“Oh, you didn’t know?” Marion moaned as she sunk deeper into her bed. The mattress creaked. “He said he couldn’t just sit around while I lay in here sick as a dog. I told him not to compare me to a dog. We had a good laugh about it. I imagine he’ll be back tonight, after his redo with Linda.”
Sabrina stood, her eyes stinging. She wanted to retort, to be the kind of woman who would stand up even to someone as sick as Marion, but she was not that person. She never had been. She was the kind of woman who nodded, who apologized for disrupting sleep, then faded into the background. She had tried too hard to seduce Tristan, and look what happened: she appeared desperate on his floor. It was best for her to fold into herself.
“I’m sorry for bothering you,” she said. She stepped back into the hall, shutting Marion’s door behind her.
“That crab knows how to get to you,” Charity said. She was hanging around by the wall like a creep. Sabrina jumped.
“The what?” she said as her heartbeat settled.
“Trying not to say the “B” word.” Charity laughed as she smoothed forward. “It’s kind of demeaning, isn’t it?”
“Can be,” she said. “What are you doing in the shadows?”
“Eavesdropping.” Charity slouched. “I’m bored.” Charity glanced at the floor, her face falling. “Linda’s out there on that do-over date.”
Sabrina knew the look: it was jealousy. She’d felt it several times in the manor already. She grabbed Charity by the arm, hoping that the gesture was comforting.
“Want me to distract you?” she asked.
“I’d love that.” Charity winked. “What do you say we go for a forbidden stroll?”
• • •
They stood in front of the nursery room where Charity had previously gone with Linda. Charity rattled the knob, but it wouldn’t give.
“Damn it,” Charity said. “It’s the best room in the house. Guess they caught onto us sneaking in here.”
“That’s okay.” Sabrina chewed her nail. She didn’t necessarily want to show Charity her own secret room, but the woman stood in her same jealous shoes. If it has helped Sabrina, it might help Charity. After all, there was something soothing in the humming ceiling, and she wanted to check out the walls again after her mysterious trip through them. “I know another place.”
In the empty room, Sabrina pressed a hand to the wall, testing the stability of the illusion. “It’s soft enough that you can fall through it,” Sabrina said. “Ask me how I know.”
Charity stood beside her and pushed her hand into the wood. As it closed around her fist, she jerked back, letting out a shriek. She clutched her hand to her chest like an injured animal, but there was nothing wrong with it, no residue, not a scratch.
“What the shit?”
“Right?” Sabrina trailed her fingers along it, like she might do to a man’s thigh in the dark, and ran through the visions she’d had of crawling through the wall’s womb. They had not been hallucinations; the wall was the same as the first time she’d encountered it.
“Something wrong?” Charity asked.
Sabrina considered the truth, then decided against it. Her sister had taught her not to trust women too easily, and she had to remember that even as she wanted nothing more than to wrap her arms around Charity’s shoulders and cry into her old black band T-shirt.
“I want to show you how they do it,” Sabrina said instead, grabbing Charity by the hand, then leading her through the long, dark hall to the fake door.
“Wicked,” Charity whispered as they crawled underneath, her voice the only thing that told Sabrina she was beside her. Sabrina knew the way by now. She’d walked it every time she played back the memory of her private moment with Tristan. When she crouched in front of the little door, Charity let out a wolf whistle. “Those sneaky bastards. I almost admire it.”
“They put their work in.” Sabrina opened the door and led the way, leaving her footprints in the dirt beneath them until they neared the platform. Halfway there, the smell hit her: something fetid, like a rotting sore.
“Holy fuck.” Charity’s voice was nasal, like she was pinching her nose.
It smelled like the worst dead people who got wheeled into Sabrina’s ER. Like sliced ham left to mold in the fridge, a hint of old bananas and gas.
“It didn’t smell like this before.” Grabbing the collar of her shirt, she pulled it over her mouth and nose like a mask. Despite the smell, she moved toward the empty platform. By the time she reached it, her eyes had adjusted to the dimness.
The platform wasn’t empty.
As she screamed, her shirt muffled the sound. Brandon Fuller’s body sagged against the squishy wall, his tongue hanging out of his blackened mouth.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Linda
Before the reshoot, the daylight that beat down on Linda was a comfort even if she knew there was no rational reason to believe horrible things only happened at night. As a little girl, each morning held the promise of a cornucopia of peaceful hours. Her father went to work before she woke, and even if breakfast consisted simply of toast sprinkled with cinnamon, she savored the way she could eat it in silence. School was easy for her in terms of the work, less so when it came to making friends, but the lonely lunch hours were manageable if it meant finishing her sandwich to a background roar of chatting children. She was a teacher’s pet who always followed the rules and never spoke out of turn, and she repeated the words of praise she received every night, a lullaby to lull herself to sleep despite the voices screaming upstairs.
Night arrived with the crunch of her father’s car tires. He kept vodka bottles under his seats and poured shots into a fast-food drink cup the moment he started the car, so by the time he pulled into the driveway, he was already swerving. When he walked in the door, Linda hid from the stench of his breath until dinner, when her mother forced her to the table. They learned not to speak, for her father’s drunkenness kept him from understanding their conversation and led to frustrated tirades against them for being obtuse. They learned not to take him up on his offers of going out for ice cream; his driving led them more than once into a ditch. They learned not to linger too long; their presence itself burdened him.
Evening arrived at the manor the same way. Before the walk in the orchard, Deja made Linda reshoot a banal scene in which she had been eating a PowerBar during a conversation with Sabrina. Deja wanted the food to be gone and the speech to be clear, so Linda stood in the foyer talking to an orange vase while Tatum filmed her, parroting Sabrina’s lines as cues. Linda finished faking a laugh as the setting sun descended through a tiny circular window, rosy and gold. She shivered.
“Don’t look cold,” Tatum said. “You looked warm in the other shots.”
Linda progressed through the rest of her lines in a strange daze. If she thought about it rationally, she didn’t believe the house was haunted, but the people in it were. Every last one of them gripped tight to their secrets, the same as her, and Deja knew the burial place of every closeted skeleton.
• • •
Linda tore into her lip with her teeth as Tatum set up the orchard for their scene. Behind the foyer’s windows, it was so devoid of light that it looked like someone had hung black sheets over the elaborate stained glass. She closed her eyes, trying to rest, but Brandon’s hung body, the black rings around his neck from the vine’s caress, flashed beneath her lids.
Still, she could fake it with Tristan, the way she’d always done. She pressed a hand to her heart. It was chilly in the room, and in her chest. Before her arrival on the show, she hadn’t realized how much she hadn’t been feeling.
At the manor’s front entrance, Tristan jerked open the door and offered her his arm.
