“I was just thinking about them, is all. About that house.”
She grunts again. “Been a long time since you bugged me about the Starling place, kid. You never used to shut up about it.”
I remember myself as a girl, scab-kneed and quick, hungry even when my belly was full. Mom and me didn’t always live in room 12—I remember other hotels, an RV or two, a couple of months sleeping on couches that belonged to men who liked the color of Mom’s hair and the careless way she laughed, but never liked me much—but the motel was the first place we stayed for more than a few months.
Bev had mostly glared at me out the front office window until the day I poked a wasp nest and got stung twice, once on each arm. Mom wasn’t around so I was just sitting on the curb, tasting tears in the back of my throat, when Bev strolled over and slapped a wet mat of chewing tobacco over the stings. She gave me a lot of shit about not having the sense God gave a flea, but the pain eased.
“Yeah, well, I googled it the other day, just out of curiosity, and didn’t find much. I thought maybe you would know something about it.”
Bev spits a black stream into her coke can and says, obliquely, “People talk. You know how it is.”
I don’t know how it is, actually, because people only talk to me when they’re cornered. Small towns are supposed to be cozy and friendly, like perfect little snow globes, but me and Jasper have always been kept on the other side of the glass. Maybe because I only showed up at church for the pancake breakfasts and Thanksgiving dinners, or maybe because of Mom, with her lipstick and her shirts that didn’t quite meet the top of her jeans and the pills she sold sometimes in little plastic baggies. Or maybe because people in Eden like to know your whole family tree for three generations on both sides and the only family we ever knew was each other.
I pick at a snowflake of doughnut glaze on the box. “Will you tell me what you know?”
“No.” Bev heaves a sigh that bears an uncanny resemblance to Arthur Starling’s before he offered me a job, infinitely harassed. The TV is old enough to make a faint electric pop when she turns it off. “But I’ll tell you a story.”
This is the story of Starling House.
People tell it different ways, but this is how my granddaddy always told it. He was a liar, but the best liars are the ones that stick closest to the truth, so I believe it.
It goes like this: Once in the wayback times there was three brothers by the name of Gravely who made a fortune digging coal out of the riverbank. They were good, honest boys, brought low by the same thing that always comes for honest men with a little money: a dishonest woman.
Eleanor Starling came from nowhere in particular and had no particular beauty, but she wormed her way into the Gravely household anyhow. She was an odd girl, silent and waifish, prone to melancholy, but the Gravely boys doted on her. It wasn’t long after she arrived that they found the oldest Gravely facedown in the Mud River. There wasn’t a mark on him, but they say his face was stretched and racked, like a man looking upon an unspeakable horror.
At the time it was considered a tragic accident, but when the middle brother announced his engagement to little Eleanor Starling a few weeks later, people started talking, as people will. They started asking themselves just how the oldest Gravely boy wound up in the Mud River, when he was known to be a sober and careful man. They wondered if perhaps he had learned something about Miss Starling that she didn’t like, or simply resisted her wiles. But people kept their suspicions to themselves; Eden has always prided itself on its good manners, and good manners are mostly keeping your mouth shut and your mind on your own business.
John Gravely wouldn’t have listened to them, anyway; he was thoroughly taken with Eleanor, or, it was murmured behind his back, taken in. On their wedding day she stood wanly at his side, too forgettable even to achieve ugliness, but John Gravely looked at her like she was ice water in July.
The fog rose that night, thick and sudden. When it burned away they found John Gravely lying dead down at the bottom of his own mine shaft, wearing an expression just as ghastly as his poor brother’s. Eleanor Starling was nowhere to be found, but the men said they saw small bare footprints that led down into the deep dark and did not come out again.
Most people hoped she would have the good grace to disappear and let the last Gravely mourn in peace, but three days later Eleanor was seen wandering the hills and hollows of her husband’s land, still wearing her wedding gown. The farmhands that found her said her skirt slapped heavy and wet against her ankles, the hem gray with silt, as if she’d walked straight out of the river. They said, too, that she was laughing, light and joyful as a child.