Chapter 13
The Casserole Network
Oz
The next morning, Maisie comes into the kitchen dressed for a trip to town. Hair pulled back, work boots, the canvas jacket with the fraying cuff she keeps meaning to fix.
She pours coffee into a thermos and stands at the counter. “I need to get more labels printed,” she says to the room.
I’m in the hallway, compressed low and dim, giving her space to move.
“And I want to check if Crawford’s got the jojoba shipment in early. I called last week but Danny just said ‘probably’ and hung up.”
“Danny,” I say.
“Crawford’s kid. Seventeen. Treats the phone like it might bite him if he holds it for longer than twenty seconds.”
Maisie’s shoulders are tight again, the left one riding higher than the right.
Three days since the call about her grandmother.
She hasn’t brought it up, and I haven’t asked.
“Back by noon,” she says, pulling her keys from the hook by the door and pausing with her hand on the knob. “Remember to stay away from the windows,” she says. “And if Mrs. Pritchett comes knocking, you’re wallpaper.”
“Glowing wallpaper,” I say, with a hint of deflation. “I still can’t seem to control my iridescence.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. “You’d be surprised what that woman will accept if you say it with enough confidence.”
She opens the door. Morning light cuts across the kitchen floor in a sharp diagonal, and I pull back from it instinctively.
“Noon,” she says again, and closes the door behind her.
I move to the window above the sink.
I keep my form pressed thin against the cabinet below the sill and extend just enough of myself upward to see through the glass.
Her truck sits in the driveway, the red one with the oxidized patch on the tailgate that looks like a cloud. She walks to it with her thermos and her keys, opens the door, tosses her bag across to the passenger seat.
The engine turns over on the second try. The brake lights flare red, then release, and the truck rolls down the driveway and swings onto Coyote Springs Road heading east.
I watch until the dust plume fades.
The house settles around me.
The refrigerator hums its low A-flat.
The clock sweeps.
A soap timer on the studio counter blinks 00:00, waiting to be reset.
Through the walls, I feel the curing racks full of rosemary-oat bars slowly releasing moisture into the dry air, each one contracting by fractions as it hardens.
On every surface, traces of her.
The thermal signature of her palm on the countertop, already cooling.
The compression pattern her boots left in the kitchen mat.
A single strand of reddish-brown hair caught in the screen door’s hinge.
All the places she pressed against the house this morning, fading by degrees.
I settle onto the kitchen floor and spread thin, pressing myself against the cool linoleum.
I wait.
I wait for twenty minutes before the restlessness starts.
Restlessness is a human word, and maybe the wrong one.
My substance has a resting state, a kind of equilibrium I can hold indefinitely when there’s nothing to process. In the cave, I held it for weeks at a time. In the storage unit, months.
But Maisie’s house is so full of stimuli that equilibrium feels like trying to hold still in a river.
I move down the hallway.
The house is small enough that I can feel its whole footprint from any room, but proximity reveals detail.
The hallway floor creaks in two places, and I learn to flow over them.
Three framed photographs hang on the wall.
The first shows a younger Maisie with a woman who shares her jaw and the set of her shoulders: Gram.
They’re standing in front of this house, squinting into the sun, and Maisie is holding a bar of soap up to the camera with both hands like a trophy fish.
She looks maybe twenty.
The joy in her posture is uncomplicated, weight even on both feet, shoulders level and low.
The second photo is a landscape.
The wash behind the house in better days, green after a monsoon.
Unremarkable except for the care someone took in framing it.
The third photo.
I slow here.
A man stands beside Maisie at an outdoor market. A trade show, maybe.
He’s tall, angular, wearing a shirt with a collar that he’s turned up in a way that reads as intentional.
His hand rests on Maisie’s shoulder, and I study the contact for a long time.
The fingers are arranged for display. Thumb forward, four fingers spread, creating maximum visible coverage.
He’s holding her shoulder the way you hold a product you’re presenting.
And Maisie, beneath that hand, has her weight shifted onto her far foot, her near shoulder microscopically raised against the hand’s downward pressure.
She is bracing under a touch that looks casual.
I move on.
Her living room I already know from the nights we’ve spent here: the grandmother’s quilt, the invoices, the bookshelf.
One paperback is turned face-down at page 214, its spine thoroughly broken.
I read the back cover.
A woman in a red dress is being held by a man whose shirt has been removed by what appears to be a significant weather event.
I’m about to read the blurb when I feel vibrations through the foundation.
A pair of footsteps.
Two sets, actually.
One heavy and deliberate, a boot heel striking packed dirt with military regularity.
The other lighter, faster.
Gary and Mrs. Pritchett.
Together.
I’ve learned both of their gaits from times they’ve walked down the street. And now here they are, at 10:15 on a weekday morning, which falls outside every pattern I’ve cataloged from either of them.
I’m already moving.
The ceiling in the hallway is eight feet, textured drywall with a thin layer of dust and a hairline crack running from the bathroom door to the smoke detector.
I flow upward, spreading myself flat and wide, thinning until my substance is barely a quarter inch deep.
The color drains out of me as I press into the surface, matching the off-white of the ceiling.
My glow dims, and from below, I am plaster.
So long as one doesn’t look hard enough.
Three knocks.
Mrs. Pritchett’s knuckle pattern, which I’ve memorized: two quick, one firm.
She knocks the way she talks, establishing a rhythm and then punctuating it.
A pause.
She knocks again.
“Maisie? Truck’s gone but your studio light’s on.”
Her voice carries through the front door with zero attenuation, a voice engineered by decades of calling across property lines.
“Gary’s with me. We’ve got a situation.”
From the ceiling, I can feel them both through the porch boards. Mrs. Pritchett shifts her weight side to side, restless, the golf cart keys jangling against her hip.
Gary stands still.
His heartbeat is elevated, a steady thrum. He’s carrying something, the weight distribution in his stance uneven, favoring his right arm.
Mrs. Pritchett tries the door handle.
Locked.
Maisie locked it when she left.
“Well, she’s not here,” Gary says. His voice is quiet and level.
“Her studio light is on a timer, I know that, but the porch light is off and she always leaves the porch light on when she goes to town. Always.”
Mrs. Pritchett’s observation lands with prosecutorial weight.
She leans toward the window beside the door. I feel the pressure of her forehead against the glass, the slight fog of her breath.
“Huh.”
“What.”
“I don’t know. Something just seems off.”
“Well, that’s not enough for a warrant, Deborah. Anyway, we can come back.”
“I want to leave a note. Do you have paper? I never have paper. Harold says I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on, which is rich coming from a man who put his reading glasses in the refrigerator yesterday.”
A rustling.
Gary, apparently, has paper.
“Okay. Okay, so here’s what she needs to know.
” Mrs. Pritchett’s voice drops half a register as she slowly mumbles what she’s writing: “Maisie: Strange happenings afoot. My blue and white Bel Air—gone. Tire ruts in the dirt leading south toward the wash, then nothing. Like someone drove it off the edge of the earth. Please report if you have information.”
I hold very still on the ceiling. Any color shift, any ripple, and I become a very conspicuous patch of ceiling.
“That car hasn’t run in thirty years,” Gary says.
“That is exactly my point. Someone towed it. In the night. And then there’s that coyote you found. Oh, I should write that down too.” She’s quiet again as she furiously adds more to the note.
Gary reads aloud, “’Wounds inconsistent with predation.‘ Where in the world did you get that phrasing from?”
“I heard it in a murder documentary, and that’s exactly how you described it!”
“Well, not in those exact words. But sure.” Gary pauses.
“Your poor little Captain. That coyote. My beautiful Bel Air. Something is happening out here, Gary, and I intend to find out what.”
They leave.
Mrs. Pritchett’s golf cart whines to life, and the two are gone.
I track them through the foundation until the vibrations fade past the property line, then I peel myself down the wall in a slow pour and settle onto the hallway floor, letting my color return in stages.
The note is wedged under the front door.
A torn sheet of lined paper, folded once, with Mrs. Pritchett’s handwriting on both sides and a smudge of Gary’s ink in the corner.
I read it through the paper without unfolding it, feeling the pressure grooves of each letter through my surface.
It’s what I already heard, but there’s an additional line after. Town meeting tomorrow at 6pm at Diner—D. Pritchett.
A town meeting.
A neighborhood watch forming around a dead coyote and a vanished car.
Mrs. Pritchett is assembling a case file.
Maisie’s truck pulls into the driveway at 12:47.
I hear the engine from half a mile out, the particular rattle of the exhaust manifold, and I’m already off the floor and compressed into the hallway by the time she kills the ignition.
She sits in the cab for a full minute before getting out.
Her heartbeat is fast and shallow, her breathing tight in her upper chest.
She comes through the front door carrying two paper bags and kicks it shut with her heel.
She pauses when she sees the note on the floor, picks it up, reads it, reads it again.
“Oh, fantastic,” she says.
I make myself apparent then. “Gary and Mrs. Pritchett came by. It seems there’s a mystery developing.”
She looks at me. The circles under her eyes are darker than they were this morning.
“There always is in this town. Strange happenings. But now it’s personal because somebody took Mrs. Pritchett’s yard art.
” She lets out a groan. “I can’t be dealing with this right now. Oz, my grandmother will be here soon.”
“I know.”
“She can smell a lie from forty yards. I mean, she once made a car salesman cry after he tried to sell her a lemon.”
“Why? Because it was sour?”
Maisie frowns at me for a moment, before letting out a delighted laugh, relaxing for the first time today. “No, I don’t mean the fruit. ‘Lemon’ also means a car that’s going to crap out on you the second you drive it off the lot.”
“Oh. I see why she made him cry then.”
She laughs again, then leans against the fridge door. The magnetic poetry on the door shifts behind her shoulder blade, rearranging a fragment of a sentence she must’ve composed months ago.
“The point is,” she says, “I can’t hide you from Gram.
I can hide you from Mrs. Pritchett because Mrs. Pritchett sees what she expects to see and fills in the rest with conspiracy theories.
I can hide you from Gary because Gary minds his own business.
But Gram will walk into this house and know something is different in ten seconds flat, then she’ll sit at that table and drink her coffee and wait for me to tell her, and she’ll wait forever, Oz.
She has infinite patience. She once waited three years for me to admit I hated the piano lessons she gave me when I was just a little girl.
And she had known all along! She was just waiting for me to speak up for myself. ”
“What will happen when she knows?”
Maisie rubs her temples, her fingers making small circles against the skin.
“I have to keep you a secret from her, at least until I figure this out. She’ll either love you immediately or call an exorcist, and I’m honestly not sure which.” She looks at me directly, her eyes tired but determined. “I need time to prepare, to find the right words.”
I understand what she’s asking.
“I’ll stay hidden,” I say. “For as long as you need.”
Maisie nods, relief visible in the slight drop of her shoulders.
Until she remembers the note, and reads it one last time.
“The Pritchett investigation is officially activated. God help us all.”