“That’s the DJ’s name? It’s accurate, I guess.”
“That’s the song. Charlie Feathers. Classic.”
“But what’s the show?”
“You mean the finest radio program in the history of the world, ever? Seriously. I’ll send you a link.”
“It’s creepy.”
“It’s from outer space. From some whole other planet. And it plays the best shit.”
And with that, off he headed for the foot of the stairs to yell or sing whatever ridiculous thing he’d come up with today to wake his current girls to their morning routine. Back when she’d lived here, Rebecca had kept a list of Joel’s wake-up hollers. She still had it somewhere, tucked into one of those paperbacks in the boxes at the foot of her futon.
“Rebecca, aren’t you way early?” he called over his shoulder. “You look good, by the way.”
That comment didn’t surprise Rebecca. Joel said something like it almost every time he saw her, or any of his former wards, whether it was true or not. What surprised her was Amanda’s murmured, “He’s right, actually.”
Rebecca was even more surprised to find Amanda eying her, even while flipping pancakes with her spatula.
“That’s ridiculous, Amanda. You have no idea how ridiculous—”
“It’s true. It’s like you’ve settled in behind your face or something. Now, if you could only learn to get some sleep, you’d—”
“I lost one last night,” Rebecca blurted. The words came out clipped, chopped up, like the scary radio-lady’s.
Amanda didn’t put her spatula down or anything. But for one moment, she stopped using it, just stood there. “What do you mean?”
“A guy. A caller. A jumper. I could hear it in his voice the second he started talking. I knew he was serious. Or … that he was different. That this was something weird and real. He was so freaky. I mean freaked-out. Oh my God, Amanda, he was saying the craziest things. It was like he was already comfortable with his decision. Like the decision was made. And I couldn’t … I botched it so badly. I couldn’t find the words to say. I said everything wrong. I panicked. I—”
“You’re sure he jumped?”
Looking straight at Amanda was like getting a faceful of ice water. That gaze stayed so still. It wasn’t exactly calming. But it was cooling.
“No. I’m not. I’m pretty positive I didn’t help, though.”
“So. Worry about that.”
“What about him?”
“How many times have I told you, Rebecca? Since the first day you came here, when you were what, thirteen? Worry about you. Worry about what you can control.”
“Yeah, thanks, Amanda. But today I think I’ll worry about the guy who died.”
For a little longer, Amanda stayed motionless at the stove, like a bird on a branch. Then she set her spatula on the counter and moved the pancake pan off the heat. “You’re a good girl,” she said, went to the yellow cord-phone mounted on the wall, and dialed it. “Hi, Dawn, it’s Amanda,” she said into the receiver, and Rebecca realized whom she’d called: Dawn Ripinsky, daytime desk officer at the East Dunham police precinct and former Halfmoon House resident, who’d left—“graduated,” as Amanda insisted they call it—the year Rebecca came.
“You at work yet, Dawn?”
No How’s your fiancé? or Haven’t seen you in ages. Unlike her husband, Amanda didn’t seek lasting relationships with the children she had cared for. She did not play Smackdown with them in the middle of the night. What she wanted, as she’d stated to Rebecca just the once, on the day Rebecca had somehow found the nerve to challenge her about it, was much more valuable, as she saw it, and much harder: she wanted her charges so competent, so ready to confront whatever came for them (not to mention what had already come), that they never once felt the need to come back. That’s how Amanda would know she had done her job.
“Good,” she was saying into the phone now. “Let me ask you. You have a suicide last night?”
Rebecca held her breath and waited. When Amanda just stood there, she whispered, “Well?”
But Amanda only waved a dismissive hand. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Yeah. Rebecca, you remember her? One of ours. That is, she used to be. She’s the one who called it in, from the Crisis Center on campus.”
Rebecca’s hands twisted in the towels on the table.
“Okay. Thanks.” Hanging up, Amanda returned to the stove. It was all Rebecca could do to keep from grabbing her and spinning her around.
Amanda, on the other hand, had already resumed sliding pancakes onto plates, while footsteps and laughter reverberated upstairs. Whatever Joel had hollered this morning, Rebecca had missed it while concentrating on Amanda’s phone call. Pipes clanked in the walls, then gushed as the upstairs sinks and showers started.
“There was no jumper, Rebecca.”
Rebecca let go of the towels. “They’re sure? How do they know? They found the guy?”
“Nope. But no splatter.”
Rebecca winced.
Amanda never so much as turned around. “What they did find, apparently, is the phone he called you from. He laid that right back where he stole it.”
“He stole the phone?”
“Off old Mrs. Tangee’s dresser. The librarian at the downtown branch, the public one, you know her? Apparently, this guy slipped in a patio door of her condo sometime after ten p.m., when Mrs. Tangee had turned off Law and Order and gone to sleep, took the phone, walked around East Dunham or up on some campus building roof or wherever until at least a little after one—”
“How do they know that?”
And there it was, the only thing that could stop Amanda from moving about her business: stupidity, from someone she had at least partially raised. She turned and stared at Rebecca until Rebecca figured it out and said, “Oh.”
“Right. So. Sometime between whenever you were done with him—”
Nice, Rebecca thought, and very nearly said. Considerately put, very gentle. Thanks, Amanda.
“—and five-twelve a.m., when the police finally got the callback number and called it and woke Mrs. Tangee up, this guy waltzed back into her condo, returned the phone, and vanished the way he’d come.”
“What?”
“That’s the best they can figure it. That’s all Dawn has got.”
“That’s…” Rebecca started, but realized she had no idea what to say. Amanda finished the sentence for her.
“… not the behavior of a guy about to kill himself?”
“No,” Rebecca said. “It isn’t.” The information should have been comforting. Instead, an all-new shudder spread from her shoulders to the tips of her fingers, from the base of her neck all the way into her feet. “It’s more like a stalker.”
I can see you …
“Rebecca, go home. Get some sleep. Really, kiddo, you need to sleep.”
Only then did Rebecca realize she’d already resumed folding. The habit was simply ingrained; it was the price of Amanda’s company.
“You should be relieved,” Amanda snapped. “Why aren’t you relieved?”
Blowing out a shaky breath, Rebecca turned her head to either side, slowly, as though wetting her hair under a spigot. She could feel the sting in Amanda’s rebuke. It felt wonderful. Amanda did care, in spite of herself. She always had. This was how she showed it.
“You’re right,” Rebecca said, folded one last towel, set it square atop the pile she’d made, and stood.
“Does that mean you’re relieved?”
“It means I’m sleepy. I’m going to go sleep.”
“Rebecca, let this go. Listen to me. You can’t do the kind of work we do if you’re going to—”
“I will if he will,” Rebecca murmured. Out the window, the trees reddened in the early morning sunlight. Her next shiver came quietly.
I can see you.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amanda barked. “Do I know what you’re talking about?”
“Nope,” said Rebecca. “And I don’t, eith
er.” She stood to go and stopped, abruptly, with her hands on the table.
What had Amanda just said? “… the kind of work we do…”
We do. Her and me.
For quite possibly the first time since she’d picked up the Crisis Center phone maybe six hours ago, Rebecca felt herself relax, felt warmth spreading through. “Thank you, Amanda,” she said quietly. Carefully. “Tell Joel…” But there was nothing she wanted Amanda to tell Joel. She just liked being around Joel, part of his games, in earshot of his holler. “Don’t forget, I can only work until five today. Then I go to Jess’s house.” She moved toward the back door.
“Is Jess really renting that house?” Amanda asked, stopping Rebecca with her hand on the knob. “She’s really living in the burned-out house?”
Surprised, Rebecca turned. The question itself was reasonable enough, a question any sane person might ask about such an apparently sane and sound person as Jess. What made it remarkable was that Amanda had asked it, was displaying active curiosity about a tenant or employee. Or rather, that she was displaying curiosity so openly that another employee could see it.
“Have you ever been to that house, Amanda? It is one disturbing place. It’s—”
“I wasn’t thinking about disturbing, Rebecca, I was thinking about filth. And lingering smoke stink. And faulty wiring, and flaking walls and lead paint and unstable floors.”
“It’s not really like that. I mean, they’ve cleaned it up, mostly. There’s nothing actually flaking or unstable. It’s just…” Rebecca’s voice trailed away as understanding dawned. “Oh,” she said then. “Ha.” Naturally, Amanda was neither nervous for nor curious about Jess; she was being judgmental. And not gently so.
“She has a baby, doesn’t she?”
“Well, yeah, Amanda. Hence my nannying there.”
To Rebecca’s amazement, Amanda blushed. Maybe. Certainly, her flour-pale cheeks reddened.
“What happened there, anyway?” Rebecca asked, at least in part to save Amanda embarrassment. Amanda-embarrassment wasn’t anything Rebecca knew how to deal with. “Do you know the story?”
The question both erased the color in Amanda’s skin and earned Rebecca her second are-you-really-that-dense? look of the past twenty minutes. “A fire,” she said.
And for the second time, and more easily, now, Rebecca laughed. “Yes. Thanks. I mean, what else? Was anyone hurt or anything? It was right before I came, right? So, at least six or seven years ago. And no one’s lived there since?”
“No one was hurt,” Amanda said. “Not that I know of. Why?”
“Because I am the girl you”—she very nearly said raised, but reconsidered just in time—“mentored. And I bought almost everything I learned here, and I think you know it. So this is me, talking, and not the freaked-out, earlier-this-morning me, either.”
“Okay. Good. And?”
“And I’m telling you, Amanda. That place is haunted.”
8
(THREE WEEKS EARLIER)
The entire next day, they drove. At some point during that scalding midmorning, an hour or so after the air-conditioning in her Sunfire finally gave up its decade-long death rattle and died, Jess thought she should probably get food, or at least coffee. But she didn’t need either; Eddie’s screaming in the back kept her plenty awake, and Benny just slept. She did stop briefly at a pharmacy for gauze and bandages to wrap her ribs and a thousand-count bottle of ibuprofen gel caps, which she gulped eight of—knowing better, knowing the body couldn’t even process that much drug at once—before she’d even reached the counter.
Then it was back to the swelter inside the car, the traffic-choked road north. Eddie kept screaming, and Benny stayed unconscious, one hand sliding off his abdomen to rest against Sophie’s bloodied legs, which lay atop the pans and stuffed suitcases. In the front, next to Jess, Sophie mostly tried to curl away from the sunlight streaming through the windshield and windows. But there wasn’t much of her to curl, so all she could really do was press against the door. Jess could tell the sun hurt her, saw the tears sneaking down her face. The girl made almost no sound, though, and never said a word.
Not only did Jess have to give her credit for that, she was also grateful for it. This way, with Eddie shrieking and the road spooling away and away toward nowhere in particular, none of them had to think.
Right at dusk, she swung them off the Beltway onto a two-lane road winding through trees into low hills. They passed a sign proclaiming the place to be Concerto Woods, and a mile or so past that, she spotted a rutted track spoking away into the shadows. Jess bumped them down that and parked under a gnarled, towering oak that seemed to stretch its branches over them like a canopy. For at least the sixth time since morning, she got out, unhooked Eddie, rocked him and fed him his bottle and some Cheerios and a jar of greenish mush. She kept herself turned three-quarters away from Sophie, her eyes on the forest but her ears pricked. The air smelled of pine resin and sap, old animal scat and wet earth. Living-thing smells.
“Sssh,” she heard herself saying as she swung Eddie back and forth, both the gesture and the sound automatic, instinctive. So, too, the burping him, the extra pressure on his back so he could feel her loving him. Little Eddie. Natalie’s boy. The last of Natalie.
Finally, as the vanishing sun sucked the daylight over the horizon behind it, Eddie settled. He stopped hiccupping and complaining. When Jess lowered him to look into his face, he even smiled, or seemed to. His gurgling might have been a laugh. After that—for perhaps his very first time without a mother—he slept.
And for one moment—and one, only—Jess felt almost peaceful.
Settling the child back in his seat, she pushed Sophie’s feet sideways so she could get at the paper bag of food she’d salvaged from the condo. One of those feet was, insanely, still in its flip-flop, and the flip-flop kept dangling over the lip of the bag until Jess stripped it off and chucked it out of the car. She rummaged, eventually coming up with some celery and a jar of peanut butter. Returning to her place behind the wheel, she forced herself to eat one entire stalk. Beside her, Sophie seemed to unfold, to the extent that she could, into the evening.
“Benny,” Jess snapped, harder than she meant to, more fiercely than she could control. “Benny, wake up.”
Eventually, he did, rolling fully onto his back, jerking his hand off Sophie’s legs and then crying out at the sudden movement before tucking the broken arm Jess had attempted to sling against his ribs. Judging by his wooziness, Jess was pretty sure that in addition to his busted arm and ankle—or ankles—he probably had a concussion. It occurred to her, too late, that she probably should have kept him awake.
She peanut-buttered a stalk for him, turned, knelt on the seat, and leaned over the back. She had the celery clutched in her teeth like a dagger so she could help Benny arrange himself. Eddie woke up and burbled. Jess actually removed the celery from her mouth to ask Sophie for help. And that’s when she realized that Sophie’s head was already turned in her direction, her teeth maybe two inches from Jess’s left breast.
Jess straightened so fast that she banged her head on the overhead light and cried out. That set Eddie screaming again. Jess ignored him, dropped the celery, kept her eyes locked on Sophie and her arms raised and crossed uselessly in front of her.
Sophie didn’t lunge or bite. In truth, she’d barely moved, except her head, not that she had much else left to move.
But she was watching, all right. Quite possibly smiling. She knew what Jess was thinking. Even more—Jess was certain—Sophie wanted her to think it.
For a long moment, the two of them watched each other while Eddie screamed and Benny moaned. Then, with a sigh, Sophie looked down at her lap or, more accurately, at her hands, which were playing with the thready, dangling red bits at the tops of the stumps of her legs.
“Ooh,” she said. And, “Huh.”
At least Jess felt alert again, now. Carefully, she edged her arm over the seat until she could stroke Eddie’s face. I
n her lap, Sophie kept doing … whatever she was doing. But she was watching Jess, too, her head cocked, brown eyes ringed by lack of sleep—did she even need sleep, now, or was that a permanent state?—but huge, like a raccoon’s. The thready bits at which Sophie picked were still wet, apparently. At least, they sounded wet.
When Sophie saw where Jess was looking, she grinned. “Celery, huh? Never understood it.”
“How’s that?” Jess had neither meant nor wanted to respond, was still too rattled by how close she’d let Sophie get. Almost everything we do, she thought, is absolutely automatic. We think we act. But we mostly watch ourselves act.
“Crunch, stringy bleah, dribbly-juicy insides, swallow. It’s like gnawing a bone.” Then, when she saw the look on Jess’s face, Sophie laughed and grinned wider. “Actually, it’s nothing like gnawing a bone.”
“Oh my God, you horrible, monstrous little—”
“Joke,” Sophie said, and to Jess’s surprise, she actually shrank back, put up her hands, palms out, like a little girl. Like the little girl she’d been right up until the moment she’d become no one, or this new thing.
“I have never gnawed a bone,” Sophie assured her. “Nor do I have plans to.”
Jess started to answer but instead inhaled a mouthful of the stink just starting to seep from the trunk. Her first impulse was to gag, which sent fresh pain shearing across her ribs, as though she’d ripped herself along some hidden perforation.
Her second impulse, once she’d recovered, was to weep, but she didn’t do that.
Her third was to get up, go around back of the Sunfire, pop the trunk, and just crawl in, curl around her daughter and Sophie’s son, and let herself sleep.
Instead, she grabbed the steering wheel and caught sight of her arms, striped and streaked where the sun had baked her daughter’s blood into her skin. “Okay,” she breathed, tasting that smell, feeling the whole horrid, unimaginable day just past melting into her. “Okay.” Keying the ignition, she backed the car out from under the oak and up the path and returned them to the road. Instead of turning toward the freeway, though, she aimed them deeper into the forest.
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