We’re going to get exploited, Larry had told the mayor, waving that book at him.
Look, the mayor said. I know this is difficult for you. But would you rather she wrote it without your help? You knew Wayne better than anybody. Who knows? Maybe we’ll finally get to the bottom of things.
What if there’s no bottom to get to? Larry asked, but the mayor had looked at him strangely and never answered, just told him to put up with it, that it would be over before he knew it.
Larry wrestled the cruiser around the last bend and then stopped. His parking lights shone dully across what was left of the old driveway turnaround and onto the Sullivan house.
The house squatted, dim and orange. It had never been much to look at, even when new; it was small, unremarkable, square — barely more than a prefab. The garage, jutting off the back, was far too big and made the whole structure look deformed, unbalanced. Wayne had designed the house himself, not long after he and Jenny got married. Most of the paint had chipped off the siding, and the undersized windows were boarded over — the high school kids had broken out all the glass years ago.
Jenny had hated the house even when it was new. She’d told Larry so at her and Wayne’s housewarming dinner.
It’s bad enough I have to live out here in the middle of nowhere, she’d said under her breath while Wayne chattered to Larry’s wife, Emily, in the living room. But at least he could have built us a house you can look at.
He did it because he loves you, Larry whispered. He tried.
Don’t remind me, Jenny said, swallowing wine. Why did I ever agree to this?
The house?
The house, the marriage. God, Larry, you name it.
When she’d said it she hadn’t sounded bitter. She looked at Larry as though he might have an answer, but he didn’t — he’d never been able to see Jenny and Wayne together, from the moment they started dating in college. He remembered telling her, It’ll get better, and feeling right away as though he’d lied, and Jenny making a face that showed she knew he had, before both of them turned to watch Wayne demonstrate the dimmer switch in the living room for Emily.
The front door, Larry saw now, was swinging open. Some folks he’d chased out two weeks ago had jimmied it, and the lock hadn’t worked right afterward. The open door and the black gap behind it made the house look even meaner than it was — like a baby crying. Patricia Pike had said that, at one point. Larry wondered if she’d put it into her book.
She had sent him a copy back in July just before its release. The book was called All Through the House; the cover showed a Christmas tree with little skulls as ornaments. Pike had signed it for him: To Larry, even though I know you prefer fiction. Cheers, Patricia. He flipped to the index and saw his name with a lot of numbers by it, and then he looked at the glossy plates at the book’s center. One was a map of Prescott County, showing the county road and an X in the Sullivan woods where the house stood. The next page showed a floor plan of the house, with bodies drawn in outline and dotted lines following Wayne’s path from room to room. One plate showed a Sears portrait of the entire family smiling together, plus graduation photos of Wayne and Jenny. Pike had included a picture of Larry, too — taken on the day of the murders — that showed him pointing off to the edge of the picture while EMTs brought one of the boys out the front door, wrapped in a blanket. Larry looked like he was running — his arms were blurry — which was odd. They’d brought no one out of the house alive. He’d have had no need to rush.
The last chapter was titled “Why?” Larry had read that part all the way through. Every rumor and half-baked theory Patricia Pike had heard while in town, she’d included, worded to make it sound like she’d done thinking no one else ever had.
Wayne was in debt. Wayne was jealous because maybe Jenny was sleeping around. Wayne had been seeing a doctor about migraines. Wayne was a man who had never matured past childhood. Wayne lived in a fantasy world inhabited by the perfect family he could never have. Once again the reluctance of the sheriff’s department and the townspeople to discuss their nightmares freely hinders us from understanding a man like Wayne Sullivan, from preventing others from killing as he has killed, from beginning the healing and closure this community so badly needs.
Larry had tossed his copy in a drawer and hoped everyone else would do the same.
But then the book was a success — all Patricia Pike’s books were. And not long after that, the lunatics had started to come out to the house. And then, today, Larry had gotten a call from the mayor.
You’re not going to like this, the mayor said.
Larry hadn’t. The mayor told him a cable channel wanted to film a documentary based on the book. They were sending out a camera crew at the end of the month, near Christmastime — for authenticity’s sake. They wanted to film in the house, and of course they wanted to talk to everybody all over again, Larry first and foremost.
Larry took a bottle of whiskey from underneath the front seat of the cruiser, and watching the Sullivan house through the windshield, he unscrewed the cap and drank a swallow. His eyes watered, but he got it down and drank another. The booze spread in his throat and belly, made him want to sit very still behind the wheel, to keep drinking. Most nights he would. But instead he opened the door and climbed out of the cruiser.
The meadow and the house were mostly blocked from the wind, but the air had a bite to it all the same. He hunched his shoulders, then opened up the trunk and took out one of the gas cans he’d filled up at the station and a few rolls of newspaper. He walked up to the open doorway of the house, his head ducked, careful with his feet in the shadows and the grass.
He smelled the house’s insides even before he stepped onto the porch — a smell like the underside of a wet log. He clicked on his flashlight and shone it into the doorway, across the splotched and crumbling walls. He stepped inside. Something living scuttled immediately out of the way: a raccoon or a possum. Maybe even a fox. Wayne had once told him the woods were full of them, but in all the times Larry had been out here, he’d never seen any.
He glanced over the walls. Some new graffiti had appeared: KILL ’EM ALL was spray-painted on the wall where, once, the Christmas tree had leaned. The older messages were still in place. One read, HEY WAYNE, DO MY HOUSE NEXT. Beside a ragged, spackled-over depression in the same wall, someone had painted an arrow and the word BRAINS. Smaller messages were written in marker — the sorts of things high school kids write: initials, graduation years, witless sex puns, pictures of genitalia. And — sitting right there in the corner — was a copy of All Through the House, its pages swollen with moisture.
Larry rubbed his temple. The book was as good a place to start as any.
He kicked the book to the center of the living room floor and then splashed it with gas. Nearby was a crevice where the carpet had torn and separated. He rolled the newspapers up and wedged them underneath the carpet, then doused them too. Then he drizzled gasoline in a line from both the book and the papers to the front door. From the edge of the stoop, he tossed arcs of gas onto the door and the jamb until the can was empty.
He stood on the porch, smelling the gas and gasping — he was horribly out of shape. His head was throbbing. He squeezed the lighter in his hand until the pain subsided.