Seven days in augusta, p.1
Quantum Girl Theory, page 1
Quantum Girl Theory is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Erin Kate Ryan
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780593133439
Ebook ISBN 9780593133446
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Jaya Miceli
Cover images: Tugol/Shutterstock, Horn Andrey/Shutterstock, Paradise studio/Shutterstock
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: Quantum Girl Theory
Spells for Sinners, Part One
Six and a Half Minutes
Spells for Sinners, Part Two
Where Thou Goest
Spells for Sinners, Part Three
Paper Dolls
Spells for Sinners, Part Four
Ghostwriter
Spells for Sinners, Part Five
Maiden Mother Crone
Spells for Sinners, Part Six
Objects of Fine Design
Spells for Sinners, Part Seven
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Follow these links to view this material as text (top to bottom): newspaper exract 1, newspaper exract 2.
PROLOGUE
QUANTUM GIRL THEORY
Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, 1946
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka, left her dorm for a hike on the Long Trail, and vanished into the thin mountain air of the trailhead.
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka, left her dorm for a hike on the Long Trail, and was kidnapped by a man with a long maroon car and a history of violence against women.
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka and left her dorm to take a cab to the bus station, where she set off for Montreal and the impossible idea of being a brand-new girl.
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka and left her dorm to meet her unkind boyfriend, who carted her to Fall River, blew through her cash, then ditched her for a moment in a diner, where she leaned over the counter and whispered to the waitress how had it come to this.
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka, left her dorm, and was quietly institutionalized by a mortified family who’d rather pretend she was dead than admit to her troubled mind.
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka, left her dorm, and met her botany teacher; after a quarrel over their relationship, he bludgeoned her in a damp clearing deep in the early winter woods.
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka and ran away to join the circus, where she turned handstands on the backs of galloping horses and learned to tame fire by swallowing it.
Quantum Girl Theory: Once she is gone, a missing girl becomes everything that everyone thinks she might be; our theories create her fate. She’s a runaway, she’s a maniac, she is bones shrouded in red cloth beneath an evergreen tree. She is a double, triple, quadruple exposure of any lifetime anyone could dream.
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka, left her dorm, and began to exist by disappearing.
And on December 2, the sun rose high and light hit the spot where the missing girl ought to have been.
The National Guard climbed mountains in search, as did her father, the Boy Scouts, a wily private eye.
Clairvoyants dreamt of her, calling the newspapers to report their visions: ice picks, black cars, an all-consuming fire.
The detective gathered facts: the eldest of four sisters, father a Scotsman (whispers: mother a drunk). She preferred to be called Paul, but the Bennington girls rarely called her anything at all. Quiet, studious. Unremarkable.
The hole she left somehow bigger than the space she once filled.
Quantum Girl Theory: A missing girl, by virtue of having endless possible lives, is more real than a non-missing girl, who gets only one life, at most.
Newsmen flooded the rural Vermont town, wingtips sinking into mud. Spectators, readers of the mystery, postured as heroes—they stopped lovely blondes in New York and Charleston; they rounded up white girls in Miami and Spokane. Holding up smudged newspaper snapshots, squinting with suspicion and spite. Gripping the elbows of strangers on opposite coasts, competing to capture the hefty reward, to capture the true Paula Jean—to tell the story’s true end.
On December 1, 1946, Paula Jean Welden put on a bright-red parka and shattered into innumerable futures. One life could never be enough.
Quantum Girl Theory: A missing girl’s potential life stamps a new world into being. All her paths are possible—they are happening all at once, and in symphony.
Across the nation, newspapers recorded every sighting, writing into existence Paula Jean as a starlet, Paula Jean as a housewife, Paula Jean as a hollow-faced nurse. A misfit, a mistress, a victim, a crime.
At a stained and round dining table, imagine infinite Paula Jeans: aged and cherub-faced, scarred and broken and barely touched. Each looks at the others—a sister, a self. Lives lived and half-lived, lives thrown away, redeemed, or lost.
She is legion.
She reaches across the table and takes her own hand.
Follow these links to view this material as text (top to bottom): newspaper exract 1, newspaper exract 2.
SPELLS FOR SINNERS, PART ONE
Bladen County, North Carolina, 1961
Mary missed her connection in Fayetteville and, still marked from the creases in the bus seat and stinking of diesel, sweet-talked her way into the pickup truck of a lanky Dublin kid headed home for supper. The boy moved to scooch his little brother out of the cab to make room. Mary patted her palm on the open window and leaned against the door to keep the younger boy from opening it.
“I like the fresh air,” she said, and tossed her twine-tied valise into the empty truck bed. She dug through her pocketbook for a scarf. “I will take a hand up, though.”
The pickup was newish, still shiny under the bus depot street lamp. Mary settled herself atop her case and tied the scarf over her wilting French pleat. She used a folded REWARD poster to clean the road grime from beneath her nails, then ate a mealy apple from her pocketbook, the last of her travel food. She threw the apple core into a field of great black crows and swiveled the band of her watch—5:46. The boy was a conscientious driver and took her the whole way to the Starkings’ house in Elizabethtown. After he hoisted her down from the back, Mary offered to write a note to his ma to help explain his tardiness for dinner, to which he aw-shucks’ed and that’s-mighty-nice-but-no-thank-you-ma’am’ed. She waited for the truck to turn the corner before she approached the Starkings’ door.
Mary would normally have figured a way to take a room in town, to brush her teeth before landing on the doorstep of the family of a missing child. With her ancient broken bag, she looked the part of traveling salesman, a closer cut than she cared for. Mary slid the valise behind the grayed porch swing. A layer of lace and the reflection from the setting sun blocked her view into the front window. She caught movement, though, the brush of a skirt hem. Mary rang the doorbell.
She let up on the bell at the creak of advancing footsteps. Her hand was in her cardigan pocket, gripping the rolled REWARD poster. An unease was building in her gut. The door cracked open.
It was so black inside the house that at first Mary couldn’t see who had answered the door. Her eyes at last found a lined and sun-browned face wearing a neutral expression. The man, white, dressed in a rolled-sleeve work shirt, opened the door a bit wider, filling the gap with his chest. He was chewing, Mary realized, and he didn’t offer a greeting.
“Mr. Starking?” She spoke clearly, not trying to hide her New England accent. “I’m Mary Garrett. I’m hoping I can help you find your daughter.” She reached out her hand to shake his, and the man slowly returned the gesture. His palm was a deep brown in the creases, not dirty but stained, and he smelled of meat and melted butter.
“You down from Raleigh?” he said through his mouthful, hand still on hers. Mary could hear the scrape of fork on plate inside the house, a woman clearing her throat.
“No, sir. I was traveling in Baltimore and I read about your girl. I have experience with these cases, and I’d like to be of assistance in looking for Polly.” The reward poster, pulled down from a bus shelter in Richmond, noted a seven-thousand-dollar reward. Enough to set her right for three full years.
Starking held her hand still and finally swallowed his mouthful. “What kind of assistance is that?”
“I have a deep women’s intuition, Mr. Starking, and dozens of families have found my services quite valuable. With time to acquaint myself with
Starking stepped forward, crowding Mary on the porch. She minced back and pulled her hand free from his.
“You telling me you’re a lady detective or that you’re a clairvoyant?” he asked, so tall above Mary’s head that she settled her gaze on his Adam’s apple. The evening’s stubble was poking forth from his ruddy skin, sharp black hairs that would burn with hard contact, that could rub soft cheeks and necks raw from the friction of it.
“I wouldn’t put it in those terms, Mr. Starking.” But if he paid her, she’d let him call her whatever he wanted.
“My grandmama was clairvoyant,” he said over her, and palmed at his neck. “She had a real gift—burdened her tremendously. Angel at her back, she called it.”
Mary waited, hand over wrist, clasped at her waist. She shifted back to give herself more room from the man, swiveled her watch with pointy fingers.
“You can help find our Paul?” Starking’s gruffness gave way to a pleading tone.
The name hit Mary like an electric shock, a hard pinch on the bridge of her nose. A wash of warmth crept down her arms. Of course some other girl might have that name, her name, the name she’d shed fifteen years earlier when she became Mary Garrett. Mary tried to reason away her body’s reaction before she blew her chance here, but she couldn’t stop feeling the clench of resentment, of having something ripped from her. An arm thrown across her shoulder, heads tilted toward each other, a sigh of oh, my Paul, a swallowed sob.
“What’s that, Gurnie?” A woman’s voice called from inside the house, weak and impatient at the same time. The woman herself appeared in the open door, fingers smudging an empty water glass. Medium height, moderately plump, flushed pink skin, nondescript but for the grief that Mary felt swirling around her. Her housedress was stained along the skirt, and Mary suddenly saw the tumble of the gravy boat as the woman’s fingers lost feeling when she noticed she had set a place for her daughter at the dinner table. A flickering newsreel behind Mary’s eyelids, the vision lasted less than a second, but it gave her the beat she needed to recover.
“Mrs. Starking, ma’am,” Mary began, extending her hand. “I—”
The man, Gurnie, held out his hand to keep the woman behind him. “You seen my Paul?” he asked, leaning toward Mary. “You get dreams? Visions? You see her?” His voice deepened as he bent, until he nearly swallowed the final word. His demeanor, more expressive now than when he’d opened the door, was still controlled.
My Paul. The sour smell of his dinner turned Mary’s stomach. “No, sir, not yet. I’ll need some time with you, that’s why I’m here—” Mary stopped as she heard the woman draw a breath.
“What’s this?” the woman asked, twisting her hands on that water glass, looking mostly at the man. “There’s news?”
“Bernice, Mrs….Garrett, was it?” He looked back for confirmation. “Says she’s got the Sight and might could find our girl.” His voice broke on the word girl, and he straightened and leaned back to the chipped clapboard siding. “My brother—”
“Lord, not this story, Gurnie,” Bernice said. She tugged at his shirtsleeve. “God knows I don’t have it in me for this right now.” A plea in her tone shortcut to the whole of their relationship—Gurnie with the wild hairs, Bernice with her deep desire for calm, for happiness in measured teacups. Bernice won most of the time. Mary didn’t need a vision to see that.
The text from the REWARD poster nearly a poem to Mary now, so many times she had read it: Polly Starking, last seen six days back in camp shirt and dungarees, riding a horse from the family farm out past Jones Lake. Horse found, girl missing. The overexposed photo: soft smile breaking a wide face, a short dark pixie cut, white browline glasses tipped up and to the right of the yearbook’s photographer. Exposing a tender neck, still pliant and plump as unkneaded bread dough. While worrying at the poster in Fayetteville, Mary had gotten a flickering vision—the horse, swampy and flustered, wandering the trail alone—that she’d followed all the way to this barely-there town. She was unlikely to get anything more without a visitation to the girl’s room, an interview with her parents, a chance to shut out the other noise and focus her mind on Polly. At least half the time, the parents offered up the missing girl’s bed for the duration; at others, she was happy to accept a nest of blankets in the parlor. But she’d been without success the past few months, and her savings had dwindled to less than eight dollars.
Nauseated and road-weary, Mary needed time to ingratiate herself; she needed the offer of hospitality to be their own idea. Otherwise, they would expect too much too soon.
“I don’t mean to impose on your time so late in the evening,” Mary said, voice smooth as glass. What a distance there was, between her ragged insides and her measured demeanor. “Why don’t I make an appointment to come back tomorrow a little before lunch? I can telephone, if you’d like. I’ll just be staying at the motor inn over”—she took a stab—“near the bank.”
“You mean Safe Lodge, then,” Gurnie said. He glanced over at Bernice and back at Mary. “I can’t have you off on your own, now, nice lady like you. Ain’t safe. Not now, not since…” and he didn’t finish.
And in the end, he declined to call a taxicab for her (it was after six, he said, and Sigsbee had likely already begun his evening drink) and insisted upon taking her himself. As he went back in to grab the keys to his truck, Mary slid her valise down to the curb. The truck, green with white lettering: Starking Bros. est. 1956. Mary studied the back of Gurnie’s truck, overfilled with sinister-looking farm equipment—thrasher, reaper, tunneler, slicer. There was no avoiding that front seat.
Gurnie gave her a hand up, and as he walked around to the driver’s side, Mary installed her valise upright on the bench seat between them, a wall of tweed and twine. She smiled across the top at Gurnie and kept her hand cupped over the door’s lock the whole ride. She would have preferred the taxi with the drunken driver, even if she was nearing broke.
“You have a business?” Mary said. She prized silence over chitchat, but she hadn’t learned a damn thing back at the house. The waves of fear and loss coming at her from both Gurnie and Bernice did nothing to exonerate them in Mary’s mind. Villains had fears like anyone else.
“Mmph,” Gurnie grunted. “With my brother, Clarence. We share the company, the truck, the heartache.”
Gurnie interrupted himself to point out the direction of Polly’s high school. Mary nodded and adjusted her case.
“Hogs,” Gurnie said.
“Hogs,” Mary said, matching his matter-of-fact tone.
“What we farm,” Gurnie said. “Four miles or so out of town.”
They crunched into the lot of the Safe Lodge. Weak neon from the motel sign blued the whole front seat and dash, as though they were sitting side by side at a drive-in movie. Gurnie started to move awkwardly, to clear his throat. Was he about to offer her money for a room? Would she take it? She might just take it. It was less wounding to accept a reward than a handout, but her back was still wretched from two nights on a depot bench and then another on a bus seat.
Yet whatever brewed inside Gurnie never made it out of him. Instead, he coughed into a handkerchief and said, “I do hope you have a dream about my Paul tonight, ma’am. I suspect Bernice might soften to the idea, too. Though anything I could ferry back to her with me tonight would be of great assistance.” His hands rested on the bottom curve of the steering wheel; to Mary, fingers like his, long and thin, always looked ready to press on the soft spot of some girl’s throat.
“Anything at all that I could pass on,” he said.
Because Gurnie was expecting her to, and because she wasn’t ready to explain to him how it all worked and how often it didn’t, Mary closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the seat, her left elbow propped on the top of the valise. Fatigue washed over her. The start of each of these searches was never an occasion of hope but of grief. Exhaustion layered over mourning. Even Mary’s salesman’s attitude couldn’t barter that truth away.
