Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(5)

But I can’t even exchange two words with him without Mom’s radar picking up trouble . . . at least, not until after the door closes behind her, and she’s outside on the motel balcony. I know my mother. Mostly I love her. But sometimes she doesn’t help. She doesn’t know how to let her shields down anymore.

Connor’s awake. He’s good at pretending to be asleep, but I know his tells; for two years when Mom was away—in jail and at trial, accused of being my dad’s accomplice—we’d shared a room because Grandma didn’t have much space, even though I was ten and he was seven and we were too old to be sharing a room. We’d had to be each other’s allies, watch each other’s backs. I’d gotten used to knowing when he was really out, and when he was just pretending. He never did cry much, not as much as I did. These days, he doesn’t cry at all.

I wish he would.

“Hey,” I say. I make it quiet, but not too quiet. “I know you’re faking it, loser.” He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move. His breathing continues smooth and even. “Yo, Squirtle. Don’t play.”

Connor finally sighs. “What?” He sounds totally awake. He doesn’t even sound annoyed. “Go back to sleep. You’re grumpy when you don’t get your not-beauty rest.”

“Shut up.”

“Hey, you wanted to talk. Not my fault you don’t like what I say.” He sounds normal.

He’s not normal.

I flop back on the bed. The bed smells like the dollar store, like old sweat and nasty feet. This whole room smells like the dollar store. I hate it. I want to go home . . . and home is the house Mom and Connor and I worked to make so nice. The one with my own bedroom, and a wall I painted with purple stenciled flowers. The one with Connor’s bugout zombie defense room.

Our house sits right on Stillhouse Lake, and it represents something I thought we’d never have again: security. My memories after the day we had to leave our first home—the one in Wichita—were a blur of plain rooms and gray cities, for years. We never stayed anywhere long enough to feel like we were home.

Stillhouse Lake was different. It felt permanent, like life was really starting again for all of us. I had friends. Good friends.

I had Dahlia Brown, who started out being the kind of girl I hated and ended up being my best friend in the world. It hurt to leave her back there, like some discarded, broken toy. She didn’t deserve that. I don’t deserve it, either. I had a sort-of boyfriend, but it’s a little bit of a shock to realize I don’t really miss him at all. I haven’t thought about him.

Only Dahlia.

We’d left our house just as it was, and I wonder if it’s been completely trashed by now. Probably. News of just who we are, who our dad is, had broken in the middle of all the craziness with Officer Graham, and I remember what happened to our old places when people found out. Spray paint on the walls. Dead animals on the doorstep. Broken windows and vandalized cars.

People can be really shitty.

I can’t help but imagine what our house by Stillhouse Lake might look like now, if people took out their anger on it instead of us. It makes my chest get tight and my stomach boil. I roll over on my side and angrily punch the cheap pillow into better shape. “Who do you think that text was from?”

“Dad,” he says. I don’t miss the slight inflection, the tiny hitch, but I don’t know what it means. Anger? Fear? Longing? Probably all those things. I know something my mom probably doesn’t: that Connor doesn’t really, really get why Dad is a monster. I mean, he does, but he was seven when our lives spun out; he remembers a father who was sometimes awesome to him, and he misses that. I was older. And I’m a girl. I see things differently. “Guess now she’s going to go after him.” Now I hear a different intonation. One that I recognize.

So I dig. “Makes you mad, doesn’t it?”

“Like it doesn’t you? She’s going to dump us like strays,” he says. This time, the cold, flat tone isn’t subtle at all. “Probably with Grandma.”

“You like staying with Grandma,” I say. I’m trying to be upbeat about it. “She makes us cookies and those popcorn balls you like. It’s not exactly torture.” I’m horrified the second the word drops off my lips, but it’s too late. I’m angry with myself, a searing red flash that sizzles in my nerves like they’ve turned into firecracker fuses. In the next second I’m back in a cabin high up in the hills, being dragged down into a basement. Locked in a tiny little cell not much bigger than a coffin, along with my brother.

I know my mom wonders what happened to us in that basement. Connor and I haven’t talked about it, and I don’t know when, or if, we will. She’ll try to make us, sooner or later.

I just want to be able to close my eyes and not see that winch and the wire noose that dangled from it, and those knives and hammers and saws glinting on the pegboard mounted on the walls. That room outside the cell looked just like my dad’s garage workshop—the pictures I’ve seen of it, anyway. I know what happened there. I know what could have happened to us, in Lancel Graham’s replica dungeon.

Most of all, I wish I could forget the stupid rug. Somehow, Graham found an exact replica of my dad’s rug. Well, it was really my rug, because it was one of my first memories: a soft spiral-braided rug in pastel greens and blues. I loved that rug. I would lie facedown on it and scoot around on the floor, and Mom and Dad would laugh, and Mom would pick me up and slide the rug back in place by the door, and it was love, that stupid rug.