A House With Good Bones

Chapter 18

There is probably something more awkward than the morning after you’ve found a jar of teeth and your mother has admitted she thinks she’s being haunted by your dead grandmother, but I couldn’t think of it. In the kitchen, Mom and I made coffee, exchanged fraught smiles, and tried to come up with extremely safe conversation topics. There were surprisingly few. She asked how my work was coming and I told her and she agreed that The Project certainly sounded difficult and I asked about her work and she told me and I agreed that clients certainly were something and both of us worked very hard not to scream into our coffee cups.

After about half an hour of this, during which I checked my email eleven times on the laptop and tried unsuccessfully to connect my phone to the internet again, I decided to go for a walk.

I went upstairs to change into my jeans. It wasn’t until I sat down on the chair to pull my shoes on that I realized that the chair was empty.

The picture of Elgar was gone too.

I looked around foolishly, as if you could just misplace a two-foot-tall framed picture of a mad sorcerer. Sure. Just like putting your phone down somewhere, or your car keys.

I didn’t even think about mentioning it to Mom.

The vulture was back on the mailbox, but I hardly noticed him anymore. Or her. Vultures aren’t sexually dimorphic, according to Gail. She’d mentioned at some point that Hermes might actually be a Hermione, but you can’t tell without a DNA test. Regardless, Mailbox Vulture was now just part of the yard, like a particularly goth lawn sculpture. Gran Mae would have considered that very not-classy, but Gran Mae kept jars of human teeth buried in the garden, so she no longer got to have a say in appropriate exterior decorating.

Phil’s truck was parked in Mr. Pressley’s driveway. He did Mom’s yardwork. Oh god, had he found any other jars of teeth in the yard over the years? Should I ask?

I should probably ask. While it was bad to have one jar of human teeth in the garden, somehow having dozens would be much, much worse. At that point we might have to inform the police. Getting cops involved did not seem like it would improve either Mom’s anxiety or my own, but surely there’s a critical mass of human teeth where you’re pretty much required to go to the authorities.

Yes. I should ask Phil. And not when Mom was in earshot.

Which meant going across the street and talking to Phil now.

Which meant… braving Mr. Pressley.

I gulped.

I had a doctorate and a job and a car and I was thirty-two years old and still I knocked on Mr. Pressley’s door with my heart in my throat.

He probably wouldn’t shoot me on sight. He’d never actually shot anyone, so far as I knew. He was more likely to call the police. And I had a perfectly legitimate reason to be there. I was asking if Phil was around. This wasn’t like when I’d asked him to buy Girl Scout Cookies as a kid.

And he definitely knew that I was coming. I’m sure he’d spotted me the minute I left the house.

I told myself all this. I could hear the distant sound of a Weedwacker behind the house. Maybe Mr. Pressley wasn’t home. Maybe he couldn’t hear me. I knocked again.

The door opened half an inch. “The hell d’you want?”

The voice was old and dry and had a crack in the timbre, but there was still plenty of power behind it.

“I was hoping Phil was here,” I said. My voice was only a little higher than normal. “I had a question for him.”

“Who’s asking?”

“Err… I’m Samantha Montgomery.”

“You with the guvmint?”

“N-no?”

“Who you with, then?”

“I don’t think I’m with anyone?” I tried to think of something else to establish my credentials. “My mom lives across the street. Phil is her, uh, handyman.”

The door opened another half inch and light winked off a pair of glasses as Mr. Pressley stared at me. “You’re her kin?”

“I’m her daughter.”

He shook his head impatiently. “Not her. Her.”

“Uh…”

“The old lady.” He was silent for a moment, then added, somewhat helpfully, “She’s dead.”

“Oh. Her. Yes. That was my grandmother.”

“Huh!”

I have been cussed out in traffic with less venom than was packed into that syllable. Good lord, had Gran Mae alienated everyone on the planet? I rubbed my forehead. “Err… I didn’t like her much either?”

There was a long moment where I expected him to slam the door in my face. Then he made a gruff noise that sounded like a laugh—a laugh? From Mr. Pressley?—and opened the door. “You best come in, then,” he said. “Don’t touch anything. And don’t be telling your friends about what you see in here!”

“I won’t,” I promised, stepping over the threshold as warily as a swimmer entering deep water.

Mr. Pressley’s house was old and musty and smelled like a smoker had lived there since the house was built. The walls were no longer beige or ecru but nicotine-colored. The carpet had been replaced with linoleum at some point, which was certainly a design choice that someone had made.

I followed him through the house. It was a mirrored layout from Mom’s and made me feel like I’d slipped into some dimly lit parallel dimension. There was an American flag in one corner and piles of papers and questionable electronics on the coffee table. I could hear a TV coming from somewhere. Whoever was speaking was furious at the liberals, the Democrats, the communists, and, for some reason, the Amish.

Mr. Pressley went to the back door. The sliding glass was covered in blackout curtains that had been duct-taped around the edges. He paused at the door and gave me another suspicious look. “You want to talk to Phil?”

“Yes, please,” I said, trying my best not to look liberal, Democratic, communist, or Amish.

“Huh.” He unlocked the door, removed the dowel holding it closed, and slid it open just wide enough for a human to pass. “He’s in the back. Phil! You got a visitor! Says she’s from across the street!”

The sound of the Weedwacker stopped. Phil came around the side of the house, wearing cheap plastic eye protectors. He took them off and wiped his face. Sweat had stuck his T-shirt tightly to his chest, revealing rather more muscle than I had expected to see that morning.

Mr. Pressley stepped back and waved at the door. I went out and heard him close and lock the doors behind me.

“Sam?” Phil twisted to check the Weedwacker’s string, which did impressive things to the T-shirt. “Is something wrong? Mrs. M okay?”

“You’re kinda ripped,” I blurted, which was not even remotely what I had been intending to say.

Smooth. Yup. That’s me.

Phil’s eyebrows shot up. He smelled like fresh-cut grass. “Um,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… you’re not… well, you are, but obviously…”

It seemed like an excellent time to stop talking. We both carefully avoided eye contact for a moment. I think Phil might have been smiling a little, but I wouldn’t swear to it because I was definitely not looking at him.

When it became obvious that the earth was not going to oblige by swallowing me whole, I said, “Mom’s fine. I, uh, had a bit of a weird question for you. I’m sorry to bother you.”

He glanced at the blacked-out doors behind me. “It’s not a bother, but I’m sorry you had to…” Phil trailed off delicately, allowing me to fill in the blanks of Mr. Pressley, the house, and the bizarre anti-Amish sentiment.

“No, it’s fine. Err.” I also looked behind me. It was such a weird question that I didn’t want Mr. Pressley hearing it and getting the wrong idea. Not that I have any idea what the right idea is, when it comes to jars full of teeth buried in the backyard. “Uh…” I lowered my voice. “When you’ve been working in the backyard, you haven’t come across any old jars, have you?”

“Old jars?” His brow furrowed. “Not that I can remember, sorry. I mean, I find a lot of odd junk in people’s yards, so unless it was really unusual…”

“I suspect you’d remember these,” I said dryly. “They’ve got… err… some human teeth in them.”

Phil dropped the Weedwacker. “Teeth?”

“Yeah, uh. Baby teeth, you know…” I decided to leave out the bit about all the other, perhaps less innocently collected teeth. It was strange enough already. “Gran Mae, err… hoarded them, we think. I found a jar. I just wanted to make sure that it wasn’t one of many.”

He let out a low whistle. “Jesus Christ.”

“I know, I know.” I shrugged helplessly. “That’s why I asked. I mean, it’s not the kind of thing you want somebody to just stumble over and freak out…”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. No. I haven’t found anything like that.”

“Mom is totally weirded out,” I said, hoping to establish Mom as a fellow victim of the situation and not an accomplice in dental collecting.

“God, I bet. Poor Mrs. M.”

“Uh.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “She, um, really relies on you as a handyman, so please don’t get spooked by this.” Or by the bit whereI was ogling you. In fact, if we could just forget that completely, I’d appreciate it. “I don’t think there’s any more around. It’s not Mom’s fault that Gran Mae was… well…”

Phil gave me a wry look. “You don’t have to explain to me about grandparents.”

“No, I guess I don’t. Well, uh, I guess I’ll get going then. Can I go around the side, or…?”

“No,” said Phil. “It’s booby-trapped.”

I waited a moment to see if he was joking. He did not laugh. “Ah. Of course.” Naturally Mr. Pressley’s side yard would be booby-trapped. What had I been thinking?

We shared another look of mutual understanding, then Phil banged on the back door twice. Mr. Pressley opened the door a crack. “You done?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks, Phil.”

“No problem.”

His grandfather grunted and opened the door far enough for me to squeeze through. In the distance, the TV announced that if God was taken out of the schools, the Devil and communism would take His place, teaching evolution and secular humanism.

Mr. Pressley led me back to the front door and unlocked it. There were multiple dead bolts on this side.

“Thanks for letting me talk to Phil, Mr. Pressley,” I said.

He grunted again. I stepped out onto the porch, expecting to hear the door close behind me, but instead Pressley said, “Hey. Girl.”

I turned back. “Yes?”

His glasses winked at me. “They’re watching the house.”

“Who’s watching the house?”

“You know.”

“The… the government?” I hazarded. (For a moment I almost said, “The Amish,” but I couldn’t imagine that going over well.)

Mr. Pressley pulled his glasses down and looked at me over the tops. “Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you, girl?”

“Probably not,” I admitted. “Who’s watching the house?”

“Them,” he said, sounding irritable, and shoved my shoulder, pointing me toward the street.

I blinked. The door shut behind me, but I barely registered the sound of the bolts being thrown.

On neighbors’ rooftops, on the mailboxes, in the trees, and even on top of the cars, at least fifty black vultures were perching, and every single one was staring fixedly at my mother’s house.