Where Sinners Sleep

Forget but never Forgive.

Eli parked the car and sat for a moment looking at the house at the end of the street. There was something about the girl, Evelyn, which he couldn't understand. Why would Kit bring someone to his home. He doesn't even allow his own father to enter premises without a purpose. Something was up and Eli had to find it out.

That was the first thing that struck him. It was not a struggling house. It was a large, expensive, well kept house with iron gates and flower beds and windows that caught the morning light in a way that said money, comfortable and certain of itself.

He got out of the car.

He knocked.

The woman who opened the door matched the house. Well dressed, silk blouse, hair set, a smile that arrived slightly too quickly.

"Can I help you?" she said.

Eli looked at her for a moment. Then he reached into his jacket and produced a card, plain and dark with nothing on it except a number, and held it out to her.

"I represent certain interests," he said, and let the vagueness of that sit in the air between them, "that are looking into the assets of the Sonnett family. There is a matter of some financial significance that needs clarification." He paused. "It would be worth your time."

He watched her eyes change.

The suspicion did not disappear exactly. But the greed that moved in behind it was louder and it won, the way it always won with people like her.

She opened the door wider.

"Please," she said, "come in."

Eli held up his phone with a picture of Evelyn on it. A still from last night's CCTV footage, grainy but clear enough.

"Do you know this girl?" he said.

The woman's smile curdled immediately.

"That dumb b***h," she said, and then seemed to catch herself, smoothing her expression back into something more presentable. "Sorry. I just. Yes. I know her. How do you know her? Does she owe you money?" A pause, and then something uglier crept into her voice. "Or has she been going around with you? Because honestly nothing would surprise me at this point."

Eli said nothing.

He put his phone back in his pocket and looked at the woman and waited, because silence was always the best way to get people to fill the space with things they had not planned to say.

It worked.

Sarah talked. She talked the way people talk when they have been waiting a long time for an audience. About how ungrateful Evelyn had always been. About how much they had given her and how little she had appreciated it. About her mother, and here Sarah's voice took on a particular quality that made Eli's jaw tighten slowly and progressively, calling her things he would not repeat, saying Evelyn was exactly the same, saying it like it was obvious, like it was simply a fact everyone already knew.

A girl appeared at the top of the stairs inside. Pretty, blonde, watching with bright curious eyes. She came down slowly, the way people come down stairs when they want to be noticed, and stood beside her mother and looked at Eli with an interest that had nothing to do with Evelyn.

"She was always trouble," Lily said, picking up where her mother left off without missing a beat. "Always making things difficult. We gave her everything and she just threw it back at us."

"I would like to see her room," Eli said.

Both women paused.

"Her room?" Sarah said.

"Yes," Eli said. "Her room."

Something passed between Sarah and Lily, quick and barely visible. Then Sarah stepped back from the door and gestured for him to come in.

The inside of the house confirmed everything the outside had suggested. Wide hallway, polished floors, a staircase that curved up to the second floor with a brass banister. Framed artwork on the walls. Fresh flowers on the entryway table. The kind of home that had been deliberately assembled to show a particular kind of life.

Sarah led him upstairs and then further, past the main bedrooms with their wide doors and soft carpets, down a narrower corridor toward the back of the house where the ceiling dropped slightly and the light changed, and she stopped in front of a door that was smaller than the others and pushed it open.

Eli stepped inside.

He stood very still.

The room was not a room. It was a space that had once been something else, a storage area perhaps, repurposed with the minimum possible effort required to technically qualify as habitable. The ceiling was low and the walls were bare concrete that had been painted over once, a long time ago, and the paint was peeling now in long strips that revealed the grey underneath. A mattress sat directly on the floor, thin and stained, with a single blanket folded on top of it with a neatness that had clearly come from the person who slept there and not from any care taken by anyone else.

The window was small and set high in the wall, painted shut, the kind of shut that meant years not months, no air, no light worth speaking of, just a grey square of sky if you stood on something to look at it.

There was damp in the corner. Dark and spreading, the kind that had been there long enough to become part of the wall.

And then he saw the evidence of the other inhabitants. A rat had been through recently, the signs were clear along the baseboard. In the far corner where the damp was worst, cockroaches moved in the unhurried way of creatures that had never been disturbed enough to learn fear.

On the floor near the mattress, a small bowl. Ceramic, chipped. The kind you might put out for an animal.

He looked at the bowl for a long time.

Then he looked at the walls. Nothing on them. Not a photograph, not a drawing, not a single mark that said a person lived here and was allowed to take up space. Except for one thing. Low down, near the floor, half hidden by the edge of the mattress, someone had written something small in pencil. He crouched down to read it.

One day I will leave and I will not look back.

He stood up slowly.

He turned around and looked at Sarah standing in the doorway of this room, in her silk blouse, in her large beautiful house, and he looked at her with an expression that she would remember for a very long time.

"She was clumsy," Sarah said, before he could speak. Her voice had lost some of its earlier confidence. "She was always getting herself into situations and we did our best with very"

"This house," Eli said quietly, "is worth how much."

Sarah blinked. "I"

"The car in your driveway," he said. "The artwork in your hallway. The flowers on your table." He looked around the room one more time. "And this is where you put her."

The silence was total.

"She is under our protection now," he said, and his voice was so quiet and so completely steady that it was somehow the most frightening thing in the room. "I want you to understand what that means. Whatever you believed you were allowed to do inside this house, that is finished. If she is contacted, if she is touched, if either of you says her name in a way I would not approve of, you will hear from us." He held Sarah's gaze without blinking. "And you do not want to hear from us."

Sarah said nothing.

He walked to the door and she stepped aside to let him pass.

"Wait."

Lily's voice from the top of the stairs. He stopped.

She was standing with one hand on the banister, looking at him with those bright eyes and a smile that was used to working on people.

"How do you know her?" she said. "Someone like you, knowing someone like her." The smile tilted. "She could never."

Eli looked at her.

"Why do you care?" he said. "About your sister."

Lily laughed, light and dismissive and completely certain of itself. "She is not my sister. She could never be my sister. I just think it is a waste." Her eyes moved over him slowly. "Someone like you, wasting your time on a girl like that. She is nothing but"

"Careful," Eli said.

One word. Flat and final.

Lily closed her mouth.

He held her gaze for exactly three seconds.

Then he walked down the stairs and out the front door and did not look back.

He sat in the car and looked at the house through the windshield, this large beautiful house in its well kept street, and he took out his phone.

He photographed everything he had seen. The outside of the house. The neighbourhood. And then he sent the photographs he had taken inside. The room. The mattress on the floor. The painted shut window. The damp. The bowl.

The pencil writing on the wall.

One day I will leave and I will not look back.

He called Kit.

"I found where she is from," he said.

Kit's voice on the other end was measured. "And?"

Eli looked at the house one last time.

"She was not living, Kit," he said. "She was surviving. Check the pictures."

He ended the call.