Chapter 3
Daphne Nighswander went from the supermax to the Quality Inn in Morgantown. The motel was almost tucked under the on-ramp
seemed to have a million pumps. Eighteen-wheelers blasted their air horns at all hours, while traffic boomed along the interstate.
Drunks fucked in the other rooms, loud through the wafer-thin walls, going at it hard enough to jiggle the pictures on the
walls. One night a car caught fire in the parking lot and the lot lizards came out of their rooms to watch it burn. They were
like little girls at a campfire, only lacking sticks and marshmallows. It wasn’t uncommon for ambulances to show up in the
wee hours to zip one of the lizards into a body bag, needle stuck into one bruised arm. Daphne found the noise and the chaos
comforting, easy to live with. It was like prison. Besides. She was not always alone. Some nights she woke and found Jayne
sitting at the little table under the picture window, Jayne with her face black and crackling and split open like the skin
of a burnt hot dog.
“What are you doin’ there?” Daphne asked her.
“I just like to watch you sleep,” Jayne said, and grinned. When she grinned, the splits in her skin bulged open to show the
crispy muscles of her face.
“I felt the same way about you when you was a baby,” Daphne said, although she could not remember if this was really true.
Daphne stayed there for somewhere between ten days and five weeks, she didn’t know how long for sure.
At some point, a decade into her sentence, time had begun to hop about in funny, random circles, like a small bird with a smashed wing.
It went around and around without ever taking off or getting anywhere except closer to death.
She was in no hurry. She contented herself with luxuries like White Castle and Kentucky Fried, and she did her research. She
had never been much of a student, had left school after eighth grade, but in her middle age had discovered at last a subject
that fascinated her: the lives of those young folks she thought of as the Goodbye Six, the trust fund babies who had murdered
her baby and who turned Tana against her. Daphne had followed their lives from the inside, using the limited resources available
in the prison library and her occasional computer time, and she revisited her studies now, with visits to both the Morgantown
library and to a local Books-A-Million.
The men and women who burned Jayne to death, they had lived interesting lives. Daphne had shot a postman while high and the
state had taken most of her adult life. The Goodbye Six had butchered Jayne and Ronnie and wandered off to be well paid and
happy . . . in between the occasional shocking scrape. Two of them had been on that plane that set down in Greenland after
it was half torn open in the sky. Donovan McBride even wrote a book about it, said the whole air disaster had been the result
of a UFO attacking with a death ray. Daphne read the book twice. The first time, it gripped her so completely, she forgot
the author had a hand in slaughtering her daughter. The second time, she studied Van’s account of terror in the air, as if
she were preparing to give testimony on it. The book was where the idea began to form that there was something unnatural about
the six of them.
Jayne’s death, of course, had been unnatural in its own right, when you considered the way she had been cooked down to the bone, the way Ronnie had been found in pieces (pieces!).
But at the time, Daphne’s thought was simply: Colombians.
The really rich one, Colin Wren, had probably hired Colombians.
The Colombians were great ones for putting heads on sticks, burning people alive, taking pieces off a person with garden shears.
But after Daphne read the McBride book, she began to wonder if the Goodbye Six were touched with something else.
Contaminated. Fire followed them wherever they went. Fire and garish death.
The other McBride, hot little piece of ass who was a rising star on Fox News, suddenly abandoned her career and disappeared
for a while. Her brother disappeared with her. Six months later, she reemerged alone. Van was gone, had succumbed to drug
addiction. The family asked for privacy and understanding.
Maybe a year after that, Daphne had come across a thread on a message board that claimed Donna and Donovan McBride were secretly
psychics who had been held by the government for a time, detained and studied, at a place in North Carolina called Cherokee
Island. The island had been wiped out, burned as if it had been napalmed, destroyed in an apparent industrial accident. To
be fair, the message board in question was dedicated to such outlandish conspiracy theories (its most popular thread claimed
that Russia was attempting to farm trolls in their northern tundra), and the person posting the Cherokee Island theory went
by the online handle of VisitorFromPlanetGor. VisitorFromPlanetGor claimed that in fact the McBrides had burned Cherokee Island
with their MINDS, that they had the power of pyrokinesis. Van had been engulfed in a fire he himself started. The thread was
written with frequent use of CAPITAL LETTERS and whole paragraphs in hysterical italics and generally had about as much credibility as the idea that the moon landing was a hoax or 9/11 an inside job (both highly
popular topics on this board). And it didn’t make a lot of sense—why hadn’t the government simply recaptured Donna? Or had
her assassinated? Would they really just let her go after she toasted their whole facility? Whatever the answer to those questions,
it was impossible to miss the recurring theme. Where the Goodbye Six went, fire followed.
And Cherokee Island had been incinerated on Easter. Like Jayne.
Like the near air disaster that had ended when BA 238 set down in Greenland in 1995.
Like the destruction of Black Cricket penitentiary.
This last especially fascinated her, not least because she had spent the first leg of her sentence there.
Daphne was in the Morgantown library, poking around on the internet, when she found an impassioned essay about one of the prisoners who had died there: Francine Trout, a fat feeb who had claimed, probably falsely, to have had a hand in the killing of a child named Cady Lewis.
The name of the victim leapt out at her.
Daphne Nighswander had been listening to Donna McBride’s podcast for years and happened to know the Lewis girl’s death was personal to her: the abduction had occurred in Donna’s very own front yard.
Suddenly there was a logic to the Black Cricket disaster.
Bad things happened on Easter to people the Goodbye Six didn’t like.
It felt like a cosmic makeup call that Daphne hadn’t been buried in the Black Cricket collapse herself. If you were inclined
to believe in the Lord, you might say that he took with one hand and gave with the other, ending Jayne but sparing Daphne.
Personally, Daphne found it far easier to believe in the devil than the Lord. And the devil, Daphne thought, had made arrangements
with the Goodbye Six.
Daphne was making arrangements of her own. The day before she cleared out of Morgantown, she paid a pair of junkies three
hundred dollars for a Sig Sauer P365. The hopheads threw in a box of 124-grain hollow-point bullets as a gesture of friendly
Southern hospitality. The Sig’s magazine carried fifteen shells. With Arthur Oakes and Donovan McBride long dead, that meant
she could shoot each of the others twice and still have a few left over for anyone dumb enough to get in the way.