****
Ava drove away from Cliffside and sped for home, still barely keeping her head above the water line.
“Your mother had a bit of an outburst earlier. We had to sedate her.” That’s what Nurse Ellerby said when she’d arrived. And Ava felt relieved. And then awful. What kind of daughter would wish for that?
The kind with a bag of money she needed to stash.
So she kissed her mom on the forehead and headed for the closet safe, wincing as she turned the dial.
6/5/96
Some days are cursed, she thought as she pulled into her driveway.
And maybe curses can’t be broken. Only endured.
She trudged inside, fully intent on grabbing a book, going for a run. Taking a hot shower. One of million things she’d counseled her patients to do. Healthy coping, she called it.
Well, fuck that.
She poured a glass of wine, whipped out her laptop, and went straight to her unhappy place. Kate’s Facebook page. How long had it been since she’d checked it? She cursed herself for not being prepared. For not seeing whatever nauseatingly perfect we’re expecting photo Kate had commissioned.
But, she didn’t find it. Only this:
Kate Culpepper was tagged in a post.
Below, the trendy La Noche Restaurant had posted a picture of Kate and Ian at a window table. The caption read:
Love Doctors dining at La Noche on V-Day . . . love is in the air!
15 mins ago–Carmel, CA.
Ava studied the photo, opening it in full-screen view, paying attention to the particulars. Kate’s flat stomach in her curve-hugging red dress. She couldn’t be too far along. No alcohol for her, just water. Ian’s glass of red, full. Far Niente, no doubt. His favorite. And she’d certainly given him a reason to drink.
The idea struck her—the way the worst ones do—as brilliant. She didn’t have any Adderall, but she still had the Xanax Ian had prescribed her. And that was even better somehow. Fitting. Karma in the form of a little white bar.
Just a pill, she thought. Or two.
One last time.
****
Ava parked on the street across from the restaurant. From here, with the Nikon, she had an unobstructed view of her target: the long, sleek, dark neck of the wine bottle, the gold foil peeled back, tipping toward Ian’s glass. And she laughed out loud when she saw the waiter cart the bottle away. Probably to a serving station.
Child’s play, she thought. Even easier than the first time. As long as she could be patient—which she could—and exact, holding out for the precise moment.
It came sooner than she could’ve hoped. But not before she made note of the absence of laughter between them. Only because she laughed so much and so often with Luke. Kate’s face seemed dour. And Ian checked his cell phone twice. For a moment, Ava considered going home, victorious in the knowledge that she had Luke. That Luke would never do such a thing. That Kate and Ian were not the couple from the shiny Facebook photo but its negative, devoid of light.
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 im
agined 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 speak, 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 win
dow, 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.
Doctors of Darkness Boxed Set Page 96
