“And why do you think Olivia was the one who killed him?”
Her shoulders hunched. “It just seems like something she would do.”
Couldn’t argue with that. “Did they both live here? Albert and Olivia.”
“Sort of. Albert lived here all the time, in that room where his”—she winced—“his body is. Olivia has a room here, but she used to come and go when she wanted. When she was here, I tried to be somewhere else.”
“How come?”
“Like I said, she gave me the creeps. Albert and I, we weren’t, like, romantic, you know?” She seemed to be waiting for a response on that, so I nodded. “It was more of a business thing. But one time he let her feed off me, and she was…not gentle. And now Albert’s gone, and he promised to turn me before…” She swallowed hard, seeming to struggle with it. I could see her eyes filling. “Before I die.” Esther was crying openly now. “What am I gonna do?”
Awkward. I felt sorry for these people, the vampire hangers-on who just wanted to be able to live, on whatever terms necessary. Who knows, maybe I’d have more sympathy if I were the one dying. But you shouldn’t become a vampire out of fear of death. If anyone should become a vampire at all, it should be because that’s what you want to be. I felt like I should tell her I was sorry or ask how much time she had left or something, but I’m not good at that kind of thing. Besides, I had bigger fish at the moment. “Can you show me her room?”
“It’s in the basement too,” she sniffled. “But it’s locked.”
“Is she in there now?” This stupidly hadn’t even occurred to me. What if I was in the same house as Olivia? A flood of emotions ran through me: fear that she would get me, relief that she might have been found, and, of course, the urge to run away very quickly.
But Esther shook her head. “The lock is one of those heavy detachable ones, and it’s on the outside. She can’t be in there.”
I looked out the window, reassuring myself that the sun was very much out. Then I told Esther she could stay where she was and descended back into the basement. In the main living room, I turned in a circle until I spotted the skinny door against the back wall. The door and the handle had both been painted the same white as the sheetrock around it, which would have been pretty good camouflage if it weren’t for the heavy silver padlock dangling from the doorframe. I approached it cautiously, paying close attention to the edges of my radius, just in case. If Olivia was in there, she was currently dead, but proximity to me would bring her to life, and she was still plenty dangerous as a human. By the time I got to the door, though, I was satisfied that unless the room turned into a huge tunnel, there was nothing Old World inside.
Behind me, I heard Esther climbing partway down the stairs, where she sat down to watch. I ignored her and looked at the padlock. It was shaped like the kind you see at the gym, but three times the size, and I didn’t think even my heavy-duty bolt cutters could gnaw through it. I went back to my bag of tools and pulled out a simple flat-head screwdriver. There was no way I was getting that padlock off without a blowtorch, but the two metal loops that it locked together were another story: they were just screwed into the door and the doorframe with ordinary screws. Rookie mistake. I could have taken the time to take out all the screws, but instead I poked the screwdriver into the U of the bolt and levered it back. I put my weight into it, and was finally rewarded with a splintering snap as the whole setup came fumbling into my stomach. “Hey,” Esther protested, but her voice was even weaker than it had been. I dropped the padlock onto the floor and pulled the door open.
Dark. Lots of dark. I felt around both sides of the wall but couldn’t find a switch. Trying not to think about what else I might find, I flailed my hand into the air a few steps into the room. Esther probably thought this looked hilarious. Finally, my fingers closed around a thin piece of string. I tugged.
There are some who might say that I screamed, but I maintain that it was more of a womanly bellow. Esther shrieked behind me. I jumped back a few feet, and when I finally got my breath, I stepped back in, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light and to the shock.
Every inch of every wall in the low-ceilinged room was covered in photos of me.
There were a few older shots—me in my high school graduation robe, a couple of shots of me running on a track. I’d only been on the cross-country team my junior year of high school, which was probably about when Olivia had found me. But most of the pictures were from the time of Olivia’s death onward. Me at the grocery store, me at a bookstore, me lying on the beach with a hat over my eyes. There was even a whole series taken through the windows of Molly’s house: me watching TV, making supper, napping on the couch with a spilled water glass on the floor next to me. I winced. No moment of my life was too mundane or too private for her to capture.
“They’re all of you.”
The voice was only a few inches behind me, and I jumped, half expecting to hit my head on the ceiling like a Looney Tunes character. “Jesus, Esther, don’t do that.” I turned around, and that’s when I saw the back wall of the room. This one wasn’t covered in pictures. There were just four big eight by tens, hung neatly, two on each side of the door. Each shot was of the person walking on the street, completely oblivious. Molly was captured at night, talking on her cell phone and throwing her head back to laugh. My brother Jack was walking with a slice of pizza in his hands. He was wearing his scrubs and an anxious look on his face, like he had to get back to work. Jesse was leaning against an unmarked car, reading from a file and chewing on his lip. Eli was wheeling a dolly stacked with boxes into Hair of the Dog.