I stared. The chaos should’ve been meaningless, probably was meaningless to Max, but my stomach lurched at the familiarity. The walls I’d painted in my sleep had carried the same frantic patterns, but not made of shit and colored wax.
It took me a couple of tries to speak. “When did he do this?”
“It was like that when I got back from the city. I’d locked the room’s door, told him to stay with Mom and Dad, but obviously he got back in somehow. I was about to start calling shrinks again when you contacted me, so I figured I’d wait.”
Shrinksagain? “He’s gone in for therapy before?”
“Yeah. Nothing serious, but he’d have…episodes, every now and then. We thought it was normal kid stuff, especially with him being so much younger than the rest of us, but it wasn’t. I just didn’t realize he wasn’t the only one having issues.”
I nodded, looking around. This definitely qualified as having issues. Maybe the housecleaners saw this room, and that waswhy they ran. “You mentioned an older sister. Where’s her room?”
For the first time, Max paused. “Carol Ann, yes. She doesn’t live here.”
My creep-o-meter pinged hard to the right. “But her ex-boyfriend does?”
“Well, Joe doesn’t live here in the house, either. He lives out on the lake, and he never comes around.”
Uh-oh. “So where does she live?”
He sighed. “She’s in Nebraska, at the Brightwell Clinic.”
That seemed important. “The what?”
“It’s a mental health hospital, okay?” Max’s words came quicker now, harsh and embarrassed as a flush crawled up his neck. “But she got sick a long time ago—like seven years. And she got sick, sick. Not possessed, sick. There was no Exorcist moment like floating people or writing on the walls or anything like that.”
I winced, but he was on a roll.
“I wasn’t here, but everyone’s stories were the same. She had a mental breakdown, and we got her the best care we possibly could.”
“And then put up her boyfriend in the lake house.”
Another long breath. “Look—Joe’s a good guy. He was seriously messed up when Carol Ann had her breakdown. We felt sorry for him, and we didn’t think it would be anything permanent. He didn’t think it would be either. But time sort of passed, you know?”
“It has a way of doing that.” And though I was acting like a hard ass, I did understand. How long ago had it been that I’d walked through the doors of that first little kid’s house, dragging all those yapping dogs, only to interrupt Rabbi Mordechai mid-exorcism? It seemed like only yesterday. “Does she have aroom where she used to sleep? Like a room you don’t use or whatever?”
A sudden thought gripped me. Had the sister originally slept inSam’sroom? Please, no. I’d seriously puke.
Fortunately, Max pointed to the ceiling. “Yeah, it’s another flight up. But I checked it this morning, like every morning. It hasn’t been disturbed.”
I couldn’t entirely shut down my nausea as we headed to his sister’s room, but Max was correct. The room looked like the perfect early twenties sorority girl haven: white furniture, Pottery Barn accents in bright teals and pinks, everything neat and tidy. No bloody voodoo doll stuck with pins or Ouija board peeking out from under the bed.
The rest of the tour finished easily enough. Big, comfortable estate house but not rudely extravagant, that felt old, not befouled, at least other than Sam’s room. We didn’t say anything more until we reached the back of the house. I could see it opened onto a large porch, and then I did stop. We were standing in the kitchen, and all the accoutrements of meal making were there. Sandwich bread, a large pot of good-smelling soup. Vegetables, dip, and little folded-over pieces of deli meat, secured with toothpicks. All of it sitting out, looking homey. Homey and untouched. Like the whole house was holding its breath.
“They’re all waiting for me out there?” I asked, surprised that my voice was barely a whisper.
“I’m telling you, most of the time it’s like this. There’s an awareness that something isn’t right, but nobody seems to know when it’s going to pop up. Or how bad it’s going to be.”
Oh, it’s going to be very, very bad.
Hearing the creature’s voice again so soon jolted me, which I was sure was its point. But instead of feeling anger, an almost absurd sense of giddiness swirled up inside me as we steppedout onto the covered back porch. I wasn’t alone out here in the middle of nowhere with all these haunted house demons, not really.
A soft laugh curled through me.Not yet.
All my good feelings leeched away.
We carried the food outside. The porch was wide and gracious, gray-painted floorboards setting off white wicker furniture. Still, as I was introduced to the family, I had to fight the shiver. They looked less like people than portraits, their gazes hollow, their secrets pushed down and boxed up, then stuck in an attic corner of this creepy old house where no one could see. They seemed to be there—but not really there at the same time. Absent in their own skin.
I frowned and tried to focus, to glean what tastes and smells I could of their histories, but my intuition wasn’t firing on any cylinders. There was the pale, slender Judith, Max’s mother, who shivered despite the warmth and made small plates ofhors d’oeuvresthat everyone ate but her. Then came the gracious, expansive father, Frank, a big man who seemed like he’d had the wind knocked out of him recently, his clothes too loose, his skin around his eyes and jaw too slack.
