The two women were in the garden now, where Meredith had bent down to pry up a flagstone covered with mud from the storm. She picked up something from under it and wiped the object on her sleeve. It was a key. The house watched, expectant. It knew that a stupid house system would have called the police if anyone other than Kevin tried to get in, but if the police came they'd find Henry here. And Meredith owned the house now.
And so when Meredith put the key in the back door and slid back the deadbolt, the house did nothing. It watched her walk inside, watched her stop just inside the door, watched her eyes narrow. "Someone's here," she said to Roberta, who was hanging warily behind Meredith. "Smell that? Fresh coffee."
"Yeah, I smell it. But couldn't Kevin have made coffee before he left?"
"He died two days ago. The coffeemaker wouldn't have stayed on that long. It turns off automatically after an hour."
"So maybe he got a new coffeemaker."
"Maybe. I smell something else, though—cat pee? You smell that?" She took another two steps inside and called, "Hello?" The house didn't answer, but the orange kitten sidled warily out from under Kevin's drafting table. According to Preston, Meredith liked cats, but the house didn't know how she'd feel about seeing one here.
"Ah," Meredith said. "Well, there's the cat." She knelt down and made clucking noises; when the kitten moved closer to her, she scooped it up and stood again, cradling the animal to her chest. "Gotcha. Skinny little thing." The kitten mewed and wiggled in protest, and Meredith said, "So where did you come from? Kevin would have given you a proper litter box."
Roberta reached out and touched the kitten's head. "Which might have gotten smelly, after two days."
"This is a very small cat," Meredith said.
"Don't look now, but here's another one." The black kitten had ventured into the living room, but Roberta ignored it and walked over to the television instead. "Well, we know whom to ask about all this, right?" She turned the knob, but nothing happened. "The TV's broken."
"Weird," Meredith said. "Storm damage?" She walked to Kevin's drafting table and picked up the phone with her free hand, but the house was one step ahead of her: it had already disabled the telephones to keep Preston from calling Meredith and Roberta. Preston would tell the women about Henry. The house didn't think that was a good idea. It didn't know how it was going to get Meredith and Roberta out of the house so Henry could escape, but it knew it had to try. "Phone's still out too. You have your cell phone? So we can call the cops if somebody's here?"
"We can call Sergei. That's all this phone does. But he could call the cops. Meredith, do you want to leave?"
The house hoped that Meredith would say yes. It considered using bots to lead her outside somehow, and then rejected the idea. If she was afraid of bots, who knew how she might react?
"No," Meredith said. "Nothing looks disturbed except the window, and that must have broken during the storm, and it's been neatly taped up. I don't think these are Kevin's cats, and I don't think vicious burglars leave kittens behind, do you?" She walked up to the couch, gingerly touching the wrinkled nest of blankets where Henry had been sleeping.
"Could that be from Kevin?" Roberta asked. "Could he have been taking a nap when you called?"
"No," Meredith said. "These blankets are filthy." She walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. "There's half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in here."
"Yes? So?"
"Kevin hated peanut butter. I can't think why he'd even have it in the house, except maybe for Theo."
Roberta sighed. "Okay, so Kevin made the sandwich a few days ago for Theo and then—and then—"
"Nice try," Meredith said, and walked back into the living room. The kitten had begun squirming; she put it down and said, "Hello? Hello, is anyone here?"
"Meredith, the house wouldn't have let in anyone who wasn't a guest, would it?"
"It let us in, didn't it?"
"Well, only with the key—oh, wait. Even if we had the key, it should have called the cops if it didn't know us, shouldn't it? Isn't that how house systems work?"
"Yeah, I think so."
Roberta wrinkled her nose. "I don't like this. Do you want me to call Sergei and have him call the police?"
"Not yet," Meredith said. "Not before I find out who's already here. Except I think I already know."
"Who?"
"Henry. "
"You think it's Henry?"
"Cats and filth. Sounds like Henry to me." She raised her voice. "Hey, Henry, if you're here, it's okay!" The house wasn't sure it believed that; Henry must not have believed it, either, because he didn't come out. After a minute or so, Meredith shrugged and said, "Well. If he's here, we'll find him."
"Oh, come on. How could it be Henry? And whoever it is could be dangerous. "
"The house didn't think so."
Roberta made another face. "The house doesn't seem to be working right, if you'll forgive my saying so. I think we should call—"
"No," Meredith said, "we're not calling anybody. It's my house. Maybe I'm not working right, either; I don't care. The last thing I'm going to do is call the police, even if it's not Henry. Come on: let's see what we've got."
Could the house believe that Meredith wouldn't call the police? No: she was a person, and she could lie. She could lie to try to trick Henry into coming out. But she'd find Henry, even if he didn't come out. The house didn't know what to do.
* * *
Meredith began a slow, deliberate circuit of the living room. She scanned the bookshelves, much as Henry had done, peered at the plans Kevin had been drawing, and finally bent over to look under the couch. "Ah," she said. "Look."
"More kittens?"
"Bots. "
Roberta bent to look at them too. "Are they new?"
"Yeah. Kevin always wanted them, but I didn't. Well, I doubt he could have been bothered to do housework."
"Are you scared of them?"
"Not anymore." Meredith straightened, sighed, and said, "Come on. Let's look at the bedrooms."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure." Meredith started down the hall; Roberta, with a shrug, followed. "This will be the hard part."
"Nicholas's room?"
"Yeah. But let me do Kevin's office first. He used to have his drafting table in there, not the living room. I want to see what's in there now." She opened the first bedroom door. "Ah. Home gym. He always said he never understood why anyone would use a treadmill instead of going outside. I guess he changed his mind."
"Privacy," Roberta said quietly. "It got pretty intense for a while, after you disappeared. For your parents and Kevin, I mean. I was protected by court order, but ScoopNet was desperate for footage of the others. Taking a stroll in the neighborhood wouldn't have been a pleasant experience for him, believe me."
Meredith bent her head. "He must have hated me," she said, her voice tight. "He had to have hated me. I lied to him, I hurt him, and then I up and just left, and all of it made his life miserable. And he died coming to get me. Because I was sick. He was trying to get me out of isolation again, wasn't he?"
Roberta touched her arm. "He probably just wanted to chew you out in person."
"I wish he had. I deserved it."
"I think you're chewing yourself out every bit as much as he would have, Meredith."
"You're a pretty strange person to say that."
"Yeah, well," Roberta said. "I blamed myself when my parents died of CV. I thought I'd given it to them, even though there was no way I could have."
''I'm so sorry. About your parents. And I never—Daddy told us about you and I never—" Meredith's voice had gotten even more ragged; Roberta touched her shoulder again and shook her head.
"That wasn't what I meant. I know the territory. That's all I'm saying. I know about blaming yourself because somebody you love is dead."
"I didn't love Kevin well enough." Meredith's voice was dull; she'd sat down on the floor, with her back against a wall.
"I didn't love my parents well enough, either. Come on. Let's get Nicholas's room over with. Are you okay? Can you stand up?"
"I can stand up," Meredith said, and did. "Did we love Nicholas well enough? Either of us?"
"Too well, maybe. Or as well as we could. I don't know what the right way would have been. I told you that this morning."
"Not calling the police."
"That would have been a better way of loving Henry Carviero. I don't know how much it would have helped Nicholas, in the long run."
So Roberta wanted to be kind to Henry: that much of Preston's story was true, then. The house waited for Meredith to respond; it hoped she would say something that would indicate whether she still hated Henry, whether she wanted to do him harm. But she said nothing, and even if she had spoken, she might have lied.
Soon Meredith and Roberta would go into Kevin's room, and the house was afraid that they would fmd Henry. It didn't want them to call the police. If it told them that not doing that would be the best way of loving Henry, who was still huddling in fear among Kevin's suits and ties, would they listen? Or would they call for help? The house still didn't know what to do, and it hated not knowing things.
Meredith opened the door to Nicholas's room and looked inside. "Oh, Gaia!"
"What?" Roberta stood on tiptoes to look over Meredith's shoulder. "Meredith, what is it? What's wrong? I don't see anything."
"Exactly. There's nothing here. He stripped it. That bastard! Everything's gone! He didn't leave anything! Not even the bed, not even—"
Meredith circled the room, wild-eyed, and Roberta followed, staying in front of Meredith, trying, it seemed to the house, to make Meredith look at her, and not at the empty room. "Meredith, what did you expect him to do? Keep it the way it was? Have to remember all that every time he looked in here?"
"Everything's gone! It's like—it's like a brainwiping all over again!"
"Is that why you came back?" Roberta reached out, grabbed Meredith's shoulders. "Stop. Meredith, look at me! That's why you wanted to come back here, isn't it? Because you hadn't been able to find Nicholas anywhere else, and this was the only place left?"
Meredith shook herself free. "Leave me alone!"
"No. I won't. Meredith, he's gone. He's not here. Nicholas isn't here, do you understand that?"
"How could Kevin—"
"Kevin did what Kevin had to do for himself." Meredith, her jaw set, turned abruptly away; Roberta followed her, circling again, her stance that of someone about to dance or fight. "You weren't around to ask, remember? Put yourself in his shoes. He was mourning you and Nicholas at the same time. How do you think that must have felt?"
"He wasn't mourning a damn thing! He didn't look for either of us!"
"And how the hell do you know that? And even if it's true, does that mean he didn't care? Maybe he was just more realistic than you were, all right? He came looking for you in the storm, didn't he? Remember? Ten minutes ago you were blaming yourself for his death, and now you're saying he didn't give a damn?"
"Go away."
"No. I miss Nicholas too, remember? Kevin's not the right person to get angry at."
Meredith stood, shaking, in the middle of the bare floor. "This is where he slept. This is where he had nightmares. We used to do rituals every bedtime and every morning to try to make the monsters go away."
"Okay," Roberta said, gentling. "Okay. You don't need the furniture, Meredith. You don't need any of that. You're carrying it all around with you."
"This is where he killed Patty," Meredith said, and hugged herself "His mouse. She was on a plate, under the bed. He pulled it out to show me. It was horrible."
"I know. You told me about that. The mice at KinderkAIr were horrible too. All over the floor, fur and blood. Meredith, we couldn't have protected him any more than we did."
"I need air," Meredith said abruptly, and pushed past Roberta into the hallway.
Roberta followed her. "We don't have to stay here, you know. We can leave if it's too much for you."
Yes, the house thought. Please leave. It had decided to use the bots as a distraction, if it had to. It sent one of the Waldobots to get a glass out of the kitchen cabinet. Then it had the bot put the glass on the very edge of the kitchen table and wait there, ready to push the glass onto the floor. The house didn't want to break the glass; it wanted Meredith and Roberta to leave instead.
"No, I don't want to leave," Meredith said. "I already did that. I left for almost five years."
"Do you want me to get you something to eat? A glass of water?"
Meredith shook her head. "No. Thank you. Do me a favor, though. Go into the master bedroom and check something for me. When I lived here, there was a dresser against the far wall as you walked in, and we had a picture of Nicholas on it. A photograph of Nicholas when he was a baby. He was wearing a pair of red overalls and standing up, holding himself up on the coffee table, grinning to beat the band."
"And you want to know if it's still there?"
"Yes. Please."
"Okay," Roberta said. She walked into the master bedroom and picked up the framed photograph on the dresser—to the house's enormous relief, she went nowhere near the closet—and then she walked back into the hallway and handed the photo to Meredith. "Here, Meredith. This was the picture on the dresser."
"Oh," Meredith said, and her voice broke and she put her hand to her mouth. "It's me. That's me, when I was a little girl. It's my mother's favorite picture of me. She must have given it to Kevin. It was on the dresser?"
"It was on the dresser. Meredith, would you call your mother now? Please?"
"No. No. Not yet. I need to see this room first, please. Just this last room. Then I'll call, I promise." She took a step toward Kevin's room, and the Waldobot pushed the glass onto the kitchen floor.