Page 75 of The Staircase in the Woods

Weariness wrapped itself around her bones, slowly crushing her. Lore went to the nook table and sat down, slumping forward.

Hamish paced the room.

“I hated having to sell a place like this back in my real estate days. Like, it’s obviously well-loved and whatever, but it’s ugly and it sucks. So the most painful thing was telling the seller,You gotta get rid of all this stuff, paint it white, try to make it look a little less like the cottage of some middle-aged upstate farmer type. Every house, you just wanted them to paint the personality out of it so that the next people could see a place to put their personality into.”

“Yeah,” Lore said, barely listening.

“Owen. Nick.”

“I know,” Lore said. “They’re gone.”Or we are.

“We need to—they can’t—they’re out there and—”

“I know.”

She scanned the room even as Hamish paced.

What stood out suddenly was the wheelchair. She almost didn’t realize it was there, since it was at the far side of the breakfast nook table—what she thought was a chair with four legs was instead a chair with two wheels. And at that place was a plastic food tray mostly empty but for bits of dried food—like maybe baby food? Something blended. Chopped. Easy to chew or gum.

Lore stood up and rounded the table to get a closer look.

Pills. There were pills in that tray. Pills of indeterminate origin—two capsules, two little tablets, a big dry horse pill. The cleaning smell was really strong over here, too, and then it hit her—

She looked around again—

Oh, god.

She knew this kitchen.

She’dseenthis kitchen before.

Never been in it, no, but she’d watched enough of thedocumentary—which used a lot of footage from the family—to recognize it.

“This is Billy Dink’s kitchen,” she said.

Hamish froze and arched an eyebrow in confusion. “Who?”

She explained. Said that Billy Dink was a thirteen-year-old boy whose mother kept him sick on purpose, who told the world he had a number of rare conditions in order to elicit their sympathy, their money, and most of all, theirattention. Because his mother, Brenda, was a narcissist monster in the throes of MSP: Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She fabricated his illnesses and kept him both sick by dosing him with various cleaning products and doped up via the pills she got from the doctor. Somehow, at some point, Billy had enough presence of mind to fight through the fog of poison and pills and realize what was happening to him—that he wasn’t born sick, but rather wasmadethat way byhis own monstrous mother. He started to hide his pills instead of swallowing them, and in a moment of clarity, he stole a serrated steak knife from one of the kitchen drawers, and on a Tuesday morning in May, just before his mother was about to talk to local reporters about her son’s condition, he stuck the knife in her neck and she died.

She died herein this room.In fact—

Lore walked into the kitchen, looking down.

The floor here was tile.

The tile was clean.

But the grout was not.

The grout had been…stained rust red in an erratic patch.

Where the blood had left her neck. Where it had pooled. Where it had used the space between tiles as canals in which to travel and spread.

“Okay,” Hamish said, confused and uninterested. On a lark, he went poking around the kitchen. Lore’s brain set to work. This was a kitchen she knew. That Greige Room was one that Hamish knew. And it had that book—herbook in it.

She remembered then the message sliced into the wallpaper.

THIS PLACE HATES YOU.

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