House of a Thousand Lies: a Novel by Cody Luke Davis

Author:Cody Luke Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

* * *

An hour later, he’s caught up on most of the relevant Wolf family history. The sky outside is starting to get lighter.

Kerry yawns, exhausted. “Did you recover any attachments?”

“No. She downloaded none. I can only see that he sent six. Big files. And that the first one was a photo.” Pink pulls a mangled, burnt piece of paper out of his backpack. “But I also found this crumpled inside what I can only guess was a melted fax machine. Diana must have exotic taste in photo paper or ink, or both, or it would’ve burned to ash. Remember he mentioned a fax? I believe this is what came out before she could unplug it. The first attachment.” He flips it around.

Kerry looks at it, and what he sees makes him shiver.

A photograph.

It’s wrinkled to shit, all four corners are torn and jagged, and there are two large holes in it, but the image is clear enough. It’s of a black iron door set into a cliff. The door—and the rock on all sides of it—is charred black, like someone started a fire on the other side. Above the cliff, there’s a strip of blue sky bisected by a jet trail.

Looking at the photograph reminds Kerry of how cold he felt when he first leapt into the brothers’ so-called treehouse. “What do we do? Who do we take this to?”

Pink frowns. “No one. Especially not police.”

Kerry laughs. “So what? We just sit on it? Pretend we never saw it?”

“It would be the smartest thing,” says Pink, but something’s bothering him. “But what if Cy is right?”

“Right how?”

Pink gets a dark, sad look on his face. “What if his brother has done worse than kill a girl and bury her in the woods? Is still doing it? Diana has already chosen to pretend. Whatever it is Cy was trying to stop … what if we are the last two people who can stop it?”

Kerry shivers again. “It’s not our problem.”

Pink nods. “Maybe you’re right. But if I’m going to pretend this doesn’t exist, I would rather know what this is. Or I’ll spend the rest of my life imagining … won’t you?”

Got a point. “Cy said to find this door,” says Kerry, “so, say we want to … how are we supposed to do that if he left the directions in the second attachment?”

Pink shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

Kerry breathes in and out, hyperventilating again. He needs to start carrying paper bags. “You know you smell, right?”

Pink laughs. “My Lyft driver down here said the same.”

Kerry nods. “Go take a shower. Leave your nasty clothes outside the door, and I’ll throw them in the wash. If we’re gonna be working on this all day, I want you sterilized before you sit on anything else.”

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