Finally bereft of the terrifying amount of things that had clogged its hallways and rooms, the mansion seemed like a cave system that was particularly well-organized into a nearly infinite number of neat marble and granite rooms. Rose shooed away the movers, insisting that she would pack up the final room herself. Once she was sure that they were busy with their lunch and general grabassery, Rose found the loose floorboard beneath where her mother’s fainting couch had been and pulled out the only bottle that had anything left in it—a rather fine vodka. She left the embarrassing number of empty bottles there for the next owners to find and chuckle at, and poured herself a mug of the tasteless liquor.

In a fit of whimsy, she poured a little of the vodka out, watching as it puddled on the aged floorboards. For Mother, whose will was just as passive-aggressive as her life would have suggested. She had demanded an elaborate funeral with doves and swords and an inappropriate twenty-one-gun salute that had, for all its pomp and circumstance that required ten thousand inconveniences of Rose, been poorly attended. What really cut her daughter to the quick, however, had been her insistence that she “not live alone in that dreary house.” Rather than count servants as company or find a roommate (or, worse yet, a husband), Rose had made the final endgame move in the lifelong tournament of passive aggression that she had shared with her mother by selling the house. All the belongings were now on their way to storage or Sotheby’s. All except for one room.

Rose had never really grown into her childhood room. She had tried to fill the empty space with knitting projects, bookshelves, writing desks, and sheet music until the whole place looked like a bookish bomb had exploded. Still, the vaulted ceilings with their ornate crown molding loomed over her, and all her possessions seemed like islands in a lake. Rose nudged a crate toward a bookcase with her foot. She drained her mug of vodka and set it on top of the bookcase. Her hand traced over the volumes on the top shelf—The Interpretation of Dreams, Psychology of the Unconscious, The Principles of Psychology…”So many big, heavy books filled with big, heavy ideas,” Rose’s mother had marveled every time she saw her daughter lugging one of them around. Rose stacked them into the crate, quickly filling it with the leatherbound volumes. They were quickly covered by the contents of the lower shelves—cheap magazines with lurid art on the cover, all of their titles promising weird tales and startling stories.

Rose let one of them fall open in her hands. While she had marked some of her favorite stories in it—usually those with eldritch alien gods and the mortals they connive into summoning them—the magazine opened to a two-page illustration that featured a craggy-faced detective pointing a gun cautiously around the corner of a brick building. His intended target seemed to be a glamorous blonde who was taking a bottle from a man in a zoot suit. Or was she giving it to him? Instinctively, Rose began to read the story. She was already two pages in when she shook herself back to reality. She dogeared the page and dropped the magazine into the crate.

As she continued to pack, Rose kept pouring herself vodka and thinking about what life would be like in the city. What her life would be like. Different. She definitely wanted it to be different. Darker would be nice. The shadows had always had a certain allure for the sheltered upstate heiress. By her fourth cup of vodka, she was narrating to herself an elaborate story.

“Then the cops will be onto me,” she muttered, tossing a box of violin strings into a crate. “But I’m already half a step ahead of them. I’ve covered my tracks—found a stool pigeon. Wait. No, not a stool pigeon…a…scrape…a goat of…a scapegoat!” She lifted her chin triumphantly. “Yes! And I’ll have a pretty little alibi, and the old goat will get what I have coming to me.” She giggled and dropped onto her expansive, bare mattress. Yes, it would be a gangster’s life for her. The excitement! The dramatic twists and turns! The glamor! The stories she would have! Her hands clasped together beneath her chin, and her eyes shone brightly. In that moment, she could not help but think that the city could be nothing but good to her, even as she prodded its slimy underbelly.

She never expected the way that the slime would seep into her own soul as time dragged on, how the sights and noises and stenches endemic to this way of life would tatter away at her edges until she was uncertain whether they had revealed a truer self underneath, or had simply torn away all the substance that had once been there. As she spent her final few moments in her mother’s mansion, she dreamed of being a mobster while not having the faintest clue what it actually meant.