Ghost Downstairs

Chapter Twelve

Lina could forget Julia when bedtime came again, and in the glow of the seashell nightlight she and Ren spent hours learning the feel of one another. Lina pitied the poltergeist while doing things with Ren that Julia never had, hearing him whisper how much he loved it, how much he loved her.

But she couldn’t help noticing the quiet, at a time when she would have expected Julia’s violence to be fiercer than ever. She bedded Ren, snagged him in the stairwells for long wet kisses, stole gropes under his apron in the pantry, and all Julia did was pound on the radiator pipes now and then? It didn’t add up.

“Has anyone heard from…her, lately?” Lina asked him, early in April.

He focused on the dry rice he was pouring into storage bins in the kitchen. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re sure? Wouldn’t she be angry?”

“If you want to know,” he began slowly.

“Yes. This once, I want to know.”

“She is angry. I’ve felt the storm brewing from the first day. But…” He crumpled up the empty rice bag. “There’s no indication it’s coming soon.”

“She’s biding her time? Saving her energy?”

“Could be. I don’t know.”

Lina leaned on the counter, stirring her coffee. “Has she ever really hurt anyone?”

Ren threw her a glance, one eyebrow cocked.

“I mean, besides you,” Lina amended. “That was an accident.”

Ren took a bunch of celery from the refrigerator and rinsed it in the sink. He brought the dripping stalks to the butcher’s block, where he chopped them. “Maybe. It’s hard to prove. She shoved Jackie and sent her to the hospital—maybe. I can’t be sure it was her.”

“Did the energy, or whatever it is, diminish right after that?”

“Yes, but that same morning she also threw your clothes around the laundry room. We know that was her. So did she only do that? Or did she do both, on a rampage?” Ren shrugged. “I can’t tell.”

“Have people been hurt any other times?”

“Things falling off shelves have left bruises and scrapes. People scared by something have run too fast and stumbled. Old people have died here—how do we know they weren’t scared into a heart attack? Whether ghosts hurt anyone—well, it’s not the kind of thing actuaries keep track of.”

“What do you believe? Are we in danger?”

He gestured with the knife in helplessness. “I ask you to be careful. That’s all.”

“How? I’m already doing the one thing that will make her angriest, aren’t I?”

His gaze flashed to her, and his voice was warmer and lower when he answered. “Yes, and I don’t intend to let you stop.”

“Good.” She arched her back against the counter, enjoying how he glanced up and down her body. “But does this mean I should go around the house in a plastic bubble, just to be safe?”

He picked up a handful of chopped celery and dropped it into a glass bowl. “Try to stay around other people, especially at night. Don’t tempt her by leaving sharp things around, or heavy things that could be toppled off high places. Stay out of the garage and the rest of the basement when you can. Open flames aren’t a good idea either.”

She was inclined to laugh at this cautious list. But the stern look he sent her sobered her. It wasn’t wise to smirk at the idea of ghosts when you were sleeping with one.

But love made her brave, or so she fancied, as she strolled down to the basement that afternoon with a basket of Mrs. B’s laundry. She needn’t be afraid, especially when she was capable of filling her mind for hours with Ren kissing her, Ren’s hands dancing along her skin, Ren’s neck tasting like the spring breeze, Ren sighing in her ear, Ren’s muscles tensing and stretching under her grip.

For the span of time it took to load laundry into the machines, Lina was quite able to put her thoughts in a happier place. She even felt brave enough to venture into the storage shelves in search of light bulbs. One had burned out in a third-floor bathroom, and Lina had been meaning to replace it. Humming a love song from some musical, she walked between the shelves, swinging the empty laundry basket, dragging her fingertips along the items. Rolls of paper towels, bottles of window cleaner, boxes of candles, cases of aspirin, and, there toward the end, packs of light bulbs.

Though old fears and new warnings nagged at her nerves, she kept her back turned to the cobwebs and the shadows, and hummed the song louder. Sunlight trickled in through the window above her head. The laundry machines tumbled and clacked from the next room. She took her time about choosing the wattage. One hundred was too bright; twenty-five much too dim. Forty sounded good. She took a package of two and turned to leave.

Before she got past the shelves, she heard a pair of loud metallic snaps. A sharp pain hit the side of her head, and she fell to her knees, gasping. The laundry basket dropped from her hand. One of her light bulbs slipped from its packaging and burst on the concrete floor, scattering white glass. Lina raised a hand to her right ear, which had gone hot, and found a hard, thin metal line along the outer ridge, and another on the lobe. Touching them sent flares of agony all the way down to her heels. She breathed through her mouth, trying not to cry out. The bit of metal in her earlobe loosened and came away in her hand.

A staple. A heavy-duty staple. Blood dyed her fingertips, and a warm drop seeped down her hairline toward her neck. Shaking with shock, she looked up.

On the shelf across from the supplies, at the level where her head had been a few seconds before, a staple gun lay on its side, pointing outward. Lina dove forward on hands and knees, heedless of the light bulb glass, and scrambled out of the shelves. Behind her, something hit the wall, and she yelped a sob and looked back. It was her laundry basket, flung after her.

When she reached the stairs she jumped to her feet and ran. She didn’t look back, didn’t retrieve her basket, didn’t try to find out whether the thumps she heard were the laundry machines or the poltergeist. At the ground floor she clamped her mouth shut to quiet her breathing, and edged around the landing with her back to the wall. She was not going to burden Ren with this.

She inched around to the next flight of stairs without anyone noticing her. Ren’s voice, answering the cook, came from across the dining room. Lina swallowed upon hearing it, quashing the impulse to dash to him and hide in his arms. She fled up the stairs, her steps muffled by the carpeting.

In the third-floor bathroom she set the remaining light bulb on the counter and opened a drawer to get the first-aid kit. Only when she was ready with the sterile gauze and antibiotic ointment did she dare to turn and examine her wounds in the mirror.

Considering someone had tried to staple her ear to her head, and considering head wounds always bled more than you expected, it wasn’t too bad. Holding her hair out of the way and gritting her teeth, she yanked out the remaining staple from the upper edge of her ear. It came without much effort, but it had punctured her ear all the way through and cut her scalp.

She had suffered no worse than many a youth who had tried to pierce their own ears, she told herself, imagining what she would say to lighten a patient’s qualms. She bent to the sink and washed her wounds with soap. Thank God she had recently gotten a tetanus shot. Really, the injury itself wasn’t serious. What made her stomach twist and her hand shake as she applied the ointment was knowing that Julia had attacked her. If it had been a nail gun instead of a staple gun, she could now be lying dead on the basement floor.

Tears spilled down her face, from self-pity, terror, rage. She used a clean piece of gauze to wipe them away, then threw it into the trash, folded her arms on the counter, and cradled her head there.

* * *

Lina arranged her hair to cover the marks and sat for the rest of the afternoon between two old ladies in the TV room, staring with them at a game show. By the time it turned into a soap opera, her hands had stopped trembling. She went up to Mrs. B, escorted her to dinner, exchanged smiles with Ren as he served them, and nodded when he leaned down to murmur into her ear an invitation to meet him that evening. Luckily it was the left ear.

But as they stood beneath the maple tree in the moonlight, nuzzling noses and murmuring nonsense, Ren’s long fingers cupped her face and began their usual stroke along her ears. She flinched when they swiped the wound, and his touch returned there at once, feeling the scab. He frowned and turned her head aside to examine it. “What did you do?”

Lina hadn’t decided yet whether she would lie to him about it. “I wasn’t paying attention, and it got snagged on a little piece of metal,” she said. Not a lie, but misleading.

He knew at once. His mouth and eyebrows set into grim parallel lines. “This morning?”

“Yeah.”

“It was her.” Ren didn’t wait for Lina to deny or confirm it. “I felt something change, but nobody said—” He exhaled and withdrew his hands. “Were you going to tell me?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“What happened?”

Lina found a loose thread on her cuff to play with, and explained the basement occurrence, choosing the least alarming words available—which still ended up sounding plenty alarming, to judge from his reaction.

He paced, slapped both hands over his face, and paced some more, shaking his head. When she was done talking he flung himself down to sit in the grass, one knee pulled up, striking a leaf against his leg.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she said again.

He waved it off.

“Say something,” she begged.

“I’ve said ‘Why me, God?’ enough times in my life. Hasn’t done me any good.”

She knelt beside him. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. I don’t want you to feel like that.”

“It’s fine she tortures me . I’m used to it, I can take it, I understand. But she has no right—” He tore up the leaf and grabbed another one off the ground. “She’s the kind of enemy I can’t fight, and it drives me crazy.”

Lina settled into the grass with her back to the trunk of the tree. “Do you think she’s waiting for you to do something that would let her go? Has she ever given any sign?”

“Not exactly.” He separated and pronounced the words in a way that made Lina suspicious.

“Meaning?”

Ren peeled the leaf into small pieces, tossed aside the stem, and cast around in the grass for another. When he found one, he tilted it back and forth in the streetlight beam. “People who have claimed to be psychics or mediums have been invited here before, as a test to see what they noticed. Marla would never tell them ahead of time about me or Julia. Almost all of them made up some kind of nonsense about ‘lingering spirits’ and ‘old memories’ in the house, and had no idea they were actually talking to a ghost. It was funny, really.

“But once, just once, in the seventies, a woman visiting Marla stopped cold when she was introduced to me, and said in this Irish accent, ‘Seanie, Seanie Appleseed. It’s Father, Seanie.’” Ren himself lapsed into the accent for those few words, as if it came naturally to him. “My father,” he explained, in his own American voice again, “was born in Ireland. When I was a kid he sometimes called me ‘Seanie Appleseed,’ since the Johnny Appleseed story was one of my favorites.”

“Which I doubt was in the obituary.” Lina felt the flesh prickle on her limbs.

“No. I don’t think I’d told anyone about it for decades. I just stared at her, Marla did too. But it was like the woman wasn’t herself. She was gripping my hand and looking at me, and said—in my father’s voice—that what happened to Julia and me should never have happened, and it wasn’t our time, and we were locked in the house where we died. I asked, ‘How do we get free?’ And she said, ‘The house. The house is holding you.’”

Lina shivered and folded her arms. “What does that mean?”

“I tried to ask, but then she said, ‘Julia’s here. She’s angry. She wants to move on but she can’t. The house is holding you both.’ Then the medium came back to herself, looked at us—I’m sure we had gone completely pale— and said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry! What happened?’” Ren smirked and shook his head.

“Did you find out any more?”

“No. Marla and I tried everything—Ouija boards, séances, meditation. We even convinced the woman to come back, but she couldn’t reach him.

She said it wasn’t her specialty, communicating with the dead. It was just something that happened to her once in a while.”

“Then you never figured out what he meant?”

“No, except it’s beyond my control, and it’s something to do with the house.”

“I wonder if it was built on a burial ground or something,” Lina said, then felt foolish, knowing she had provided a cliché from a horror movie.

Ren threw the leaf aside and shrugged. “Places hang on to events sometimes. They don’t need to be haunted before that. Once something happens there, the place becomes…” He waved toward the house. “What it becomes.”

Lina conceded with a tilt of her head. “I suppose your situation isn’t totally unheard of. The ghost of Anne Boleyn doesn’t roam around the entire world, just the Tower of London, where she was beheaded.”

“A house in Norfolk too, I hear. Where she lived.”

Lina looked at him, a sad smile pulling at her mouth. She saw it mirrored on his face. “Guess I’m not the only one who’s done research on ghosts,” she said.

“I looked up everything I possibly could.” He found a twig in the grass to play with. “Which wasn’t easy before the internet. God, I love the internet. My life improved immeasurably when we got that. There’s one thing most ghosts can’t do. Web searches.”

“Maybe there are chat rooms for people like you. Do you think?”

“There are chat rooms for teenagers dressed in black who like to pretend they’re like me. I suspect I’m not alone, to answer your question. But I haven’t found anyone to prove it.”

Lina moved closer, until their sides touched. “You aren’t alone.”

Ren dropped the twig and put his arm around her. “Are you okay?” His voice was husky. His fingers lifted to touch her ear.

“Yeah. I was scared, but it could have been a lot worse.”

He sighed and pulled her into a hug. She felt a kiss on her scalp, through her hair. “I’ll do everything I can to keep her from hurting you. But you have to be careful. I can’t always be there.”

“I know. I was stupid. You told me not to go downstairs alone, and I did…”

“It’s okay.” His hand trailed up and down her spine, comfort sliding into seduction in a way she had become deliciously familiar with. “It could have been worse.”

* * *

Lina didn’t ask, over the next two days, whether Ren sensed Julia’s impending thunderclouds or not. Lina stayed out of the basement whenever possible, and if she had to go down there she contrived ways to get other people to go with her. It seemed to work. Nothing new happened.

In the meantime she clung to Ren. It was strange, considering how awkward she tended to be with people, but she now liked nothing better than to lie naked with him, both of them trailing their fingers along the other’s body as if drawing notes out of the piano. Sometimes they joked and laughed like children. Other times they waxed thoughtful and spoke of finances, war, religion, ethics, and Ren’s metaphysical observations on being a ghost.

But none of those observations predicted the ferocity of what happened a few nights later.

It was Wednesday. Ren was tidying up the kitchen after dinner. Lina was in Mrs. B’s room, reading a comedic novel to her. Over their laughter, and the fitful rain blowing against the window, Lina barely noticed the clangs and hisses of the radiator. But it soon became truly obnoxious, clanging louder, hissing harder. The smell of metallic steam pervaded the room.

“Goodness!” Mrs. B turned in her chair to look at the thing. “It sounds like it’s trying to bang a hole in the wall.”

“They need to get that furnace looked at,” Lina said. “It’s not sounding healthy.”

“Well, go on—if I can hear you over that racket.”

Lina went on reading, to the accompaniment of the growing noise and sputtering steam. Finally she paused. “You know, that isn’t good. There shouldn’t be steam in the room.”

“I think you’re right. It feels like New Orleans in the summer in here.”

Lina closed the book and stood up. “I’m going to turn it off, and we’ll call a repair guy tomorrow.”

But she didn’t get to take more than one step, for at that moment the radiator exploded.

Steam and bits of pipe hit her in a wall of scalding noise. Lina found herself on her knees with her face against the carpet, her arms covering her head, instinct taking over as if she had lived in war zones her whole life. Books and furniture fell and shook. Cries of surprise echoed from other rooms. Lina grabbed Mrs. B’s arm and pulled her out of the chair. Mrs. B was limp and moaning, her eyes shut, her face contorted in what looked like anger. Lina seized her around the rib cage and hauled her along the floor toward the corridor.

The carpet was hot and soaked, and Lina’s clothes were wet by the time she got Mrs. B into the hallway, where a small crowd had already gathered. Their mouths moved, but she only heard an inarticulate hum through the ringing in her ears. She laid Mrs. B on her back and leaned over her. “Mrs. B! Mrs. B, are you okay? Come on, Mrs. B, open your eyes, talk to me.”

Mrs. B’s skin had blistered and swollen on the side that had been nearest to the radiator. Alan and Marla rushed into the corridor and crouched beside her.

“Get me cold water and towels!” Lina shouted at Alan. “And you call 911,” she commanded Marla. “Tell them she’s got steam burns. She’s still breathing. Go!”

Marla nodded and dashed away.

Steam could be inhaled. It could damage the lungs, especially in children and the elderly. That was the foremost panic in Lina’s mind as she rested a palm on Mrs. B’s frail chest, watching it rise and fall, willing it to keep going. If only everyone would be quiet—she needed to listen…

Alan came back with towels and a basin of water. Lina rinsed the burns gently, and when Alan tried to help she snapped at him to listen to Mrs. B’s breathing instead. A moment later, she felt a cool wetness dab her arm. She jerked aside and glared at Marla, who held a dampened towel.

“You got burned too, honey,” Marla said. “Is it just your arms? Be sure they have a look at you.”

Lina couldn’t care less about her arms, snarled as much at Marla, and returned her attention to Mrs. B.

She was soon eased out of the way by the medics, one of whom took her aside despite her protestations and applied burn ointment and bandages to her arms, hands, and jaw. At some point she felt a touch on her back, and glanced up to see Ren beside her, pale, his lips closed tight. It was pointless to say anything to him yet, while everything was still up in the air. She looked away.

As she and Marla got into the ambulance with Mrs. B’s stretcher, Lina spotted Ren at the front fence, clutching the iron spikes and staring after her. Their eyes locked. The medics swung the ambulance doors shut and erased him from view.

The doctors at UW Medical Center determined that Mrs. B had multiple second-degree burns and some lung damage. Because of her age they wanted to keep her there a few days. Around midnight the nurses urged Lina and Marla to go home and let Mrs. B sleep.

Alan came and got them. Lina sat in the back seat, gazing out the window, fingers rubbing the white bandages on her arms. “I failed her,” she said. “I was hired to take care of her, and instead I brought this on her.”

“Don’t be silly!” Marla turned in her seat to look at Lina. “How the heck was this your fault?”

“Radiators don’t do that kind of thing on their own.”

“They do if they’re old enough,” Alan said. “We should have had that thing repaired ages ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if her kids brought down a lawsuit on our heads.” He drifted into a gloom.

“It was Julia,” Lina said. “She was after me, and Mrs. B got in the way.” She lifted her gaze long enough to see Marla and Alan exchange glances.

“Well,” Marla said, “we can’t prove that.”

“And we sure as hell can’t tell the lawyers that,” Alan muttered.

Lina didn’t press the point. But her mind professed the final verdict. They know. They know it’s my fault.

Mrs. B’s room was a mess. It looked like Ren and Alan had done their best, pulling things off the soaked carpet and stacking them in the hallway. But the rest would be the work of plumbers and plasterers. Steam had scarred the walls; the place smelled soggy and unfamiliar. Lina dragged herself on to her own room.

She was not surprised to find Ren slouching in the chair there. His latest book lay unopened on the nightstand beside him, and he scrambled up at once when she arrived. The question was in his face. She answered before he could ask.

“She’ll probably be all right. As long as no lung complications set in.” Exhausted, Lina threw her coat on the desk chair and collapsed onto the bed. “She’s a hardy old woman. I think she’ll pull through.”

“Good.” It was all he said, and all either of them said, for at least half a minute. “Do you want me to stay?” he finally asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Tonight took a lot out of her,” he said. “I doubt there’ll be anything else for a couple days.”

Lina closed her eyes in a throb of pain. It was Julia, then. As if there had been any doubt.

“But if you can’t stand the sight of me,” Ren said, “I don’t blame you. I’ll go.”

“I can’t stand the sight of myself,” she whispered, eyes still closed.

“Will you believe me when I say it’s never been this bad before?”

“I believe you, but it doesn’t make me feel better.”

She heard Ren move to kneel beside her. He kissed her bandaged arm. “What about you?” he asked.

“It’s nothing. Second-degree at worst. Shouldn’t scar if I put the ointment on it. It’s funny, though, isn’t it? Burns on top of my burns.”

“What? Oh. When you were a kid.”

“That was my fault too.” Lina didn’t open her eyes. “I was twelve. Mom was out with some guy from work. Dad got mad and went out to find her. My brother and I were hungry, so I thought we should make hot dogs for everyone on the charcoal grill. A nice gesture. Maybe they’d never fight again if they came home and found we’d made them hot dogs.”

Ren’s cheek rested on her shoulder. His arm clasped across her.

“You can guess the rest,” Lina said. “I added lighter fluid when I shouldn’t have. It flared up. I jumped, knocked over the grill, got scarred for life. Lina strikes again.”

“Lina…”

“At least that time,” she said, her voice choked, “I didn’t hurt anyone else.”

Ren held her tighter. “You didn’t do this.”

“Mrs. B…” Lina winced at the flood that pushed up into her eyes. “Mrs. B never woke up, all the time we were there, so I don’t know…I don’t know if she blames me…if she’s in pain…” Her voice was a mere squeak now.

Ren’s arms lifted her and brought her head to his shoulder. While she wept he stroked her hair and said nothing until she had quieted.

Then all he said was, “We’ll make it stop. There has to be a way.”

Lina was too tired to wonder how. She nodded and kissed him, and fell asleep.

* * *

Lina spent the next day in a variety of unpleasant tasks. When the furnace repairmen arrived, an insurance agent shadowing them, she related the incident to them, minus ghostly theories. The group clumped down to the basement to look at the furnace. Lina went along, dreading every step despite her sizable entourage. The men shook their heads and said it sure was a weird case. A pipe must have burst, but to do it with that kind of strength, and in a mild season when the system wasn’t getting overworked—well, that was bizarre. The insurance agent launched into a story of a television that had exploded on someone in a case he had examined. Lina wondered if that had been the work of a ghost too. He would undoubtedly think her insane if she piped up with the proposal that poltergeists were the silent killers of American households. Maybe she was insane. Poltergeists were probably only the silent killers of this household.

She visited the other seniors, but that didn’t calm her either, as they wanted to know what had happened with Mrs. B, and Lina only ended up retelling the story. Not being able to tell it truthfully made it even more distasteful, and the seniors were upset, which didn’t help. Some of their family members got word of the accident and called Marla and Alan to demand assurance that it wouldn’t happen again. Lina found Marla slumped in her quarters, her eyes covered with one hand. Marla rambled about how one family threatened to withdraw their mother from this place, and another actually was going to, and the calls were only going to increase as more families heard about the accident; and, God, why did she and Alan ever think they could control a house like this?

“It’s my fault,” Lina mumbled again.

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’ll move out.” Lina felt numb as she said it. Would she really? Where would she go?

“Now that’s just stupid,” Marla said. “Whatever happens here, I’d rather have you around to help. Besides, Ren would only fall into a blue funk if you left, and no one would be able to stand living with him.”

Lina nodded, too tired anyway to imagine having to move her stuff.

Marla slid her hands up into her hair. “At least Mrs. B wants to stay. Against her son’s wishes, I ought to add. Guess she got into a holy-hell knockdown fight with him at the hospital over it.”

“She’s awake? And fighting?”

“Well, arguing. On a notepad. Still can’t talk, with the oxygen tubes…”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Marla pushed up from her chair. “Come on. I was going to visit her. She’ll want to see you.”

When they entered the hospital room Mrs. B sat up with difficulty and smiled, but with the oxygen mask over her nose and mouth she couldn’t talk to them. She patted their hands and winked, and urged them to talk by pressing her thumbs onto their palms when they paused. Lina’s tongue stuck in her throat. It broke her heart to see the lively old woman reduced to this. Marla did most of the talking. Out of nowhere she conjured up some humor and regaled Mrs. B with the stories of what the repair guys had said and what characters they were.

When they got up to leave at dinnertime, Lina leaned over to kiss Mrs. B on the forehead and whispered, “I feel so guilty. I knew the ghost was jealous, and then this happens…”

Mrs. B’s eyes took on a disparaging look, and she waved her hand in the air to swat Lina away. The unspoken words chirped in Lina’s head: Oh, fiddle!

She smiled despite the ache in her heart. “You’re probably right. Goodnight, Mrs. B.”

Marla and Lina drove back to the house, barely speaking. They parked in the garage and entered the house through the office in the basement, where they found Ren.

He shut a file cabinet drawer and stood up to look at them with a hollow gaze. For the first time, the sight of him made Lina’s flesh creep. Not until now had he worn some aspect of the walking dead. Was the sparkle really dulled in his eyes, or was it a trick of the light? Were his colors washed out and tending toward gray, or did her tired eyes paint them like that? Surely his hand wasn’t translucent there, resting on the filing cabinet? No, that was impossible.

She let her gaze drop. “Impossible” should not have been in her vocabulary anymore. It ought to have been banished along with “alive,” “dead,” and “sane.”

“Hey, kiddo,” Marla said.

“Hello,” he said. “Dinner’s almost ready. About fifteen minutes.”

Marla glanced from him to Lina, then trudged to the stairs. “Right. I’ll see you two up there.”

When the landing door closed behind her, Ren moved again, dispelling the notion that he was nothing but an old sepia-toned photograph projected in three dimensions into the room. “How is she?” he asked.

“Mrs. B? She’s okay. She’s kept her spirits, at least.” She stopped, chagrined to have used the word “spirits.” If you thought about it, language was full of idioms that wouldn’t do when talking to a ghost. I nearly died laughing. We don’t have a ghost of a chance. I’ll finish this if it kills me. In despair, Lina lifted her gaze to the walls. “So, what were you doing down here?”

“Nothing much.”

She ventured forward and touched the filing cabinet. “What’s in these?”

“Files on the house. Taxes and…” He sighed. “Insurance. I wanted to make sure Marla and Alan are covered. If she’s going to do this much damage, and if I’m the one to blame…”

She took his hand. “You’re not. I feel guilty too, but we’re not the ones loosening the pipes till they burst. Or whatever exactly she did.”

“I know.” His hand did not move in hers, but at least it was warm. He didn’t seem dead as long as he was warm.

“So are they covered?” she asked.

“About as much as they can be. Comprehensive, along with earthquake, flood, and so on.”

“She can’t cause an earthquake, can she?”

“I don’t think so. But then, a few days ago I wouldn’t have said she could make a radiator explode either.”

Lina glanced around the basement room, her stomach lurching at the knowledge that Julia had died about twenty feet from here. “Maybe we should go upstairs.”

“Dinner’s about ready. You might want to round up the residents.”

He withdrew his hand and followed her up the stairs, and they parted at the landing. As Lina continued up to the third floor, she eyed everything with resentment—the carpet, the wallpaper, the overhead light fixtures, the paintings, even the doorknobs. Radiators, laundry baskets, and staple guns had already been used against her, so why not the rest of the furnishings?

Lina asked so little of life. She had behaved well whenever possible. She had fallen in love with someone who was trapped and lonely, and she wouldn’t have minded living here for the rest of her life if it meant she could be with him. But fate wouldn’t even let her do that.

If Ren had been an ordinary man they could have run away together. But then, if he had been an ordinary man there would have been no need to run.

The worst was knowing that other women had found themselves in the same dilemma, and had all unanimously chosen what looked like the only wise option. Leaving this situation. Leaving him.

What began as a routine hanging up of her coat in her room ended with Lina raking the hanger at the bar until it caught, slamming the closet door, and kicking it. No! She wouldn’t leave. She wouldn’t be like those others. Love was rare and precious; she had to stop dumping it down the drain like a cocktail she was too squeamish to drink. She had to act if she wanted to save it. Any wild idea was worth a try.

After all, nothing could be wilder than reality.