The fluffy stuff in question was indeed vermiculite, according to some guy at Pete’s who Mike had chatted up on the subject. Nothing to get excited about, but wear gloves when you pick it up. Wear masks when you mess with it. It’ll get into your chest and make your lungs all itchy.
When all that was done, they moved on to the wainscoting and wallpaper, those two miserable projects.
Mike and Sally were happy and a little day-drunk, playing dorky 1990s songs from Mike’s playlist again while they scraped wallpaper in the dining room by electric lantern light, since the fixture still wasn’t working.
Denise needed a break. She declared this loudly and scraped together enough change for a soda and a beignet, and promised to be back in an hour or two.
Then she hiked down to Crispy’s with her laptop, planning to wait around until someone she knew showed up.
Surely someone she knew would show up. Eventually.
Yep. Church had let out, and everybody’d finished up lunch at home. Now the little restaurant was collecting the usual suspects, wanting Internet and some freedom. She recognized most of the kids her age, but didn’t know them well enough to chat them up. She thought about asking to sit with them, but chickened out at the last minute and took her usual table against the wall.
Finally, Terry arrived. She grabbed him before he could even order any food, and dragged him over to her table. She leaned forward and said, “Guess what: I think I know the name of the old lady ghost.”
“Really?”
“It’s Vera Westbrook. The house belonged to her, and get this: She vanished, not long before Joe died. Nobody knows what happened to her, but I’m pretty sure she’s dead, and she’s the second ghost—the one without a hit list.”
“Hey y’all two.” Dominique brought a tray from the front counter and slipped it into the slot next to Terry like she was sliding into home plate. It held a clear cup for holding water, not soda, and a ninety-nine-cent order of beignets. “Any more news about the ghosts?”
They caught her up on the Vera Westbrook development, and Denise concluded, “I think Joe was having some kind of fight with Vera Westbrook too. He might’ve even killed her. It sounds like she doesn’t like him much. Maybe when Terry comes back over with his recorder—”
“Not if, but when!” he declared happily.
“… then maybe we can get Vera to tell us what happened to her. She’s been helpful before; she might be helpful again.”
“You let me know how that goes. I want to know,” Dom told her firmly. “But I don’t want to be there, when you find out. I just want the download when you’re done, got it?”
Denise liked how Dom didn’t argue with her, or tell her there was no such thing as ghosts, or act like this was stupid. “I will. I’ll tell everybody. Maybe I’ll write a big Tumblr post about it, and tell the whole world.” Then she told her about the agent, Eugenie Robbins. “You never know. This lady might get me enough money for a decent laptop.”
Norman joined them then, adding his tray to the assortment that now covered the entire table. He’d paid extra for a second corn dog, and brought a plastic Aquafina bottle from home, so she guessed the potluck hadn’t filled him up. “Been refilling it here for a couple of weeks,” he explained. “Hello, ladies and Terry.”
Together, they discussed theories of ghosts, probabilities, and how to find further evidence until the restaurant manager started to give them the side-eye about hanging around for so long without buying anything else. Denise had already texted her mom and told her she’d walk back soon, and after she promised Norman that she’d update him tomorrow, he’d headed back in the direction of his own home. Dominique and Terry kept pace with her as she walked back to the Agony House.
“Hey, Denise, listen,” Dominique began. “If you’ve got a minute today …” She trailed off.
“If I’ve got a minute, what?”
She cleared her throat, and hemmed, and hawed, and generally acted like she was very uncomfortable about what she needed to say. “See, my grandma wants to know if you’ll come talk to her.”
“What?”
Terry perked up. “Mrs. James? How’s she doing?”
“She’s good, Tee. Same as always. So … what do you say? I just live a couple of blocks away from you. Grandma wants to ask you about your place, that’s all. She wants to talk about the nail house.”
Denise shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Let me text my mom that I’m running late, so she doesn’t worry.” She pulled out her phone and fired off a text begging an extra twenty minutes to find her way home. She hit SEND and pocketed the phone again. “Let’s do this.”
Dominique’s house was long and narrow, with a single story and tall front shutters on either side of the front door. The porch was close to the ground, just two short steps that sagged like the ones at Denise’s place. There was even a haint-blue ceiling, like it was just something everybody around there had. The porch was clean, and so was the living room, where a couple of antique chairs flanked a couch that once had been a very fancy velvet, and now looked a little too lived-in to call fancy anymore.
Before they went inside, Dominique turned to Denise. “She’s going to ask you about ghosts, I just know it. She loves all that spooky business. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”
“Spooky business is fun business!” Terry declared.
“Yeah, says you. Fun to hear about, that’s all. I like for my dead people to stay good and dead.”
“What’s the fun in that?” he asked.
“The fun of not getting your butt scared off.” Then she cleared her throat, and said loud enough to project all the way to the back door: “Grandma, I’m home—and I brought that girl from the nail house!”
A voice came from the kitchen. “Good, I’m glad to hear it.” Mrs. James poked her head around the corner and said, “Give me just a second, if you would. Take a seat, and make yourself comfortable. Terry? You came along too? Nice to see you, son. Can I get either one of you a Coke?”
“No thank you, ma’am,” said Terry.
“No thank you, ma’am,” Denise echoed.
Everybody sat down, and a moment later their hostess joined them, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “I’m glad you were willing to come around, dear. Remind me your name?”
“Denise, ma’am. Denise Farber. Dominique said you wanted to talk about the house.”
“That’s right.” She took the chair that faced them all the best, and folded her hands across her belly. She was a thickset woman with sharp eyes and a kind expression. She could’ve been forty or seventy. She just had one of those faces, where it was hard to tell. “Your folks picked up the old nail house, over there on Argonne.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Well, I asked Dom to bring you here because I know your parents are doing all that work on the place, and I wondered if you’d … found anything.”
The very picture of innocence—or possibly confusion—Denise asked, “Like … what?”
Mrs. James’s eyes just about twinkled. “Like anything … or anyone … hidden inside that place. My momma always said the house was abandoned because someone disappeared, and was never found. When I was a kid, we used to dare each other to go inside, looking for a body.”
“I think my stepdad found a dead possum in the bathroom wall, but that’s been the worst of it.”
The older woman laughed gently, then looked a tad embarrassed about it. “I can’t decide if that’s good to know, or a little disappointing. There were so many stories, and we all wanted to get inside so bad—but we were all so scared. Just looking inside the windows was enough to make us squeal. You’d see lights in there, sometimes. People walking past the windows.”
“Yikes …” Denise whispered.
“Just squatters or trespassers, I figure. It’d been boarded up for so long, before that last fellow bought it—the one just before y’all picked it up. He said he ran out of money, but I heard through the grapevine that the place spooked
him too bad to keep working on it. Like something inside that house don’t want anyone looking around too much. Like it doesn’t want anyone to stay.”
Terry opened his mouth, but Denise gave him a kick on the leg that wasn’t particularly discreet—but effective. He closed his mouth again.
Denise cleared her throat. “I don’t know why the last guy left the house like he did. It sure looked like somebody got started and ran out of money, so that’s probably all it was. As for us, like I said—we found that dead possum.”
Mrs. James nodded. “But your parents, they’re remodeling, aren’t they? Gonna open it up, like a little hotel? Haunted hotels in New Orleans are a dime a dozen, but people love ’em. You should play that up, if you ever get it off the ground.”
Denise sighed hard. “God knows we’re trying to get the place in order, but it’s falling apart at the seams.”
“It’s not much to look at anymore, if you don’t mind me saying—but it can’t be that bad on the inside.”
“Ma’am, the inside’s no picnic. The other day, we had to spend a night in a hotel because the living room ceiling caved in. But there weren’t any corpses up in there, either. Nothing that used to be alive except for a snakeskin or two.”
“Well, you keep your eyes open. For years and years everybody talked like there was a body inside, someplace.”
“Probably just because Joe died there,” Terry said helpfully.
“Joe?” she asked with a very keen look on her face. “Joe who?”
“Joe Vaughn,” Denise answered. She sure did wish that Terry could keep his mouth shut. “He was a comic book writer, back in the 1950s. He fell down the attic stairs and broke his neck, but I’m pretty sure they took his body away and buried it. It’s definitely not at the foot of the stairs anymore, so …” Her voice faded out.
“Maybe that’s it,” Mrs. James agreed. “Neighborhood lore can get tangled up something awful, with little bits of truth and little bits of lies all mixed in together. You never know for sure what’s real, and what somebody made up to scare a bunch of kids away from a dangerous old house. Have you opened all the walls yet?”
“The plumbers and electricians did. It took a few days.”
“All of the walls?” she pressed.
“All of ’em with wires or pipes inside, so that’s … just about everything, right?”
“I suppose.” She leaned back and looked at Denise hard, like she was trying to decide if she was telling the truth. “But you’re saying there’s nothing in that place? Not a single haunt or haint? Not even … a whiff of perfume? The fellow before you said he kept smelling roses and lilies,” she said, and the twinkle in her eyes was now a gleam.
Denise held her breath. When the phone in her pocket buzzed and pinged, she let it out in an unladylike gasp. “I’m sorry,” she sputtered. “It’s my mom, I’m sorry. I really have to go. Thank you,” she said as she stood. “Mrs. James, thank you for the hospitality, but I have to run. Terry, Dominique … I’ll catch y’all two later.”
When she got home to Argonne Street, she stood out front, like she did the very first time she saw the house. Mouth half-open, feeling glum, wondering if it could be saved. Or if it was even worth saving. But before she could drag herself up the porch, Sally opened the front door. “There you are. I was starting to wonder.”
“I took a detour. I sent a text, didn’t you get it?”
“It was a vague text.” She stood aside to let Denise up the steps and around the hole on the porch, which still hadn’t been fixed. “Come on inside, if you want something to eat.”
Dinner was seafood, something that wasn’t quite the fast-food junk they’d mostly eaten for days. Sally had picked it up from a po’boy place somewhere that wasn’t Crispy’s, but Denise didn’t care. She’d never had a proper po’boy from Crispy’s, anyway.
“Not that I’m complaining,” Denise said as she pulled out a foil-wrapped sandwich the size of a baby’s head. “But when are we going to have a working kitchen?”
“Soon,” Sally said. “The electricians are almost done.”
“I keep hearing that.”
“So do we.” Mike pulled off his face mask and drew up a chair.
Sally passed out napkins. “We’re getting there. Gradually. We’ve got that next chunk of money approved, and it should hit our bank account this week … but it’s supposed to go to the next round of work. Maybe we’ll take a couple hundred bucks and scare up a stove with more than one burner mostly working, and an oven that doesn’t spit fire. Maybe we’ll even spring for one that was made in this century.”
“I’d settle for last century, so long as it worked.” Mike bit down on a full, golden bun and chomped through the fried shrimp stuffing.
Everyone ate in silence after that, because everyone knew they were eating all the money they’d set aside that wasn’t for the house. Nobody needed to say it out loud.
After food, Denise excused herself and went upstairs, where she turned the AC unit up half a notch past the agreed-upon setting, and pulled out her phone.
Trish had sent her a row of ghost and skeleton emojis, so apparently she’d found a Halloween stash someplace.
Denise grinned and typed back. Did I tell you I saw Tulane the other day? It’s a pretty campus. Library is great.
After a pause, a typing bubble appeared, and then her friend replied: ur not chickening out on me, are you? still coming home to be my roommate?
Obvs. Just saying, is all.
She put the phone away, not entirely sure of what, exactly, she was just saying. Even if she could, she didn’t really want to stay in Louisiana, did she?
Forget it. She didn’t want to think about it.
She was almost finished reading Lucida Might and the House of Horrors, so maybe that would distract her. Only a handful of pages remained. She might feel a little bad about finishing up without Terry, but she’d already read pretty far ahead of him, and she could always invite him over to let him finish on one of these afternoons when the house and its ghosts weren’t actively trying to kill anyone.
She fished the manuscript out of her bag and settled into bed—sitting on top of the covers, propped up by all her pillows.
Denise looked up from the book. She smelled something.
Flowers. Roses and lilies.
She sniffed until she was sure; it was very faint, but it was definitely perfume. Soon, it would be dark outside, so she flipped on the bedside lamp that sat atop a box beside her. It wasn’t dark yet, but the room was gold and dim, and she wanted every bit of light she could get.
The air didn’t just smell funny, it felt funny. It felt like it was buzzing. Like music with nothing but the bass turned up, somewhere far away. Like the damp, brittle humming of the sky when there isn’t any rain, but any minute, there will be lightning.
Denise closed Lucida Might and set it aside. She only had another couple of pages to read, and then she’d be done with it—but then again, that’s what she’d thought when she’d picked it up half an hour ago.
She thought of the previous night, when she’d been reading about a ceiling collapse, and downstairs, that’s just what had happened. She thought of Mike falling through the porch. Windows that fell shut and almost crushed hands. Nails that appeared in stair rails. Bricks that crashed onto feet.
Slowly, she reached for her phone. She pulled up Terry and composed a text. She wasn’t sure who else to ping.
Something weird is going on. I mean, EXTRA weird. Are you there?
She wasn’t sure what she expected him to say or do, but she needed to say something, to someone. Trish was too far away to do anything but worry; Norman might think she was crazy, and she didn’t think she knew him well enough to pass off crazy as charming. Dom might be intrigued, but Denise had brain-farted and forgotten to ask for Dom’s number, and anyway—Dom didn’t want to get in the middle of any ghost drama, she’d made that clear. On the one hand, she wanted to respect her wishes, on the other, she would’
ve just about killed to have her there … oh well. It was nobody’s fault but her own.
She’d have to settle for Terry. He was most likely to understand, and he was adventurous enough to respond to her summons. She hit SEND.
Unhooking the phone from its cable, she slid out of bed and poked her toes through the slots of her flip-flops. She dragged her feet and the foam-bottomed shoes scraped across the rough boards.
The roses and lily scent faded, and something else took its place. The new smell was sour and dark.
“Mom?” Denise called out. She reached her bedroom door and hung on to it, looking down at the hall’s carpet runner and checking for footprints. There weren’t any. “Mike?”
Nobody answered.
The smell grew stronger. The air grew thicker, and Denise felt light-headed. She let go of the doorframe and stepped into the hall, then took the rail and stood near the top of the stairs.
“Mom? Mike?”
Nothing was going on. Nothing was weird. If there was a terrible smell, it was in her imagination—or else it was in the attic, where there were plenty of terrible smells to go around. Just a draft, that’s all. Just a rush of air pushing down under the door, into the rest of the house. Just some ghost with a grudge, or a different ghost with a pleasant odor and gentle warnings.
She kind of wished she had Terry’s recorder handy. She wondered if anything was trying to talk, and she just couldn’t hear it. Surely something was trying to communicate.
Her phone was a solid lump in her shorts pocket. She pulled it out. Terry hadn’t texted back, but the phone had a voice recorder feature buried in it somewhere.
Still standing on the stairs, she poked at the screen until she found what she was looking for. She pressed the icon to turn on the mic. She held it out like she’d seen Terry do, away from her body, away from the static noise of her clothes, her breathing, her heartbeat.
“Is there anybody here with me?” she whispered. “What do you want?”
The Agony House Page 17
