Sarah Benadine is Dead

Chapter XV, Part I

Part Three

The Death Wish

April—June 1956

One small theory before we are on our way: there is perhaps nothing a human will not do with the right set of variables and provocations. Throughout the tale that history tells, much has been done in the name of love, hate, fear, anger, desperation, and the like. Atrocities have been committed. Miraculous good deeds have been performed. Battles have been waged.

All of this on a grand scale as well as a much smaller one.

***

Mabel Starkowski had died on June 4th, 1955. She had never left Clearwater. While all of Medula was trying to find her, she was somewhere south, rotting underneath Briargate School for the Gifted.

There are very few plain mysteries in the entirety of this story, but why none of the authorities in Medula spent any real time looking into the notion that she had never made it home to Medula is certainly one of them. Any number of things could be the cause: misunderstanding, miscommunication, incompetence, cutting corners, deliberate sabotage. I myself like to believe—perhaps over-optimistically—that it was an honest, if grave, mistake. The time has long since passed for anyone to know for sure. Whatever the cause, the error did not matter much in the end. It is highly unlikely that normal police would have been able to find Mabel Starkowski even had they been looking in the right place.

In the end, Allison Groves would never know that she was the last person to see Mabel alive.

Shannon, Caleb, Ginger, Ollie, Jared, and Dexter did not see much of Allison for quite some time after the night of March 16th. In theory, she was still around plenty. She showed up to her classes and could be seen in the hallways and corridors. Caleb would usually see her at breakfast and dinner. But she was suddenly harshly unavailable; she went home every weekend she had the chance, she all but disappeared most lunch periods, and she spent most of her free time in her dormitory. It was not blatant avoidance, but it came close. The six of them were willing to give her space; she had to come to turns with something they already had. By the start of April, a bit regretfully, they'd grown used to the lack of her presence.

Allison herself spent an increasing amount of time alone. Even at night in her dorm room, when her roommates were there she drew the curtains around her bed and read or studied or simply sat lost in her own thoughts. This solitude was much harder to find on weekends when she went home; the Groves family had been blessed with twelve children, and though Allison was the youngest—and only five of them, Allison included, still technically lived at home—at any given time the Groves's house could be found packed to the rafters with both family and friends.

Allison's oldest brother Victor turned thirty-one at the beginning of April. Miriam Groves, the Groves family matriarch, had always gone above and beyond on each child's birthday—an impressive feat considering there were twelve of them—so it was no surprise when every sibling, Victor's girlfriend Signe, and plenty of family friends were ordered to the house on the weekend following Victor's. Allison escaped to the bedroom she shared with two of her sisters as soon as she thought was safe. No matter how badly she wished to be alone, it was not worth it to invoke the wrath of her mother. Miriam Groves was not a woman of much flash, but she was a master of finding subtle ways of making her irritation perfectly clear. None knew this better than her children.

Allison figured she wouldn't be particularly missed. The concentration of the party was, understandably, considerably older than she was, and even the youngest of her older siblings had managed to wiggle their way into adult conversation that Allison herself was still too young for. She'd lasted downstairs as long as she could—she'd entertained one of her cousin's young children with her mastery of yo-yo tricks—but eventually she'd lost interest. She'd snitched a piece of cake on her way up—her mother abhorred her to eat in her bedroom—and padded up the stairs quickly, not wanting to be caught. As she climbed the stairs, she could hear booming laughter from the living room.