The whole effect was glum, and more than a little spooky. It wasn’t hard to imagine Norman Bates somewhere inside, sitting in his rocking chair, wearing his dead mother’s clothes and cradling an ax in his arms.

The image brought a badly needed smile to Shallie’s face, if a flimsy one. The motel was, and probably always had been, a depressing place, but it hadn’t been a house of horrors. Not for her, anyway.

Della and Norm Schafer, Shallie’s legal guardians from the day she was abandoned as a two-year-old, in Room 2, hadn’t physically abused her. Granted, they did apply for, and receive, foster parent status and money, largely because there was a legitimate family connection, since her mother had been Della’s half sister… Still, life hadn’t been easy.

Dysfunctional even then, discouragement ground into them by chronic hard times, the Schafers had fed her, provided her with clothes, mostly hand-me-downs and thrift store finds, and new shoes, twice a year. They’d kept her in school and, once a week, they’d sent her (and, of course, their own kids) to church.

Neither Della nor Norm would have dreamed of setting foot in God’s house themselves, and they hadn’t been shy about saying so. Church was for hypocrites and cowards, they’d maintained, though every Sunday morning, they’d sent their little brood off to hear the Gospel and drop a coin in the collection plate.

Throughout Shallie’s childhood, they’d treated her with the same disinterest and sometimes scorn as they had their twins, Bethanne and Russ, who were five years older than Shallie and none too pleased to have a toddler shoehorned into the cramped bedroom they shared in the “family quarters” behind the motel’s front office.

At first, the twins had largely ignored the newcomer.

Later, when bored, they’d teased and sometimes bullied her. They’d spent whole days pretending she was invisible, so convincingly that Shallie, still too young to start kindergarten, began to believe them. Maybe, she remembered thinking, she wasn’t real at all. Maybe she’d just made herself up.

To a four-year-old, the possibility made sense.

All her life, all that time spent living with the Schafers, she’d known that no one was going to protect her. She couldn’t depend on Norm or Della—they weren’t mean, but they paid little or no attention to the kids, unless they were forced to. Their interests usually didn’t veer past the bottles of low-end booze they gulped down and the equally low-end reality TV shows they devoured. Nor could she depend on Russ, who’d made clear that he had no use for her. Especially after an incident that involved her smacking him—hard enough to cause a bloody nose—when he’d tried to make her eat a stinkbug…

Bethanne seemed to resent Shallie as much as her brother did.