3. Hannah
HANNAH
Ihave learned that a scrub brush is cheaper than a therapist. The front parlor has surrendered three layers of grime by noon, and I'm on my knees working a rag into the baseboards when Lily drops onto the bottom stair with a paper sack and a triumphant expression.
"So," she says. "I have intel."
"You have a soda and a sunburn."
"Both. Also intel." She unwraps a stick of gum and folds it into her mouth. "I went to the hardware place for the wood screws you wanted. Ruby — she owns it, red hair, talks like she's being timed — she knew grandma. Knew the house. Knew the porch needed re-flashing before I even said which house."
I sit back on my heels and stretch the ache out of my shoulders. "Small towns."
"It's not small, Mom, it's nosy." Lily chews, considering. "Anyway, she asked who was helping us. I said nobody. She got weird about it."
"Weird how?"
"Weird like she wanted to say a name and didn't." Lily nods toward the dark line of pines and the roof beyond them that belongs to the man we haven't talked about since we saw him.
"Three different people brought up the neighbor.
Nobody finished a sentence about him. It's a whole town of unfinished sentences. "
"Maybe he's just private."
"Maybe everyone's terrible at gossip." She stands, brushing off her jeans. "I'm gonna go figure out the upstairs bathroom. The faucet sounds like an orchestra."
"It's just the pipes."
"That's what the pipes want you to think."
She thumps up the stairs, the radiators resume their slow clicking, and a shutter bangs somewhere I keep meaning to fix.
I return to the chest I was sorting through. grandmother kept everything. Hymn programs, seed catalogs, a tin of buttons sorted by color. I'm halfway through lifting out spools and a cushion bristling with pins, when the bottom doesn't sound right under my knuckles. Hollow where it should be solid.
I work the panel with my fingernail, and it lifts.
Three notebooks, cloth-bound sit organized underneath.
Inside one, columns of symbols I don't recognize.
Dates running back forty years, each one paired with a set of initials.
Marginalia in grandmother's tidy hand: meeting moved, third lantern, trust C.
, not the others. On another page, underlined twice, a single line that snags on something in me and won't budge: We shelter the ones the world would drag into the light.
I read it three times. It's a metaphor. It has to be — she taught Sunday school, she ran a literacy drive, she was a woman who collected buttons.
Daylight is the kind of thing you say about the shy, the shamed and the forgotten.
People who couldn't show their faces. I give the notes a sensible answer, and I keep the notebooks, stacked beside me where I can see them.
By late afternoon I've stopped pretending I'm not rattled, so I do what I always do with a feeling I can't fix — I ignore it.
I head to grandmother's workroom, off the back hall, where the good tools and the worse drafts live.
I put the hammer inside, and lock the wooden door behind me to avoid the house getting colder than it already is.
It's so hot outside, I can't make sense of why it gets so cold in here.
The evening creeps in, and I pass the hall again to find the workroom wide open.
The dark of the room exhaling cold into the corridor.
I stop with a plate of toast going cold in my hand and run the whole evening backward.
I locked it. I felt the bolt. The key is still warm in my pocket; I close my fist around it to be sure.
"Lily?" I call to the second floor.
"What?"
"Did you go in Grandma's workroom?"
"The creepy one? Hard pass."
So. The key, in my jeans, and the door is open anyway.
The tools hang where they belong, the drafting table sits untouched.
It would be easy to decide the old latch failed, that a house this tired can't be trusted to hold a bolt.
I can't explain it, so how can I explain that to someone else.
I've had a lifetime of being told my feelings aren't valid, and I'm done with that.
I shut the door again. I lock it again, and I stand a beat too long before I find something else to do.
I'm fixing a loose tread on the cellar steps with a flashlight.
The third step from the top has been off since we arrived, and I set my weight on it to test the give.
A dumb idea because the board splits clean and my foot drops through into nothing.
As I'm close to tumbling over, a hand clamps around my arm and stops the fall.
"Don't twist," a voice says. "Lift straight."
I turn to the voice, and a man's eyes meet mine.
Silver, bright, gorgeous yet intimidating.
His black hair falls slightly over his forehead giving him an incredibly handsome look.
It's the neighbor. I'm sure of it. He steadies me as though I weigh nothing, and I begin to remove my foot from between the boards.
Once I'm stable he lets go and steps back.
My heart misbehaves. "Who are you, and how did you get in my cellar?"
"Alaric Blackwood." His answer is quiet. "Outer door. Doesn't latch." He kneels, examines the broken tread, runs a thumb along the splintered edge. "Rot, not the screw. Whole stringer's soft. This would have happened eventually."
"And you happened to be passing my cellar at night, Mr. Blackwood."
"I saw the light." He says it like it explains everything, and maybe in his world it does. He's already lining up the flashlight on the next tread, testing it. "This one too. And the one above it."
"I can manage my own stairs."
"Clearly." Dry man, but not unkind. The cellar feels smaller for him standing in it. "Replace the stringer before you put weight anywhere on these. I'll send dimensions."
"I didn't ask you to."
"No," he agrees, and that's all. He climbs past me, careful of the rot he already mapped in darkness, and pauses at the top. "Lock the outer door, if it'll hold. Some of them don't, in these old houses."
He disappears leaving me staring where he stood. I move toward the landing and lock the main door with certainty, and sit in bed mulling over what he said.