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Eventually, we’d managed to sort the attic back into order, tucking the letters and clippings into boxes and setting them back on the shelves. I swept the space out and even cleaned the windows. By the time we headed back down, the place didn’t look ghostly at all, and I found it hard to believe how terrified I’d been the night before. The whole house was starting to feel less haunted and more, just, old.
We finished sanding floors on the main level Saturday evening, falling into bed—me in my own room—and immediately to sleep with no ghostly interference all night. On Sunday, we started upstairs, working through the bedrooms we weren’t using. By the lunchtime, the house was almost livable, the company we’d called to complete the job of refinishing the floors would show up Monday. We’d agreed early on to do as much of the work ourselves as we could, but since Michael had a store to run and I had very little home improvement experience, there were limits to what we could do. And we also had the improvement fund to work with.
I was vacuuming up some of the last bits of sawdust from our sanding when Michael stepped in front of me to get my attention. I shut off the vacuum. “What’s up?”
“Since the guys are coming in to finish the floors, it probably makes the most sense for us to stay somewhere else, keep off of them until they’re done.”
I hadn’t thought about that. “Somewhere else?”
He shifted his weight, wrapping a hand around the back of his neck, and I sensed the same reluctance in him that I felt in myself. I didn’t want to leave the house. In the few days we’d been here, it had begun to feel like an odd kind of home, and we’d gotten along so well it was hard to remember that we weren’t actually any kind of family. “Yeah, I thought maybe you could go back to your mom’s for a few days? Dan and I could stay at my place. Get him out of the construction zone.”
“Oh yeah, sure.”
“It should take the guys a day or two to finish prepping and then they’ll refinish. I think the hardwood will be cured and dry in a week.”
A week with Lottie? I swallowed back my disappointment. “Sure.”
I said goodbye to Michael and carried my bag down the hill to the Tin. I went back to Mom’s house with her that afternoon.
Sunday dinner with Lottie was always a bit of an inquisition, but this one was particularly painful.
“So you two are getting along?” Mom asked over a forkful of chicken.
All eyes at the table were on me—my sisters, Wiley Blanchard’s, and Cormac’s. His girls were at his brother’s house, so he and Paige were both free to offer opinions and advice about my odd living situation.
“Yeah, we are,” I said.
“No in-house pranking? Maybe you could switch the sugar and salt or something. Keep the feud rolling on a smaller scale,” Cormac suggested.
“Definitely not,” I said. “The feud is ludicrous, and you should all just forget about it.”
“Tell that to poor Verda,” Mom said. “Her moose got dinged when they moved him back to her garden this time, and now he has a divot right in his privates.”
“In his what, Mom?” Amberlynn laughed.
“You know.” Mom sniffed, clearly too refined to repeat her comment about moose privates.
“Let me get this straight,” Wiley said. “The moose sustained a feud-related groin injury?” He was barely suppressing a grin.
“Yes,” Mom said stiffly. “And you know Verda thinks of that moose as representative of Harry. It’s almost like those horrible Tuckers kicked Harry in the balls or something.”
No one at the table was doing a good job showing the appropriate amount of respect for the idea of Uncle Harry’s dearly departed balls at this point.
“I hate seeing Aunt Verda upset,” Amberlynn said, and something in her voice made me worry.
“Don’t do anything,” I warned.
She smiled at me, and I had a very bad feeling that something might already be in the works.
“So what’s Michael like?” Paige asked. “He’s always kept to himself, seemed pretty private since high school.”
“What was he like in school?” I asked. Michael and Shelly had been behind me in school. I hadn’t really known them. But they were only a year behind my sister Paige.
“He was popular. Soccer star and all that. Everyone was sure he was going pro.”
“And then he got Shelly knocked up and he decided to put a ring on it,” Amberlynn added. She’d been a year behind him and Shelly, so had no doubt had a front row seat to the scandal.
“Which was the noble thing to do,” I pointed out, even though I was not one of Shelly’s greatest admirers, based on her performance at the house.
