"Beginning with your own."
"Maybe," he said.
"Because you need children," she said.
He shuddered.
"Don't you?" she asked.
"I don't know if I could ever do that again. Now that I know what it does to you when you lose one."
"Is it any worse than losing a parent?"
"Yes."
"Worse than losing yourself?"
"I've never lost myself, Sylvie. Neither have you."
"I must have," she said. "Because it feels so good now that I've found myself again."
"You think because we danced, because we kissed, because we love each other—we do love each other, don't we?"
She kissed him again.
"You think," he said, "that this means our problems are over. But they're not."
She sat crosslegged on the floor. "Something's still wrong."
"Right. But what is it? What's the thing that if we fix it, everything will be all right?"
"It's not the house," said Sylvie. "The house isn't aware, really. It's strong, but it doesn't know anything. It... holds people. That's all it does. It makes them yearn for this place. It's a home."
"And that's not bad."
"That's not bad if you want to be here. My point is that the house isn't what's wrong. It just is."
"The ladies next door don't feel that way."
"You know what the problem is? She's still out there."
Don's mind was on Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea and the mysterious Gladys upstairs. "Who?"
"Lissy. My roommate. My murderer."
"Don't I know it."
"I know I can't live here forever, Don. If you can call me alive."
He squeezed her hand.
She smiled at him. "I know that if you're really going to be happy you have to love a living woman."
"I do," he said. "You."
"I know that maybe if I could let go of this place, if I could drift away. I mean, think about it. Who is it the house holds onto? Not the Bellamys. When they died, they drifted away."
"True," said Don. "And why didn't their children get caught up the way the ladies next door did? They grew up here and yet they could leave, they could even sell the place."
"That is odd, when you think about it. Why would two prostitutes be tied here, and not the others? Why me, and not the others who died here?"
"Maybe because you lost something here. Maybe you all lost something."
"My life," she said. "What about them?"
"I don't know. Their innocence? Their trust?"
"Their self-respect?"
"I don't know them that well," said Don. "But they lost something and so they can't leave the house until they get it back."
"Maybe it's not something in particular at all. Maybe it's just—loss."
"Other people have to have lost things here, too."
"Well, then, maybe it's need."
"What do you need?"
"A life," she said, laughing.
"But that's not a joke, is it?" he said.
"No," she said. "Even before she killed me, I needed a life, Don. My parents were gone. There was nobody to show my accomplishments to. You know? Nobody to watch me sing or dance or whatever and clap their hands when I got through it without a single mistake."
He nodded. "I know what you mean."
"So I believed all that stuff about pleasing myself." She laughed. "Can't be done. You can't please yourself by doing what you want. Because it doesn't mean anything if it's just you. There has to be somebody else it matters to. I think... I think that in my heart I needed that to be Lissy. I needed her to care about what I did."
"And instead she cared so little that she was willing to wreck it all just to get a good grade on a paper."
Sylvie nodded. "So it's my own need holding me here."
"Maybe," said Don.
They sat in silence for a while.
"Or maybe," said Don.
"What?"
"Maybe it's justice that you need."
"What's justice? I hit Lissy with a stone. I could have killed her. As far as I can tell, my being dead and trapped here may very well be justice. Maybe this is hell, Don."
"Hell is knowing she's out there, thinking she got away with it."
"Not just thinking," said Sylvie. "She did get away with it."
"I want to find her," said Don.
"No."
"I just want to... I don't know. Send her a note. Just let her know that somebody knows what she did."
"And then?"
"I just don't think she should be happy," said Don.
"Will it bring my body back to life?"
Don thought of the corpse lying on the mattress down in the tunnel. He thought of Nellie's little body—and his ex-wife's, too. She at least had died for her sins. Lissy hadn't.
"She has to face what she did," said Don.
Sylvie laughed. "You're not going to do that by sending her a note."
"How, then?"
"Bring her back here," said Sylvie. "Bring her back to me."
Don looked at her. What was she talking about? What did she mean to do?
"Maybe now that the Bellamy house is becoming itself again, it's time for it to be haunted."
He thought back to the movies he'd seen with haunted houses. Poltergeist. The Uninvited. The Changeling. He thought of Lissy coming into this house and coming face to face with the woman she murdered. And the house...
"Oh, man," he said. "What would happen?"
"I don't know," said Sylvie. "But one thing's certain. She couldn't hurt me again."
"So she comes," said Don. "We find her somehow and she comes and you face her and she, what, I don't know, runs screaming from the house and never has a good night's sleep again. Or she goes to the police and confesses. Or she laughs at you and burns the house down. Or she dies of a heart attack. Whatever. Then what?"
"Then nothing," said Sylvie. "We know, that's all. We find out what happens and then we both know."
Don thought about this. "Is there really some balance in the universe? Some scale of justice that will bring her here and find some way to set things to rights?"
"She's what's missing, Don. You're the one who kept saying it—she's out there. And she shouldn't be. She committed murder in this house, Don. If anyone should be trapped here, it's her."
"You think the house wants her?"
"The house just wants. But if she comes, I think it might want her."
"And it will let you go."
"Maybe."
"Let you go, but how? By making you disappear? Like you did this morning out there in the yard?"
"Would that be so terrible, Don?"
"I don't want to lose you."
"Don, be honest, please. You don't have me. You never can. And I can never have you. So maybe the best thing, the right thing—remember, you were asking about that?—maybe the right thing is for me to be set free of this place. And maybe if Lissy comes here, that can happen. I can..."
"Go to heaven," he murmured.
"Whatever."
Don swung his legs off the cot and got up. "I've got to use the john." Then he laughed. "And I actually worried about whether you'd been peeing in some sink or something."
"Gross," she said.
He walked through the huge ballroom instead of along the narrow hall. When he got to the bathroom he closed the door out of habit. It felt so good to release his bladder. The easing of that pressure.
He thought of the ladies next door. What pressure they felt, what its easing would mean to them. Was Sylvie right? Did it all depend on bringing Lissy back?
When he came back into the ballroom, he could feel a draft. A cool breeze was blowing outside, and the front door was open. She couldn't have gone outside!
No. She was sitting on the bottom step of the stairway, looking at the outdoors.
He sat down beside her. "You know, I'm not some macho guy who avenges murdered girls."
"I know," said Sylvie. "That's what's eating you alive. That you aren't the kind of guy who takes the law into his own hands. You left the law in other hands and it screwed you over pretty bad."