“Yes. Why? Planning to shoot a ghost?”
“Never know.”
“You know you can’t ever go into my bedroom. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Promise me you won’t.”
“Cross my heart.”
For a moment, Grant considered trying to leave again, but just the threat of that all-encompassing pain put a shudder through him.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Paige said.
“What’s that?”
“You’re thinking when you wake up in the morning, it’ll be different. That there will be light outside and people driving around, and we’ll have somehow slept this off.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
She reorganized the covers and tucked them under her feet.
Shut her eyes.
“Don’t get your hopes up. You don’t wake up from this.”
Chapter 15
Two years ago on Thanksgiving night, Grant had questioned a man charged with manslaughter in the death of his wife and children. He’d driven them home drunk from a family dinner and veered head-on into a tow truck. Somehow managed to escape without a scratch.
Grant never forgot how the man had sat in the hard, remorseless light of Interview 3, his head buried in his hands, still fragrant with booze. He wasn’t a bad guy. No priors. Had only been moderately drunk. And up until that evening, he’d always been a model family man.
He’d just happened to make a bad choice, catch a tough piece of luck, and ruin his life.
He wouldn’t answer questions, wouldn’t look at Grant, just kept saying over and over, “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is happening.”
Grant had been disturbed by it for a lot reasons, but mostly because he’d driven when he shouldn’t have plenty of times.
But for the grace ...
But lying in the firelight as sleep stalked him, he realized he’d never truly understood the sentiment, the horror running through that poor man’s mind, until now.
I can’t believe this is happening.
Exactly.
It was the feeling, the desperate wish, to go back. To hit undo. To have never walked up the steps to this—haunted?—brownstone. To have never seen Paige’s eyes on Facebook. To be anywhere but here—lying on this couch in this cold house under these conditions and Don dead upstairs.
Don is dead.
He hadn’t put those words together yet. Hadn’t had a chance to.
Now, in the dark with Paige asleep beside him, they came upon him like a freight train out of nowhere, arriving all at once with a truth so big it tripped his breakers.
He felt dizzy, sick.
Don is dead.
It kept repeating in his head—such small words—and yet they were the sound of a lynchpin sliding out. Of Rachel, Don’s wife of fifteen years, washing the dinner dishes alone at night in the kitchen before going up to an empty bed.
A new gust of nausea swept over him.
He’d convinced Don to come here.
Grant couldn’t handle the stillness any more.
Needed a drink now.
He swung his legs over the edge of the sofa and leveraged his weight up, carefully stepping over Paige.
The dying fire provided just enough glow to see the flashlight on the coffee table. He grabbed it and picked his way through the living room, testing each floor plank for noise before committing.
At the wet bar, he reached for the Macallan. Pulled the cork, took a long drink straight from the bottle. It didn’t touch his ravenous thirst, but it quenched something so much deeper.
Grant moved through the living room toward the front door.
At the edge of the foyer, he stopped, turned on the flashlight.
Canvassed the room.
Everything in its right place.
Further on in the dining area, the table and ladder-back chairs made a strange geometry of shadows on the wall as the beam passed over them.
Grant stepped into the entryway.
The chill hit him flush on.
What little heat the fire still produced hadn’t made it this far.
The staircase loomed just ahead.
Pausing at the bottom, he shined the flashlight up toward the second floor. It didn’t quite reach the top, leaving the last few steps in a pool of darkness.
A wash of uneasiness turned his stomach, Grant beginning to second-guess that drink.
He moved closer to the staircase, compelled to scatter the darkness at the top, but just as his foot touched the first step, a thump like a bowling ball dropping on the floor above him shook the house.
He froze, heartbeat thudding in his ears.
Still couldn’t see the top of the stairs.
The dining room chandelier swayed in the wake of the noise, tiny glass prisms clinking.
Grant shot a sidelong glance toward Paige in the living room, unwilling to completely tear his eyes or the flashlight away from the staircase.
The firelight was too weak to see her face, but she lay in the same position.
Grant began to climb, each step groaning, and he kept climbing and kept climbing. Knew it wasn’t possible—perhaps a symptom of sleep deprivation—but it seemed as if there were twice as many steps as before.
As he approached the top, the floral print of the wallpaper slowly emerged out of the black.
He stepped onto the old carpeting of the second floor and stopped.
The beam of light just a tight circle on the wall straight ahead.
Pure darkness on either side.
He twisted the face cap, hoping for a wider coverage of light, but it only dimmed what little it had to offer.
Grant brandished the flashlight over his shoulder as he moved on and rounded the corner, the hallway illuminating unevenly.
He exhaled.
All quiet.
Paige’s bedroom door still closed.
He went on, past the cramped closet where he’d hidden from Jude several hours before, past the table, past Paige’s door, and down to the end of the hall where he turned to find the guest bedroom still open, just as he’d left it.
At the doorway, he stopped, resisting an inexplicable urge to enter.
He shined the anemic light into the room.
The stripped bed.
Bits of Don’s phone still scattered on the floor.
The bloody footprints.
Horror again at the thought of what had happened in here.
At what lay sprawled across the checkerboard floor of the bathroom.
So why was he walking toward it?
Why was he following those bloody footprints back to their source?
He wanted to stop but didn’t.
Couldn’t.
The interior of the bathroom swung into view, and he tried to look away, knowing he should just turn off the flashlight, spare himself from seeing this scene again. The images from before had already left an indelible mark. The kind of imprint that would never leave.
But he was already standing in the doorway.
He steadied the light.
The pool of blood where the man had once sat was empty and beginning to congeal imperfectly, like a cracked mirror, black in the feeble illumination of his light.
Don was gone, a sudden confluence of terror and relief flooding through him at the possibility that Don might still be alive.
Grant stepped into the bathroom and crouched down at the edge of the dark puddle.
Passed the light over it.
That’s not right, is it?
If Don had somehow gotten up or been moved, the blood would have smeared.
And let’s be honest—that is a shit-ton of blood.
Grant stood and traced the floor from the puddle to the doorway with his light. Just the one set of footprints from before—Jude’s.
He put his light on the shower curtain.