“What is Ray having you do here?” I asked Bunny.

“Weird, but kinda fun. We have to put a pee smell somewhere.”

“He wants us to pee in here?”

“No, it’s down in my car, it’s coyote urine. I’m thinking we put it in the master bedroom.”

“Why would he want to make the house smell like pee? Isn’t that like the opposite of what would make it sell?”

“Well, so, Mr. Mitchell retired, and then, like, dropped dead, very sudden, last year, and right before they were supposed to go on a cruise. So Mrs. Mitchell was utterly bereft, and he basically built this house, all the woodwork was his, so Mrs. Mitchell didn’t want to stay here. She moved in with her son and his wife in Arizona so that she could be closer to their kids and be grandma and everything. But she needs the house sold really bad because Mr. Mitchell didn’t have life insurance or anything, and I think she was counting on his Social Security for their retirement to work or something. Anyway, her one thing was she didn’t want to sell to someone who was going to tear it down, so my dad priced it high so that it would sit, so she would change her mind.”

“What?”

“Well, he priced it about a hundred grand above market, so it’s just been sitting here for like almost a year, and finally Mrs. Mitchell got really mad and demanded he have another open house, so he wants it to smell like pee, and for me to try to make it seem sort of weird, like we rented too-big furniture to make the rooms feel smaller—did you notice that downstairs? Because he doesn’t want anyone at the open house to make an offer.”

“But why?” I asked, starting to be truly alarmed.

“Because his friend Toby is going to buy it. After the open house, he’ll go to Mrs. Mitchell and say, I’m so sorry, there were no offers, and then a few days later, he’ll go to her and say, I did finally get an offer, but it’s only for X amount, and it’s from a developer. But she’ll be so desperate at that point that she’ll just take it.”

“That’s fucked up,” I said.

“I know!” Bunny said. “It really is. But I guess that kind of thing goes on all the time. Because, like, then the developer guarantees my dad that once he remodels it, he’ll list it with my dad, so my dad gets commission on both sales. And usually some kind of kickback to boot. And also, the development drives up property values all around, so my dad winds up making more on every other sale, and on and on.”

“Your dad is…”

“Utterly cold-blooded. I know. It’s interesting. I had no idea. I’m not positive if the things he does are illegal, but they are definitely immoral.”

“What other kinds of things does he do?”

“Oh, like he bribes inspectors and stuff.”

“He bribes inspectors?”

“Yeah, when you buy a house, the buyer pays to have it inspected, and usually people don’t know house inspectors, like off the top of their head, so they ask my dad, who do you usually use? And he says, ‘Oh, use these guys, they’re the best!’ And so then the inspector is getting all his business from my dad, so he’ll generally pretend everything is okay with the house even without my dad paying him, though sometimes he has to pay them if there is something really, really wrong.”

“Wrong in what way?”

“I don’t know, like a heat pump leaking carbon monoxide or something. Black mold.”

“Yeah, I’m definitely guessing that’s illegal.”

Bunny shrugged. “Everyone does it, he says.”

“Right,” I said. I didn’t know what I was so upset about. I had always known Ray Lampert was not some upstanding guy. I’d known he was a shark, that his teeth were fake-white, that he cared more about the way things looked than the way they were. Why was I so surprised?

Bunny was lying down on the brown shag carpet, her arms and legs spread out like a starfish. “This room is just so cool,” she said. “I almost wish I could be a kid again just so that it could be mine.”

“You don’t feel guilty?” I asked. “Helping him.”

Bunny sighed, then rolled over onto her stomach and looked at me. “At first, I really did. But, Michael, just—if everyone already thinks I’m bad, then why not just be bad?”

“That’s the most idiotic thing you’ve ever said,” I told her.

“Look, what I’m saying is, my dad—he can be terrible. I mean, he’s selfish, he’s manipulative, he has delusions of grandeur, he compulsively lies, even about things he totally doesn’t need to lie about. He’ll even lie about having seen a basketball game he didn’t catch! But there’s good in him too.”

“Everyone has good in them! Jesus!”

“He’s my dad,” she said. We were still lying side by side on the carpet, looking at each other. I could see the vein in her neck bouncing with her pulse. I could hear it when she blinked her eyes.

“I don’t want to be good anymore,” she said. “I think it’s a rigged game.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Like, think about your mom. I looked it up, and there’s a whole pathology and strangling is the last stage before domestic violence turns into murder. Your mom was one hundred percent right to stab your dad. She’s probably still alive because of it. You’re probably alive because of it.”

“My dad would never have killed us!” I said, furious with her, with her internet wisdom, her “whole pathology.”

“People kill people,” Bunny said. “Anyone could commit a murder if they were just put in the right situation. Right and wrong are just these labels people use to oppress each other.”

“You are fucking crazy,” I said.

“There is no justice in the world, Michael,” she said, composed as a baby vampire. “My father is the worst person I know, and look at him. He’s fucking rich.”

At least that much was true.

“Coach Eric kissed me,” she said. “When we were practicing.”

Of course he had, I thought. That rotten, blue-eyed, Disney-villain-looking creep.

* * *

—

I did not stay and help Bunny pour coyote urine in the closet of the master bedroom. But I find myself now, years later, unable to discharge from my memory that house. I can remember every room, every detail of its odd layout. I think about Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell and everything they built together, that library with its built-in bar, its secret compartments. I imagine Mrs. Mitchell had a book club and that they felt special meeting there, and maybe Mr. Mitchell played bartender, and maybe he was even hokey about it and pretended to have an Irish accent as he served the ladies Guinness or something. And their children. Imagine having grown up in that house. Imagine trying to describe it to someone else. There had been so many amazing spaces, even beyond the child’s library in the attic. There was a huge deck off the second story with a hot tub inside a screened-in gazebo. There was an artist’s studio with built-in rolling storage because Mrs. Mitchell had liked to paint. There was a two-thousand-square-foot garage filled with machinist equipment worth thousands of dollars where Mr. Mitchell had done his work. You could have parked eight cars in there. There was a tiny pond with a little bridge over it in the side yard, and there was a turtle still living in it. Bunny and I saw him, basking on the edge. Did the developer know to get the turtle out before he tore it down?