The Only One Left by Riley Sager
FIFTEEN
Ricky
Lenora types the name with such force that the letters scar the page as if they’ve been applied with a branding iron. Now she stares up at me, defiant and irritated. Her eyes, narrowed like a cartoon villain’s, seem to ask if I’m satisfied.
I’m not, despite the chapter she just banged out in the middle of the night and the questions she tapped answers to before the typing began. The first one, posed immediately after I burst into her room, was “Did you know him, Lenora?”
She replied with taps in the affirmative against the bedspread.
“Do you know what happened to him?”
A single tap that time. No.
“Did Ricardo do it?”
Carter was right. Short of her being the culprit, it was the only explanation that made sense. Ricardo was here that night. Then he vanished—most likely after killing Winston and Evangeline Hope. And I think Lenora either knew this or suspected it.
Lenora turned away from me and gazed across the room at the typewriter. I knew that look well enough by then to march to the desk, put a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter, and carry it to the bed. Lenora then began to type, the thwack of the keystrokes loud enough to echo through the nighttime quiet of her bedroom.
i cant tell you yet
“Why not?”
because i need to do it in order
I repeated my question: “Why?”
She nodded, signaling me to hit the typewriter’s return bar.
so youll understand what happened
Another nod.
and how
A third nod.
and why
“Or you could just type who did it now,” I said hopefully. “And help me understand later.”
A hint of a smile played across Lenora’s lips. She was, I realized, enjoying this. Teasing out her story bit by tantalizing bit. Keeping me on edge.
She placed her hand flat atop the keys. Usually a sign that a chapter was over. In this case, it meant she wanted a fresh page. I obliged, fetching a few sheets of paper from the desk and rolling one into the typewriter.
A new chapter was about to start.
Lenora and I spent the next two hours typing. As time passed—and midnight came and went—the mood of the room subtly began to change. It got colder. Not all at once. Slowly. The chill crept in the same way winter does after a glorious fall. By the time Lenora started typing the third page, I was shivering from cold.
Worse was the sense halfway through her writing that we weren’t alone, even though no one else was in the room with us. I know because I began to check, my gaze darting to the closed door and the dim corners where light from the bedside lamp couldn’t reach.
No one else was there.
Just us.
Yet I couldn’t shake the sense that someone else was nearby, watching us. Even as Lenora typed about meeting a handsome stranger on the terrace, my thoughts drifted to what Jessie had told me on the murder tour.
That Mary claimed to have seen the ghost of Virginia Hope roaming the second floor.
That she was scared of this place.
That it was why she fled.
Hope’s End isn’t a normal house. There’s a darkness here. I can feel it. Mary did.
Even though Jessie had said it to set up her prank in the ballroom, I wondered if maybe there was some truth behind it. In my experience, most lies contain at least some kernel of truth.
Because I felt the darkness, too.
And I didn’t like it one bit.
Lenora slapped my hand then, yanking me from my thoughts while also indicating that I needed to press the shift key. I did and said, “Do you feel that? Like someone else is here?”
She tapped no and resumed typing as I continued to feel the gaze of unseen eyes watching us and the creeping chill that got stronger and stronger until that final word was embedded onto the page.
Ricky.
The room gets warmer the moment Lenora types it. The chill I’d felt vanishes in an instant, as does the feeling that someone else is here, hiding and watching. Now the only person watching is Lenora, who continues to stare at me, asking without words if what she’s just typed is enough.
“For now, yes,” I say as I return the typewriter to the desk, the page in the carriage flapping as I go.
I still don’t know half of what happened before, during, or after her parents’ murders, but Lenora doesn’t need to type it all out tonight. What she did write was breathless enough for me to infer several key facts.
For instance, I now think I know why Lenora got rid of the murder weapon. It’s the same reason she told the police so little about that night.
She was trying to protect someone.
Why she did it also seems clear.
Eight months before the murders, Lenora had fallen in love with Ricardo Mayhew.
