Starling House, page 23
The dusk deepens. The stars quicken. The power plant glows hot orange. There’s a gathering weight in the air, like rain. Like a consequence, coming straight for me.
I call Jasper again, counting each ring before a cool voice tells me the owner of this number has not set up a mailbox. I’m telling myself firmly that there’s no reason to panic, nothing to worry about, when I see it: a wisp of mist rising up off the river.
My feet go numb, like I’m walking into cold water. I watch another milky curl spiral upward, reaching toward my ankles.
I call again. The water reaches my belly, a sick chill.
Again, and again, and I feel myself going under.
TWENTY-TWO
When Arthur’s phone rings, he assumes he is dreaming. It’s happened once or twice (or maybe three times, or four) recently. It’s a stupid dream, because only one person has this number and she has no reason ever to speak to him again. Still: he keeps the phone in his breast pocket, and never lets the battery dip below twenty percent. He lingers by the socket while it charges, just in case.
But now he can feel the buzz of the phone against his chest and Baast is staring at his pocket with a disgruntled expression. He fumbles it out of his pocket and answers without pausing to look at the screen.
“Yes?” He hopes she can’t hear the foolish gallop of his pulse.
“Arthur Starling?”
There is a pause while Arthur’s heart sinks and he berates it for rising in the first place. “Who is this?”
“My name is Elizabeth Baine. I’m with the Innovative Solutions Consulting Group, calling on behalf of Gravely Power. We’ve been trying to contact you for some time.”
Arthur supposes he should have expected this. They no longer have a spy, so they must resort to less-elegant strategies—bribery, blackmail, various unlikely legal threats designed to frighten people into compliance. But you can only be frightened if you have a future to lose, and Arthur doesn’t.
The morning after Jasper’s visit, Arthur called Eleanor’s publisher. The first person told him chirpily that she didn’t know who to ask about the source of a nineteenth-century dedication, but she’d get back to him! (She did not get back to him.) The next person asked him if he knew there was a recession on and that everyone was stressed and overworked and did not have time to pursue the eccentric requests of a dead author’s not-quite-descendant. The next person hung up on him.
But Arthur persisted, and eventually he spoke to the great-nephew of Eleanor’s first editor, who consulted the family archives and confirmed that the dedication was added in the seventh edition, in accordance with the will Eleanor Starling wrote just before she disappeared.
Arthur had thanked him and hung up knowing that Opal was right, and that Eleanor had left instructions for finding Underland.
Since then he’s been readying himself, waiting only for the mist to rise.
“So, Mr. Starling—”
“Fuck off.”
He’s pulling the screen away from his ear when the voice sighs and says, tinnily, “That’s the second time today I’ve been told to fuck off.”
The tendons go taut across the back of Arthur’s hand as he presses the phone back to his ear. “You’ve spoken to Opal.”
“Who do you think gave us this number?” Of course she did. Arthur doesn’t blame her; he deserves worse. “We expected a little more from her, if I’m honest. But she proved uncooperative.”
“What does that mean?” Somewhere inside Arthur there is a leash, badly frayed. He hears invisible threads snapping. “What did you do to her?”
“We didn’t do anything to her.” It’s her mild amusement that does it: the leash breaks.
His voice emerges as a glottal rasp, fury-choked. “If you’re lying, if you’ve hurt her, I swear I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” She asks it quickly, almost greedily, as if she knows precisely what violent delights he is imagining. The cellar door, thrown open. The Beasts running loose, clotting her arteries or crashing her car, raining a thousand calamities on her miserable soul—
Arthur swallows savage bile and does not answer, fumbling for the ragged remains of that leash.
“Did you think we took a bat to her kneecaps? We’re corporate consultants, not mob bosses.” Elizabeth Baine laughs, artfully. It’s supposed to make Arthur feel a little chagrined, quietly reassured.
Arthur is neither. “You drugged Miss Opal without her consent or knowledge.” He remembers the way she looked—sick and reeling, unwillingly vulnerable, like a knight stripped of her armor; he wonders where Baine is now and how quickly he could get there. “Then you questioned her, you must have threatened her—”
“We found the right incentive for her cooperation, that’s all. Or I thought we did.” There’s a shrug in her voice. “Apparently I was mistaken.”
Had Opal refused them, in the end? His heart lifts, and he tries hard to stamp it back down. “That’s too bad.”
“It is. So, we were going to approach you directly. Starling House isn’t the only place we’re investigating, I hope you know. It’s one of several unique sites—we’re calling them anomalous apertures, in the reports—but it seems to be the most active. I was going to offer you a fairly absurd amount of money for your property. I imagine you would have refused—”
“Yes.”
“—forcing us to work with Mr. Gravely to pursue the mineral rights to your land which, as I suspect you already know, do not belong to you.”
A little chill slicks down his spine, dampening the pleasant heat of hate. He thinks of all the notices and letters he’s received from Gravely Power, the font growing larger and redder with each missive. He’d forwarded them to the family lawyer without opening them, and been assured that no one could mine his property without his written consent, as it was no longer the 1940s. But if there’s anyone with fewer scruples and more connections than a coal company, it’s surely Elizabeth Baine.
Arthur swallows a vision of strangers digging and pawing through his earth, pretending to look for coal until they found something much worse.
Arthur decides it’s a helpful reminder of what will happen if he fails, if he lingers up here in Eden, rather than going down to Underland.
“I hope you’re prepared to spend the next decade in court, then,” he says into the phone. He hopes his growl is convincing. “I promise I’ll make you regret ever setting foot in Eden.”
A sigh gusts through the speaker. “I’m sure you would have.” Only then does Arthur hear her odd choice of tenses: would have, was going to. “But I don’t think it will come to that. I’ve found what I need.”
The chill thickens, congealing in his stomach. “And what’s that?”
He can see her smile hanging before him, a sickly Cheshire grin. “The right incentive.”
The line goes dead.
Arthur is almost at the front gates when he realizes he cannot see his own feet, because he is running through a thin veil of mist.
TWENTY-THREE
I call Jasper nine more times on the way back to the motel, hanging up before the automated message begins and forcing myself to take ten steps before I call again. No answer.
I don’t have Logan’s number in my phone, so I call the high school counselor and ask him to look it up for me. Mr. Cole tells me he can’t do that due to student confidentiality or whatever and I put a tremor in my voice, which isn’t hard, and say, “Please, sir. I’m worried about Jasper.”
Ten seconds later Logan answers his phone and says “Hi?” with the ponderous wonder of a teenager who has spent the last week marinating in weed and video games.
“Hey, tell my brother to pick up his phone.”
“Opal?”
“No, it’s Dolly Parton.” I can almost hear the gears of his brain grinding, like nachos in a blender. “Yes, Logan, it’s Opal. I want to talk to Jasper.”
“Uh, he’s not here?” He doesn’t sound very sure.
I exhale slowly through my nose. “Logan Caldwell, are you lying to me?”
I hear the click of his throat as he swallows. “No, ma’am.”
“Well then where is he?”
“Home, I guess? He said he had that interview thing to get ready for, but he was supposed to come over later, my mom’s making wings—”
I hang up before I say something I’ll regret. Like: What interview, or, How come he told you and not me, you little shit? The power company people must have gotten ahold of him somehow, and he didn’t have the guts to tell me. I have a guilty flash of the Stonewood acceptance folder waiting under my bed in its sparkly gift bag; I walk a little faster.
The air is hushed and the fog is thickening fast. The leaves are thrashing above me, white-bellied, and the wind tastes bitter in the back of my throat. Dark, oily clouds boil on the horizon.
Maybe Jasper just turned his phone off for his interview and forgot to turn it back on. Maybe he fell asleep with headphones on. Maybe Arthur is drawing the Starling sword even now, standing between the Beasts and my brother.
Or maybe he’s waiting to befriend them, empty-handed, leaving Eden to fend for itself. I walk a little faster.
I’m getting close when I hear the sound of sirens. High and distant, howling closer.
I look up at the sky and realize that it isn’t thunderclouds massing overheard, eating the last of the light: it’s smoke.
I stop trying to call Jasper. I run, shoes slapping the road, lungs aching. The sky darkens. The smoke thickens, pooling and coiling above the fog, nothing at all like the honest gray of chimney smoke, or even the bleached white clouds from the power plant. It’s black and sour, littered with greasy flakes of ash and the chemical remains of things that were never meant to burn. It tangles with the mist, forming dark shapes that make my eyes sting.
All the Gutiérrez kids are out on the sidewalk in front of Las Palmas, coughing into their elbows, their faces blurred by mist and smoke. One of their aunts shoos them back inside as I pass, casting worried looks over her shoulder. Her face appears at the old drive-thru window, watching the sky. She pulls a charm from her blouse and kisses it three times.
Four fire trucks scream past me, cutting through the haze. I stare after them, willing them to keep going straight, as if my will matters at all, as if anything in this damn town has ever gone right.
The trucks turn in to the motel parking lot. My jaw twinges, the way it does when I’m about to puke.
I run faster.
I make the last turn and the heat hits me. It boils off the motel in an acrid wave, drying my eyes and cracking my lips, burning the mist away. I shove past knots of onlookers, knocking phones out of hands, taking an elbow to the corner of my mouth and not caring, not even feeling it. I trip over a canvas hose and lurch back up, coughing hard, lying to myself as hard as I can.
Maybe Bev tried to reheat her pizza in the toaster again. Maybe a guest stubbed their cigarette out on their mattress. Maybe it was just regular bad luck, rather than a Beast with a taste for Gravely blood.
It’ll be fine. Everything’s okay.
Then I make it around the last car and see that nothing is okay, that it might never be okay again, because the Garden of Eden is burning.
The Garden of Eden is burning—flames blooming from the rooftop, shingles melting and oozing into the gutters, guests huddled beneath shiny emergency blankets—and I don’t know where my little brother is, and it’s all my fault.
Someone is shouting at me. I ignore them, squinting through the smog, blinded by the blue strobe of police lights and the sting of smoke. I’m looking for that brass number 12, that not-quite-a-home, that one safe place—but it’s gone. There’s nothing but a gaping hole where our door used to be, a black throat spewing smoke. The window is gone, too, the sidewalk glittering with glass. Flames lick over the sill to lap at the eaves.
I run. A hand grabs my shoulder and I bite it, quick and vicious. The hand disappears. I taste someone else’s blood.
I’m yelling now, my voice swallowed by the hungry roar of the fire, close enough to feel the bite of cinders through my jeans. They get me right before I dive through the hot maw of the door.
I don’t go down easy. It takes two volunteer firefighters and a state trooper to pin me and get the cuffs around my wrists, and even then I’m still kicking and clawing, because once I stop fighting I’ll start screaming.
I should have gotten him out of Eden. I should’ve known a lucky penny and a mad Warden weren’t enough to keep him safe. It’s only now, thrashing on the hot pavement, that I realize how much I still trusted Arthur Starling. He failed my mother, but I never really believed he would fail me.
“Let me go, let me go, where is he? Did you get him out?”
They don’t answer. Someone steps through the smoke and stares down at me with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, and of course Constable Mayhew would be here. Of course the two worst moments of my life would be overseen by a saggy old man dressed like an extra from the set of a direct-to-DVD Western, his ten-gallon hat held up by the sheer density of his eyebrows.
I laugh at him, and note distantly that it sounds like sobbing.
He points at me with the waxed tip of his mustache. “This her?” It takes me a dizzy second to understand that he isn’t speaking to me.
He’s speaking to the man just behind him, a hulking figure in a sharp black suit. His face is unpleasantly familiar; I remember those eyes staring at me from the slanted surface of a rearview mirror.
It occurs to me that not every Beast comes crawling out of Underland. That some of them live up here, and walk around in expensive suits and pencil skirts.
That Arthur didn’t fail us, after all.
“Yes, sir,” the man says earnestly. His accent is local but overblown, a step away from caricature. “I saw her acting funny this evening. She dropped this.”
He hands the constable something small and square, and Mayhew squints down at it. It’s an old-fashioned matchbook with something written across the front in blue cursive. I can’t read the words by the flare and flicker of the firelight, but I don’t have to. I already know what they say.
My Old Kentucky Home.
TWENTY-FOUR
It’s nine miles to the constable’s office in Mudville, but it feels like more. The sheriff’s office gets bigger and shinier SUVs every year, but Mayhew’s car smells like hot piss and cigarettes. The AC dribbles from the vents. My hair is gummed against my cheek, clotted with soot and blood, and my shoulders are wrenched backward in their sockets. Already my fingers feel staticky and dead. One of the troopers suggested they might uncuff me for the ride over, pity on his face, but Constable Mayhew gave him a long, grim stare and said, “Not this one, Carl.”
After two miles I announce that I have to pee. Mayhew ignores me. A mile later I tell him I’m going to puke and beg him, with an artfully choked voice, to slow down and open the door. He doesn’t even bother to sigh.
After that I focus on scooting close enough to the door to yank on the handle, wondering how bad this is going to hurt, until he says, tiredly, “The child locks are on, Opal.”
I let go of the handle. “Look, I just want to know if Jasper, if he was—” I press my forehead against the window, hard. “Do you know if they got any kids out of the motel?”
For a minute I think he’s going to revert back to ignoring me, but eventually he grunts, “No.”
I catch my own eyes in the rearview mirror, red-rimmed and wild, and look quickly away. The last few miles pass in silence. Bad thoughts keep trying to bubble up—like the last thing I said to him was go to hell—but I don’t let them make it to the surface.
The Muhlenberg County Detention Center is a low sprawl of concrete jammed between a U-Pull-It junkyard and a Waffle House that doubles as a Greyhound stop. I feel like it ought to be dim and bleak inside, but it’s all white tile and bright canister lights. It looks several decades newer than the high school.
There’s a woman with bleached highlights sitting at a kiosk. The constable sets a plastic baggie on the counter and she takes it without looking away from her desktop.
“Is that my phone?”
Neither of them look at me. My phone buzzes against the counter.
“Excuse me, that’s mine—give it to me—”
Constable Mayhew tips his dumbass hat to the receptionist and hauls me away by the elbow. My tennis shoes squeal across the floor. “Who’s calling? Can you see the name? Please!”
Mayhew pulls harder and I go limp, dangling by one elbow while he swears through his mustache. “Just tell me who it is, I’m begging you. There’s a fire and I don’t know if my brother made it out.”
The receptionist looks away from her computer long enough to observe my ash-streaked clothes, my scorched eyes. She glances down at my phone with the expression of a saint performing a reluctant miracle. “Somebody named Heath Cliff? Like the candy bar?”
I sag, shoulders shrieking, heart shattering. “Can you check my missed calls? Please, I just need to know—”
“Come on, Opal, time to go.” Mayhew hooks two hands under my armpits.
The receptionist is scrolling, acrylic nails tapping on my screen. “Just Heath, again and again.” She clucks her tongue. “He’s got it bad, hon.”
“Can you check my texts? You know how kids hate to call—”
The receptionist is flicking over to my texts and Mayhew is giving himself a hernia trying to lift me when the glass doors bang open.
It’s Bev. Reeking of smoke, glaring through smeared ash like an avenging angel with a buzz cut. Charlotte trails anxiously behind her, offering a pained smile to the receptionist.
Bev stops halfway across the hall and crosses her arms. She rakes her gaze across us with scathing deliberation, and if I had room to feel another ounce of emotion, I would be terrified. That motel was her life and livelihood, her home, gone because I decided to punch the wrong person in the teeth. I wonder if Constable Mayhew can get me behind bars before she murders me in cold blood.
