“But you didn’t go there. You wouldn’t. Or—did he give it to you? Because if he did I’ll—”
Jasper shakes his head once. “No, he”—he says it with audible italics—“didn’t give it to me. I stole it.”
“Why?” Somewhere underneath the panicked shrieking sounds in my head, a more detached part of me would also like to know how. （A less detached part of me wants to know if he saw Arthur, if his wounds are closing up right, if he asked about me. I smother that one in the cradle.）
Jasper does not look like any part of his brain is panicking or shrieking. He looks resigned. “Because I wanted to know what happened to you, and what the hell is up with that house.”
“So, you decided to commit a crime about it, and hide the evidence in your backpack. Do you have any idea what kind of people are watching the Starling place? What they’d do to you? Were you ever planning to tell me, or—”
“Surely”—for the first time in this conversation, there’s a hint of heat in his voice, a dangerous aridity—“you don’t think you have the moral high ground here.”
A half second’s pause here, while I shore up my crumbling defenses. I fall back on the oldest line, the one I could say in my sleep: “Everything I did, I was doing for you.”
He looks at me with an eerie clarity, as if he’s reading a map of me, with every fault line and fissure in my character clearly labeled. “Okay,” he says, gently and tiredly. I think, for no reason, of that video he made of the bloody-handed girl mouthing I love you at the camera.
“Okay,” he says again. He looks back down at his laptop, scrolling and clicking. “But would you like to know what I found out?”
I cross my arms, feel the chill bumps prickling beneath my T-shirt. “Arthur already told me.”
“You think he told you everything?” Jasper asks, mildly.
I hesitate. It’s just a fraction of a moment, but he sees it. He smiles, not particularly happily, and gestures to the grass beside him.
I don’t sit down so much as cave in. Jasper looks out at the cornfield, the sharp lines of new shoots warped by noon heat, and tells me a story.
This is not the story of Starling House.
I mean, it sort of is, but it’s not about Eleanor or her husband or whoever else. I don’t care about who built the house or why, or whether they were good or evil or insane. I care who came after and what happened to them, and making damn sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.
This is the story of the Wardens of Starling House.
The first one after Eleanor was a guy named Alabaster Clay—do not shush me, Opal, how many of your stories have I sat through—who showed up in 1887. Alabaster was from Crow County, way east of here, and he’d been born with a rare skin condition where all the color drained out of him in big, milky patches. Which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that the local preacher apparently accused him of devilry or witchcraft or something, and Alabaster was driven out of town. A little while later he started having these dreams—I won’t describe them, because I know you know what kind of dreams I mean—and eventually he showed up in Eden. He wrote to his sister that he “followed the starlings.”
And then in 1906 they found old Alabaster hanging on the front gates of Starling House with his throat ripped out. I looked up the date in Charlotte’s newspaper collection. They blamed it on wild dogs at the time; seems they’d attacked several people that same night.
After Alabaster came two young Osage women, Tsa-me-tsa and Pearl. Their family was originally from somewhere on the Ohio River, but they’d been driven west, and then farther west, and then came the Indian Appropriations Act and they were left scraping a living out on the big flat hell of Kansas. Pearl and Tsa-me-tsa were orphaned and sent off to one of those fucked-up boarding schools, but then Pearl started having these dreams. （This is what we might call a pattern.）
If you look their names up in the school records, it says they both died in a typhoid outbreak. That must have been some administrator trying to cover his ass, because they lived in Starling House for more than twenty years before they died.
Nobody ever found their bodies, but according to your boyfriend’s notes—ow! Jesus, it’s called a joke—they have headstones side by side on Starling land.
Then came Ulysses Wright, the son of Tennessee sharecroppers. He and his parents arrived in the early thirties, after their employer sold the land out from under them. His parents died of regular old age, but Ulysses was found with the sword still in one hand. Next were Etsuko and John Sugita in ’43. They were originally from California, but met in Jerome, Arkansas. After about six months of unlawful detention they climbed the camp fence and followed the Mississippi north. They had two daughters in the house before Etsuko was found floating down the Mud River. After them came Odessa Dixon and her wife, then Eva Jackson, then Lynn and Oscar Lewis.