The House in the Pines(8)

After laying out what had happened—an account no different from what the video showed—the article included a quote from her grieving boyfriend, Frank Bellamy: “I just can’t wrap my head around it. I wish there was something I could have done.”

It wasn’t his words that upset Maya but the fact that the article presented him as a witness.

“Says here the death isn’t being treated as suspicious,” Dan said. “The police would’ve questioned Frank since he was there.”

Maya scoffed. “That’s what happened last time.”

Dan looked at her. Her clenched posture and sweaty temples. The heavy bags under her eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m just frustrated.”

He seemed unconvinced. Concerned, even.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Something was off even before you saw the video.”

She could have told him then about the Klonopin. But Dan didn’t believe her about Frank. He was trying, but he didn’t. Telling him she was going through withdrawal would only make things worse. “It’s just seeing that girl die . . .” She trailed off.

“I can imagine. It must’ve been so hard to lose your best friend.”

Her eyes watered. She looked away. Anyone else might have seen how upset she was and humored her. But unlike her, Dan had no problem telling people what they might not want to hear. She wouldn’t change this about him, but it hurt. There was no one whose opinion she trusted more, and if he didn’t believe Frank could have killed Cristina, then he was probably right.

Maya was probably being paranoid.





FOUR




She knew the cake would be delicious. Deeply chocolatey, topped with pecans. It would be beautiful on the cake stand she had bought for this purpose. She wanted to impress Dan’s mom, an acclaimed photojournalist. The cake had to be perfect, and it would be because Maya had learned to bake from her mom, Brenda Edwards, who had learned from her own mother, and so on, a line of women who’d been stress-baking for years before anyone coined the term.

Growing up, Brenda had a sister named Lisa whose behavior had prompted the baking of many desserts. As children, the two were best friends or they were enemies, depending on how Lisa was feeling. She had a way of warping her surroundings to fit whatever mood she was in. She could turn a boring shopping trip into an adventure, or a trip to the beach into a hellish ordeal.

Wherever Lisa went, doors were slammed and voices were raised. The only constants in her life were her parents, her three brothers, and Brenda, and out of all of them, Brenda was the one who knew her best. The one who would blame herself most for what happened.

Lisa was fifteen when she began to suspect that breezes off a nearby lake were blowing in through her bedroom window and poisoning her with toxic fumes. Brenda, who was two years younger, believed her at first. And to be fair, Silver Lake, which was less than two blocks from the house, had been notoriously contaminated for over a century. A cotton factory in the 1800s was the first to pollute its water, followed by a hat factory and two oil spills. In 1923, the surface of the lake broke out in flames—and that was all before GE dumped PCBs into it.

Lisa’s suspicions didn’t come out of nowhere, but over the next few weeks, they spiraled into obsession, the first of many obsessions she’d have in her life. She stopped bathing, convinced that the lake’s noxious waters had seeped into their water tank. She wore a gas mask everywhere she went, even though her parents begged her not to. She had fought with them all her life, but as time went on, the fights got worse. She told her parents and siblings that they would all die unless they moved to a different house.

By the time she was sixteen, it seemed obvious that the problem wasn’t Silver Lake. Something was wrong with Lisa, but no one would name it. This was back when few people talked about mental illness, not to mention that Lisa’s parents—Maya’s grandparents—were experts at avoidance. The only place either spoke openly was in the darkness of a confessional booth at church.

Lisa never got the help she needed, and instead evened herself out with vodka and pot and eventually speed. The rest of the family put up with her until she was eighteen, at which point she moved to California with a much older man.

She was dead at twenty-one.

Maya was too young to have met her, yet even in death, her aunt Lisa was a major presence. A cautionary tale. One whose guilt followed Brenda around. So when her daughter, at the age of seventeen, started saying things that didn’t make sense, Brenda called a psychiatrist. Then she forced Maya to take the antipsychotics Dr. Barry prescribed, and to this day, Maya hadn’t fully forgiven her.

She hadn’t seen her mom in over a year, but Maya thought about her every time she baked. It was her mom who taught her to be precise. Precision took focus. Brenda’s careful cups of flour had distracted her from her sister’s screaming and suicide threats. She taught her daughter how to pour her attention into the batter, and this was what Maya did now. She turned the mixer on high, sent her ingredients swirling, and stirred in three yolks. She beat down the images bubbling back up.

Dan hadn’t believed her, but she didn’t want to resent him. She’d rather rewind to before she saw the video—to yesterday—when finally, after almost seven years, she’d lulled herself into thinking that maybe her mom was right: maybe Maya was just like Aunt Lisa, unable to see beyond her own delusions. The unwell mind, Dr. Barry had said, is rarely capable of recognizing its own illness. The words had comforted Maya over the years, because if she was delusional, then she wasn’t in danger; Frank hadn’t really killed Aubrey.