The Spite House(29)
“And you would just stay here by yourself?” Dess said, her voice rising for the first time.
“Keep it down. You’ll worry your sister.”
Dess inhaled deeply and shut her eyes for a moment of micromeditation. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay. This is what we signed up for. We knew that this was at least possible, right?”
“I just didn’t think anything would happen this soon.”
Eric nodded and forced a smile. He didn’t want her to see anything other than confidence in him. She was scared, and he was forgetting to be her father. He’d asked so much of her, lately. In moments like this he realized he had to remember how young she still was, despite all she’d been through and the extraordinary growth she’d undergone. She had not, in fact, signed up for any of this.
Still, he didn’t want to say anything that might put her off this opportunity entirely. Not after what he might have just seen in the hall. For the first time since they’d had to leave home, since he’d started pondering what all he might have inherited from his grandfather, he thought he might finally get some answers. That they might be near, right here in this house.
“I get you,” he said. “I thought we’d at least have to wait a few nights for anything weird to happen. But hey, maybe it was nothing, right? Like you said, it could just be the way this old house is built. Doors might kind of swing a little bit or we might hear the house settling, all that stuff. Remember our old place, how some of the doors slammed when we turned on the AC? Maybe there’s a draft that does the same thing here. There’s probably some regular explanation for this. And if not, it could be for the best that it starts up sooner, so we can get right into it. Like tearing off a Band-Aid fast instead of slow. Or just jumping right in—”
—the water, he was going to say, but he locked the words in his throat. He winced like he’d plucked a thorn from his fingertip, then forced the memory of Stacy playing in the water from his thoughts.
“Jumping right to the end,” Dess said.
“Exactly. But listen to me, and I mean this. If you don’t want to stay here you have to tell me. I’ll be fine on my own.”
“If it gets to be too much for Staze, then we’ll talk about it,” Dess said.
Eric said, “Or if it gets to be too much for you too.”
She wanted to push back at this, he could see it. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t anywhere near that scared yet, but the lie wouldn’t leave her lips. Dess turned and joined Stacy in her room, asked her if she could help her do some coloring.
Eric stood alone in the foyer. Troubled as he was by the prospect of staying here by himself, he was more troubled by the anxiousness he’d seen on Dess’s face, and troubled most by the fact that the best he could do for his girls was to have them live with a stranger who was willing to spend a fortune seeking evidence of an afterlife. He had no reason to suspect Eunice of anything thus far, but he’d known her for less than a day. He needed to trust her, but was distantly aware of the possibility that her benevolence was an act.
CHAPTER 11
Max Renner
More than one doctor implied that Jane Renner was acting, especially after finding out what she and Max used to do. The job that brought his wife to this state was actually hindering the quality of the medical care she received. A job that she hadn’t been enthusiastic about, despite supporting his efforts to make it their long-term career.
“Husband and Wife Paranormal Researchers” was how they promoted themselves. Privately, they considered themselves “Stealth Skeptic Parodists,” patterned after a television program Max enjoyed, hosted by Neal Lassiter. Max and Jane visited many supposedly haunted locations and went through the same motions as any other “ghost hunting” team, while slyly highlighting the absurdity of jumping at shadows and sounds and shuddering at indecipherable EVP recordings, many of which were added during postproduction. That was supposed to be what set them apart from the countless others doing the same thing on the internet.
They found decent success. Fourteen thousand followers was a tiny fraction of what the most popular people in the field had, but Max did the math. If they got ten percent of those people to donate an average of five dollars a month they’d be doing well enough. Cover their business expenses, pay their personal bills, and have more than enough left over to treat themselves. And their numbers had been creeping upward for a year before they went to Degener.
People enjoyed their banter. Commenters on their videos said they came off as a couple hosting a home-remodeling show rather than a ghost-hunting show. Many hardcore ghost-hunting fans didn’t like their irreverence or playfulness, but others found it refreshing. Their core audience either didn’t notice how staged it all was or just didn’t care. Maybe they tuned in specifically to watch such shamelessness.
There had been nothing staged about that last night in the spite house. If Max had any of the video or audio recordings from that night, or the three weeks that preceded it, he could share them with some of the doctors to prove Jane wasn’t faking anything. It wouldn’t necessarily be enough to convince them ghosts were real, but it would convince them that the Renners had been through something. They’d see what weeks inside the spite house had done to them, the before and after. Max left all of that equipment behind, though, and hadn’t saved anything to a cloud or put it online before leaving. Eunice Houghton probably kept it in a vault somewhere. He didn’t want to see it anyway. It was bad enough when he relived that night in his mind.