Page 10 of The Boo Next Door

We stand there. October's coming down the street behind him, woodsmoke and wet leaves, and the Hendersons' reaper sighs and re-inflates, and I would rather be caught dead than let this man know that from my doorstep, backlit like that, he looks like the poster for a movie I'd watch twice.

"The cord," he says, holding it out.

"Keep it. You coiled it. It's bonded with you now."

His mouth does something — not a smile, nowhere near a smile, but a structural report of where one would go — and he sets the cord on the porch rail, precisely, and walks back across the yards, and I watch him go while hating everything I'm feeling.

Sunday I make it worse, and for once it's not on purpose.

I'm on the tall ladder against the porch gable, hanging the drape rail, when the whole thing gives a little kick sideways — old gutter, soft fascia board, the ladder skates six inches, and I ride it down about four rungs of pure Looney Tunes before I catch the rail and hang there like laundry, one shoe in the hydrangeas.

And he's just there. Over the fence, across the grass, before I've even finished my first swear word — a hand flat against the ladder, the other steadying my spine like it's a load of lumber, and he doesn't yell, doesn't lecture. He re-sets the ladder feet with his boot, looks up at me, and says, "Foot down. Left one first."

I get down. My heart's going for reasons I assign entirely to the ladder.

"Fascia's rotten there," he says. "Rail needs to mount into the corner post. I'll—" He stops himself. Reroutes. "You'll want a longer lag bolt."

He's not wearing a jacket. He has been, evidently, hauling dragon vertebrae in a T-shirt in October, because apparently the cold rolls off him like water off a duck, and I am now aware — clinically, deeply against my will — that the man is built like something you'd anchor a suspension bridge to.

"Thanks," I say, in a voice that's fine. It's fine.

"Mm." He glances at the séance porch, the drape rail, the sight lines. Something in his face does actual arithmetic. "Forced perspective?"

"Maybe."

"Huh," he says, one syllable with an entire review inside it, and leaves, again, the way he always leaves, like the last word is a tool he doesn't need to buy because he already owns it.

I climb back up my ladder.

I came to this town to save Bee's house. I am instead in a land war with a man whose shoulders should be zoned commercial, and the worst part — the part I will be taking to my grave, which at this rate is reasonably priced and next door — is that when the ladder slipped, some idiot chamber of my heart didn't flinch.

Because it already knew he'd be there.

Chapter 4

Grady

The new fog manifold is overkill, and I build it anyway, because the alternative is thinking.

Four zones, individually valved, timed off a controller I salvaged from an irrigation system. Nobody needs this. The dragon needs one good fog bed and a light rig. But Monday night I stood at the fence a long while looking at her porch — at the drape rail she remounted, into the corner post, with the right lag bolt, like she does listen, she just files it under her own ideas — and I caught myself wondering what her table lift ran on, whether she'd sourced a linear actuator or built a cam, and that's a problem.

So. Manifold.

"You're going to fog your own house off the map," Ravi says Tuesday, when he stops by to borrow my post-hole digger and stays two hours, in the tradition of his people. He walks the zone lines, whistles. "What's zone four even for?"

"Coverage."

"Coverage." He looks at the layout, then at the fence, then at me, and I watch him do the math I've been not doing on purpose. Zone four throws along the north property line. Her line. "Huh," he says, with his whole face.

"Density reads different against her lights now. Her build changes my backdrop."

"Sure. Backdrop." He hands me the digger like a man declining to press charges. "You know what's funny? Nine years I've known you, and the most words I've ever heard you say in a row have been about fog placement."

"That's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

He leaves. I run the lines, and while I trench the last one I catch the sounds from over the fence, the way you catch a radio through a wall. Her jigsaw, going in short confident bursts. A power chord of hammering. Her voice, narrating something to somebody — the cat, the wig stand, the porch itself, no way to know. At one point she laughs at her own joke, alone, over there, and the jigsaw starts up again.