My Neighbor Literally Bites

1. Hannah

HANNAH

The road into Briar Glen narrows to a single lane, and by the time the house comes into view, my hands have memorized the wheel.

"Okay," Lily says from the passenger seat, lowering her phone. "That's either our house or where they film the documentaries about it."

I slow the car to a crawl. Grandmother Elspeth's or Grandmother Evie, as known to everyone else, Victorian rises out of the overgrowth like something that grew there—three stories of gray clapboard, a turret crowned with a weathervane gone green, porch railings sagging in a slow surrender.

Ivy has climbed halfway up the east face.

Two of the upstairs windows are dark in a way that feels deliberate.

"It has good bones," I say.

"It has a good skeleton, Mom. That's different."

I pull into the gravel drive and cut the engine.

The quiet that rushes in is enormous—no traffic, no neighbors' televisions, just wind moving through pines and the tick of the cooling engine.

After eleven years in an apartment where I could hear Gregory's new key in the lock before I could hear my own thoughts, the silence is almost a physical thing.

"Boxes won't carry themselves," I say, and get out before she can read my face.

The porch step gives a little under my boot, soft with rot. I test it twice before trusting it. Lily comes up behind me with a box marked KITCHEN—MAYBE and stops at my shoulder, looking up at the door. Stained glass, dust-furred, a pattern of leaves I remember tracing as a kid.

"She really left it to you," Lily says, quieter now.

"She really did."

"Why not your dad? Or—"

"Because she liked me," I say, as I turn the key in the old lock.

Inside, the air is cool, stale, and smells of cedar and dust. Something sweet passes through my nose—lavender, maybe, ground into the floorboards decades ago.

Sheets cover the furniture in the front room.

A grandfather clock stands dead in the corner.

Lily sets the box down and turns a slow circle, taking in the height of the ceilings, the carved banister, the water stain blooming across the parlor plaster.

"This is going to cost a fortune," she says.

"Probably."

"Like, a visible fortune. We're going to be able to see the money leaving."

"We'll do it room by room." I run a hand along the banister and it comes away gray. "I did the whole apartment myself, remember. The bathroom tile—"

"They fell off in November."

"It held until November."

She almost smiles. That's what I keep watching for in her—the almost-smile that means she's still in there under the sarcasm, still the kid who used to narrate our grocery trips like wildlife footage.

She's been behaving okay for me since the divorce, but I've been performing for her, and neither has called each other out for it.

We haul boxes until daylight goes amber. Lily claims the bedroom with the window seat. I take my grandmother's old room without thinking about it, then stand in the doorway a long while, not going in.

Around dusk, dragging the last suitcase up the drive, I see it through the trees.

A neighboring estate sits next door, hidden behind a wall of dark pines, and where my house is decaying, that one is intention.

Wrought iron. Black stone. Not a single light on, though the windows are sparkling clean.

It seems to observe the road like a closed face watches a stranger.

Where the properties meet, I see a man standing. He's tall, dressed in dark clothes, perfectly still. Not working in his yard, not walking a dog, not doing any of the ordinary things people do. Just standing. Looking at the house. Looking, I realize, at me.

I should look away. Instead something holds me there, some pressure between us like the moment before a storm breaks out. His eyes are burning into mine, and the rest of the evening seems to go very quiet, quieter than the quiet already was, as if the wind itself paused to see what I'd do.

A creak behind me breaks the spell. Lily's foot appears next to me, and when I look back, he's still there. I lift a hand—neighborly, automatic, but he doesn't wave. After a moment he turns and walks back toward the black house, unhurried, and the pines close over him.

"Who was that?" Lily asks.

"Neighbor, I guess."

"Friendly."

"Mountain people are private." I'm already explaining it to myself. Long drive. Empty stomach. A strange house and stranger nerves. An imagination that's had eleven hundred miles to wind itself up. "Come on. Let's find the kettle before it's pitch black in here."

We eat gas-station sandwiches at the kitchen table by the torch of my phone because three bulbs are dead and I haven't found which box I put them in.

Lily tells me the upstairs faucet makes a noise like a dying goose.

I tell her we'll add it to the list. The list is already, in my head, extending past my arm.

She goes up around ten. I stay down to check the locks, a habit Gregory left me—the man cheated for two years and somehow I'm the one who learned to check that everything's secured before bed. The front door's solid. The side door's solid. The back door is not.

It's ajar by a half-inch, the deadbolt thrown but the strike plate splintered, as though someone forced it and then, oddly, pulled it almost-shut behind them. I pause on the spot and listen to the sounds surrounding me. Nothing. Just the dying goose, dropping somewhere overhead.

There are marks on the floor by the pantry. Dried mud, the tread of a boot, tracked in, stopping at the pantry door and going no farther. I crouch over them. Bigger than mine. Bigger than Lily's.

And in the small room off the pantry—Elspeth's old workroom, empty but for shelving—there's a smell that doesn't belong. Sharp and metallic, like a fistful of old pennies.

I check the silver in the drawer. There.

The clock on the mantel, the only thing in this house worth lifting.

Untouched. Nothing's gone that I can see, and that's somehow worse than a clean robbery would be—because a thief takes things, and I don't know what this was looking for, or whether it found it.

I consider calling the sheriff. But explaining out loud this feeling, on my first night, in a town that doesn't know me yet, doesn't make sense. Instead I push the rear door shut, drag the table against it, and find a hammer in the KITCHEN—MAYBE box.

"Not tonight," I say to the empty house. To whoever was here. To Gregory, maybe, three states away. "You don't get to scare us off on the first night."

Upstairs, my daughter is finally asleep. I'm overreacting from all the stress, so I head upstairs and lay down, praying I will sleep away the worry.