Made You Up(88)

“How’d you know that was there?” Tucker asked.

Miles shrugged. “He probably has them all over the place.” He kicked the welcome mat aside, and there was another key underneath. “See?” He kicked the mat back in place, then unlocked the door and pulled it open.

Inside, the smell of mustiness coated everything like a thick layer of bad cologne. Tucker sneezed. Miles closed the door behind us.

“It looks so . . . normal.” Tucker said.

We passed a staircase and went into a dining room lined with cabinets.

“Maybe for a retired octogenarian,” I said. Antique furniture filled every available inch of space, some of it broken and some of it in usable condition. I thought I saw a WWII gas mask wedged between a broken scale and a worn cookie tin, but I grabbed Miles’s hand and told myself that it wasn’t really there.

We scoured the entire lower level of the house, from the dining room to a narrow, dirty kitchen to a living room with the ugliest orange shag carpet I’d ever seen in my life. For half a second I was tempted to leave McCoy a handwritten note expressing my profound and sincere astonishment that he had the balls to keep such a carpet in his home.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except for the gas mask and a few magnets shaped like swastikas on the refrigerator.

“I haven’t seen anything,” I said.

“No.” Tucker shrugged. “But there’s still upstairs.”

I turned toward the staircase again and saw a flash of red.

“Charlie!” I hissed, darting after her. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted her to stay in that car. She was too much like me to stay put. She froze halfway up the stairs, looking back.

“I told you to stay in the car!” I said.

“But I want to help!” she cried, stomping her foot.

“Get down here right now.”

“No!”

“Charlemagne!”

“You sound like Mom!” She charged the rest of the way up the stairs. I ran after her. Miles and Tucker were right behind me. I shouldered open the door Charlie had gone through.

And then I froze.

“Look at all the dresses,” Charlie crooned.

The room was a museum exhibit. Dresses—prom, homecoming, cocktail, formal, even wedding—were displayed on mannequins. The mannequins all wore blond wigs. Plastered on the walls behind them were pictures upon pictures upon pictures, all of one person: Scarlet.

My stomach lurched. These could be my walls.

There was a large wooden desk on the far side of the room, strewn with papers and more pictures in frames. A pair of silver heels sat on the corner.

“What the actual f*ck.” Tucker walked in, then Miles a moment later.

I put an arm around Charlie and moved her behind me as Tucker, Miles, and I moved to search through the papers on the desk. There were all sorts of things—bills, official-looking documents from school, taxes that hadn’t been filed yet, a half-completed crossword puzzle.

“This is all just junk,” Tucker grumbled, picking up a stack of blank printer paper. It didn’t even look like McCoy had a computer, much less a printer.

“Keep looking,” I said. “There’s got to be something. . . .” I grabbed the corner of a photograph and slid it out of the mess, careful not to dislodge anything else.

It was a picture of Celia and an older, dark-haired man with an arm around her shoulders. Both of them were smiling. Celia’s father, maybe? The man’s eyes had been burned out, the edges of his face crinkled and red.

But why would McCoy burn Celia’s father’s eyes out? Why would he burn anyone’s eyes out? How could anyone go this far down the rabbit hole without realizing they needed help?

And more importantly, what would he do if he found us here, looking through his things?

I stuffed the picture back where I’d found it, grabbed Miles and Tucker, and pushed them both toward the door. We needed to get out of here, now. “We’re not going to find anything else. Let’s go.” Eyes peeked out of the dark space under the desk. “Charlie! Come on!”

No one asked any questions. Miles pulled the key from his pocket and locked the front door behind us.

“Uh-oh,” Tucker said.

McCoy’s junker of a car trundled down the street. Miles shoved the key above the doorframe, then grabbed us both and yanked us off the porch. He pushed Tucker and me behind the dead shrubs that hugged the side of McCoy’s house, then ducked in after us. Sharp branches dug into my arms and head, and sweat trickled down my neck. McCoy pulled into his driveway, got out of his car, and went inside.