Chapter Text
Rita Skeeter was completely and utterly lost. She’d been driving for the entire day, and was currently in the middle of nowhere. She wished she could have a more specific identifier than the “middle of nowhere,” but unfortunately, her phone hadn’t had a signal for hours, and she hadn’t seen a car for who knew how many miles. That was how in the middle of nowhere she was.
She’d finally given up, and pulled out the old map her mother had given her, the map her mother had always used to navigate to Granny’s house in the past. When her mother had handed it to her, Rita hadn’t believed she’d actually need to use it. She’d thought her mother was being overly cautious, as usual. She was rapidly coming to terms with the fact that her mother using this map to get to her grandmother’s house was not, in fact, because of her mother’s difficulties with technology, but rather due to the fact that her grandmother evidently lived in a location divorced from all modern civilization.
At the next road intersection, she pulled over and unfolded the comically large map. She knew the road she was on, and using her phone as a compass, she guessed which direction to go. She did this at every crossroads, over and over again. Sometimes, she was hardly sure that the map was correct at all, as she swore the roads she was driving on didn’t match the directions on the map.
After hours of driving on what the same few roads (the roads all looked similar, but not that similar), she realized that her phone wasn’t properly telling her the direction because the car’s metal exterior was messing with the magnetic field. So every fifteen or so minutes, she pulled over, stuck her arm out of the car, and checked to make sure she was going the right way.
Despite the frequent stops, it took her far less time after that to follow the map. It was still difficult, but didn’t quite feel like she was in some alien alternate reality where she kept driving in circles.
Finally, Rita started to see buildings— mostly farms and silos, but signs of human life, nonetheless. Even then, though, she sometimes had to drive in circles before finding the right way. Some of the roads she was looking for simply didn’t exist, leading her to make u-turns and drive the same stretch of road over and over until she realized that road simply wasn’t there. Other times, roads that weren’t on the map popped up out of nowhere. Many roads didn’t have signs at all, she simply followed them, hoping they were the road she wanted. That’s what she got, she supposed, for following a map that was over a decade old.
The entire thing had the rather frustrating effect of feeling like a metaphor for what her life was now— wanting to get somewhere, but unable to find her way, and completely alienated from all society as she did so. The problem with being a gossip writer was that one tended to make many enemies. When one was a journalist in Washington DC, well, those enemies tended to be very powerful. Powerful in a way that was difficult to recover from.
Rita had seen many of her colleagues be disavowed by major public figures— politicians, artists, celebrities, philanthropists. Usually, their storm of bad publicity faded over a few months as the famous figures moved on to more important issues than the journalist who had written a scathing article about them. Rita had seen in happen numerous times.
Indeed, she herself had been hated by almost everyone who was anyone in Washington. For her, too, the hatred usually passed and everything went back to normal. It was a miserable few months, for sure, as she had to stay offline to avoid seeing threats of death or violence, but after all that, she was back to writing her usual articles without a problem. She’d expected that that was going to be what happened this time, too.
What she hadn’t accounted for, however, was the fact that her most recent articles had made enemies within the journalist community as well. Writing an article about lead editors and managers of several rival newspapers laundering money was a remarkably fast way to get herself blacklisted. It particularly didn’t help that the articles she’d written hadn’t been entirely true, either. This meant that even those in the Daily Prophet (the newspaper the article was published in) had ended up hating her for marring their credibility. She’d lost every ally she had, and most neutral connections as well.
Every major city, and most suburbs, in America had at least one influential figures who despised Rita enough to ensure she was blacklisted from every magazine, newspaper, and periodical available in that area. She hadn’t fully appreciated just how insular journalism was until it was all turned against her.
If she was being entirely fair with herself, she should have known what she was getting into. Publishing slightly exaggerated articles wasn’t exactly something journalists were supposed to be doing, but is was acceptable enough if it sold headlines. Flat out lying, on the other hand, was prohibited. In hindsight, there was no way she could have written an article about the head of another newspaper that contained lies and expected herself not to be blacklisted from every major publication. She really wasn’t sure what she’d been thinking. But now she had to live with the consequences.
Jobless and friendless, Rita had driven home to her parents’ house in tears, asking what to do. Her mother had ended up providing the solution, suggesting that she take a year or so off and let herself relax and reset, away from it all. Her mother had given her the keys, the awful map, and told her that she could move in to her grandmother’s old house in Mort’s Pine. Her grandmother had died years ago, and it was unsurprisingly difficult to sell a small house in a backwater town that wasn’t able to be found through Google Maps. People especially didn’t want to buy a house where the walls were stained with nicotine and cockroaches skittered through every gap in the paneling.
For all its faults, though, it made it the perfect location for Rita to escape the backlash and start anew. If it was almost entirely off the grid, it meant no one in the town hated Rita, giving her a relatively fresh start. She had enough money to stay on her feet for about a year, longer since she wouldn’t have to be paying for her own housing.
Thus that was how Rita had found herself driving for hours through the countryside, hoping she was following the map properly. She knew she was in the right county now, at least, as she’d passed the sign welcoming her to Sanguire County.
She realized, with increasing concern, that she was down to a quarter tank of gas. She pulled out the map, a more urgent destination now necessary. Her eyes scanned the roads and crossroads for a little gas pump sign that was near Franklin Boulevard, the road she was currently on. If she was right, there was a gas station only about fifteen minutes away.
Twenty minutes later, she was paying with cash at the front of the gas station, as the credit card scanner on the pump didn’t work. (It had taken her repeated attempts and a lot of frustration to discover this.) While she was there, she asked the cashier about directions to Granny’s house, figuring it couldn’t hurt to get more help.
“Can you take me to 4601 Cherry Street?” Rita asked, fully expecting him to have no clue what she was asking about.
The man’s eyes immediately flickered with recognition. “’Course. You just keep going on Franklin, and then take a right on Cheshire, and then when you see the oak tree, there’ll be a slight left and—” he stopped, realizing Rita’s eyes had glazed over. “Let me just right that down for you.” He pulled out a sheet of notebook paper and scrawled directions onto it. “There you go.”
“Thank you,” Rita replied, tucking the paper into her purse.
“Get there quickly,” he said. “Not safe driving at night ‘round here.”
She nodded, thanking him for his help, then went back to her car. As the car slowly filled with gas, she skimmed over the man’s directions. Her car freshly fueled, she followed the cashier’s directions to her grandmother’s neighborhood. As the sun slowly set, she used her phone’s flashlight to make the words out on the sheet of paper, sometimes cross referencing the written directions with her map.
The roads were completely dark. Not a single car was on the road, and it seemed that the town had never heard of putting in a street light. Despite the fact that, as far as she knew, they were nowhere near a body of water, fog curled in front of her so densely she couldn’t see over twenty feet in front of herself. She guessed that the combination of fog and lack of night lighting was the reason the man at the gas station had recommended such caution when nighttime hit. She had to drive slowly in order to make sure she stayed on the road.
By the time she parked in front of her grandmother’s old house, it had been over an hour since she’d left the gas station. Illuminated by the dim street lights, she recognized it from the couple of times her family had visited her grandmother, as well as from the time everyone had cleaned the house out after the funeral. It was smaller than she remembered, and much of the front lawn alternated between patchy and overgrown. The pavement was a mosaic of cracked cement.
Rita jostled the key in the lock of the front door, needing to jiggle it to properly let it turn. After a bit of forceful shoving, she was in. The entryway gaped before her, shrouded in darkness. She flicked on the lights, which surprisingly turned on, illuminating the hallway in a warm flickering glow. She rolled her suitcases into the hall. The house smelled of cigarettes and time, every surface coated in dust.
The house was almost entirely empty. Everything remaining in the house was either worthless or too bulky for people to take after her grandmother had died. There was a couch, its cushions pitted with cigarette burns. The shelves on the bookcase were warped from time, only holding a few old magazines and historical romance books.
A cockroach skittered across the floor. Rita jumped back involuntarily. The floors were so dusty that there where footprints where she’d stepped. She sighed, and vowed to clean the house tomorrow. Tonight, she was dead tired from her journey.
She inspected the bed frame and mattress for any potentially dangerous decay, and then put her sheets on top of it. (She didn’t trust the pair of sheets that were still on the bed). She crashed her exhausted body into the bed, falling asleep within minutes of shutting her eyes.
The next morning, Rita found her way to a local diner she’d driven by on her way to the house, as there was no food in the house.
She’d wanted to get to the grocery store the previous night, but had been far too exhausted to do anything but go to sleep. Also, given the fact that this town was nothing like DC, grocery stores probably closed far earlier, anyway. Not to mention the fact that she had no clue where a grocery store even was, and couldn’t use Google Maps to find her way to one, because not only was there absolutely no signal in this town, but her grandmother’s house didn’t have WiFi. This was extremely frustrating, but she rationalized to herself that at least she’d be able to really separate from society here. It would be refreshing, a detox from the internet, or something like that, anyway. Besides, she had no clue how to set up the internet herself, always having depended on her father for such things.
The fact that the town wasn’t on Google Maps was incredibly suspect to Rita in a way that made the journalist portions of her brain hum with curiosity, but she reminded herself that she was over that. She’d be living in this town for about a year, so she didn’t want to stir the pot.
As she walked through the metallic diner doors, she was greeted by the cacophony of different voices overlapping together. A few people at the front glanced toward Rita with curiosity as she stepped in. The smell of potatoes permeated the air, putting a growl in her stomach.
The hostess, a teenage girl leaning on the hostess stand scrolling on her phone, looked up at Rita with curious blue eyes. Her name tag read “Julie.” She blinked a couple of times, as though unsure of whether Rita was real. “Hello! Hi!” She stammered for a couple of seconds, then regained her composure. “Will it just be you ma’am?”
Rita was slightly taken aback by the use of “ma’am” to apply to her (she was in her late twenties, hardly old enough to be a “ma’am) but nodded “yes.” Going to restaurants alone had once stung, but she’d long since gotten used to it. Most of the girlfriends she’d dated had soon found Rita to be a frustrating significant other. If they weren’t upset by how Rita would always prioritize her work over her partner, they were irritated by the callousness with which she handled conversations, or betrayed when they discovered that she was incapable of keeping a secret. Enough girlfriends had told her the same thing that she’d long since realized it was very much a her problem, but she simply didn’t care to change. She liked the way she was as a person, thank you very much.It was probably a bad sign that most people who weren’t blood related to Rita had cut themselves off from her, but although the abandonment hurt, she was assured in the fact that she was still herself. She wasn’t changing herself or watering herself down for others. And if that meant being a bit of a manipulative bitch, she didn’t really care.
“Excellent, right this way,” Julie pulled a menu out of the hostess stand, glancing at Rita every couple of seconds.
Rita would have been amused by Julie’s reaction if she wasn’t so confused. Did the hostess recognize her from somewhere? She’d assumed that her fall from journalistic grace hadn’t been so widespread as to touch this town in the middle of nowhere, but perhaps she was wrong to assume such things. Or perhaps the girl had an interest in journalism herself, and thus was up to speed? Rita’s curiosity was piqued.
“So, are you new here?” Julie asked. “I don’t recognize you.” The words were excited, almost giddy at the prospect of meeting someone new.
“Yeah, I’m staying at my grandmother’s old place,” Rita sat at the table Julie had guided her to.
“What’s her name?” Julie placed a roll of utensils on the table along with the menu.
“Gloria Jordanson.”
“Oh yeah, Mrs. Jordanson, of course. She went to church with us. Sold excellent cookies at the bake sale.”
“Yes,” Rita replied. She unfolded the napkin onto her lap. “I’m staying in her place.”
“What brings you to Mort’s Pine?” Julie asked.
Rita paused, considering what to tell her. “Just wanted to escape the city.”
“Well, this is an escape alright,” the hostess laughed dryly. “Just watch out or you’ll want to be escaping here.”
Rita laughed awkwardly.
“Oh, don’t listen to her,” a middle aged man sitting at the next table over said to Rita. “It’s lovely here.”
“Sure, Mr. Wagner,” Julie said. “If you want your entire world to be like twenty people.”
“Small isn’t a bad thing,” the woman next to Mr. Wagner said.
“It is when you’ve literally never left this God-forsaken town,” Julie replied.
The couple at the straightened. “Don’t use the Lord’s name like that,” the woman said. “It’s disrespectful.”
Julie huffed. “Oh, please, like anyone could say God hasn’t forsaken this town when they’re keeping this town—”
“Watch it,” the man said sharply, gesturing at Rita.
Julie looked back at Rita as though she’d forgotten Rita was there. “Right. Well, I hope you enjoy your stay here, however long it is. If you have any questions about the menu, please let me know.” She walked away to serve another table.
Rita was left confused as to why Julie had been cut off. It was probably some sort of local superstition of some sort, or else something they simply didn’t want tourists to know.
“So, you’re Gloria’s granddaughter?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” Rita replied. “I’ve been here a couple of times to see her, but never for that long.”
“I’m Lindsey, Lindsey Wagner.” She reached over to shake Rita’s hand. “And this is my husband, George.”
“I’m Rita.” She shook Lindsey’s hand, and then George’s.
“I think I remember seeing you a few years back,” Lindsey commented. “Was it at the funeral?”
“Probably,” Rita responded. She didn’t really remember much of the funeral, as her thoughts had mostly been occupied with the news story about a senator’s affair she’d been following at the time. She knew it made her a terrible person, but it wasn’t like she’d known her grandmother well, so her career had been the most important thing at the time. It still was, honestly. But after being blacklisted, it was impossible to maintain her career, so she needed to distance herself from it.
“Awful about her passing away,” George said. “What brings you here?”
It seemed that everyone would be asking her that question while she was here. “Escape from the city,” Rita replied.
“Oh, which city?” Lindsey asked.
“Washington DC,” Rita replied.
“That’s lovely, I went there with some of my girlfriends a few years back.”
Rita’s brain had to recalibrate for a second as she remembered that some straight women referred to their female friends as “girlfriends.” She engaged in some mind-numbing small talk with the couple until Julie came back and took her order. They were a nice couple, of course, but whenever Rita engaged in small talk, she slowly felt her brain crystallizing in place. At least when she was a journalist, she could pry deeper, going beyond the surface to figure out the gossip of what was really going on. She was tempted to do it now, to let her trustworthy energy seep into her body language so she could pry back the log of superficiality and reveal the grubby underside of these folks. But it was literally her first morning in town. Her curiosity could wait.
Her meal at the restaurant was bland but satisfying. She’d ordered eggs and sausage, that being her go-to meal whenever she ate in a diner. It provided a good measuring stick against which she could test the quality of the food. Although her breakfast here wasn’t the best she’d ever had (that award went to the Frying Fork, a diner she’d gone to when investigating someone who lived in Kentucky, of all places), it was certainly in her top five. She paid the bill, then left.
At the restaurant, she’d asked the couple for directions to the nearest grocery store. They’d laughed at her saying “nearest,” because it was in fact the only grocery store in town. Getting there was easier than she’d expected. It was fitted directly next to a gas station. She went inside the store, taking her grocery bags out of the trunk of her car.
Inside, the store was strangely small. Used to sprawling supermarkets, this store only had around seven or eight aisles. Shelves displayed one (or maybe, if she was lucky, two) brands of a given item. Rita realized that she’d need to modify her usual shopping list a little bit. She’d forgotten how much more varied the stores in northern Virginia were. Still, she made it in and out of the grocery store without much incident.
On the drive back to the filthy house she got lost numerous times. While it hadn’t been too hard following directions from the diner to the grocery store, she realized that she was still incapable of creating a mental map of the town. In the end, she’d had to back track to the diner to get back home. It definitely wasn’t the most efficient route, but it served the purpose she needed it to. She vowed to dedicate one day she was here simply driving around the town to get her bearings.
Today, however, she needed to start cleaning. Because of the refrigerated nature of most of her groceries, she started with quick cleaning of the fridge. It was merely serviceable enough for her to trust that she wouldn’t get food poisoning from keeping her ingredients in there.
She started in the kitchen. She was extremely thankful that she was able to download music and had brought her speaker, because otherwise cleaning would have been mind-numbingly boring. By lunch time, the kitchen was clean enough that she felt comfortable unpacking her dishes and making herself a salad for lunch. She’d just started to fork olive-oil coated spinach leaves into her mouth when all of the sudden, there was a knock on the door.