The Grownup (4 page)

I slept into the afternoon and woke in the darkness, in the middle of a thunderstorm. I stared at the ceiling until the sun set, then got dressed and drove over to Carterhook Manor. I left my useless herbs behind.

Susan opened the door with wet eyes. Her pale faced glowed from the gloom of the house.

“You
are
psychic,” she whispered. “I was going to call you. It’s gotten worse, it’s not stopping,” she said. She collapsed onto a sofa.

“Are Miles and Jack here?”

She nodded and pointed a finger up. “Miles told me last night, quite calmly, that he was going to kill us,” she said. “And I actually worry…because…Wilkie…” She was crying again. “Oh, God.”

A cat padded slowly into the room. Ribby and worn, an old tomcat. Susan pointed to it.

“Look what he did…to poor Wilkie!”

I looked again. At the cat’s back haunches was only a frayed tuft of fur. Miles had cut off the cat’s tail.

“Susan, do you have a laptop? I need to show you something.”

She led me up to the library, and over to the Victorian desk that was clearly her husband’s. She clicked a switch and the fireplace whooshed on. She hit a key and the laptop glowed. I showed Susan the website and the story of the Carterhooks. I could feel her warm breath on my neck as she read.

I pointed at the photo: “Does Robert Carterhook remind you of anyone?”

Susan nodded as if in a trance. “What does it mean?”

The rain spattered at the black windowpanes. I longed for a bright blue day. The heaviness of the house was unbearable.

“Susan, I like you. I don’t like many people. I want the best for your family. And I don’t think it’s me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you need someone to
help
you. I can’t help. There is something wrong with this house. I think you should leave. I don’t care what your husband says.”

“But if we leave…Miles is still with us.”

“Yes.”

“Then…he’ll be cured? If he leaves this house?”

“Susan, I don’t know.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you need more than me to fix this. I’m not qualified. I can’t fix it. I think you need to leave tonight. Go to a hotel. Two rooms. Lock the adjoining door. And then…we’ll figure it out. But all I can really do for you is be your friend.”

Susan stood dizzily, holding her throat. She pushed back from me, murmured
excuse me,
and disappeared out the door. I waited. My wrist was throbbing again. I glanced around the book-filled room. No parties here for me. No referrals to rich, nervous friends. I was ruining my big chance; I gave her an answer she didn’t want. But I felt, for once, decent. Not telling-myself-I-am decent, but just decent.

I saw Susan flicker past the door heading down the stairs. Then Miles swooped immediately after her.

“Susan!” I yelled. I stood up but I couldn’t will myself to go outside the room. I heard murmuring. Urgent or angry. Then nothing. Silence. And still nothing.
Go out there.
But I was too afraid to go alone into that dark hallway.

“Susan!”

A child who terrorized his little brother and threatened his stepmom. Who told me calmly that I would die. A kid who cut the tail off the family pet. A house that attacked and manipulated its own inhabitants. A house that had already seen four deaths and wanted more.
Stay calm.
The hallway was still dark. No sign of Susan. I stood. I began walking to the door.

Miles suddenly appeared in the doorway, stiff and upright, in his school uniform, as always. He was blocking my exit.

“I told you not to ever come back here, and you came back—you came back again and again,” he said. Reasonable. Like he was talking to a child being punished. “You know you’re going to die, right?”

“Where’s your stepmom, Miles?” I backed away. He walked toward me. He was a small kid, but he scared me. “What did you do with Susan?”

“You’re still not understanding, are you?” he said. “Tonight is when we die.”

“I’m sorry, Miles, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

He laughed then, his eyes crinkling up. Complete mirth.

“No, you misunderstand me. She’s going to
kill you.
Susan
is going to kill you and me. Look around this room. Do you think you’re here by accident? Look closely. Look at the books closely.”

I had looked at the books closely. Every time I cleansed in here, I looked at all the books, I coveted them. I pictured stealing one or two for my little book club with…

With Mike. My favorite client. Every book I ever read with Mike over the past few years was here.
The Woman in White, The Turn of the Screw, The Haunting of Hill House.
I’d congratulated myself when I’d seen them—how clever I was to have read so many of these fancy-people library books. But I wasn’t a well-read bookworm; I was just a dumb whore in the right library. Miles pulled out a photo from the desk drawer, a wedding photo. The summer sunset behind the bride and groom left them backlit, shrouded. Susan was gorgeous, a luscious, lively version of the woman I knew. The groom? I barely recognized the face, but I definitely knew the dick. I had been giving hand jobs to Susan’s husband for two years.

Miles was watching me, his eyes squinting, a comedian waiting for the audience to get the joke.

“She’s going to kill you, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to kill me too,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s calling 911 downstairs right now. She told me to stall you. When she comes up, she’s going to shoot you, and she’s going to tell the cops one of two things. One: You are a con artist who claims she has psychic powers in order to prey on the emotionally vulnerable. You told Susan you could help her mentally unstable son—and she trusted you—but instead, all you’ve been doing is coming into the house and stealing from her. When she confronted you, you became violent, you shot me, she shot you in self-defense.”

“I don’t like that one. What’s the other option?”

“You actually are legit. You really did believe that the house was haunting me. But it turned out I’m not haunted, I’m just a run-of-the-mill teen sociopath. You pushed me too hard, I killed you. She and I struggled with the gun, she shot me in self-defense.”

“Why would she want to kill you?”

“She doesn’t like me, she never has. I’m not her son. She tried to pack me off to my mom, but my mom has zero interest. Then she tried to ship me to boarding school but my dad said no. She definitely would like me dead. It’s just how she is. It’s how she makes her living: She defines and eliminates problems. She’s practical in an evil way.”

“But she seems so—”

“Mousy? No, she’s not. She wanted you to think that. She’s a beautiful, successful executive. She’s a goddamn overdog. But you needed to feel like you were preying on someone weaker than you. That you had the upper hand. I mean, am I wrong? Isn’t that your whole business? Manipulating the manipulatable?”

My mom and I played that game for a decade: dressing and acting the part of people to be pitied. I didn’t see it coming the other way.

“She wants to kill me…because of your dad?”

“Susan Burke had the perfect marriage, and you ruined it. My dad’s gone. He left.”

“I’m sure a few…liaisons is not the reason your dad left.”

“It’s the reason she has chosen to believe in. It’s the problem she has defined and plans to eliminate.”

“Does your dad know…I’m here?”

“Not yet—he really does travel all the time. But once my dad learns we’re dead, hears Susan’s story? Once she tells him about being so scared, and coming across the business card for the psychic in his copy of
Rebecca,
and desperately asking her to help…imagine that guilt. His kid is dead because he wanted a hand job. His wife was forced to defend her family and
kill
because he got a hand job. That horror and guilt—he’ll never be able to make it up to her. Which is the point.”

“That’s how she found me? My business card?”

“Susan found the card. She thought it was odd. Fishy. My dad loves ghost stories, but he’s the world’s biggest skeptic—he’d never see a palm reader. Unless…she wasn’t really a palm reader. She followed him. She made an appointment. And then you walked in from the backroom with his copy of
The Woman in White,
and she knew.”

“She confides in you.”

“At first I took it as a compliment,” he said. “Then I realized she’s trying to distract me. She told me about her plan to kill you so I wouldn’t realize I was going to die too.”

“Why not just shoot me in an alley one night?”

“Then my dad feels no pain. And if she’s seen? No. She wanted to kill you here, where it looked like she was the victim. It’s actually the easiest way to do it. So she made up that haunted-house story to lure you here. Carterhook Manor, so
scary.
”

“But the Carterhooks? I read about them online.”

“The Carterhooks are a fiction. I mean, they existed, I guess, but they didn’t die like you think.”

“I read about them!”

“You read about them because she wrote about them. It’s the Internet. Do you know how easy it is to make a Web page? And then make some links to it, and then have people find it and believe it and add it to their Web pages? It’s tremendously easy. Especially for someone like Susan.”

“That photo, it looked like—”

“Ever been to a flea market—shoebox after shoebox of those old photos, buck apiece. It’s not hard to find a kid that might look like me. Especially if you have a person who is willing to believe. A sucker. Like you.”

“The bleeding wall?”

“She just told you that. Sets the mood. She knew you liked ghost stories. She wanted you to come, and to believe. She likes to fuck with people. She wanted you to befriend her, be worried about her, and then—bam!—have that moment of shock when you realized you were going to die, and you’d been scared of the wrong thing. Your
senses
betrayed you.”

He smirked at me.

“Who cut off your cat’s tail?”

“It’s a manx, dummy, they have no tails. Can I answer any other questions on the road? I’d rather not wait here to die.”

“You want to come with me?”

“Let’s see: leave with you or stay here and die. Yeah, I’d like to come with you. She’s probably done with her call. She’s probably at the bottom of the stairs. I already hooked up the fire ladder in my room.”

Susan’s heels clattered across the living room, toward the stairs. Moving fast. Calling my name.

“Please take me with you,” he said. “Please. Just until my dad gets home. Please, I’m scared.”

“What about Jack?”

“She likes Jack. She only wants us gone.”

Susan’s footsteps quicker now, closer.

We took the fire escape. It was quite dramatic.

We were in my car, driving away before I realized I didn’t know where the hell I was driving. Miles’s pale face reflected passing headlights like a sickly moon. Raindrops glided from his forehead down his cheeks and off his chin.

“Call your dad,” I said.

“My dad’s in Africa.”

The rain was clattering against my tinny rooftop. Susan Burke (that magnificent con artist!) had infused me with such a fear of the house, I’d been insensible. Now I could think: A successful woman marries a rich man. They have a baby who’s a real charmer. The life is good except for one thing: the weirdo stepson. I believed her when she said Miles had always been cold to her. I’m sure she was always cold to Miles. I’m sure she tried to get rid of him from the start. Someone as calculating as Susan Burke wouldn’t want to raise the oddball, awkward kid of another woman. Susan and Mike muddle along, but soon her cruelty toward his firstborn infects their relationship. He turns away from her. Her touch chills him. He comes to see me. And keeps seeing me. We have just enough in common, with the books, he can trick himself into thinking it’s a relationship of some sort. Things with Susan continue to disintegrate. He moves out. He leaves Miles behind because he’s traveling overseas—as soon as he returns, he’ll make arrangements. (This was pure guess, but the Mike I knew, who giggled when he came, he seemed like a guy who’d retrieve his kid.) Unfortunately, Susan discovers his secret and blames me for the destruction of her marriage. Imagine the rage, that a lowdown woman like me was
handling
her husband. And now she was stuck with a creepy kid she hated and a house she didn’t like. How to solve the problem? She begins to plot. She lures me in. Miles warns me in his elliptical way, toying with me, enjoying the game for a bit. Susan tells the neighbors something vague—that I’m here to help poor little Miles—so that when the truth comes out—that I’m a former hooker and current grifter—she will seem wretched, pitiful, pathetic. And I will seem ruinous. It’s the perfect way to commit murder.

Miles looked over at me with his huge moon face and smiled.

“You know you’re basically now a kidnapper,” he said.

“I guess we need to go to the police.”

“We need to go to Chattanooga, Tennessee,” he said, somewhat impatiently, as if I were backing out of a long-standing plan. “Bloodwillow is there this year. It’s always overseas—this is the first time it’s been in the United States since 1978.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s only the biggest supernatural convention in the world. Susan said I couldn’t go. So you can take me. I thought you’d be happy—you love ghost stories. You can hit the highway if you take a left at the third light up there.”

“I’m not taking you to Chattanooga.”

“You’d better take me. I’m in charge now.”

“You are delusional, little boy.”

“And you are a thief and a kidnapper.”

“I’m neither.”

“Susan didn’t call 911 because she was about to kill you.” He laughed. “She called 911 because I told her I caught you stealing. She’s been missing jewelry, you see.” He patted the pockets of his blazer. I heard a jangle inside.

“By now she has come back upstairs and found her troubled stepson kidnapped by a fortune-telling hooker-thief. So we’ll have to lie low for a few days. Which is fine, Bloodwillow doesn’t start till Thursday.”

“Susan wanted to kill me because she found out about me and your dad.”