If you’d asked me to describe the neighborhood watch and biggest menace, I’d have sketched you Edith Cable: steely blue hair, eyes like beady sapphires, and a smoker’s laugh that could strip varnish. The woman had eyes in the back, side, front, and top of her head, nothing happened in the neighborhood without her knowing. She was also a firm believer that karma had enough on her plate, so she handled all her own retaliations personally. Every neighbor who got on Mrs. Cable’s bad side typically put their house up for sale within one to two years.
As a kid, she terrified me. As a teenager, I’d mowed her lawn for precisely one summer, after which I’d vowed to never again work for a woman who thought “tips” came in the form of unsolicited life advice and expired Nilla wafers. Now, as an adult, she regarded me with the sort of wary suspicion usually reserved for returning war criminals and bad cable installers.
“Mrs. Cable.” I forced a smile as I met her at the edge of the cracked sidewalk. “How are you?”
She planted her cane between two slabs of buckled concrete and sniffed, her nostrils flaring. “My friends are all dead, Adam. I’ve outlived every single one. They say only the good die young, but as you can see, I’m proving everyone wrong.”
I laughed because that was what was expected when Edith Cable spoke. “Yes, you are.”
“Look at you! I never thought I’d see you here again. What brings you back?”
“Some circumstances have changed.”
She eyed me, that sharp Cable gaze, and sucked her teeth. “Sounds mysterious.”
“It’s not really. I’ve got girls now. Twins. I decided this would be the best place to raise them.” I hesitated, glancing back at the house. “Didn’t realize the place had gotten so… haunted.”
“‘Ran into the shitter’ is the phrase you’re looking for.” She leaned in, lowering her voice to a stage whisper. “Your father let this place go. The last two really bled him dry.”
“Last two?”
She snorted. “Hussies, brides, wives, homewreckers. Take your pick. The last one, the one with those little yappy dogs. She left him in the middle of the night, took the car, the dogs, and all the jewelry. Dr. Patel, down the street, said the moving truck was in and out in under an hour. Slick as a whistle. Your father was so mad he just sat on the porch and drank for a week. That drinking was what killed him.”
I hadn’t spoken to my father in over ten years, so I didn’t have any idea what his life was like the past decade. “I thought it was a heart attack.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s what killed him, killed him, sure. But he was in rough shape for months. Kidney, liver, you name it.” She looked at me as if I should have known this. Maybe I should have. “Terrible thing, to watch a man rot in his own house. Alone,” she said quietly, then straightened her jacket and, with a sudden pivot, jabbed a finger at me. “Don’t make the same mistakes, Adam.”
I opened my mouth to promise her I wouldn’t, but her phone rang—a little jingle just slightly hipper than you’d expect—and she barked, “Gotta go! My stories are on. You be good to those girls, Adam. Don’t make them hate this place like you did.”
She shuffled away, leaving me with the feeling I should respond but not really knowing what to say. Trying to shake off that strange interaction, I turned and took a deep breath. My eyes automatically went to the Bliss house.
As much as I wanted to go next door, knock and demand to see Billie, I knew I had no right, so I had to focus on getting the house ready for my girls and do everything I could to put my Billie sighting out of my head. The knowledge that she was a couple hundred yards away was doing all sorts of things to me, but I had to ignore it.
The house loomed before me, three stories of sun-faded yellow paint and warped gingerbread trim, every window either fogged or cracked. If the exterior looked this bad, I was bracing myself for the interior. For a split second, I thought of getting back in the van and driving away, taking the girls someplace new, some place where the walls didn’t echo with arguments and the yard didn’t reek of a broken family. But those were ghosts, this was just a house. It was a good neighborhood. Good school district, that I’d already enrolled them in. And once I fixed it up, it would be a nice place to raise kids.
With renewed determination, I walked up onto the porch and opened the front door. The house greeted me like a punch in the nose. The scent was the first thing, a thick, offensive cocktail of ancient carpet mildew, industrial air freshener, and something I sincerely hoped was mothballs. The entryway looked as if it had hosted a demolition derby. The once-grand staircase was now missing three balusters, and the newel post wobbled like a loose tooth. The wallpaper, which I remembered as a soft gold, now drooped in strips, stained the color of old tea bags. Every surface was filmed with dust, and in the corners by the coat rack, I spotted a web full of mouse droppings.
“Jesus,” I breathed. “I should have brought a hazmat suit.”
But the house hadn’t finished showing off its decline. In the kitchen, the linoleum floor had curled up at the seams, so every footstep was an adventure in balance. The fridge, a late-80s monstrosity, hummed like a dying animal. I opened it out of morbid curiosity and instantly regretted it. Inside, sixancient jars of relish, no fewer than three half-used ketchups, and a Tupperware that might as well have contained the spawn of Cthulhu. I slammed the door shut and moved buying a new fridge up to number one on my to-do list.
The downstairs bathroom—tucked under the stairs—smelled like someone had tried to mask the scent of a leaky sewer pipe with a eucalyptus candle. The shower was rust-stained, and the toilet’s tank lid was missing, allowing a colony of mold to flourish in the open. I ran the sink, and the water spat brown for a full thirty seconds before clearing up.
Upstairs, things were only marginally better. The master bedroom had been cleared of most furniture, but the carpet bore the fossilized footprints of a thousand late-night pacing sessions. My dad’s old office was the most usable space. Three walls were bookshelves, and then there was a massive bay window with a bench. The spare room had a single bed and dresser. My old room still painted the pale blue I’d loved as a twelve-year-old, held nothing but a toppled bookcase and a crusted-over lava lamp. The room I’d thought about using for the twins was a horror show: water damage on the ceiling, a green-black bloom of mold on the far wall, and a broken window patched with duct tape and a flattened Amazon box. I closed the door on it and exhaled, long and slow, like maybe if I let enough air out, I could drift right out of this reality.
I was halfway back down the stairs when I heard a knock at the door. For a split second, I expected it to be Billie. But when I got downstairs and opened it, I saw it was Maddox and two guys.
Maddox made quick introductions. “Adam, this is Alex Vaughn and Nick Locke.”
“Hi.” I shook both their hands and hearing their names clicked that these were the men Maddox had started his charity with. I read an article about them, they were his foster brothersand like Maddox, they were also billionaires. Alex Vaughn worked in construction and Nick Locke in the media space.
What the hell were they doing on my porch?
“We’ve heard a lot about you,” Alex said.
“These guys are like my brothers,” Maddox explained, “and you were like my brother before they came around.”
“Oh, right. Nice to meet you.”
