Chapter Two
Lina had read that it took at least two months to feel at home in a new job—and besides, where else would she go?—so she stuck it out at Drake House even though it often felt like a foreign culture. They called things by pet names or ones she wasn’t accustomed to. The room adjoining the dining room was a “parlor,” a term she never encountered except in Victorian novels. The “living room,” in contrast, was the large room at the front with the grand piano. “Firesides” were the casual gatherings at the fireplace in the living room on cold evenings.
“Having a fireside tonight!” Marla or Alan would tell her. “Come on down!”
The iron fire escape on the house’s back exterior wall was the “smoking lounge,” since no smoking was allowed in the building and therefore smokers had to step outside. As far as Lina could tell, though, none of the residents or employees did smoke, so the term must have been a holdover from the sorority days, like Ren Schultz’s job title of “houseboy.”
Lina didn’t talk to Ren much during the first two weeks. She figured he was avoiding Jackie Clairmont and her vicious walking stick, and he was always busy cleaning or fixing something when Lina did stumble upon him. Though he kept to himself, he seemed to be around a great deal, and Lina wondered if he ever went home. When she remarked on this to Mrs. B one day, she learned he already was home.
“Comes with his job,” Mrs. B said. “Tiny room in the basement. I’ve seen it when I’m down there for laundry. I don’t know how he can stand it. That basement’s eerie if you ask me.”
Lina eased Mrs. B’s bare foot out of the basin of warm water and toweled it dry. “Considering Seattle rent prices these days, he probably thinks it’s a bargain. By the way, have you made friends with Mrs. Clairmont? She doesn’t say much when I visit her.”
“Dolly and Gertrude and I have gotten her to play gin rummy with us. Haven’t asked her yet why she whacked poor Ren, though. Those ugly warts looking any better?”
“I think so. Just going to apply a little more of this stuff.” Lina dabbed wart-remover ointment onto Mrs. B’s heel with a gloved pinky. “She probably has some interesting sorority stories about this place.”
“I expect so. All we’ve talked about in regards to U-Dub was what we studied and what we wore. And how hard it was to get a decent drink during the Depression!” Mrs. B laughed.
Lina smiled and taped a small bandage over the warts. “I wonder if the U Library has any history on the house. Might give us theories on our ghosts.”
“You should go look! And I’ll see if I can’t sweet-talk some clues out of Jackie.”
Sounded like a good hobby, and Lord knew Lina needed one. She still got nervous thrills in her stomach when she checked her email, thinking Brent might write to her, though she had no good reason to be nervous. What could he say?
A spell of self-analysis during an afternoon walk in the cool October sunshine showed her the pathetic truth. She hoped he might write, I was wrong to leave. I love you and only you. I’m dumping Joanne and coming back , or at the very least, I’ll never love her the way I loved you, but if you and I can’t be together I suppose I have to take the second-best option . She thwacked a mailbox post with her rolled-up umbrella on her way past. He was never going to write that. She was acting like a fatuous young girl. A mature woman would forget the jerk and embark on a spicy new relationship. Say, with a twenty-something coworker.
Unworkable idea, but at least it made her smile.
Anyway, until she answered Brent in a personal email and actually addressed the subject of his engagement, she wouldn’t know what he’d say.
At the end of her second week at Drake House, Lina typed out a message that underwent several drafts before she considered it acceptable.
Dear Brent,
I’ve been so busy with my new job, I haven’t had the chance yet to congratulate you. I didn’t want you to think I was sulking. Of course it was a surprise, but I wish you and Joanne all the best. I hope to meet her someday. Please stay in touch.
Take care,
Lina.
His answer, the next day, was:
Thanks L. Glad you’re doing good. Never thought I’d get engaged so fast but this thing with Joanne knocked me off my feet! You’d like her, she’s really great. Thanks for writing. Makes me feel better about the bitter goodbyes. You take care too.
- B.
She reread his email four times, feeling offended and breathless, like he had casually grabbed her head and stuffed it into a pile of wet leaves. She turned off her computer and staggered down to the kitchen. Ren and the cook were preparing the house’s lunch, but she ignored them and steadied her hands by making a cup of coffee.
Knocked him off his feet. How very nice for him. Nothing at all like his tame, ho-hum relationship with Lina, she supposed he meant to say. She edged past the cook and put two slices of bread in the toaster, tapping her fingers on the counter as she waited. Bitter goodbyes—right, did he mean the part where he had accused her of having no spine, no sense of adventure? Or the part where she had accused him of having no regard for what she valued? Or the way he had answered that she must not really love him, and her retort that maybe he was right?
Her toast popped up. She slapped it onto a plate, attacked it with peanut butter, and thumped the plate onto the breakfast bar beside her black coffee. The Seattle Times lay in a heap on the bar. She pulled it over and flipped through it. She could go to her room and cry, but that would be continuing to act like a fatuous young girl. She could write him a nasty email and never send it, but that would be feeding the fire.
Most infuriating of all, she realized she didn’t even want him back, and was upset over him anyway. What she wanted was that whole year and a half of her life back, since it had come to nothing. She had failed at a relationship, as usual, and hated the fact. She knew she had to get on with life, jump back into the saddle and so forth, but how did people do that?
The crossword puzzle in the newspaper was about one-quarter filled in by someone with a tentative pencil. Lina found the pencil in a cup on top of the microwave and sat down to finish their work. She didn’t have to be on call until after lunch. Might as well burn off some steam by throwing herself against the mighty wall of the New York Times crossword.
It didn’t help. After twenty minutes she still got no satisfaction from filling in the easy clues, and the hard ones just made her want to stab the puzzle creator with a number two pencil.
For instance, what was she supposed to do with “Munchies, his ’n hers,” six letters, beginning with C-R and ending with E? Her mind stalled on “crepes,” but that didn’t end with E, and while crepes might have been considered “munchies,” there was nothing particularly his-’n-hers about them. Adding words and crossword puzzles to the list of things hell-bent on vanquishing her, Lina reached for her toast without looking.
Someone took a sharp breath. A hand caught her wrist. She lifted her head. Inches from her fingers, a hairy brown spider skulked on her plate, two probing feet right there in her peanut butter. She yelped. Counting leg-span, the thing must have been three full inches across.
Ren, after stopping her from putting her hand straight on it, let her go and clapped a dishtowel around the spider. Spindly legs emerged from the cloth, and the creature skittered toward her edge of the counter.
“Look out,” Ren said.
“It got out,” Lina said at the same moment. She leaped off her stool.
When the spider crawled over the edge, lost its footing on the smooth Formica surface, and fell to the floor, Lina was ready: she smacked one sneaker-clad foot down on top of it, and felt a crunch through the rubber.
She retracted her foot to view the crushed brown shape on the floor. “Got it.” She took a napkin from the dispenser on the counter and bent to collect the dead spider. After dropping it in the trash, she allowed a moment for a deep breath. The adrenaline was the first thing to dispel her gloom today.
“Thank you,” she said to Ren.
“No problem. I’d hate to see anyone get bitten. Hobo spiders are venomous.”
“I know.” Lina shuddered. “I saw a case once at the hospital.”
“Nurse. That’s right. You would already know.”
“Maybe Alan and Marla should call an exterminator.”
Ren shook his head. He sorted out the newspaper, peeking under each section. “We have some traps in the basement. I’ll replace them. Best way, really, is to encourage other spiders to live here. They prey on the hobos.”
“You study entomology or something?” Lina picked up her cup of coffee, glancing around for anything small and moving.
“No. Hobo spiders show up in the news now and then.” Ren smiled. “Anyway, entomology is about insects. Does it cover arachnids too?”
“I’m not sure. Good question.”
Ren picked up her plate. “I assume you don’t want this anymore.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
“Can I get you another one?”
“No, I think I’m off toast for a while. Maybe forever.”
“All right.” Ren glanced at the one section of the paper he had left undisturbed. “Going to finish the crossword?”
“No. It’s giving me a headache. I can’t work out the last few clues.”
Ren turned the paper around toward himself. Three seconds later, he picked up her pencil and filled in “C-R-O-Q-U-E” for the “Munchies, his ’n hers” word.
Lina leaned over the counter to read it. “Croque? Oh. Croque monsieur…”
“Croque madame,” Ren finished, saying it with her. “Types of sandwiches. Croque, meaning munch.”
As he spoke, she caught the unmistakable scent of grape gum. Ordinarily the snaps and chomps of gum-chewing irritated her, but he was so subtle with it she hadn’t even noticed until now. She found the smell comforting. It took her back to her childhood when she and her brother would buy gum and candy at the AM/PM and climb up to the cul-de-sac to watch cars zooming by on I-5 below.
“Wow,” she said. “You know about French and arachnids.”
Ren bowed his head, as if he thought he had been too boastful. “Well. Leave it to the kitchen help to come up with the food ones.”
“Would have taken me all day.” Lina stepped back. “Thank you again. See you at lunch.”
“See you.” Ren didn’t glance up; he was immersed in another clue.
He had dark brown eyes, and dark brown eyelashes to match. From that angle, when he was bent forward over the breakfast bar, they appeared to be sweeping his cheekbones. Which was a stupid thing to think, because everyone’s eyelashes were situated close to their cheekbones. Lina marched away.
She had enough time before lunch to start some laundry, so she carried a basket of clothes down to the basement, using the back stairs, which happened to pass the kitchen. Before she reached the ground-level landing, she made sure her underwear and dirty socks were tucked out of sight beneath a towel. On the landing she met Ren coming up from the basement, his apron dusty with flour, his arms laden with institutional-sized cans of peaches.
“Finished your crossword,” he said. “Already? What was the river in Estonia?”
“Narva. N-A-R-V-A.”
“Don’t tell me you just knew that.”
He shifted the cans. “I think I’d seen it in another crossword before.”
“Too modest.” She started down the stairs to the basement. “You’re good. I’m coming to you next time I’m stuck.”
His voice floated after her. “I’ll do my best.”
His footsteps moved into the pantry over her head as she reached the basement. Her limbs felt lightweight. She switched on the water in a washing machine and scattered powdered soap into it.
What was that, then? Flirting, that’s what. She hadn’t tried that for over a year, since getting together with Brent. As she remembered him, the gloom resettled itself around her. Irrational, really. She would have to get over Brent, yes, and flirting with Ren might be good practice, but it could hardly be anything else. She knew nothing of Ren except his name, his aptitude with vocabulary, the fact that he wasn’t in college, and the way his hair narrowed to a curling point at the nape of his neck.
And she hadn’t even realized she knew that last thing until now.
The laundry room door slammed shut, startling her. She was alone in the room and hadn’t seen anyone in the basement. Drafts and strangely-weighted doors were common enough in old houses, but she still felt uneasy. The basement had no pet name, and Lina saw why. Low ceilings, inadequate light from bare bulbs, half a dozen small rooms with solid doors, and jumbled storage boxes stretching into far dark corners would only have inspired nicknames like “the crypt” or “the mortuary.” Time to go back upstairs.
She turned and almost tripped over her laundry basket, which was lying upside-down behind her. She may have put it there—unlikely a place though it was—but she was pretty sure she did not turn it upside-down.
A chill shimmied up her spine as she remembered the lamp turning itself off her first night.
You were supposed to talk to ghosts, she had heard. Let them know you were friendly. She had been known to murmur hello to dead patients’ bodies in the hospital when alone with them, telling herself it was a courtesy to the deceased person, but also because secretly she hoped it might keep them from turning into vampires and attacking her. She had worked long, late hours and her mind, with Stephen King’s help, devised some bizarre horrors. But nothing in the hospital had ever moved by itself, corpses or otherwise.
“I don’t have anything against you,” she said aloud to the laundry room. “Please don’t try to scare me.”
Nothing answered, of course.
Lina flung her clothes into the machine, picked up her basket, and escaped from the laundry room. She considered stopping on the way up to ask Ren if he had ever noticed anything uncanny around here, but then vetoed the idea. She may have selected him as her latest flirtation practice, but running up and saying, “Something just shut the door and turned my laundry basket upside-down!” won the prize for pathetic conversation openers. Even the names of Estonian rivers beat that.
All the same, she was determined you couldn’t pay her to stay in that basement overnight. No, sir.
* * *