“Friends? Family?”
“He doesn’t have any close friends, and he doesn’t talk much to his family. He doesn’t have a good relationship with them.” He didn’t have good relationships with anyone. Why did she expect it would be different with her? So many red flags she should’ve seen before it was too late, before it ended in bruises and blood.
Caleb nods. “Good. He’ll be another victim of the Suicide Motel.”
“You’re not going to call the police?” she asks, and is immediately ashamed of the hope in her voice.
“Do you want me to?” Caleb’s eyes are hard and serious, like glass. “I’d rather not have the cops all over here, for Elijah’s sake. But if you want me to call Uncle Isaac, I will.”
“They’ll think I did it, won’t they?” Elijah shifts from foot to foot. “Because they think I’m weird. I touched the antlers too.”
Caleb raises his eyebrows. “Is that what you used?” He puts his hands on his hips and looks from Elijah to Sarah to Ben—no, to thebody. He heaves a sigh. “I don’t know what they’ll think.”
“Don’t call them.” Sarah doesn’t have to think twice. She can’t let Elijah suffer for her actions. And Ben deserves to be forgotten. To disappear.
“Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.” Caleb pulls a garbage bag from the bucket. “Sarah,” he says, tossing it to her. “Go upstairs and have a shower. Put your dirty clothes in there. We can try to wash them or?—”
“Toss them.” She doesn’t want to see that hoodie ever again.
A fistful of latex gloves and an industrial-sized bottle of bleach follow the garbage bag. “Elijah and I will take care of the body. We’ll put it in the garage. Unfortunately, the ground’s frozen, so we’ll have to wait until spring to bury it.”
It, as if Ben is a thing and no longer a person. Because heisjust a thing now. Whoever Ben was, he’s not the length of meat and bone stretched out on their grandmother’s couch.
Caleb tugs on a pair of latex gloves and hands another pair to Elijah. Elijah’s face looks worse than Ben’s, but at least he’s alive. Caleb starts to unroll the plastic drop cloth outside of the parlor. “We’ll put him in the chest freezer and cover him in road salt. If the power goes out, the salt will help if he starts to decompose, but he should stay frozen in the garage all winter.”
The idea of Ben frozen in this moment, forever preserved as the vicious man who tried to hurt her and Elijah, terrifies Sarah more than he did when he was alive.
“Sarah,” Caleb says, noticing she hasn’t moved. The steel in his eyes bends a little. “It’s going to be okay. Now go. Elijah and I will take care of this.”
“Go,” Elijah says, pulling on the latex gloves.
Sarah runs upstairs, careful not to touch the railing with her sticky hands, and the steps groan under her feet like a dying man.
* * *
Ben is dead.
Sarah wrenches the shower’s hot water faucet until the bathroom clouds with steam. She opens her mouth and rinses away the bile and sick, scrubbing behind her gums with the fingers of her left hand. The fingers that didn’t touch the antlers. If she scrubs hard enough, maybe she can also wash away the taste of Ben’s blood. But it’s too late. The memory is branded inside her, as unwanted as a parasite. She imagines it burrowing deep inside her belly and curling up like a fetus. The storm inside him, now brewing inside her.
Ben is dead, and she’s alone.
And because no one can watch her in the bathroom, not even Jacob Vass’s ghost, she braces herself against the ugly shower tiles and laughs and laughs as Ben’s blood swirls down the drain.
After the water runs clear, Sarah gets dressed and pads downstairs, cradling a garbage bag heavy with her blood-soaked clothes. A chill settles into her bones as air currents sweep through her wet hair. Caleb must have opened a window or door. The house is breathing. After months, possibly years of being sealed in a bubble—like the sunroom—Sweetside Manor has opened up and come to life.
And she was the first cut, letting the infection in.Someone’s been sleeping in my bed.
The house creaks, drawing icy air from the outside. It inhales. Exhales. Inhales again. The draft carries the sting of bleach on its back. It scorches the inside of Sarah’s nostrils and the back of her throat. She approaches the parlor, shielding her nose and mouth with her hand as the smell intensifies. The house murmurs as snow strafes the front windows.
Ben’s body and the plastic drop cloth are gone. A rag mop stands to one side. Sarah recognizes the cheap white motel towels, now stained ombre from deep red to pale pink and spilling out of a garbage bag. The brothers are wiping down the sofa, wearing respirator masks. The vinyl slipcover gleams. Grandma Sweet had been prescient in her zeal for protecting the upholstery.
The floor and wood panel walls are clean too, the broken pottery and dried grass whisked away, the coffee table straightened. Even the stag’s nose has been blotted so the bloodstain looks like a natural discoloration.
Elijah wipes down the antlers with a wet washcloth, almost reverently. The blood on his shirt has dried, and Sarah’s not sure if it’s his or Ben’s. She feels a pang of guilt that she got to have a hot shower while he’s walking around with injuries.
“Is there anything I can do?” she asks, setting her smaller bag down next to the towels.
She expects Caleb to say,You’ve done enough. But when he turns to her, the eyes above the mask are kind. “We’re almost finished. We just need to take down the curtains. If you want to be useful, you could get his things out of the hall closet. Put on a pair of gloves first.”
