Page 49 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
@gustagusta:not really. Pretty sure you still need a father to make babies
@ktcakes888:that is very transphobic
@spinn_doctor:okay, snowflake
@goodnightsky:I meant that RC Barnes isn’t necessarily a man
@pawsandclaws:Didn’t Lucy say her mom was a journalist?
We racked our brains. Had Lucy mentioned her mother’s job? There had been so much speculation about Lucy’s mother and what had motivated her to move to the area, and to the Faraday House specifically, that we had trouble separating the threads of fact and fiction. Lucy’s mother was an escaped criminal, an impoverished ghost hunter, and an eccentric heiress, all in different retellings; she had been a tragic divorcée, a hot lesbian, and even the escaped acolyte of a Chicago-based cult that had briefly swept national attention after a raid in late summer of their Evanston-based compound.
But Olivia Howard was insistent: Lucy had certainly mentioned that her mother worked in journalism at the fake birthday party. Skyler Matthews backed her up. She remembered talking to Lucy about her mother’s career on a crime desk, back before Lucy Vale became a StrutGirl, back when she was still alternating between the gamers and the literary geeks at lunch.
We tracked all the biographical parallels to Rachel Vale we could find in descriptions of R.C. Barnes’s career path. The more we rooted through details about the author, the more compelling connections we found to the Vales—including an obsession with privacy that might explain the Vales’ pathetic digital footprint.
@ktcakes888:check it out. RC Barnes used to write for the Chicago Tribune
@ktcakes888:Didn’t Lucy say that she and her mom lived in Chicago?
@hannahbanana:she’s definitelybeento Chicago
@kash_money:no mention of a cat
@gustagusta:no mention of akid
@meeksmaster:this article says RC Barnes is the pen-name of a Michigan-based journalist
@nononycky:It’s gotta be her
Within twenty-four hours, Skyler Matthews and Kaitlyn Courtland had made an impressive graphic—modeled after the murder boards they’d seen while binge-watching old episodes ofLaw & Order—to compare all the points of biographical intersection between Rachel Vale and R.C. Barnes. Their work persuaded us: Rachel Vale had a secret identity as aNew York Timesbestselling author.
As soon as we knew, it seemed inevitable, the only possible resolution of all the mysteries that had surrounded the Vales since their arrival. For example, the fact that Rachel Vale didn’t seem to work but could afford to buy Halloween costumes for her shrubbery; the fact that she had so many tattoos; the fact that the Vales leaned progressive. According to Spinnaker, it was impossible to make it in media these days unless you voted Democrat or took to Twitter.
Sensing a forthcoming rant about the deep state, @ktcakes888 briefly muted his account.
Our excitement snowballed quickly into hypotheses about the Vales’ net worth and what the rumored Netflix docuseries based on R.C. Barnes’s first book meant for the rest of us. We wondered if she had been to LA, had met any of our favorite YouTube stars, or could get us our own series. Skyler Matthews, who was by then floating the idea of her own podcast, suggested she might invite R.C. Barnes on for an interview. Olivia Howard outrageously claimed to have known all along that Rachel Vale was an artist just from reading her aura. Jackson Skye countered that journalists weren’t artists. Allan Meeks fired off a dozen eye-rolling emojis in a row.
@meeksmaster:what are you talking about?
@meeksmaster:All they do is creative writing
@spinn_doctor:never trust the #fakenews
@geminirising:okay qanon
@geminirising:Put the crazy down
Will Friske reminded all of us, irrelevantly, that he’d dropped a deuce in Rachel Vale’s toilet back when he and his cousin were clearing their yard.
If Rachel Vale was famous, then so was her toilet.
Then Peyton Neely introduced a new line of conversation. Wasn’t it odd that only months after a famous writer had moved into the Faraday House, a bunch of supposed strangers allegedly broke onto their property to try and excavate the yard for Nina Faraday’s body and then made a podcast about it?
Wasn’t it . . .convenient?
@badprincess:you think it was a setup??
@badprincess:Like some kind of publicity stunt?
