Page 37 of The Vacancy In Room 10

I spread out a new stack of canvas paintings protected inside plastic sleeves, and just before I decide to let go for the night and go to sleep, one of the paintings stands out. My heart speeds up, and I pick up the image.

It’s Cass. He’s painted Cass. She’s laughing. She has a strand of dyed pink hair falling across her eyes, and her elbows are leaning on her knees. She’s looking away—to the side, her mouth wide in a belly laugh, her eyes sparkling. So, wait a second. Maybe there is only one painted image here and not one hundred, or maybe I just haven’t found them yet, but this is not a depressed, suicidal, post-breakup woman. If she moved here because of a breakup, then she met Henry afterward. So why is she so happy? This is dated just weeks ago. She’s mourning a loss. She had her heart broken. By who?

Henry, is this who you painted a hundred times and couldn’t get enough of?

16

CASS

I didn’t answer any maintenance calls today. I know what I said—don’t act off. Don’t give anyone a reason to think back on this time and recall strange behavior, but I can’t do it. I cannot patch a leaky sink hose or replace the doorknob in 110. I can’t go into the office for supplies or to answer emails—the office where Eddie is wrapped in bedsheets and lying on the utility closet floor with the AC cranked too high because neither of us want to Google how long it takes for a body to start to putrefy and smell.

I just sit on the floor of my apartment next to the bed and vacillate between certainty that we did the right thing and are national goddamn heroes for getting this man off the streets, and unparalleled terror and guilt—a feeling like I’ll never be able to live with myself, and I’m going directly to hell.

Four days. I think it’s longer than I assumed, even in this heat. I saw it in a movie once, and I think it can take four days before the smell starts to become noticeable. After everyone left the pool and were long asleep, and the air was still in the small hours of the morning, I turned off Eddie’s phone and slipped it into the open slit of the passenger window of his truck. Then I wished I would have used his phone to look it up because when they find it, they won’t trace it back to me. I think we have time, though.

My phone pings with a message. I ignore it. It won’t be Callum. We agreed no texts or calls between us. We’d meet in the office tonight, and we’d drive after dark and find a place to...leave him.

When it pings again, I grab for my phone off the nightstand and look at it. It’s Rosa. Oh, God. Rosa. Why is she texting me? She never texts me.

I open it, my heart pounding. And then...it’s just a photo of Crystal in a red spandex dress that barely covers her crotch. The text beneath it says, ready to party. I don’t know why she’s sending me this, so I just respond with a smiley face and try to steady my breath and not throw up.

I stay this way until late in the afternoon when I finally force myself to leave my bedroom and make a cup of coffee. I slip a T-shirt and shorts on and look out at the courtyard and pool deck. It’s like nothing happened. It’s just a sunny Saturday, like any other.

Sylvie waters her plants on her balcony, Letty in 102 paints her toenails on a lawn chair, and the pool girls are all playing cards with the kids running amok.

How does Rosa not wonder why Eddie hasn’t contacted her since last night? He doesn’t seem like the husband who checks in and offers I miss you’s or I love you’s every night, that’s for sure, but it won’t be long. A day or two, she might assume a lost phone or bad road signal, but not for long.

I think about Frank and how much I disappointed him in a world of people who do nothing but disappoint him, and I feel again like I could be sick. I draw the curtains and sit at the kitchen table in the cold dark of my small apartment until it’s time to meet Callum.

A few hours later, I stand inside the back door of the frigidly cold office. The sharp smell of bleach and floor cleaner sting my eyes, and I’m afraid to move until Callum gets here, because somehow the irrational fear that Eddie could somehow not be dead and instead be lying in wait to murder me is a real, visceral feeling, no matter how ridiculous it is.

When Callum slips in the back door, pale and panicked-looking, I realize that he might be worse at this than me. I’m a wreck, but he increasingly does not seem like the kind of guy who can actually pull this off without giving us away. I don’t have much of a choice now, though.

He takes a deep breath and then blows it out with puffed cheeks. “Okay,” is all he says.

“I’ve been thinking about it, and I think maybe we just drive east into the desert. There’s not much between here and Amarillo, so we just... I don’t know... Just stop when it seems deserted enough,” I say.

I have been thinking about this through the night and all day. I think about true crime shows and how they catch people, and I think about DNA and forensics and mortality and hell, and I think about my future and how we should have probably called the police. Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore, except that I want this to be over.

“And then what?” he asks, and it’s confirmed that I truly do need to take the lead on this. I feel outside of my body and like a completely different person, saying the things I’m saying.

“Then we dig.” It comes out in an uncertain whisper. But before he can even react, there is a hard rap at the front door of the office. We both leap and stifle a yelp.

“Who the fuck is that?” he mouths silently with a look of accusation in his expression, like I invited folks over for a cocktail party right now.

I respond with an exaggerated shrug, and then I hear them—the pool girls, giggling and hooting.

“Cass, come on! We’re gonna be late, yo,” Crystal says.

“What are they doing here?” Callum asks, and it hits me. The photo Rosa sent with Crystal in her booty dress. The party.

“Shit,” I say back in a hushed voice. “We’re all supposed to go into Santa Fe for the Summer Blitz.”

“The what?”

“It’s a big charity ball thing.”

“Why are they going?” His whisper is sounding more like a hiss, and I can see the spit fly from the corners of his mouth.

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