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Vera’s ostensible task was to clear out the house and to watch her mother die.
Vera wondered if, in the destruction of the old front steps, anything had been found. But of course, the thing Vera hid there must have been destroyed. She would have seen on the news if they’d found what she tucked beneath those old boards so many years before.
the voice that had always been flat and loveless but had turned hateful the year Vera turned twelve.
“You don’t need to call me ‘Mom’ while you’re here. Just call me Daphne.” She didn’t look Vera in the eye. “Things aren’t that different just because I’m dying. Let’s not pretend.”
No matter what Daphne thought of her daughter, no matter how hard the next few days or weeks or months were going to be, Vera had once belonged here.
This room, more than any other, was always the safest place in the house for Vera. This room had been hers.
Why hadn’t Francis ever fixed it? She only wondered for a moment before the answer came to her. He wanted to be able to hear.
The moment of longing she allowed herself was an excess, a once-a-year indulgence. It was all she could permit herself in this house, where remembering Francis was compulsory, but missing him was forbidden.
The shadow stayed. It was next to her bed, a bunched-up thing, something like a man crouching to pick up a penny or tie his shoe. It was a blur in the center of her field of vision, something floating on the surface of her eye, a fingerprint on her retina. It was not there, couldn’t be there—but she couldn’t see through it or around it either.
His fingernails have something black crusted beneath them, dark crescents that Daphne would make him scrub away with a stiff brush if she saw.
Dried blood probably
The other half of her is taking in the faint sheen of panic on her father’s face, the bloodless pallor of his cheeks, the thready capillaries in the whites of his eyes, and that half of her knows that something is wrong.
Is her bed above his murder workshop where he mames and dismembers bodies? Is that what she's hearing.
Sometimes they don’t understand where they are and they get scared,” he adds. “Sometimes they get hurt. And I have to help them escape.” Something has come into Vera’s father’s voice, some far-away thing that she knows he will not explain to her. Adults do that all the time, talking around big feelings and ideas as if no one will notice that they’re saying two things at the same time.
Yea he definitely talking about his victims .
“Promise you won’t go into the basement to see the animals,” he says. “It’s really very dangerous. You could get hurt.” His voice is gentle, serious, and he’s looking right at her. This, she understands, is big.
When the thud comes, she snaps her fingers four times fast. The sounds fade quickly. Vera smiles at the quiet and returns her hand to the bed, resting her arm on top of the covers. She decides that she likes this new superstition. She decides that it works.
She falls asleep so quickly that she doesn’t register the faint sound that comes from beneath her bed. It is the sound of clumsy fingers, trying to learn how to snap four times fast.
The voice was speaking in a half-whisper, rasping and tender. It sounded so familiar. She had to move, she had to turn on the lights, she had to scream. She could swear she recognized that whisper. “It was just a bad dream. You’re all in one piece now. Go on back to sleep, Vera-baby.” She could feel the breath of the speaker against her ear. It was cool and close, and it smelled like rot and cut grass and turned earth and sweet lemon.
“I’ve come home to … to sort things out. To take care of the house.” Mrs. Gregson laughed mirthlessly, a short sharp bark that made Vera’s skin jump. “Burn it down,” she said. It wasn’t a suggestion or a joke—she spoke with all the authority she’d brought to more mundane phrases of Vera’s youth.
There was nothing she could say to this woman, the mother of her childhood friend. Nothing she could say to these people. There was no apologizing, no explaining.
“She still … she’s mad at me. She holds me responsible. For all of it.
“We’re still here for them to hate, because of people like you.”
“I don’t date men.” “Men like me, you mean.” “Men as in men,” she replied.
Once Hammett Duvall’s book had been published, everyone wanted a piece of the Crowder House.
she knew beyond a doubt that her presence was the last thing Daphne wanted. She was a last resort, a backup to the backup to the backup. Daphne had only called Vera home because there was no one else to call.
It was a page ripped out of his journal. The journal Vera had hidden under the front porch. The journal that she’d assumed—that she’d hoped—had long ago turned to pulp.
I KNOW THAT SHE WILL STAY GOOD SO LONG AS I REMEMBER TO KEEP BAD THINGS AWAY FROM HER.
She thought, but did not say, that she had missed her father too much to risk going to see him, to risk the sting of him sending her away like Daphne had.
“I’m a spiritual rendering artist.”
“The grease that’s in you, the filth, they saw it and so did I. I locked you up to protect everyone from your foulness.”
Does she think she's a killer like her father?
it’s the exact same voice he used to speak to Vera before. Because of this, she decides she likes him.
that’s when she’ll see the light below her bed. The light that will let her understand the world in a way she never has before.
He is her best friend and she loves him, although most of the time she is not sure that she likes him very much.
they didn’t find the drafts of his confession, the ones he’d ripped up and tossed into the trash can beneath his desk.
Francis Crowder was never going to come home to claim that journal. A tuberculosis outbreak at the supermax facility took care of that.
It should have reminded her that Daphne had been alone for nearly two decades, trapped in a notorious house in a town that hated her.
She’d learned to stop thinking of her mother as a person a long time ago, back when it still hurt to want Daphne to love her. Forgetting that her mother was human had been necessary.
Until now, it had been about erasing the evidence that her mother had lived and died here. Now, it was about more than that. Now, it was about finding evidence that once, half a lifetime ago, love had lived here too.
“Do you know,” Daphne said softly, staring down at her own trembling hands, “that my life began the moment I laid eyes on you?”
She couldn’t remember her mother ever saying I love you, even in the time before it all went so wrong.
The stench of the room was close and choking. It was an amphibious smell, like turned earth and rain, dark mold and half-rotted wood. There was an undercurrent, too, of sweet lemon.
Wth is this woman sick with? It's like her body is being taken over
“Please. You were my only friend.” “No, Vee,” he said with a smile that Vera couldn’t quite read. “I think we both know you had another friend.”
Going back, I realized Brandon knew more than we thought about everything.
This house, the house her father built, the house where her mother would die—this place was safe. This place knew her. This place was where she belonged.
“Fuck you,” he said. She could tell from the way he said it that he’d been practicing in his head. “I didn’t want to kiss you anyway. You’re ugly, and anyway I told you I don’t like you like that.”
Me thinks you does protest too much. That or you just can't stand rejection.
their eyes meet for the briefest of instants, and in that instant, Vera sees her mother’s eyes flash don’t. She doesn’t quite shake her head, but it’s there, between them: a warning, an insistence, a demand for silence.
“It’s not true, though, right? Dad loves us.” “He loves me,” Daphne says crisply. “Your relationship with him is your own business.”
Well dang
That sound—a low, muted, metallic clicking—was definitely coming from Daphne. It went on and on, growing in volume, and Vera could place it now. She could place it, because it sounded just like the plastic-coated links of a bicycle chain sliding through an O-ring, rattling against a cement floor—
“No, those aren’t for me. They’re from back when he still used to write to you.”
Vera didn’t have to think about it even for a moment to know that she wouldn’t be able to survive his kindness. It would break her heart.
She’d heard the words, that much was certain. She’d heard them spoken aloud. That could only mean that she’d been the one to say them. Except that the voice she’d heard wasn’t her own.
You never want to let a big fish get away.” He looks at her somberly. “Fish are big old gossips. They’ll tell all the other fish to stay away from where you’re standing.”
Sounds like his murder philosophy too
