The Grownup Read Online Free PDF Page B

these fancy-people library books. But I wasn’t a well-read bookworm; I was just a dumb whore in the right library. Miles pulled out a photo from the desk drawer, a wedding photo. The summer sunset behind the bride and groom left them backlit, shrouded. Susan was gorgeous, a luscious, lively version of the woman I knew. The groom? I barely recognized the face, but I definitely knew the dick. I had been giving hand jobs to Susan’s husband for two years.
    Miles was watching me, his eyes squinting, a comedian waiting for the audience to get the joke.
    “She’s going to kill you, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to kill me too,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “She’s calling 911 downstairs right now. She told me to stall you. When she comes up, she’s going to shoot you, and she’s going to tell the cops one of two things. One: You are a con artist who claims she has psychic powers in order to prey on the emotionally vulnerable. You told Susan you could help her mentally unstable son—and she trusted you—but instead, all you’ve been doing is coming into the house and stealing from her. When she confronted you, you became violent, you shot me, she shot you in self-defense.”
    “I don’t like that one. What’s the other option?”
    “You actually are legit. You really did believe that the house was haunting me. But it turned out I’m not haunted, I’m just a run-of-the-mill teen sociopath. You pushed me too hard, I killed you. She and I struggled with the gun, she shot me in self-defense.”
    “Why would she want to kill you?”
    “She doesn’t like me, she never has. I’m not her son. She tried to pack me off to my mom, but my mom has zero interest. Then she tried to ship me to boarding school but my dad said no. She definitely would like me dead. It’s just how she is. It’s how she makes her living: She defines and eliminates problems. She’s practical in an evil way.”
    “But she seems so—”
    “Mousy? No, she’s not. She wanted you to think that. She’s a beautiful, successful executive. She’s a goddamn overdog. But you needed to feel like you were preying on someone weaker than you. That you had the upper hand. I mean, am I wrong? Isn’t that your whole business? Manipulating the manipulatable?”
    My mom and I played that game for a decade: dressing and acting the part of people to be pitied. I didn’t see it coming the other way.
    “She wants to kill me…because of your dad?”
    “Susan Burke had the perfect marriage, and you ruined it. My dad’s gone. He left.”
    “I’m sure a few…liaisons is not the reason your dad left.”
    “It’s the reason she has chosen to believe in. It’s the problem she has defined and plans to eliminate.”
    “Does your dad know…I’m here?”
    “Not yet—he really does travel all the time. But once my dad learns we’re dead, hears Susan’s story? Once she tells him about being so scared, and coming across the business card for the psychic in his copy of
Rebecca,
and desperately asking her to help…imagine that guilt. His kid is dead because he wanted a hand job. His wife was forced to defend her family and
kill
because he got a hand job. That horror and guilt—he’ll never be able to make it up to her. Which is the point.”
    “That’s how she found me? My business card?”
    “Susan found the card. She thought it was odd. Fishy. My dad loves ghost stories, but he’s the world’s biggest skeptic—he’d never see a palm reader. Unless…she wasn’t really a palm reader. She followed him. She made an appointment. And then you walked in from the backroom with his copy of
The Woman in White,
and she knew.”
    “She confides in you.”
    “At first I took it as a compliment,” he said. “Then I realized she’s trying to distract me. She told me about her plan to kill you so I wouldn’t realize I was going to die too.”
    “Why not just shoot me in an alley one night?”
    “Then my dad feels no pain. And if she’s