“What’s a Chicago dog?” he asked, eyeing the ad as it started over.
“It’sexactlywhat your daughter’s craving right now. Pickle spear and all.”
“Get her one,” Gallagher ordered with a glance in the rearview mirror at Lenore.
“We don’t have the money for that,” I insisted. “But it’s happy hour, so drinks are half-price. Ihaveto see Gallagher try a grape soda with Nerds.”
“What’s a Nerd?” He scowled at the menu, evidently frustrated that the ads played too quickly for him to catch all the details.
“There’s a printed menu above the screen,” I told him. He had to duck his head to see that high up through the rear window, because the top of his cap nearly brushed the ceiling of the car.
Lenore and Gallagher studied the menu while I used our phone to search for Wi-Fi signals within range. There were three. Two of them were locked hotspots, likely coming from other cars. The third was from Starbucks.
Relieved, I logged in as a guest and was already tapping like mad on the keyboard when Lenore pressed the red button and began ordering. Absorbed in my search for Elizabeth Essig’s social media accounts, I wasn’t really listening, so when a carhop on actual roller skates showed up ten minutes later, I was surprised to see her hand Lenore a hot dog wrapped in a foil envelope.
Lenore handed it to me. Then she accepted three drinks and tipped the carhop.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have done that!” I said, even as I ripped the foil wrapper from my snack. “We can’t afford it.”
She shrugged. “What good is freedom if you can’t enjoy it every now and then? Eat your hot dog.”
“Thanks. Want a bite?” I asked. She started to shake her head. But she was as sick of rabbit stew as I was—I could practically hear that in her voice. “Here. Take a big bite.”
I handed her the hot dog and twisted until I could see Gallagher in the rear driver’s side seat. Holding his huge Styrofoam cup between his knees, he ripped the wrapper from his straw, then shoved it through the hole in the lid. Then he took a long drink.
“Wha—” He crunched into something and made a face. “Lenore, this is not root beer. It seems to be shards of glass floating in cough syrup.”
The siren giggled. “That would be Delilah’s grape soda. With Nerds.”
I smiled as I traded cups with him and set mine in the center console. Then I took a big bite of my hot dog and went back to the search engine on my phone.
Elizabeth Essig’s social media accounts were unlocked and full of photographs. It wouldnottake the police long to realize they had the wrong woman. And it wasn’t hard for me to imagine myself living her life based on her pictures. She seemed to have lots of friends, and to truly like the guy I could only assume was her boyfriend.
Would he still be her boyfriend now that she was under arrest? Or would he abandon her—as my own boyfriend had—to avoid being labeled a cryptid sympathizer. Or being accused of beastiality.
There were no comments from him on her pages or his own since she’d been arrested.
Other than pictures of her setting up her classroom for the new school year and celebrating various birthdays and holidays with her friends—never in any manner that might sully the reputation of an elementary school teacher—there was little else to be learned about Elizabeth from her accounts.
So as I devoured my hot dog, I turned my attention to the dozens of articles that had already been published about “my” capture. Most of them were full of background information, including details of my original arrest and months in Metzger’s Menagerie, then subsequent recapture and sale to the Savage Spectacle. Several of them showed the burned-out husks of the Spectacle’s buildings after the national guard had bombed the entire compound.
I’d seen those images many times, and I never got tired of staring at the ashes of the most loathsome place I’d ever been forced to call home.
TheOklahoma Dailyhad the most useful information, at least for my purposes. The reporter had interviewed several of Elizabeth’s friends and coworkers, who all expressed shock and anger over her arrest. No one seemed to believe the claims that she was a cryptid outlaw, but no one seemed surprised by them, either.
“You guys, Elizabeth Essig’s best friend told a reporter that last year all of her friends were worried this would happen when ‘the real Delilah Marlow’ was arrested at Metzger’s and my picture was all over the news. This says they all noticed the resemblance then, and they were all—quote—‘mystified’ by it.”
“I bet they were,” Lenore said.
According to the article, literally dozens of people were willing to swear to the paper—and to a court of law—that Elizabeth Essig was human, and that she’d hardly left Clinton, Oklahoma, in at least three years, except for a yearly girls’ trip to Dallas during summer vacation.
However, at the end of the article one of her coworkers admitted to finding it a bit odd that the daughter of a—
“Holy shit,” I mumbled around the last bite of my Chicago dog.
“What?” Gallagher turned away from the rear windshield, where he’d been eyeing the other customers in brooding suspicion.
“Elizabeth Essig’s mother was a survivor of the reaping.”
