CHAPTER 22

The next several weeks went quickly, as Nisa and I prepared for the time ahead. I wished I’d taken more photos of Hill House to show to Stevie and Amanda Greer. Imani had bowed out—her daughter had college visits scheduled during the period we’d be there—but she’d assured me she was on board with directing the public reading once we all returned to the city.

The few overexposed photos I had weren’t worth sharing, though I found myself gazing at them when no one else was around, feeling a faint jolt every time I did, as though I’d been sneaking a look at Nisa’s phone. But mostly I was busy packing, and making sure Stevie didn’t do something impulsive, like invite some guy he’d met on Grindr to come along.

I also had to make arrangements with Amanda. Who, it turned out, didn’t want to tell her agent she was taking the job.

“It’s two weeks out of town, without a producer attached—she’ll tell me not to waste my time,” she said when we spoke one afternoon. “No offense. But I really do like the script, and I’m sure we can come to an agreement…”

The agreement was considerably more than I’d anticipated, but probably less than what I’d have to shell out if I went through Amanda’s agent and Equity. I went over my bank balance, totting up what I’d already paid out for Hill House, for Amanda Greer, for Melissa and Tru Libby (who had indeed agreed to cook), not to mention gas and food. Whenever I felt anxious at how quickly my grant money was disappearing, I’d scroll again through my blurry photos of Hill House and envision myself on the veranda with Nisa, a bottle of champagne between us as we watched the sun slide down the October sky.

And at last, we were headed back to Hillsdale, the day before Amanda was scheduled to arrive. Stevie came with Nisa and me, scrunched in the back seat along with our pillows, backpacks, and the oversized duffel bag that contained his laptop, microphone, and other recording equipment. Also his arsenal of vape pens, both tobacco and cannabis; a prescription bottle of alprazolam that had Stevie’s name on it, though the various pills, mostly but not limited to sedatives, had in fact been pilfered from numerous friends and relatives.

“It stays with me, you know that,” Stevie said when I’d raised an eyebrow at the duffel, currently flopped over his lap like an enormous green-and-white-striped slug. “If I put it in the trunk there’ll be no room for Nisa’s case of wine, or her guitar, or her books, or her extremely special coffee hand-roasted by cloistered nuns…”

“Oh my god,” moaned Nisa. “How many weeks of this, Holly? And it’s not nuns, it’s Trappist monks.”

Stevie and I burst out laughing. “Good to know,” I said.

It was a beautiful morning. We’d left before dawn, and hit the Taconic at sunrise. The autumn leaves were just past peak, scarlet and blaze orange and luminous yellow. It was so early there were few other cars on the parkway. I glanced at Nisa. “Are you excited?”

“So excited,” Stevie replied before Nisa could open her mouth. “You said this house is haunted, did you ever find out what the deal is?”

“Not haunted. Ainsley told us that—”

“Because I did.” Stevie opened his window to take a hit from a vape pen, exhaling rose-scented mist. “The woman whose husband built the place was killed when her carriage ran into a tree. That was in 1880. Then another woman was killed about sixty years ago when her car ran into the same tree. Same thing happened again with another woman in the eighties. They finally cut the tree down.”

“That doesn’t sound haunted,” I said. “It sounds like bad driveway design. I saw the stump—that tree must’ve been huge, I don’t know how you couldn’t see it.”

“It was on a forum about haunted houses.” Stevie adjusted his glasses in a professorial way, as though he were lecturing on DNA splicing rather than a Reddit thread. “They think maybe one of them killed herself. And there was something about a kid who might have poisoned his family when they were living there. No, not his family,” he said, musing. “Someone visiting them. But that was a lot later, in the eighties, maybe.”

“Wow.” Nisa slid down in her seat. “That’s crazy. Did you google it?”

“Of course I did.”

“And…”

“And nothing. It was before the Internet, and Hillsdale’s in the middle of nowhere. A couple mentions of a small-town tragedy, and Hillsdale got name-checked in some old article about all those Satanic preschool cases. Also, one on Satanic D&D players. Otherwise the only thing I saw was that one post on Reddit.”

Nisa shot me a triumphant look. “I told you there were ghosts! Ainsley was lying.”

“Nobody said they saw a ghost,” Stevie said mournfully. “Just, you know, that Hill House has bad vibes. Also, bad cell reception.”

“Haunted houses never have cell reception.” Nisa turned to face Stevie. “That’s how you know they’re haunted.”

Stevie laughed with more enthusiasm than her remark warranted. She leaned into the back seat to take his hand. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.

“Me too,” he replied.

Stevie and I had met right out of school, at a shoestring theater that operated out of a former massage parlor on Broome Street. Pay to Look, a trio of short plays I’d written, had run there for a weekend. Stevie was the sound guy. Each play was based on a peep show. Diableries was inspired by an 1840 Parisian lithograph, and The Murder of Maria Martin in the Red Barn by a peep show from 1894 England; Pay to Look was based on my own fleeting experience as an Internet sex worker to put myself through my final year of college.

Pay to Look was only performed that one weekend, but Stevie behaved as though we’d been signed to a West End run. His sound design was exquisite: eerie captures of voices, distant rumblings of thunder, screams that became the cries of seagulls. I was surprised he knew about nineteenth-century peep shows, but it turned out Stevie was obsessed with Victorian toy theaters, which dovetailed with my own taste for Grand Guignol. He had an odd collection and would sometimes bring some of his cardboard models to our rehearsals.

“Don’t you just wish you could disappear inside it?” he’d asked me once, reluctantly folding up a portrayal of The True Story of Bluebeard.

“I wouldn’t fit. And you sure wouldn’t.”

We’d been so close back then, though never romantically involved. Stevie slept with both men and women, whereas I hadn’t touched a guy sexually since I was in high school. We’d get high and wonder why we couldn’t fall in love with each other, and not narcissistic children’s book editors and actresses (me), and a series of bodybuilders, usually lawyers, prone to steroid-induced rages (Stevie).

“Is love dysphoria a thing?” he’d wondered aloud one night as we lay on his couch, limbs entwined and so stoned I couldn’t feel my tongue. “Because I think that’s what I have.”

“It’ll happen, baby,” I’d reassured him.

But it never really had.

“Did you bring any of your creepy theaters?” I asked, hoping to shift his attention from Nisa.

“I did!” Stevie let go of Nisa’s hand, stretching his long legs so his feet bumped the opposite side of the car. “Bluebeard, an original Jacobsen I found on eBay—Danish, it was so expensive but it’s beautiful. The sets are all from a Moorish castle. I swear you could live in it. If you were, like, two inches tall.”

“Oh my god, you are such a geek, Stevie.” Nisa batted at him playfully.

“You’ll thank me when you hear what I’ve done for your show. Our show,” he corrected himself, catching a glimpse of my face in the rearview mirror. “Holly’s show.”

“Our show,” Nisa repeated, and stuck in her earbuds.