The tuna had been cheap. A discount brand. The lid’s edges were sharp and crude, as if the tin had been cut with a hand-cranked opener, not the electric one that they had in the kitchen. The can was empty, but it was still damp inside. That’s how she’d noticed it.
That faint underpinning of fish underneath the cloud of bleach and detergent.
She’d asked the twins, but they claimed not to know anything about it. She didn’t think they were lying. They were afraid of the basement, so they never played there. Her mother didn’t know about it, either. She supposed that it had fallen down from one of the ceiling beams—a trash relic left behind from the previous homeowners. But that didn’t make sense to Katie. The can was far from its stamped expiration date, and they’d been in this house for five years now. Plus, there was the dampness.
And the smell.
Katie knew she was being paranoid. She hadn’t known any of the victims, not really. She’d never had any personal connections to them, and she’d only ever been friendly to David. Still, as she applied stain stick to her sleeve where the blue drink had spilled, she eyed the window ledge. She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been here, sitting on top of the dryer, listening to her family upstairs. Eating tuna fish.
She undid the first few buttons of her blouse but then, thoroughly spooked, decided against it. She could wash the shirt tomorrow. Hurrying toward the planks that served as stairs, Katie glanced over her shoulder for one last look. She stopped.
A quart of latex paint sat on the floor beside her mother’s old treadmill. She picked it up and placed it on the ledge against the window. And then she felt foolish. How could that protect her from an intruder? But she was scared enough to leave it. Perhaps it would be the magic charm that warded off the evil spirit.
Upstairs, Leigh and Clark were spread out on the living room carpet, reading comics. Leigh noticed her first. “What’s for dinner?”
“What’s for dinner?” Clark parroted.
Katie hurried past them toward their shared bathroom on the second floor. Her arm felt gross and sticky, and her cramps were getting bad again. “Mac and cheese.”
“With hot dogs?” the twins asked.
“Only in Leigh’s half,” she said, and the twins cheered. Clark hated hot dogs. He also hated hamburgers and pizza. For a child, his eating habits were baffling.
As Katie bolted up the stairs, her mom thumped down them. She worked the twelve-hour night shift at the hospital. Three days on, four days off. She was currently on, without the option to take off any shifts to watch over her children. The staff was doing mandatory training in preparation—anticipation—of further attacks. “Do you have everything you need? What happened to your shirt?”
“I’m fine, we’re fine,” Katie said.
“Keep your phone in your hand. Don’t open the door for anybody.”
“I know, Mom.”
“I love you!” she called out.
“Love you, too.” Katie didn’t look back as she said it. Her mom kissed the twins goodbye as Katie grabbed a clean T-shirt and pajama pants and locked herself in the bathroom. She removed her blouse to scrub her arm with a warm washcloth and Sesame Street–branded soap, and then she swallowed an Advil and peed.
Leaning over to grab a new tampon from under the sink, Katie startled. All the toiletries were in the wrong place. The tampons and extra rolls of toilet paper were out of reach and had been rearranged entirely with her makeup caddy, flat iron, and hair products in the back of the cabinet, and the twins’ old bath toys in the front.
Katie’s first thought was scary and irrational: David.
She’d heard a rumor at the memorial that he liked to mess with his victims before he killed them. That he moved their stuff around to make them think they were losing their minds. The man she’d overheard swore that he’d gotten the information from a county deputy, though there hadn’t been any mention of it in the news.
Her second thought was much more realistic: Mom’s been guiltcleaning again.
Katie usually cleaned, because her mother worked nights and took care of the twins during the day. Her off-days were for catching up on sleep. But as Katie pushed the toys onto the bath mat and stretched for the tampon box, she noticed dust inside the cabinet. Mom cleaned, but she couldn’t even do it right. Katie groaned.
Her mom claimed that Katie had obsessive-compulsive disorder. As a nurse who’d spent her early years working in psychiatric units, she was always diagnosing everyone.
Outwardly, Katie denied it. Inwardly, she knew it was true.
Katie worked long hours, too. School and the twins’ bedtime routine, in addition to college applications, student-loan applications, extracurriculars, and volunteering at the hospital—all the while worrying that she still wasn’t doing enough to get out of Osborne. Ritualistic cleaning and straightening and checking and organizing made her feel calmer in a world that was out of her control. Six years ago, everything had blown up when her dad stormed out only a few weeks after the twins were born.
Antisocial personality disorder, her mom had diagnosed.
Katie refused to go back to the way things had been.
As she moved everything back to its correct location, her eyes snagged on a fresh droplet of blood. It was on the alligator-shaped bath mat, near the toilet—and it was her own. Katie swore under her breath. She blotted it with a tissue and scoured it with cold water. There was a thunk downstairs. “Hey,” she yelled. “What was that?”
“We don’t know!” the twins said.
“What’d you guys do?”
“Nothing!”
Katie sighed. Sure. She changed into her pajamas and hustled toward them. Ninety minutes later, she tucked their warm, sleepy bodies into bed. She turned on their matching night-lights, closed their door, and sighed again. Time was hers, at last.
She headed back downstairs to work on an essay for the University of Southern California. All the universities she was applying for required a flight—or, at least, a lengthy car trip—to get there. She loved her family, but she’d love them more with distance.
Night had spread its bat-like wings. Katie turned on the porch lights and the overhead light in the kitchen, where her work was laid out across the table. As she reflected on a time or incident when she’d experienced failure (tonight’s essay topic), it took all her willpower not to check the news. She wished that she could have walked to the school with everybody else. Even Zachary—Zachary, who smelled like stale cigarettes and unwashed clothing, who’d never given a crap about his grades and pretended not to give a crap about anyone—was in attendance.