Starling House(41)

But I can ignore it, because I have to. Because I learned a long time ago what kind of person I am.

I’ve been checking Jasper’s email every night, but there’s been no follow-up from the power company. Just notifications from YouTube videos and promo emails from U of L. Jasper’s been moody and evasive, always checking his phone and curling his lip when I ask him what’s up, but whatever. I can ignore that, too.

I throw myself at my work, instead. By the beginning of May I’ve scrubbed and polished the entire second floor and most of the third, and Starling House is clean enough that I’ve started flinching when Arthur hands me my envelope at the end of each day, wondering if this will be the last time.

I work longer and harder, conscious that I’m inventing new tasks but unable to stop. I bleach yellowed bedsheets and beat rugs; I order polish online and shine all the silver I haven’t stolen yet; I buy two gallons of glossy paint in a color called Antique Eggshell and repaint the baseboards and windows in every room; I watch a YouTube video on window glazing and spend three days fooling with putty and tacks before dumping it all in the garbage and giving the whole thing up. I even ask Bev how to patch plaster, which is a huge tactical error because she drags out a trowel and a bucket of mud and makes me practice by fixing the hole in room 8 where a guest punched through the drywall. She sits in a folding chair and shouts unhelpful advice, like a dad at a kids’ soccer game.

I knock my forehead against the wall, not gently. “If you tell me to feather the edges one more time I swear to Jesus I will put another hole in your wall.”

“Be my guest. Oh wait! You already are, forever.”

“Not my fault you made a bad bet with Mom.”

Bev spits viciously into her empty can, her lips pressed tight. “Yeah.” She nods at the patch on the wall. “I can still see the edges. You have to feather it—” I throw my trowel at her.

Spring in Kentucky isn’t so much a season as a warning; by the middle of May it’s hot and humid enough to make my hair curl, and there are only two rooms in Starling House left untouched.

One is the attic with the round window—I started up the narrow steps one day with a bucket and broom, and Arthur opened the door with an expression of such profound spiritual alarm that I rolled my eyes and left him to stew in whatever nest he calls a bedroom—and the other is the cellar.

Or at least, I think it’s a cellar—it’s whatever is waiting beneath the trapdoor in the pantry, the creepy one with the big lock and the carved symbols. I haven’t pulled up the rug since that first day I found it, but it tugs at me. It feels magnetic, or gravitational, like I could set a marble down anywhere in the house and it would roll toward it.

Elizabeth Baine seems to surmise its existence somehow.

Is there a basement or crawl space in the house?

I reply with that shrugging emoticon.

A terse silence of several hours, then: Please find out if there is a basement or a crawl space in the house.

I let her stew for a while before writing back, I’m really scared of spiders sorry. I add an emoji shedding a single tear, because if she’s going to blackmail me into selling out a man who quietly doubles all his recipes for me, I’m going to make her regret it.

Baine replies with a string of annoyed texts, which I ignore. She mentions karst topography and ground-penetrating radar and includes several blurry aerial maps of Starling land.19 I turn my ringer off.

The next time I check my phone there’s a picture of the Muhlenberg County High School. It’s an odd angle, taken behind the football field, where the bleachers back up onto a sea of feed corn. It wouldn’t be remarkable at all, except that I know it’s where Jasper eats his lunch every day—and so does she.

I stare at the picture for a long time, feeling that cold place in the middle of me.

The next day I roll back the rug in the downstairs pantry and send her a picture of the trapdoor. She’s thrilled. Exactly where is it located? Is it locked? Do you know where the key is? And then, inevitably: Could you find it?

I’m not surprised by the request—you don’t drug a person and threaten their only family member if all you want from them is a nice conversation and a couple of email attachments—but I’m a little surprised how much I don’t want to do it. I delay as long as I can, backtracking and seesawing, sending back obnoxiously long lists of all the places I’ve looked for the key without finding it. She urges me to try harder and I send even longer lists in response, with footnotes. She suggests that perhaps I could pick the lock, making delicate mention of my school disciplinary reports; I reply that I was a shitty teen who knew how to open cheap doors with a credit card, not an old-timey bank robber.

In the end I receive a text that directs me very simply to open the cellar door by Friday. There are no threats or dire warnings, but I scroll back up to look at that picture of the high school until the chill spreads from my chest across my back, as if it’s pressed against a stone wall.

The next day I wait until I hear Arthur’s footsteps on the stairs. The sullen scrape of the coffeepot, the squeal of hinges, the squelch of boots on wet ground. Then I put down my paintbrush, thump the lid back on the can with the butt end of a screwdriver, and go up to the attic room.

It seems to take a very long time to get there: the staircase stretches endlessly upward, doubling back on itself more times than is strictly logical, and I make a dozen false turns on the third floor. The fifth time I end up standing in the library I sigh very hard and say, to no one in particular, “You are being a real dick about this.”