1. Rae

present

I narrow my eyes.Across the mall's cracked parking lot and up a dirt driveway, a dilapidated two-story house stares down like a guard watching over the gates of hell. The two windows on the top floor are reminiscent of boxy, judging eyes. The blue, peeling paint is like layers of tattooed skin. The gray front door resembles rotting flesh. Desert surrounds the outside perimeter of the mall's parking lot, except for that one house, almost like the house was never meant to be there. It's a scar that will never truly go away.

The Galloway House.

The house was constructed in the seventies and nicknamed after the first residents that lived there, a family of four that died by murder-suicide. I'd be willing to bet their deaths helped my father get a deal on the house…before he died inside of it too.

I start my car's engine and drive through town, back to my new apartment. There are sections of Pahrump that remind me of Anywhere, USA. Places that seem like they would be a good place to raise a family. Places that blend in, full of the same commercial buildings, the same chain restaurants, the same brick schools, and the same good old Americans that roll around, pretending as if nothing can go wrong. Some parts of Pahrump show their true colors: the old casinos, the signs pointing to the bunny ranches, the slot machines inside of the grocery stores.

All of it is mundane.

My apartment's carpet matches the walls—a bile yellow—and the countertops are black and scratched. A bed. A dresser. A fold-up table and a matching chair. Surveillance cameras are nestled into each corner of the living room, kitchen, and bedroom, which, so far, is my only personal touch to the space. It's not like the penthouse back in Vegas, but it's still mine.

I check the surveillance camera footage on my laptop. There's nothing interesting. Still, I keep the cameras rolling. A person could steal the most important thing from you, and unless you're ready, you'd never know it.

My last hookup—a firearms CEO who was very protective of his family's heirloom pocket pistol—was ready for me. I was caught on camera and fired for attempting to steal the pistol from him. And that night, my mother told me the truth.

You're just like him,my mother had said.

Who?I asked.

One minute, I think I know who you are, and the next, it's like you're a complete stranger, she rasped. This isn't a joke, Raven. The world isn't yours to take. Your choices have consequences; don't you get that?You stole from a real person.

I've stolen from a lot of people,I snarked. You know that. He's not special.

Jesus Christ, Raven, she had shouted. You're just like Michael.

Who the fuck is Michael?I asked.

She stared at me for a moment, her jaw quivering. Your father, she whispered.

"‘My choices have consequences.'" I laugh out loud. "What choices?"

It's not like I chose to have a blank space for my father's name on my birth certificate. It's not like I chose to get videotaped without my knowledge, nor did I choose to get fired from the Opulence, nor did I choose for that infamous night to be the night where my mother finally told me my father's name. And I sure as fuck didn't choose to be the illegitimate child of a cheating husband who murdered his wife.

I huff, then open up the internet browser on my laptop, and quickly search for my father's name: Michael Hall. Links to different articles sprout up over the screen. I've clicked them all now, and most of them are sourced back to the original newspaper articles. There's no new information.

Frustration swirls inside of me, mixing between my temples. I grit my teeth, then scrutinize each link, thinking of my mother.

You're just like Michael,she had said. As if I was born a bad person, like him.

Knowing exactly how much my mother turned a blind eye to the rules I broke proves that there's more to my father's story. Even now, keeping quiet about our biological connection, is proof of that. She's hiding something.

I roll my eyes. You can fuck someone. Suck their dick. Let them go down on you. You can get them drunk and steal their watches. Their white gold cufflinks. Even their heirloom pistol, as long as you look like a good daughter. But if you get caught, you're suddenly the devil's spawn.

Since that night, I've been determined to prove my mother wrong. To show her, and the entire fucking world, that my father was murdered. He didn't kill himself. He didn't even kill his wife. Yeah, he may have been a cheating dirt bag, but he wasn't that bad.

I'm not that bad either.

I click on another article—the main one I've been obsessing over—and enlarge the photo of Michael Hall, the same blurry image that's on every website. Trees in the background. A man with light brown hair and soft blue eyes. There's a kindness to his gaze that is the opposite of how my mother described him.

I've got dyed red hair and brown eyes. I used to have dark brown hair, but with enough bleach, you can change even the darkest hair to apple red. My mother, on the other hand, is platinum blond—she started dying it once the grays came in—and she has light blue eyes like my father. Eyes I didn't get.

In my case, brown eyes are very rare, but they are still a possibility. Lucky me. Two blue-eyed beauties making one messed-up, brown-eyed child. More proof that I'm the ugly duckling. The devil's spawn with sin in her eyes.

Husband kills wife, then himself,the article subtitle reads. Another murder-suicide at the Galloway House.

"Michael Hall," I read aloud. Then I absentmindedly add my own name to his surname: "Raven Hall." It could have worked.

I reread the article for the hundredth time. My eyes scan quickly, and I hyper-focus on sets of words.

wife cheats?—

murder in a fit of rage?—

drugs in his system?—

gunshot wound to the temple?—

killed himself.

I shake my head. Even if I wasn't closely connected to the late suspect, I would still think the circumstances of the crime were off. Why would a man have drugs in his system if he was going to kill his wife then himself? Wouldn't the drugs have made it difficult to kill her? Wouldn't he have drugged himself as a way to commit suicide? Why would he use a gun too?

His wife was cheating; in the autopsy, among deep lacerations noted inside of her vaginal canal, there was also trace evidence of condom usage. But I'm proof that Michael Hall was cheating too. He fucked my mother while he was married, so why would infidelity make him kill his wife? And why didn't the police investigate the wife's lover? Was it more convenient for them to conclude that it was a murder-suicide and be done with it? Maybe the police are more involved than it seems.

Either way, none of it makes sense.

Or…maybe it does, and I don't want to accept the truth that my father is nothing more than a hypocritical misogynist that killed his own wife. Maybe I don't want to accept that the first person I might be able to relate to is objectively horrible.

I slam my laptop close, then scroll through my phone's gallery. I open a picture of the Galloway House. The peeling, blue paint. The slumped overhang. The dull gray door. The tattered curtains in the windows. I squint as I zoom in on one of the second-story windows.

A shadow hovers behind the curtains, as if someone's there, watching me take the picture. I'm just imagining it though; it's probably an old coat rack or something.

Still, the house still draws me in, like the answers to my father's death are waiting inside of those walls.

My phone rings, and I jolt. The picture vanishes from view, replaced with my mother's name and profile picture. I deny the call, then dim the phone's screen.

The device rattles again. I glance at the text message preview: The director says your job?—

I don't have to read it to know what it says. My mother thinks she can get my job back. I never wanted to work at the hotel, and I really don't want to work there now that I have a new goal.

The next text message preview: Please come home. You can't?—

"Home," I snicker as I delete her text messages. I can read through her words. Asking me to come "home" is not about helping me; it's about her guilt. She feels bad that I was fired, and she definitely does not want me to find out the truth about my father.

I open up the picture of the Galloway House again. I imagine a male voice—my dead father's voice—calling to me from the pixels on the screen. Come find me, Rae.

When I go inside, what will I find?