Chapter 6
When Thora awoke in the morning, she strode to the kitchen for coffee. There, she collided with Lee, coming out of the shower
in the bathroom where the old pantry had once been.
Thankfully, he managed to keep his towel on as Thora put her hands on his chest. It was broad and solid, but it had give to
it. Thora had only ever touched Cody’s chest previously, which was smooth and hard. He had a habit of removing his shirt at
work sites, which she knew from social media, and he was a little vain about it. Enough to make him adhere to strict regimens
regarding both push-ups and waxing appointments. Lee’s reddish chest hair felt different under her hands. She refused to acknowledge
that she liked it.
“Sorry,” Lee said, sidestepping her and retreating to his room.
Thora felt her face flush. The taxidermied birds were right; it was a terrible idea to let him stay here. She had writing to do, and she needed solitude for that.
She simply needed to set boundaries. The Wood Room would be her writing space, and he would be advised to keep out of it.
She would demand he keep noise to a minimum. No music or video without headphones. No singing or whistling. No clanging pots
and pans while she was writing.
Surely he wasn’t planning to stay long. Wasn’t fall the best time to paint houses? He must have work to get back to.
She got her moka pot ready to brew coffee. Offering Lee a cup as she detailed her boundaries would perfectly balance politeness
with firmness.
The telephone sat on the counter, catching her eye like a colorful but poisonous frog. She didn’t want to think about that
startling ring, the mesmerizing whispers, so she wrapped the cord around the phone and shoved it in the cabinet above the
refrigerator, where it could be well out of her hair. If it rang from up there, game over. That went past weird into terrifying.
At that point, Juniper would belong to whoever was animating the phone and Thora could make a new plan.
Her instinct, as she waited for the coffee to brew, was to check her phone. Instead, she sent her daily proof-of-life satellite
text to Mack and sat at the table. Although the brief text conveyed she was safe and sound, the reality was more complex.
The more she thought about that call, and how only a bumbling raccoon saved her from an infinite trance, the less safe or
sound she felt.
Trying to distract herself from her own fright, she imagined how to shoehorn this story into something appropriate for her book.
By hook or by crook, she’d make this story fun weird and not scary weird.
Maybe the kids wouldn’t know how a landline worked—Thora barely did herself—and she could spin a scary chapter out of something mundane, like a genuine wrong number call that frightens the kids out of their wits until one of them figures out what’s going on.
It could be a great source of winking humor for the parents of young readers, who were always part of the target audience.
As ideas started flowing, so did the optimism about moving to Juniper, even if she had disturbed something by moving in.
Lee had left a notebook of his on the table, open to a blank page. Thora picked up his pen and wrote across the top, Draw me a possum. She was thinking of the cartoons Lee drew in college and wondered if he kept up with that. Whether he still had that offbeat
and oddly existential sense of humor.
Eventually, Lee came in to join her, dressed in a fisherman’s sweater and dark green corduroys. It was more lighthouse keeper
than house painting bro, which she wasn’t expecting. She quelled an unwelcome urge to squeeze him and that added layer of
cushy knitting.
He was also wearing her winter hat. There was no mistaking it; it was an extremely one-of-a-kind chullo-style hat with earflaps.
Amethyst catered to Thora’s style when she knit the hat, incorporating geometric patterns and loud colors. Her own sensibilities
manifested in a handful of gemstone beads strung into the tassel at the top of the head, for creativity and protection. This
was a “fuck you” of a hat, one for people who truly didn’t give a shit about other people’s tastes. As much as it didn’t vibe
with the rest of Lee outfit superficially, it suited him on a deeper level.
“I’ve been looking for that hat,” she remarked.
“Is this yours? Cody let me borrow it, and I thought it was his. I’m so sorry.”
Cody was unworthy of this hat, to say the least. “Can you picture him owning this hat? Wearing it?”
“You’re right. I should have known.” He took the hat off his head and slid it onto hers, sharing the warmth he’d already imbued
into the wool. It felt unwholesomely good. “Looks much better on you than on me.”
That warmth he shared must have melted her brain for what she said next. “You can keep wearing it if you like. I brought my
backup hat.”
“Say no more. I fucking love this hat,” he said, and pulled it back off her head. A normal person might have tugged the hat
off by the tassel, but not Lee. With hands on each side of her head, he slipped his fingers under the earflaps and lifted,
as if he were about to toss the hat like pizza dough. In the process, his palms slid over her ears with no small degree of
sensuality. It would have been less intimate if he’d unhooked her bra, somehow. He put the hat back on his head, smiling blithely
as if he hadn’t just dressed and then undressed her. She felt herself flush, more flustered than she was seeing him in a towel.
“Sorry about before,” he said.
“Don’t mention it,” Thora said, and she meant that quite literally. The less she acknowledged those pecs, the better. “Help
yourself to coffee.”
“You want a cup, too?”
“Yes, please.”
“Cream and sugar?” he asked.
Surely he asked that out of politeness, and not because he remembered how she took her coffee.
“Yes, please,” she repeated.
He took two mugs from the cupboard. One where the handle made the C in the word CAMP, the remaining letters painted across to look like logs. The other was from the Woodhill Diner, a properly sturdy diner mug, and well-loved, from how faded the logo was.
Lee poured their coffees, dispensed sugar from the container on the counter, and opened the fridge for the cream.
“What the fuck?” he exclaimed, shutting the fridge again.
Thora skidded her chair back in surprise. She had cleaned that fridge only yesterday. What could be in there?
“What’s wrong?”
He opened the fridge again, pulled something out. Touching it as little as possible, as if it could burn him, he set it on
the counter.
It was the rotisserie chicken container.
She walked over to the counter to see it more clearly.
The meat was all gone. Completely gone. As if the chicken had been picked clean by scavengers and then the carcass was bleached
on parched, cracked earth under a desert sun. It wasn’t a carcass at all; it was a skeleton. Completely dry and white, almost
sterile looking.
“What the fuck?” Thora echoed.
“You didn’t do this?” Lee asked.
“No! When? How?”
The two stood side by side, studying the bones in utter puzzlement. Weren’t arrangements of bones supposed to foretell the
future? What kind of omen was this?
“Are we sure George didn’t keep a wife in the attic who’s been scrounging for food the past few years?” Lee mused.
“I checked the attic for unattended wives when I got here. Could that raccoon have done it?” Thora suggested.
“Like, while we were, um . . .” He didn’t have words for what had happened to them the previous night. His joke about an attic
wife soured as the fear crept back into her.
“When we lost time,” she offered. It was least horrifying way to phrase it.
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “This is so clean.”
“Raccoons are notoriously clean creatures,” she reasoned. Despite her suggestion, she knew perfectly well a racoon didn’t
do this.
Lee’s brows furrowed. Thora had never noticed the complexity of his eye color before. Greenish on the outside, more amber
toward the middle. Bryony Brooks would have had a marvelously sexy word for that eye color. Maybe “topaz.”
The sound of Lee dropping the plastic tray and its contents into the trash startled her. Their eyes met, topaz and indigo.
“How does trash work here?”
“When George was alive, Mack picked up his trash every couple of weeks and added it to hers. I hired a trash service. There’s
a bin for trash and one for recycling at the bottom of the driveway. I’m ordering one of those fancy indoor dehydrating composting
gadgets because bears will get into everything otherwise. And I’m not dealing with a bear-proof latch on my garbage. I know
all too well about the overlap between the cleverest bears and the most hopeless people when it comes to those latches, and
I’m pretty hopeless.”
Chuckling, he scooped the trash bag, which was mostly empty but for the chicken skeleton, out of the bin and walked out the
kitchen door.
Thora was cheered by that. Much like stowing the telephone in a cupboard, she would prefer not to be greeted by those bleached
bones every time she went to toss out a piece of garbage for the next few days.
While he was gone, Thora pulled the cream from the fridge and finished fixing her coffee.
She didn’t know Lee’s preference, so she left his black and sat back down at the table.
Damn, it was nice that he’d taken the initiative to take out the trash himself.
When he returned, she would invite him to a civil conversation in which she stated her boundaries and he made his own exit strategy plain to her.
She had been in a heightened emotional state after last night’s phone call, but she wouldn’t go back on her offer.
When Lee came back through the kitchen door, he washed his hands. Then he fixed his own coffee—also adding cream, Thora noted—and
he raised his eyebrows to her as if to ask, “Can I sit here?”
She gestured to the seat with her open palm. His eyes darted to her hand, shiny and scarred, but he said nothing.
Instead, he redirected his focus to the note she left on his paper and grinned. “It’s been a little bit since I talked to