Chapter 1
Survival Rule #1: if the locals offer you their condolences before you’ve even arrived, it isn’t kindness. It’s statistics.
POV: Renata
The last gas station fell behind us a little after five, and from there the road began to narrow, as if someone were reeling it in from the other end. I kept counting things out the window because counting calms me down: four pumpkins on the steps of a stone house, three dogs that barked at us without much conviction, a sign warning of a dangerous curve right after the dangerous curve, and zero bars of signal for the last twenty minutes.
“Put the phone away,” Kai said, eyes on the road. “There’s no signal up here. It’s part of the charm.”
“It’s also part of every movie where the girl dies at minute twelve.”
“You look like you’d make it to at least minute forty.”
He said it with that crooked smile that showed off the snaggletooth I found so sexy, the same smile he’d given me a month earlier at a bar, when he dared me to guess which song would play next and lost the bet, and the round. Kai was twenty-eight, with green eyes so pale they looked fake, strong arms from hauling sets around a theater, veins standing out on his forearms every time he turned the wheel, big hands covered in little cuts, and an astonishing talent for turning anything into a challenge, which was exactly why I liked him.
We’d been seeing each other for a month without putting a name on it, and at twenty-four I had a track record that left no room for doubt. In every relationship I’d ever had, the most stressful moment was meeting the parents, and in every single one I’d bolted right before it happened. My college boyfriend, for example, I left at a gas station, with the tank half full, on the way to lunch with his mother. I was always the one who left first. It was faster and it hurt less, like ripping off a Band-Aid.
So when Kai suggested we spend the long weekend at his father’s house, I decided that this time I was going to break the pattern. Not because I thought he was The One. I had a great time with him and he fucked like a god, but there was a long stretch of road between that and thinking about the future. I did it to try something different, to see whether, for once, I’d get a different result. Besides, the plan had its charms: three nights, a fireplace, food I wouldn’t have to pay for, and Kai naked somewhere with no neighbors.
The only strange thing had been how insistent he was about the date.
“It has to be Halloween,” he’d told me, three times on three different days. “Any other weekend the house is just a house, but on Halloween my dad takes it very seriously.”
“Your dad dresses up?”
“My dad has never dressed up in his life,” he answered, and then he went quiet for a second longer than normal, as if he were picking the next word up with tweezers. “My dad prepares the house.”
I didn’t think much more about it. I assumed his father loved decorating for the holiday and that the enthusiasm had rubbed off on Kai.
We stopped to buy wine in the last village before the house. It had exactly one street, with a church, a closed bar, and a shop that sold everything from batteries to rubber boots, and that week its window was full of real pumpkins and construction-paper bats made by some kid. The woman behind the counter, who had to be around seventy and wore her glasses on a little gold chain, recognized Kai the moment he walked in, and then she looked me up and down with a scrutiny that struck me as anything but neighborly.
“Is it that time again already?” she asked him while she wrapped the bottles in newspaper. “And this one’s this year’s girl?”
“This is Renata,” Kai said, too fast.
“Well, I hope you last, Renata,” she said. She handed me my change and patted my hand, the way you pat someone who’s about to go into surgery. “Bundle up. It gets cold up there at night. And you can hear everything.”
Back in the truck I asked him what she’d meant by “this year’s girl,” and Kai laughed and explained in great detail that in a village of forty people nobody had anything better to do than keep track of everybody else’s lives, which was true and, at the same time, didn’t answer my question. In my line of work, that has a name. I’m an insurance adjuster. I spend my days reading claim reports and visiting flooded kitchens and dented cars, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that when someone gives you a very detailed answer to a question you didn’t ask, you should write it down somewhere. I made a mental note: 5:48 p.m., first suspicious answer of the weekend.
The house appeared at the end of a pine-lined drive when there was hardly any light left. It was big, gray stone, two stories, with tall narrow windows and a wooden porch that wrapped around the whole front. There wasn’t a single plastic cobweb or skeleton hanging from the railing, and that threw me more than if there had been. The only thing announcing the date was the pumpkins on the steps, at least a dozen of them, and none of them had a face. Someone had carved them with the patience of a watchmaker, in patterns as fine as lace, and the candlelight spilled through the holes and drew shadows on the porch floor that shifted with the wind. The biggest one, on the top step, was a clock face, with Roman numerals and two hands, and it read three o’clock.
“He makes them,” Kai said when he saw me staring at it. “Takes him a week.”
“Your dad spends a week carving pumpkins and it didn’t occur to you to warn me he needs professional help?”
“I told you he takes it seriously.”
Inside, the only light came from the fireplace in the living room at the far end, and the entryway smelled of wax, firewood, and something sweet that took me a moment to place as baked apples. There wasn’t an inch of bare wall to be seen. Everything was covered in things, and not the kind normal people hang up, but a collection of objects I would never have put together of my own free will.
There was a board with dozens of antique keys pinned to it like butterflies, a row of wall clocks each stopped at a different hour, a stained mirror with the most elaborate gilt frame I’d ever seen, a cabinet full of glass eyes sorted by color, wooden masks with gaping mouths, a stuffed owl that followed me with its eyes even though that was impossible, and, sitting on the bottom steps of the staircase like guests who’d gotten tired of waiting, five porcelain dolls the size of a petite woman. About my size, actually. They were shop-window figures from the turn of the century, with porcelain faces and hands and papier-mâché bodies, corseted waists, tall updos, and yellowed lace dresses. They sat with their hands folded in their laps, every one of them wearing the same smile, the smile of someone who knows something you don’t.
My first impression was that I had walked into a madman’s house. My second, that the madman had a lot of money and very bad taste in company. Next to the staircase stood a grandfather clock, tall and dark, its pendulum motionless behind the glass and its hands stopped at seven minutes past three.
“It’s been stopped for eleven years,” Kai said when he saw me looking at it. “Don’t ask.”
It seemed odd that no one had fixed it, but I didn’t give it much thought.
“Dad!” Kai shouted, and no one answered.
I set my suitcase down and took a couple of steps toward the living room, and that was when a deep, calm voice, in no hurry at all, came down from the dark staircase, right above my head.
“You’re late.”
I jumped. Not a little jump, the kind you can cover with a cough, but a full-body jump, complete with a little shriek and a hand clutched to my chest like a great-aunt at a wedding, and while my heart found its way back to where it belonged, I watched Rex Stone come down the stairs one step at a time, without turning on the light, as if the dark belonged to him.
Kai had told me his father was forty-seven, and for some reason I’d pictured someone in a sweater vest, with a beer belly and a bad back. I was wrong about the vest and the belly, because he wore a thick gray wool sweater with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows, and the forearms showing beneath them were thick and veined, the forearms of someone who doesn’t just look at furniture but carries it too. And I, who have a documented weakness for forearms, had to force myself to look somewhere else.
I wasn’t completely wrong about the back, either, because his shoulders were very broad and slightly stooped, like someone who spends long hours bent over a table. He was enormously tall. I’m barely five feet, and standing in front of Rex Stone I had the feeling I’d shrunk a little more.
His hair was dark and going gray, longer than Kai’s, pulled back any which way, and he had a short beard that had turned almost white at the chin, gray eyes so pale they looked like water in the firelight, and reading glasses hanging from the collar of his sweater. He stopped on the bottom step, which meant he still had a full head on me by an offensive margin, and he looked at me.
He didn’t look at me the way you look at the girl your son brings home. He started with my boots, which were new and were destroying my right heel, moved slowly up over a pair of hips I’d spent half my life trying to hide under long coats, continued to my hands, lingered for an instant on my face, and went back down to my hands, and I had the very clear sense that he was putting a price on me.
“Rex,” he said.
“Renata,” I replied. And since the silence was stretching out, I added, “Nice to meet you, I guess.”
“You guess right.”
He held out his hand. It was huge, warm, and rough, and mine disappeared inside it. A thin white scar ran across his thumb, and he squeezed just enough. I held his gaze because I hate losing, even at something as silly as who looks away first, and for a few seconds neither of us moved, and Kai cleared his throat beside me, and I kept holding, and then I made the mistake of glancing down at his mouth, just for an instant, to check whether he was smiling.
He wasn’t smiling. But he noticed where I’d looked, and that was worse.
Rex 1, Renata 0, I thought as he let go of my hand and bent to pick up my suitcase before Kai could. What I didn’t put on any scoreboard was that, as we climbed the stairs, I kept wishing he’d turn around and look at me again, and that there was nothing funny about that, because he was the father of the guy I was sleeping with.
He took me to the guest room himself, on the second floor, at the end of a hallway with a long runner that swallowed footsteps. It was a huge room, with an iron bed, a dark wooden wardrobe with a mirror on the door, a window that looked straight out onto the woods, and a small desk under the window. On the dresser sat a mannequin head wearing a wig of old-fashioned curls, and I decided not to look at it for the rest of the weekend. He set the suitcase in a corner, switched on the bedside lamp, and stood in the doorway for a moment.
“The shower takes a while to warm up,” he said. “None of the doors in this house have locks. Dinner is at nine.”
“And what if I want to close the door?”
“You can close it. What you can’t do is lock it.”
And he left, and I stood there thinking that this was exactly what the killer would say at minute twelve of a horror movie.
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NB🎃
