“Or dangerous.”
He sounds worried enough that I give him my most earnest smile. “I’m not. For real.” It might even be true. I mean, if houses can be haunted, Starling House absolutely is, but so far all it’s done to me is moan and creak. And I’m pretty sure Arthur is just a garden-variety asshole rather than, say, a sexual predator, or a vampire. “Pretty please?” I nudge the spoons with my knee. “My phone camera sucks.”
Jasper holds eye contact for another moment, just to let me know that he’s not buying what I’m selling, before flopping dramatically back against the mattress. “I would, but Bev turned the internet off again.”
“Did you ask her to turn it back on?”
He opens one scandalized eye. “I thought you loved me. I thought you wanted me to survive to my senior year—”
I whump a pillow at him and he wheezes theatrically. It sounds a little more real than he meant it to, the breath whistling in his throat.
I head back across the empty parking lot to the front office, where Bev is busy yelling at Jeopardy!, pausing only to spit tobacco juice into an empty coke can. She’s probably not even fifty, but she has the social habits and haircut of a ninety-year-old man.
We have our traditional argument: she maintains that the internet is for paying customers and not for depraved freeloading teenagers; I swear at her; she threatens to throw us out into the street; I swear again; she flips me off and turns the power strip back on. I steal four packets of Swiss Miss from the folding card table she has the audacity to advertise as a breakfast bar.
“Those are also for paying customers, by the way.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have any of those, do you?”
Bev scowls at the TV and says, “Those Gravely Power people are back,” which explains her sour mood. The only thing Bev hates more than me and Jasper are actual guests, who sometimes have the nerve to ask for things like reliable hot water and room service, and the only thing she hates more than guests is Gravely Power, which, as far as I can tell, she holds personally responsible for every social, environmental, and economic problem in the state. None of the executives actually live in Eden, obviously—Don Gravely has a brand-new house right outside the city limits, with seven bathrooms and white columns and one of those awful lawn jockeys out front, smiling a false red smile—but a bunch of them come into town every year for their annual meeting or whatever, and there’s nowhere for them to stay except the Garden of Eden Motel. Bev’s only comfort is that they always leave with a thick layer of bird shit caked over their windshields.
Bev looks away from Jeopardy!to glare between the blinds at the line of expensive SUVs in her parking lot. “They’re talking about expanding, did you know that? One of them was going on about doubling capacity and opening new fields and all that. They’re going to build a whole new fly ash pond, the woman told me.” She adds, reflexively, “Goddamn vultures.”
“Careful, that’s Muhlenberg County’s number one job creator you’re talking about.” I don’t like them much either—maybe if they put filters on their smokestacks rather than just paying EPA fines every year, Jasper could actually breathe, and I wouldn’t have to clean a haunted house so I could afford to get him out of here—but I like watching Bev’s face turn red.
“We used to have luna moths when I was a kid. You ever seen one of them?”
“No?”
“Exactly.” She seems to feel she’s won the argument, because she thumps a pile of my mail on the counter and returns to her show.
There’s a stack of library holds from Charlotte, which she doesn’t have to deliver to the motel but does anyway; a couple of notices from debt collectors who are shit out of luck; some junk mail; and an envelope from the Department for Community Based Services with RETURN SERVICE REQUESTED printed in all capitals. That last one makes me swallow and tuck my hair behind my ear—my only tell, Mom used to say.
Trebek is sneering his way through a $400 question when I clear my throat. “Hey, Bev?”
She slides half a box of glazed doughnuts across the counter without looking away from the television. “They were going stale anyway.”
“Actually, I was wondering—you know the Starlings?”
She turns away from the Daily Double, frowning. I have an encyclopedic familiarity with Bev’s frowns, ranging from “turn that damn music down” to “have you been in the petty cash jar again, you reprobate,” but this one is new. It’s wary, almost worried, although the only things Bev typically worries about are bedbugs and tax audits. “What about them?”
“I was just thinking about them, is all. About that house.”
She grunts again. “Been a long time since you bugged me about the Starling place, kid. You never used to shut up about it.”
I remember myself as a girl, scab-kneed and quick, hungry even when my belly was full. Mom and me didn’t always live in room 12—I remember other hotels, an RV or two, a couple of months sleeping on couches that belonged to men who liked the color of Mom’s hair and the careless way she laughed, but never liked me much—but the motel was the first place we stayed for more than a few months.
Bev had mostly glared at me out the front office window until the day I poked a wasp nest and got stung twice, once on each arm. Mom wasn’t around so I was just sitting on the curb, tasting tears in the back of my throat, when Bev strolled over and slapped a wet mat of chewing tobacco over the stings. She gave me a lot of shit about not having the sense God gave a flea, but the pain eased.
“Yeah, well, I googled it the other day, just out of curiosity, and didn’t find much. I thought maybe you would know something about it.”
Bev spits a black stream into her coke can and says, obliquely, “People talk. You know how it is.”
I don’t know how it is, actually, because people only talk to me when they’re cornered. Small towns are supposed to be cozy and friendly, like perfect little snow globes, but me and Jasper have always been kept on the other side of the glass. Maybe because I only showed up at church for the pancake breakfasts and Thanksgiving dinners, or maybe because of Mom, with her lipstick and her shirts that didn’t quite meet the top of her jeans and the pills she sold sometimes in little plastic baggies. Or maybe because people in Eden like to know your whole family tree for three generations on both sides and the only family we ever knew was each other.
I pick at a snowflake of doughnut glaze on the box. “Will you tell me what you know?”
“No.” Bev heaves a sigh that bears an uncanny resemblance to Arthur Starling’s before he offered me a job, infinitely harassed. The TV is old enough to make a faint electric pop when she turns it off. “But I’ll tell you a story.”
This is the story of Starling House.
People tell it different ways, but this is how my granddaddy always told it. He was a liar, but the best liars are the ones that stick closest to the truth, so I believe it.
It goes like this: Once in the wayback times there was three brothers by the name of Gravely who made a fortune digging coal out of the riverbank. They were good, honest boys, brought low by the same thing that always comes for honest men with a little money: a dishonest woman.