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As I reach for it, I recall Ahmed mentioning this morning that Yasmine had misplaced her master keycard. My jaw tightens in the realization that I’m no longer the only guest who has access to every room.
This boy can’t possibly understand what he’s taken from me. He’s only eight. He can’t know that all I had left of Peter sat inside that paltry plastic Ziploc, tied with a blue ribbon and rolled up like bad marijuana. He’s not old enough to comprehend the kind of annihilating loss I’ve suffered, and he didn’t mean to rip the last remnants of my husband away from me.
I want my husband’s hair back, and I want the Seebers thrown out of my hotel. I want them tossed down the horseshoe steps until their necks break as they land in a pile on the sidewalk.
Through the cage’s thick mesh, I see the remains of the slaughter: three slain cockatiels, what’s left of them, two reduced to a mere pulp of feathers and bone, the third strangely intact but for its chewed-off head. The tiger-striped cat, that high priestess of the garden, sits in the aviary’s far corner, her tail beating back and forth, her yellow eyes innocently observing the fallout of her nighttime feast. I sensed her immense gratitude last night when I unlatched the aviary’s door for her. After all, she’d been hungering for those birds her entire life.
He’s taken his glasses off, and the folded pair are wedged in his crotch, sticking up like a little erection.
That's a weird simile to use in reference to a child… just ew
Otto is hugging his mom tightly, his chin nestled on her shoulder, his cheeks swollen with tears. I can’t stop looking at his face, mesmerized, like staring into a fire, the power and force of it. When he lifts his eyes up at me—I can’t help it—I smile.
“The French husband is abusive?” he scoffs. “I do not believe that. He is very nice, very concerned about his wife and son. He calls every day to ask me how his family is doing.” “He does?” The news doesn’t track with the picture Tess painted of a violent, volatile cinematographer.
Otto has stolen my job. The little shit is trying to make me redundant; that’s his revenge. I who invented this ritual, who coined the very words he’s now aping to lure guests down to the glory of my dying day. Children aren’t the world’s inheritors, they are its thieves, skating by on the hard work of generations that came before them.
I decide to lie, which is all adults do to kids anyway, lie to them viciously about the benevolence of the world we’re passing on to them.
But the reason it takes me so long to identify it is because its head is missing, the one slain cockatiel that the cat didn’t fully devour.
It’s Peter’s hair, not all of it burned like I thought, but whatever he saved now jammed in the decapitated body, right where its head should be.
My intention is not to kill him. That is what I tell myself: I’m not going to murder Otto. I simply want to scare him with the possibility of death, to shake his unearned sense of invincibility so drastically that, perhaps for the first time in his eight years of life, he truly feels the flimsiness of his mortality and understands the pecking order of the planet.
My motivation for keeping quiet wasn’t merely to show the boy that I wouldn’t cower. I had other reasons. Ahmed would surely have added this incident to his growing list of calamities, and I can’t risk attracting the attention of the management of Richesse Resorts.
I know I should let him go now. Let go! a voice in me cries. Let him go so he can drink the air and live. But I want another minute with him like this, holding onto him without any resistance from him, the two of us together in perfect unity and stillness.
Right below my foot, splayed on its side in the mulch bed, is the tiger-striped cat, sphinx of the garden, now a feeding ground for maggots. I gag at the sight of her, the orange fur matted with blood, teeth shattered in her mouth, her bludgeoned body left to rot in this neglected patch of the garden.
The boy is the aggravator. He’s the allergen that’s poisoning the house. No more half steps. He must be gotten rid of.
I often thought, Yes, of course, it’s my turn. How perfect. First my husband, then my daughter, now me. I wanted to lie in bed and accept whatever death was coming.
I’ve found that the best way to hide a secret is to keep it from yourself.
Oh wow this is profound considering this is how she hid the fact that her beloved peter was a child molesting monster of a father. She rather believe her daughter was dead than the truth.
You can only withstand losing everything in your life once. There can be no second time.
I lift the butter cookie to my lips, and a bitter odor catches in my nostrils. The cookie’s underbaked soft spot has also left a sticky residue on my fingertips. I study the cookie, its pistachio-green hue and lunar dough, and bring it to my nose to take a cautious sniff. The acrid chemical reek doesn’t seem altogether foreign. It takes me a second to recognize the smell of the disinfectant that Seif used to clean out the aviary.
Tit for tat. Attempted murder for attempted murder. Although I only meant to scare the boy, to bring him just short of the threshold, he was willing to carry me across it.
I’m all alone with a monster, and I need to protect myself! Madness too is a kind of protection, a suit of armor to ward off calls for reason and proportion,
Let me guess, you can’t stand the boy either. Otto.” Ben groans out the name as if it were a roller coaster that’s supposed to be fun but induces vomiting. I’m pleased by his open disdain for Otto, although I’m careful to couch my own hatred.
I’m heartened that at least Ben sees Otto for the terror he is. The boy has hoodwinked everyone else but the two of us.
Ahmed returns to the line. “Your caller is back. It is a child, I think. I’ll put it through. She says her name is Julia?” All I feel in that second is the blood pumping through my temples.
“It is ritual here at hotel, we gather for the end of the sun. Very beautiful, you will see. The boy does it for us every night.” I slam the door shut.
But I must be careful. Be careful, I tell my black reflection in the flat-screen. Remember what happened in Sils Maria. But that was different. That wasn’t your fault!
Peter also believed that if you’re absolutely forced to do something unpleasant, make it someone else’s job. I am too old and slow to kill him. But there are other methods.
My eyes narrow. “What was?” “Tell me a five-year-old understands allergies, okay? I’m sure my mother just said she couldn’t eat it, not that it would make her so ill that she needed to be taken to a hospital . . .” Tess sighs, purposely eliding the details of Otto’s poisoning. I could clue her in on his penchant for poisoning old women.
I want every one of Otto’s sins paraded out in the open, including the worst one, the evilest of them all, calling me up pretending to be my dead Julia. But I must let Tess figure out the monstrosity of her son on her own.
“Tess, at the tombs, you told me you felt frightened around him. That one moment he’d be violent, and then he’d turn around and be loving. Please tell me you aren’t in denial about your husband’s abuse?” She lets out an affronted laugh. “Maggie, you misunderstood. I wasn’t talking about Alain.” She leans toward me, her green eyes flinching as they enter the shaft of light. She drops her voice. “I was talking about Otto.
“But the incident spooked Alain. He started to wonder if Otto had been holding the saw every night that he stood staring at him while he was asleep.
She had an asthma attack on the playground, and the teachers accused Otto of hiding her inhaler.
I stare at the idiot across from me. It’s always the parent who can’t see the true nature of their children, blind to the obvious, refusing to connect the dots.
“My mom won’t see him. I told you, she’s a religious fanatic. She doesn’t want to set eyes on her grandson again. She thinks . . .” Tess won’t say it, but I know the words that finish her sentence because I’ve thought it too: She thinks he’s evil.
she might have realized the monster she’s just mistaken for a friend.
Tess signed Otto’s death warrant the moment she told me that he was researching me on the internet. I don’t want to think about the crumbs of biographical data he’s already compiled from his marathon searches.
“I don’t want your money,” he hisses. “You need jail.”
His head is bent awkwardly, and a bubble of blood forms in one nostril. I fall to my knees, leaning over him, half terrified that I’ve killed him and half terrified that I haven’t. A beautiful man in the prime of his youth—nineteen? twenty?—his skin still so hot to the touch.
I recognize her instantly, Liesbeth de Clerq of Richesse Resorts, the oversight manager dispatched during a crisis to steer a wayward hotel back into the corporate fold. The last time I saw her was in a chalet in the Alps after the violent murder of a hotel guest.
“Where have I been all these years? I’ve been inside your head, touching things.”
The more I helped, the more the world around me brightened, and the more my blotches receded and became an affliction of the past.
A meddlesome third party only adds complications: they pay too much attention and disrupt reliable routines; worse, they offer themselves as counselors and negotiators when a more decisive break is
It sounds like she's talking about herself
How could she betray me? How? I could kill her!”
“Yes, of course you should want to kill her. I’d have murdered my husband if he took up with all the cleaning ladies behind my back, rest his soul. You need to end it. Once and for all. Before you have a child together and she’s still cheating on you right and left. Trust an old woman. It won’t get better. End it, Bajnok. This is your last chance.” Hanna was found by housekeeping the next morning, strangled in bed, the covers pulled over her head.
And right here you give him permission and justification to kill his wife.
Madlen went to the canton’s chief of police, demanding an investigation, refusing to let the case rest as a run-of-the-mill honeymoon murder-suicide. Finally Liesbeth requested a meeting with me and the cantonal police chief, promising to sort out the “unfortunate misunderstanding.” I checked out in the middle of the night.
“His father is the military. Rafik’s father is the top general of the southern division. A very important man in Luxor. That is why Rafik is welcome to use our facilities. I’m afraid his father is very upset by his disappearance. His officers won’t be allowed to return to their camp until they find him.”
