Falling into the Horror Boss's Lap novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The East Room

In Stroud House, with every light on, Billie spars with the Horror over a bad movie, and Dalton sends a photo of her open apartment door.

The woman who had said "right on time" in the dark turned out to be driving the car.

She wore a leather jacket, her gray-streaked hair cropped short, and she handed me a steel thermos before I had finished sitting down.

"Drink that," she said. "It's tea. It's mostly sugar."

"Noreen," the man beside me said, "stop drugging the guests."

"It's tea, Donovan."

I held the thermos in both hands and watched Baltimore slide past the window.

I was still shaking, and I hated that.

Donovan Stroud sat with his hands on his knees, looking straight ahead.

He had not said a word since the theatre.

Stroud House stood on a hill above Fells Point, a stone mansion the size of a small hotel.

Every window in it was lit.

Every single one, at one in the morning, with the curtains open.

"Do you have a problem with the electric company?" I asked.

"No," Donovan said.

"Do the electric company have a problem with you?"

"Not for years."

Noreen made a small sound that might have been a cough.

She showed me upstairs herself, along a long hall where every sconce was burning, to a bedroom at the end with a fire already going.

The bed was turned down.

The curtains were deep blue, and there was a vase of white roses on the dresser.

"The east room," Noreen said. "It's yours."

I opened the closet to look for a hanger.

Jeans, sweaters, a gray cardigan, three nightgowns, flats.

I took a sweater off the rail and checked the tag.

It was my size, exactly, down to the half-size in the shoes.

"Noreen," I said, "why does this closet have my clothes in it?"

"Mr. Stroud likes to be prepared."

"For what?"

"Guests."

"Do all your guests show up in my size?"

"You'd be surprised," she said, without a flicker, and left me standing there holding a sweater that smelled new.

Lacey arrived forty minutes later, in scrubs and her bomber jacket, carrying an aluminum bat over her shoulder.

Noreen had let her in the front door.

Noreen was now holding the bat, and Lacey was holding a crab cake off a silver tray.

"I got your text," Lacey told me, mouth full. "It said, quote, I fell on the Horror, come get me. I took a cab. I took the bat. Billie, he's got a butler."

"Noreen is not a butler," Noreen said.

"She carries my coat. She's a butler."

I laughed, and the laugh broke into something wetter than I wanted, and Lacey dropped the crab cake and held me in the middle of the hall while a stranger in a leather jacket politely studied the ceiling.

"You're staying," Lacey said into my hair. "I'm staying too. If he tries anything, I will call 911 and then hit him."

"He hasn't tried anything," I said.

"That's what they say right before the thing."

I could not sleep.

At two in the morning I put on the gray cardigan and went looking for a kitchen.

I found a light under a door instead, and the sound of someone being murdered at low volume.

The room was a small screening room with leather chairs.

A man in a hockey mask was chasing a screaming blonde across a cornfield on a screen the size of a wall.

Donovan sat in the third row with his jacket off and a bowl of popcorn in his lap.

Every lamp in the room was on.

"You watch this with the lights up," I said.

"I like to see the exits."

"There's no exits in a cornfield. That's the whole point of the cornfield."

He looked at me then, and I saw something move at the corner of his mouth that did not quite become a smile.

"You've seen it."

"Slaughter Hayride? My father rented it on my twelfth birthday." I dropped into the chair beside him. "She's going to hide in the silo."

"She's not going to hide in the silo."

"She hides in the silo."

On screen, the blonde ran straight into the silo.

Donovan held out the popcorn without a word.

We watched the hockey mask find her.

I told him the rest of it between handfuls, flat and in order, the way I would explain a spilled paint jar to a seventh grader.

Alden's voice behind the curtain.

The stairs.

My father's heart.

He did not write anything down.

He did not interrupt.

When I finished, he said, "When did he die?"

"July twelfth."

"Did you see a doctor sign for him?"

"A hospice nurse. She came nights." I frowned. "I never got her name."

"Hm," Donovan said, and for some reason the sound made the hair rise on my arms.

"Why didn't you throw me off your lap?" I asked.

"You were warm."

"That's not a reason."

"It was at the time."

My phone buzzed against my leg.

It was Dalton, and there was a photo.

My apartment door, standing wide open, the lock hanging off the frame.

Under it he had typed, "Come get your things, babe. We're all here waiting."

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