won’t be hard. Then he can hunt down and slay, or . . . He doesn’t know. It’s like that old movie: I know who you are and I know what you did. Except he doesn’t.
He aches all over, as if they just told him that his father died. How do you grieve for somebody you never knew? It’s odd. He does. He always has.
Get down on your knees and thank your God.
What? He trips, nicking his hand on a latch. ‘What!’ Oh, crap, this house is not good for me. Why is he still on the second floor?
It’s in the blood.
‘Get the fuck out of my head!’
Not him. Never. Do you hear?
The hell of it is, he does. Where he should be downstairs and out of here at a dead run, Dan’s like a car with a dead battery, stalled in front of her bedroom door. Either he’s batshit crazy or the old bitch really is yelling, It’s in the blood.
Out, he thinks, got to get out, but he lingers, boiling with questions. Then, my God! At his back, there’s a disturbance in the air. Before he can swivel to see, there’s a thump between his shoulder blades. Mom!
Air knifes into his chest.
Liberated, he runs for the exit, wondering how the fuck his mother got into this house.
29
Jessie
Jessie has been in worse places. The cavernous front room of the Sixties Modern shrine to Orville and Mildred Kalen is littered with the expected: crumpled beer cans, miniature airline empties and ranks of full-sized dead soldiers; clothes strewn every whichway; unopened bills and second notices, sleazy skin mags and months’ worth of old newspapers, some still in their plastic wrappers like snakes that died before they could slough their skin.
The architect’s vision went to hell the day Brad Kalen shipped his ancient parents off to Golden Acres, that’ll teach you to have a baby way too late in life, that’ll teach you to spoil him rotten. Mold overtook the white stucco walls the day they left; their pictures faded. It’s been a long time since anybody opened the dusty fiberglass curtains on their panoramic view of the inlet, or opened the sliding doors. Dead dieffenbachia droop in porcelain urns on the filthy terrazzo and the whole place smells of sour laundry.
He’s here, she thinks, sailing into the kitchen as though she’d swept down the curved staircase all dressed up for the next party every night of her life here, the privileged child of the house.
Yes she has been here before. No she doesn’t want to talk about it. Junk from Brad’s tux pockets litters the kitchen counter: wallet, keys, dented silver flask. Somebody jammed last night’s dress clothes into the washer, tuxedo and all, and started it; through the glass she sees the stuff revolving, a study in black and white. A stinking load Brad washed but left to mildew in the machine is heaped on top; it was too vile to put into the drier. Brad’s black patent leather dress shoes sit in a bucket of suds, he’d probably puked on them. Somebody – not Brad – somebody’s fastidious.
Bobby, she thinks. He lugged Brad out of the club last night, an unlikely pairing. Sure, they hung out back in the day, but they were never friends: the gorilla and the thinking stork. That load is sloshing into the rinse cycle; he must have just left. Good old Bobby. She nukes water in one of the few clean mugs she can find and with a grimace, takes the only thing available – instant – and makes coffee. Get the bastard up. Then we can start.
She goes up the pink granite stairs, wondering whether she’d rather find him awake or stupefied. All she has to do is see whether or not he’s dead, but Lucy Carteret’s son is in town, and Jessie has questions. Snores rip through the upstairs hall: asleep, not dead. Too bad. It would have settled a lot of things.
Fuck. He’ll be hard to wake up.
Brad is on the rumpled platform bed in the ruined master bedroom, drooling on his black satin sheets. Round bed, mirrored ceiling. Looks like a set for a porn shoot, but not anything you’d want to watch. Bobby maxed out on Brad around the time he should have been shoveling him into the shower. The room stinks of puke and hangover.
There are things it’s OK to do in high school. Kids don’t cut as fine a line when it comes to niceties, but adults