Page 64 of The Vacancy In Room 10

When I get back to The Sycamores, I go into the office. I take a deep breath and blow it out hard with puffed cheeks, then kick my shoes off on the cool floor and try to shake off what just happened and the myriad of complex emotions I have about it all, because I have to stay focused. I have to—

My thoughts stop cold when I see a piece of paper taped to my desktop computer that I know I didn’t put there. I walk around the giant wood desk and stand in front of the computer and pull off what appears to be an article clipped from a newspaper. It has an image of a married couple in a small black-and-white photo. I skim what it says.

Tortured, then murdered in their own beds. Ties to cartel.

Then I read the name Victor Becerra, infamous kingpin... That’s Eddie’s real name. Holy mother of shit. It says although he was in prison at the time of the murders, it’s still thought that he orchestrated them and many others.

I feel my head get light and tingly, and my body shakes. I turn it over to see a note on the back. Who could have come in here? How did they get in? Who would do this? My thoughts race. Then I read it.

Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean he can’t hurt you. Did you leave fingerprints on the money you took? Be more careful.

A scream escapes my lips before I can stop it, and I cup my mouth with both hands as tears stream down my face.

23

ANNA

What is she hiding? What the hell does Cassidy Abbott know about my life that I don’t know myself? It’s infuriating. I search her for the tenth time all over social media and for some reason I think new information will materialize, but she hasn’t posted a thing in months. I already knew from previous searches that there is little about her anywhere—I mean, nothing aside from the basics—a high school softball victory in the local paper years ago, a small business she started that looks like it didn’t go anywhere. Lots of photos of her on Facebook from months back, looking like a completely different person, I might add, in designer dresses—always holding a glass of bubbly or with her arms around a group of other women, who all look like they belong in a Macy’s ad.

Now she’s here in her Super Mario Brothers overalls, covered in spackle half the time, having lost everything and perpetually acting paranoid. It’s weird. Is she hiding from someone? And how does she literally just slam the door on me when I want to talk to her? I’m not waiting around anymore. I need answers. The torture of not knowing, of crafting stories in my mind is boiling over now, so patience is no longer my strategy.

By dusk, I’ve waited long enough, and Callum should be back by now. There’s no way I’m calling or texting him about this. What I found will shock him, and he’s the first person I need to tell. Maybe he can help me make sense of the image of the woman I’m looking at.

I nod a hello at Rosa and Crystal who sit quietly in front of Crystal’s apartment door on folding chairs smoking cigarettes. Then I walk around the corner to Callum’s door again, and I tap my knuckle on the window and call his name. Nothing.

“Hey, Callum,” I call and jiggle the doorknob, and I’m surprised when it opens. It’s not locked, so either he’s home or maybe Cass didn’t lock it after she did whatever the hell she was doing there. I look behind me to see if anyone is looking in my direction, and then I call one more time inside the front door and listen. No movement.

“Hey,” I say one more time, walking inside, tentatively. I realize he’s definitely not home, and I really shouldn’t be in here, but for some reason I don’t leave. I give the pool deck and parking lot one more quick glance before I slip inside and close the door behind me.

The apartments are all tiny—barely five hundred square feet, since they were converted from a roadside motel. They are almost all laid out the same, too. A tiny galley kitchen to the right of the front door. A small living space straight ahead with a sliding glass door to the back of the building with a small concrete slab to put a grill or something on the first floor, and a small balcony off the back of the second. There is a narrow hall to the left, bedroom on the right side, bathroom on the left.

Mine is almost identical, so as I scan the small area, I try to see if anything is out of place because something is off—it feels eerie, and I don’t know why.

The kitchen is clean, no scalded pans in the sink, no beer bottles on the counter. The coffee table still has a few bottles and a discarded T-shirt on it. The air is hot and stale, so he didn’t end up fixing his AC. I go down the hall and look at the bathroom from the doorframe. The cabinet under the sink is open, and a pipe wrench is on the floor next to a bucket collecting water from what looks like it was a dripping pipe, but it’s dry now.

I open his medicine cabinet. God, I feel like such a crazy stalker. Why am I doing this? There’s nothing much there. Razor cartridges, cologne, hair gel. I close it. I should go. I’m gonna go.

I turn off the bathroom light and walk out when I notice his bedroom door directly across the hall is closed, and for some reason that piques my interest. He lives alone. No pets. Why is it closed? Probably no reason at all, and I’m just slowly losing my shit, but I decide to open it anyway.

It’s dark and hazy inside, but through the bits of light that seep in from the edges of the closed blinds, I can see that all of the furniture besides the bed is covered in white sheets. It looks ghostly and makes my blood run cold. I think of Lily, and maybe it’s some sort of respect—preserving her things or... I’m not really sure what, but that’s where my mind leaps.

But my instinct to get the hell out of here is eclipsed by my desire to know what I suddenly feel like Callum has been hiding, because this is weird by any standard. I move to where I imagine the dresser is and grip a handful of the fabric, pulling it off in one sweeping motion, but there is no dresser underneath. There is no couch or bedroom furniture at all.

Against the wall of Callum’s bedroom, neatly stacked in rows, are Henry’s paintings. Dozens of them, and they all have the same image. His wife, Lily’s, face.

When I saw Henry’s hard drive and realized the affair was with Lily, I thought I would come to Callum, and we might commiserate together and figure out how this happened and what the hell it snowballed into. I was certain he would be as shocked as I am...but he knew. This whole time; when I cried to him, when I asked about Cass and Rosa and the fucking schoolgirl, he knew. He never told me the truth once. He acted shocked about the affair. And all this time, the missing paintings were here. And the affair was with his wife. God help me.

I pluck the sheet off another pile that I initially thought was a recliner or love seat in the corner. More paintings. Mostly gritty candids in this section.

They’re all here. Lily with her long dark hair and delicate features. Even severely ill and shockingly thin with shadows beneath her eyes, she was hauntingly beautiful, and he captured it with skill. Henry painted her healthy and laughing with a sundress and a daisy tucked behind her ear, and also in bed with a hospital gown and a gaunt face, and made them both equally stunning. This is the woman he loved—the woman he cared for as she was dying and whom he carried out an affair with, even as she was facing her last days...and Callum knew.

I sit on the floor in front of a painting of her by the pool with sunglasses on, sipping a drink with a bendy straw. She’s covering her face with one hand and giving the artist a seductive look. The image steals my breath, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to think, to feel. How can I hate someone who’s died? How can I hate someone my husband loved? And why didn’t Callum tell me what he knew? None of this makes sense.

Suddenly, I hear a key in the lock of the front door. I leap to my feet. There’s nowhere to run, so I freeze for a moment and listen. The door opens, closes. A bag, it sounds like, is tossed on the floor. He probably unlocked the door the way he does every day without noticing it was already unlocked, because he doesn’t call out or look around the apartment with suspicion. I hear the TV click on and the news anchor’s voice fill the space.

I don’t know what to do. I think about confronting him and charging out of the room, taking him off guard, but then I keep asking myself how he got all of these and if knowing about the affair means he had something to do with what happened to Henry. What if he’s dangerous?

Then I think, no, that’s ridiculous. He’s lost his wife, he’s mourning. What if Henry gave these to him, and Callum knows Henry paints everyone all day and somehow doesn’t see the intimacy in these? After all, artists paint subjects in all kinds of emotional states and a variety of moods and poses, and really, what the hell does Callum know about any of that? What if these are what’s left of his wife, and he cherishes them, and he doesn’t actually know?

---