She looked a lot like her mother, without the cruel lips and shamelessness.
I shivered at the bottom of the staircase, barefoot and shirtless, wearing only baggy sweatpants. Wisps of my breath curled through the air. I checked the thermostat. Emily had turned off the heat. I snapped it back on.
She wore wet Sojourner State pajamas and the tatters of ward slippers. Her feet were mucked with grime. The hospital was eight miles out of town, and she looked like she’d walked the whole way here in the rain. She kept tapping the empty box of fish food against the side of the aquarium with her left hand. In her right she now held the .22 loosely in her lap.
Her lips moved but she made no sound. She nodded, shook her head, and even shrugged as if deep in conversation.
I’d seen a few unstable teens in my time. I’d been one myself. I’d hit a bad patch during puberty after my parents died, and skidded into the wall. I’d stolen cars and driven all over the state trying to escape myself. I’d climbed water towers out of my head and broke into houses just to page through photo albums and pretend I was a part of the family. They used to find me curled under the blankets, holding dolls, wasted on crank and muttering, “Mommy.”
I was shopped around from one foster family to the next until they finally packed me off to the juvie detention wing of Sojourner State Psychiatric Facility. I spent two years in hell fighting my way out of gang rapes and forced body modification with broken razor blades. You had to be on your toes to avoid hydrotherapy, where more than a few kids drowned. The orderlies used to stage ward matches between the paranoids, the firebugs, chronic masturbators, bipolars, claustrophobes, the disassociatives, the sociopaths, and depressives. The only reason I ever got my shit together was because I possessed an unholy amount of survival instinct that I never realized I had.
Cecil floated in a tight circle on his side. Emily had finally put down the empty box and was dangling her fingers in the water, making ripples that kept Cecil chugging along. The hand in her lap danced nervously, the .22 swaying left and right, angled at my chest. She didn’t seem to be aware that she was holding it.
“You’ve got scars,” she said.
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Where’d you get them?”
“Lots of places.”
“Like where?”
“In juvie detention, alley fights, poker games gone sour.”
“They’re cool.”
Mottled pink and white scars, some of them as thick as a finger, might be considered a lot of things, but I’d never found them to be cool. I felt self-conscious being half-naked in front of this kid. I was also freezing. I went to the closet and put on a sweatshirt. When I turned back to her the gun had quit prancing and the barrel was pointed in the direction of my belly.
I was worried, but not too much. I’d been shot with a .22 before. At this distance it stung like hell but not much more. Besides, Emily had no beef with me. I knew what was on her mind. If I’d been in her place, six years in the state bin with nothing but blood on my mind, I’d have done the same thing. Except I wouldn’t have stolen a .22. I’d have made sure to grab something with real firepower. I wondered where she’d gotten the pistol. I wondered if she’d hurt anyone yet.
“I’m Emily Wright,” she said.
I nodded. “Emily, you shouldn’t be here.”
“My parents were murdered in this house.”
“I know.”
“Why would you buy a house where people were murdered?”
I told the truth, at least a part of it. “Because it was cheap.”
No one else had wanted the place. Houses where two people had been butchered tend to be off-putting. They’d stabbed her father, Ronnie, eight times. Katy’s face had been beaten in so badly that she’d choked on her own broken teeth before being gutted. Ron had been a towering, powerful man, but his hamstrings had been cut, along with the tendons in his forearms and wrists, so that he’d been left crawling on his belly in his own filth until he and his wife had died down there in the dark in the root cellar together.
I hoped Emily didn’t know anything about that.
She glanced around the living room, made a sweeping gesture with the pistol. “It’s a hundred years old, with three floors and five bedrooms. There’s a pantry and a root cellar and a large yard. Three thousand square feet, not including the half-finished attic.”
She sounded like John Acton—Remember, Acton means action for your Home Buying Needs!—the realtor who’d sold me the place.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot of house.”
She removed her hand from the aquarium, and Cecil slowly quit spinning. She wiped her fingers on my couch and I felt an odd flush of anger. “But you live here alone.”
“I was engaged when I bought the place.”
“But you never got married?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
The muscles in the hinges of my jaw bunched. “She didn’t love me.”
“How do you know?”
“I found out.”
I knew that she’d been unfaithful to me. I knew that she’d been sleeping with a number of men in town. Including John Acton. While he was showing me the half-finished attic, scuffing the rat droppings aside while he shunted the flashlight beam across the wide, empty expanse, I thought about breaking his collarbone. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. She kept on stepping out, and Acton still worked the deal for me. Realtors, they never let anything get in the way of going to contract.
“Emily, you need to go back.”
“I’m home,” she said, and her voice lightened a bit. “Did you know my parents?”
“Yes. Everyone in town knew them.”
She nodded and smiled like she was remembering good times. I couldn’t imagine that she’d had many of them with Ron and Katy. “Did you work with them?”
“I was what was known as a ‘friend of the club.’ ”
“So you’re a criminal.”
Ronnie Wright had been the leader of the Brothers of Bedlam, the local motorcycle club. Mostly they’d controlled chop shops, run guns, and grown and distributed high-quality weed. That’s how it was at first. After the money started to pour in, so did trouble from the other clubs, crank dealers, syndicates, and greedy cops. More than a few of my scars had come from helping Ron out of jams.
Rain throbbed against the windows, sounding like small hands tapping at the glass, seeking attention. The breeze picked up and the timbers in the attic groaned and settled. The girl glanced at the ceiling like she thought her parents might be showering, getting ready to come down and sit with her.
She asked, “Tell me. Did you love or hate the brotherhood? Everybody in this town seems to have felt one way or the other.”
“I went back and forth.”
That got a giggle from her. It wasn’t a happy teenage-girl laugh but something that sounded like it was coming from an old woman getting ready for the inevitable lonely end. Emily’s chin came up, and she eyed me coolly. “Did you ever fuck my mother?”
I had. A lot. But most guys had. A lot.
I didn’t answer. I held my hand out. “Give me the gun.”
“I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Who are you going to shoot?”
“The person or people who murdered my parents.”
By implication that meant she figured I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure how she’d come to that conclusion, but I was glad regardless.
“Where did you get the piece, Emily?”