Dear Killer Read Free

somehow, our house of white bricks decorated with silver flower boxes and black shutters—they felt the same. Cool. Posh. Luxurious.
    “Hi, Mom.”
    “Did you have a good time while you were out?”
    “I went to check the mail,” I said in reply. She laughed and put her head back in the kitchen, beckoning to me. I followed her into the neatly groomed room. It was decorated in civilized, carefully calculated, quietly expensive neutrals like the rest of the tall house, but right now was filled with steam and smoke that lent it an almost comically mysterious air. She was working over a pan on the stove, and the whole room smelled like food. The recessed lighting lit everything in a muted glow.
    “So? Any interesting requests?” she asked, glancing back at me after a moment.
    “I haven’t read them yet,” I reminded her. She knew that. Rule one was seeing no wrong and no right. Rule two was to be careful. And reading the letters at the mailbox was not being careful.
    “Oh, that’s right.” She smiled, as if she didn’t know, that familiar infuriating look of almost apathy settling on her features. “You should take them up to your room, then. I’m nearly done with dinner.”
    She stuck a spoon in the pan and moved it about. For a moment neither of us said anything. I saw her left hand twitching. I could see it there—her longing for cruel power, stuffed beneath a surface of cool glass, shoved away because she no longer had any use for it. Beneath her indifference something dangerous languished.
    “All right.” I paused. “Dad’s not home?”
    “No, of course not,” she said without any unhappiness in her voice, or at least none that I could hear. I shrugged. I wasn’t surprised.
    “I’ll be right back down, then.”
    I went out of the kitchen and up the three flights of stairs toward my room. The stairs were steep—usually, when I climbed stairs, I skipped steps and went quickly, but in my own home, I couldn’t do that. It always took me a while to reach the top, and it was never quite as easy as I felt it should be after seven years of doing the same thing.
    So I went up slowly. Like always, I looked around at the photographs on the walls as I rose through the house. We had a nice photography collection—my mother liked collections. So we had a collection of fine china, a collection of old records, a collection of photographs, and collections of a dozen other kinds of things. I liked the photographs best. They were expensive, naturally, and most of them quite old. A picture of the blurry sun over New York. A picture of cracking ice. A picture of a violinist with his eyes closed, enraptured. All of them were lined up neatly alongside the staircase, in perfect black frames, matted with white paper. They demanded attention, contrasted as they were with the pale tan uninspiring walls.
    My room was the one farthest away from the front door.
    I wasn’t quite sure why I had chosen it when we had moved into the house seven years ago; climbing so many stairs so often was simply a pain, but what was done was done, and I wasn’t about to move at this point. My mother had allowed me to decorate it however I wanted to, and it was too perfectly done for me to leave it now.
    I walked in and closed the door behind me. It was the only room in the house not decorated in brown, tan, navy, white, gray, or black. It was decorated in cream and scarlet, with rich fabrics and an antique sort of elegance—thick, heavy curtains, crushed-velvet pillows like old paper, a towering four-poster bed with carvings that looked oddly like Monet’s irises, heavy floral potpourri in a glass dish on top of my dresser. Everything was neat, in its place. I liked to keep things neat.
    “Your room is like an old lady room,” my mother had said to me once, sighing about the disparity between my room’s decoration and the decoration in the rest of the house. I couldn’t really deny it.
    Somewhere, a dog barked.
    I set the bag of letters