Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  “It’s too high up,” Melissa said, pointing at it, sitting on top of the window molding.

  “Melissa, what did you do?” I launched myself into the room and started picking up tools.

  “Nothing! I thought you did it.”

  Oh, please. “Why would I throw my tools around like this?”

  “Why would I?” she asked.

  “Come on, Liss. You know I didn’t leave the tools like this, and there’s nobody else in the house.” Although I had to admit, that hammer hanging from the window was awfully high for her to manage. Did she just fling it and get lucky?

  “Well, I don’t know! This was how it looked when I walked in.” She stuck out her bottom lip in a gesture of defiance.

  I forced her to look me in the eye. “Really?” I asked.

  Melissa’s gaze never wavered, which was unusual. “Really,” she said.

  Swell. Now I was beginning to believe her. “Well, then, how . . .”

  I never managed to finish the question, since I was interrupted by a loud groan of wood and what sounded like hailstones hitting the floor in the hallway just off the living room. That was followed by a loud crash. I was out the kitchen door before Melissa could even turn her head, but she still ran faster than I did. We arrived in the living room at the same moment and stopped dead in our tracks.

  The very wall I’d been agonizing over now had a gaping hole at least three feet tall, right down its center. My visions of retaining the period detail and integrity of the room had been literally destroyed. I wanted to cry.

  “Why did you do that?” Melissa asked.

  Two

  “These walls are real plaster.” Terry Wright, the unbearably upbeat real estate agent, had been especially proud of that fact when she’d shown me the house for the first time. “They don’t have that bland feel that wallboard gives you. This could be a real selling point for your bed and breakfast.”

  “I’m not opening a bed and breakfast,” I’d told her, deciding not to comment on her suggestion that people would choose whether or not to vacation here because of the walls (I came around to the idea later). “I’m opening a guesthouse. I’m not going to serve food.”

  “Oh,” Terry said, her usually unbreakable glee momentarily dampened. “Well, that will keep more of our restaurants busy, won’t it?” From zero to cheerful in less than three-point-two seconds, a new record. Terry, maybe five years older than I am, obviously took good care of herself and was at exactly her proper weight, with blonde hair and a beatific smile. It’s a wonder she didn’t work at Disney World.

  The house was exactly what I had been looking for, but I couldn’t let Terry know that. It had a real sense of dignity, but without stuffiness: three of the seven bedrooms had wood-burning fireplaces, as did the living room; the ceilings were twelve feet high; the overall feeling was one of comfort and ease. It had been built as a residence, not a vacation home, so it was insulated, and Melissa and I could live here all year long.

  I’d known something about the house before I’d started searching. The people who had lived here for years, the Preston family, had had a lot of kids, the oldest of whom I’d gone to school with. They’d moved on about a year and a half ago, and there’d been another owner since then. The house seemed to have held up reasonably well overall, but while it was obvious some recent work had been done, this was no in-move-in-condition house. I’d have a lot of work to do. Which was also what I wanted (I couldn’t afford a perfect house, and I would have missed the challenge), but I didn’t tell Terry that, either.

  I put on a pensive face and stroked my chin a little. “Well, I don’t know . . .” I began.

  Melissa, behind me, practically burst out of her skin. “Come on, Mom!” she bleated. “This is exactly what you’ve been talking about!” The girl had a lot to learn about negotiation.

  I turned to look at her. “Not exactly,” I said, and made significant eye contact.

  My daughter, enthusiastic but astute, nodded, looked around the room, and tilted her head. “Yeah,” she said. “The fireplace does look kind of crooked.”

  Damn! It actually did. I hadn’t noticed that. Would I be able to repair it, or would it become “part of the charm of the place”?

  “Oh, I don’t think so! I think it’s darling,” Terry said. Her voice, directed at Melissa, dripped condescension and syrupy child-speak. “It looks fine to me.”

  “Is there any way to find out if the fireplace has been maintained properly?” I asked. Show doubt; maybe bring down the price a little.

  “It’ll all come out in the home inspection, but I’ll check my file. I have two copies of everything on my computer,” Terry said. She was so organized I had to fight the urge to punch her.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, back in my scorched-earth-negotiator mode. “I’m a little spooked by the fact that the house has been on the market for eleven months.”

  Terry waved a hand to dismiss that fact, and her voice took on a false confidentiality. “Everything’s staying on the market for months these days,” she said. “It’s the economy.” Uh-huh. “I’m telling you, with seven bedrooms, four baths and that kitchen, this is the place for a bed and breakfast.”

  I looked at Melissa, who rolled her eyes. Then she stared off into the distance, as if something really interesting were suspended from the ceiling. “Somebody died here,” she said in a faraway voice.

  I sighed a little. Melissa does that kind of thing sometimes when she thinks she can put one over on a grown-up. She doesn’t like it when she’s talked to as if being a kid equals being stupid.

  “Knock it off,” I hissed at her.

  “Actually, someone did sort of die in the house,” Terry said. I tried not to imagine what “sort of” dying could mean. Terry was doing her best not to stammer, but the effort was clearly difficult. “The previous owner of the house passed away here last June.”

  Of course, I already knew about that; it was why the house was for sale. Terry had mentioned it as a sales point (“the estate is really motivated to sell”) when we’d first met at her office.

  “I’m okay, Mom,” Melissa said, noticing the way I was looking at her, and tried to wink. But she can’t wink just yet, so to Terry, I’m sure it looked like a grimace of pain. I could use that.

  “I think maybe we’ll go home and think about it,” I told Terry.

  “They’ll drop the price another ten thousand,” she said immediately.

  Really? “Make it twenty,” I countered.

  “Done.”

  “I’ll have my lawyer call you,” I told her, and took Melissa, who had given up on her audition for a séance and resumed her normal expression, by the hand. I needed to get back to the car before I had my inevitable panic attack.

  Terry looked positively triumphant when we left. Maybe I should have held out for a thirty-thousand-dollar reduction.

  But I hadn’t walked into this transaction blind. I’d done my research: Even in a down economy, a house on the Jersey Shore could more than pay for itself as a vacation rental, and one that allowed for five sets of guests at once (seven bedrooms minus one each for me and Melissa) meant I could make enough in a decent summer to pay for the rest of the year and put some money away for Melissa’s education.

  “You bought Patty Preston’s house?” Jeannie Rogers asked in a disbelieving whisper on the phone. Jeannie, my best friend since the sixth grade, was talking quietly because she was at work. “Isn’t that kind of creepy?”

  “What’s creepy is that you still think of it as Patty Preston’s house, despite the fact that neither of us had ever set foot in the place before I went to ask about buying it, and besides, I hear she lives in Colorado now.”

  “You have no appreciation for the past,” Jeannie said.

  “If I had no appreciation for the past, I wouldn’t be buying a house that’s over a hundred years old,” I pointed out. “I’d bulldoze it and get myself a McGuesthouse.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Melis
sa said, her eyes wide. “Mr. Barnes says . . .”

  I put my hand over the phone. “Nobody’s knocking the house down,” I told her. Then I took my hand off the phone and said to Jeannie, “You know I’d do it.”

  I could hear Jeannie look heavenward. We know each other too well.

  She didn’t respond, so I went on: “Listen, if this deal does go through, I’m going to need an expert’s advice. Talk to your husband.” Jeannie’s husband, Tony Mandorisi, was an expert contractor and the man I asked for advice whenever I was taking on a project I hadn’t tackled before. Besides, I introduced Jeannie and Tony, so they both owe me. Tony is a good guy, something I discovered back when I was working at HouseCenter and he returned an extra pallet of drywall I hadn’t counted, knowing the overage would’ve come out of my paycheck. He wasn’t my type (I mentioned he was a good guy, no? I tend to end up with men I’ll eventually call The Swine), but we’d chat whenever he came in for supplies, and eventually I suggested he might be interested in meeting my friend Jeannie. They were married a year later.

  “Consider him on alert,” Jeannie said.

  We hung up, and I looked over at Melissa. She was smiling, but an unusual smile that made me grin back at her.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked her. Mothers can do that, I’ve decided. From anybody else, it’s annoying.

  “It’s going to fun be living in that house,” she answered.

  Three

  “A hole just opened up in the wall by itself?” Tony Mandorisi, general contractor extraordinaire, good friend, and Jeannie’s husband, sounded tired on the phone. Guys who work with power tools love to sound tired—it conveys the message that they labor hard, physically, all day. “Was there any sign of instability before that?”

  “No.” I sat on a lawn chair in my bare living room, nursing a bottle of Rolling Rock. “I hadn’t even touched it yet. I was trying to figure out how to preserve the plaster.” I had spent a few hours priming the living room walls for painting, and now had to decide on a color to replace that alarming red. And I had looked into repairing that crooked fireplace and decided that the amount of work involved translated into an amount of money that meant the fireplace’s quirkiness was quaint and should be preserved just as it was.

  “I guess you don’t have that problem anymore,” Tony said. Thanks. “But I don’t get it. How does a wall demolish itself? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yeah. I’m telling you, I’m afraid the upstairs will come crashing through the ceiling and become the downstairs.”

  Mentally, I could see Tony close his eyes and push his Yankees cap down on his head. “Are you sure this house is something you can handle? You need to get that B and B running soon if you want to make your mortgage payments.”

  “It’s not a B and B,” I told him for the nineteenth time. “It’s a guesthouse.”

  “And the difference is?”

  “I’m not going to serve breakfast.”

  “So it’s not a B and B,” Tony admitted. “It’s just a B. And I’m still worried that you’re in over your head.”

  That was not what I needed to hear. “You were the one who encouraged me to open a guesthouse,” I reminded him.

  “Yes, a guesthouse. Not that guesthouse.”

  “What’s wrong with the house? I got it for a great price and I can fix it up for not too much more.”

  “I just don’t know that you can do it all by yourself, Alison. The trouble is, you’re swinging for the fences on your first try.”

  “My only try. How many houses do you think I can afford?”

  “Maybe you should have gotten a smaller house,” he tried.

  “Then I couldn’t accommodate as many guests, and it would be ten years before I’d be able to turn a profit. I don’t have that kind of time.”

  Tony hesitated; he knew that already. “Or . . .”

  “Or?”

  “Or I’m right, and you shouldn’t have tried to do the repairs all by yourself. You know, there’s no shame in hiring help.”

  I burped, a window-rattler. I never have to worry about being ladylike around Tony, thank goodness, and luckily Melissa sleeps like a rock, or she’d have heard that one all the way upstairs. “No, there’s no shame in it, but there is expense, and I can’t afford it.”

  “And that’s your problem,” Tony said. “Your margin for error is too narrow. If you don’t get this house in order, and I mean soon . . .”

  “I will,” I said. And I left no room in my tone for argument. In my mind, sure, but in my tone, not at all.

  Tony made a grumbling noise. “I’ll come by and take a look tomorrow,” he said. “See if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “Can you make walls stop self-destructing?” I asked.

  “The least I can do is watch,” Tony said. “I’ve never seen one do that before.” He chuckled.

  “You’re a gem, Anthony,” I told him.

  “Tell that to my wife.”

  “I introduced you to your wife.”

  “I’ll come by tomorrow.”

  It’s good to have friends.

  At one in the afternoon the next day, I was alone in the house. Melissa was at school until three, and Tony had called to say he’d be in after he finished the tiling job he had scheduled.

  I don’t mind being alone, especially when I have things to do; it helps me focus and keeps me on task. The quiet is nice, too.

  But today, I kept hearing things, even when they weren’t there. Creaks. Snaps. Crackles. Pops. I had to wonder if I was under siege by breakfast cereal.

  I was on a small, three-step ladder, sealing a small hole in the kitchen wall with joint compound from a giant fifty-pound bucket resting on the top step. Fixing a gap like this is a study in a steady hand and judicious use of compound. If the hole is small enough, you can get away without plaster, and besides, there would eventually be cabinets over this part of the wall. I was doing this one mostly as a test for other, more prominent patches.

  And maybe it was also a way to get a little something done before Tony arrived and kill some time without having to make any decisions about larger things, like the gaping hole in the living room hallway wall.

  The iPod dock in the corner was playing one of my favorite oldies, a Creedence Clearwater Revival song, “Bad Moon Rising.” I allowed myself to sway a little, but just a little, on the ladder, in time to the rhythm.

  And of course, that was when I dropped the knife I was using to spread the compound.

  Now, you have to understand. I never drop a tool. Not ever. But this time—there’s no other way to say it—I could have sworn it was knocked out of my hand. I know, I know. But that was what it felt like.

  I stood there for a moment, baffled. But there was nothing to be done but climb down and pick up the wide knife, which was currently stuck to the floor with joint compound.

  This was the kind of week it was shaping up to be.

  Grumbling about what a klutz I seemed to have become, I stepped onto the kitchen floor, littered with newspaper (which I’d spread everywhere except exactly where the knife had landed—compound side down, of course), nails and sawdust.

  John Fogerty of CCR was warning me not to go out tonight as I reached down to get the knife from the floor. Then I heard something from above me, and I looked up just in time to see the bucket of compound slide itself off the top step of the ladder.

  And fall directly toward my head.

  I don’t actually remember anything for a while after that. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you how long I was on the floor. I do remember that I felt incredibly sleepy, and my head really, really hurt.

  So what if the rapidly spreading joint compound was all around me? I was sitting, and not lying down. That was what was important, I decided.

  It was obvious my head had taken a decent-sized hit, and when I put my hand up, it came back with blood on it. Swell. Which was what I also assumed was happening to my head.

  I grabbed a roll o
f paper towels that was within arm’s reach and blotted the spot on my head that hurt the most. The blood was already beginning to slow down. Head wounds bleed like crazy at the beginning but stop quickly. I held the towel wad there, wishing I had the strength to get up and walk over to the cooler I’d left in the living room. A cold beer would be almost as good as ice on the wound right now.

  My mind began to clear as the desire to sleep for six or seven weeks was overtaken by pain. I took a vote in my mind and came down against touching my head where it hurt again. I didn’t want to know how much it had swollen. And then my breath caught again, but for a different reason.

  Standing in the kitchen, on the other side of the ladder, were a man and a woman. He was in his mid-thirties, like me. He was also tall and looked powerfully built, like an athlete, but with an incongruous goatee.

  The woman was smaller and younger, maybe late twenties, and would have been beautiful if she hadn’t been scowling. She wore a pair of cargo pants and a tight t-shirt that read, directly across her breasts, “What’re YOU lookin’ at?”

  But it wasn’t just the presence of two strangers in my kitchen that was bothering me. The really disturbing part was that I couldn’t see them clearly.

  Great, I thought. A concussion. Just what I need.

  “What did you do that for?” the man barked at the woman. He had an accent of some kind. I couldn’t place it. But then, my head was in another time zone. “You could have killed her!”

  “Well, that would have stopped her too, wouldn’t it?” the woman responded, with almost no inflection in her voice.

  “Excuse me,” I said, my voice sounding very far away. My head was starting to throb. “I don’t want to pry, but who are you and what are you doing here?”

  They both stiffened as if struck by electricity and turned to stare at me.

  “Uh-oh,” the man said. “I think she sees us.”