Starling House(40)
I sidestep in front of her. “Wait, I was wondering about that Gravely stuff. Do you think you could drop off one of those crates? I could help you catalog it all.” I don’t care about the Historical Society even a little bit, but I would like to know why a Gravely had my mom’s phone number. It’s probably nothing—she probably owed him money or flirted with him in the Liquor Barn parking lot or tried to sell his wife off-brand makeup—but I keep the receipt folded in my pocket anyway.
“What Gravely stuff?” Bev has spun away from a Wheel of Fortune rerun just to glare at me.
“Oh, did you think this was your business?” I make a sympathetic face. “Not everything is about you, babe.”
This kind of overt obnoxiousness usually redirects her attention, but not this time. She shakes her head. “There’s nothing you need to know about those people. Whatever it is, best leave it alone.”
I’m opening my mouth to reply but Charlotte lets out a caustic little laugh. It barely sounds like it belongs to her. “Just leave it alone, huh? Just sweep it under some rug and hope nobody sees.” She’s looking at Bev with a degree of anger that strikes me as wildly disproportionate. She whips back toward me, braid arcing, eyes flashing. “I’ll bring the first box down as soon as I get a chance.”
She stalks out. The buzzer sings two flat notes as the door slams.
“Uh.” I point to a crisp white box behind the desk. “That package is mine, I think.”
Bev kicks it at me without looking away from the TV. I follow Charlotte out the door.
It’s an overcast day, chilling toward evening, and the parking lot is full of birds. Grackles so black they look like bird-shaped holes cut in the pavement, a few crows, the speckled gleam of starlings. Charlotte cuts through them like a boat through dark water.
“Hey!” Charlotte stops but doesn’t turn around, one hand fishing for her keys.
I catch up to her, shooing birds off the hood of her car. “I was just wondering. Do you believe Miss Calliope’s story? Like, do you think there’s really something awful under Starling House? Because I was talking to Ashley Caldwell the other night and she—”
“I don’t know, Opal. Maybe. Not really.” Her Volvo beeps once as she unlocks it. She slides into the front seat and pauses, looking hard at the closed blinds of Bev’s office. “The only awful thing about this town is the people who live here, if you ask me.”
She must mean Bev, and I experience a brief, unnatural urge to defend her. The slam of Charlotte’s door saves me.
I open my new fancy phone and shove the packaging in the dumpster. If I thought about it much—the sleek, expensive shape of it, the weight of it in my palm—I might feel guilty, but I slide it into my pocket without thinking anything at all. The screen scrapes softly against the stolen penny.
THIRTEEN
April in Eden is one long drizzle. Moss sprouts in the sidewalk cracks. The river gets fat and lazy, rising until it licks the belly of the bridge and laps at the mouth of the old mine shaft. The seasonal plant nursery opens in the flea market parking lot and the ants make their annual assault on Bev’s continental breakfast bar.
Starling House creaks and swells, so that every window sticks and every door is wedged tight in its frame. I expect an outbreak of mildew and weird smells, but the house merely acquires a rich, wakeful scent, like a fresh-turned field. I have the fanciful idea that if I dug a knife into the crown molding I would find green wood and sap. If I laid my ear on the floor I would hear a great rushing, like a pair of lungs drawing breath.
Even Arthur seems affected. He’s altered his usual schedule of lurking and scribbling, spending more and more time outdoors. He returns with mud on his shoes and dirt beneath his nails, a healthful flush across his cheekbones that I find obscurely upsetting.
He frowns repressively if I ask what he’s been doing.
“Careful, your face’ll stick that way.” When he doesn’t answer, I make a stricken expression. “Wait, is that what happened to you? I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”
Arthur turns away so abruptly that I suspect the corner of his mouth is misbehaving again. He crosses to the stove to stir a cast-iron pot of something hearty and healthful-smelling. Eventually he asks, reluctantly, “What are you eating?”
I hold up a sleeve of powdered mini doughnuts from the gas station. “A balanced breakfast.”
He makes a small noise of disgust and stalks away with his lunch, leaving the pot on the stove. There’s a clean bowl and spoon set carefully beside it. Looking at the bowl gives me a weird, knotted feeling in my stomach, so I wad the doughnut wrapper in my pocket and get back to work. The next morning there’s half a pot of coffee waiting, velvety and black, and a skillet of fried eggs on the stove. My phone hums against my hip. It’s not poison, you know.
I waver, worrying about debts owed and the food of fairy kings. But would it be so terrible to be trapped forever in Starling House? The banisters gleam, now, and every windowpane winks as I walk by. There are fewer cracks in the plaster, as if they’re sewing themselves shut, and just yesterday I found myself lying in one of the empty bedrooms, pretending it was mine.
I eat until my stomach hurts.
It’s impossible not to feel guilty, then. I’m not used to it—guilt is one of those indulgences I can’t afford, like sit-down restaurants or health insurance—and I find I don’t like it much. It perches heavy on my shoulder, ungainly and unwelcome, a pet vulture I can’t get rid of.