Open House (Creatures of the Night #2)

Chapter One

The house was uglier in person than it had been in the photos, and the photos had been bad enough that the price made sense.

I cut the engine and sat a moment with my hands on the wheel, looking.

The siding was the color of old teeth. The porch roof sagged on one side.

The front yard was mostly weeds and one optimistic dogwood that someone had planted decades ago and then forgotten about.

Behind me, the cul-de-sac curved away through pleasant little ranches and split-levels, lawns mown, mailboxes upright, a flag on somebody’s porch two doors down.

Mine was the house that brought the property values down. Mine was the project.

The deed sat in a folder in the back seat. The keys were in my purse. The bank account that had been my retirement was poured into the foundation under all of this now, and the only way to see any of it back was to make this house into something somebody else wanted to live in.

I climbed out of the car.

The movers were already there, their small truck parked at the curb, two men unloading the bed frame onto the front walk. The older one looked up and gave me a nod. The younger one gave me a smile a little too tired to be flirty and a little too friendly to be anything else.

“You the homeowner?”

“That’s me.” The word felt strange in my mouth. Before the divorce, I had been a wife in a house her husband had picked. Before that, a renter. Now I was thirty-five and the house was mine and I was about to live in it alone.

“Where do you want the bed?”

“Upstairs, front bedroom on the left. I’ll show you.”

The key stuck in the lock and then turned.

The smell hit me as the door swung open.

Not bad, exactly. A closed-up-house smell, dust and old wood and the chemical ghost of cleaner used a long time ago.

Under that, something sweet. Almost like a candle had been left burning in here once and the smoke had gotten into the walls and stayed.

I held the door for the movers and crossed into the living room.

The light was good. South-facing windows in the main room, an enormous picture window in the kitchen onto the backyard, the kind of light no amount of bad paint and water-stained ceiling could kill. That light had sold me on the place. I stood a moment and let myself feel it.

“Ma’am? Bed?”

“Sorry. This way.”

The stairs creaked in three different places.

The front bedroom had the morning light, which was why I had picked it; I pointed them at the far wall and left them to it.

The rest of the house deserved a look as the owner, not the buyer.

The inspection had been the inspection. This was something different.

The living room was bad. The carpet was the color of something that had once been beige and given up.

The walls were several coats of nothing in particular, applied by people who had not cared.

But the fireplace was brick, the ceiling had a beam I had not expected, and the finished version of all of it sat clear in my head. Good bones. Terrible everything else.

The kitchen was worse and better. Worse, because the cabinets were particle board with peeling wood-grain veneer and the countertops were laminate that had never been pretty.

Better, because the layout was right. The half-wall would come out for an island.

The upper cabinets would come down for open shelving.

The whole thing was already finished in my head — that was the part of this work I loved.

My hand found a chip in the laminate as I ran it along the counter.

Behind me, in the living room, the movers thumped past with a box. The younger one called, “Kitchen?” and I said, “Yes, anywhere on the floor.”

At the back of what would be a small downstairs bedroom, a door I had taken for a closet opened onto a narrow flight of stairs going down into the dark.

The inspector had mentioned it: unfinished basement, some moisture, vent for HVAC.

I peered down once and shut the door again. Problem for another day.

The movers were coming out of the front bedroom when I came back up. The older one said the mattress was next, and I stepped past him to look at the room.

The cold hit me in the doorway.

The hallway behind me had been mild. The bedroom was several degrees colder, easily — a drop you could feel on bare arms. The window was closed.

The radiator under it gave off only a thread of heat.

The vent in the ceiling was open and putting out tepid air.

Old house, weird ductwork. I made a note to mention it to the contractor in the morning.

“Ma’am?”

The younger mover was in the doorway with the mattress on its side, waiting for me to get out of his way.

“Sorry. Come on in.”

By the time they had set up the bed and asked about the eleven boxes and the dresser and the kitchen table I had bought used on the way down, I had forgotten about the cold.

They shook my hand at the front door, climbed into their truck, and pulled away.

The cul-de-sac went quiet around me. I was alone in my house.

I stood a moment in the front yard. The sag in the porch roof. The teeth-colored siding. The dogwood. Mine. The thought sat well. I went back inside, climbed the stairs, and pushed the bedroom door open to put a sheet on the mattress.

It was still cold.

Everything else was fine. The bed where I had said. The boxes against the far wall. The afternoon light coming through the window the way I had hoped. The vent was on the list. I crossed the room and pulled a box toward me, and as I bent over it, the door eased shut behind me.

Not slammed. Eased. The small click of a latch settling.

I straightened up.

Old houses had drafts. Old houses had floors that sloped, doors hung half a century ago by people in a hurry. I opened it again and propped it with the heaviest box I had, the one full of books, and stood with my hand on the knob a second longer than I needed to.

Then I went back to the bed and opened the sheets.