Chapter 13. Lenore
Lenore
Around dusk, the party breaks up. Parents wrangle children into booster seats with promises that they’ll see their friends again at school on Monday. Cal stays behind to help clean up, carrying the folding chairs and stowing them in the garage.
I linger, tossing out paper plates smeared with chocolate frosting, chasing down colorful leaves of tissue caught in the wind. Shelby finds me at a folding table, rolling up a half-empty bag of corn chips.
“I was thinking,” she says, “about what you said last weekend.”
“Last weekend?” I echo, racking my brain. My memories from that night at the Penalty Box are cloudy at best, though I don’t think that we had much to say to each other.
“You invited me out to lunch,” she says.
“Right. You said that you’re busy.”
“Most days, I am,” she says, “but I could probably grab a coffee or something, so long as it’s on a school day.”
We exchange numbers, except that hers hasn’t changed since high school. I shout goodbye to Avery, who’s climbing on the monkey bars and couldn’t care less. Cal walks with me to the front of the house, where my rental car is parked beside his truck. “So,” he says, “I guess I’ll see you Monday.”
“You’re not working this weekend?”
He shakes his head. “I have some stuff I need to take care of around the house.”
I try to ignore the pang of disappointment in my chest. “Thank you,” I say, “for inviting me today. Even though you forgot to mention that it was a birthday party.”
Cal breathes a guilty laugh and scrubs a hand at the back of his neck. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
Before I can overthink it, I pull him into a hug.
After a beat of hesitation, his strong arms encircle my waist, holding me flush against him.
We stand there for a moment, breathing each other in.
His sweater is soft and smells like wood and faint cologne and the ever-changing outdoors.
The feel of our bodies pressed together triggers something instinctual in me—a desire to be closer, impossibly closer than we already are.
Instead, I draw back, but we don’t let go of each other. My nose skates across his cheek, the scrape of his stubble, until our eyes meet, so close I can hardly see him clearly. We’re sharing breaths.
My heart pounds, hard enough that I wonder whether he can feel it through his sweater. His eyes are inky, blue swallowed up by black. I drop my gaze to his lips.
“Hey, wait up!”
Jesse’s voice breaks the spell. Reluctantly, we ease apart, though our eyes remain locked together, something wordless passing between us.
Jesse jogs around the side of the house, a heavy canvas jacket in one hand.
“You left this inside.” He tosses the jacket to Cal, who goes to catch it and almost drops it.
“Thanks, man.”
Jesse leaves, and in the ensuing silence, our eyes find their way back to each other. Except the moment has already passed, like it always does. His words from the farmer’s market ping around inside my skull: I don’t go after the things I want.
Cal takes a few steps backward, toward his truck. “Get home safe, Lenore.”
My mouth has gone dry. I want to call after him: What are we doing? Maybe he does want this, but I’ll never know for certain, because he isn’t doing a damn thing about it.
“See you Monday,” I grumble, and climb into my rental. I turn my key in the ignition and pull away from the house without sparing another glance in his direction.
At the bottom of the driveway, I stop to plug my phone into the car. I need something to clear my head. I tap the touch screen to pull up a list of recent calls, and scroll until I find Katie Nguyen-French.
“Hey,” she puffs. “I’m walking the curb. What’s up?”
“You know that I’ll always be here for you,” I say. “Right?”
I hear her panting into the phone and imagine her standing with her hand on her hip and one leg propped on the curb, like a pregnant Captain Morgan. “Yes?”
“I mean after the baby arrives,” I clarify. “I just—let me know what you need. I’ll come stay with you guys, if that’s really what you want. I want to be there for you both, one way or another.”
“Are you feeling all right?” she asks. “Did you hit your head?”
“No.”
“No, you’re not feeling all right, or no, you didn’t hit your head?”
“I didn’t hit my head,” I say.
“But you are feeling all right.” Her tone is light, but probing.
I sigh through my nose. “I’m fine. I just love you guys. I want to make sure you know that.”
“Okay,” she says dubiously. “We love you, too.”
A minute later, we hang up, and I’m left alone with my thoughts.
It’s dark out by the time I turn onto the long dirt drive that leads to the farmhouse.
I left the lamp in my bedroom on, but the lonesome glow from the window does little to combat the looming shadow of the woods.
I kill the engine. A thick silence blankets the property, punctuated only by the car door shutting behind me.
It’s almost eerie, how isolated the property feels at night. I unlock the side door and step into the mudroom. I reach overhead for the pull chain, and click on the light.
Prior to this trip, I’d never spent a night here without someone else in the house—even when my brother would go stay with a friend, there was always Gran. As much as this is my childhood home, there is something undeniably unsettling about wandering a house this large and old at night.
The long floorboards groan and buckle beneath my feet, a reminder that the dank basement sits below, home to all sorts of creepy-crawlies.
Thick horsehair plaster dampens the sound between one room and the next.
There are rooms in the house with no windows at all: the second staircase, the long upstairs hallway, where the dark threatens to swallow you whole.
Generations have lived and died within these walls.
At least one person must have had enough unfinished business for a haunting—if you believe in that sort of thing.
Mostly, I don’t. I’ve always figured they would’ve shown themselves in the years I lived here, but Gran liked to remind me that ghosts were people; some liked to make a racket, and others kept to themselves.
I check over my shoulder as I pass through the keeping room. Moonlight sifts through sheer curtains, casting the antique furniture in silver until headlights pass on the road, and the shadows turn like hands on a clock.
A shiver crawls up my spine, pulling goose bumps beneath my sweater. I rub my arms and keep moving.
I release a breath when I reach the kitchen, where a cooktop light still burns beneath the range hood. I grab a bag of chamomile tea from the pantry and crank on the hot water, testing the temperature with a finger.
Thud.
My head snaps up. It sounded like that came from somewhere upstairs. Maybe a branch broke on a maple tree and hit the roof. Café curtains trim the window above the sink, which looks toward the woods. It’s so dark that my own face is reflected back at me, eyes wide as saucers.
Uneasy, I fill the mug with hot water and dunk the tea bag to let it steep. The clock above the stove reads 8:03. I lean my butt against the counter, trying not to dwell on the thudding sound. You hear all sorts of things, this close to the woods.
I’ve gotten used to living in the city, where noise is steady, predictable in its unpredictability: bleating car horns and drunken shouting as people stagger home after the bars close for the night.
Human beings are loud, but out here, where there’s not another soul for miles, it’s quiet—until it’s not.
My thoughts drift back to Callan. I wonder whether he’s home yet.
I could call him to find out, something to break up the silence, make me feel a little less alone in this big old house, but stubbornness rules out that idea.
My head is too jumbled about where things stand between us. I won’t be the one to reach out.
A faint sound drifts from somewhere beyond the kitchen, like chatter on a low-volume television. I must be hearing things. I stick my head into the keeping room, but the screen is black. That’s when I hear it again: low voices, urgent. A floorboard creaks overhead.
My whole body goes rigid.
I back into the kitchen until my ass connects with a cupboard.
Pulse racing, I slide a long carving knife from the block on the counter.
Something moves in the periphery, and my heart springs into my throat, but it’s only my reflection above the sink.
With my free hand, I pat around my waist, searching for pockets out of sheer muscle memory. I forgot that I’m wearing a skirt.
Shit. I left my phone plugged into the car.
Footsteps groan on the stairs. I clutch the knife in front of my chest and debate making a run for the side door, but that would mean passing directly in front of the staircase.
A large man rounds the corner and I scream, raising the knife overhead.
He shrieks—a pitchy sound. Some part of me registers that whoever he is, he’s obviously terrified, but my nervous system is in fight-or-flight mode, and it’s chosen fight.
I charge toward him and he stumbles backward through the dark keeping room, knocking over a fiddleback chair, crashing into the coffee table, planting a hand on it to steady himself.
The doily slips right out from under him and he falls on his ass with a thud, scuttling backward like a crab.
I fist his shirt collar and point the knife at his throat. “What the hell are you doing in my house?”
“Y-your house?” he stammers.
I yank him toward me. My eyes adjust to the gloom. I see the flicker of fear, his throat dipping in a nervous swallow. “Answer the question.”
“It was a dare,” he squeaks. “My friends—”
I blink, noting the crackle in his voice—immature, pubescent. Not a man. A teenager, his face pallid, the whites showing around his eyes. “What do you mean, it was a dare?”
“This place is supposed to be, like, abandoned,” he says, eyes darting to the knife and back up again. “It’s been empty ever since that old lady lost her mind, or whatever. They say it’s haunted.”
His words skewer me straight through the heart. My grandmother. He’s talking about my grandmother—not like she’s a person, who lived and loved here, but like she’s a local legend. A scary story.
I release his shirt and ease back. “Get out.”
For a split second, he doesn’t move, sprawled on the braided rug in the dark. “Are you going to call the cops?”
I point the knife at him, twitching it in the direction of the door. “Get. Out.”
Apparently, he does need to be told twice, but at least he listens the second time. I take a few steps backward to watch as he struggles to his feet on shaky legs and scampers through the mudroom, leaving the side door hanging open behind him.
Frantic whispers are exchanged on the porch. I make my way over in time to see a group of teenagers stumbling down the driveway, their shadows cast long from the motion-sensor light spilling across the lawn.
Hands shaking, I shut the door and lock it. Only then do I notice the faint breeze rustling the curtains, cold autumn night seeping in.
I breathe a humorless laugh and tug the squeaky window shut, fixing the latch so that it can’t be opened from the outside.
I move into the kitchen and collapse into a dining room chair, dropping the knife onto the table with a clatter. I bury my head in my hands, my body racked with dry, shuddering sobs.
I only give myself a moment before I gulp a few breaths and push to my feet. Returning to the mudroom, I peer through the gap in the curtains. No sign of anyone outside.
I press a button on the key fob hanging on a hook beside the door, and the rental car chirps to let me know it’s unlocked. I slip out the door, brisk night air closing in around me, and open the car door to grab my phone out of the cup holder, tugging the cable free.
Back inside, I debate calling the police.
They were kids—kids who broke into my home, but aside from the shock of adrenaline it gave me, it was more or less a victimless crime.
Besides, they had assumed that the house was empty.
It would have been empty, had I not dropped everything to stay here one last time.
Two weeks, and then this house changes hands forever. It’s hard to fathom. It almost feels like I don’t have the right to be offended by the break-in. My claim over the property is dubious at best, suspended in the purgatory of escrow.
Still, the encounter rattled me. I can’t imagine that I’m going to sleep tonight, flinching at every whispering breeze, every shadowy tree branch waving outside my bedroom window.
I find Callan in my recent contacts and press call.
This is not me giving in and reaching out first. These are extenuating circumstances.
“Hi,” he says, sounding pleasantly surprised, if a bit confused.
“Hey,” I say in a rush. “Someone broke into the house just now, and I’m not sure—”
“What?” he almost shouts. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I mean, a little shaken up, but it was just some high school kids. They took off running when they saw that I had a knife.”
“What?”
“A kitchen knife,” I rush to explain, like that makes it any better.
I’m frazzled, tripping over my own words.
“I don’t know whether I should call the police.
I mean, they seemed harmless. At least, the one I actually spoke to seemed harmless.
Claimed that it was a dare, something about the house being haunted—”
“I’m coming over,” he interrupts.
I hate the way my pulse quickens, but it’s marching to a different beat than the earlier spike of adrenaline. “You don’t have to,” I say meekly, but I want him to. Under normal circumstances, I’m not afraid of the dark, but for the rest of tonight, I’m going to be on edge.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he says. “In the meantime, don’t go wandering. Better yet, get back in the car and lock the doors until I get there. I don’t want you alone in the house until I’ve checked all the rooms.”