Starling House, page 11
Arthur is standing by the driver’s door, looking cross and bored in a puffy coat that shows several inches of bare wrist. He should be intimidating, blocking the drive with his face stark and half-shadowed in the setting sun, but intimidating men don’t clean up other people’s vomit, in my experience.
I stop when I get close, hitching my hip against the wheel well. “Hi.”
A stiff nod.
I point my chin at the truck. “Whose car?”
His lips ripple. “My father’s. He liked…” He trails away, apparently unable to tell me what his father liked. He adjusts the side mirror instead, his hands gentle, almost reverent. “I cleaned it up. Hasn’t been driven much since…”
I consider waiting him out, letting the silence stretch him like a man on one of those medieval racks, but I find a small measure of mercy in my soul, or maybe I’m just tired. “What exactly is happening right now?”
Arthur exhales, abandoning the mirror. “What’s happening is that I’m asking you not to walk home.”
“It’s not my ho—” I catch the word between my teeth, bite it in half. “So are you offering to drive me?”
His eyes meet mine for the first time, flashing with an emotion I decline to identify. “No.” He holds out a stiff arm and something clinks in his fingers. It’s another key, except this one isn’t old and mysterious. It’s cheap metal, with the Chevy symbol engraved on the head and a little plastic flashlight on the key chain. “I’m offering you a car.”
My hand, half-outstretched for the key, freezes in midair.
This is not a candlestick or a coat, something a rich boy would never miss. This is a temptation I don’t want, a debt I can’t pay. Mom’s entire life was a house of cards built from favors and charity, bad checks and pills. She never closed a tab or paid a parking ticket; she ripped the tags off in dressing rooms and owed everybody she ever met at least twenty bucks. When she died her house of cards collapsed around us: the junkyard took the Corvette, her boyfriend took the pills, and the state did its damnedest to take Jasper. All we had left was room 12.
But I’m trying to build something real for us, a house of stone and timber rather than wishes and dreams. I work for what I can and steal the rest; I don’t owe anybody shit.
I slip my hand back into my coat pocket without taking the keys. The stolen letter gives a recriminatory rustle. “I’m good, thanks.”
Arthur’s eyes narrow at me, arm still stiff between us. “I didn’t mean forever. Just until your work here is through.” Another flash across his eyes, bitter black. “I don’t like people asking questions about this place.”
“Oh.”
“And take this, too.” He says it carelessly, as if it’s an afterthought, but the piece of notepaper he pulls from his jacket is folded in a crisp square. He tips it into my hand along with the Chevy keys, fingers carefully not touching mine.
“I don’t—is this a phone number?” The sevens are crossed with old-fashioned lines, the area code bracketed in parentheses. Hardly anybody in Eden bothers with the area code because it’s 270 all the way to the Mississippi, and who would visit from farther than that? “Since when do you have a phone number? Or a phone?”
It’s difficult to pull off a really convincing sneer after giving a girl your number, but Arthur makes an admirable effort. “Just because I didn’t give you my number doesn’t mean I don’t have one.” He slides a matte black square out of his pocket as proof, pinching it awkwardly between thumb and forefinger. There’s a filmy look to the screen. He hasn’t even peeled the plastic cover off yet. “If those people bother you again…” He shrugs at the paper in my hand.
“Okay.” I blink down at the keys and the phone number, feeling disoriented, suspicious, as if Bev just asked to adopt me or Jasper brought home a B+. “Okay. But who are they? And why do they want—oh, come on.”
But his shoes are crunching past me up the drive, his shoulders pinched tight. He disappears back into Starling House without looking back.
I slide into the driver’s seat of the truck, hands strangely clammy. I never got my license—a fact I will withhold to share with Arthur later, whenever it seems funniest—but I know how to drive. Mom taught me. You’d think, the way she loved that Corvette, that she wouldn’t have put a preteen behind the wheel, but she was the kind of person who didn’t like to eat dessert unless you had some too. The last time I had my hands on a steering wheel she was in the passenger seat, head tilted back, eyes closed, smiling like nothing had ever gone wrong or ever would.
I look up as I turn the key in the ignition. There’s a single light flickering from the highest window of the house, soft gold in the near night. A lonely figure stands silhouetted behind the glass, his back turned to the world.
* * *
Jasper still hasn’t come back (I’d texted him hey lmk if you’ve been murdered or joined a cult, and he’d replied not murdered and then, by the grace of Lord Xenu), and room 12 is too quiet without him. I wake often that night.
The first time it’s the sound of tires on wet pavement that gets me, and the sudden conviction that a sleek black car is pulling into the parking lot. The second time it’s the old, bad dream, the one where Mom is drowning, her mouth open in a soundless scream, her hair drifting like red kelp, and I’m rising away from her, leaving her to the dark.
I turn up the heat and wrap myself in that ridiculous coat before getting back under the covers, driving back the cold memory of river water in my chest.
The third time it’s the hellcat who lives under the dumpster. She wakes me with her usual strategy of sitting on the sill outside and staring at me with such predatory intensity that some ancient mammalian instinct makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I ooch down the bed and kick the doorknob open with my bare foot, but she remains perched on the windowsill, looking out across the parking lot as if it’s pure chance that she was staring holes through my screen at dawn.
I glare at her hunched-up shoulder blades, marveling that anything so desperately needy could be so willfully unpleasant, and then I fish Arthur’s number out of my coat pocket.
The letter comes with it.
I hadn’t forgotten about it; I just hadn’t felt like reading it when I got back to the room. Apparently reading the stolen correspondence of someone who has just cleaned up your vomit and given you his father’s truck was too low, even for me.
But now it’s lying right there on the bed, a scrap torn from Arthur’s vast quilt of secrets, and nothing’s really too low for me.
Dear Arthur,
I hope you don’t get this letter for a long time, but I know you will. I’m not much for reading, but I’ve read everything the other Wardens left behind, and they all felt like this at the end: worn down, wrung out. Like when you sharpen a knife too many times and the blade goes thin and brittle. And then one bad night, it breaks.
And there are so many bad nights. Seems like the mist rises more often than it used to, and the bastards go down harder than I remember. The floors are sagging and the roof leaks. Don Gravely’s boys are pecking at the property lines again, like crows. You’d think a Gravely would know better, but he’s a hungry one, and some mornings I’m too tired to walk the wards. Your father says I’ve been talking in my sleep.
I don’t know. Maybe whatever’s down there is getting restless. Maybe the House is weaker, without its heir. Maybe I’m just getting old.
What I know is that sooner or later—probably sooner—Starling House will need a new Warden.
This is your birthright, Arthur. That’s what I told you the night you ran away, isn’t
* * *
I reread the letter five or six times in quick succession. Different phrases seem to rise off the page each time, swelling in my vision: mist rises; Gravely’s boys; whatever’s down there; birthright. Then I just sit, staring at the blocky red numbers of the motel clock, thinking.
I think: He can’t leave. It sounds like he tried, but he’s bound to that house in some way I don’t understand. Trapped in this town, just like me, making the best of the messes our mothers left us.
I think, jealously: But at least he has a home. A claim, an inheritance, a place he belongs. I’ve never belonged anywhere, and—no matter what I dream or pretend, no matter how dear and familiar it becomes to me—Starling House will never belong to me. I’m just the cleaning lady.
I think: How desperate must a person be, to be jealous of a cursed house?
But then I touch the page, a letter from a mother who cared enough to say goodbye, and think: Maybe it’s not the house I’m jealous of.
My phone buzzes on the bedside table. It’s a text from a number I don’t recognize, with a faraway area code that makes my guts twist: Enjoyed our chat. We’ll be in touch soon.
I go very still, then. The entire scene in Baine’s car had acquired a wavering, bad-trip quality, extremely unlikely to my sober mind. But I remember what she wanted from me, and I remember the way she pulled Jasper’s name like an ace out of her sleeve.
I raise my phone and take a single, slightly shaky picture of the letter.
It’s exactly the sort of thing she’s looking for. It’s proof that there’s something bad and strange going on in that house, something anomalous. I can almost see the letter being dissected fiber by fiber in some distant lab, distilled into a set of data points.
The hellcat saunters through the open door without looking at me, as if she hadn’t been shamelessly begging at the window. She settles on a fold of Arthur’s coat and begins kneading the fine wool, growling a little in case I try to touch her.
Without thinking about it, without deciding to, I delete the picture. I fold the letter back into my pocket and withdraw Arthur’s number instead.
I am aware, on some level, that six A.M. texts are well outside the boundaries of the housekeeper-and-homeowner relationship, but I picture his face upon being woken even earlier than usual—the offended red of his eyes and the black weight of his brows—and can’t help myself.
do you have canned tuna
Three little dots appear and disappear several times in response, followed by: Yes. He doesn’t ask who it is, either because he has some spooky sixth sense or because—the thought feels sharp and fragile, like it ought to be swaddled in Bubble Wrap—he hasn’t given this number to anyone else.
I don’t write back.
* * *
Twenty minutes later the truck is parked in his driveway, ticking softly to itself, and I’m knocking on the front door of Starling House. The air has a sweet, green smell this morning, like running sap, and the birds are flitting bright between the trees. The vines on the house are covered in corkscrews of new growth, waving gently at me.
Arthur greets me with his customary glare, his features twisted and sour. I could almost imagine I hallucinated the previous day, the sight of him folded uncomfortably on the bathroom floor, looking up at me with his face young and uncertain, his hands scarred and huge around that ridiculous plastic cup. I’d almost forgotten he was ugly.
But it’s too late for second thoughts, so I pretend I don’t have any. “Morning! I brought you something.” I open my coat and the hellcat explodes out of it like one of those aliens that pops out of people’s chests. She hits the floorboards, spitting, and vanishes down the hall to flatten herself under a curio cabinet. She watches us yellowly, making a sound like an old-fashioned police siren.
Arthur stares down his own hallway for several long seconds, then looks back at me. “What.” He says it with a period at the end. He tries again. “What—why—”
“Well.” I give him a modest shrug. “I owed you. You did give me a truck.”
“I did not give you a truck.”
“Seems ungenerous. I gave you a cat.”
The corner of his mouth twitches upward before he bends it back into a frown, and I think the pint of blood it cost me to get her in the truck cab was probably worth it. He crouches a little to look under his sideboard. The police siren sound goes up an octave. “Is it a cat? Are you sure?” He straightens. “Look, Miss Opal—”
“Just Opal.”
That flash in his eyes, there and gone. “I am not interested in adopting any kind of animal, Miss Opal. I do not want any—”
“Strays?” I ask sweetly. I’m already waltzing past him into the house. “Feel free to toss her out yourself. I’d get a good pair of gloves, though.”
I go straight up to the library, counting on the hellcat to keep Arthur busy. The book of Hopi folklore is right where I left it.
I tuck the letter back between the pages and return it to the shelf. I hesitate, feeling stupid, thinking about the way Arthur’s mother had capitalized the word “House.”
Then I clear my throat. “Just—keep this safe, okay? Hide it.”
When I return to the library later that afternoon, the book is gone.
TWELVE
Despite daily threats to the contrary, Arthur does not toss out the hellcat.
She spends the first day skulking from room to room like a spy infiltrating an enemy camp. I catch glimpses of iridescent eyes under couches and dressers, a puffed-up tail disappearing behind a headboard. At lunch I discover her in the kitchen, hunched possessively over a small porcelain dish of tuna. By the following morning a box of expensive litter has appeared in the downstairs bathtub, complete with a tiny plastic rake, and the hellcat has colonized the most comfortable sitting room. By the end of the week her empire includes every sunbeam and cushion in the house—and I would swear there are more of those than there were the previous week, as if the house has rearranged itself specifically to please one deranged cat—and she greets me with the insolent stare of a countess facing an unwelcome petitioner.
I swat at her with the broom. “Scoot, Your Highness.” She gives a luxuriant stretch, bites my exposed ankle hard enough to draw blood, and trots away with her tail standing straight up like a kitten.
The next time I see her it’s in the third-floor library, where she’s curled in an implausibly innocent ball on Arthur’s lap. The fresh wounds across the back of his hand suggest that he made the critical error of touching her.
He’s giving her a reproachful, we-talked-about-this glare. “No biting, Baast.”
“I’m sorry, what did you call her?”
Arthur jumps several inches, winces as the hellcat’s claws latch on to his legs, and glares at me. “Baast.” He tries to say it snidely, but there’s a faint flush along his neckline. “She’s a guardian goddess from ancient Egypt.”
“I know that, jackass.”
The flush extends to his jaw. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“You are aware that this animal spent most of her life under a dumpster. She once got her head stuck in a Pringles can.” I still have a scar from rescuing her.
“Well, what did you name her?”
“I didn’t name her anything. Bev called her the hellcat and so did we.”
He looks so affronted that I laugh. He doesn’t join me, but his face un-snarls very slightly. He stares hard out the window. “Who’s Bev?”
“A pain in my ass.” I fall into the chair across from him and hook one leg over the arm. “She owns our motel, and she’s always giving me shit.”
Black eyes slide back to me. “Your motel?”
His voice is neutral, but I’ve got a good ear for pity. My chin juts out. “My mom got us a room rent-free at the Garden of Eden. You’re familiar with rent? The thing you have to pay if you don’t inherit a haunted mansion?”
I’m being nasty on purpose, but he doesn’t flinch. He just looks at me, eyes shadowed under those ridiculous eyebrows, a question working its way to the surface. “What—what’s the money for, then?”
“Dirty magazines.” I answer flat and fast, too quick for him to stop a huff of laughter from escaping. He raises his hands in surrender and fishes an envelope from his shirt pocket.
I take the money and stand to leave, but I find myself lingering, running my fingertips over the patterned upholstery, watching the woods descend into gold and gray. “It’s for Jasper,” I say abruptly. “My brother. He’s—super bright, and really funny, and most high school art is embarrassing but his videos are honestly so good. He’s good. Too good for Eden.” The truth comes easily, sweet as honeysuckle and just as hard to get rid of. “He got offered a place at this fancy private school and I thought if I could send him there … His first semester is all paid up.”
“Oh.” Arthur looks like he would very much like to get up and stalk dramatically off into the shadows, but the hellcat makes a small noise of warning. His hands open and close a few times before he observes, with the stilted air of a spy participating in a formal exchange of information, “I went away to high school.”
“Oh yeah?” I can’t picture him anywhere but here, tucked away behind iron and stone and sycamore bones, but I remember the final, unfinished line of the letter: the night you ran away.
“My parents didn’t—but I wanted…” It’s not hard to imagine what a fourteen-year-old Arthur might have wanted: friends and video games and notes passed in class, cafeteria tables full of laughing kids instead of frozen dinners in empty rooms. I wanted those things, too, before I divided my life into two lists. “I was only there two years before I was needed at home.”
I study his face, the hooked shadow of his nose, the bruised-fruit look of the skin beneath his eyes. I shouldn’t ask, because it’s not my business, but he looks lonely and weary and worn-out, and I’ve been all of those things for a long time. “Needed for what? What does this house need from you?”
