She was a slob. She should be putting her efforts into keeping her space clean, not trying to lose weight. It put him on edge to see things in such disarray.
More splashes, these louder. She was getting out of the bath.
He smiled again and went to his hiding place.
CHAPTER 5
DUST SWIRLED IN the blistering air as the black Grand Cherokee sped away. Standing on the dirt drive, Allie lit a cigarette and stared at the small house . . . a place she hadn’t seen in nine months. Since the night she’d watched her brother kill himself.
She inhaled a combination of smoke and putrid bayou air, then retched. Her eyes watered and the lining of her throat felt as though it had been scalded with acid. She had never felt so sick. It had been a whole day since she’d vomited the pills in the motel room and the pain hadn’t eased a bit.
Back in the motel bathtub, the pills came back up, but after about five minutes of retching, she thought for sure she was still going to die.
Just not painlessly, like she had hoped.
Naked and shivering, she’d crawled out of the tub, across the dirty, threadbare carpet, and retreated back into bed, where she dry-heaved until she was kicked out of the room by the day manager, who had demanded thirty dollars for another day in order for her to stay. She would’ve given it to him, but all she had was the twenty-dollar bill that Johnny had given her, plus a little loose change.
She was such a loser.
She couldn’t even manage to kill herself right.
Sick and dazed, Allie had stood, clinging to her stomach, outside the motel for what seemed an eternity before she was able to untangle her thoughts enough to figure out where she could go.
Just a place to rest until she didn’t hurt so much.
Then slowly, it had hit her. The only place possible, really. The house in Grand Trespass, Louisiana, where she had lived with her brother. Her childhood house. The town that was little more than a pit stop for people who were going to real places, traveling the I-10 highway. It was a sad little place. And technically it wasn’t even in Grand Trespass proper, but in Weston, an even smaller and drearier town.
It had taken Allie twenty-four hours and rides from four different men, but she’d gotten there. The problem was she was too afraid to go in.
She swallowed hard. Just seeing the house again made the reality of all that had happened there so much more real. She dragged on her cigarette and stared at a used hypodermic needle next to her foot.
The tall grass and wiry weeds had grown tall, strangling the old house. Old, faded strips of yellow police tape littered the sun-beaten front porch, and nasty graffiti in large red letters blared hateful things about her family against the peeling siding. Reading the words stung, and her knees grew so weak they came close to buckling.
Allie had been staring at the house for almost an hour when a searing pain shot through the center of her stomach, doubling her over and forcing her to finally go in.
It was now time. She had to lie down . . . to sleep.
Clutching her stomach, she shuffled up the dusty gravel path that led to the house and climbed the rickety porch steps.
She froze.
A skeleton of a dead cat—isolated tufts of coarse black fur still attached to its backside and tail—rested in the corner of one of the stairs. She wondered if it was the cat she’d been feeding during her last weeks in the house. The cat she’d heard her brother call “Ian.”
Her eyes went to the front window. The glass was completely gone, leaving nothing but a dark, gaping hole into the living room. The front door was also ajar.
She opened the screen door, then pushed the wooden door wider, breathing in the musty odor of the neglected house. The scents of mold, decay, and urine flooded her nostrils. It looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to the room. Fragments of glass, drywall, stuffing, and pieces of furniture littered the floor. The couch slumped over with broken springs. Everything was coated in a thick layer of dust.
Her stomach lurched as her eyes locked on the bloodstained carpet. She stared at it for a long while, reliving that awful night. The one she still wanted so badly to do over.
She tore her gaze away from the spot where her brother had died and fumbled in her back pocket for another cigarette. As she took a lengthy drag, something cool slithered up her back. She spun around, clapping her free hand to the small of her spine, then the base of her neck, anxiously feeling for whatever it was. But nothing was there.
Then, she realized she felt cold. Very cold.
I just need to lie down, she told herself.
“Who’s there?” a voice asked, coming from the kitchen.
Allie jumped. Stepping backward, she called out, “I live here. Who are you?”
Silence.
She grasped the metal knob of the front door. “Is someone there? Hello?”
Nothing.
She bent down and picked up a large shard of glass from the carpet and moved slowly through the living room, her pulse racing. “Hello?” she called again.
Silence.
A few minutes passed before she mustered the courage to tiptoe to the kitchen and peer around the corner.
An enormous hole had been dug in the center of the linoleum floor.
Probably where the cops had dug looking for more bodies. The rest of the floor was covered with litter: burger wrappers, discarded beer and soda cans, dirty paper towels, a pair of red panties, and a tennis shoe she didn’t recognize. Litter was also strewn across the yellow Formica counters.
But there wasn’t a soul in the room.
The screen door to the back porch was ajar.
Maybe the person got scared and bolted.
“Hello?” she called again, for good measure.