Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(70)
“And when I come out?” I sucked in a deep breath, then let it out. “How do I look? Am I crying?” Am I hurt?
“Delilah, you don’t want to do this. Just get it over with and let them take the memory. You’re always better after that.”
Horror washed over me, and suddenly the van seemed to be closing in around me. “So, you send me in and let them take whatever they want, then you drive me back and let Vandekamp steal the memory? Why? To keep me functional? If you cut out the rot, the fruit stays fresh longer?”
His gaze met mine in the mirror again, and it wasn’t unsympathetic, but his voice carried thick threads of warning. “This is the way it works.”
“I’m going to be sick.” They hadn’t gotten all the rot. I could feel it growing inside me, and if I didn’t get rid of it, it would infect the baby. And maybe the furiae.
“No, you’re not.” Oncoming headlights painted the inside of the van with bright light. “Take a deep breath.”
My stomach heaved. Bile burned in the back of my throat. “Stop the car. I’m going to vomit.”
“Just take a deep breath and lean back. You’ll be fine. You always are.”
Maybe. But only because afterward they would open me up and scrape out all the parts that weren’t good anymore.
Why would Vandekamp erase the memory, but leave me with the living, growing proof of what had happened? Did the father know? Did he want the child? Was he paying the Spectacle to keep the baby healthy? Surely Vandekamp wouldn’t protect my pregnancy unless he could somehow profit from it.
Unless the baby was his...
*
After a nearly silent hour-and-a-half-long drive, according to the dashboard clock, we drove into a neighborhood full of large houses seated back from the road on sprawling lawns. Pagano turned the van onto a long brick driveway, then drove past the huge lawn, an elaborate circular drive and a massive house strategically lit by garden and floodlights. He parked behind the house, next to a black sedan.
Pagano uncuffed me, and my heart thumped harder as we climbed the back porch steps. A man in a black suit opened the door and ushered us into a huge kitchen that smelled like sugar cookies but looked as if it had never been used.
Paralyzing pressure built around my lungs as I eyed the man, trying to determine what kind of person he was based on the look in his eyes and the set of his jaw, but I couldn’t catch his gaze.
Pagano turned me toward the door we’d just come through and pointed at the top of the frame, where I found a device clipped to the wood, steadily blinking red. “If you go more than two hundred feet from this sensor or my remote control you’ll be paralyzed and in a great deal of pain.”
Before I could respond, a woman in understated but expensive clothes stepped into the room, followed by a second woman in her fifties wearing the very same housekeeper’s uniform I wore. Minus the scarf.
My confusion mounted. I’d assumed I’d been engaged by the man of the house, and that his wife would not be home.
“This is the temp girl?” The well-dressed woman’s gaze swept over me, lingering nowhere but my eyes, where she seemed to be looking for something specific.
“Yes, ma’am,” Pagano said, and still the woman’s gaze held mine.
“I’m going out. You are to dust all the second-floor bedrooms.” With that, the woman marched out the back door and down the steps, followed by the man in the suit, who was evidently her driver.
Confused, I glanced at Pagano, but he only shrugged and headed out the door after them to wait in the van. Leaving me alone in the house with the real housekeeper.
“Here.”
I turned to find her holding out a dust rag and a spray bottle of furniture polish. When I took them, she pulled a vacuum cleaner from a closet in a dark hallway off the kitchen, then disappeared into another room. A moment later, the vacuum cleaner turned on, and the sound echoed throughout the house.
Alone, I stared around the cavernous kitchen, as bewildered as I’d been terrified moments before. Then I ventured toward the front of the house and found a curving staircase leading up from the lavish entry. Was I actually supposed to dust? Who spends an obscene amount of money to hire a cryptid that doesn’t even look like a cryptid to dust the upstairs bedrooms?
With the vacuum cleaner masking the sound of my footsteps, I climbed the stairs to a landing in the middle of a hallway branching to either side. To the left were three closed doors and on my right I counted four.
Exactly how many rooms would I be dusting?
In the first bedroom on the left, I sprayed the dust rag with the cleaner and began wiping down the furniture, careful not to turn my back to the door. There had to be more to the engagement than dusting, and if the vacuum cleaner would cover my steps, it would cover someone else’s too.
The dresser, both nightstands, all three bookshelves and the sleigh bed frames were all spotless and free of dust. But I dusted them anyway. Then, when no one came looking for me, I went through the drawers.
Hers held a well-worn paperback novel, a bottle of lotion, a pair of fingernail clippers and a hospital ID badge identifying her as Dr. Sarah Aaron, trauma surgeon.
His held a handful of change, a comb, a wad of receipts and a wallet, confirming my terrifying suspicion that the man of the house was still home. His Virginia state driver’s license identified him as Bruce Aaron. Age forty-two. Organ donor.