As Birmingham carried them farther from downtown, the frayed edges of Pacington began to appear. Overgrown lawns. Crumbling driveways. Shingles hanging crookedly from roofs like scales shedding off a lizard’s back. They had barely traveled half a mile and yet Kris felt light-years from the meticulously trimmed grass and pristine sidewalks of Center Street.
By the time Birmingham cut an odd angle across the 800 block of North Willow Street, there was more wood or cardboard filling window frames than glass. Some of the houses had been completely abandoned.
It’s a mirage, she realized. Downtown was for visitors, for the summer crowd, for those few vacationers who still journeyed to Lost Lake to escape the Kansas heat with a few months of boating and swimming. But the rest of the town of Pacington, well, it was an old, moth-eaten sweater, unraveling into a pile of threads. Its glory days were long gone. No amount of weed whacking could change its downward trajectory.
On the dilapidated porch of one of the last holdouts on the block, a man in a grease-stained tank top pointed at Kris with two fingers clamped around a cigarette.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?” he yelled. “Go. Go!”
Kris hit the gas, cranking the wheel to the left, onto Willow. She had to get off of this street. She didn’t care if a dead end rammed the Jeep into the hillside. She could not spend another second on Birmingham Drive.
The next intersection was coming up quickly. Kris slowed just enough to check for pedestrians and oncoming traffic, and then she rolled through the stop. In a yard on the corner, a mangy dog ran to the length of its chain and barked wildly at the Jeep as it passed. Kris thought she caught a glimpse of its owner watching, confused, from the front porch, but she did not look. Her eyes were on the line of downtown rooftops in the distance.
Only a few more blocks.
“Mommy?” There was fear in Sadie’s voice.
“It’s okay, baby.”
Third Street flashed by, then Second, and Kris was suddenly at the corner of Willow and Center Street.
Tires chirped on the hot pavement as she brought the Jeep to a sharp stop. She let out a rattled breath.
On the opposite corner stood the out-of-place Victorian house that was now the Book Nook. That structure had seen the growth of the town from a quaint village along the muddy Verdigris River to the roaring vacation destination brought about by the accidental creation of Lost Lake. And now it sat perched like a vulture, watching as its beloved community died from the outside in.
Kris flicked on her turn signal. She tapped the steering wheel impatiently as she waited for a late-nineties Ford Expedition to rumble by, and then she turned quickly onto Center and pointed the Jeep toward home.
“Home,” she whispered, testing it.
The word tasted like a bitter pill on her tongue.
She pushed the car faster as the town of Pacington fell away behind her. She wanted to leave it in the rearview mirror.
That place is rotting, too. Just like Daddy’s lake house. Just like Mommy in her grave.
Her foot pressed down harder on the accelerator, sending the speedometer creeping past sixty. She wished she could abandon the voices in her head as easily as she had just abandoned the town.
She reached the spot where the highway forked, and slowed the Jeep just enough to safely swing a hard left onto River Road. Sunlight strobed through the trees as the car sped toward the lake house. There was the gap in the embankment where the gate should have stood.
But it fell down, didn’t it? That rotten gate. That rotten gate at a rotten house outside a rotten town that not even the lake would want to swallow.
She cranked the steering wheel, the back tires slipping on the dirt road as the Jeep fishtailed through the gap. Only when she could see the house before her did Kris hit the brakes. The Jeep skidded to a stop in the gravel drive, kicking up a fresh cloud of powdery dust.
The second the car came to a halt, Sadie was unbuckling her seat belt, throwing open the door, leaping out. She raced up to the lake house before Kris could even put the Jeep in park.
“Sadie!”
Kris felt the all-too-familiar thud of her heart against the wall of her chest as she slammed the driver’s-side door shut and hurried across the overgrown yard. Brown grasshoppers fluttered out of her way as she pushed through the weeds. She was forced to slow as she navigated the obstacle course of tangled weeds and loose bricks along the path to the front porch. She glanced up at the front door, expecting to see Sadie waiting with an impatient scowl for her mother to unlock it.
The door was wide open.
Icy needles of panic pricked her flesh.
Had she left the door unlocked? She tried to recall the twist of the key, the thunk of the dead bolt sliding into place, but everything before that moment was a blur.
She stepped into the dim threshold between the sunlit porch and the shadows of the claustrophobic foyer. Her hand gripped the door jamb as if her body were trying to keep her from entering.
“Sadie!” Her voice was swallowed by the empty house.
From somewhere farther inside, she heard the mischievous giggle of a child.
Kris felt the warm rush of anger course swiftly through her body. She drew in a breath as her parental gears shifted from protector to disciplinarian.
See? It was not her own voice. It was Jonah. It’s a pain in the ass, isn’t it? Having a kid. If we didn’t have her—
“There is no ‘we,’ you cocksucker,” Kris whispered, and the words cut the air like a freshly sharpened blade.
She stepped into the house and instantly came to a stop again.
What was that smell?
It wasn’t the foul stench of a rotting bird that had greeted her when they first arrived, but it was just as surprising, just as unexpected.
She sniffed deeply, and the sweet odor of perfume tickled her nostrils.
Someone was inside! This was no longer Jonah’s voice. This was panicky Kris, fearful Kris. God, she hated that voice.
Yet she couldn’t deny the thought made sense. The unlocked door. The lingering scent of perfume.
What if someone had been in the house?
What if they never left?
Or perhaps she had simply left the front door unlocked, the latch not fully catching, and the wind had pushed it open while they were gone.
The gears shifted once more, and the engine inside her growled, low and menacing, as the disciplinarian became a warrior. She wasn’t taking any chances.
She marched into the kitchen, swerving left at the island as if on a preset track. She yanked open a drawer. Metal utensils clanked inside. She quickly scanned the random items and snatched up the one good knife she had brought from home, a boning knife with a slender seven-inch blade. For some reason she couldn’t explain, it was her preferred knife in the kitchen, her go-to. She used this knife for everything.
Never this. This is a first, she realized.
She slammed the drawer shut, not caring if the intruder heard the sound, in fact hoping that any noise might send them fleeing out into the woods.
With the knife gripped tightly in her hand, Kris moved like a predatory animal into the great room. The perfume smell was stronger there. The air was heavy with its sickening sweetness.
Across the room, sunlight hit the back windows at just the right angle to turn them into four fiery pillars. They looked like something out of a pagan ritual. Yet even against their dazzling brilliance, Kris could see that the French doors were shut tight. She moved quickly between the furniture and the fireplace and gave the door handle a sharp yank.