You're Next

He grabbed the gray envelope and hurried across the parking lot to Hank’s room. When he knocked on the door, Hank called out, ‘Yeah, come in.’

The door was unlocked. Mike pushed in, the room led to by a brief hall. It was dark, lit only by the laptop, which sat open on the tiny desk, throwing off a lavender swirl of screen saver. Hank sat on the bed, facing away, his shoulders slumped. ‘Yeah, come in,’ Hank said again. The screen saver threw dappled light across half of his body before the glow shifted to the ceiling.

Mike stopped at the verge of the room, felt the smile bloom on his face. ‘We did it, Hank.’

A meow came out of the dark, and Hank’s fat tabby oozed from the blackness to rub against Mike’s leg. It sat on his foot and began assiduously licking its front paw.

Mike held up the envelope. ‘It’s all right here.’

The screen saver kept on, mapping blocks of light on the far wall, the lampshade, Mike’s shoes. A section of warped floorboards flashed into sight ahead. A trail of tiny paw prints, rendered in smeared black, led from around the side of the bed to the cat at Mike’s feet.

Icy horripilation moved up Mike’s arms, crawling across the back of his shoulders.

He dropped the envelope, reaching for the.357 tucked into his jeans. The envelope slapped the floorboards, and the cat started, scampering off, leaving fresh prints of blood.

Mike brought the revolver up, aiming, pivoting to take in the half dark around him. Across the room Hank sat as still as marble, facing away. Only then did Mike see the microcassette recorder on the comforter beside him. Hank’s voice issued again from the tiny speakers: ‘Yeah, come in.’

Mike put his back to the wall, barely hearing his thoughts above the roar of blood in his head. A faint rustle came from the unlit bathroom between him and the front door. He was pinned in the brief hall. Inching forward into the room, he charted a trembling course toward a corner. The screen saver kept on with its disco alteration, bringing the walls and ceiling to life, making them bulge and contract like lungs. In the watery light, he noted the Ethernet cord trailing from the back of the laptop to the outlet beneath the desk, and he knew with fierce, distraught conviction that they’d tracked Hank to the motel when he’d logged in.

The cat bolted back into view, a whisper against the dust ruffle, and Mike started, a quick movement matching him in the space beside the curtains. He pivoted ninety degrees and pulled the trigger, the muzzle flash lighting the wall mirror already spiderwebbing around the bullet hole.

Too late he heard something whistling through the air behind him, and then the warped floorboards rushed up and hit him in the face.

Chapter 55

Janine, the oldest, kept a cocoon on a twig in a giant pickle jar, which Ms Wilder set on the ledge above the kitchen radiator in hopes of warming the chrysalis to fruition. Before every meal the girls watched it for signs of life. Traditions, though few and plain, were adhered to with rigor.

Kat slept in the fourth bedroom on a mattress laid between two bunk beds. She slept fitfully, and by the time she did drift off, she was trampled during the morning bathroom stampede. The other girls were neither nice nor cruel, though in some ways their indifference was worse. As if Kat were no more than another in a long line of undistinguished bodies that had rotated under this roof, no different from the countless that had predated her and the countless more that would arrive to displace her. She slept curled up like a puppy and smoothed out the top sheet before breakfast in a semblance of making a bed. She realized that she was doing her best to leave no imprint behind.

Most of the girls were swept off to school, and Kat cherished the relative quiet brought by the days. She sat in the family room, watching Ms Wilder through the kitchen doorway, shifting to keep her in sight as she moved to the stove or the little letter desk to pay her bills. Finally Ms Wilder looked over at her and said, ‘Honey, you’d better find something to do afore your eyeballs fall out,’ and Kat had skulked over to the bay window, plopped herself down, and stared at the road, reparsing her father’s last words to her, searching out hidden meanings and nuance.

You’ll think I won’t know how great you turned out.

There were so many gaps and spaces, and it was too late to ask him to fill them in.

You need to be tough. Your life is at stake. No one can know anything about you.

She was Katherine Smith from San Diego – they’d been there a few times for SeaWorld and Legoland, and she could describe the smell of the mist coming off the ocean. But so far no one had asked, not even Ms Wilder.

I will come back for you.

Nothing uncertain about that. Was there?

Staring at the occasional passing car, she strained her mind but couldn’t remember if her father had said anything about when he’d come back. Two weeks? Two years? When she was a teenager?

Kerry Ann, the three-year-old, was tattooing Kat’s knee with a drumstick. Kat brought the drumstick over to a broken xylophone and tried to play her the Orphan Annie song she’d practiced a lifetime ago with her piano teacher, but she couldn’t get it right, and besides, Kerry Ann was distracted chasing the cat.

When everyone got home from school, Kat tried to disappear into the walls. She sat at the bay window as the girls stormed around with their backpacks and hair bunchies and rambling stories. Her scalp itched from the chemical treatment; she had been pleasantly surprised that no one had made fun of her when Ms Wilder had combed the gunk through her hair on the first night. They’d all been there before.

Janine took note of Kat staring at the street and halted. She was pretty in a bug-eyed sort of way.

‘Don’t waste your time,’ she said.

‘He’s coming,’ Kat said. ‘He swore it to me.’

Janine pushed out her bottom lip with her tongue and applied a bright swath of lipstick. ‘You’ll learn,’ she said, and pranced over to join the cluster of girls at the pickle jar.

Their conversation washed over her, but she barely heard.

‘Maybe it’s a monarch.’

‘Ms Wilder says it’s the wrong season.’

‘Oh, ’cuz Ms Wilder knows everything?’

‘She knows more than you.’

‘There are lots of kinds of butterflies. Besides, monarchs are too Halloweeny. I hope it’s yellow instead of orange and black.’

‘Just as long as it’s not a ugly moth.’

It was as if Kat were underwater, the voices warped and distant. She pressed her nose to the glass. There was just her and the street and a caught-in-her-throat prayer that her father would show up with a stolen car and a smile.

During dinner Kat did everything not to cry. She chewed and swallowed, forcing food through the stricture of her throat. She tried not to meet anyone’s gaze, because she knew if she did, she’d break and start crying and then that’s who she’d be forever after: Katherine Smith, the Girl Who Cried at Dinner. So she directed her gaze at the twig and the cocoon. As the girls rose to clear – her job was silverware – she saw it pulse once.

That secret got her through after-dinner chores and teeth brushing. When she prepared for bed, she saw that one of the girls had stepped on her pillow with dirty feet. A dark smudge right in the middle. She padded down the hall. Ms Wilder was in the family room with the older girls, watching a Hannah Montana rerun – Jackson pouring cereal from the box into his mouth, half of it making it in.

‘Sorry to be trouble,’ Kat said, ‘but can I have…? My pillowcase is dirty. Can I have another one?’

A few of the girls tittered, and Kat’s face grew hot.

Ms Wilder said, ‘Honey, what we got is what we got.’

They turned their focus back to the TV. Kat stood there feeling stupid.

Ms Wilder said, ‘Something else?’

‘I… Do I get to go to school?’

Ms Wilder said, ‘We’re working on that.’