“However much you want.” The Starling fortune has diminished substantially over the years, but Arthur won’t need it for much longer, and the debt he owes her has no dollar value. She would be within her rights if she asked him to leap into the Mud River with stones in his pockets, whether she knows it or not.
Opal says a number and tilts her chin up in some obscure challenge. “That’s per week.”
“Fine.”
He expects another smile, maybe even a real one—judging by the state of her shoes and the sharp bones of her wrists she could use the money—but she takes an almost-imperceptible step away from him instead. Her voice goes low and edged in a way that makes him wish she’d taken several more steps back. “Is this a joke?”
“No?”
Opal doesn’t seem relieved. Her eyes roam across his face as if looking for the lie. “Just cleaning. Nothing else.”
Arthur feels like an actor whose partner has departed from the script. “Well, it might need some extra work here and there. The House has been somewhat neglected.” The wind whistles forlornly through a missing windowpane. He grinds his heel into the floor. The wind dies.
She wants to say yes. He can see it in the tilt of her body and the hunger in her face, but she says very clearly, “I mean nothing else.” He stares. She licks her lower lip. “Nothing for you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
She looks away from him, squinting instead into the empty space above his left ear. “See, when a rich man offers a young woman a lot of money out of the blue, and doesn’t ask for her housekeeping résumé—I’ve been cleaning rooms at the motel for years, not that you care—that young woman might have cause to wonder if he expects her to do more than clean. If maybe he has a weird thing for redheads.” She tucks her hair self-consciously back under her hood. “If, in fact, he expects her to f—”
“Oh God, no.” Arthur wishes very much that his voice hadn’t cracked on the last syllable. “This isn’t—I’m not—” He closes his eyes in brief, mortal humiliation.
When he opens them Opal is smiling. He thinks it’s probably the only genuine smile he’s seen from her: a sly twist of her lips, wry and sharp. “Then sure. I accept.” A wave of warmth rolls down the hall and sighs out the door, smelling of woodsmoke and wisteria. Her smile widens, revealing three crooked teeth. “When do I start?”
Arthur exhales. “Tomorrow. If you like.”
“You got cleaning supplies?”
“Yes.” He’s pretty sure there are some bluish spray bottles beneath a sink somewhere, and a mop in the third-floor bathtub, although he’s never used either. He isn’t sure his parents did either; the House simply had a shine to it, back then.
“What are my hours?”
“You may arrive any time after dawn and leave before sunset.”
Wariness slides like a fox across her face, there and gone again. “What a super normal way of putting it. See you tomorrow, then.”
She’s turning away when he says, “Wait.”
Arthur draws a jangling metal ring from his pocket. There are three keys on the ring, although there should be four, each fashioned with long black teeth and a stylized, snakelike S. He removes a single key and extends his hand to Opal. She flinches, and he thinks sourly that she is much more frightened by him than she’s pretending to be, and much less than she should be.
He dangles the key. “For the front gate. Don’t lose it.”
She takes it from him without touching his skin; he wonders if her hands are still cold, and why she can’t be bothered to wear a proper coat.
Opal runs her thumb over the shaft of the key with the corner of her mouth hooked in an expression slightly too sad to be a smile. “Just like the book, huh?”
Arthur feels himself stiffen. “No.”
He tries to shut the door in her face, but it won’t latch. It jams for no reason at all, as if the frame has swollen or the floor has warped in the few minutes since he opened it.
Opal’s face slides into the gap. The House casts blue shadows across her skin, swallowing her freckles. “What’s your name?”
He glowers. She slouches one shoulder insolently against the frame, as if prepared to wait, and it occurs to him that this entire absurd scheme relies on Opal being the sort of person who learns lessons, who lets things lie; he wonders, too late, if he made a mistake.
“Arthur,” he says, and the syllables sound foreign in his mouth. He can’t recall the last time he said it out loud.
He gets a final glimpse of her face, the wary shape of her eyes and the quick pulse at her throat, that single damned curl escaping again from her ratty hood—red as clay, red as rust—before the door comes abruptly unstuck.
The latch gives a contented click and Arthur is alone in Starling House once more. He doesn’t mind it—after a certain number of years the loneliness becomes so dense and rancid it’s almost a companion in itself, which creeps and oozes at your heels—but now the hall seems hollow. There’s a forlorn slant to the walls, and dust hangs like ash in the air.
“Tomorrow,” he says, quietly. The dust motes dance.
Walking away from Starling House feels like climbing back through the wardrobe or up the rabbit hole, waking up from some heady dream. It seems impossible it could exist in the same world as abandoned Burger Kings and cigarette butts and the candy-red logo of Tractor Supply. But there’s the key in my hand, heavy and cold and very real, like something plucked from the pages of The Underland.
I wonder if Arthur’s read it as many times as I have. If he ever dreams in black-and-white, if he ever feels a watchful weight on the nape of his neck, the imaginary pressure of animal eyes.
I slip the key in my apron pocket before I clock in.
“You’re late.” Lacey says it just loud enough for the manager to hear, but not loud enough to be accused of snitching.
“Yeah, I just swung by the Starling place on the way back. Thought I’d see if they were hiring.” Once you’ve established a reputation for dishonesty, it becomes possible to lie simply by stating the flat truth.
Lacey’s mouth bends in a glossy bow. “That’s not funny. My meemaw says there were two Starlings living there back in her day, a pair of women.” Her voice lowers, bowing beneath the weight of implication. “Neither of them ever married.” I would like to ask Lacey’s meemaw if she’d considered the quality of potential husbands available in Muhlenberg County, but I suppose, given the existence of Lacey, that she must have made certain compromises. “And one day, they just disappeared. Gone. And that was the very same day that little Willy Floyd went missing.” 6 This correlation is presented with all the gravity of a lawyer revealing damning evidence to the jury.
“Didn’t Willy’s friends say he went down the old mines on a dare?”
Lacey has to pause to ring up two bags of dog food and a clearance birdhouse. “My meemaw says they were Satanists, who needed Floyd for a blood ritual.
Arthur hadn’t struck me as a cultist, but neither had he seemed like an upstanding Baptist. I don’t think they’re allowed to grow their hair past their chins. “What are the signs that someone’s a Satanist, Lace?”
“Well, nobody ever saw them inside a church.” I remain silent until Lacey recalls that I don’t go to church, either. Mom went before I was born, she said, but once you’re on the outside, the only way back in is on your knees; neither of us ever liked crawling.
Lacey rushes to add, “And they were always wandering around at night. And they kept strange animals, likely for sacrifices.”
“Sounds messy. Bet they could use a housekeeper.”
Lacey gives me a disapproving look that would have made her meemaw proud, and I spend the rest of my shift restocking and mopping. I clock out without even bothering to dip a hand in the drawer because maybe—assuming this isn’t an elaborate prank or a Satanist ritual or a weird sex thing—I don’t have to anymore.