Chapter 3
Lila
Foam board does not carry itself, and by sheet thirty-one I have renamed every muscle in my back after people who have wronged me.
But by Friday, the porch has bones.
Here's the design, and I'm allowed to say this because I did it professionally for nine years: it's good.
A Victorian séance parlor, built out from the porch in forced perspective, so from the sidewalk you're looking into a room that shouldn't fit — velvet drapes, a table mid-lift, chairs pushed back like the guests just fled, and a medium who is very much no longer with us presiding over it all.
Motion-triggered. The table actually rises.
I have the sight lines drawn in colored pencil, because I learned from the binder, and across the top of my build sheet, where a normal person would write a title, I've written WWBD.
What Would Bee Do. It's not a title. It's a load rating.
"Talk me through it," I tell the medium, who is currently a wig stand and a dream. "You died at this table in eighteen ninety-one. You have unfinished business and outstanding library fines. Give me tragedy."
The wig stand gives me nothing. Everyone's a critic.
What Bee would do, specifically, is have this build half-wired by now, and this is where the campaign hits its first supply problem, because at four fifteen on Friday afternoon, I plug in the second fog machine, and the entire house dies.
Not flickers. Dies. The refrigerator makes the sound of a large animal lying down.
"No, no, no." I take the stairs to the basement two at a time with my phone flashlight. The fuse box is down here somewhere behind Bee's canning shelves, and when I find it, I make a noise I'm not proud of.
Fuses. Actual fuses, glass-and-ceramic, museum-grade, and the one for the porch circuit has a black scorch through its little window like a tiny dramatic sunset.
Grady Ellis's voice arrives in my head uninvited. Sixty years old. Fuses, not breakers. Whatever you're planning, that panel won't hold it.
"I know," I tell the fuse box. "Don't you start too."
I have two spare fuses. At my current burn rate that's one and a half days of October.
And the person who stocks fuses locally is Marge, who will tell Grady before the register drawer shuts, and the person Bee's own binder says to ask about rewiring is — no.
Absolutely not. I did not declare war on Tuesday to file a surrender by Friday.
Which is how I end up in my own side yard at two in the morning, in a bathrobe, running my heavy-duty cord — quietly, respectfully, like a raccoon with a plan — across the property line and into the exterior outlet on Grady Ellis's garage.
Look. I know. But hear me out: his garage has its own subpanel — it's visible right through the window, the man has enough amperage over there to run a small regional airport — and this is a victimless crime.
I'll unplug before dawn. He tests his fog at six.
I know his schedule the way you know the schedule of an enemy submarine.
"This never happened," I tell Beetlejuice, who has followed me out in violation of every household policy, and is sitting on the fence post watching me commit utility theft in a bathrobe.
He blinks, slow, which in cat means either I love you or I've seen worse. With him it's genuinely both.
The fog machines run all night. It's beautiful.
Saturday morning, my lawn has been rearranged.
I notice it from the kitchen window, mid-coffee, the way you notice a spelling error in a tattoo.
Overnight, someone has taken the twelve plastic skeletons I'd staged as fleeing séance guests and re-posed them on my front lawn in a neat choreography, and it takes me a second to see it, and then I see it and I cannot unsee it.
They're arranged into letters. The skeletons spell GIVE UP.
The G is two skeletons doing something that would get them ejected from a family attraction. The exclamation point at the end is a single skeleton, face-down, defeated, with my own orange extension cord coiled beside it like a signature on a crime.
He found the cord. He unplugged it, coiled it — coiled it nicely, which is somehow the most insulting part, the man could not stop himself from cable management even mid-taunt — and then he used my own dead army to send me a message.
I stand at the window for a long moment, coffee cooling in my hand.
"Beetlejuice," I say. "We're going to Frankie's. Mommy needs war counsel."
Frankie Nguyen makes coffee the way I build monsters — with contempt for moderation. Her shop lives where the video store used to be, and she's kept the MEMBERS ONLY sign as decor, and when I walk in she looks up from the steam wand, tracks my expression, and says, "Whoever it is, we hate them."
We were nine together in this town. Some friendships you just re-enter, like a house.
"Grady Ellis," I say.
The shop goes quiet. Not silent — quiet, the way a room gets when everyone in it wants to hear better while pretending to read.
"You can't hate Grady Ellis," Frankie says, but she's already making my drink, which means she's negotiable. "He's on the water tower calendar. He's Mr. July."
"He posed my skeletons into the words give up."
Frankie sets the milk down. "Okay, that rules. What did you do to him first?"
"Why would you assume—"
"Lila."
"I ran one extension cord into one outlet on his garage. Barely a cord. A courtesy cord."
"You stole power from the fire marshal's favorite son to run your ghost porch.
" She hands me something with maple foam on it, and Marge was right, I would fight my family for this.
"God, it's like Bee never left. Do you know he closes his whole street with the fire truck on Halloween? Do you know what you're up against?"
"A winch," I say. "I've been told about the winch."
"You're up against a man this town would elect mayor by acclamation, and you're going to be the crazy lady stealing his electricity in a bathrobe."
"How do you know about the bathrobe."
"Denise runs at five. She has a group chat." Frankie leans on the counter, and her voice drops out of comedy for exactly one sentence, which is her way. "You okay? House and everything?"
"Roof's eighteen. Estate's got two."
"So you need the Gourd money."
"I need the Gourd money."
"Okay." She straightens up, and just like that we're operational again.
"Then don't get disqualified doing crimes.
Win it on the build. You're the only person who's ever lived here who does this for an actual living.
Make the town cry, take the check, fix the roof.
" She points a portafilter at me. "And stop giving Mr. July free material.
He doesn't need to be funnier. He's already tall. "
The hardware store on a Saturday in October is Hollow Creek's true town hall, and Marge Okafor presides over it from behind a register with a popcorn machine going and loyalties for sale to no one.
"Fuses," I say. "The ceramic screw-in kind. All of them. Whatever you have."
"Box of twenty do you?" Marge is already reaching, because of course she stocks them. Half this town's wiring predates the moon landing. "You know these keep blowing because—"
"Because my panel is a sixty-year-old antique. I've been told. By everyone. The panel has a fan club."
"I was going to say because you're running two fog machines on a fifteen-amp circuit, honey. But sure, blame the panel." She rings me up, then leans on the counter with the unhurried menace of a woman who knows everything and bills nothing. "Heard about the skeletons."
"Which part?"
"All the parts. Denise got pictures before you woke up. The G alone." She fans herself with a paint stirrer. "I laughed so hard I had to sit on a riding mower."
"You know he shops here too."
"Everybody shops here. That's the beauty of it.
" Marge gestures at her kingdom, aisles of rope and rakes and murder-adjacent implements.
"I'm Switzerland. Beautiful, neutral, extremely well-armed.
He buys chain, I sell him chain. You buy fuses, I sell you fuses.
Then I go home and tell my sister everything, because neutrality ends at six p.m."
"What's he buying, Marge."
"Nice try." She drops a candy pumpkin in my bag, on the house.
"But I'll say this much, because your grandmother would've wanted you to have it.
" She lowers her voice to the register-adjacent whisper that carries exactly as far as she intends, which is the whole store.
"Whatever he's building this year, he ordered parts in August. August, honey.
You're not fighting a man. You're fighting a supply chain. "
Wonderful. I have eleven months of savings, a cat, and a wig stand.
"One more thing," Marge calls as I hit the door. "He asked what gauge you were running." A beat, savored like the last popcorn. "Sound familiar? You two are the only people in forty years who ever asked me that question, and the other one raised you."
Back home, I re-stage the fleeing séance guests, and because morale matters in wartime, I name them as I go.
The face-down defeated one becomes Gary.
The two from the disgraceful G become Mitzi and Roland, and I position them mid-scandal at the far end of the porch where the church crowd won't linger.
"Nobody surrenders," I tell the troops. "We are professionals."
The troops rattle in the wind, which I choose to hear as applause. Beetlejuice, from the porch rail, surveys the whole operation and then very slowly closes his eyes, which is the most honest performance review I've had in years.
Win it on the build. It's good advice. I am full of maple foam and good advice when I get home, ready to be a professional, and I remain a professional right up until sunset, when Grady's projector comes on.
Every night, he tests his projection loop on the big blank side wall of his garage.
Ghostly forest, moving shadows, something with wings.
Tonight, from my porch, I watch it cycle, and I notice — professionally, the way a locksmith notices a bad lock — that his projector sits on an unsecured tripod eight feet from the fence line, angled by hand.
I do not steal his electricity. I don't touch a single cord.
I just hop the fence at nine, rotate the projector eleven degrees, and go to bed like a woman at peace.
Eleven degrees puts the ghostly forest, in its full cinematic glory, on the front of the Hendersons' garage across the street — directly over the inflatable graveyard, which as of this week has thirteen tombstones and a reaper that Denise's group chat says is visible from the water tower.
The Hendersons have been escalating unopposed for years. Let the two great powers meet.
I sleep like a baby.
Or I would, except that at some point after midnight I surface halfway out of a dream, and through the window the projection is still cycling across the street — wings moving over thirteen tombstones — and in the dream-logic margin before I go back under, my brain serves me a memory without asking.
Bee at that same window, some October when I was small enough to fit on the radiator cover, watching the Hendersons of her era over-decorate, saying, Never interrupt an enemy who's making a mistake, Lila-bug, and then, we'll interrupt them anyway, it's funnier.
I wake to my doorbell at seven forty and a voice I already recognize saying, from my own porch, perfectly level, "I know it was eleven degrees, because I had to re-level it."
I open the door in yesterday's paint shirt. Grady Ellis stands there holding my orange extension cord, coiled, like a man returning a library book, and behind him on the street I can see Mr. Henderson out photographing his own garage with his phone.
"Morning," I say. "Sleep okay?"
"Henderson thinks the projection was a gift. He's asking where to rent one." A muscle in his jaw does something expensive. "He wants my ghost forest on his garage nightly. He's offering me forty dollars."
"That's below market."
"I know it's below market."
We stand there. October's coming down the street behind him, woodsmoke and wet leaves, and the Hendersons' reaper sighs and re-inflates, and I would rather be caught dead than let this man know that from my doorstep, backlit like that, he looks like the poster for a movie I'd watch twice.
"The cord," he says, holding it out.
"Keep it. You coiled it. It's bonded with you now."
His mouth does something — not a smile, nowhere near a smile, but a structural report of where one would go — and he sets the cord on the porch rail, precisely, and walks back across the yards, and I watch him go while hating everything I'm feeling.
Sunday I make it worse, and for once it's not on purpose.
I'm on the tall ladder against the porch gable, hanging the drape rail, when the whole thing gives a little kick sideways — old gutter, soft fascia board, the ladder skates six inches, and I ride it down about four rungs of pure Looney Tunes before I catch the rail and hang there like laundry, one shoe in the hydrangeas.
And he's just there. Over the fence, across the grass, before I've even finished my first swear word — a hand flat against the ladder, the other steadying my spine like it's a load of lumber, and he doesn't yell, doesn't lecture.
He re-sets the ladder feet with his boot, looks up at me, and says, "Foot down. Left one first."
I get down. My heart's going for reasons I assign entirely to the ladder.
"Fascia's rotten there," he says. "Rail needs to mount into the corner post. I'll—" He stops himself. Reroutes. "You'll want a longer lag bolt."
He's not wearing a jacket. He has been, evidently, hauling dragon vertebrae in a T-shirt in October, because apparently the cold rolls off him like water off a duck, and I am now aware — clinically, deeply against my will — that the man is built like something you'd anchor a suspension bridge to.
"Thanks," I say, in a voice that's fine. It's fine.
"Mm." He glances at the séance porch, the drape rail, the sight lines. Something in his face does actual arithmetic. "Forced perspective?"
"Maybe."
"Huh," he says, one syllable with an entire review inside it, and leaves, again, the way he always leaves, like the last word is a tool he doesn't need to buy because he already owns it.
I climb back up my ladder.
I came to this town to save Bee's house.
I am instead in a land war with a man whose shoulders should be zoned commercial, and the worst part — the part I will be taking to my grave, which at this rate is reasonably priced and next door — is that when the ladder slipped, some idiot chamber of my heart didn't flinch.
Because it already knew he'd be there.