by Ellery Kane
When Ian rose from his chair, her heart quickened. And she felt she’d come too far. Too late to turn back now. But that wasn’t true. Not really. She often told her patients it was just a line, an excuse, to do what you wanted to do. And what she wanted from Ian was always the same because it would never be enough. Retribution.
Ava barely breathed, trailing him with her lens as he emerged from the restaurant and headed across the parking lot. His mouth a straight, grim line.
Back to Kate, fingers pecking at her phone. She sipped her water, took another bite.
To Ian again. And . . . was that—David? They’d walked to the tall row of hedges in the shadows, talking animatedly. Arguing, she decided, when she saw David swipe at the air, dismissively.
Kate lay a finger across her cheek—a tear? an eyelash?—and returned to her phone, pressing it to her ear.
Now or never.
Ava could’ve been caught. Maybe a part of her hoped she would be. Ducking in through the side entrance, slipping down the hallway, sighting the serving station with its array of bottles. The Far Niente stood alone at the corner, as if it had been waiting for her. A willing conspirator.
She set her purse on the stand, pretending to search it. Looking for her dignity. Her moral compass.
Nope. Not there.
She already had what she needed concealed in her palm.
And then it was gone, sunk to the bottom of the bottle. And she was too.
In her car, she watched for a while. Until the waiter returned to fill Ian’s glass.
“We’re even.” She said it out loud to him as he downed the first sip. But she meant it for herself. As a proclamation. I got the last word.
****
Ava remembered the extra potstickers. Pretty damn impressive, given the day she’d had. She set the table and started on the wine, allowing herself an extra generous pour. Luke wouldn’t mind her starting without him. Not after she told him she loved him. Screw Valentine’s Doom. She’d do it tonight. Like ripping off a Band-Aid.
She sat on the sofa, relieved to have made up her mind. And then she heard it. A single fat drop of rain on the window. Like the tap of a finger. The sky had been holding out all day, and it couldn’t wait any longer.
Ava picked up her phone to text Luke. To tell him to be careful. To tell him the potstickers were getting cold. That she’d already eaten his fortune cookie. But as she typed, an incoming message appeared. And another.
From Ian. A drunk and medicated Ian.
hop ur happy this is what u wanted, rigth? me toend my pathetic excuse for a life
kate’s gone
bye aves
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Ava hit dial, each unanswered ring firing a hit of panic through her veins. Until finally she hung up. She took a rattled breath.
Was he pranking her? Good one, Ian.
She reread the text, uncertain—real or not real?—and checked the clock.
9:39 p.m.
She could get to Ian’s and back in under eight minutes. Nine, with the rain. Luke wouldn’t be back till after ten.
She had time.
****
With no umbrella, Ava ran from her car toward the house on Cortez Road, making her way around the back, already soaked.
Blame it on the dark or the rain, but the house looked different than she remembered. Larger and hungrier. Like a beast sleeping on a hillside. One yellow eye lit at the center of its forehead.
From the glass pane in the kitchen door, she spotted Maddie sitting on the linoleum, knees tucked to her chest. And even through the rain, she heard her humming “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”
Ava waved her arms until Maddie walked to the door on small bare feet.
And opened it.
****
Whatever happened is over.
That much Ava knew. Because the whole house held its breath.
“Where are Mommy and Daddy?” she whispered to Maddie, trying not to sound unhinged.
“Upstairs yelling. Daddy’s mad.” Maddie sniffled. “And I dropped my chocolates.”
“It’s okay. We’ll get your candy later. I need to talk to your daddy.”
Maddie clung to Ava’s leg, her little hands like claws. “Can I go with you?”
“Not yet. I want you to wait here and watch the door like a big girl.”
“For spiders?”
Ava nodded. And Maddie listened, her eyes wide and wary.
“Can you count to one hundred?”
“One. Two—”
“Good. If I’m not back here by the time you get to one hundred, is there somewhere you can hide?”
Maddie whimpered, pointing to the bookcase in the foyer, its shelves stocked with the Love Doctors’ literary trophies: Prescription for Love and Love CPR. And Ava imagined Ian and Kate had penned their names on the cover pages—right below “Love is Always the Best Medicine!”—the same way they’d defaced the copies she’d requested through their publisher.
“It’s a secret door,” Maddie said. “Like in the movies. Mommy said I’d always be safe there.”
And Ava turned from her, wondering if she should arm herself. The Wusthof set, her twisted little wedding gift, winked at her from its place by the sink. Any of those knives, sharp as the first cut of love, would do nicely. But she couldn’t imagine it, stalking around with a knife. What was she afraid of?
The stairway beckoned to her with gauzy light from the bedroom.
It seemed to pulse. Like the twitching tail of the beast. So she moved toward it.
And crept up.
Step after step.
Certain her soft footfalls would awaken the dead. That, or Maddie’s voice. She’d stopped counting at twenty-three, but her singing chased Ava, reminding her. I’m here. I’m here.
When she reached the landing, the smell, terrible and familiar, hit her first. Long after her father died, she’d read about the metallic scent of blood. And how early humans could track wounded prey by its scent. She felt primeval, moving animal-like, hair raised.
She passed the breadcrumb trail of Maddie’s chocolates. And her knees weakened at the sight of her nightmare-come-to-life again. The bedroom door, ajar.
As she drew closer, the blood smell got stronger. Until she realized its source. The soaked carpet just beyond the threshold.
A broken lamp.
A foot. Kate’s?
She stopped, not knowing why. A presence? A sound?
Then, a righteous clap of thunder, unheard of in Carmel, and she screamed.
Down the stairs she ran.
Into the kitchen.
Maddie was gone.
****
Ava made it home in five minutes. Five minutes that passed the way of an hour. She couldn’t remember the drive. Only the sound of the wipers swishing, desperately clearing the rain from her windshield.
She took off her clothes.
Put them in the dryer.
Poured herself another glass of wine.
Arranged the food containers on the table and sat there, cold and empty, the Happy Dragon judging her from all sides.
She held her phone. Pressed the numbers—9-1-1—while murder-suicide ran on a continuous loop in her head.
Imagined what she would say. How she would explain herself.
But when Luke walked through the door, grinning and warm and safe, she dropped the phone in her purse.
She’d put on her mask—swallowed her guilt down along with those three words she’d intended for Luke.
And she left Wallace Bergman burning on the hillside. Again.
What was done was done.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Saturday Evening
February 25, 2018
If the house at 151 Cortez Road could sp
eak, what would it say about me?
I’m certain it would not call me friend.
Interloper.
Intruder.
Coward.
Wrongdoer.
Enemy, perhaps. Depending whose side it took.
It would not feel sorry for me. It would stand in judgment of my errors. My glaring omissions. My grievous miscalculations. My purposeful misdeeds.
I am the one to feel sorry. For this thing of grandeur, polluted now. Maddie will never pad barefoot down these halls. Kate’s laugh will never echo here. Ian will never curse under his breath after spilling his coffee at the breakfast table. Forevermore, it will only be known as that house. Marked like the house of my childhood as a place where the unspeakable happened.
But it doesn’t want my pity. It wears its infamy proudly as a new coat of paint.
In fact, standing here again at the kitchen door with Cleo beside me, I’m sure of all the things this house could say, it would tell me this: “Get out.”
“Are you ready?” I ask Cleo, inserting the spare key into the lock without waiting for her answer. We’d found it in the backyard, stashed inside a hide-a-key rock, right where she’d said it would be.
The door relents—what choice does it have?—but the alarm wails, branding me for what I am. It’s a blaring reminder I don’t belong here.
“I can turn it off,” Cleo whispers, in a voice steadier than I’d expected. “I watched Ian do it a few times. The passcode is Maddie’s birthday.”
Seconds later, the house is silent again, and I’m not sure if it’s better or worse. Because in the quiet stillness, I feel it watching us. Watching me.
But we don’t have long to get in and out before Cooper arrives, so I steel myself—it’s just a house, after all—and start up the staircase, dreading this part the most. The slow, creeping climb and where it ends.
Eyes straight ahead.
Don’t look in the bedroom.
Walk right past.
And yet it calls to me, like that half-opened door of long ago. It demands to be seen. So I oblige, jerking my head there and away again. As if I can look without seeing. See without looking. It feels dangerous and blinding. Like staring into the face of an eclipse.
Part of the carpet—that part—has been removed and carted away to an evidence room. And the blood smell is gone, swallowed by the bite of ammonia. Though I know it’s unlikely, I imagine Sheila on her knees, scrubbing Ian’s blood from the bathtub, smearing the remnants of my name across the mirror with a washcloth. Rubbing until she’d removed it entirely.
“Doctor Lawson?”
Cleo managed to get ahead of me somehow. And I hurry to catch up to her, wishing she hadn’t spoken. Not so loudly. The house will take it personally. An affront. A show of disrespect. “Get out,” it seems to say.
“Maddie’s room,” she tells me, quieter this time. I wonder if she can feel it too. How out of place we are here.
The hinges whimper with her gentle push on the door. Beyond it, moonlight streams in from the window, illuminating a pale-yellow bedspread. It’s the color of the sun, of scrambled eggs and daisies, but knowing what’s happened here turns it sour, jaundiced. Circus animals trapped in the wallpaper regard us with forced cheer, as if at any moment they’ll go stark mad and trample us. The flat eyes of Maddie’s dolls follow us, unblinking.
At the center of it all, a massive dollhouse, closed and shuttered, where Cleo crouches and slides her hand around the back.
“Can you believe the size of this thing? I stumbled over it trying to get downstairs after Kate came home.”
From under one of the dark eaves, she produces the phone, Velcro affixed to one side. She powers it on, her pale skin shimmering like a ghost’s in the artificial glow. Lingering in the doorway, I shudder.
“Let’s go.” My voice breaks the silence, a splintered crack in bone. And I’m already making bargains, promising the house I won’t speak again. Not unless I have to.
“Don’t you want to know what’s on it?”
Desperately. But I shake my head.
“Get out,” the house says again.
But my feet stay planted. And Cleo is transfixed by the screen. “Look,” she says.
It may as well be an apple. Luscious, forbidden, and filled with the knowledge I’m powerless to resist. I step into the room and hold out my hand, preparing to take a bite. As I read the last outgoing message, I imagine the house roaring like an angry god.
Tuesday, February 14, 2018 9:33 P.M.
I tried to leave and he’s scaring me. Threatening to hurt himself. Please come. No sirens. XO
“Who do you think—” A sound from downstairs, unmistakable and horrible, stops her mouth from moving.
The front door has been opened.
I look up and out the window, the one where Maddie had pressed her face so many times, her little nose bumping the glass, and see a police car unmoving on the street. Lights off and empty.
I meet Cleo’s startled eyes in the window’s reflection, my own terror reflected back to me, doubled. The house let someone in.
“Hide,” I mouth, uncertain if I could speak out loud, even if I’d wanted to.
Cleo palms the phone and crawls under Maddie’s bed, lying stiff as a mummy beneath it. And I scurry to her closet, wedging myself inside, sliding the door shut, and covering myself with clothes that smell faintly of bubble gum and baby powder.
I listen for the footsteps I know will come, but all I hear is the sound of my own breathing. Urgent as a freight train, impossible to stop. And I can’t help but think of Maddie, how afraid she must’ve been hiding. The horrible things she must’ve dreamed. The awful reality that waited for her.
“Carmel Police, show yourself.” Cooper’s voice is a whip. It commands. Punishes. Twists your ear like a petulant child and makes you listen. “I saw you in the window. I know you’re in here.”
He thinks there’s only one of us. And I’m grateful I’d left the car a few blocks away, insisting we make the rest of the trip on foot. I slide my cell phone from my pocket, the screen alight like a firefly in the dark. In its corner, two paralyzing words: no signal.
“Cleo, c’mon. Let’s talk about this.”
His voice moves like a whip too. Lashing from one end of the room to the other. I mash the buttons on my phone in a panic. Nothing happens.
“Did you talk to Ava? Whatever she told you, it’s a lie. It’s a part of her sick obsession with Ian. She’s using you. She’s already used you. Who do you think took those pictures? Now come out, and we’ll find the phone together. Or did you already?”
His whip-voice trails off. And then it stops, leaving only unbearable silence. The kind of silence with a life of its own. A dark, pulsing life. Like the dry rot that had taken root in the home of my childhood the very moment after my father had pulled the trigger. The kind of silence that destroys. And that kind of silence can only end one way.
With a scream.
Cleo’s.
I fling open the closet door and see her pinned to the ground, struggling with Cooper. Flailing, grabbing, clawing, both of them, for something at her side. The phone we came for has skittered from her hand, well out of reach. It cowers beneath the bed like it knows. And the house is laughing at us now.
Because I see it then, just as Cooper secures it in his gloved hand. My chef’s knife, glinting in the moonglow.
He cackles bitterly at me, and it may be the worst sound I’ve ever heard. Worse than the desperate wail of my mother, my father’s raging bellow. Or the times when he’d go quiet, walled off inside himself like the core of a nesting doll. Worse than Maddie’s quivery singing. Worse, even, than Wallace’s last-gasp moan.
“You’re here,” he says, like I’ve given him a gift.
His knee presses against Cleo’s stomach, securing her like a
mounted insect. She sucks in a desperate breath and gasps for another, pushing at him with her hands, as delicate and useless as a fly’s wings. “Your timing is impeccable as always. The way you showed up on Valentine’s Day. And tonight. It’s like you want to be caught. You want to be punished.”
“I called the police.” I hold my phone out like a weapon. Not the useless hunk of aluminum it’s proven to be. “The real police.”
He doesn’t even look at me. Or my phone. Only at the knife. “I know you don’t have cell service. That’s what signal jammers are for. I couldn’t have Cleo dialing for help, could I? That would’ve ruined everything.”
I start toward him, a tottering, off-balance step, but his eyes fix me to the spot. That and the knife—my knife—at Cleo’s throat. Her body stiffens at the sight of it, balks under his weight, and he jams his knee in deeper.
“What is it about Doctor Ian Culpepper?” He’s looking straight into her wild, bulging eyes. But he’s talking to me. I can feel it. “You just couldn’t get over him. And poor Cleo fucking him, the way you wanted to. Still. Even after he’d dumped you for Kate and you’d started duping my kid brother. Even after Ian’s body started rotting six feet underground. So, what did you do? You followed Cleo here, and you stabbed her with the knife from your kitchen. And then, I had to shoot you.”
It’s matter-of-fact, his pronouncement, and a cold dread grips me. It’s a poison pill on my tongue, ready to be swallowed: They will believe him.
I glance toward Maddie’s door, closed now, and calculate the distance, the time it would take to get there. While the knife glints with intention, and Cooper’s gun watches me from his holster.
“Why?” The impossible question I’d been taught to avoid. Ian had told me once that why is a wild goose chase—nobody really knows why they do what they do. They just do it.
And didn’t I know that? As much as I’d railed against it, I felt driven by the past, a deep-churning current, a submarine river, steering my ship from port to port as surely as a sailor’s wind.
Still, I need to keep him talking. Listening I can manage. Listening I’m good at. Listening will buy me time. Precious time.
