The wispy-bunned grandmother, Kate, glared at me even when I wasn’t looking at her, and then of course there was the tousle-haired, seven-year-old Sam, who hovered at her side, almost as if he were standing guard. I didn’t know how he’d gotten there, but I’d already decided he was a sneaky little fuck.
I’m watching you, buddy,I thought at him, hard.
Sam pressed closer to his grandmother, and Max glanced around. “Where’s Emily?”
“Out,” croaked the old woman. I peered at her a little more closely, somehow knowing she was Dad’s mother, not Judith’s. Like Sam, her reaction to the evil worming through this house seemed a little closer to the surface. Even her eyes had that weirdmilky look, the encroachment of cataracts making her look crazier than a bed bug.
Max sighed and gestured for me to sit down. Reluctantly, I did.
Then they all stared at me. Not knowing what else to do, I launched in with my questions.
They answered in turns—when trouble started, what the worst part was—but their voices had that practiced quality of people who’d told the same story too many times to too many skeptics. I stopped listening to their words and focused on what I could taste instead: Judith’s disappointment, Frank’s fear, Kate’s...nothing. She gave me nothing at all.
With her last non-answer, though, somethingfinallystirred inside me, the same prickling of awareness I felt looking at Mrs. Klein’s hangdog house or catching the scent wafting off Claire Bickwell’s dickhead boyfriend. The rush and tumble of possibility when I shook Max Graham’s hand, Sam’s echoing screams as I stared at his disgusting room. Something that was all me, not the demon inside me. Something I understood.
I exhaled with more relief than I expected, but nobody noticed. I could do this, I thought. I was doing this.
And I was doing it my way.
“Everyone experiences difficult things differently,” I said, looking around the room. “Can you each tell me what the worst part has been, so far, for you?”
“Covered that,” the dad grunted, staring down at his knees.
“Oh, Frank,” Judith sighed, staring at me reproachfully as she reached over and squeezed his forearm. I refocused on the grandmother, who was back to glaring at me, while Sam stared at the far wall, his mouth puckered tight.
Then I glanced at Max.
And stopped cold. Uh-oh.
Max didn’t speak, but he watched me with a clear and unambiguous light in his eyes that made me shudder all the way to the core of my being. Working with Mordechai, I’d seen that expression a hundred different times over the years. I’d just never had it directed at me.
Directed at me, it took on a whole new weight.
Hope.
Uh-oh is right.This time, laughter spilled out around my mocking inner voice, filling up my mind, clogging my throat.
“Shut up,” I thought fiercely at the thing crawling around in me, the thing I despised but suddenly felt I needed in a way that made me slightly sick.“Just—chill for a second.”
It fell silent but didn’t leave me. Not quite.
Not yet. It ribboned through me like an arch-backed cat, equal parts reassurance and threat. For the first time, I didn’t mind it so much. If it was a demon, maybe it could help me. Maybe it was the reason why I’d been so successful at the Klein’s.
I didn’t want to think about that too much.
Instead, I exhaled, slow and careful, and kept up with my questions. The house stayed still the whole time. There was no moaning or wailing of a host of ghostly corpses, there were no crashing dishes or clattering windowpanes. Even Sam finally flagged, his arms around his grandma, his big eyes watching me, angry and accusing. Eventually, the family’s answers ran together in mutters and sighs, their voices flat and echoing, as if they’d been rehearsing these responses for years.
At that point, I knew we were done. I walked back through the house with Max and out onto the wide front porch, grateful that the sun was still shining. The whole place was quiet, save for the breeze rustling in the trees. It looked like what I supposed it’d been for most of its existence, a peaceful idyll in the Midwest. The home of an absurdly prosperous somebody or other, and the birthplace of generations of ordinary people after that.
Until this generation, who’d gotten their asses uniformly kicked.
“What next?” Max stood too close to me, and I knew he didn’t want to let me go. But I had to get Steve’s car back. I had to get the letter written and inserted into Mordechai’s papers, with copies sent to Max and the Rockdale temple, possibly the diocese. Anyone I could think of.
What was more, I didn’t know how I felt about Max standing that close. It felt weirdly right yet completely wrong all at once, my nerves jumping at his every glance.
Not only my nerves, either. Deep inside, I felt a strange kind ofawareness. The kind that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with how close Max was, how much space he took up in the air between us.
A low, possessive growl murmured far in the back edges of my mind, almost too low to hear.
