The Wise and the Wicked by Rebecca Podos

Author:Rebecca Podos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

• Twenty-One •

Evelina Chernyavsky answered the door to room 113 in a powder-blue bathrobe sprinkled with little pink flowers, her hair braided into a blond-and-gray corona. She wore no makeup, and blinked heavy eyes in the light filtering through the clouds.

It was barely eight o’clock at night—had she been in bed?

“Ruby.” Her mother blinked and looked beyond her, as if she’d been expecting somebody else on her doorstep. Finding no one, she shuffled back to let Ruby in.

Though the air outside was freezing, Ruby didn’t rush across the threshold, but stepped cautiously over it. She could tell on sight that the Molehill Motel wasn’t a mints-on-the-pillow place, more the vending-machine-for-dinner-except-the-vending-machine-is-busted sort of accommodations. Maybe there was a “continental breakfast” in the lodge, if they preferred boxed cereal and a pitcher of room-temperature milk on the continent. Inside the fairly barren room barely lit by a flickering bulb, there were two twin beds with two papery-looking pillows apiece. There was a mini fridge, a small TV on a bureau, and a single-serve coffee maker surrounded by boxes of assorted teas she must’ve accumulated over the last month. The closet door gaped open, her mother’s things spilling out. Worn, loose jeans, soft sweaters, milky-colored scarves. A yellow knit winter hat faded and pilled with age, a giant pom-pom perched on top.

She recognized that hat.

Don’t be afraid, baby. We’re Chernyavsky women. The dark is scared of us.

There was a tug in Ruby’s heart as something ruptured, some seal puncturing, letting loose six years’ worth of little-kid need, mindless and pure. The sort Dahlia never elicited, no matter how hard they pretended that she was the “mom.” But this woman who smelled the same as she remembered? Ruby wanted her to promise again and again that it was going to be okay. She wanted her mother to take care of everything and be in charge of everything. Of Ruby’s hunt for the truth, of Ruby’s future, of Ruby.

And that was no good at all.

“Bathroom?” she gritted out. It was becoming her go-to move.

Without waiting for an answer, she tracked snow and road salt into the carpet, headed for the closed door beyond the closet. Ruby hurled herself into a bathroom the unhealthy green of an overripe avocado, locking the door, sitting on the toilet, trying to breathe through what felt like pounds of gravel clogging her throat. Still, she wasn’t far enough from her mother, so she shoved back the plastic shower curtain, tucked herself into the dry bathtub, and pulled shut the curtain.

That was a little better.

She needed to approach this scientifically, unemotionally. Create hypotheses, ask questions, gather information.

She needed to get her shit together.

Crawling back out of the tub, her eye caught on the sink top. Among travel-sized bottles of shampoos and creams, hairpins and coiled cast-off jewelry, a familiar necklace winked. Polina’s locket, the one she’d seen in the little wooden box on her bedroom vanity. Her mother must’ve gone back to the house and taken it.

Ruby doubted any of the

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