Murder House

by Jordan Castillo Price

“Afraid of? Nothing. I just don’t think this needs to happen at the gym.”

  Right. I’m sure his random non-reason had nothing to do with him spewing emotional distress. Was it possible he didn’t know? I’m sure he was well aware of the trail of outbursts he’d caused…but maybe he didn’t realize how easy it was to recognize that tainted emotional stew: the meat of failure seasoned with the tang of incompetence, all wrapped up in a big bowl of fear.

  I’d dined on it enough times myself to be well acquainted with the taste.

  Funny thing was, while I didn’t feel like a particularly successful spy, a few nuggets of tradecraft training floated to the surface as we argued. First, if I wanted to rope him in, I’d need to drop it. And second…he was definitely lying.

  The things people think they know about liars are generally wrong. The proverbial shifty eyes, for instance, are just someone searching their memories. I might not have noticed it before, but according to the tradecraft readings, Bly had just done two major tells: repeating my question, then answering in a bunch of fragments. And then, he reached up to scratch his stubble. Another hit—self-grooming was a common clue. Heck, he gave off so many tells, he might as well have come right out and admitted the gym scared him.

  But according to the tradecraft, if I wanted to know why, I couldn’t let on that I cared. “Fine, screw the gym. I don’t have the hips for it anyway. But what reason could I have for banging on his door?”

  Bly didn’t offer any advice one way or the other, so I’d have to work things out myself. Yet another way in which he differed radically from Jacob, who’d be bubbling over with the urge to tell me exactly how he would solve the problem.

  Fine. I’d think of something myself.

  “Hale came over to bitch about us playing music and burning incense. If I actually lived here, I’d resent having someone tell me what to do in my own damn house.” And if I really was a stay-at-home douchebag who’d skated through life without needing to keep my head down and avoid scrutiny, I knew exactly what I’d do.

  Not just turn the music back on…but turn it up.

  The Victor Baine persona’s folder was not only filled with a raft of computer-generated articles, but his own playlist, helpfully curated by an identity expert at the FPMP. It wasn’t particularly to my taste and I’d never heard of any of the bands, but I could say one thing for the music. It had a really solid bass line.

  I positioned the bluetooth speaker against the wall that abutted Hale’s living room. If the little glimpse I’d stolen was anything to judge by, he spent most of his time there. Did I feel bad for disturbing his reverie?

  Not at all.

  He could relax and enjoy his solitude once I finished my damn assignment.

  My own musical taste was stunted by the time I spent committed to various institutions in which I didn’t have a record collection to call my own. Sad to say, I totally missed grunge—which I think I would’ve liked, since I’ve always dug flannel and I look pretty good in horizontal stripes. I was pleasantly surprised to find I didn’t actually mind my persona’s hipster folk-rock music. It sounded sort of angry, but in an understated, passive-aggressive way. And I could just hum along with any twenty-five-cent words I didn’t quite understand.

  Most importantly, the rattling thump of a beat-up kick drum would surely drive any crabby old man to distraction.

  Bly had retreated upstairs with his laptop and a pair of earplugs to finish some work. Ostensibly, anyhow. I’m guessing what he really wanted was to avoid talking about what happened at the gym. I stood downstairs and let the music wash over me. I was only three songs into my playlist—standing there in the middle of the living room, looking up the lyrics to make sure I heard them right—when a knock sounded at the front door. A very assertive knock.

  Good. I could act really annoyed when I answered. But when I swung open the door, fully prepared to tell Hale to go take a hike (while secretly hoping he’d insist on sticking around), I was surprised to find my neighbor kid instead.

  25

  “Hey,” Madison said blandly.

  Could they hear my music all the way across the street? “Hey.”

  The kid slithered past me in the boneless way of someone whose joints aren’t yet creaky with post-yoga stiffness and age. The only outerwear she had on against the biting winter cold was fingerless gloves and a gray hoodie with cat ears. She gave neither of them to me to hang up, and simply flopped down on the couch, settled a glittery spiral notebook in her lap, and talked over the music as if its painful volume was perfectly normal.

  “So, this is dumb AF.”

  The music, or…?

  She grabbed a throw pillow, squashed it into shape, then dragged it onto her lap and perched the notebook on top of it. “I’ve gotta do this thing for school where I interview someone in a creative field, and my mom says both you and Jack are ‘creatives.’ Is that even a real noun? And, like, isn’t everyone creative?”

  Probably not everyone. My idea of creativity was putting a splash of steak sauce on my eggs—and even that earned me weird looks in a diner. As I dialed down the music a few notches and perched on the opposite side of the couch, I considered the question, then finally settled on the answer, “Some more than others.”

  “I guess.” She propped her feet on the cardboard box I’d been using as a coffee table, side-eyeing me to see if I was gonna call her on it.

  I stacked my feet next to hers. “The thing about assignments is that you probably shouldn’t think too hard. I’m guessing no one expects you to delve into the philosophical origins of creativity. They just want you to find someone getting paid to dick around on the computer all day and ask them a few standard questions.”

  “Perfect.” She pulled out a sparkly-looking pen, yanked the cap off with her teeth, and whipped open the notebook. “So what do you do for a living?”

  The answer, which I’d run through with my trainers, flowed out like second nature. “I’m a columnist for Zeitgeist Journal, a regular contributor to Coursera and content curator for Zap Unplugged.”

  “Zeitgeist?” she asked. I spelled it. “Uh…maybe I should record this and transcribe it later.” It would get her out the door faster than waiting for her to write everything down, that was for sure. She pulled out her phone, called up an app, hit the big red ‘record’ button and asked me to repeat myself. Which I did, verbatim. Why mess with success?

  “And where do you get your ideas?”

  From a team of well-paid professionals in a covert government organization. “Ideas are everywhere. It’s just a matter of seeing them.”

  “What’s the toughest part of your career?”

  The easy answer would’ve been “writer’s block.” I was just about to say it when I realized that Terri-Anne would be auditing my answers, and if they were too glib, she might get suspicious. “People don’t take you seriously if you don’t bring in a regular paycheck,” I said. While I had no great love of the stay-at-home douchebag, I did feel bad that he had to constantly validate his life choices because his husband was the one bringing home the bacon. “Obviously, you need money to survive. You can’t pay for groceries with the self-satisfaction you get from writing a really good blog post. But what’s more important? Money? Or making something out of nothing and putting it out there in the world for other people to enjoy?”

  Whether or not anyone actually enjoyed the douchebag’s writing was another story. But I figured that he probably thought some people did.

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  I experienced a moment of panic over the question’s simplicity—mainly because if my trainers had selected a favorite color, they hadn’t shared it with me. Or maybe they had, and the answer was buried in a massive digital haystack of dozens of half-read tradecraft papers.

  “Blue,” I answered truthfully. Which kind of freaked me out…because, what did someone’s favorite color say about them? And what might it say about me when I was pretending to be someone else? For al
l I knew, Madison would feed my answers into some database at school, and the computer would light up with the message, Fraud! Does not compute! Clearly not a real person!

  I was relieved when she just pulled a wad of thread from her pocket, picked out three shades of blue, and knotted them together at the end. “Here, hold this.”

  She handed me the knot. I held it. She worked some kind of thread magic—a cross between braiding and knotting—while I stared dumbly at her flying fingers, and a striped, spiral cord took shape.

  “Did you always want to be a writer?”

  “Yes,” I answered automatically.

  “Even when you were in high school?”

  “Absolutely.” When you pick a position, it’s best to stick to it.

  “Even if everyone else thought it was lame?”

  I was about to keep on hammering home my response when I realized we were no longer talking about me. “I never really gave a shit what the other kids thought.” Patently untrue. I memorized all the funny parts from the Simpsons and acted them out every Monday at lunch. On the best reenactments, I’d make someone choke on their Lunchables.

  “I don’t care either,” Madison agreed, too quickly.

  “And I’m sure writing articles is nowhere near as interesting as your idea.”

  “My YouTube crafting channel?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Madison focused on the threads. The spiral braid grew a few more inches before she added, “You’ll never be an influencer unless you know how to be funny. Or cool. Or….” She shrugged. “Whatever.”

  I might have zero idea what being an “influencer” entailed, but hadn’t a roomful of middle-aged gay men been hanging on my every word? “Sometimes you’ve gotta fake it till you make it.” Even when you literally don’t understand a word of what you’re reading. “Works like a charm.”

  “That’s just a saying.”

  “Hand to God, totally true. I’m living proof.”

  When I raised my hand as if I was swearing an oath, Madison looped the thread thing around my wrist and tied it off with a deft knot. I froze, staring at my first friendship bracelet mutely…and wondered why it was so hard to swallow past the lump in my throat.

  Fortunately, Madison didn’t notice I’d gone quiet. “I’ve been building up a spreadsheet with good keywords for my titles. Maybe that’ll help…if organic search even means anything anymore.”

  “You’d be surprised what people can dig up online if they really try,” I said vaguely.

  She closed her recording app and hopped up off the couch. “So, my mom says to ask what other food allergies Jack has.”

  “Just milk.” Wait, Madison hadn’t been at the gym when I lied to the Yoga Lady. But Bly had used the allergy excuse to get out of eating the pie. “Mainly milk. But other things, too. Really, more than I can keep track of on any given day. Honestly, it’s best not to cook for him at all.”

  Madison accepted my explanation at face value. She clearly hadn’t read the tradecraft paper on spotting a liar.

  I followed her out and stood on the crunchy, salted concrete stoop with my arms crossed against the cold, watching as she trooped back to her house—a real house where the walls were made of brick and the neighbors weren’t crammed right up against them. What was the townhouse made of? I turned and picked at the wall. Some sort of faux brick-like extrusion on the first level. Vinyl siding above.

  Damn, I missed the cannery.

  My gaze fell on the stoop next door—how could I possibly miss it? The thing was barely four yards away. Sylvester Hale. So close, yet so far. That aggravating old neighbor was the only thing keeping me from heading back to my real home, where I could eat a real dinner, and fall into bed with my real man.

  It wasn’t just the cannery I missed, and not just Jacob, either.

  I was homesick for my real life.

  26

  Another week rolled by. A week of constricting jeans. Of ingesting coffee to the point of nausea at See You Latte. Of tradecraft articles so dry they made my eyes cross, and my fake husband changing the subject every time I so much as thought of the gym.

  Of Hale eluding me just as deftly as the random whiffs of decomp on the third floor.

  It was a Thursday afternoon, Bly was still at work, and there was nothing left to unpack. I stood in the living room, glaring at the off-white wall that separated me from my quarry, when movement from the corner of my eye nearly sent me through the cheap plasterboard ceiling. Thankfully, it was nothing more dead than the hideous, oversized Valentine’s bouquet falling apart. It was with great relish that I hauled the withered vegetation to the alley, even if I was annoyed by the trail of dried rose petals it left behind.

  On my way back inside, I realized I was hearing voices. Not in a psychic way, or even a psychotic way. Hale was having a conversation in his back hall…which abutted mine. Tradecraft sprang to mind—determine if the sound is coming through an air leak or vibrating through the structure of the wall by cupping your ears and making a radar out of your head. I followed the sound, but I didn’t see any gaps or cracks, and the sound was muffled. No time to get a drinking glass to press up against the wall (yeah, even in the age of elaborate digital listening devices, that old trick actually can work) so I just pressed my ear to the drywall and plugged the opposite ear.

  “No, I do not wish the cab to be on its way. I would like it in twenty-five minutes, as I’ve already told you thrice. What’ve you got? Read it back to me.”

  Hale was clear enough, but the other end of the call was, unfortunately, not on speakerphone. I was already wondering how fast the office could pull up his cab records when he said, “No, not Happy Tails—that’s a pet boutique. Twice Told Tales, the book shop.”

  Bingo.

  Once I texted Bly to meet me there, I gave my hair a half-assed gooping—holy crap, I had a full-fledged beard now—then crammed the baseball cap over the goop, slipped into my bright red parka and sprinted off toward the bookstore. There were actual customers there this time, enough that Cleghorn was too busy manning the cash register to yell at me about my nonexistent bag. Somehow, I’d imagined the warren of towering, dusty shelves would be empty when I had my big showdown with Hale. But that was okay, I’d adjust, because I was through playing hard-to-get. I’d force him to answer those mediumship questions if it was the last thing I did.

  I assessed the shop’s layout, pinpointed the nonfiction where Hale was most likely to linger, then scoped out a suitable spot where I could lie in wait to cut off his escape route. Those tall, narrow aisles felt claustrophobic before. Now I was glad for the cover they’d provide. I backed into place, buzzing with energy like a thoroughbred at the starting gate. Unfortunately, I was so hyperfocused on my target that I backed right into another customer—a big guy who gave a huff of disgust when the stack of books he’d been carrying dropped to the worn carpet in a series of percussive thumps as they cascaded out of his grasp.

  When I turned to assess the damage and mirrored the sound of annoyance—exactly—we both froze as recognition dawned.

  “You’re wearing glasses,” I said stupidly.

  Jacob immediately slipped them into his coat pocket and crouched to pick up the books I’d knocked out of his hands. “Just cheaters…the lighting in here is awful.”

  I crouched right along with him. In fact, the two of us moved in tandem like we’d been choreographed, from the huff to the crouch to the nervous pawing of the tattered paperbacks that somehow neither of us could manage to grab hold of. Low to the floor and face to face now, Jacob and I stared at each other like the answers to all the world’s mysteries would reveal themselves in one another’s eyes, if only we had the capacity to comprehend.

  Had he always been so…? I mean, I knew he was handsome. That’s the first thing anyone would see. But what I couldn’t help but notice now was the longing in his big, dark eyes. I couldn’t stand to see it, and figured I’d focus on the books. But that just opened up a floodgate of me
mories instead.

  Him. Me. In the exact same position, hovering over a virtually identical pile of trashy paperbacks. A few weeks ago? No, add in the amount of time I’d spent in that purgatory of a townhouse, more like a couple of months. It was the final piece of furniture left from my old apartment, the bookshelf that used to hold my scant collection of VHS tapes that had all given up the ghost long ago. We’d repurposed the shelf to house Jacob’s trashy novel collection…but the furniture turned out to be a surprisingly harsh critic.

  A spill of interchangeable thrillers lay tumbled across the upstairs hallway, with their shadowy main characters—all shown from the back, fleeing some vague terror at a funny angle with urgent titles hinting at their various fictional predicaments—and the white veneer shelves had collapsed into two distinct parts. The top and one side canted one way, the bottom, back and shelves, the other. Jacob and I crouched down on either side of it, just like we were right now. But then, everything was infinitely more mundane.

  “I don’t think this is fixable,” he’d said as he showed me the edge where the pieces fit together. Where they were supposed to fit together, anyhow. Where the wood should’ve held the joinery, there were ragged gaps instead of the prefab slots I expected to see. “The pressboard is falling apart. Even if I pumped it full of glue and got it to hold together, chances are it’ll never sit level or plumb again.”

  I shrugged and pushed the collapsed parts out of the way so we didn’t trip over them. “I think it’s served its purpose. I’ll take it out back when the snow lets up.” I almost missed the fact that Jacob was holding a hunk of frayed, white-veneered particleboard in his lap and looking at it with the sappy kind of expression that he was currently turning on me.

  “What?” I laughed. “Are you particularly attached to this bookshelf?”

  He stared at me a moment, then said, “No. You were.”

  Back when he said that, I realized the lousy apartment I used to live in felt like a distant white-on-white memory.