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 goddam 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 read.”
“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. Two floors below and 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 one floor down, climbing.
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.