The air near the gun cases felt colder, and when I breathed out, I could almost see my breath.
Then I felt it. Not quite possession—this was something else. An infestation, tied more to place than person. House familiars, they were called in the old texts. The presence hung over the room like fine mist, and once I sensed it, I could feel its shape and size. It knew I was here too. Something quivered in the corners, a shadow slipping out of the way.
“You need to go,” I whispered.
My hands had started to lift when Max shouted from deeper in the house. “Oh, Jesus. Emily!”
“Max!” A peal of laughter sounded as I heard a loud splash deeper in the house, and I turned to pick my way back through the stacks of catalogs and ducks, making it only halfway when Max strode into the room. He looked both furious and embarrassed, and he held up his hands. “Probably not the best time for us to?—”
“Who’s out there with you? Oh, Max! You brought agirlhere?”
I jolted straight as a woman dashed out of the hallway, her hands clapping together with childish glee when she caught sight of me. She was beautiful, and I recognized her from the pictures in the house as Emily Winslow, Max’s mom’s sister, the small-time actress and model who’d been living with Max’s family for the past few years in between shows or gigs or whatever actresses and models did. She was dressed in a silky pink robe that almost reached her knees, and her hair was in a high, blonde springy ponytail. Water dripped from the tip of that ponytail onto the hardwood—dark drops that seemed too thick, almost black in the dim hallway light.
As I stared, she fumbled with the robe’s sash, securing it more tightly. “Well, don’t just let her gape at me, Max. Is this your friend from the other day? The one who upset Judith so?” When Max couldn’t seem to find the words, she finished lashing her robe to her voluptuous body and strode toward me, her handout. Somewhere in this town there apparently was someone who did manicures.
“I’m Emily Winslow, you might have heard of me? I was inThe Family Five—the daughter. Everyone knows me from that one.”
“Oh my God, of course,” I agreed. I shook her hand quickly then pulled it back to cradle it against my body, as if I was awestruck. It seemed to be the correct response. She flushed with delight and turned again to Max.
“I fully approve.”
“What are you doing here, Emily?” he asked tightly.
“I preferred it when you called me Auntie.”
“I preferred it when you acted like one.”
“So serious.” She pouted, then turned back to me. “Are you going to liven him up?”
“Emily.”
“I was taking abath, Max. What did it look like I was doing?”
“You had to have heard me coming through the house.”
She winked at me, a little ‘just between us girls’ move that sent another jolt of uneasiness through me. “Maybe I wanted to surprise you.”
“Something wrong with the bathtubs up at the main house? Jesus, Emily, Joe just died.”
“Well, he didn’t die here, give him credit for that.” She looked around the room as if suddenly seeing it. “And at least now we can get rid of all hisstuff. He was always so sensitive about hisstuff. Like hisstuffwas going to bring Carol Ann back. So tragic, isn’t it?”
My gaze jumped to Max’s as she turned on her heel and flitted through the room, and it was everything I could do not to look for hidden cameras. Because she was putting on a show, right? She was every boozy housewife in every Hollywood moviesinceThe Great Gatsby, only she was standing in a dead man’s living room.
Virulent whore.
The thought was thick with revulsion, disgust—and it blossomed up out of me so strongly I tasted copper and ash. My demon’s flavor, not mine. But the hatred felt like mine, the judgment, the contempt. For a moment I couldn’t tell where I ended and it began.
Emily’s head swung around toward me, her mouth curving into a smile. “Why are you here, little girl?” she asked.
“Jesus, Emily.” Max practically groaned as my brows climbed my forehead. “Have you been drinking?”
“And what if I have?” Emily’s transition from siren to wronged victim was instantaneous. Her eyes widened piteously, her mouth wobbled. “Joe isdead, Max, as you so helpfully pointed out. The only one ofallof you who understood me, and he’s dead.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. I lifted my hands as she swayed toward me, but Max was way ahead of me on this. “What do you mean, he understood you? Joe didn’t talk to anyone long enough to understand them. He barely set foot outside of this house.”
“You think so?” Emily had shifted back to sultry vixen and was drawing her hand along a pile of jumbled carvings. “You think you knew him in the, what, three times a year you bothered to come out and check on him? The boyfriend of your dear, somewhat departed sister, Max, tsk tsk. You’d think you would have shown him more compassion than that.”
“We let him live here out of compassion.”
