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“What history?”
And for the first time in our conversation, Mitzi finds herself at a loss for words. She reaches for a lock of her hair, twisting it in her fingers until she’s isolated a single strand. Then she yanks it from its root and tosses it over her shoulder. “You should ask the parents.”
“They just moved here. They don’t know anything. What are you talking about?”
“When I was a kid, we called your cottage the Devil House. We’d dare each other to peek through the windows. My brother offered me quarters if I would stand on the porch and count to a hundred, but I’d always chicken out.”
“Why?”
“A woman was murdered. Annie Barrett. She was an artist, a painter, and she used your house as her studio.”
“She was murdered in the cottage?”
“Well, they never actually found her body. This was a long time ago, right after World War Two.”
Teddy’s face reappears in the second-floor window. “Has it been five minutes yet?”
“Almost,” I tell him.
When I look back at Mitzi, she’s already backing across the yard. “Don’t keep the little angel waiting. Go enjoy your ice creams.”
“Wait, what’s the rest of the story?”
“There is no rest of the story. After Annie died—or went missing, who knows—her family turned the cottage into a garden shed. Wouldn’t let anyone stay out there. And it’s been that way ever since, seventy-some years. Until this month.”
* * *
Caroline comes home with a minivan full of groceries, so I help her unload and unpack all the bags. Teddy is upstairs in his bedroom, drawing pictures, so I use the opportunity to ask about Mitzi’s story.
“I told you she was cuckoo,” Caroline says. “She thinks the mailman steams open her Visa bills so he can learn her credit scores. She’s paranoid.”
“She said a woman was murdered.”
“Eighty years ago. This is a very old neighborhood, Mallory. All these houses have some kind of horror story.” Caroline opens her refrigerator and loads the crisper drawer with spinach, kale, and a bundle of radishes with soil still clinging to their roots. “Plus the previous owners lived here forty years, so obviously they didn’t have any problems.”
“Right, that’s true.” I reach into a canvas grocery bag and pull out a six-pack of coconut water. “Except they used the cottage as a toolshed, right? No one was sleeping out there.”
Caroline looks exasperated. I sense she’s had a long day at the VA clinic, that she doesn’t appreciate being ambushed with questions the minute she walks through the door. “Mallory, that woman has probably done more drugs than all my patients combined. I don’t know how she’s still alive, but her mind is definitely not right. She is a nervous, twitchy, paranoid mess. And as someone who cares about your sobriety, I’m going to strongly suggest you limit contact with her, okay?”
“No, I know,” I tell her, and I feel bad, because this is the closest Caroline has ever come to yelling at me. I don’t say anything else after that, I just open the pantry and unpack boxes of arborio rice, couscous, and whole grain crackers. I put away bags and bags of rolled oats, raw almonds, Turkish dates, and weird shriveled-up mushrooms. After everything is unpacked, I tell Caroline I’m heading out. And she must sense that I’m still upset because she comes over and rests a hand on my shoulder.
“Listen, we have a terrific guest bedroom on the second floor. If you want to move over here, we’d be thrilled to have you. Teddy would go bananas. What do you think?”
And somehow, since she already has one arm around me, it turns into a kind of hug. “I’m fine out there,” I tell her. “I like having my own space. It’s good practice for the real world.”
“If you change your mind just say the word. You are always welcome in this house.”
* * *
That night I put on my good sneakers and go out for a run. I wait until after dark but the weather is still muggy and gross. It feels good to push myself, to run through the pain. Russell has a saying that I love—he says we don’t know how much our bodies can endure until we make cruel demands of them. Well, that night I demand a lot of myself. I do wind sprints up and down the neighborhood sidewalks, running through shadows of streetlamps and clusters of fireflies, past the ever-present hum of central air conditioners. I finish 5.2 miles in thirty-eight minutes and walk home feeling deliriously spent.
I take another shower—this time, in the small, cramped bathroom of the cottage—and then fix myself a simple supper: a frozen pizza heated in the toaster oven and a half-pint of Ben & Jerry’s for dessert. I feel like I deserve it.
By the time I’m finished with everything, it’s after nine o’clock. I turn out all the lights except for the lamp on my nightstand. I get into the big white bed with my phone and put on a Hallmark movie called Winter Love. I have a hard time focusing, though. I can’t tell if maybe I’ve seen it before, or maybe the story is just identical to a dozen other Hallmark movies. Also, it’s a little stuffy inside the cottage, so I stand up and open the curtains.
There’s a large window next to the front door, and a smaller window over my bed, and at night I keep them open to generate a cross-breeze. The ceiling fan spins in slow, lazy circles. Outside in the woods, the crickets are chirping, and sometimes I’ll hear small animals pacing through the forest, soft footsteps padding over dead leaves.
I get back into bed and start the movie again. Every minute or so, a moth smacks against my window screens, drawn to the light. There’s a tap-tap-tapping on the wall behind my bed but I know it’s just a branch; there are trees growing close on three sides of the cottage and they scrape at the walls every time the wind picks up. I glance at the door and make sure it’s locked, and it is, but it’s a very flimsy lock, nothing that would stop a determined intruder.
