Hiders

by Meg Collett

  “I’m sorry.” The kid looked nowhere near Violet and that suited her perfectly. She wanted to shrink away from the attention they’d garnered from all the other customers. The store was silent except for them, and as Tooty released the boy and he slunk away, the other customers opened up a path for him, a few of them putting their hands on his back to steer him out of the store, like he was a kicked puppy needing guidance. A few left with him, murmuring to one another and casting condemning looks back over their shoulders.

  Violet wanted to throw up.

  “What a dick.” Stevie huffed and crossed her arms.

  “I’ll go ring up the customers,” Maggie said. She waited until Violet looked up at her. “You good?”

  Violet nodded.

  She and Tooty walked away, leaving Violet with Stevie and Kyra. They both leveled worried eyes on her. “Violet—” Kyra began.

  “It’s fine,” Violet said. “I’ll get your icing, Stevie.”

  She started toward the fridge, letting her hair fall around her face since it was burning hot with shame, but Stevie reached out and stopped her. “If you were an icing, Violet, you would be my favorite to dip my cookie into.”

  “Oh, dear Jesus,” Kyra said, throwing up her hands. “Was that actually supposed to make her feel better?”

  Violet raised her eyebrows as Stevie fired back, “I don’t see you swooping in with any sage words of wisdom to lighten the moment!”

  “I’m so sorry, Violet,” Kyra said, ignoring Stevie.

  “I don’t know what you’re apologizing for. That was a great compliment.”

  “No. It was truly awful and a bit sexual and you should probably be really ashamed.”

  They both looked at Violet right as she tucked away a smile. They caught her. Kyra’s shoulders relaxed.

  “See?” Stevie said. “She liked it. I can tell. We have this mind communication thing going. You wouldn’t understand, Kyra, because you’re pregnant.”

  “What’s me being pregnant got to do with anything?”

  “The baby blocks your telepathic abilities. It’s simple science.”

  “How hard did she work this morning?” Violet asked Kyra. She was still fighting back a smile, and Stevie might have caused her blush to deepen with her icing comment, but she’d certainly dissipated Violet’s shame.

  Kyra sighed. “I kid you not, she moved one box then sat down on the couch and told Hale where to put his things.”

  “All that directing was hard work! The man has no eye for design.”

  “Oh, for sure.”

  Ignoring Kyra, Stevie leaned toward Violet. “Are we good? Do we need to hug it out? Cause I think we had a moment there.”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Violet said around a laugh.

  “You sure? Cade tells me I hug really well.”

  Kyra groaned. “Please stop. You’re scaring her away, and I actually want to be friends with her.”

  Violet’s stomach dipped a little. They wanted to be friends with her, and they’d stood up for her. She racked her brain for something cool and funny to say—something Stevie might say—but she waited too long and Stevie beat her to it.

  “Do you hear that?” She put her middle finger to her temple like she was Professor X. “Violet is telling me that you’re the one scaring her.”

  “I know you’re not telepathic, Stevie. And frankly, the fact I even have to say that concerns me.”

  “If you’re hearing voices in your head,” Violet said, finally thinking of something she hoped was funny, “it’s not me.”

  Kyra hooted with laughter. “Oh, girl. Yeah, you might want to get that checked out, Stevie.”

  Stevie narrowed her eyes at them. “Very funny, you two and a half.”

  “A half?” Kyra asked, confused.

  “Uh, you’re pregnant, Kyra. Surprise.” Speaking from the corner of her mouth, Stevie whispered to Violet, “I have to remind her of the fact an alarming amount.”

  “You really don’t have to remind me. This heartburn is doing a fine enough job.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Anyway,” Kyra said. “Would you want to get lunch with us? I know you might not want to after everything, but we would love to hang out with you if you want.”

  Violet’s heart thumped heavily. If Kyra and Stevie hadn’t been in the shop during the encounter with the young teenagers, she would have helped Maggie, collected her paycheck, and retreated back to her house. She would have hidden in her parents’ room, hearing those teenagers’ voices in her mind for hours on end, taunting and haunting her. It would have affected her for days.

  But they had been here, and they’d come to her defense. It felt . . . good. She didn’t need to retreat.

  She looked up at the two women across from her and said quietly, with a smile in the corner of her mouth, “I will, as long as Stevie keeps her cookies to herself.”

  9

  Violet opened the door the next evening to watch as Arie stepped out of his truck. He had his UGA ball cap on backward, his typical plaid shirt, and a thickly woven pair of work pants. His boots hit the ground with a heavy thunk. He hadn’t seen her yet from where she stood beneath the sway-backed porch, deep in the evening’s long, autumn shadows.

  He turned and finally spotted her. His only sign of surprise was his dark brows spiking up toward the plastic snap band of his hat. “You know,” he said, “you could say hello or something.”

  “Oh. Hello.”

  “Too late now, Violet. You already scared the shit out of me.”

  She pulled the edges of her cardigan tighter around her. She wore one of her mother’s long cotton dresses; it dragged across the ground slightly at her heels, the hem tattered and faded. The buttons were mismatched where Violet had replaced them many times, but it was warm and smooth against her skin.

  “You didn’t react much to be that scared,” she said.

  With his back to her as he rummaged around in his toolbox, he shrugged. “Guess I’m just the strong, silent type.”

  She thought it might have more to do with him being a Marine, but she kept that to herself. “I don’t think the strong, silent type would call himself the strong, silent type.”

  Arie pulled on some kind of harness with pulleys, wenches, and a few stray lines of rope with carabineers attached. “Then what type would you call me?”

  “I highly doubt there’s a type that suits you properly. What’s that?” She lifted her chin toward the harness.

  “A lift harness.” He snapped in the final buckle and pulled a strap tighter around his waist. Then he pulled out a long, sturdy-looking coil of rope from the toolbox.

  “The mysterious type,” she said.

  He glanced up then. “Really? Why’s that?”

  “Because you always make me ask the obvious questions. For example, why are you in a lift harness?”

  “Sorry.” He chuckled. “I’m cleaning those stone guys’ teeth. It’s on the list.”

  Violet didn’t bother stepping out into the light to look up at the gargoyles along the roof. She already knew what he meant, and she knew all too well how high the stone statues were perched. Arie was going to climb up there because she’d put it on the list. Really, she’d only thought the task sounded clever. But thinking of it now, of Arie, with his leg, lifting himself up to the attic’s guttering with only a rope and a worn harness to support him, her heart fluttered up into her throat.

  “That one isn’t next on the list,” she said.

  “You didn’t stipulate doing them in order, and Hale let me borrow the equipment today.”

  He moved along the house, his eyes shaded beneath his hand as he searched for a place to secure his rope. Violet’s heart picked up speed as she recalled the crumbling chunk of her house in Francesca Morgan’s hand and the rotted wood all along the outside. Ironically enough, the rot was from the clogged gargoyles, whose mouths acted as a runoff point for rainwater in the gutters; without an exit point, the water poured straight ov
er the gutters and down the outer walls of the house, pooling along the windowsills and doorframes, all places where Arie might step or reach for a handhold.

  “You have to do them in order. No gargoyles.”

  He pulled his attention away from searching the house and turned it on her. “Are you having second thoughts about how I’m going to repay you? Got something else in mind?”

  The smirking pull of his mouth threatened to burn her cheeks if she mulled his words over too long or considered how much she might actually want to renegotiate the terms of their deal. From the elongated pause between his question and her response, he knew that was exactly what she was debating. His smirk widened, and the pit of her stomach turned fluid with warmth as she took in his brown skin and the mischief in his maple syrup eyes. He wouldn’t argue too much if she proposed new terms.

  “Fine,” she said. “The gargoyles then. But you can come up to the attic and attach your rope from there. I don’t particularly want to clean bits of brain from my front walk today.”

  With a nod, he ambled up the porch stairs after her. “You’ve got a really dark sense of humor.”

  Violet let him pass into the house. “Is that bad?”

  “Just surprising. The good kind, though.”

  Violet closed the screen door and studied his back as he unabashedly took in her house once again. She kept the lights off most of the time, and the entry only had enough natural light to illuminate the expanse of the hall up to the base of the stairs curving upward in a smooth sweep of dusty mahogany banisters.

  As they climbed up to the second floor, Violet listened to the way Arie walked and the offbeat thump of his leg.

  “Cade told me what happened yesterday with those kids at Maggie’s. I guess Stevie was pretty fired up about it.”

  Violet didn’t look at him as they continued on to the third floor. “They were just young and dumb.”

  “Assholes, too, from what I heard.”

  She kept quiet, and he didn’t press the conversation. She’d put the exchange with the teenagers from her mind, refusing to let herself think about it. For Stevie and Cade, and even Kyra and Arie, the event might be shiny and new in its awfulness and base nature, but to her, it was just one knot in a long string of tangled days involving people all too similar to those teenagers. It wasn’t just the young who mocked her, but the housewife down the street who fed off gossip or the middle-aged man on his lunch break or even the elderly couple who tsked at her as she walked by, as if her very existence were a sin. There wasn’t a line across the battlefield that kept certain people from saying cruel things. It was a free-for-all. If every instance was unique, she would never surface for air.

  “There’s the hatch to the attic,” she said once they were up on the third floor and past her parents’ bedroom. Her father’s study was farther down the hall, toward the front corner of the house. She nodded up at a small square door in the hall’s ceiling. “It has a pull-down ladder.”

  Arie nodded, and she didn’t ask if he could manage it. If he was going to be climbing around her house in merely a harness, she assumed he could handle a ladder. She wondered if he felt the same way she did about addressing every instance where someone might question his ability to do something. Maybe that was a knot in his tangled string. Maybe if he responded to every question asked of him, he would always be answering, always defending himself.

  She stepped back and he pulled on the string, unfolding the ladder. An overly warm whoosh of stale air gusted down on their faces.

  “Ladies first,” he said, stepping back and gesturing for her to go ahead of him.

  She climbed up without looking back. If he needed privacy to get up the steep steps, then she could give him that. Pulling herself up through the floor, she emerged into the uppermost room of the house and walked, head slightly bent against the lower, cobwebbed ceiling, straight toward the single window positioned in the peak of the roof, between the two gargoyles.

  Only when she heard him climb up behind her did she turn around and say, “Watch the spot over there by that beam. The floor’s rotted through.”

  He glanced over, scrutinizing the sag in the beam and the way the wood had chipped away beneath the water leaks and termites. “Sounds dangerous,” was all he said.

  She cranked open the window and looked out, grimacing. The two gargoyles were perched on the roof above her head on either side of the massive gabled window, just a few feet away, but Arie would still have to go through the window and be suspended on the outside. She craned her neck back and looked up at the ironwork above the window’s gable.

  “This should work,” she said. The iron had been welded into the metal beneath the wood, so it might stay beneath his weight.

  “Should?” he questioned. “I need more than a ‘should’ here, Violet.”

  She reached up and pulled on the iron, letting her body dangle.

  Behind her, Arie snorted. “I weigh twice as much as you do.”

  “It’s impolite to guess a woman’s weight.” She grunted and heaved on the iron, jumping up and down a bit to see if it bounced loose.

  “Why do we always get into etiquette lessons? Here, move over.” He came up behind her, his shoulder brushing against hers. He reached up to grab the iron, and for a moment, she was cocooned in his body, beneath his arm. He smelled of sawdust and sweat, and her eyes fluttered shut as she briefly allowed herself to relish the moment and the warmth of his big body.

  Most people only came near her by accident.

  Opening her eyes, she ducked around him and stepped back, putting distance between them. If he noticed, he didn’t show it as he tested the ironwork. “Seems pretty solid.”

  “Seems like it should work.”

  At that, he glanced back at her, his expression flat. “Surprising. Very surprising.”

  “My sense of humor?”

  “No,” he drawled, turning back to the window. “Not your sense of humor at all.”

  He looped his safety rope around the iron and adjusted his belts and pulleys. All too soon, he stepped up onto the windowsill, his head bowed beneath the upper part of the window. He tested his weight against the anchor once and stepped off into the air, disappearing completely.

  Violet’s breath lodged in her throat. She hurried over and looked out the window. Dangling right below her, he looked up and smirked. “Come to check on me?”

  “Seems to be working.”

  “Probably should hold.”

  “No brain matter on the porch, if you please.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He attached a lanyard to the upper right corner of the window, closer to the gargoyle, and winched himself up with a metal hand crank until he was angled along the side of the window—a pendulum frozen at the tip of its arc. In position below the gargoyle, he pulled out a wire brush from his tool belt and scrubbed the inside of its mouth. Leaves and squirrel nests fell out in moldy clumps, sailing to the ground below. It took him fifteen minutes just to get one gargoyle free of debris, and then he moved on to the gutters around it. Once he finished, he gave himself some slack in the line, swung below the window, and winched back up to the other side, his legs kicking off the side of the house to slow himself or change trajectories.

  Violet stuck to the shadows beneath the window eaves but kept her eyes trained on Arie. The light shone down on his cap and the sweat beading on his neck as he worked. She couldn’t help but wonder about the drops as they rolled beneath his shirt collar and tracked along the planes of his back. One thought led to another, and she suddenly imagined her hands on his shoulders, sweeping them down his sides to his tapered hips. She imagined how smooth his skin would feel above the rigidity of his muscles.

  As he cranked himself up to get in a better position, his biceps bulged and veins popped out on his forearms. She could have watched him move about all day, but she forced herself to duck back inside, pretending she’d only been checking on him to guarantee the rope was holding and not merely checking him out.

/>   Her cheeks flushed with heat. These tasks would be—

  Her phone chimed in her pocket, a rather plaintive wail, and she jumped. So rarely did she get phone calls that she didn’t recognize the sound at first. She ducked deeper into the darkness and pulled the pay-as-you-go flip phone from her pocket.

  “Hello?” she said, questioning herself almost as much as the person on the other end of the line.

  “Ah,” Gregory fumbled, completely taken aback that she’d actually answered. In truth, she didn’t typically carry her phone around, much less actually answer it. “Violet,” he recovered. “Hello! How are you?”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked instead of answering the stupid question.

  “Oh, well. Right. I’m calling about the Teller Morgan Group situation.”

  The situation, Violet noted as he rambled on about Francesca Morgan and the police report she’d filed against Violet. Violet wanted to be in a hundred and one other places than right here, listening to Gregory delicately laying out the details of the charges.

  “—condemning the house. I told them—”

  “What?” Violet stirred herself back to the surface. “What did you say about the house?”

  “Ah,” Gregory fumbled, and Violet had the obscene urge to shake his delicate, old body and rattle his bones to force him to speak faster. He acted so intimidated by her, and she had no idea why. “Teller Morgan Group sent over some paperwork this morning to the Canaan mayoral office. They wrote up a proposition to have the property seized under an eminent domain public use clause. I didn’t think such a thing could hold any water with the proposition coming from the state, but the mayor approved it this afternoon.”

  She clutched the phone to her ear, listening to the ragged, wet hitch in Gregory’s lungs. This time of year, after one particularly bad winter when his lungs filled with fluid, his family had him on constant pneumonia watch.

  “What does that mean?” she asked above the rattle in his voice.

  “It means they’re trying to take your house.”

  The silence rustled thickly over the phone, filled only by their breathing and the awkward readjusting of the phone. Violet waited because she knew he hated that. To him and people like him, silence was unbearable.