Page 65 of The Vacancy In Room 10

I hear footsteps in the hall and I just stand there helpless in the middle of the room, adrenaline coursing through my veins. Then I hear him peeing in the bathroom across the hall, and I turn behind me, looking to see if I can go out a window, and I notice his closet with the door open. A few of the paintings of Lily lean up against the wall inside the closet. My heart almost stops when I see the handful of canvases.

In each painting Lily is nude, stretched out on Henry’s bed or in a tangle of drop cloths on the floor of his studio. And each of these paintings are vandalized. In every one of them, her face is slashed through, the canvas destroyed.

Holy. Shit.

My heart pounds in my chest, and I feel the blood rush between my ears. The toilet flushes, and I am terrified he’ll come into the bedroom next.

I leap onto his bed and try to unlock the window above his headboard. The lock flips open, but it makes a screeching noise when I slide the glass open, and I know I have to move fast. I push the screen out with my palm, and it falls to the sidewalk below, and then I hoist myself into the window frame. I have to go out headfirst, and I reach around blindly until I feel the ground beneath my palms below the window. I get my hips over the frame and let myself fall into the crabgrass below, safely outside, and run for my life before he sees it was me who knows his secret.

24

CASS

Once I lock myself inside the office, I check the back room and utility closet and peek out the blinds a half dozen times in case whoever left this is still here waiting in the shadows, ready to torture and kill me the way they did to that poor couple in the newspaper. I realize an hour has gone by, and nothing has happened. Nobody is here.

Nobody has a key to the office besides the owner, who doesn’t even live in town. Did I leave the door unlocked? Even if I did, the person coming here to leave it wouldn’t know that. Okay, maybe I just left the door unlocked, and they were going to slip it in the doorjamb like before until they realized it was unlocked and could really scare me, but damn it. I’m sure I locked it. I remember grabbing my things and locking it as I watched Frank just about make it across the pool deck and home before I turned and went with Reid. I’m sure of it... I think.

When I sit down, finally, and look at the clipping again, and read the note over and over, something strikes me. The words, be more careful. The whole thing sounds like a threat on the surface, but then when I think about it...if someone knows what I did and wants to expose me, why aren’t they? Or why aren’t they demanding something in return for their silence? It’s this fact that makes me wonder if this isn’t a threat at all. It might be someone actually trying to help me.

They warned me to move the body, they’re telling me now that I’m still not safe simply because the main threat of bones being dug up is gone, and telling me to be careful. Is there someone out there connected to this who wants me to get away with it?

I know the first thing I need to do and that is to tell Anna the truth—how Henry is involved in all of this. About how I’m involved in all this and hope she can forgive me. But more important, I hope I can make it right. What she told me last night changes everything. Henry’s death wasn’t a suicide. It all came together for me in that moment.

I text her. I need to show you something. I’m gonna stop by, and I leave it at that because she deserves to know before I go to the police. I can’t live like this anymore. It’s about to all come out, and the only way to expose the whole story is to start by turning myself in. I’ve made a decision.

This is it, I think. Life as I know it is about to change as soon as I set this in motion. I take a breath, pick up my bag, and then...I hear the front door lock click open. This time I’m sure it’s locked, because I locked myself in and checked it a thousand times in my debilitating paranoia over the last hour. My whole body stiffens, and my eyes go wide and still. An unrecognizable cry of fear escapes my lips, and then the door opens.

I stumble back in fear and clutch my throat. Then, when I see it’s Rosa who lets herself in, I’m so utterly confused by it, I don’t know whether to be afraid of her or not. She stands there in her church dress and Mary Janes, but I quickly remember who she’s married to and what I’ve done, and the shy, demure facade crumbles.

“Don’t go to the police,” she blurts out of nowhere in her usual soft, almost childlike voice.

“What?” is all I manage to stutter out.

“I’m tracking your phone and computer. I know you’re probably thinking of going to the police, but you don’t want to do that,” she says flatly, calmly, like she’s telling me a perfectly normal thing.

“You what?” Again, that’s all I can come up with in my state of shock.

“Meet me at the bar across the street,” she says, slipping back out the door. But I just stare at her with my mouth open. “Five minutes,” she adds, and I nod dumbly, and she’s gone.

What the fuck just happened? I look out the blinds and see her cross the main road and go inside Donnie’s Tavern. Oh, my God, is she gonna kill me? Is that whole place lined with cartel just waiting for me?

She knows. Holy hell. She knew all along? This doesn’t make any sense. How could she have a key or know every move I made? And what does this all mean, because I thought I had a plan, and little Rosa just waltzed in and blew everything up. I mean...what choice have I got? I go.

In a corner booth, Rosa has two beers in pint glasses sitting in front of her. She pushes one to me when I sit down, and my mind hasn’t yet wrapped around Rosa tracking my phone or drinking a beer or giving me orders, and I just—I’m really stunned into silence, just hoping she hasn’t poisoned my drink, because that’s how upside down this all feels.

I sit, and she can clearly read every bit of distress and confusion across my face, because she just starts.

“I don’t think you should go to the police, Cass, because they don’t have any leads. Well, they’re connecting it to a couple of the cartel guys he was closest to right now, even though that probably won’t go anywhere since they have alibis, but you’re nowhere on their radar,” she says, and it’s like a completely different person I’ve never met is speaking to me. I know my mouth is still hanging open like a bumbling idiot, but I just can’t process this.

“I don’t understand,” I mumble. “You want me to... You know what happened. You...”

“I do,” she says, taking a chug of beer, like a person who suddenly fits in in the belly of a dark bar discussing murder, somehow.

“Um...and you want me to get away with it?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You can’t be punished for what you did. I refuse to let that happen. You saved my life,” she says, and I can hear the emotion behind her voice.

“I what?”

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