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 unsnarls 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?”
He inhales, straightening his back against the chair. “You should go. It’s getting late.” I think he’s trying for a cold brush-off, but he just sounds sad.
“Okay, be like that. Good night, Baast, Goddess of Dumpsters.” I bow to the hellcat and catch the white flash of Arthur’s teeth. I award myself a point, refusing to wonder what game we’re playing or why I would get points for making him smile. “Night, Arthur.”
The white glint vanishes, and he watches me leave in chilled silence. The floorboards moan an apology beneath my feet.
The evening air has a springtime hum to it, the silent sound of live things unfurling, emerging, surfacing, sprouting. I drive with the windows rolled down, letting the wild smell of it fill me up, pushing out the embarrassing ache in my chest. I don’t know why I thought things would be different now, after puking on his shoes and driving his dead dad’s truck and protecting his stupid secrets. Mom was always trying to turn frogs and beasts into handsome princes, but it never worked out for her. I should know better.
*
I don’t head straight back to the motel. Instead I take an abrupt right turn, and another, until my headlights are coasting over eerily smooth lawns and concrete birdbaths.