A little chill ran down my breastbone. I kept my voice light and curious. “Why’s that?”
Bev watched me closely when she answered. “His parents, they weren’t too bad. People will tell you all kinds of nonsense about them—Bitsy Simmons swears up and down they kept Siberian tigers, says she saw a big white thing in the woods one night—but I don’t believe it. The husband, he used to drive this beat-up old truck around, and he always waved when he passed the motel . . . Anyway, both of them turned up dead, eleven or twelve years ago. And the boy, he doesn’t even call the police, not for days.”
The chill settled low and heavy in my stomach. Bev continued, softly, “The animals had been at them so bad the coroner said he couldn’t tell what killed them in the first place. Hell, maybe they did keep tigers. But the coroner said that boy didn’t shed a tear the whole time. Just asked if he was finished yet, because it was past his suppertime.”
After a long, unpleasant silence, I managed a hoarse “Huh.”
Bev clicked the TV back on while I gathered up my books and junk mail.
She waited until I was halfway out her office door before she said, low and serious, “Stay away from Starling House, Opal.”
I crossed the parking lot with my neck bent and my hands shoved deep in my pockets. The mist was just slithering up the riverbank, pooling in the potholes and dips of the road.
It’s higher now. The streetlights have gone hazy and spectral, like low-hanging planets, and the fancy SUVs are animals crouched beneath them. By tomorrow, there will be little flecks of rust on the rims, and the fine leather seats will smell green and rotten.
Mom always said nights like this were unlucky. She wouldn’t place a bet or cut a deal until the mist burned off the next day.
I don’t believe in luck, but it was misty the night Mom died, and I sometimes think if it hadn’t been—or if she hadn’t had a few and announced, with her usual sincerity, that she was going to turn our lives around, or if I’d argued with her instead of pretending I still believed her, or if she hadn’t been driving that damn Corvette, or if that whatever-it-was hadn’t run across the road—well. Maybe she would be the one telling me to stay away from Starling House, instead of Bev.
And maybe she’d be right. I don’t much like the idea of cleaning the house of a woman who murdered her husband for his money, or a pair of women who kidnapped a kid, or a boy who looked down at his parents’ bodies with dry eyes. I have the sudden urge to take a shower, to scrub the dirt of Starling House out from under my nails and never go back.
A noise from the other side of the room: a high, wavering whistle. The note stops, rushes out, starts again. It sounds like a teapot just coming to boil, but it’s not: it’s a sixteen-year-old trying to breathe through bronchial tubes that are swelling shut.
The first time Jasper had an asthma attack I was twelve. It was three in the morning and Mom wasn’t in her bed and I didn’t want to call 911 because I knew ambulances were expensive. I turned all the faucets on as hot as they would go and shut the bathroom door. I held him in the steam—his ribs heaving, his muscles trembling under soft baby fat—until I realized he wasn’t going to get better and Mom wasn’t going to show up. When the dispatcher answered I said, calmly, “I don’t know what to do.”
I know what to do, now. I get out of bed and put an inhaler in Jasper’s hand before he’s fully awake. I count two pumps, five breaths, two pumps more. Jasper doesn’t say anything, but his eyes are steady on mine.
I dump two scoops of instant coffee in a Waffle House mug and microwave it on high, then stir in all four packets of hot chocolate. Google says caffeine helps, but Jasper can’t stand the taste.
He drinks it. We wait. Every five minutes or so I snap my fingers and he lets me check to make sure the beds of his fingernails aren’t turning blue.
Eventually the whistle goes flat, falling down the scale until it’s just air again, rushing in and out.
“I’m good.” Jasper’s voice is still a little strained, but he hates when I baby him.
I get back in bed and pretend to sleep, listening until his breathing turns deep. I think about the banner on Stonewood Academy’s site: the clean blue of the sky, the healthful green of the lawn. I hold it in my head like a promise, like a map to the real Eden, until the colors oversaturate in my head, unreal.
I don’t think about ghost stories or murder mysteries, sins or starlings, because none of it matters. I’m going back to Starling House, because I have to.
For Jasper.
The words are comfortable, familiar, the easy answer to every question I’ve ever asked myself. But for the first time they ring a little rote, a little thin, as if there’s some shadowy part of me that doesn’t believe them. That smiles and whispers in my ear: Liar.
I show up even earlier on my second morning, my wrists scored by the weight of shopping bags, my shoulders bruised by the handles of a broom and mop. I knock more times than is strictly necessary, loud enough to set the starlings screaming. Bev hates them because they eat her persimmons and sound like dial-up internet, but I’ve always liked them. Every now and then you see them at dusk, rising and falling in these grand, twisting patterns over the pits and marshes Big Jack left behind him, and you think if you stare at them long enough you’ll make sense of them, read whatever it is they’re writing on the sky, but you never do.
I jump when Arthur opens the door. He doesn’t bother to speak this time, only stares at me with grim resignation. There’s a line of fresh scabs along his jaw, and bluish hollows beneath his eyes, like he gets even less sleep than everybody else in Eden.
I hesitate on the threshold, wondering if I’m about to slide sideways into dreamland, sucked under the strange currents of this strange house, until Arthur sighs at me. I quash a strong urge to stick my tongue out at him. Instead I hand him the heaviest shopping bags and march past him to the kitchen. It takes an embarrassing number of twists and about-faces before I find it, Arthur trailing behind me like a mocking shadow, plastic bags shushing against his knees.
He piles his bags on the cookstove and looks almost fearfully at the bottles of bleach and borax and off-brand Windex. I stole most of it from Bev’s supply closet—I consider Arthur’s second twenty a tip for rudeness—but I bought the mop and broom brand-new at the Dollar General, along with an Ale-8 and a candy bar for lunch.
Arthur retreats upstairs to do whatever he does during the day, which I assume involves a coffin filled with grave dirt, and I set to work on the sitting room again. It looks better than I remembered, still shabby but approaching habitable. I spend the rest of the day scrubbing grime from the baseboards and rubbing oil soap into the floor, and if there’s anything haunting Starling House it has the decency to let me work in peace. I go home sore and proud with another envelope in my back pocket. I mail the second payment to Stonewood that night.
The rest of the week goes the same way. On Thursday I fill three trash bags with mouse-chewed sheets and mud dauber nests, dragging them behind me down the long drive. On Friday I soak ten sets of yellowed curtains in bleach water and hang them to dry on the backs of dining room chairs, so that it looks as if a family of ghosts has come for supper. On Saturday—I hadn’t asked if I was working weekends, but I need the money and Arthur doesn’t seem to know what day of the week it is—I sweep out the pantry and find a trapdoor poorly hidden beneath a rug.