Page 50 of The Chain House

Five. And this boy was one of them. Sam was one of them.

She closed her eyes, tight, and saw a boy waving to her from the second-floor window of a blue house. A blue house in need of painting. No, he’s not waving, he’s putting his hand on the glass, because … because that’s what he does with …

“The Raven,” she said, looking again at the picture she now held in both hands because it was shaking too much in one. “Yellow.”

Trevor Harper was The Raven. Annie Harper was Yellow.

Her mind flashed back to the closet wall and what she’d written on it.

The Raven was here.

The Raven is a lyer.

Why?

“Jennifer …” Carl said behind her.

She studied young Trevor Harper in the picture—he was such a small man. What did you do? Why were you a liar?

“Jennifer,” Carl said louder.

She turned around to find Carl standing with a foot-tall stack of what looked like booklets in his hands, folded pages stapled and colored with Crayons and markers. “What are those?”

“Comic books,” he said. “Homemade. Looks like a kid drew them. They’re old. They were left on the kitchen table.”

Jennifer stood from her crouch, plucked the top comic book from the stack, and read the title: The Raven & The Mongoose. Adventure #1. The cover featured a colored picture of what she assumed was a raven holding a baseball bat and swinging it at a faceless bad guy, with what she assumed was a mongoose chewing the bad guy’s right leg.

Underneath the picture were the words: Written by Tommy Batise.

CHAPTER22

Before

JENNIFER FELT LIKE she’d started a ball rolling and there was no way now to stop it.

Showing Iris, Markie, and Peter the sketches she’d drawn and hid under her bed was one thing, but showing them to Raven and Yellow was another. But she knew she had to do it, even while the doing of it brought along with it a sense of doom that made her want to cry. She’d seen the three women come back from the woods last night and burn what they’d been wearing in a fire. She knew she shouldn’t have been out of the barracks, but she hadn’t been able to sleep, and she’d heard commotion outside on the ranch. She’d been curious, so she’d sneaked outside and hid behind a tree, just as the three women emerged from the woods, wobbling a little and laughing a lot, like she’d often seen the adults do after eating the gummies. At first, she’d been shocked because they’d come from the woods, and she remembered thinking, Good thing the demons didn’t get them. But then she noticed the large knives they were holding, larger than any knives she’d ever seen, like swords almost, and wondered if maybe they were the demons. The three women then approached an outdoor fire where Sal Batise sat on a log, like he was waiting for them to come from the woods. Waiting for them to come back home. He stood when he saw them and kissed them all one by one. He said something and they giggled. They tossed their big knives into the fire and then immediately started taking their clothes off and throwing them into the flames. The flames went whoosh, licking toward the trees, growing as each item of clothing went in and disappeared into spirals of smoke and floating ash. Jennifer had really started trembling when she’d seen who came from the woods next—the mean one, the big bad wolf, the man in the weird mask, and in his right hand was something sharp and twisted and he used it to open a bottle of wine he held in his other hand. They all shared the wine, passing the bottle around and talking in whispers and laughing, and then the man in the mask and the Breaker of Chains began taking their clothes off too and the giggling women walked into their arms.

That’s when Jennifer turned away and hurried back to the barracks, praying she hadn’t been seen or heard or sensed, or whatever bad guys did to know somebody was watching. And as soon as she retreated to her bed, where the other three were still sound asleep, she took her papers and pencils from beneath the bed and started drawing everything she’d just witnessed outside around the fire. She’d studied them, their faces, their hair, their bodies, the way they walked, which one was tallest, and which one was shortest, and which one was in between. She’d seen them before, all three women, and had once heard Yellow refer to them as Sal’s Angels, except she’d said it in a way that made Jennifer think Yellow didn’t like them very much. And so she drew them coming from the woods and she drew them holding those knives and she drew them undressing into the fire, and now here she was, having just told Yellow and Raven all about it, and even though they’d not brought up the boy she’d seen earlier in the window, she had a feeling they both believed her now, and the boy was in that house, and now Yellow and Raven acted like they were planning to do something about it. And now that she’d told them about what she’d seen last night and showed them the pictures, they were dead set on doing something about that, too, because Yellow said, “It’s time,” and Raven agreed, with tears in his eyes, like they’d maybe been planning to do something even before tonight and this had been, what Jennifer’s mother used to say, the final straw. And it looked like Raven was trying to muster up courage and strength, and that’s when he sat Jennifer and Iris and Markie and Peter down in the shadows and told them that things on the ranch were about to change. That the people here weren’t who they thought they were, and they’d made a big mistake in coming—just like Jennifer’s mother had said before she’d gone into the woods—and they’d made an even bigger mistake by staying for as long as they had.

Because something bad had happened. Really bad. And Jennifer, they said, was somehow a witness to it.

“But we will take care of you and make sure you’re safe,” said The Raven. The Raven was calm and gentle and soft-spoken, and Jennifer trusted him with her whole heart. He gathered the kids closer and said, “Let me tell you a story I started writing when I was your age. It’s about a raven and a mongoose who fight bad guys.…”

CHAPTER23

“HELLO, THIS IS Sam Harper,” he said into the cell phone the guard handed him outside Warden Wren’s office.

Half of Sam couldn’t wait to get back inside with Sal Batise, while the other half considered running from the prison with whatever he’d learned thus far and never coming back. It seemed almost comical, how he was suddenly the center of attention as Sal’s lone go-between, and now Governor Hawthorne was on his way to the prison, and here he was on the phone with Mallard Malone’s editor.

“Mr. Harper, this is Donna Hanson from Quiver and Bow. Mallard Malone’s editor.”

“Hi,” Sam said. “Nice to meet you.”

He felt like an unprepared fool and didn’t know what else to say but also couldn’t imagine what the publishing house felt now that it had all but been confirmed, in the most disturbing of ways, that Sal Batise was Mallard Malone. Of the eighteen burials referred to throughout his series, potentially mirroring where real victims had been buried around the country, three had been unearthed in the past two hours: the one in Georgetown, Indiana; another in Waco, Texas; and a third in St. Louis, Missouri. By now, it was clear Sal Batise had a photographic memory; he’d named all three victims who’d been unearthed. DNA tests would have to be done, but with the given names all matching missing persons from decades past, authorities—and now the FBI—assumed, at this point, that Sal wasn’t lying.

Over the phone, Donna Hanson said, “We’ve been following on the news, Mr. Harper. As we’ve told the media and local police and the FBI, we knew nothing about any of this being secretly written into the Mallard Malone series. And believe us or not, we, until this point, never knew who Mallard Malone was. The first book in the series arrived on our desk nine years ago. It was literally left in a box on the porch at our offices at Quiver and Bow, here in downtown Manhattan. Obviously, we agreed to publish it. It said it was an exclusive submission, but we had a week to decide before the book would be left on a competitor’s doorstep. We loved the concept and the writing. It was flawless. But because the whole thing was a bit sketchy, we offered a low advance. It was accepted.” She spoke quickly, as if her time on the phone with him was limited, or maybe she just couldn’t wait to get it over with. “At first, the correspondence was done over regular mail, with warnings that any detective work trying to learn of his identity would be considered a breach of the contract signed with Mr. Mallard Malone, proprietor. Understand, Mr. Harper, that Quiver and Bow, at the time, was an indie press. We, as you probably know, have blown up since, with houses now in multiple countries, due to our success with Oliver Crown and Mallard Malone. We now have seven other publishing imprints. The book blew up on its own merits, but part of the book’s ultimate rise to superstardom had to do with the idea of the anonymous author. I probably don’t need to tell you the rest, but that’s how it started.”

Sam said, “I’m referring to this correctly by calling it the chain?”