The Only One Left by Riley Sager

TEN

Just like when Mrs. Baker first led me to it, my bedroom door seemingly moves on its own. One touch of the handle is all it takes to send it swinging open with a pronounced creak.

Inside, the room glows red. An uneven, pulsing light coats the walls and makes the bedroom look nightmarish. With each flash of red comes an insistent buzzing sound.

Lenora’s call button.

She needs me.

I push into the room, my eyes stinging from the pulsing red light on the nightstand. I trip over the box of books sitting in the middle of the floor, sending it toppling. Paperbacks spill around my ankles as I keep moving.

To the adjoining door.

Into Lenora’s room.

To her bed, where she lies with her left hand clenched around the call button. Her eyes are open wide and wild.

“What’s wrong?” I say, too worried to think about the fact that she can’t answer me. Anything could be wrong. Another stroke. A heart attack. Seizure or sickness or impending death.

When she sees me, Lenora’s grip on the call button loosens. She sighs, looking childlike and embarrassed, and I think I understand what happened.

“Did you have a nightmare?”

Lenora, still holding the call button, uses it to tap twice against the bedspread.

“Must have been a real humdinger,” I say, which is what my mother called especially nasty nightmares. The kind that linger after you wake. The kind that make you afraid to close your eyes again. “Do you want me to stay here until you fall back asleep?”

Two more taps.

When I was little and had a real humdinger of a nightmare, my mother would crawl into my bed and wrap her arms around me, which is what I do now with Lenora. She looks so rattled—still so utterly scared—that it feels wrong not to.

“Nightmares are just your brain thinking it’s Halloween,” I tell her. Something else my mother said. “All trick, no treat.”

Lenora’s left hand finds my right one and clasps my fingers. The gesture, despite being tender, almost desperate, leaves me reeling. Lenora Hope, my town’s version of the bogeyman and the woman whose guilt kids to this very day chant about, is holding my hand.

Part of me wants to recoil from her touch. Another part of me feels terrible about that. No matter what she did in the past—which, let’s be clear, was very, very bad—Lenora’s still a human being who deserves to be treated like one.

If she even did all the things she’s accused of. The same thought I had in the ballroom occurs to me now: Would a seventeen-year-old girl even be capable of killing three people like that? These were physical crimes. Slitting her father’s throat. Stabbing her mother. Tying a noose around her sister’s neck and hoisting her to her death. I wouldn’t be able to do it, which makes it hard for me to believe someone half my age could.

Maybe Jessie’s theory is right and it was Winston Hope or someone else. If so, Lenora has paid a terrible price. No, she never went to jail. But she’s been imprisoned for decades.

In her own home.

In her childhood bedroom.

In a body that refuses to function.

Then again, if what everyone has said is true, then it means I’m embracing a murderer. One whose care and well-being I’m responsible for. I’m not sure which scenario is worse. I’m also not sure I can continue to work here without knowing the truth. Maybe that’s what made Mary leave without warning. She could no longer take the not-knowing.

“Lenora,” I whisper. “Did you really do it?”

She releases my hand, and I hold my breath, preparing for the answer about to be tapped against the bedspread. To my surprise, Lenora doesn’t tap. Instead, I get a nod toward the typewriter on the other side of the room.

“You want to type?”

Lenora taps twice against my hand.

“Right now?”

Two more taps. More urgent this time.

Because it seems easier to bring the typewriter to Lenora instead of the other way around, I carry it across the room in an awkward waddle and plop it down on the edge of the mattress. Then I climb back into bed and prop up Lenora against me so she can easily access the keyboard. All that effort leaves me perspiring. This better be worth it.

“Go ahead,” I say as I place her left hand on the keys.

Lenora knits her brows, thinking. Then she types four words before nodding, signaling for me to hit the return bar.

i wont hurt you

My pulse quickens as I read the sentence.

“I appreciate that,” I say, not sure how else to reply. How did Lenora know I wanted to hear this? Are my emotions as easily read as hers?

Lenora resumes typing.

i suppose youve heard the song about me

“The rhyme?” I say, surprised she knows of its existence. It must be horrible having her life—and her family’s deaths—reduced to a childish chant. “I have. It’s . . . cruel.”

i find it amusing

Another surprise. “You do?”

all that effort for little old me

“Is it true?”

you can find out

Curiosity tugs at me. As does fear and a healthy dose of uncertainty. “How?”

i want to tell you everything

“Everything? What does that mean?”

things ive never told anyone else

“About the murders?” I say, surprised I can hear myself over the sound of my heartbeat pounding like a drum in my ears.

yes about that night

I look at Lenora. The dim light of the room somehow makes her green eyes brighter. They glint fiercely now. Emeralds lit from within, holding me hostage in their gaze.

My God, she’s serious.

“Why me? Why now?”

because i trust you

“Are you sure?”

Lenora’s hand slides from the typewriter and drops to the mattress. Her body language is crystal clear. She’s sure.

“I’ll think about it,” I say as I carry the typewriter back to the desk. By the time I return to the bed, Lenora is asleep. I can tell by her breathing—a deep, steady rhythm. I switch off the lamp and place the call button next to her left hand before tiptoeing away.

Back in my room, I finally ditch the nurse’s uniform. Taking it off feels like removing armor. I feel freer, yes, but also oddly vulnerable. Gone is the sense of purpose I’d felt when I first put it on. Now I’m back to being aimless, slump-shouldered me.

After putting on a nightgown and fuzzy socks, I press a hand to my heart. It’s still galloping. This time, I know exactly why.

After decades of silence, Lenora Hope wants to tell all.

And I need to decide if I want to hear it.

Part of me thinks, obviously, yes. This place, with its murderous past, mind-messing tilt, and general dourness, is already a lot to deal with. I suspect it would be easier if I knew what happened that night—and Lenora’s role in it. Especially because I’m the one who’ll be spending the most time with her. The one tasked with feeding her, bathing her, dressing her, keeping her alive. At the very least there’d be no more wondering, no more suspicion.

Then again, not knowing provides at least a sliver of optimism. If Lenora confesses to killing her family, that will be gone.

I’m still weighing my options as I start to unpack, beginning with the books I’d abandoned when Jessie showed up at my door. I grab a handful and take them to the bookshelf, which is already filled with paperbacks, leaving no room for my own. I grab one—Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett—and open it. Inside the front cover, written in ballpoint pen, is a message.

This book is the property of Mary Milton

Those same words are in the next book I pick up, a battered copy of John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire. While it seems odd that Mary left so many books behind, I also understand. Books aren’t easy to move—and maybe Mary thought whoever replaced her would enjoy them.

Things start to make less sense when I abandon the books and try to unpack my clothes. The dresser’s top drawer is filled with pristine nurse’s uniforms exactly like my own. While I totally get why Mary left those behind—I would have done the same thing—more of her clothes fill the other drawers. Not just uniforms, but slacks, blouses, and underwear. I assume they belong to Mary because some of the tags bear initials written in Magic Marker.

MM

Sorting through the clothes, I see a pair of Jordache jeans, a pink Lacoste polo shirt, a striped blouse with the price tag still attached. Sears. Twelve dollars. All of it looks to be new and in good condition—far nicer than my own clothes.

In the closet, I find a wool coat drooping from a hanger. And boots on the floor below it. And an empty cardboard box bearing a word again written in Magic Marker: Books.

Beside it, surrounded by a thin coating of dust, is a narrow rectangle of clean floor where something else used to sit. What it was, I have no idea. Another box, presumably. Now gone.

On the closet shelf is a medical bag similar in shape and size to the one my parents gave me. I pull it down and peek inside, seeing most of the same items I keep in mine, arranged in an orderly manner. Its presence makes no sense. If there had been a family emergency, as Jessie suspects, Mary surely would have spent a minute grabbing her medical bag and at least some of her clothes.

Instead, she left almost everything behind.

I give up trying to unpack. It’s late, I’m tired, and there’s no place to put any of my belongings. As I turn out the lights and climb into bed, two thoughts hit me in quick succession—a fact and a question.

The fact: Mary left in a hurry.

The question: What drove her away?

After putting the snow globe in my room, I crept downstairs, hoping to gorge myself on leftover birthday cake. But there was no cake to be found. Only Berniece Mayhew, who looked none too pleased to be washing dishes at that late hour.

“Happy birthday, Miss Hope,” she muttered when she saw me, not a drop of happiness in her tone.

On my way down the hall, I noticed that the door to the billiard room was ajar. Maybe some of the servants were playing, which they sometimes did behind my father’s back. Usually, they let me join in, much to Miss Baker’s alarm.

“Ladies shouldn’t play pool,” she once told me.

“Lucky for me I’m not a lady,” I replied.

I paused at the door and peeked into the room. Indeed, there was a servant inside. I couldn’t see who it was because she was spread facedown against the billiard table, her skirt pushed up to her waist.

Behind her was my father, his trousers around his ankles and his face turning crimson as he thrust into her.

I gasped. Loud enough for them to hear. My father looked to the door as I scrambled away. But it was too late. I’d been caught. I ran anyway, down the hall, past the portraits of my family that Peter had painted earlier. Their faces stared at me, as if I was the one who’d done something wrong.

I ran to the other side of the house and slipped into the ballroom. There, I collapsed onto the floor, my mind a jumble of thoughts, many of them wicked. I wondered how many other servants my father had screwed, in how many different rooms. I wondered who this one was, and if she was taking pleasure in it or if my father had forced himself on her. I wondered if Peter at that very moment wanted to be doing the same thing to my sister. Mostly, I wondered if anyone would ever want me in that way.

My father soon appeared in the doorway, casting a long shadow across the ballroom floor. For a moment, I thought he was about to confess his misdeeds, apologize, promise to do whatever he could to atone for them. If he did that, maybe my mother would feel fit enough to leave her bedroom. Maybe my sister and I wouldn’t be treated like prisoners. Maybe there could be some happiness again in this godforsaken house.

Instead, my father joined me on the floor and wiped away the tears that had started falling down my cheeks. It was, I realized, the first time he had touched me in months.

“Hush, my darling,” he said. “This isn’t worth getting upset about.”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

It did to me. By then, I’d known about the rumors that my father liked to seduce the servants. Berniece whispered about it so much I couldn’t help but hear. But I wanted to know who it was and why my father did it.

“Don’t you love Mother?” I said, trying hard to halt my tears.

“I do,” my father said. “In a very complicated way. Do you love her?”

“Of course.”

“Then it’s best not to tell her about this. It would kill her. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

“No, sir,” I replied, my eyes downcast because I couldn’t stand to look at him.

He chucked my chin like I was a baby. Or, worse, a dog. “That’s my good girl.”

As my father turned and left the ballroom, I almost called out that he was the parent I wanted dead. After all, he deserved it. I didn’t because I felt the need to behave like the good girl he expected me to be.

But here’s the thing--I wasn’t a good girl.

Not in the least.

You’ll see for yourself very soon.