Chapter 5
Lila
There's a box on my porch rail, and I interrogate it for a full minute before I let it in the house.
No note. A hundred feet of contractor-yellow cord, heavy as a python.
A box of fuses — my fuses, the right fuses, the exact amperage, which narrows the suspect pool to one, because only two living people have ever cared what amperage this porch runs, and I'm holding the box.
A ground-fault adapter. Heat-shrink tubing, which is pointed, because it means he knows I've been splicing, which means he's been listening to my extension cords the way I've been listening to his winch.
"It's not a gift," I explain to Beetlejuice, who has come out to supervise the interrogation. "It's psychological warfare. He's establishing that he can see my weaknesses. It's like when the Godfather sends you fish."
Beetlejuice sniffs the cord once and walks away, which is his way of saying the fish is fine, Lila, use the fish.
I use the fish. The séance parlor runs all evening on clean, uninterrupted, correctly rated power, and the table lift cycles like a dream, and I hate how good it feels. Somewhere over the fence, a winch runs. Neither of us sets anything on fire. Détente.
It lasts three days, and then the government gets involved.
Town hall on a Friday afternoon smells like radiator heat and folding chairs, and the Founders' Fright Committee sits behind a table like a parole board that bakes.
I'm in the second row. Grady Ellis is four chairs down in the same row, because we arrived separately, at the same time, from the same street, like a divorced couple at a recital, and the seating math got witnessed by everyone in the room.
Ruth. Behrens and the good clipboard. Marge, attending in a strictly popcorn capacity. Dottie presiding.
The wall behind the committee table has forty-one years of Founders' Fright photos on it, and I made the mistake of looking.
Bee's in eleven of them. Bee with the bride.
Bee with the pirate wreck and the fire marshal, mid-argument, both of them clearly enjoying it.
Bee at seventy-nine, the last one, in a lawn chair with a blanket over her knees, directing something out of frame with two fingers, like a conductor who no longer needs the orchestra to watch.
I looked away from the wall before the meeting started. Mostly.
"Thank you both for coming," Dottie says, which is hilarious, because the summons Behrens hand-delivered used the word required twice.
"Happy to," I say.
Grady says nothing. He's in a canvas jacket, sitting the way big men sit on folding chairs, which is carefully, and I keep my eyes on the parole board where they belong.
"The committee has reviewed the warning issued Thursday," Dottie says.
"And frankly, we've reviewed the two of you.
And we find that a warning is a fence, and fences hold livestock, not weather.
" She folds her hands. "So we're trying something else.
The elementary school's Haunted Walk is a week from Saturday.
As you may have heard, Carol Finch had her hip done Tuesday, bless her, and the Walk currently consists of nine sheets of plywood in the gymnasium and a bin of cotton webs from the Clinton administration. "
I see it coming the way you see a wave coming. There's a whole second where you could theoretically run.
"You're both professionals," Dottie continues.
"One of you builds attractions for a living.
The other one holds this town's record for engineering things children scream about.
As of today, you are co-chairs of the Haunted Walk.
Jointly. You'll build it together, staff it together, and stand next to each other at the cider table Saturday night while four hundred children have a wonderful time.
Consider it," and here she smiles, with the full warmth of a woman who has already won, "community service. "
"Dottie," Grady says.
"Sentence first, appeals never," Dottie says. "The gym's open evenings. Ruth has the key and Carol's binder. Any questions?"
"Is there a budget?" I ask, because I have been part of institutions before.
"There's a bake sale," says Ruth.
"So no."
"There's a spirited bake sale."
Beside me, four chairs down, the most annoying thing happens.
Grady Ellis laughs — one syllable, caught late, smothered fast, but I hear it, everyone hears it, it's like hearing a statue sneeze.
Dottie looks briefly, professionally satisfied, the way you look when a machine you built passes its first test.
"Wonderful," she says. "Co-chairs, exchange numbers. Committee stands adjourned, we've got a potluck setup at five."
In the aisle, on the way out, he stops next to me. Up close in daylight he smells like cedar and fog fluid, which shouldn't be a real smell, and is definitely not a good smell, and I need to stop cataloging it.
"Monday," he says. "My garage. The gym's got no table saw, we'll pre-cut everything at my place and haul it."
"Your garage."
"Six o'clock. I'll leave the fence gate unlocked." He's already walking, because leaving is his native language, and then he adds, over his shoulder, not quite turning, "Bring the cat if he wants to inspect."
I stand there in a folding-chair aisle experiencing a chest event I refuse to diagnose.
"It's a work site," I tell Marge, who has materialized beside me with popcorn and a face like a Renaissance painting of I Told You So. "Don't."
"I didn't say a word, honey." She offers the bag, and her face does not stop being the painting, and the popcorn, I notice too late, is the celebration batch, the one with the candy corn mixed in, which Marge deploys exclusively for town milestones. "Popcorn?"
His garage is unfair.
I want that on the record. I walk through the fence gate Monday at six with my drill, my speed square, and my hostility, fully prepared to workshop alongside the enemy in professional silence, and his garage cuts me off at the knees.
It's insulated. It's lit like a surgical theater.
There's a table saw older than both of us, cast iron, tuned like an instrument, and a wall of clamps in descending size order like organ pipes, and the whole place smells like cedar and machine oil and — I'm going to say it, fine — like him, and every tool has a drawn outline on the pegboard where it lives.
It's Bee's shed, is the problem. Bigger and squarer and masculine, but it's her shed, the same religion practiced in a different church, and I wasn't ready for that.
"You're staring at the clamp wall," he says.
"I'm not staring at the clamp wall."
"People stare at the clamp wall."
"Your dust collection has zoning." I point at the ceiling drops with my speed square, arm steady, voice steady. "This is a cry for help. You know that, right? Somewhere in this town there's a support group."
"There is. It meets at Marge's register." He rolls out Carol Finch's binder on the workbench.
The fence gate clicks behind me. Beetlejuice walks into the garage like the building has been expecting him, does one full perimeter lap with his tail up — the clamp wall, the lumber rack, the dark corner where a tarp covers something big — and then sits down in the exact geometric center of the floor and looks at Grady.
"He does inspections," I say. "Don't take it personally."
"Wouldn't dream of it." Grady opens a drawer, takes out a folded moving blanket like he had it staged, and drops it on the end of the workbench, up high, out of the sawdust line. Beetlejuice flows up onto it in one motion and assumes the loaf of final approval.
I look at the blanket. The blanket that was in a drawer. Pre-folded. At cat height.
"That was already there," Grady says.
"Sure it was."
"It's a shop blanket."
"It's a cat bed, and you had it ready, and this is the single most incriminating thing you've ever done." I clamp my butcher paper down before he can answer. "The town saint keeps a guest bed for my cat. Wait till the group chat hears."
"The group chat," he says, "is how I knew he likes fleece."
I have literally no comeback. Nine years of professional banter with union scenic carpenters and I've got nothing, because the man committed premeditated kindness with supporting research and then confessed to it in a flat voice like he was reading a materials list. And we go to work.
And here's the thing nobody warned me about, the thing I'd have paid to be warned about: working with him is easy.
Not pleasant. I'm not saying pleasant. But we speak the same language at the bench — I sketch the Walk's nine stations on butcher paper and he's already pulling stock, calling cut lists off my drawings without me translating, and when I say the tunnel section needs a pinch point so the kids bunch up before the scare, he doesn't ask why, he says, "Thirty-two inches?
" and he's right, thirty-two inches is exactly right, and I hate that a man this size knows the choreography of small frightened children to the inch.
By eight o'clock the plywood's cut and racked, labeled in his blocky lettering on strips of tape.
By eight thirty we're at opposite ends of the bench with coffee he made without asking how I take it — wrong, for the record, he makes it strong enough to shingle a roof, and I drink all of it — and the conversation slides somewhere I don't steer it.
"Why monsters?" he asks. Out of nothing. "Theme parks. Whole career. Why that."
"Everyone asks that like it's strange, and yet nobody asks accountants why numbers.
" I turn my mug a quarter-turn. "Because a good scare is a gift.
It's the safest fear you'll ever feel. You scream, and then you laugh, because your body just found out the monster was foam, and for one second, everything that's actually chasing you is foam too.
I got to build that feeling for strangers eleven hours a day.
" The next part comes out before I decide about it.
"And Bee got there first. She built me a haunted maze out of storm fencing when I was seven, out back, all summer.
It's her fault I had to move away to do it.
Which is a sentence I've been thinking about a lot lately, standing in her house, going broke. "
The garage is quiet. The good kind, mostly.
"Roof's really eighteen?" he asks.
"Roof's really eighteen. Estate's really two.
Severance is really gone in eleven months, ten if Beetlejuice keeps eating prescription food.
" I look at him down the bench. "So that's me.
That's why I need your pumpkin. What's your story, champ?
Why does a grown man with a fire schedule and a business spend four figures a year fogging his own lawn? "
Something happens behind his face. Doors closing in a corridor, one after another, quiet.
"Tradition," he says.
"Tradition."
"Town expects it now." He shrugs, and it's smooth, and it's nothing, and I've spent nine years around performers so I know a rehearsed line when it walks past me in work boots. "Somebody's got to give the kids a headline."
"Huh," I say, which is his own move, and I watch it land on him like a borrowed tool.
I let it go. We're co-chairs, not friends. His secrets are his.
"You like the garage," Frankie says.
Tuesday morning, her counter, maple foam. I've made the tactical error of describing my evening honestly.
"I respect the garage. It's a professional respect. Between professionals."
"You described his clamp wall for ninety seconds. I timed it. Kayla wanted to order and I made her wait."
"The clamps are in descending size order, Frankie. Like organ pipes." I hear it as it leaves my mouth. "Okay. Fine. I hear it."
"Mm-hmm." She wipes the wand with the smugness of a woman batting a thousand. "And the coffee he made you was terrible, but you drank all of it."
"It was strong. Roofing tar. My esophagus has a complaint on file."
"But you drank all of it."
"It would have been rude—"
"You," she says, pointing at me with a full carafe, an occupational threat display, "took the fish."
"What?"
"You told me Sunday the cord was like the Godfather sending fish.
Then you plugged your whole ghost porch into the fish.
Now you're in the fish's garage every night this week, and your cat has a bed there.
" She lets the carafe rest. Leans in. Drops fifteen years of best friendship on me at close range.
"Lila. Honey. Nobody in this story thinks you hate the fish. "
"He's the competition. In three weeks one of us takes the money and the other one is very publicly not the Merriweather who mattered.
" It comes out with more edges than I planned, and Frankie's face does its quiet shift, and I loop back, because I can hear that the joke and the wound just came out of the same drawer.
"I don't hate him. I've decided it's worse than that.
He's exactly the kind of person Bee would have—"
I stop. Frankie waits. She learned waiting from somewhere terrible, probably Dottie.
"Bee would have liked him," I finish, and neither of us says anything, and someone's oat milk screams in the pitcher like it understands me.
Tuesday night, pre-cutting done, I pack my drill, and that's when I see it — up on the high shelf above the lumber rack, back in the shadow between two totes, a curve of pale gray.
A crescent. Papier-maché, big as a bicycle wheel, the surface hand-textured in little overlapping strokes, and there's a chip out of the bottom edge of the smile.
The chip is what does it. Somewhere below my conscious floor, a filing cabinet drawer rolls open. A ladder in the dark. Cocoa. Face the porch so I can see them from my chair.
"What's that?" My voice comes out normal. Genuinely normal. I'm as surprised as anyone.
He follows my eyes to the shelf, and there's a beat — a held sixteenth note, nothing, you'd need to be a person who reads rooms professionally to catch it — before he says, "Came with the house."
"Huh," I say again.
I carry my drill home through the fence gate, and I stand in my own yard, and the maple's dropping leaves on the ruins of the fog war, and I run the math like a person checking a lock they already know is locked.
Bee's moon is in her shed. I inventoried the shed my first week — well.
I started to. I opened the door, and it smelled like lavender and sawdust and her, and I closed it again and called it triage.
But the moon is in there. It's in there under a tarp with everything else, because where else would it be.
I know that moon from somewhere. I know it the way you know a smell.
But Bee's moon is in her shed. Obviously.
Obviously it is.