Malice House

by Megan Shepherd

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Supernatural suspense; Ghost; Horror

Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling author Megan Shepherd comes a complex tale of dark magic, family secrets, and monsters that don't stay on the page. "A propulsively charming nightmare, pooling like spilled ink across your imagination." — Kiersten White, New York Times bestselling author of Hide "Haunting and beautifully written . . . an exploration of the mysterious power of stories." —Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author of All the Missing Girls and The Last to Vanish "One step away from our world lies another: a land of violent fantasies, of sharp-toothed delights. . . ." Of all the things aspiring artist Haven Marbury expected to find while clearing out her late father's remote seaside house, Bedtime Stories for Monsters was not on the list. This secret handwritten manuscript is disturbingly different from his Pulitzer-winning works: its interweaving short stories crawl with horrific monsters and enigmatic humans that exist somewhere between this world and the next. The stories unsettle but also entice Haven, practically compelling her to illustrate them while she stays in the house that her father warned her was haunted. Clearly just dementia whispering in his ear . . . right? Reeling from a failed marriage, Haven hopes an illustrated Bedtime Stories can be the lucrative posthumous father-daughter collaboration she desperately needs to jump-start her art career. However, everyone in the nearby vacation town wants a piece of the manuscript: her father's obsessive literary salon members, the Ink Drinkers; her mysterious yet charming neighbor, who has a tendency toward three a.m. bonfires; a young barista with a literary forgery business; and of course, whoever keeps trying to break into her house. But when a monstrous creature appears under Haven's bed right as grisly deaths are reported in the nearby woods, she must race to uncover dark, otherworldly family secrets—completely rewriting everything she ever knew about herself in the process.

Release date: October 4, 2022

Publisher: Hyperion Avenue

Print pages: 420

Sample

 

I NEVER MEANT to find the manuscript, but maybe it meant to find me.

I’d arrived in Lundie Bay five hours later than planned, after a delayed flight and a stop at the Seattle-Tacoma airport bar, much to the chagrin of Dahlia Whitney, who stood beside me in the overgrown gravel drive, frowning up at the peeling paint of Malice House.

“So you’re an artist,” she said reproachfully.

I looked down at the canvas bag flopped open at my feet, bleeding out brushes and tubes of paint.

“Watercolor and ink,” I said, rubbing at a black ink stain on my thumb. “I do children’s book illustrations mostly.”

She folded her arms and didn’t ask to see my work. She jutted her chin toward the house with a grunt. “Well, let’s get started.”

How long had it been since I’d last seen Malice House? Three spindly stories that rose from the sea cliff unsteadily as though even after a hundred years they might not withstand one more. The smell of the nearby ocean mixed with overstuffed memories of a house bursting at the joints with books: books lining the shelves, stacked in the hallways, boxed up in the attic. The first time I came, I had set up an easel along the cliff and tried to sketch the house. But it had defied two dimensions. No matter how I worked on the perspective and planes, every drawing felt wrong. There was something so interdimensional about Malice House that without the smell of the pines, the taste of the sea spray, the ever-changing shadows on the rooftop, it was merely scratches on paper.

I thought of the last time I’d visited my father before his death, dragged there by my own guilt that it was only the two of us, and that he hadn’t been such a bad father that I was allowed to be such a bad daughter. Dad’s mind was already slipping. Dementia was an efficient beast. Eating holes in a once-sharp mind. It had been late summer, two years ago, and we’d taken the long walk into town down along the bluffs and sat at a coffee shop on the pier, where he’d calmly told me about the demon living inside the house’s walls. It was a pale crustacean the size of a small person with garden-shear-like claws. At night, he said, he heard it slithering beneath the main bedroom floorboards.

“It’s Haven, right? You should stay in the guest room, Haven.” Dahlia climbed the porch steps with no little difficulty, muttering about stiff joints, and unlocked the front door. The musty smell of old books and damp wood enveloped us. Moving to stand in the open doorway, I swept my eyes over the entry hall and spruce-beam archway that led to the library; rooms that felt unfamiliar even though I’d been in them countless times. Dad had been gone for six months—enough time for a coating of dust to have settled over the tables and lamps.

Dahlia unceremoniously tossed me the ring of house keys.

I narrowly caught them, stumbling forward as though waking from a dream.

“I thought I’d take the primary bedroom,” I said. “For the view.”

She made that deep-throat grunt again. “Suit yourself.”

Dahlia Whitney hadn’t liked my father, and the feeling had been mutual. Somehow the two of them had rattled around the old house together for years despite his paranoia that she was trying to kill him and her determination that he should accept Christ. If he had to have a caregiver, he protested, why couldn’t it be someone who didn’t resemble a lumpfish in an apron? For her part, Dahlia Whitney did her duties, cashed my father’s checks, and only had one condition of employment: She would never sleep a single night under Malice House’s roof.

I let out a long breath as I took in all the work ahead of me. After my father’s death, I’d hired a Seattle cleaning company to drive the two hours north to Lundie Bay and do the initial purge: strip the bedsheets, donate his clothes to charity, rid the house of anything perishable, wash and put away the small army of coffee cups he left on every surface. Since then, though, the house had remained untouched. Every shelf burst not only with books but yellowing paperwork, mugs the cleaners had overlooked, a half dozen long-dead houseplants. If they sought resurrection at my hand, they were out of luck.

An end table in the sitting room held a battered old typewriter and several picture frames that had been turned facedown as though to protect them from dust. Curious, I stood the frames up one by one. The first held a picture of Dad accepting a literary prize—they’d all blended together after a while. There was my parents’ wedding photo from their elopement, the same one I had framed back in New York. The last one was a photograph of a small group of people holding teapots in mock seriousness—I only recognized my father and the bookstore owner in town, whose name I couldn’t recall.

None of the photographs were of me. Grumpy, but not altogether surprised, I turned the wedding photo facedown again.

“Electricity and water are still on.” Dahlia switched on a lamp. “And the landline. There’s a phone in the kitchen and another in the upstairs hallway. The utility company cuts off service whenever a deed transfers hands, but since no one’s taken up residence since your father died, they let the account sit.”

“What about internet?”

She grunted. “Your father never had it. You’ll have to sign up with Comtek. There’s an office down on Boardwalk Street.”

I mentally added signing up for internet to my to-do list. My old phone was useless now since it was on Baker’s plan. I’d picked up a cheap pay-as-you-go flip phone in La Guardia, but it was talk and text only. In the meantime, one of the coffee shops in town would have Wi-Fi. Lundie Bay may have had a reputation as a sleepy seaside village, but being only two hours from Seattle, it drew the kind of tech investor second-homers who required constant connectivity even on vacation.

I followed Dahlia Whitney on a shuffling tour of the house as she pointed out a vent in need of repair, a box of long-unanswered mail, which burner on the stovetop worked and which didn’t, how to jiggle the back door open when it got stuck. We wandered past my father’s bar cart in the library—Scotch decanters long empty, resting next to the engraved copper Pulitzer Prize medal; the surprisingly small kitchen; the overly formal, never-used living room; the creaky stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor; the sleeping porch off the primary bedroom with the sea view and molding wicker furniture. I’d have to do something with all of it. The musty rugs. The drawers full of old files. The towels and linens. And the books, books, books; they watched from every corner of every room like vigilant gargoyles.

I was exhausted by the time I opened the door to the attic and tugged on the single light’s cord. The bulb blinked to life lazily. “I guess we should check out the attic.”

Dahlia Whitney gave another grunt, this one definitive. “I’m not going up there.”

I hesitated. I’d been in the attic enough times to know that my father, a closeted hoarder, had squirreled away countless boxes and stacks of who knows what up there.

“I don’t know what to do with everything,” I argued. “What needs to be shipped back to his publishers, what can be thrown away...”

She shrugged tensely.

Wasn’t this why I’d hired her? To show me what needed to be done?

“Mrs. Whitney—”

“Nope.”

From where I stood at the base of the stairs, a sudden coldness bit at my neck, coming from the direction of the attic. My ink-stained fingers grazed the uneven wall, patched over time and time again, and I shivered. The smell of dirt wafted down from up there. Freshly turned dirt.

As I was about to climb, Dahlia let out a small exclamation.

When I turned, she was staring into my father’s bedroom. I was on the verge of asking her what was wrong when I joined her and saw broken glass on the bedroom rug.

“Well, that’s just great,” I groaned. How much would a broken window cost to fix? I grabbed a tissue from the bedside table and knelt to collect the broken shards. “Can you tell what broke it?” I asked over my shoulder as she hovered in the doorway. “Maybe a branch?”

I glanced outside. Beyond the window was the front lawn. There weren’t any trees on that side of the house.

Dahlia was quiet for a few moments, her jaw working. She pulled out her phone and checked the time as though anxious to be on her way. “Teenagers, probably. Pranksters.”

But there wasn’t a rock or brick to support her theory. With her silence beginning to make me nervous, I tugged on the decorative iron bar framing the broken pane. “Good thing Dad took security seriously.”

It hadn’t been more than a year after he’d moved into Malice House that the first stalker showed up on his porch. Dad had written a literary horror in 2000 called Other/None Other. His creepiest fan mail came from readers of that book—letters accompanied by gruesome art or that were written to the story’s murderer, as though the letter’s author couldn’t separate fiction from reality. My father was unlisted in the phone book, but that hadn’t stopped weirdos from knocking on the door every couple of years, wanting an autograph or attention—the worst incident being the time an aspiring writer broke in at gunpoint and made my dad listen to him read his bad poetry. After that, Dad installed a security fence around the property, added extra locks on the doors, and paid a small fortune for custom windows with narrow iron bars to prevent entry. No cameras, though. He didn’t like the idea of anyone, even a security company, watching.

Wind slithered through the broken pane, making me shiver.

“Can’t keep out what’s already in,” Dahlia muttered.

My eyebrows rose. Dahlia Whitney was the type of woman to wear a silver cross necklace and proudly display a bumper sticker for a megachurch on her Kia.

“You don’t believe this place is haunted, do you? I thought that was just my dad.”

Her head snapped to me. “Don’t be stupid.” But the wavering in her watery eyes didn’t match her sharp tone. The wind whistled, and she kneaded her hands together and slid a glare back in the direction of the hallway. “Of course I don’t believe in ghosts. Neither did Amory, until his mind started to go. He got it in his head there were spirits here. Used to leave toast out to appease them. Under the bed, tucked in dresser drawers...” She scoffed. “It only drew the mice.”

I shifted the tissue full of broken glass from one hand to another. “He, um, mentioned a demon living in the walls.”

She pressed her lips together a few times. “I’m aware. Said he heard it under the bed. He kept a golf club by his pillow. Just in case.”

This time we both looked fixedly at the bed.

“What I’m saying is,” she said while wrapping her sweater more tightly around her torso, “I’d take the guest room.”

After Dahlia left—begrudgingly accepting my excuse that I was out of cash and would have to send her a check for keeping tabs on the house since my dad died—I dragged my suitcase up the stairs and unpacked a few things into the primary bedroom closet. I wasn’t the type to be deterred by moldy toast and phantom drafts. Besides, the screened-in sleeping porch off that bedroom would make a great studio so long as I could keep the rain out. Regardless, before I headed back downstairs, I found myself pausing by the bed and, after a second’s debate, bending down to peek underneath.

No demons.

Just dust and an empty china plate the cleaners had missed.

I straightened, chastising myself. I had greater worries than an old man’s ghosts. Before I’d left the airport, I’d checked my bank account. After the rental car fees and the two airport drinks, the account had sunk to high-two-figures territory. Not enough to pay Dahlia for the upkeep she’d done over the last few months. Certainly not enough to set up an internet account. Or buy much more than a frozen pizza, really.

Running from my past life, from my marriage, wasn’t cheap.

The whole world assumed that Amory Marbury’s estate was worth millions, and it would have been if he hadn’t made a series of bad investments in the last years of his life. The courts had ruled that the copyrights to his extant works and all royalties those works earned go to pay off his creditors in perpetuity. All that was left to inherit after settling debts and draining bank accounts had been the house. Tomorrow, I’d set up my painting supplies on the porch when I could judge where the best light fell, but even if I completed and sold an illustration tomorrow, it would take months to get paid. And thus far my art business had brought in exactly, well, zero dollars, so I’d found other ways to pay the bills in the interim.

On the drive up, I’d swung by a pawn shop in a strip mall just north of Seattle and bought a five-dollar used VHS player. Now I pulled a bootlegged VHS cassette out of my bag and went downstairs to connect the player to my father’s bulky old television set in the living room. When Rob, screen name SlasherDasher, had first offered me the gig, he’d promised to pay under the table and, more importantly, pay promptly. He hadn’t let me down yet. And a three-hundred-dollar transfer to my account tomorrow was worth staying up for all night tonight.

I rifled through my father’s old Scotch bottles until I found one with a few fingers left.

Though the handwritten label on the cassette read Anderson Anniversary Vacation—1991, it actually contained an underground slasher film about a family who managed the off-season maintenance at a summer camp. I took notes on my laptop while sipping from Dad’s crystal decanter. There was an interesting twist halfway through about the daughter and the drained lake. My eyes were bleary from watching the cheap VHS player’s wavy images, and when I reached for the bottle again, I found it empty. With a sigh, I paused the movie, untangled myself from the sofa, and poked around the kitchen for more booze, finding nothing. The cleaning crew from Seattle had probably absconded with most of what had been left out.

The light, I noticed, was still on in the attic stairwell.

I frowned up at the flickering bulb. A recluse who collected expensive Scotch would likely have an emergency supply stashed away somewhere, right?

The stairs creaked as I made my way up. Inside the cramped space, a sloping roof hid all manner of boxes, old furniture, insect-eaten stacks of clothes. On the other side of the single attic window, a moth hurled itself at the glass. Barefoot, I stepped over creaking boards that I didn’t trust not to wield loose nails and made my way past towering stacks of old manuscript copies, piles of research books, lesser-known awards my father hadn’t deemed worthy enough to display downstairs with the Pulitzer, and boxes of promotional tidbits his publisher had sent him over the years, mostly bookmarks and posters and custom bookplates for his signature.

After the funeral, his petite editor with a white streak of hair and tortoiseshell glasses had cornered me at the reception. “You’ll go through his office, of course,” she’d said with a wave of wineglass in hand. “He was such a complicated man. A writer’s office is like their soul. He wouldn’t want anyone but you to glimpse within it.”

Without thinking I’d answered, “I guess his soul was composed of promotional coasters for Exit, Nebraska.”

The editor had blinked from behind her glasses and gone to talk to the other publishing professionals around the buffet table.

Complicated didn’t begin to describe my father.

Now I picked my way through the attic’s maze of shadows. In one box, I found newspaper articles about my father that perhaps he’d meant to put in a scrapbook but never got around to. In another were too-small clothes he’d stored up here when he’d gained weight, ever hopeful of fitting back into them. I reached for another, smaller box and paused at the earthy scent. An odor I’d noticed earlier but that had faded amid the other musty attic smells.

To my surprise, it was a box of dirt. Not packaged soil from a plant nursery, but hard clumps, some still clinging to dried grass, as though my father had dug it right out of the garden and boxed it up. More boxes smudged with dirt rested nearby.

Okay, Dad...

Pushing the box away, I dusted off my hands and spotted a promising-looking wooden crate below the window. It was filled with packing straw, the kind of crate that came nailed shut and probably had required a crowbar to open. I dug around in the crate until my fingers glided over a bottle. Jackpot. Inside were dozens of bottles of Scotch, their labels printed in a language I couldn’t immediately place, which I assumed meant they were either very good or very bad. Knowing my father, I suspected the former.

As I grabbed two bottles and turned back toward the stairs, I saw the pages.

They were yellow and curled, tucked into a desk drawer that had warped from years of humidity. Though the drawer had a lock, a portion of its bottom had rotted away, revealing the sheets.

My father had his quirks, but it seemed odd to lock away papers in his own home when he was the sole resident. Was he worried about Dahlia snooping?

Curious, I set down the Scotch. Jiggling the drawer confirmed it was locked, but I grabbed a brick-like copy of Bodies of Water, my father’s second book, and knelt down to batter the drawer bottom’s desiccated particle board until the rest of it broke off. Chunks of wood rained down along with wafting yellowing pages like curled autumn leaves. If there had once been a string or rubber band to bind them, it had long ago rotted away.

I inspected the first few pages in the poor light of the single bulb. They were small, about five by seven inches, with a rough edge as though ripped from a notebook. The writing on them was undeniably my father’s, which was strange, since he usually typed everything on a battered old typewriter like the one downstairs. In my childhood memories, however, he wrote by hand and had only moved to typewriters later in life. When his editor had sent him a computer sometime in the late nineties, urging him to join the modern world, he’d smashed the thing in front of reporters and fired the editor, then moved to a new publishing house that offered him twice as much for his advances. Judging by these curled, handwritten pages, he must have written them decades ago.

My eyes scanned over random lines about grotesque mermaids and horned beasts, and it became clear that the unnumbered pages had shifted out of order when they’d fallen. I tucked my feet underneath me and settled in to put them in order, hunting until I came to what looked to be a rumpled title page.

He’d written the title in small, unassuming letters: Bedtime Stories for Monsters. Below the title was a table of contents:

“Beasts of Sun”

“Extremities”

“The Decaylings”

“Sweet Cream”

“Kaleidoscope”

“Sundown Coming”

“Everyone’s Favorite Uncle”

“Late Fees”

There was no date, no author credit to Amory Marbury or anyone else for that matter, which struck me as odd. Frowning, I flipped over the paper as though maybe an explanation had been scribbled on the back. But it was bare.

Doubt crept into my mind. Maybe this wasn’t one of my father’s old projects. It didn’t match the tone of his hefty literary tomes like Bodies of Water, novels about suicidal businessmen and the dissolution of marriage and the quiet desperation of swing-state politicians. None of his other works had even a whiff of the paranormal. Besides, why would he keep a manuscript secret? I’d never known him to be shy about discussing works in progress.

Still, there was no doubt that it was his handwriting.

I settled in to read the first page, and my sense of confusion grew with each line. It was, as the title suggested, a book about monsters. Literal monsters. The introduction read like a macabre fairy tale. One step away from our world lies another: a land of violent fantasies, of sharp-toothed delights.... I flipped through the unordered pages, trying to get the gist of the story. From what I could gather, it was set in a twisted world reminiscent of the 1950s mixed with the most depraved fantasies of the Brothers Grimm. Each of the eight stories centered on a different character. One was a witch who sold dubious potions at a Night Market, another a kestrel that could take on a human form, another a traveling salesman with an uncanny way with words.

What had inspired such characters? Neither my father’s imagination nor his habits had ever struck me as morbid: He collected Scotch, not, say, some serial killer’s demented prison artwork. The only time I could recall him mentioning anything macabre was when he’d described our distant relatives, deriding them as criminals and occultists and murderous dentists.

I flipped through the manuscript. At around fifty pages, it was far shorter than my father’s other works, yet there was something familiar about the writing style, especially compared to his early efforts, when he’d experimented with magical realism and extended metaphor before settling into contemporary realism for the bulk of his career. Those early stories hadn’t gotten much attention, though they were among my personal favorites.

Headlights shone through the window, throwing unwelcome bursts of light in my face, and I grimaced. The neighbor’s house, higher on the cliff, was mostly hidden behind trees during the day but fully revealed itself at night when the lights were on.

I blinked, disoriented. What time was it? My phone was downstairs next to the empty Scotch bottle.

Shit—the movie. If I didn’t write the summary, I wouldn’t get paid.

But a summer-camp killer was the last thing on my mind now. Rubbing the dust from my eyes, I gathered the manuscript pages in the basket of my arms and grabbed the neck of one of the Scotch bottles. I paused when I saw the headlights outside, still burning. When my father had bought Malice House, it must have been the only home for miles, buried in the steep seaside forests, built when the only lifestyle it could possibly suit was that of a recluse. But in the past few decades, Lundie Bay had gained a reputation as a seaside getaway for the outrageously rich, and now the road to my father’s house was dotted with mansions, each more modern than the next, built from local Washington timber and steel beams salvaged from old fishing yards. The neighboring house had been constructed a few years ago (my father had been livid to have people so close), a multimillion-dollar steel box overlooking the ocean.

I watched as the distant headlights shone on a figure—a man—lugging armfuls of something from his car trunk to the side yard. After another minute or so, the headlights were switched off, and I almost turned away until I saw a small flash of light in the darkness. The man had lit a match, and with a sputter of fuel, a bonfire erupted.

I stared at the blaze, hidden by the neighbor’s tree line to everyone but me. What kind of person, I wondered, was awake at three a.m. on a weekday, alone, sneaking around their own house?

Then I realized with an unwelcome shiver that, apparently, I was.

I SPENT THE night with the pages of Bedtime Stories for Monsters fanned out on my bed, sifting through them like an archaeologist, uncovering layer after layer of my father. I made an alarmingly large dent in the bottle of Scotch in my excitement to solve the puzzle of this manuscript. I found myself reaching into my canvas bag for a paintbrush as I read, craving the sensation of running my thumb over the bristles. I often thought best with a paintbrush or pencil in hand—an artist to the core.

Now that I had the manuscript more or less in order. I settled back with the same tingle of anticipation that I always got when poised to crack open a new book. As I sipped my drink, I read in fascination about a monster that hid under the bed, waiting to pinch bare feet off with crab-like claws, not unlike the demon my father believed lived in the house walls.

The stories were loosely stitched together, all taking place in a demonic world called, interestingly, Malice. Taken from the name of my father’s house, of course, even though it had already been named Malice when my father bought it eleven years ago—a corruption of the previous owner’s name: Miss Alice. M’Alice. Which—if the townspeople were to be believed—fit mean old Alice Halliday perfectly well.

There were no real plotlines to the stories, though one character named the Harbinger did appear in several different stories on a search for some ultimate monster. My mind spun with a thousand questions. When had my father written this? During his brief affair with cocaine in the nineties? No, that didn’t seem right—as bizarre as the stories were, they were too well structured to be some sort of coked-up ramble. Had he been testing out a new style under a pen name? His editors would have balked at a collection of macabre fairy tales compared to his award-winning literary works. Or were these stories he’d heard from those disreputable distant relatives in Lisbon and Helsinki and Joshua Tree?

By the time daylight filtered through the bedroom windows, I had finished reading the last page but was no closer to understanding why my father would have written such stories, and more curiously, hidden them away for decades under lock and key. But my hands were trembling with excitement. They might not have been the type of stories my father’s editors would hold in high esteem, but I adored them. They were my kind of stories. Stories of madness. Of monsters. Of magic. My skin was prickling—this lost manuscript was a buried gem.

It wasn’t until later in the day, as I ate a crumpled granola bar I’d found in my purse in a poor excuse for lunch, that it occurred to me that the manuscript could also be a financial opportunity. I almost choked as the realization hit me: An undiscovered Marbury manuscript could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. My father’s creditors owned the copyrights to his six previously published works, but this one wasn’t named in the settlement. They had no claim over it. Granted, Bedtime Stories for Monsters was no usual Marbury work, but with the right cover and marketing campaign, anything with my father’s name would race up the bestseller list.

Excited now, I started to think through the idea. The problem was how to get the manuscript into the right hands. Over the years I’d met my fair share of my father’s publishing contacts, but I hadn’t gotten on well with them; whenever I’d told any of them I wanted to illustrate children’s books, they’d avoided me, afraid I’d pester them for a contract. And, to be honest, I hadn’t left the best impression when I’d gotten drunk at his funeral and told most of them exactly where they could shelve their condolences.

Then I remembered the framed photograph next to the old typewriter, one of the ones turned facedown. I went to the library and took a second look at the portrait of the small group. Besides my father, the only person I recognized was the owner of Lundie Bay Books. Catherine Tyson? Tisdale? Tybee—that was it. Catherine Tybee. We’d met a few times at his book signings in town. She and her husband had been in a book club my father started in an effort to bring more culture to Lundie Bay. She’d struck me as a fawning older woman beaming in the presence of the revered Amory Marbury, but she was sharp and professional and, most importantly, hadn’t been at the funeral to witness me making a fool out of myself. As I remembered, her husband—probably the white-bearded man in the photograph with his arm around her—had been a big-shot editor in New York before retiring.

A bookseller and her editor husband would certainly have publishing connections, or at least know which direction to point me in.

I considered the idea over the next few days while I attempted to rearrange the house and make it feel less like I was living in a dead man’s shadow. Eventually, I decided it was worth getting in touch with the Tybees, which meant making myself look presentable.

I tugged on clean pants while I considered my hair. It didn’t like the Pacific Northwest’s perpetual damp. And tossing and turning every night in my sleep had left my hair unattractively curly. My flat iron was back in Baker’s apartment along with nearly everything else to my name. When I’d left, all I’d grabbed were my art supplies, laptop, and a few clothes—just the essentials until I could get myself back on my feet.

I pulled my hair into a low ponytail, brushed my teeth clean of a lingering film of alcohol, and grabbed the manuscript and my laptop. I was nearly out the door when a voice in my head whispered a warning.

I looked down at the small notebook pages that held Bedtime Stories for Monsters.

Lundie Bay wasn’t only famous as a getaway destination for tech investors. My father had left a permanent mark here, as much a tourist draw as the nearby Mayfelt Islands. There were people out there obsessed enough with his works to break in at gunpoint. What would they do if they knew about an undiscovered manuscript?

An old tin of Werther’s caramels sat on the entry table. My father must have been the only one in the world who still sucked on them, picking up the habit when he gave up smoking. I folded the manuscript pages in half, threw out the ancient, half-melted candy, and hid the story inside.

Outside, the sun was mottled behind clouds—normal weather for the area. Either that or steady rain. I smelled the sea mixed with pines as I opened the rental car door. Pulling out the gate, I hit the remote-controlled button to close it behind me and caught a glimpse of the neighbor’s driveway, thought again of the car pulling up so late at night, the tangerine flare of a lit match, then the blaze.

What had my neighbor been burning?

From here I couldn’t see the lower level of the house, only the steel point of the roof. But I caught the name as I drove by the mailbox.

Kahn.