Jasper still hasn’t come back （I’d texted him hey lmk if you’ve been murdered or joined a cult, and he’d replied not murdered and then, by the grace of Lord Xenu）， and room 12 is too quiet without him. I wake often that night.
The first time it’s the sound of tires on wet pavement that gets me, and the sudden conviction that a sleek black car is pulling into the parking lot. The second time it’s the old, bad dream, the one where Mom is drowning, her mouth open in a soundless scream, her hair drifting like red kelp, and I’m rising away from her, leaving her to the dark.
I turn up the heat and wrap myself in that ridiculous coat before getting back under the covers, driving back the cold memory of river water in my chest.
The third time it’s the hellcat who lives under the dumpster. She wakes me with her usual strategy of sitting on the sill outside and staring at me with such predatory intensity that some ancient mammalian instinct makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I ooch down the bed and kick the doorknob open with my bare foot, but she remains perched on the windowsill, looking out across the parking lot as if it’s pure chance that she was staring holes through my screen at dawn.
I glare at her hunched-up shoulder blades, marveling that anything so desperately needy could be so willfully unpleasant, and then I fish Arthur’s number out of my coat pocket.
The letter comes with it.
I hadn’t forgotten about it; I just hadn’t felt like reading it when I got back to the room. Apparently reading the stolen correspondence of someone who has just cleaned up your vomit and given you his father’s truck was too low, even for me.
But now it’s lying right there on the bed, a scrap torn from Arthur’s vast quilt of secrets, and nothing’s really too low for me.
Dear Arthur,
I hope you don’t get this letter for a long time, but I know you will. I’m not much for reading, but I’ve read everything the other Wardens left behind, and they all felt like this at the end: worn down, wrung out. Like when you sharpen a knife too many times and the blade goes thin and brittle. And then one bad night, it breaks.
And there are so many bad nights. Seems like the mist rises more often than it used to, and the bastards go down harder than I remember. The floors are sagging and the roof leaks. Don Gravely’s boys are pecking at the property lines again, like crows. You’d think a Gravely would know better, but he’s a hungry one, and some mornings I’m too tired to walk the wards. Your father says I’ve been talking in my sleep.
I don’t know. Maybe whatever’s down there is getting restless. Maybe the House is weaker, without its heir. Maybe I’m just getting old.
What I know is that sooner or later—probably sooner—Starling House will need a new Warden.
This is your birthright, Arthur. That’s what I told you the night you ran away, isn’t
I reread the letter five or six times in quick succession. Different phrases seem to rise off the page each time, swelling in my vision: mist rises; Gravely’s boys; whatever’s down there; birthright. Then I just sit, staring at the blocky red numbers of the motel clock, thinking.
I think: He can’t leave. It sounds like he tried, but he’s bound to that house in some way I don’t understand. Trapped in this town, just like me, making the best of the messes our mothers left us.
I think, jealously: But at least he has a home. A claim, an inheritance, a place he belongs. I’ve never belonged anywhere, and—no matter what I dream or pretend, no matter how dear and familiar it becomes to me—Starling House will never belong to me. I’m just the cleaning lady.
I think: How desperate must a person be, to be jealous of a cursed house?
But then I touch the page, a letter from a mother who cared enough to say goodbye, and think: Maybe it’s not the house I’m jealous of.
My phone buzzes on the bedside table. It’s a text from a number I don’t recognize, with a faraway area code that makes my guts twist: Enjoyed our chat. We’ll be in touch soon.
I go very still, then. The entire scene in Baine’s car had acquired a wavering, bad-trip quality, extremely unlikely to my sober mind. But I remember what she wanted from me, and I remember the way she pulled Jasper’s name like an ace out of her sleeve.
I raise my phone and take a single, slightly shaky picture of the letter.
It’s exactly the sort of thing she’s looking for. It’s proof that there’s something bad and strange going on in that house, something anomalous. I can almost see the letter being dissected fiber by fiber in some distant lab, distilled into a set of data points.