Bethany Hagen: Landry Park

I looked up, hoping that the men had heard me, but instead I saw a girl in a ball gown, her green eyes gleaming in the frozen darkness.

She was crouched on the ground behind a tree, as if she had been hiding. Her pink gown was ripped up to the thigh, exposing a long leg and a very swollen ankle. Blood clustered around her nose and lips, a dried streak trailing from the corner of her mouth down to her neck, and her hair was yanked and tangled out of its elaborate twist.

As I got closer, I could see that it was Addison’s daughter, Cara Westoff, tormentor of my childhood and the most sought-after girl in Kansas City.

“Oh my God,” I said when I could breathe again. “Are you okay?”

“Do I look okay?” she snapped.

“You look like you spent the night in a gibbet cage,” I told her, and tried to brush a clump of hair away from a scrape on her cheek. She slapped my hand away. If we had been in any other situation, I would have walked away.

Cara and I were born days apart from each other to mothers who were best friends and rivals. We were both firstborn children and both destined to be heirs. But while Cara was born blond and plump and cooing, I was born red-faced and scrawny and stone-eyed. Cara was beautiful and vibrant, while I was quiet and racked with frequent bouts of the mysterious illness that plagued all the Landrys as children. She had everyone—parents, servants, strangers—convinced that she was the sweetest girl ever to twirl on the earth, and maybe even I believed it for a time.

However, it soon became clear she had a wild streak. As children, our games of hide-and-seek sometimes turned into vicious hunts that ended with hair pulling and Indian burns. She took my desserts at dinner and kicked my legs under the table. And any time I dared protest, she’d play sweet-voiced and contrite, probing whatever new bruise or scratch she’d left with long fingers.

“See? No harm done,” she’d say, eyes flashing from my face to the corners of the room and back again.

When she was nine, she dared a servant boy to kiss her on the mouth and then watched without emotion when the boy and his family were removed to a distant farm. When she was twelve, she stole a pouch of her father’s opium and smoked an entire pipe of the stuff, falling asleep right at the dinner table, then blaming her torpor on a late night spent studying. And the year after that—the year I became sickest of all—she tried to run away from home, but was caught after driving the family car into a ditch. She told her father that I’d convinced her to do it, had made her steal the car to come fetch me so that we could run away together.

I’ll never forget Harry Westoff’s face—ruddy and furious—looming over my sickbed like a malevolent moon.

“Daddy,” Cara had said, her voice lilting up in that syrupy-sweet tone. “I’m sure Madeline didn’t mean any harm.” Even through my fever-racked haze, I could see her eyes darting around, just as they had when she tried to convince me that she hadn’t hurt me.

“I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding, Harry,” Father said, his hand heavy on my burning forehead. “At any rate, I will not have you accosting my daughter while she’s sick.”

Father’s word, as always, was law for other gentry. Harry glared at me before sweeping out of the room. Cara stayed to brush her lips against my cheek and whisper in my ear.

“See? No harm done.”

We talked less after that. I remained housebound and frail for almost a year, and by the time we started the academy at fourteen, she’d quickly ascended the pyramid of popularity while my reserved nature and frequent absences kept me in relative obscurity. She chose dresses; I chose books.

We stopped writing to each other on our sleek white tablets, and even our mothers—the sole impetus for our infant companionship—stopped trying to bring us together.

As I stood next to Cara, our past flitting through my mind, I realized that this was the closest we’d been to each other in years. And she’d slapped me, as if I needed another reminder that we weren’t friends—or even friendly —anymore.

“I’ll go get my father,” I told her. “My cousin Jamie is here, too. He can look at your ankle.” The words came out softer than I expected; I realized that I did want to help, no matter how she’d treated me before. She looked so brittle and so uncertain with her shredded dress and bruised skin.

“No!” she said. “Just—just help me up and get me back to the house. No one needs to know I was out here.”

“Cara, they’re turning the house upside down to find out who screamed. How do you plan on blending in with blood on your face and an injured ankle?”

“I don’t know! But they can’t find me like this, they’ll think—”

I never found out what she was worried they’d think because Father and Jamie finally noticed that I wasn’t with them anymore. With a shout to the others, they came straight over to us, Jamie jogging and my father walking in long, brisk strides a few yards behind him, their lanterns casting strange shadows over Cara’s face.

Jamie wasted no time in kneeling on the frozen needles and raising a hand to Cara’s battered face. “May I?” he asked. She looked like she wanted to say no, but my father was standing next to her, his face cold and sharp, and Mr. Wilder and Mr. Glaize were approaching, so she simply rolled her eyes.

“Might as well,” she said.

“Cara Westoff!” Mr. Wilder sputtered, his words labored from his hurry over to us. “What in the name of heaven are you doing out here?”

Cara tilted her head up to him. In the light, I could see the blood on her face more clearly, and bruises, too, running along her throat like a necklace. “I got lost.” Her voice was surly, proud. Pure Cara. “And I don’t need any help, thanks.”

Father pressed his lips together, examining her with steel eyes. “You’ve been assaulted, Miss Westoff.”

Mr. Wilder choked at the word assaulted , and Mr. Glaize started roaming the area around us, as if he expected the assailant to be skulking behind the nearby pines. I myself felt a twinge of fear. If someone could catch Cara, as athletic and tall as she was, by surprise, it wouldn’t take much for them to overpower me, short and thin and with muscles just strong enough to pull a book from the shelf.

“We’ll take it from here,” Father said when Cara remained silent. “Did you see your assailant? Hear anything important?”

“Is he nearby?” Mr. Glaize asked, still tramping around the clearing. “Do you know if he fled?”

“Was he at the debut?” Mr. Wilder asked in a trembling voice. “Not a guest, surely, but maybe as a servant?”

Cara gave me a fierce glare, as if somehow this was my fault, but she didn’t answer.

Father shook his head slightly. “I’m afraid the police will need to question you, and they’ll want to do it promptly. It’s best to get this taken care of quickly, for your sake and for ours.”

Mr. Wilder pressed a hand against his chest, rubbing it as if something was burning him from the inside. “Surely, Mr. Landry, we do not need to involve the police?”

“It’s your property, Mr. Wilder. But a gentry girl’s honor and health are at stake, and you can imagine Addison and Harry Westoff aren’t going to rest until they’ve brought the assailant to justice. I assume you don’t want to seem reticent to help the Westoffs?”

“Reticent? Of course not! Obviously, I’ll do whatever it takes to help the Westoffs. But a brazen attack here at Wilder House, and on Marianne’s debut night…”

Father ignored him and knelt in front of Cara. Jamie was still peering into her face, gently lifting her hair to probe the bruises along her jaw, but Father waved him away. “Miss Westoff, before the police get here, is there anything you’d like to tell us—about what you might have seen? Who you might have been out here with?”