It’s that faraway number again. Please send interior photos of building to [email protected] by 8:00pm on Friday. We look forward to working with you.
Jasper is watching me when I look up. He’d thawed somewhat beneath the sheer weight of calories, but his face is closed and tense again. “Who was that?”
I do a masterfully casual shrug. “Lacey. That guy asked for her number again at work and I told her to give him Bev’s instead.”
Jasper doesn’t even pretend to smile. He nods at the grease spots on his paper plate. “Okay.” He shoves the plate in the trash and slouches into the bathroom. A minute later I hear the petulant white noise of the shower.
I steal his laptop and waste a few minutes conducting a series of ineffective searches (“elizabeth baine isc,” “isc group,” “innovative solutions consulting”). All I get is a series of stock photos and corporate pages so devoid of actual information it feels like an elaborate joke. The ISC Group is committed to finding solutions to every problem. Our consultants have a long history of bold strategies and innovative techniques.
I pick up my phone. Set it back down.
I try to picture Arthur Starling the way I once did, the way everybody else still does—a ghoulish, shadowy figure, surrounded on all sides by sins and secrets. Instead I see him in the soft light of evening, determinedly petting a cat that has already bitten him once and will certainly do so again.
The laptop makes a soft ding. A new message notification appears in the corner of the screen, slightly transparent. I’m not generally in the habit of spying on Jasper’s emails, but this one is from the Gravely Power HR department. I open it and read exactly two lines before my vision goes red and jagged.
Dear Mr. Jasper Jewell,
Thank you for your application to Gravely Power. We would love to schedule an interview at your earliest convenience.
I take two breaths, maybe three. I think about the seismic boom of the turbine exploding at the power plant. I think about the fly ash pond leaking slowly into the river, which is the reason why the health department says it’s only safe to eat catfish once a year. I think about the greasy black dust that falls sometimes on close, windless days, and about Jasper’s asthma attacks coming closer and closer together. The dark days and unlucky nights, the bad endings that wait for both of us, just over the horizon.
Then I think about Jasper, knowing all of that, filling out the application anyway.
Just yesterday Stonewood sent me a fat folder of forms and releases and bewildering orientation brochures. One of them showed a group of boys rowing a strange, flat boat, their uniforms perfectly ironed, their hair sandy and sideswept. There was a confidence to them, a vitality that I both hated and craved. I tried to picture Jasper sitting among them—brown and gangling, asthmatic—and felt the first breath of unease. For some reason I heard my own defensive voice in my ears: I was just trying to help.
But it wouldn’t be like that. I was doing the right thing.
I mailed the forms back as requested, the signatures beautifully forged, and slid the folder itself into a sparkly gift bag for Jasper’s seventeenth birthday, in June. I only have one payment left, which won’t be a problem—so long as Arthur doesn’t fire me and Baine doesn’t sabotage me.
I drag the email from Gravely Power to the trash and empty the entire folder. It takes me a little googling to figure out how to block an incoming email address, but I do that, too.
Then I close all my tabs and text Baine two letters: ok.
Later—much later, after the steam from the bathroom has dissipated to a chill dampness throughout the room, and Jasper and I are both in bed, pretending to sleep—my phone buzzes again. I expect it to be Baine’s reply, but it’s not.
It says: Good night, Miss Opal.
Betrayal is just like shoplifting: the trick to getting away with it is not to think about it. You tuck the box of tampons under your left arm and keep walking, wearing an expression that suggests you’re thinking about dinner or homework, because you are. No one ever asks what you’re up to because you’re not up to anything.
So I spend April doing exactly what I did during March—sweeping and dusting, scrubbing and polishing, bothering Arthur and dragging bag after bag of garbage down the drive—except every now and then I pause to hold up my phone and take a picture. At the end of each week I send an email to the address I was given, and the next morning there are questions and demands in my inbox. The foyer pictures are too blurry, please resend ASAP. Is that door locked? What’s on the other side? Can you provide a rough sketch of the floor plan?
I write back at random, offering a careless bouquet of lies and half-truths and sullen I don’t knows, provoking increasingly annoyed replies. The floor plan I draw them is laughably incomplete, and includes several rooms that don’t exist. Or maybe they do—when I try to recall the precise order of halls and doors in Starling House the map twists and writhes in my head, snakelike, and leaves me dizzy.
But Elizabeth Baine and her consulting group must be getting something out of it, because they keep texting. In the middle of April I send a picture of the front door and get a flurry of emails in response: We need better pictures of those symbols. Are there other objects like this in the house?
There are. The place is full of the odd and uncanny: little crucifixes made of woven wood and tied with twine; silver hands with eyes in the middle; gold crosses with looped tops; sachets of dried leaves and salt, a dozen other charms and amulets strung above doorways and windows. At first I shoved them into dresser drawers and closets as I tidied, but the next day I’d find them right back where they’d been before.
Arthur had caught me once clearing a mantel into a garbage bag, swearing. He told me to leave it and I told him that lucky charms were, in my experience, total bullshit. I picked up a battered copper coin, a penny with a harp printed on one side. Like, do you really think this will save you? He’d answered, unusually earnest: No, but it might buy you time.
Then he’d stalked away, deploying his only known tactic for ending a conversation. I’d waited until I heard the clank of pots in the kitchen before slipping the coin into my back pocket.
Now I take pictures of the other objects I left on the mantel: a small mirror with eight sides, a silver heart pierced by a sword, a bundle of dried lavender. The digital shutter sounds much louder than it should.
Good work, Baine writes. We’re sending you a higher-quality phone tomorrow.
I pick up the package in the motel office, and run into Charlotte. She’s leaning over Bev’s desk, her face intent.
“Oh hey, did my holds come in?”
Charlotte straightens very quickly. “No. I was just—”
She gestures at Bev, who says, shortly, “She was dropping off my books.” She spins her office chair to face the television. “Not everything is about you, Opal.”
“Oh my God, you can read?”
“Bite me.”
Charlotte sighs a little harder than is necessary for what is essentially a civil Garden of Eden conversation. “I was just leaving.” Those two little lines are framing her mouth again, and her glasses are slightly askew.
I sidestep in front of her. “Wait, I was wondering about that Gravely stuff. Do you think you could drop off one of those crates? I could help you catalog it all.” I don’t care about the Historical Society even a little bit, but I would like to know why a Gravely had my mom’s phone number. It’s probably nothing—she probably owed him money or flirted with him in the Liquor Barn parking lot or tried to sell his wife off-brand makeup—but I keep the receipt folded in my pocket anyway.
“What Gravely stuff?” Bev has spun away from a Wheel of Fortune rerun just to glare at me.