You've Been Warned--Again Read online

  “You didn’t say how you know my name,” Carter says.

  “Okay, okay,” the stranger says, clearing the air with his hands. “I admit I did some poking around when I heard the house had sold. I can never seem to mind my own business.”

  “So why are you really here?” Carter demands.

  “The wheel is come full circle: I am here,” the stranger recites, gazing off at the ceiling. “King Lear, Shakespeare.”

  “You think this is a joke?”

  Just then Martha blusters out of the kitchen. Carter becomes conscious of the pulse in his left temple. It’s like the incessant pricking of a needle against his brain.

  “I thought we’d scared you away,” Martha tells the stranger. She fans herself with an oven mitt, glistening in a sheen of sweat.

  “I’m not easily spooked,” the stranger says.

  “That’s promising.” Martha cocks her hip against the back of the recliner, mere inches from the stranger’s head. “We haven’t met a soul in this town till now.”

  “New Englanders keep to themselves,” the stranger says.

  “Do they still burn witches, too?” Martha asks.

  Something twists inside of Carter’s gut.

  Martha’s always been generous with her attention. Crouched on her haunches beside the stranger, she brushes the bangs away from the wound on his forehead. “We need to clean that boo-boo up,” she purrs. “There’s bandages in the bathroom.”

  “What about dinner?” Carter asks.

  She bats her eyes at her husband and says, “Turkey’s kaput, but I’ve got some Lean Cuisines in the cellar icebox. It creeps me out down there. Could you be a dear?”

  Carter nods. Sure, darling. Anything for you.

  He regrets tossing that gin bottle into the fire. He could’ve saved it for this moment instead, picked it up by the neck, and smashed it across the stranger’s forehead. What a curveball that would’ve been.

  The stairway to the cellar is steep, its steps precariously bowed. They’re original, like so much else about the house. Carter descends them into the musty underground.

  There’s a deep rumble down here, a thrum like a slow-motion recording of a pulse. It’s the nearby Atlantic crashing against the rocky shore.

  In colonial times a family named Thorpe won this land from the Narragansetts, not too long after that first Thanksgiving went sour. Their clan graveyard outside boasts ten generations of tombstones, until the sudden end.

  Relics have been left behind, like the upright piano collecting dust beside the icebox. Carter doesn’t head that way to fetch the frozen dinners. He doesn’t give a damn about that.

  Instead, he ducks inside a dirt-floor chamber hollowed out from the original stone foundation. He pulls a string to light a bare bulb overhead and kneels beside an antique steamer trunk.

  The floorboards complain against the weight of bodies moving upstairs. Down here, Carter feels his soul begin to glow like a coal-fired furnace. He is alone with his dreams.

  He opens the latches and raises the lid. The only item inside the trunk is the vintage Browning over-under shotgun, passed down from his father.

  The Whitmore gun, a gun with history. Carter can’t help but tremble with an almost religious reverence.

  He learned to shoot with this Browning, and so did his son. He remembers the swell of pride when Alan blasted his first clay pigeon to smithereens.

  Carter had all the love in the world for his children. He remembers Stella gripping his hand as the glass elevator in his office building climbed into the Manhattan skyline. His legacy, his genes, his history wound together with his future.

  But time smothers everything. Entropy. Even his only son—Lord, how it sickened Carter to consider this truth—even Alan Whitmore let down his guard, and it killed him.

  Why did Carter summon his remaining children home today? Maybe out of hope that they could be redeemed, to show them what he’s realized—that no matter your sins, no matter the chaos in the world, there is always a route to permanent peace.

  He runs his fingers along the gun’s checkered fore-end and studies the leaf patterns engraved on the receiver. Then he breaks the action and loads two fresh shells in the chamber.

  One night, three decades ago, he broke into the home of a Jew attorney who had poisoned Carter’s life in the most personal way imaginable.

  He remembers the lawyer’s face as Carter raised the gun, this gun. That look of disbelief was the most delicious part.

  And afterward, he was never even questioned about the murder.

  Not a pillar of society—not a man like Carter Whitmore.

  Chapter 7

  I have just a minute to pull myself together before Nate finds me curled on a guest room bed. Who am I kidding? I’m a mess, and sulking alone makes it worse. I’ve soaked my sweatshirt sleeves with tears.

  “I didn’t burn the stupid turkey,” I tell him, as if that’s the crux of my problem.

  “Obviously not.” Nate pets my hair to soothe me. I feel like a child who’s had a nightmare. Shh, it’s okay. Go back to sleep. But the stakes in this situation are much higher. I’m a grown woman facing her moment of truth. If I can’t stay stable through one family visit, then how am I going to be strong enough to walk out on the Whitmore Freak Show once and for all?

  I don’t know why I was drawn to this room, but it doesn’t help me feel like an adult. It’s more of an alcove, a miniature bedroom for a little girl. There’s a music box and a milk glass lamp on the side table. On the wall is a painting of a bonneted girl in a garden.

  Mother was never one for vintage furnishings. This must’ve already been here, for years. I can’t help but wonder who used to sleep here, and why they’ve left all these heirlooms behind. It disturbs me in a vague way, like the feeling of being watched by someone you can’t see.

  “You’re still going to tell them, right?” Nate asks.

  “Please don’t pressure me on this.”

  “I won’t—just, the wedding is, like, a month away.”

  “I know,” I assure him, though there’s so much I don’t know. My place in this family used to be clear, before I lost my stomach for business school and took up with Literature and Poverty instead.

  I let Nate kiss my cheek, even if his beard feels like pine straw against my edgy nerves. I have to let him try. He’s my boyfriend. My fiancé. I’ve made this decision for life.

  He lies down beside me on the narrow bed and holds my face in his hands. His lips travel up to mine, and I sense the shift from pity to intimacy.

  I want to confess the hallucination of my brother I had in the kitchen. I need Nate to reassure me I’m not crazy, that these minor fugues happen to everybody. I need to depend on somebody else’s inner strength for just a few minutes. But his eager tongue wets my lips, and the chance is gone.

  “Somebody will hear us,” I whisper in his ear. My breath on his skin makes him shiver. His fingertips drift beneath my sweatshirt and across my bare stomach.

  His touch tames my anxious nerves and quiets down the chatter in my head, but not quite enough, not here. “Nate, I know you’re trying to help…”

  “Just let me take care of you. You always feel better.”

  He pops the button on my jeans and cups his hand between my legs. My hips instinctively arch toward his touch and my breath escapes in a throaty shudder.

  Maybe he could erase all this trouble….

  “Feel good?” he asks. I hear the jingle of bells somewhere, like a herd of sheep rounded up at dusk. Or is it goats?

  In my mind, ugly faces blur into soft, benign shapes. My mother, my father, my sister—dissolving one by one.

  A final face remains stuck in my head. The stranger’s. He tilts down his chin and arches his eyebrows, like he’s sharing a secret. A dirty secret.

  I don’t feel Nate’s touch anymore, just a numb bloom of mounting pleasure that could come from anyone, even the stranger’s—

  I grip Nate’s wrist and tug hi
s hand away, ashamed.

  The slant of hallway light through the bedroom door has widened. I raise my head from the pillow, squinting. As my desire dies down, my vision sharpens again.

  I see a girl’s pale face. I see her wide, glistening eyes.

  Chapter 8

  Sorry to interrupt,” she says.

  I jolt upright and bash my head against the sharply slanted ceiling. My eyesight pops like a camera flash and I taste blood on my tongue. Serves me right.

  I button my jeans in a hurry. In a frantic effort to make us look innocent, I nearly shove Nate off the bed. Then I turn the key on the antique lamp.

  In the light, the girl’s no ghost. She’s not a trick of my fragile mind. I’m almost relieved to see that she’s flesh and blood, with a constellation of facial piercings, a pleated miniskirt, and skull-and-crossbones patterned tights. All dressed for clubbing and nowhere to dance.

  “Chloe?” I ask. “Oh, God—is this your room?”

  “Nope!” She bounces into the rocking chair by the door and keeps on bobbing to a faint electronic throb from her earbuds. She twines a thread of chewing gum from her teeth to her index finger and eyes us like she wants the show to go on.

  But Nate and I are both sitting upright now, hands planted chastely on our knees. To hide the evidence, he has dropped a throw pillow over his lap.

  I want to believe she only poked her head in the room just before I spotted her, that it was too dark for her to see what we were doing. But the truth is undeniable and makes me squirm.

  My sixteen-year-old niece was peeping on us.

  So blatant, so nonchalant, I don’t know how to address it.

  “I—I didn’t realize you were here,” I say.

  “Ma tends to forget I exist. Who’s the beard?”

  “Nate,” Nate says with a quick show of his palm.

  “This is Stella’s daughter, Chloe,” I explain to him.

  “Way to go, Nate!” she cheers, nudging his leg with her chunky-heel platform shoes. “You scored yourself a Whitmore. But the question is: are you really up for the project?”

  “How long’s it been, Chloe?” I butt in.

  “Five years. I’ve saved all your birthday cards.”

  Last time I saw my niece was at Alan’s funeral in New York. The day my perspective changed, when I saw that being rich and connected wouldn’t save my soul.

  Back then, she was a shy kid in pigtails. She still has the pigtails, but on a teenager they’re weirdly fetishistic.

  I nod at her earbuds and ask, “Is that your phone? Are you getting any service?”

  “I wish. It’s just my music library. We’re still stranded on Cannibal Island.” She blows a bubble the size of a golf ball and snaps it with her teeth.

  I feel guilty. I could’ve reached out to her with more than just birthday and Christmas cards, more than following her Instagram account and inviting her to visit me in New York. She deserves an advocate from inside this family.

  “I’m sorry if we made things awkward,” I say.

  She leans forward, takes my face in both her hands. Her fingers are covered in rings and other trinkets. “Hey, I’m not here to judge. Just remember what Smokey the Bear always says: use protection! Don’t fuck up like Stella did.”

  “Chloe, you’re not a fu—”

  “Not me, Auntie. Your genius sis is pregnant again.”

  I can’t hold back a legitimate gasp. “Does anyone know?”

  “Downstairs? Hells no. They’d shit a brick.”

  “Why? Who’s…never mind.”

  “Who’s the sperm donor?” Chloe guesses. “Friend of mine. Well, used to be, till he bonked my ma. Want to know the best part? He’s a black dude. Oh-ho-ho, I can’t wait to see Dumba’s face.”

  She’s finally pressed the right button. Not because I care one iota about the race of people Stella sleeps with, but because my sister’s holiday news is going to spoil mine. To announce our engagement was the only reason I gambled my emotional health showing up here today. I can’t let that purpose get overshadowed. Our relationship, Nate and mine, deserves better.

  “Come on, Nate.” I grab his hand and yank him upright off the bed. “Let’s have a talk with my family.”

  “See you later, masturbators,” Chloe calls out behind us.

  Chapter 9

  Carter comes up from the cellar refreshed, like he’s taken a dip in a cool tide pool. The shotgun is back in the steamer trunk, but Carter likes to think about it being there, loaded.

  His sense of purpose has made him stone cold sober. He couldn’t care less that the air is choked with the smell of burnt dinner. He won’t let anything kill his mood.

  But then his ears prick at the sound of Martha’s duck-like giggle. It’s coming from the bathroom at the end of the main hallway, where she took the stranger to bandage his head.

  That was more than ten minutes ago. There’s no reason they should still be in there, no good reason at all.

  Carter moves toward her voice, lingering a moment at a grandfather clock in the dining room. It has no hands on its face. Another Thorpe heirloom without an heir to claim it. The pendulum hangs motionless. He likes it that way, broken, like time can’t touch this house.

  Martha laughs again. The bathroom door at the end of the hall stands open a crack, but it seems to widen as Carter approaches. He moves past the yellowed wallpaper, past dim oil paintings of faded seascapes.

  He feels his body acutely, the blood rushing through every vein and artery. An intense emotion tightens his muscles, but he can’t seem to recognize what it is, like some vital wiring has been cut.

  Both of them are in there, the bathroom. The stranger sits on the lip of the claw-foot tub with Martha on her knees at his feet. She’s lowered herself, one hand cupped over the stranger’s shoe.

  Carter watches from just outside the door. The ache in his torso flares up. When he braces his palm against the wall, the wallpaper ripples, or seems to.

  And then a tune springs into his head, an old favorite.

  Martha, my dear. You silly girl, look what you’ve done.

  In the bathroom, something goes wrong for Martha. The stranger shakes her hand from his foot like he’s shooing a dog. She tips off balance and smacks her elbows on the checkered tile floor behind her. Her yelp is so pathetic, Carter suffers a pang of shame for her sake.

  “You bastard,” Martha growls as she struggles to her feet. Carter knows she’s talking to him, not the stranger. He has interrupted her fun. The door’s wide open now.

  She strikes a dignified pose, fingers brushing her pearl necklace. But God bless her, her hair’s out of whack and her stockings have split a run.

  The stranger’s face betrays no shame or fear. His belt’s buckled and his pants unmolested. Surprisingly, he actually does wear a fresh bandage on his forehead.

  “Where are the goddamn Lean Cuisines?” Martha says.

  “I’m not hungry,” Carter tells her.

  “What the hell were you doing down there? I’m starving.”

  Carter knows her outburst is all smoke and mirrors meant to distract from her indiscretion, but he lets her do her magic. Why not? The earth is buried in snow, and the clock has no hands.

  “Go get them yourself,” he tells her, deadpan.

  “Fine, I will.” When Martha huffs down the hall in her stockinged feet, Carter steps aside to let her pass. She’s left her pumps in a pile by the toilet.

  She’s also left the men to settle things, but Carter hesitates. He’s beat a housing discrimination case in court, he’s talked investors out of millions. He knows how to find weaknesses in other men, but there is no tell in this stranger’s eyes. No soul.

  There’s only the faint, untraceable ping of familiarity, like Carter has known this man before, somewhere. Maybe in those dreams that shock him awake, drenched in sweat. The dreams that make it impossible to sleep again for the rest of the night.

  “Martha’s an eager beaver. You must be a gratified m
an,” the stranger says, arching one eyebrow.

  “I need you to leave,” Carter snaps.

  The stranger sits up from the edge of the tub and walks over to the bathroom mirror to primp his bangs. “In this weather? I guess you know how risky that would be?”

  “You bet your ass.”

  “Is it because I refused your wife’s alternative medicine?”

  “Go to hell.” Carter speaks the words calmly, politely, though his rage could burst from every pore. He imagines himself bashing the stranger’s face against the porcelain sink until every perfectly chiseled feature has been pulverized.

  The stranger grins and thrusts out his hand like they’ve reached a mutually agreeable business arrangement. “Nice to have met you, Mr. Whitmore.”

  Carter wants this over with, so he grips the stranger’s hand. It’s feverish, almost too warm to touch. The stranger doesn’t look the least bit sickly, but Carter pulls away, repulsed.

  He watches the man head off toward the living room. Carter knows he won’t actually leave without being forced, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe there’s even a better way for Carter to reclaim his domain.

  For now, Martha’s voice grabs his attention.

  She’s been to the icebox and now she’s coming back up the cellar steps, humming that same jaunty Beatles melody that flashed in Carter’s mind just now.

  “…when you find yourself in the thick of it…”

  He moves to the cellar door and watches Martha climb. Frozen dinner boxes are stacked in her arms. The overhead light casts her long shadow back down the stairs.

  She’s surprised to find him waiting for her. She chirps “Oh!” and pauses on the topmost step. All those martinis are making her wobble.

  Just then, the overhead bulb sputters out. The house heaves a great exhale as the power grid goes down. White noise gives way to black silence.

  “Jesus, Cart, the electric. I told you—”

  “We’ll be fine, Martha, my dear,” Carter says.

  Then he shoves her square in the chest.