Just Like Home(66)
Vera keeps the light trained on the man’s face so she doesn’t miss anything. “Well,” she whispers. “You should have thought of that.” She pauses for a moment, taking an inventory of the words she knows, the worst ones, the ones she doesn’t often use but wants to learn to wield smoothly, without stuttering or pausing. She puts the full weight of her fury behind the word. “You should have thought of that before you raised Brandon to be such a cunt.”
The man chokes on another sob, and another, the rope of drool that trails into his lap turning pinker each time he gasps. Vera’s legs start to prickle with pins and needles.
She doesn’t want to leave. Not yet. She wants to see what’s going to happen to him. She doesn’t feel afraid, not even a little bit. She feels powerful and she doesn’t want to let that feeling go.
But then a sound comes from overhead: four sharp taps on the ceiling.
Vera’s heart leaps into her throat and she races up the steps, out through the basement door, swinging a sharp turn into her bedroom. She eases the door shut behind her and then dives into her bed.
Just as she pulls the covers up to her chin, she hears her father walking past the bedroom door. The sound of the basement door opening and closing is clearer than usual, so clear that it’s as if there’s no wall in the way of it.
Vera waits for her heartbeat to slow. A few seconds’ difference and she would have been caught. She doesn’t know what will happen if she gets caught in the basement. Her father has never been angry at her, not that she can remember. He’s not even angry when he’s working in the basement—when Vera watches him through the peephole under her bed, he mostly just seems sad.
She doesn’t want to be the one who makes him angry. She doesn’t know what he’s like when he’s angry.
And because of those four taps on the ceiling, she didn’t have to find out.
Vera turns onto her side and lets her arm drape across her body so it falls over the side of the bed. She holds her breath, and she snaps four times.
She waits without knowing what it is she’s waiting for. After a few seconds of silence, she clears her throat.
“Thank you,” she whispers. “For warning me.”
The room gets a little warmer and the darkness gets a little thicker, and before Vera can wonder who it is she’s thanking, she’s fast asleep. She dreams of warm hands stroking the hair back from her face, and a voice telling her everything will be all right.
She will believe that voice for one more week.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Getting the bed home from the big box store wasn’t easy. Duvall wanted to talk the whole time, but unlike the drive to the store, he wanted Vera to answer him. He had questions, so many questions, about everything Vera didn’t know how to discuss. Her father, and her childhood, and the Crowder House.
He especially wanted to know about that last one. He asked about the places she’d hidden as a kid, the secret corners and the creaky floorboards, the parts of the house that had frightened her and the parts that had fascinated her. Vera answered him in monosyllables, staring fixedly out the half-rolled-down passenger-side window the entire time, sucking down the fresh air greedily. She only broke and looked at him a few miles away from home, when he let out a deep sigh and asked a question she couldn’t stand to answer.
“Why don’t you just let me in already, Vee?”
She’d turned to him involuntarily, appalled. “What?”
Glancing between her and the road, Duvall hit her with that cocked eyebrow again, tipping his head toward her in a way that made the skin of his throat stretch tight over the bulge of his Adam’s apple. “C’mon,” he murmured in a low, enticing voice. “I’m just trying to get to know you, the same way I’ve been trying to get to know the Crowder House. Don’t you want to quit being all alone in that head of yours? I hear you in the night sometimes, you know. Pacing around, trying to get away from whatever it is that won’t let you rest. You don’t have to deal with it all on your own.” He put a hand between them on the bench seat, palm-up, invitational.
“I don’t have trouble sleeping,” Vera replied softly, not reaching for him. “Not most nights. And I don’t pace.”
“No?” Duvall took his hand back as casually as if he’d never stretched it out at all. “Then why did you have to go and get a new bed so urgently today? Is it because something happened in the night?” His gaze darted between her and the road. “Something you couldn’t explain? Vera, you can tell me,” he added, his voice so kind and reasonable that Vera’s hands twitched into fists. “Was it him? Was it Francis?”
She couldn’t answer him, not honestly. She couldn’t shake the feeling that if she started answering him, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She was finally starting to let herself want things—so many things—but that wasn’t one of them. So instead of answering him, she dodged.
“What have you been working on?”
“I told you,” he said, sounding impatient for the first time. “I’m communing with the house so I can put voice to—”
“What’s it look like? When you work?”
He was quiet for a moment, his jaw working back and forth as though he were debating whether or not to answer. He glanced over at Vera again. “I’ll trade you,” he finally replied.