she stepped gingerly through the debris scattered around the room. There were two doors at the back. She opened one and found the bathroom, moving the flashlight back and forth and resisting the urge to gag. It stank far worse in here than it did in the living room. The sink at the far end was half full of dank water, with sodden towels lying knotted on the floor, their surfaces speckled with rot.
She closed the door and moved over to the second. This one had to lead to the bedroom. Bracing herself for what she might find, she turned the handle, pushed it open, and shone the flashlight inside.
“Anything?”
She ignored the question and stepped carefully over the threshold.
There was dust in the air here too, but it was clear that this room had not been neglected and uncared-for like the rest of the property. The carpet was soft, and looked newer than the rest of the furnishings. While there was no furniture in here, she could see imprints in the carpet where items had rested: a large flattened rectangle formed under what might have been a chest of drawers; a single square that she could only guess at; four small squares spaced out far enough that they might have been a long table against one wall. The latter were deep too—the table must have had something heavy stored on top of it.
No obvious marks from a bed, though.
But then she noticed something, and quickly moved the flashlight back to the far wall. She could tell that it had been painted more recently than the rest of the apartment, but it had also been amended. Around the base, someone had added careful drawings. Blades of grass seemed to grow out of the floor, with simple flowers dotted here and there and bees and butterflies hovering above.
She remembered the photographs she’d seen of the inside of Frank Carter’s extension.
Oh, God.
Slowly, she moved the beam upward.
Close to the ceiling, an angry sun stared back at her with black eyes.
Forty-nine
Your daddy liked these books when he was younger.
Pete almost said that as he knelt down beside Jake’s bed and picked up the book. The light in the bedroom was so soft, and Jake looked so small, lying there beneath the blankets, that he was momentarily transported back to a different time. He remembered reading to Tom when he had been a little boy. The Diana Wynne Jones books had been one of his son’s favorites.
Power of Three. He couldn’t recall the contents, but the cover was immediately familiar, and his fingertips tingled as he touched it. It was a very old edition. The covers were frayed at the edges, and the spine was so worn that the title was lost in the string of creases. Was this the actual copy he himself had read so many years ago? It was, he thought. Tom had kept it and was now reading it to his own son. Not just a story passed down through time, from father to son, but the exact same pages containing it.
Pete felt a sense of wonder at that.
Your daddy liked these books when he was younger.
But he caught himself before saying it. Not only did Jake not know of Pete’s relationship to him, it was not Pete’s place to reveal it, and it never would be. That was fine. If he wanted to claim he had changed over the years and was no longer the terrible father from Tom’s worst memories, he could hardly lay claim to any of the better ones either.
If that man was gone, all of him had to be.
With a new man in his place.
“Well, then.”
The light in the room made his voice quiet and gentle.
“Where are we up to?”
* * *
Afterward, he sat downstairs in silence, the book he had brought untouched for the moment. The warmth he’d felt upstairs had carried down with him, and he wanted to absorb it for a while.
For so long now, he’d buried himself in distractions: used books and food and television—ritual in general—as a way of clicking fingers to one side of his own mind and keeping it from glancing in more dangerous directions. But he didn’t feel that now. The voices were silent. The urge to drink was not alive tonight. He could still sense it there, in the same way that a stubbed-out candle smokes a little, but the fire and the brightness of it were gone.