Heather(45)
It’s only 3:30 but feels later, in the dim of the trees, that thin November light draining away earlier every day. She misses the Riley house but doesn’t know it, didn’t even register a driveway, until the GPS tells her it is recalculating then unable to connect again. She swears, pulls a U-turn, gasps when a deer leaps across the road, lets her foot off the brake just in time—another pair of eyes, startled wide. That old warning about deer in the street: Where there’s one, there are usually two. She waits a moment, her heart thumping in her ears, and then the other bolts in front of her, tail high.
She slows to a creep after she misses the house for a second time and makes another hasty U-turn. Not a single car on the road, no noise beyond a blue jay issuing a warning call from the trees. She knows that between the woods that border the Riley property, to the east and a little bit north, she’d find the house where Jenna grew up, the one she sold when Callie was a toddler and Jenna’s father passed away. Where Jenna had been young once, building forts in the yard, mastering the acoustic guitar, blissfully unaware of the blunt way she was about to be cut off from her girlhood forever. Callie grew up early, had to, but so did Jenna. Overnight.
She can’t see the house until she’s nearly upon it, the driveway hook-shaped so the house doesn’t come into view right away. It is bigger than she thought it would be, a Colonial that must have been beautiful once. Dormered windows, a wide wooden front door, a portico above it—most of the windows broken, the paint peeling and weathered away, but graceful lines to it. The lawn is covered in a jumble of debris: a busted lawnmower and a stack of car tires, a sofa with a shovel laid across the cushions. A boat engine but no boat in sight. Along the lower roofline the places where the gutters should be are bare—the originals were probably copper, pried off and sold for scrap.
She gets the Maglite out of her trunk, takes a breath, approaches the front door. She doesn’t think there will be anyone there—the house too far gone, too remote, even for squatters, but still she can’t help but wish she had her personal weapon on her instead of locked up back at the cabin.
The porch is soft with rot, the wood giving under her boots. The lock has been forced years ago, the front door open a quarter inch already. She nudges the door open with her toe and is hit with a wave of cat piss, catches the flick of a tail around a doorway as she steps over the threshold.
She’s right—squatters once, as far she can tell by the ancient sleeping bag slouched over a camelback sofa, a litter of Dinty Moore cans in the middle of the room, clothes strewn across the floor.
“Police,” she calls, putting the word out in front of her like a shield, the way she has so many times before. Waits for a groan of the floorboards, a door creaking closed: nothing. “Police!” she yells again, her voice echoing through the rooms.
Inside, that same juxtaposition of elegance and rot. Wainscotting on the walls, a pendant in the center of the ceiling, rococo with flowers and boughs of fruit, from which a chandelier must have hung once. The smell of cat piss so strong it makes her eyes sting. The elegant turn of the banister, the stairs furred with dust and grime a quarter inch high.
She takes a lap around the lower floor, the kitchen like a time capsule. Mouse shit scattered on the shelves of the pantry. A few half-empty bottles of spices. Off the kitchen a narrow set of stairs, the kind that had been used by servants once. Or for a girl sneaking out the back of her house. The stairs creak, announcing her every move. Perhaps Sabrina Riley had known exactly where to place her foot, how to calibrate her weight, so she could move through the house unheard. Though it would have gotten harder as her pregnancy progressed. As her stomach pushed her center of gravity off balance, as her feet and ankles swelled, as her body became unfamiliar to her.
Wallpaper along the upstairs hall, water-stained and faded with age, patterned with vines that twist together and come apart again. The landing is thick with dust, a scrim of footprints through it like someone danced or fought a long time ago. The smell from the bathroom is so putrid that she has to pull her shirt up over her nose to keep from gagging, and even from outside the doorway she can make out dark sludge around the base of the toilet, the shower curtain ripped from its rings and bunched over the rim of the tub.
She closes her hand around the delicate brass knob of the first door to her right, turns it and finds what must have been the primary bedroom, a wood sleigh bed, the headboard carved with pine boughs, the bedsheets stained yellow with time. Terry Riley is not of much interest to Callie. Some teenage pregnancies are hidden because of incest, but Callie doesn’t get those cues from this case. Riley was probably gone too long, too checked out, to mess with his daughter. Daughters, rather. Probably, if Callie had to guess, he never had any idea of the pregnancy.
She crosses the hall so she’s on the other side of the stairs. The next room is so clearly a teenage girl’s room. A four-poster bed with finials carved into pine cones. A little painted nightstand with an alarm clock on it. A collage of faded pictures on the wall above the bed. Supermodels with their big hair and high-waist jeans, teenagers who look ravaged by hard drugs: all stark bones and wan, miserable faces, their eyes protruding from their starved flesh. It seems like it hurts, to exist in those bodies. She thinks about Opal, wonders when there will be a time when girls aren’t told how to look, won’t be forced to contort themselves into one thing only for the fad to pass and then they’re handed the next template. Curvy and womanly, big hair and lashes and all-American smiles, a girl who would eat a burger, lick her fingers, wash it down with a Cherry Coke. Or waifish and impossible to please, a ladder of rib bones protruding through their chests.