The House Guest by Mark Edwards(46)

I pressed the intercom and, after a few seconds, a voice said, ‘Yeah?’

‘Jesse? My name’s Adam. I need to talk to you.’

‘You’re the Brit. From the pool.’ My accent was that strong? ‘It was you, at my nana’s place?’ He strained to project aggression, but there was fear in his voice he failed to mask, I was sure of it. ‘Where’s your bitch at? She with you?’

His choice of words made me flinch. ‘I’m not really her boyfriend. We just made that up to stop you hassling her.’

‘Yeah, well, we stopped.’

‘I need to ask you some questions,’ I said quickly, before he could click off. ‘The woman I was with at the pool, Eden, I think she’s done something to hurt my actual girlfriend. Will you please let me in? Or come out and talk to me? I promise I don’t mean you any harm. Eden’s not my friend. Not anymore.’

I could almost hear his brain ticking over, trying to figure out if this was a trick.

‘Come up,’ he said, and he pressed the buzzer to let me in.

He was waiting in the doorway of his apartment. As I came towards him, he peered over my shoulder to check there was no one with me, then beckoned me in and shut and bolted the door behind me. He wasn’t wearing his baseball cap today. But as he turned towards me I saw he was holding a small handgun.

I sucked in a breath. Two days ago, someone had tried to run me down. Yesterday, I had seen my first dead body. Nobody had ever pointed a gun at me before, and my first thought was that I should have accepted Wanda’s offer. But, perhaps because of everything that had happened to me during the past few days, I wasn’t as scared as I would’ve thought I’d be. Perhaps it was because I’d heard fear in his voice. Had seen it when he ran away from me. And maybe that was foolish of me. Scared people are more prone to making rash decisions.

‘Put your arms in the air,’ he said.

I obliged, and he came over and patted me down with his free hand. Apparently satisfied, he told me to sit down. Again, I did as he asked.

He noticed me glance around the neat apartment and said, ‘My mom’s at work.’ There were fresh flowers in vases, shelves full of romance novels, and framed photos of a grinning, gap-toothed little boy on the wall. Jesse went over to the window and peered down at the street. He was as jittery as anyone I’d ever seen.

‘Why don’t you put the gun down, Jesse?’ I said in the calmest voice I could muster.

‘Uh-uh.’

‘We can’t talk while you’ve got that thing pointed at me.’

Still, he hesitated.

‘Come on, Jesse. I don’t have a weapon. You’re bigger than me. What am I going to do? Please, put the gun down.’

With agonising slowness, he obliged. He sat in an armchair and rested the pistol beside him, so he could easily grab it if he needed to.

‘Why did you run away when you saw me?’ I asked.

He narrowed his eyes at me. ‘I didn’t run away.’

‘Okay.’ Macho pride. One of the greatest obstacles to honest communication. ‘But you do seem scared of something. It’s Eden, isn’t it? What happened? Did she come back? With reinforcements?’

He didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t trust me or because he didn’t want to admit he was afraid.

‘All right, listen,’ I said. ‘I’ll go first.’

So I told him everything I knew, going back to Eden turning up at the house. The only thing I omitted was Jack’s death, as I thought that would make him even more scared. He listened with ever-widening eyes. He really was like a little boy. When I’d finished, I waited, convinced he would accuse me of bullshitting him.

Instead, he said, ‘A cult? Like the Manson family or some shit? I watched this show on Netflix. That dude was sick.’

I wasn’t sure if he was using ‘sick’ in the positive sense.

‘But it totally makes sense,’ he said. ‘Shit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The guys who did it. They were freaky, you know what I mean? Like they were . . . too normal. Does that make sense?’

I could only stare at him.

‘Soon as we saw them coming towards us, I said to Brandon—’

‘Wait, who’s Brandon?’

He stared at me like I was stupid. ‘The guy who was with me at the pool.’

Muscles.

‘I know you think he was a jerk, but he was my best friend since I was, like, six.’

Why was he talking about him in the past tense?

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

His gaze fixed on a point across the room. ‘So, it was, like, seven thirty, something like that? Not quite dark. We’d been hanging at the pool and we were going to go home, get dinner, before hooking up with these girls we met.’

‘You were heading out of the park?’

‘What I said. Only, these two guys started coming towards us. These preppy-looking dudes, young but wearing suits. I thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses or some shit.’

‘Hang on, what day was this?’

‘Sunday.’ That was the day Jack and Mona got back.

Jesse went on. ‘Anyways, they come up to us, like they’re gonna try to talk to us about Paradise or whatever, and Brandon and me look at each other, like, this is gonna be fun, and then one of them, the taller one, holds up a picture – a picture of that bitch you were with.’