He shut the door, and I walked to the bottom step and sank down, my head in my hands.
Who just accuses their stepfather of murder, without even asking him about it?
A crazy person, that’s who.
I sat like that for probably fifteen minutes, utterly at a loss as to what I should do or even think. Forget the computer file. Forget the ghost. Did I really believe my mother had fallen in love with a serial killer? Some vague sense of dissatisfaction, of an unanswered question, lingered at the back of my mind.
Finally, I stood up and padded slowly to my bedroom. I was tempted to crawl back under my covers right then and there, even though it was the middle of the day. I was worn out from the morning — the week — the month — my life. I was so tired.
Then I heard a sound from downstairs.
I crept to the top of the stairs and listened with every bit of attention I could scrape together in my panicking mind.
A sound — a footstep? Or my heart again?
I closed my eyes and listened so hard it hurt.
No, I wasn’t imagining it. A footstep. Downstairs.
There was someone in the house.
“Reed?” I called. Maybe he’d forgotten something and come back inside.
But there was no answer.
My cell phone was downstairs, and the battery was dead anyway. I tried to recall what time Mom had texted about Jonathan driving back from Palm Springs.
Something moved in my field of view, practically giving me a heart attack. Looking down, I saw a thin stream of water moving forward like a snake, trailing ahead toward the end of the hall, almost as if the floor slanted downhill – which, of course, it didn’t.
I glanced back down the stairs, and as I did, the thought came automatically: Don’t be crazy, Willa.
But you know what? This wasn’t crazy. This was me trusting my instincts.
The water reached the end of the hall and seeped under the door to Jonathan’s office. I went on tiptoe, staying as close to the wall as I could, praying I wouldn’t step on any creaky floorboards.
Then, shattering the quiet, there came a cough from downstairs.
And a dragging sound, like someone was moving furniture around.
I kept going. With every agonizing step, I was sure I was going to give myself away. Somehow I made it to Jonathan’s office and opened the door.
When I saw the room, I gasped.
The whole room was covered in the same two words, repeated over and over:
GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT
The rose petals led to an open window. I deviated from the path just long enough to pick up the phone and hear the thick silence of a dead phone connection.
Someone had cut the line.
I no longer had the luxury of agonizing over whether I was overreacting.
I hurried to the window. The drop was at least sixteen feet, but there was a trellis bolted to the exterior wall below the window — where the jasmine bloomed so fragrantly at night. I didn’t have time to worry about whether it could support my weight. I swung my leg over and struggled to grip the tiny holes with my toes. By the time I got to the ground, my bare feet were full of splinters and cramped from holding on so tightly — but at least I was out.
I crept around the side of the house, pausing to peer into the front yard. Unfortunately, there was no way to get through the front gate without coming into easy view through the huge den window. If Jonathan was still in the house, I could run for it — but if he saw me, and chased me, he would almost certainly overtake me.
I saw the front door start to open and darted back to the rear of the house, where he wasn’t bothering to keep watch.
He didn’t have to. Because he knew, like I did, that the only way into and out of the property was through the front gate. The fences at the sides of the house were eight feet tall, with metal spikes on top and nothing to use as a foothold. Behind the citrus trees in the back, the hillside dropped off steeply into the ravine, littered with cactuses that had spines the size of sewing needles. Even if I made it down there, I wouldn’t make it more than five or ten feet — and then I’d be a sitting duck.
Why hadn’t I grabbed a pair of shoes?
He would have heard you. He would have known what you were planning to do.
I had to find someplace to hide — someplace where he wouldn’t look right away. The guest cottage sat silently, facing the pool, an impartial observer.
I looked down, and in front of me, a single rose petal fluttered to the tile. A few feet away, another one appeared. I followed the sparse path around the side of the guest cottage, where there were two windows hidden from view of the main house. If I broke one, would Jonathan hear the impact of a rock on the glass?
As I looked at the window, it swung open.
I overturned an old bucket that someone had stashed back there and used it to reach the window and crawl inside. I pulled the bucket in after me, then closed the window and locked it.
I looked around. The main room was small, with a kitchenette off to one side. The walls were cheap wood paneling, and the carpet beneath my feet was chocolate brown and mashed flat, sprinkled with dust and small white flecks fallen from the decaying popcorn ceiling. It felt strangely oily against my bare skin.
At some point in its history, this had been a cute, functional little guesthouse, but now it was a creepy, smelly hole of a place, packed with old furniture — a ragged, damp-looking sofa, a huge wood cabinet with a little rounded glass TV screen in it, a coffee table with crooked spindly wooden legs … Every imaginable surface was covered in junk, mostly cardboard boxes and bulging plastic trash bags.
The windows were all covered in brown paper, each one rimmed by a brilliant square of sunlight seeping in from behind the paper’s curled-up edges.
To my left was a door that led into a bathroom. Next to it was a set of shutter-like accordion doors — a closet?
As I stared at them, they opened with a creak.
Honestly, I don’t even know why I was surprised. Did I say a creepy, smelly hole of a place? Obviously, I meant a creepy, smelly, haunted hole of a place.
I walked over to the closet. Bonus — there were shoes in there, a lot of them. Fancy, high-heeled, vintage-y looking shoes, old enough to have belonged to Diana Del Mar — not the kind of thing you’d normally wear to hike through a ravine, but certainly better than nothing.
But when I tried to slide my foot inside one, I realized that Jonathan was right — movie stars did have tiny feet. I held one up and looked at the number on the sole. Size five and a half. I couldn’t even force the toes of my size-eight foot inside. It was a mathematical and physical impossibility.
Outside, a shadow passed in front of the papered-over door.
I knew he couldn’t see me, but the sight still turned my blood to ice.
I was standing motionless when a sound in the closet caught my attention. I looked over just as all of the clothes slipped off their hangers to the floor. Then the two dozen or so hangers began to swing, all at different speeds, making a horrible scraping sound on the ancient wood bar.
“Quiet!” I hissed, darting over to the closet. I was about to pull them all down — I might be trapped in here, but at least I could keep Paige from telegraphing my exact location to a murderer.
My plan was interrupted when I saw the hinge.
There was a hidden door disguised in the wood paneling of the closet wall.
When I gave it a push, it opened easily, revealing a small, dark space. I reached my hand inside and found a light switch, flipping it on.
A flight of stairs led down into absolute darkness.
A biting scent floated up and invaded my nose. I turned away, my nostrils stinging, and remembered what Leyta Fitzgeorge had asked me — what seemed like a weird question at the time — whether I ever smelled the strong smell of vinegar.