The Spite House(33)

“So he’s a little bully. We’re not scared of bullies, are we?”

Stacy hesitated before shaking her head.

Dess said, “Hell no, we’re not. So we’re going to walk right by him, we’re going to walk out of here, and he’s not going to try anything unless he wants his ass beat. And if his big sister shows up, she can get it too.”

Stacy squeezed Dess’s hand and stood by her. They approached the door, Dess placing herself between Stacy and the corner. She watched the corner for movement, listened for a voice or breathing, anything to validate what Stacy said was there. All she perceived as they made it to the door was that the temperature continued to fall.

She opened the door and as she moved Stacy through first, Dess felt the door hit something before it bumped against the wall, like someone had put their foot at the bottom of it. She hurried out after Stacy and they both turned to see the door start to close. Could have been the push of a breeze if a window had been open. Maybe the house was more tilted than they noticed.

She held Stacy close and braced herself to see and hear the door slam on its own. Instead it remained ajar, and the sound that made her jump came from one floor down. Someone was on the stairs. She heard, “Hey, it’s me,” and through the thudding of her heartbeat in her ears she almost didn’t recognize her father’s voice. She turned the flashlight toward the sound of his voice and felt like the world was righting itself when she saw that it was, indeed, him.

“What are you doing?” Eric said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Dess said, “and, uh, I went to check on Stacy.”

“Did something happen?”

She looked back to the door. It was as she’d last seen it, wasn’t it? It hadn’t inched any closer to closing? Maybe it had, but just a literal inch, then. Nothing significant enough to justify her wariness of it.

“We just had to get out of there,” Dess said.

“I heard somebody,” Stacy said.

The expression on her father’s face told Dess that he was keeping something important to himself, and that she ought to ask him what he had just asked them. He wouldn’t cop to anything in front of Stacy, though. She would have to wait until later.

“If you want, we can all go downstairs,” Eric said. “Play some games or something. Then if either of you get tired you can have the couch. And we can all keep an eye on each other just in case. Probably should have done that anyway. First night sleeping in different rooms. I think we’re all just a little bit out of our comfort zone.”

“Yeah,” Dess said, leading Stacy down the stairs, now putting herself between her sister and the room, like a shield.

On the ground floor, in the house’s shrunken living room, Eric and Dess let Stacy pick the first game, and she selected her favorite, ABC’s. After playing through two rounds they moved on to charades, but after just a few turns of that Stacy was lying on her side on the couch, her head on a throw pillow, eyes closed. Dess took the opposite end of the couch. She would sleep in a sitting position so she could put her head on the back cushion and let her father have the extra throw pillow as he made do with the floor.

“Night, Dad,” Dess said.

“Good night.”

“Hey. One thing real quick.”

“What’s that?” Eric said.

Dess double-checked to be sure Stacy was asleep, then said, “You know you’re going to have to tell me what happened to you upstairs, right?”

Eric sighed. “Good night, Dess.”

“Yeah. Talk to you in the morning,” she said.





CHAPTER 14



Eric



A whisper drew him from sleep like an alarm. Eric would have mistaken the voice for Tabitha’s, but he knew that this was just part of him wanting to hear his wife’s voice. This had been a stranger telling him something about dreams. He couldn’t recall what exactly they said but suspected it was more threat than warning. Maybe he was wrong, though. Maybe he was just paranoid. Everything that happened in the last year and a half pushed him to employ suspicion as a first line of defense.

He sat up and saw that Stacy was still asleep and that the other end of the couch was vacant, save for a note written in black crayon on a sheet of paper. Out running. bb. Dess. He checked his watch. Eight thirty in the morning.

So Dess had gotten up early, ventured upstairs by herself to get paper and a crayon from Stacy’s room, wrote her note, and left the house without waking him. If past lives were a thing—Hell, why wouldn’t they be, Eric thought—Dess had been a ninja or spy in one of hers. He knocked on his forehead with his knuckles and bit down on the word “stupid” before it could get out. He had to do better. That was all he could control. Lecturing her like she wasn’t an adult would do no good. It wasn’t like he had much disciplinary leverage over her, either. What privileges could he take from her? What else could he do to impart how he felt besides raise his voice, which wasn’t his style? In terms of authoritarian hierarchy, they were less father and daughter and more co-guardians. Hell, she had even earned her own money. He couldn’t pull rank on her or pull anything away from her. Despite all of that, he was still the parent here. The only one she had left, for all practical purposes. If he let something happen to her, there was no one else to blame. Hell, for all he knew something already had happened to her and he was here wasting seconds he couldn’t get back thinking about what he couldn’t do instead of just doing better. A spear of guilt gored him as he felt sure that Dess was in trouble. Of course she was. If there was one thing recent history had taught him, it was that fears came true far more often than dreams.