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Karen Wheeler had always been a kind woman. She never yelled at her children too harshly, always had been a good wife to her sometimes unbearable excuse of a husband, and donated whenever she possibly could. But she was refined in a way that made her careful not to cross too many lines, just enough that people praised her character but didn't isolate her from the respectable crew she had aligned herself with long ago. She took pride in her home and family, keeping the yard at its finest, not a single shred of grass above the other at any moment and her children clean and presentable at all times. She was a good person. But she was coward at times, she knew that. Last year she wanted nothing more than for her sweet little Mike to come home and never have even tampered with the other boys in Will Byer's disappearance. She had never wanted him to be seen as a trouble maker, and she let that blind her from keeping an eye out for the young boy, her son's friend. She'd been on a path of redemption since May, just trying to free herself of that guilt that had been weighing on her shoulders like bricks attached to her back. Her eyes shifted up from her plate at the dinner table and she could see that attempt at reconciliation with her moral alignment plainly now.
Sherry Prescott, her sister's daughter, sat next to Nancy, as she had for a week now. Karen had tried her best not to look at her niece as a charity case, but it was hard not to. Her late sister had passed when the girl was six, and Samuel Prescott had grabbed her tiny hand and drug her all the way to New York City, miles and miles away from anyone with a hint of Concord blood in them. For eleven years now she'd lived in a penthouse in the beginnings of the Upper Eastside with no family at all. She must not have been a happy child, all alone in a big home with no father to come home every day. Little Sherry had always just figured he was working, paperwork and such, but he'd actually been involved in something far worse. He had been creating shell companies and planting mattress stores around the country to launder money through all this time. He worked for the New York Stock Company, an employment frowned upon by everyone he kept in contact with. No one really knew how trustworthy it was, though, in Samuel Prescott's case— it was soaring.
Three months ago, though, his power crusade came to an end. The IRS had started investigating him and his companies, because his tax reports didn't make much sense for the cars and jets he kept purchasing, and low and behold, they struck gold. He was so in debt that they had no other option than to change those fines into a forty-year sentence, leaving his seventeen year old daughter even more alone than she ever thought possible. His assistant had tried to get custody of Sherry, but Child Protective Services believed it would be best to get her out of New York completely, especially with all of the publicity in her face. The only living family they could find was the Wheeler household in Hawkins, Indiana, and Karen had agreed wholeheartedly. She had loved her sister deeply, and Kate would've done the same for her children.
However, she was still getting used to having her niece around. In comparison to the older two Wheeler children, Sherry stuck out like a sore thumb. Her hair was thick and wavy, a warm golden color that made her seem as if she was spun from gold herself, and her cheeks were permanently flushed, it seemed, dabbled with a birthmark along the left side of her face under her eye, and only there. She had the same eyes Mike did though— dark brown and slanted, a little less angry than the boy's though. That was most certainly a Concord trait, not one of a Wheeler.
