Plain Bad Heroines: A Novel Read online

  Mrs. Broward certainly believed that she did this to the only copy of Mary MacLane’s memoir that she knew her daughter to have ever owned.

  Of course, all of this was only spoken of later.

  Perhaps you already know that when the story of Flo’s and Clara’s deaths reached the press, Mary MacLane herself, then staying nearby at a seaside hotel in Massachusetts, was asked to issue a statement. She’s reported to have said, “I wish I could have known those girls.” This was both uncharacteristically short for a Mary MacLane statement to the press in those days and the thing that the two of them no doubt would have wanted to hear the most from her.

  Before we move on, one more thing about that copy of the book found with the bodies. It was handled by faculty and police, Pinkertons and even Flo’s and Clara’s bereaved family members (not one of whom claimed it as belonging to their kin). And then, not so long after, it was misplaced. Officially misplaced, anyway. Lost. Unable to be located when it was asked after by reporters who felt sure they’d missed something the first time they’d gone through it and who now wanted another look.

  Even Principal Libbie Brookhants* herself could not find it. She was the school’s young if capable founder. She knew its grounds and buildings better than anyone else left alive, and she told those doubting reporters that she had made a point of looking for the copy in question in every place on campus that it might have conceivably ended up; it simply could not be found.

  The book was gone.

  This part won’t get more pleasant with my stalling so we might as well get on with it. And just so you know: the facts, such as they are, get foggier from here on out, too.

  We know, based on where the girls were later found, that at some point Clara veered from the orchard path. Whether this was due to Charles’s gaining speed or some tactic meant to prevent that from happening, I cannot say, but it proved a fateful choice.

  To be sure, that path had its own difficulties, but now a tangle of hailstorm-downed branches and thick undergrowth snagged at the soft fabric of Clara’s dress and tripped up her steps. When she was found, her skirt was clogged with thorns and twigs, shredded from the things in the understory that had caught her.

  In fact, Clara seemed to forge directly into a section of woods that the Brookhants students called the Tricky Thicket, an area of bizarrely dense growth—the trees leafier, the brambles bramblier—fed by a hot spring. It was said that even in winter, even with snow otherwise all around, the ground in that patch stayed thawed and ferns grew lush and green, and ripe blackberries might be found.

  Perhaps thinking it would provide her with cover, Clara now much more slowly made her way through this thicket. And if she’d also been looking backward, every so often, checking on Charles’s unhinged approach, then that too would have hindered her speed.

  Though they’d left the path, the two cousins were now close enough to the orchard, to Flo, that she would have heard their shouts. Or screams. It’s likely that this was why she came running toward them, hoping for Clara but finding Charles first. When that stupid man was brought from the woods, he had a black eye and a bleeding face swollen from more than stings alone.

  “She charged me like a drunken bear,” he told a reporter from the Providence Daily Journal. He was talking about Flo, who, he said, had attacked him. In an interview given from his sickbed he called her “a real she beast. More animal than girl. She had something in her hand, a stone or stick.” He also said that her actions toward him had proved him right, and that what he’d previously told Clara about Flo was now made undeniably true. “That girl was no lady! She was a ruffian bastard—some foreign-born devil who exerted her depraved influence over my cousin. Clara was only too female-minded to see it.”

  When asked why he had been chasing his cousin in the first place, Charles had said, as if obvious: “We had not finished our conversation to my satisfaction. And before we could do so she openly defied me, playing up to her schoolmates. I knew that her mother, my beloved aunt, would want me to correct that sort of insolence at once. So I did.”

  Charles explained that during her weekend at home, Clara had been issued an ultimatum regarding her family’s expectations for her future comportment at Brookhants: if Clara wanted to continue to attend the school for her senior year, and to graduate with her class, she would immediately discontinue her friendship with Florence Hartshorn and cease all activities related to The Story of Mary MacLane. (And as you now know, Mrs. Broward apparently believed that even continuing to possess a copy of that book was an activity related to it.)

  Wretched Charles might have admitted that Flo attacked him, but why and how she did so was as unclear (and speculated about) in 1902 as it is today. Was it only to interrupt his pursuit of Clara? Or did Flo witness something else between them? Something worse? And when did she do it, exactly—before the yellow jacket attack or while it was already underway?

  Because in the end, Readers, the yellow jackets are the thing. I told you that at the start.

  What Clara did, in the middle of the Tricky Thicket, was step over a fallen log and directly into a ground nest of them. And this particular ground nest was of a size not only unusual, but seemingly impossible for a northern state like Rhode Island.

  Yellow jacket colonies in places as far north as New England are supposed to last only one season. They can’t overwinter, because the region is too frozen and food scarce for anyone but the queen, fed fat off the sweets of her minions, to survive. In places like Florida, warm even in January, it’s not so unusual for ground nests to continue season after season—for decades, sometimes, with dozens of queens ordering around thousands of workers—the cycle of birthing and feeding, eating and building, churning along without pause. But that’s not supposed to be the way in Rhode Island, which has a winter with snow and cold and frozen ground.

  Just not in the Tricky Thicket.

  And so here it was: a yellow jacket nest to build your nightmares from, its paper chambers stretching in underground layers until it was almost the size of three of Charles’s cars parked in a row. And Clara’s foot, slipping off the edge of a mossy log, landed in the uppermost layer of the nest’s papery frame, where it promptly sank and sank, up to her knee it sank, wrenching her to a stop. She would have had only moments to comprehend what had happened, why the ground had given way, because now the yellow jackets were coming, furious and streaming up from the rip like a rattling chain shot into the sky.

  Remember that a yellow jacket is not a honeybee. A honeybee has a barbed stinger that lodges in flesh, which means that it can sting you only once before it leaves that stinger in you and dies.

  But a smooth-stingered yellow jacket can and will sting you multiple times.

  And thousands of vengeful, broken-homed yellow jackets stinging you multiple times?

  Charles later said that he heard his cousin’s screams, but there was simply no time to reach her: Clara was swallowed up by the swarm at once, as if she now wore a writhing mummy wrap of yellow jackets, a pulsing black-and-yellow outline that smothered her until she was now them.

  At some point Flo must have charged toward Clara, presumably to help her, and was at once wrapped in her own cloak of yellow jackets. And Charles—of course, fucking Charles—ran away. But not before pushing his now-useful driving goggles over his eyes. The goggles and the running away did not prevent him from being stung, nor did they keep him from swelling with hives and passing out on the path leading back to the school. But they did help to keep him alive.

  Later, horrible Charles would say that he’d found great purpose and meaning in the fact of his life being spared that day. By all accounts he used that purpose to idle away his remaining days, spending his inheritance while failing at several half-hearted business ventures and in general behaving like the brutish, moneyed bowl of rancid bowels that he was. This behavior lasted for a period of several years, until he was killed on the maiden voyage of a very big ship that met a very bad end.* But thankfully this sto
ry is not about cousin Charles, so let us leave him to his turbid depths.

  Death from anaphylaxis is not known to be gentle. There were some signs, in the shape of the smashed undergrowth, in the piles of vomit found nearby, that our strong, young heroines did struggle together for a time.

  How long Flo and Clara clung to each other, how hard they might have worked to move beyond the yellow jackets, the nest, is impossible to ascertain—and would, I’m sure, be quite difficult to put into words, even if we did know. Given the sheer number of stings each received—and so many of them to their faces—it couldn’t have been long before they both succumbed to the thickening dark from which they would not wake.

  That they might have had the chance, in their final moments, to say just how much they meant to one another, the real desires and textures of their souls, is a most doubtful thing given the horror of their circumstances. What is important to remember, Readers, is that they had said these things to each other before those circumstances befell them.

  They were discovered very near to the place in the nest where Clara’s foot had made the tear. There were so many angry yellow jackets still swarming the area, like a buzzing net draped over the whole of the thicket, that the responding Brookhants faculty, and soon after, the Tiverton police, determined that a controlled fire was the only way to get near enough to bring the girls out.

  Brookhants students later told stories of flaming yellow jackets making their way from their now-burning nest, through the woods and onto campus, before drowning themselves, bodies hissing, in the fountain in front of Main Hall. Apparently, there were so many singed yellow jacket carcasses floating dead atop its surface the following morning that students began dipping their hands in to take them: death souvenirs. Eventually, the groundskeeper was sent to clear them with a net. Despite this carcass-skimming, the water is said to have soon turned fetid, an oily black algae growing along its sides and surface. So rank was this water, so unclean, that within days the school had no choice but to drain, scrub, and refill the fountain. This, like so many Brookhants stories, may only be the stuff of dorm-room-lights-off legend.

  Brookhants students later told stories of flaming yellow jackets . . . drowning themselves, bodies hissing, in the fountain.

  But then, stranger things have happened. Even, especially, at Brookhants.

  That our complicated, wonderful heroines were found twined together, hands clasped and heart to heart, has never been disputed. But given the time it took to rouse awful Charles and make enough sense of his stupid mutterings to locate them, and then to assess the situation, bring the supplies, and burn the nest—coupled with the number of stings each girl received—it is of no surprise that Flo’s and Clara’s mortal bodies had not fared well.

  Any exposed skin was welted: their hands and necks and, the worst, their faces, which were now balloon masks of protruding lips and swollen eyes. Clara’s eyes had been bleeding, the tracks of blood dried down her cheeks. The attack was so severe, so ferocious, that their topography of red hives, a telltale sign of the anaphylaxis, was quite obscured by bruising. The unfortunate students who saw them carried out of the woods—for in their makeshift planning, the officials had forgotten to bring sheets to cover them—said their faces looked like bitten and rotting Black Oxford apples. More than one girl made that comparison.*

  I did tell you this story was ghastly.

  You might think it an improvement on said ghastliness that within three years of this terrible day, the Brookhants School for Girls was closed, its buildings left empty and wanting for students who would not arrive. But you should also know that before that happened, three more heroines died on the property, each in a most troubling way.

  It’s true, of course, that all death is troubling to those of us left alive to bear witness, but certainly among the most troubling of all are the ugly, unexpected deaths of young people just starting to understand who and how they might be in the world. Or how they might remake the world to better be in it.

  Perhaps equally troubling are the deaths of older people submerged in deep regret.

  Everything else to come in these pages comprises the story of three heroines from the present and more heroines from the past and how they all collided around Brookhants, and a book, and also a book about Brookhants.

  I’ll say it again: Brookhants, and a book, and a book about Brookhants.

  And who, you ask, am I? The voice telling you to come this way, to follow me? Some hazy apparition with a beckoning hand? A thousand yellow jackets shaped to look like a body with intention, one prone to scatter into diverging paths if provoked?

  I can promise you that by the time we reach the end, you’ll know me much better than I’ll know you. (And if I seem to know things I shouldn’t, or couldn’t possibly, well that’s part of our bargain. I’ll cite my research when I can, but when I can’t: I do now ask for your trust in me to fill in the gaps as I see fit. I can see quite a lot from this vantage point.)

  Finally, let me say, right up front, how sorry I am about all the potential for puns. I cannot help that the school’s name is Brookhants* and that it’s said to be haunted. Whether it was, in fact, haunted even before Clara, Flo, and the yellow jackets depends on where and how you start the story of Brookhants, and for how many years you’re willing to trace it.

  I told you, this is only one way to tell it. And only one place to end it.

  And perhaps it hasn’t ended yet.

  So let’s begin.

  Meet Your Plain, Bad Heroines Three

  In the summer of 20— in Hollywood, Audrey Wells watched as her mom, Caroline Wells, used the wipers to try to clear a confetti of ash from their windshield. This left a gray smear across their view, a hazy blotting out that matched the smoke blotting out the California sun.

  Now it was like seeing the world through the skin of a ghost.

  Los Angeles was on fire: palm trees with flame canopies where there should have been leaves and hillside houses slumped into towers of char like the oversize remnants of those black snake fireworks. One blaze had jumped the freeway and missed their own neighborhood by a mile. For now. The same could not be said for the homes of some of Caroline’s still-new(ish) clients. Caroline Wells: scream queen turned real estate agent.

  “And dog food,” Caroline was saying, still messing with the wipers and now the blue spray stuff as well. That did the trick. The ghost skin washed away. “The Chavezes have one of those poodle mixes. He’s bitty,” she added, “so I’ve never been scared of him.” She looked quickly at Audrey and tacked on: “I haven’t.”

  “Dog food,” Audrey repeated as she swiped out of Instagram and into her notes app to type it. This was not an item typically found on their shopping lists. Or, like, ever before.

  Audrey had only recently moved back in with her mother after three years of paying an unsustainable amount of rent for her own place in Santa Monica. Both of them had been working hard not to act like it was a concession, this living-together-again thing. (Hence this joint shopping trip.) It was a choice. An opportunity. It was surely not some sign of failure for either of them.

  Audrey noticed her mom touching the thin white scars on her face, one hand on the steering wheel, one hand tracing her jaw. Caroline used to do this all the time, a tic, but maybe she did it less so these days.

  Something occurred to Audrey. “Are we sure their dog is OK? I literally just read something about all the missing pets—I mean because of the fires—they escape. Do you know for sure they even still have it?”

  “Shit,” Caroline said, dropping her hand from her jaw as she messily merged them two lanes over, a chorus of honks in their wake. “I have no idea. I don’t want to text them to ask if their dog is dead on top of everything else.”

  Audrey had a decent imagination for personal tragedy that blooms from a chaos of random events, both because she was an actor and it was her job to, and also because, as you might already know: she had been party to a version of it. Not a “your new ho
use just went up in smoke and your dog died, too” version, it’s true. But hers involved those scars on her mother’s face and it had been, if not tragic, at least ugly in a very public way.

  They were pulling into a busy strip mall with all the stores to buy all the things on this list they’d been making. Not that buying these things—bananas and bottled water, socks and hand wipes, crying chocolate (as Caroline called it), and yes, dog food for the dog that may or may not still be alive—would make any of this easier for the families with char where their houses had once been. But maybe some of it would give them at least a moment or two of comfort, a few simple needs provided for. Years later, Audrey still remembered the people who’d sent food baskets and flowers after Caroline’s incident. And she also remembered the people who hadn’t.

  Plus, you have to do something, right? When things like this happen? You have to do something or you’re left doing nothing, and that, in Audrey’s experience, made you feel helpless, and helplessness was a feeling she despised. In others, sure, but mostly in herself.

  “Should we split up?” Caroline asked as she parked them near a shopping cart stall. “Divide and conquer?”

  “No,” Audrey said. She was back to scrolling Instagram. “That never works. I can never find you where you say you’ll be and then I’m locked out of the car and you’re not answering my texts.”

  “That’s a lot,” Caroline said, her own phone in her face.

  “It is a lot.”

  “If you learned to drive, you’d be the one in control of the keys.”

  Audrey’s refusal to get her driver’s license—even at the age of twenty-three—was a sticky spot between them, one that ultimately also linked back to Caroline’s past public debacle. Shouldn’t I be the one too scared to drive? was a thing Caroline had said to Audrey more than once.