Page 18 of The Boo Next Door

"So you moved somewhere nobody knew you."

"Picked it off a map. Cheap house, volunteer department needed bodies. Figured I'd work, sleep, bother no one. Great plan."

"How long did that last?"

"The plan? About two months." I consider the actual number. "The believing in the plan, maybe a year. You can go a long time in a small town thinking you're invisible. Everybody knows your truck, your coffee order, and your marital history, and they just let you keep the costume on till you're ready."

"Historically great results," she says, soft, and I don't know where she got Ravi's line, except that it's not Ravi's line, it's just the line, the one everyone eventually says to me, and in her voice it doesn't have teeth.

"First October, I'm here two months, nobody knows my name except the chief. And this town starts — doing this." I wave at the tunnel, the gym, the whole month of it. "Every house. Old ladies on ladders. The gas station does a theme. And I'm the new guy with a garage full of tools and no reason to be anywhere, so when somebody asked me to help with a build—" Careful. Here's the ledge. Her grandmother on the other side of one pronoun. "—I helped. And then it was every night. And then people knew my name because of what I could make, which was the first way anybody'd known me in years that didn't feel like a bill coming due. The dragon's not for Halloween. Halloween's just when this town lets you build the thing."

Silence. The good kind, and it stretches, and I've said more words in a row than I've said since the divorce lawyer, and I feel like a submarine that surfaced too fast, and Lila Merriweather is looking at me like — I don't have a comp for it. Like I'm a build she just figured out the joinery on.

"Grady," she says, quiet. My name, not Ellis. First time.

She's got glue gun in one hand from the webbing repair, forgotten. There's cotton web in her hair. We're eighteen inches apart on a stage apron in a dark gym and her eyes drop, half a second, to my mouth. Half a second, but I read gauges for a living. And the air between us goes exactly the way the fog went, one slow bank rolling somewhere it's not supposed to be, and I lean, or she leans, the report will never establish which⁠—

The gym doors open with the specific boom of municipal architecture, every light comes up, and Dottie Pruitt's voice arrives ahead of her like artillery.

"Co-chairs. Wonderful. You're both here."

We are three feet apart by the time her heels hit the free-throw line. Lila is stapling something that does not require staples. I am examining the tunnel frame like it's load-rated for my dignity.

"Storm's moved up," Dottie announces, clipboard in hand, and if she saw anything, and she saw everything, she banks it. "Nor'easter makes landfall tonight, not tomorrow. Sky comes down by nine, ten o'clock, they're saying. The gym will hold, the fire marshal signed off this morning, and the Walk goes Saturday as planned once it blows through. But I'll need your exit plan updated by the weekend, Grady, and your fog cut in half, Lila, don't argue, and both of you need to go home right now and look to your own yards, because whatever you've got standing outside—" she peers at us over the glasses, one to the other, missing nothing, "—batten it."

She leaves. The lights stay up, fluorescent and honest, and whatever was in the air has gone back to wherever it lives.

"Tonight," Lila says, businesslike, packing her glue gun like it's evidence. "Great. My drapes are rated for a strong opinion, maybe. Not a nor'easter."

"Dragon's rated for sixty. Gusts'll run past that on the ridge."

"So we've got three hours of daylight to strap down our armies." She shoulders her bag, and then, because she can't help it, because there is a version of her that will be haggling on her deathbed: "You know this is exactly what the committee wanted. Two enemies, one gym, forced cooperation, weather event. Dottie's basically running a wildlife breeding program."

"You should tell her it's working."

It's out of my mouth before the review board convenes. Flat delivery, same as always, but the content — the content is a confession with a building permit, and we both hear it. She goes still. The gym hums its fluorescent hum.

"That's the most words you've ever said at once that scared me," she says, and there's no joke rigged under it anywhere, which from her is its own confession.

"You asked for the data."

"I did. I hate it. Keep it coming." At the gym door she stops, and doesn't quite look back. "Hey. What you said. That's not what a load-bearing wall sounds like, for the record. Just so you have the data."

The door booms shut behind her.

I stand in the gym a long time, in the tunnel we built, with my jaw doing the thing.

Ravi's voice, this morning, in the bay: tell her about the letter before the letter tells her about you.

I've spent three years engineering things that stand up to wind. Tonight I find out if any of them is me.

Chapter 7

Lila

Three hours of daylight, Dottie said, and the sky gives us ninety minutes.

I'm on my porch fighting forty yards of velvet drape into submission when the first real gust comes down Foxglove Lane like a plow, and the séance parlor inhales. That's the only way to describe it. The whole forced-perspective room takes a breath it was never engineered to take, and my medium — my beautiful medium, four days of sculpt work, her face finally just dead enough — leans hard against her guy wires and looks at me like, well?