That night Andrew lay in a bed that wasn’t his. He stared up at the ceiling of the master bedroom, Harlow’s head on his chest, hardly able to believe that he’d gone along with it—that he had let her seduce him.
It hadn’t taken much. The idea of losing someone who actually understood him, someone who represented everything he had always wanted—it was too much to risk. He had followed her into the master bedroom, seeing her as someone broken, someone as used up as he was. And yet after all had been said and done, the sickening churn of his stomach refused to let him deny it: what he’d done was wrong. The restraints; the things she had asked him to whisper into her ear. It had freaked him out.
But he’d done it anyway.
Unable to get back to sleep, he carefully slid out from beneath her, sneaked out of the room, and stepped across the hall to the room he was meant to occupy. He stopped by the window, his attention paused on Mickey’s fixer-upper—the house that still held most of his things. The trees bent and swayed in the unrelenting wind. It was strange looking toward that house instead of away from it. He’d spent so many nights looking at the Wards’ perfect home, wondering what it would be like to stay there rather than where he had been, but now that he was there, he gazed back toward where he’d come from. It was true what they said—the grass was always greener. The grass on the other side of this particular fence was dead and brown, but he wanted to be back there.
Something crossed behind one of the curtains, but he dismissed it as a trick of the light, nothing but shadows and paranoia—the storm throwing gloom like a magician throwing smoke. But the longer he stared, the more convinced he was that Mick’s house wasn’t empty, that there was someone in there.
He crawled into the guest bed, pulled the sheet up to his chin, and squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to sleep, but he couldn’t breathe. It was as though a demon had crawled out of the darkness to perch on his chest, its weight pressing heavy against his diaphragm—Fuseli’s painting come to life. He sat up, trying to swallow, but his esophagus refused to cooperate. With his heart pounding hard in his throat, he pulled his knees up to his chest and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. It’s just anxiety, he told himself. He was losing his grip, losing himself. Harlow had proved one thing, whether she had meant to or not: she was in charge. She’d pulled him into her bed, and Drew had done what she wanted.
He shook his head as he took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. Overwhelmed with the need for a drink, he shot back to his feet. He had seen a liquor cabinet downstairs.
In spite of his runaway heart, he tried to be as silent as possible. Creeping into the hall, he didn’t want to wake the owner of the house. Something about going downstairs without her knowing felt forbidden. Harlow had never demanded Drew stay upstairs, but he felt as though she expected him to stay in his room until the sun came up, waiting to hear the June Cleaver clatter of dishes in the kitchen. This, however, was no June Cleaver moment. This was A Nightmare on Magnolia Lane.
He wondered if Red had tailed them to the drive-in, wondered if he had followed them back to the house. Perched up in one of the trees that flanked the street, he could have easily seen everything that had transpired in the hallway just hours before. He would have seen Andrew following Harlow into Red’s old bedroom. And if she had been anything the way she had been with Red, Red would know exactly what had happened behind closed doors.
Harlow hadn’t had time to call somebody to change the locks, and that meant Red still had a key. He could have been hiding in the shadows at that very second, waiting to grab him, to wrap his hands around Drew’s throat, to swing an ax high over his head and embed it in Andrew’s skull. His heart thumped inside of his chest like a boxer punching a speed bag.
He tiptoed past Harlow’s door even though walking normally would have looked far less suspicious. He stopped at the top of the stairs, took a deep breath, and crept down the steps. Outside, the wind roared.
Stopping in the dining room, he tugged on the liquor cabinet door. Naturally, it was locked. He closed his eyes, exhaling a steady breath of defeat. Rather than searching the place for the key, he settled on the kitchen instead.
Squinting against the brightness of the fridge, he pushed the milk aside to reach farther into its confines, fishing out a hidden carton of orange juice. He shook it, popped it open, and poured himself a glass—and was thrown into blindness as the door swung closed. Groping for the door handle, he pulled it open again, illuminating the kitchen in a cold white glow, nearly choking on his juice when his eyes found a silhouette standing at the base of the stairs, watching him from afar.
His mind reeled; he was sure it was Red, come to settle the score. Every horror flick he’d ever watched came rushing back to him, ready to flatten him with all the slasher scenes he’d seen, the thousands of gallons of fake blood, the terrified screams and the pitiful begging: Please, don’t kill me. If he ran, he’d hardly move at all. It would be nothing but one continuous shot—a dolly-zoom effect, woozy and claustrophobic.
“Andy?”
Drew’s heart flip-flopped. It was Harlow.
“Oh God,” he murmured, nearly squeaking out the words. “Did I wake you up?”
“I was still awake.” She took a few steps forward. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah, why?” he replied, but he knew what she meant. What had happened upstairs, combined with looking as though he’d just seen a ghost, very likely made him look ready to run for his life.
“I just don’t want things to be awkward,” she told him.
“I’m OK. Just thirsty.” He lifted his half-drained glass of orange juice.
Harlow nodded and turned to go back up the stairs.
When she finally disappeared, he stood there, staring at his glass of OJ, wondering how the hell he’d gotten himself into this situation.
Even in exile, Harlow had a hold on Red. While she and Andrew romped around Creekside before rolling between the sheets, Red had spent hours on a metal-legged stool, staring at a motionless Mickey Fitch.
He imagined this was what Mickey had done before his first time—sat, stared, prayed to hear the distant buzz of an alarm clock growing louder, louder, loud enough to rouse him from this nightmare.
But Mickey wasn’t dead.
Red looked down to his hands for the thousandth time. A twenty-milliliter ampoule of propofol rested in his right palm. Though he had never administered the stuff himself, he had seen the effects firsthand. Harlow called it “milk”; it was one of her favorite drugs because it kept the object of her hobby quiet—a surprised gasp when the needle pricked the skin, but that was all. Years before, Harlow had complained about how difficult it was to obtain. But that was the magic of the Internet, and Harlow knew where to look.
Turning his attention from the emulsion in his hand to the man on the autopsy table, he watched Mickey’s chest rise and fall with shallow breaths. He had no idea how long the guy had been lying on the table, no clue when Harlow had shot him full of anesthetic. If he administered another dose too soon, the result would be grim. Death by cardiac arrest wasn’t nearly as gruesome as dismemberment, but it was forbidding enough to keep Red where he was, sitting atop that stool, wondering what the hell to do.
If Mickey had been the guy who was sleeping in his house, sleeping with his wife, he wouldn’t have given two shits about taking a bone saw to the bastard’s throat. But Mickey had just been doing his job.
Andrew was the problem.
He eventually left the safety of his chair to wander the perimeter of the room. Before now, he’d never actually set foot in this room. Harlow’s determination to purchase two homes rather than one had bewildered him until men in hard hats descended his basement stairs. She told them she was lilapsophobic, and tornado anxiety wasn’t exactly conducive to Kansas living. The house next door would be occupied by their only son, she said. The tunnel would serve as a storm shelter as well as an underground bridge linking the two properties together. If the workers had s
till been skeptical, their suspicions were tossed aside when she paid them in cash, tax-free, no strings attached.
That room was lined with stand-alone freezers—twenty-nine cubic feet of storage space per unit; plenty of room for an intact body in each one, big enough for a duo if they were torn apart. Three of those freezers were lined up end-to-end. Harlow liked to overplan. She had enough room for half a dozen bodies, just in case Mickey couldn’t toss them into the trunk of his TransAm and drive them out to wherever he took them fast enough.
Red stopped at the freezer closest to him and pulled its top open. Cold air rolled over the open top, spilling over the side of the chest like dry ice in a witch’s cauldron. It was bare. The second freezer matched the first: vacant, hardly used. Hesitating in front of the third icebox, he had to wonder why he was looking inside them at all. This wasn’t his pastime. He wasn’t interested in discovering the body of a kid who’d mowed his lawn and painted his window trim. But much like driving by a freeway accident, he had to look, and there it was: A red streak decorated the back interior wall, as though a limb had tumbled out of a bag and made a wide, gory sweep—a calligraphy brush with flesh for bristles. A single bag sat inside the icy, frigid vastness—black plastic hiding its contents from the world.
Seeing it, Red suddenly understood why he’d gone from freezer to freezer—this bag was his ticket out of this mess. He’d paid the True Value a visit with full intention of laying Andrew out, gutting him like a fish not only to remove him from the equation, but to show Harlow that he could do it. But this was better.
He let the door slip from his grasp. It slammed shut loudly enough to incite a wince. Red’s eyes darted to the autopsy table. His wife’s former employee took a deep breath, fighting against the haze of anesthesia, trying to claw his way back into consciousness. Red stepped across the room, grabbing for the syringe on the counter—he had found it there when he had arrived, unable to decide whether to chalk it up to Mickey’s mess, or whether Harlow had set it out for him, anticipating this very moment. The syringe skittered across the surface in his haste, tumbling to the floor and rolling out of view.
“Goddamn it,” he hissed, crouching down, trying to locate it, but it was gone. Exhaling a frustrated sigh, he threw open the cabinet doors. But despite the freezers being mostly clean, Mickey’s shortcomings were housed within those drawers; chronic disorganization that Red was now forced to dig through at the most inopportune time.
If Mickey had been able to peel his eyes open and bear witness to the scene, Red was sure he would have roared with laughter. Each second that ticked away was a second closer to waking up, a second closer to Mickey’s saving himself from poetic justice. If he roused before Red found what he was looking for, he’d be saved by his own mess, delivered from a premature grave by chaos rather than kindness. This was irony at its best.
While Mickey tried to surface, Red flung the contents of each drawer onto the floor by the handful. He would have marveled at the senselessness of the stuff he was pawing through if his pulse weren’t rattling his brain—fast-food coupons and Starbucks receipts, loose music CDs and a copy of American Psycho. For the first time in his life, he could hardly see through his own dread. As careful as Harlow was in constructing this steel trap of a room, she hadn’t splurged on restraints. There was no point. All the boys who ended up here were already dead; and if Mickey Fitch came to, Red was as good as dead too. There would be no plea bargain, no leniency for his case. If Mickey Fitch woke up, he’d grab Red by both sides of his head and twist. The last thing Red would hear would be the breaking of his own neck.
Naturally, the last place Red checked was the place he should have looked first: a one-hundred-count box of syringes sat at the bottom of the cabinet that housed Harlow’s endless supply of “milk”—the same cabinet that had been at his elbow the entire time he was sitting there, watching Mickey sleep.
“Son of a bitch!” he barked, snatching the box up, tearing at its cardboard lid. It wriggled its way out of his grasp, the contents spilling out, detonating like a faulty bottle rocket, exploding against the ground. He scrambled to grab one in midair, feeling like Wile E. Coyote just before that dim cartoon canine plunged off a desert cliff.
Mickey’s arm twitched, sending Red headlong into a fit of panic. Snatching one of the syringes off the floor, he grabbed for an ampoule of anesthetic, uncapped the needle with his teeth, and stabbed the needle through the plastic vial before pulling back the plunger. Ready to stab the needle into Mickey’s neck, he stopped himself, remembering all the medical shows he’d watched over the years. Taking a steadying breath, he tapped the syringe and pushed the air bubbles out.
And in his hesitation, at that very moment, Mickey Fitch opened his eyes to the world.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
By his seventeenth year, Isaac Ward’s unconditional love had run out, and Harlow knew it. He had pulled away from her years before—a growing distance Red blamed on adolescence and rebellion. But Isaac’s eyes told a different story. He’d endured a life of secrets, just like his mother had, and he hated her for putting him in that position. The way he looked at her made Harlow wither: his gaze accusatory, heavy with condemnation. She had defiled him, and he had no intention of forgiving her.
At first, Harlow tried to ignore his glares, but Isaac’s eyes were deep. They pulled her under, threatening to drown her in an ocean of guilt. His critical glances reached beyond the scope of his own abuse—and reached into Harlow’s past, pointing out all of her indiscretions. His biting gaze, along with the way he turned away from her when she came close, it caught her by the ears and rubbed her nose in her sins. Suddenly, she could hardly look at her only child, because she didn’t see Isaac anymore. She saw herself, her own anger toward her father. She saw a broken life—one that had left a hole in her heart.
She was disgusting. A sinner. A wicked, wretched, horrible woman who was bound for hell. And that infuriated her, because it wasn’t her fault. Reggie Beaumont was to blame.
Everyone had admired him as he beamed the word of God into living rooms; he was the white knight of televangelism. But the world forgot that knights wore armor, and beneath that armor there was sinning flesh and lecherous blood. Reggie Beaumont hid behind a veil of faith, and his daughter was the only one who knew his secret.
She had denied it for years, blaming fuzzy memories on bad dreams. The dream was always the same: a bedroom door opening in the dead of night, a pink ruffled comforter being pulled aside, Daddy whispering into her ear that Jesus loved her while her skull knocked against the headboard.
It was Danny Wilson’s fault too, the boy who had been nothing but a gentleman—until he got Harlow back to his apartment. It was the fault of the highwayman who’d left her mother along the road for dead, and now it was Isaac himself, with his unrelenting gaze. They had turned her into a monster. If she could only erase them all, she’d be free of the guilt; she could shrug off the stigma and finally go on with her life.
The problem was, Reggie Beaumont was dead, burned to death while he slept. Harlow had watched the flames lick up the sides of her childhood home before turning away, only a week from her wedding day. Danny Wilson was dead, pummeled to death with his prized baseball trophy. The man who’d killed her mother had never been apprehended. Harlow could only hope he had left this world with Bridget Beaumont’s screams reverberating inside his skull.
Isaac was the only one left.
She hadn’t been fancy with it, and maybe that was the problem. Walking in on him while he brushed his teeth, she grabbed him by the back of the neck and jammed his toothbrush down his throat. Startled, he stumbled backward in bare feet, his hands desperately groping at his neck when he should have been shoving his fingers into his mouth. He gasped for air, his face contorting in ways she’d never seen before—a mixture of pain and surprise, terror and disbelief. When the bathroom rug curled beneath his feet, Isaac lost his balance.
Watching him tumble with bated anticipation, she thoug
ht his fall was oddly graceful; he twisted in midair like Mikhail Baryshnikov, coming to an abrupt stop when his temple met the corner of the tub.
Isaac’s blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, his nose, his ears, pooling along the joints of the bathroom tile, cross-hatching the stark-white floor with crimson veins. The delicacy of that pattern was almost artistic—bloody filigree curling across an unspoiled canvas. When Danny had fallen at her feet, a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She killed, and for a second, the pain was gone. But now she felt nothing. No release. No absolution. Nothing but more emptiness, an emptiness that went on forever.
Harlow took a seat on the edge of the tub while Isaac bled onto the bathroom floor. Chewing on the pad of her thumb, she wasn’t thinking about what she’d done; she wasn’t thinking about her father or her son. She was thinking about the hollowness she felt, and how she must have done it wrong.
She had to get another boy. She had to try again.
She had to try over and over again until she got it right.
Drew considered jumping in his truck and taking off, but he didn’t want to give Harlow the wrong impression. He felt hideous after what had transpired in the master bedroom the night before—but that was his fault, not Harlow’s. He should have never let it go as far as it had. Harlow was lonely. He could hardly hold her responsible for what had happened.
But that didn’t change the fact that he desperately wanted out, wanted to fly away with the wind like Dorothy. He didn’t want to sit at Harlow’s kitchen table, and he didn’t want to listen to Frank Sinatra. If he had to listen to one more Rat Pack tune, he was going to lose his fucking mind.
And so, needing escape but not wanting to run away like his own father had, Andrew settled for the next best thing: the front yard. He slipped into the garage and prepped Red’s push mower for another morning of work. The wind was bad, but he couldn’t stay inside for another second. Watching Harlow flit about the kitchen didn’t feel the same anymore. The idea of having ruined something amazing turned his stomach. He was afraid the fairy tale was over, that he had destroyed it by getting too close.
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