I slip the key in my apron pocket before I clock in.
“You’re late.” Lacey says it just loud enough for the manager to hear, but not loud enough to be accused of snitching.
“Yeah, I just swung by the Starling place on the way back. Thought I’d see if they were hiring.” Once you’ve established a reputation for dishonesty, it becomes possible to lie simply by stating the flat truth.
Lacey’s mouth bends in a glossy bow. “That’s not funny. My meemaw says there were two Starlings living there back in her day, a pair of women.” Her voice lowers, bowing beneath the weight of implication. “Neither of them ever married.” I would like to ask Lacey’s meemaw if she’d considered the quality of potential husbands available in Muhlenberg County, but I suppose, given the existence of Lacey, that she must have made certain compromises. “And one day, they just disappeared. Gone. And that was the very same day that little Willy Floyd went missing.” 6 This correlation is presented with all the gravity of a lawyer revealing damning evidence to the jury.
“Didn’t Willy’s friends say he went down the old mines on a dare?”
Lacey has to pause to ring up two bags of dog food and a clearance birdhouse. “My meemaw says they were Satanists, who needed Floyd for a blood ritual.
Arthur hadn’t struck me as a cultist, but neither had he seemed like an upstanding Baptist. I don’t think they’re allowed to grow their hair past their chins. “What are the signs that someone’s a Satanist, Lace?”
“Well, nobody ever saw them inside a church.” I remain silent until Lacey recalls that I don’t go to church, either. Mom went before I was born, she said, but once you’re on the outside, the only way back in is on your knees; neither of us ever liked crawling.
Lacey rushes to add, “And they were always wandering around at night. And they kept strange animals, likely for sacrifices.”
“Sounds messy. Bet they could use a housekeeper.”
Lacey gives me a disapproving look that would have made her meemaw proud, and I spend the rest of my shift restocking and mopping. I clock out without even bothering to dip a hand in the drawer because maybe—assuming this isn’t an elaborate prank or a Satanist ritual or a weird sex thing—I don’t have to anymore.
By the time I get back to room 12, Jasper is passed out in a gangly diagonal across his bed, headphones mashed sideways, the nape of his neck soft and exposed. He must have finished his homework, because his favorite off-brand editing app is up on his screen.
He’s always taking little videos—tree limbs crisscrossing in the wind, tadpoles wriggling in a drying puddle, his own feet running on cracked pavement. Standard moody-teen art, basically, but the angles are odd and unsettling, and he layers so many filters over the images that they acquire a spectral unreality. Lately he’s been stitching them together, weaving them into tiny, strange narratives.
In one of them, a giggling white girl is carving a heart into the trunk of a tree. Dark liquid wells up from the wood, but she ignores it, carving until her hands are slicked red to the wrist. The final shot is her turning to the camera, mouthing I love you.
In the latest one, you see a pair of brown hands lowering a dead bird into the river. The footage does a funny little skip, and then a hand reaches back out of the water, covered in wet black feathers. The hands clasp tight; with passion or violence, it’s impossible to say.
Jasper had red welts all over the backs of his hands for days, where the superglue had taken off bits of skin.
He won’t show me this new one yet. The frames on his screen now are just a series of empty white squares, like fogged-up windows.
I hold the doorknob to muffle the latch behind me, but Jasper stirs, squinting up at me with his curls squashed flat on one side. “You just now getting home?” I flinch a little; room 12 isn’t a home so much as a place we happen to be, like a bus stop or a gas station.
“Frank kept us late.”
Actually I’d spent an extra hour shivering on the old railroad bridge, watching the oily rainbow sheen of the water and wondering if I’d just done something incredibly stupid. In the end I decided I probably had, but that was hardly a first, and at least this time it might be worth it.
I flop beside him on the bed. “Did Miss Hudson get your book report back?”
“Yeah, I got an A.” Jasper appears to struggle with himself before adding, “Minus.”
“I assume you’re trying to signal some sort of hostage situation. Blink twice if you’re being blackmailed.”