek

3 DECEMBER 1929

The Polish engineer pulls the car over two blocks away and sits with the engine running, thinking about what he’s seen. A bad scene, that much he knows. He couldn’t make out exactly what was happening. The man lying in the middle of the street bleeding in the snow. That shocked him. He nearly ran him over. He wasn’t really concentrating on the road. Steering the car through the streets by rote equation that equals home, all the way from Cicero.

He’s a little drunk, Bartek admits to himself. A lot drunk. When he starts losing, the gin comes easier to hand. And Louis kept the drinks flowing all night and into the small hours of the morning, long after he’d spent the last of his coin. And gave him credit on top of it. Enough to sink himself utterly. Now he owes Cowen $2,000.

The ugly truth is that he was lucky to be able to drive away in his car at all. They’ll be coming for it Sunday morning right before church if he doesn’t find a way to raise the money by the weekend. Better than coming for him, but that’s next. Diamond Lou Cowen does not f*ck around.

Gambling with known gangsters. Chumming around with personal friends of Mr Capone. What was he thinking? He has enough problems on his plate without getting in the middle of a bloody altercation at five o’clock in the morning.

But he’s intrigued. At the glow spilling out onto the street from the ruined house and the improbable sumptuousness he spied through the open door. He should go back and help, he tells himself. Or just go and have a look-see. He can always call the police if it’s serious.

He turns the car around, circling back to the house.

The key is waiting for him on the front porch, barely on the threshold of the closed door, spattered with snow and bloodstained.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


Thanks to everyone who helped make this book what it is.

I had a crack team of researchers digging up information, out-ofprint books, videos, photographs and personal histories on everything from illegal abortion groups to real-life radium dancing girls, the evolution of forensics, ’30s restaurant reviews and the history of ’80s toys. My dedicated researcher Zara Trafford, as well as Adam Maxwell and Christopher Holtorf of research and game design company SkywardStar, all found me strange and amazing things, elaborated on by Liam Kruger and Louisa Betteridge, and also Matthew Brown, who was always on call by dint of being married to me. Thank you.

In Chicago, Katherine and Kendaa Fitzpatrick were the best possible hosts, although it was a little weird taking Katherine’s two-year-old daughter along on a murder scene playdate to Montrose Beach. Kate’s husband Dr Geoff Lowrey provided medical advice and fact-checking, as did ENT surgeon Simon Gane. Any gruesome errors are mine.

Twitter friend Alan Nazerian (@gammacounter) drove me round, accompanied me to Wrigley Field and introduced me to helpful people, including Ava George Stewart, who gave me invaluable insight into criminal law over the best Chinese food in the city at Lao Hunan, and Claudia Mendelson, who walked me through Architecture 101 over coffee at Intelligentsia. Claudia put me on to Ward Miller who talked about the city’s most amazing buildings over dinner at Buona Terra. (Chicago is a foodie kind of town.)

Ghost tour guide, historian and YA fiction novelist Adam Selzer took me to the creepiest places in the city, including the back corridors of the Congress Hotel, and filled me in on intriguing Chicago history and the ’20s and ’30s in particular, much of which I couldn’t fit into the book, and treated me to that Chicago institution: Al’s Beef.

Longtime Chicago PD detective Commander Joe O’Sullivan (@joethecop, now retired) ran me through the inner workings of police procedure at the Niles police station, where he took me through some startling boxes of old evidence with haunting photographs. (Also: bacon and bourbon cocktails at divey bars.)

Jim deRogatis gave me the inside scoop on working at the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper’s librarians, ink in the air, the editors and cranks and stories from the frontlines. I have taken liberties. He also provided in-depth intel on the ’90s music scene, and sent me a copy of his brilliant, hilarious book, Milk It: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90s

I’m grateful to sports reporter Keith Jackson and The Tribune’s Jimmy Greenfield who talked about the ins and outs of sports journalism with me, as well as philosophies of baseball.

Ed Swanson, a volunteer at the Chicago History Museum, offered to read the novel for me, fact-checking the history, Americana and El (or L as it was previously known) routes with an eagle-eye. Any mistakes are mine and some minor ones, like the actual release date of The Maxx or the presence of any African-American workers at the Chicago Bridge And Iron Company in Seneca, are intentional nudges in service to the story.

The newspaper article on the murder of Jeanette Klara owes much to a real piece of journalism about a real-life radium dancer, ‘In New York She Is Dancing To Her Death’ by Paul Harrison, published in the July 25 1935 edition of the Milwaukee Journal. Thanks to the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal for permission to quote some of the great lines from the original.

Pablo Defendini, Margaret Armstrong and TJ Tallie were very helpful with excellent Puerto Rican swear words while Tomek Suwalksi and Ania Rokita translated and double-checked the Polish dialogue, also obscenity-laden.

Mutant-protein-wrangling scientist Dr Kerry Gordon at the University of Cape Town advised me on Mysha Pathan’s research.

Nell Taylor at the Read/Write Library gave me a deep history of Chicago zines, while Daniel X O’Neil talked me through the ’90s punk and alt theatre scenes as well as Club Dreamerz and sent me off with original flyers. Thanks also to Harper Reed and Adrian Holovaty for hanging out at the Green Mill listening to ’30s-inspired gypsy jazz band Swing Gitan.

Helen Westcott loaned me all her criminology textbooks and serial killer reading matter, and Dale Halvorsen kept me supplied with great true crime podcasts he found. My studio mates Adam Hill, Emma Cook, Jordan Metcalf, Jade Klara and Daniel Ting Chong kept me grounded with funny YouTube videos and daily merciless teasing. And thanks to all at animation company Sea Monster, for letting me hide out there to work when our building was being renovated.

Thanks to my friends and family and strangers on Twitter who leaped to help with useful suggestions or translations or medical advice or Chicago recommendations, and anyone I have neglected to mention.

I’m not going to list the full bibliography of my research, but some of the most useful and entertaining reference works included: Chicago Confidential by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, an amazing, sexy, fun guide to the seedier places and people of the city published in 1950; the wonderfully accessible Chicago: A Biography by Dominic A Pacyga; Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters In American Nightlife 1885–1940 by Chad Heap; Girl Show: Into The Canvas World of Bump and Grind by AW Stencell; Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition by Griffin Fariello; the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union’s Herstory resources on Jane at The University of Illinois Chicago’s website, including transcriptions of personal histories; Doomsday Men by PD Smith, about the history of the atom bomb (and extracts Peter emailed me from his new book, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age); Perfect Victims by Bill James; Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert K Ressler and Tom Schachtman; Gang Leader for A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh; Jack Clark’s Nobody’s Angel; The Wagon And Other Stories From The City by Martin Preib; Wilson Miner’s talk on how cars shaped the world in a tectonic way at Webstock 2012; Chicago Neighbourhoods and Suburbs by Ann Durkin Keating; as well as The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold; I Have Life: Alison’s Journey as told to Marianne Thamm; and Antony Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree, which all gave me devastating insight into what real victims of violence and their families endure. Studs Terkel’s oral histories were invaluable for conveying real people’s stories in their own voices.

First readers Sarah Lotz, Helen Moffett, Anne Perry, Jared Shurin, Alan Nazerian, Laurent Philibert-Caillat, Ed Swanson, Oliver Munson and time-travel plot advisor genius Sam Wilson all made great suggestions on making the novel better and more interesting.

The book wouldn’t have made it into the world without super-agent Oli Munson. Thanks also to everyone at Blake Friedmann and their international co-agents. I’m especially grateful to the editors and publishers who believed in it right off the bat, especially John Schoenfelder, Josh Kendall, Julia Wisdom, Kate Elton, Shona Martyn, Anna Valdinger, Frederik de Jager, Fourie Botha, Michael Pietsch, Miriam Parker and Wes Miller.

I wouldn’t have been able to write it without the love and support of my husband, Matthew, who played single dad for weeks at a time to our daughter, while I was away on research trips or in lockdown behind my desk writing and editing and is always first among first readers. Thank you. I love you.