Fog Descending (House of Crows), Lisa Unger [best summer books .TXT] 📗

It was a big, burned-out old structure, a house not dissimilar from Merle House in scope and scale. But bigger, a nightmare version of the house that was essentially a summer playground to all of them. Merle House was old, too, but clean and well managed by Penny. It was filled with antiques and rooms of books, a movie and game room with real arcade machines. Some of the rooms upstairs at Merle House were locked, but the keys hung in the kitchen, and Penny didn’t mind if they explored. Don’t touch anything! One room had a piano and nothing else. One had a mural on the wall—a fairy-tale landscape featuring princesses, castles and unicorns, elf cottages, birds, flowers.

Here, at this strange place, the building seemed to sag. Foliage grew wild, grass tall and shrubbery untended. Vines snaked over the door and through broken windows, lush and green. The chimney was partially collapsed, and the roof had so many gaping holes that it looked like it had been in a meteor shower.

Was this still Merle property? Ian calculated that the nearest road might be two miles. He looked to determine if there was a drive that connected the house to a main thoroughfare; he saw only trees. It was surrounded on all sides by forest. How was that possible?

“Oh my God,” said Claire. Her voice was a breathless whisper.

Mason and Matthew were already running down into the clearing around the house. Now the sky was growing dimmer. He could even see the ghost of the moon rising. There was still plenty of light, though, the sun long from setting. If they turned back now, they would get home in more than enough time to avoid Penny’s wrath.

Claire took his hand, started tugging him away. “This . . . isn’t safe. Let’s get out of here.”

She tugged at his arm, pulling back toward home. But he resisted, instead pulling her gently in the direction of the broken-down old house.

“We came all this way,” he said. “Let’s just check it out. Then we’ll go. I promise. Five minutes, that’s it.”

She was curious too. He could tell by the way she kept watching Matthew and Mason, listening to their whooping calls of excitement. Claire was sensible, but she had an explorer’s spirit to match any boy’s. If there was something amazing out there, she wouldn’t want to be left out.

She gave an uncertain nod, then followed him down the hill.

8.

Merle House was quiet. Sometimes Matthew got the feeling that it slept, or at least dozed. When he had that feeling, he made his movements very slow and quiet, not wanting to disturb. He looked in on Jewel, who was, as usual, staring at her tablet.

Her room was dark; she lay on her bed with the glow of the screen lighting her face. He wondered if her neck was at a healthy angle but stopped short of saying anything. If she noticed her father standing at the door, she didn’t bother to acknowledge him. She’d clung to him today. He hadn’t even realized how much he missed the feel of his daughter in his arms. But her need for Daddy had been short lived. She was back to hating him.

“You bungled it,” Samantha had said earlier. “You made it seem like you didn’t believe her.”

“I didn’t.”

“Okay, but she believes she saw something. She was afraid. No one likes to feel dismissed, Matt.”

He wasn’t stupid. There was a load to that last sentence. Samantha had gone cool since the afternoon, like the chill before a storm.

“Good night,” he ventured from the doorframe. But Jewel had her AirPods in. Even if she had heard him, she might have just ignored him.

Apparently she had some new friend named Eldon, whom she’d met on that game she played nonstop. He knew this because, unknown to Jewel, he had an app that mirrored her phone, showing him all her texts. Samantha was not especially supportive of this kind of parent spy behavior, but neither did she make a move to stop him. He also suspected that Samantha tracked Jewel’s location—or had when she’d still had any place to go. Their daughter was unpredictable, had a wild streak, could be talked into doing things she knew were wrong. Once he’d had to drive out to some field in the middle of nowhere in Florida when she’d called and asked him to pick her and her friends up from a rave. He’d thought she was sleeping at her best friend’s house. Eve’s parents had thought they were at Jewel’s. He’d found the girls walking on the side of the road, dressed like—it must be said—total sluts in cut-off shorts and too-tight glittery shirts, platform heels. What were you thinking, girls? Samantha didn’t even know about that. That was back when he was still the FP—the favorite parent, the cool one.

“Um, good night,” she said finally, with an edge. Like, good night, go away. How long had he been standing there, lost in thought?

He thought about trying to apologize, to talk about earlier, but the truth was he just wanted to forget it ever happened.

Back in the bedroom, Samantha was sitting by the fireplace. It was a nicely appointed room, had been the master suite. Old Man Merle pretty much lived in his study, mainly slept on the couch in there. Samantha had ordered all new bedding, new drapes. (Again, they really didn’t have the money for that. But Samantha seemed to be willfully ignoring their dwindling savings account.)

“So when are you going to start talking to me?” she asked when he came in and sat on the edge of the bed.

“What do you mean?”

“Matt, how many more secrets are there?”

“My past is not a secret,” he said. “It’s just—the past. I don’t think about it. It’s gone.”

She frowned, then looked down to pick at a thread on her sleeve. “I had a call today, from the detective back home.”

Matthew felt his body stiffen,