Page 2 of The Boo Next Door

I'm sorry. The shed. He has opinions about my grandmother's shed.

"I'm not with the estate sale."

"Appraiser?"

"I'm the granddaughter."

Something moves through his face. Fast, there and gone, like a fish under ice. If I didn't know better I'd call it guilt, but I've been wrong about faces before, which is how I ended up single and eleven hundred miles from a job that no longer exists.

"Lila," he says. Not a question.

"That's unsettling."

"Bee talked about you." He looks at me a beat too long, and then, because apparently we're done with that topic forever, he nods at the dragon. "Winch is loud. Gets louder in the mornings. Figured you should know."

"Gets louder in the mornings," I repeat. "The bone dragon."

"The compressor for the fog runs at six." He says it the way other men say I'll pray for you. "You get used to it."

And then he just — leaves. Walks back to his ladder. Conversation over, apparently, by unanimous vote of one.

"Okay," I tell the fence. "Sure."

Back inside, Beetlejuice is sitting in the exact center of the kitchen table, which was forbidden under Bee's administration, testing the new government.

"Don't get comfortable," I tell him. "We hate the neighbor."

He starts to purr. Traitor.

I mean to unpack the car. What I actually do is open the hall closet looking for towels and find October instead.

The binder is on the middle shelf where it has lived my entire life, fat as a phone book, held together with duct tape and rubber bands and what I can only assume is witchcraft. THE BUILDS, says the spine, in marker gone brown with age. Inside: forty years of graph paper. Wiring diagrams in her impatient hand. Fabric swatches stapled to fog-timing charts. A pull-out map of the front yard with sight lines drawn in colored pencil, labeled where they scream.

Page after page after page. The floating bride of two thousand nine. The pirate wreck that leaked real bilge water until the fire marshal got involved. The moon — the famous one, the paper moon big enough to stand in, with a note in the margin that says face the porch so I can see them from my chair.

I sit down on the hallway floor with the binder in my lap and go through it like a person reading letters from the front.

Here's what nobody tells you about inheriting a house. It's not the furniture that gets you. It's the systems. The binder. The filters note. The extension cords in the shed, coiled and labeled by length, because she was a maniac in exactly one direction. A whole engineering of joy, built and refined for four decades, waiting for somebody to pick it back up.

The last page isn't a build. It's a sticky note, stuck crooked to the inside back cover, in handwriting smaller and shakier than the rest.

Ask Grady before you rewire the porch, it says. He'll act like it's a favor to him.

I read it four times.

"Who," I ask the empty hallway, "is going to explain to me why the enemy is in the binder?"

The hallway declines. Beetlejuice walks across the binder, sits on the floating bride, and begins washing his foot.

"You knew her longer than I knew her," I tell him. "You could contribute."

He does not contribute. Fine. It's fine. It's a note. She was old, he was next door with a ladder, towns work like that. It means nothing except that she knew his name, and knowing this town, he probably hauled her trash cans up the driveway twice and got knighted for it.

Besides. Whatever he was to her, he's the man I have to beat now, and I'd rather not complicate that with information.

I put the sticky note back exactly where it was, which is a thing you do with holy objects, and I go unpack the car for real this time.

The Lighting of the Gourd is the kind of thing you cannot explain to people who aren't from here, and I have tried. On the first of October, the entire town of Hollow Creek gathers on the green at dusk, and Dottie Pruitt throws a switch, and a pumpkin the size of a Volkswagen — the Great Gourd, fiberglass, older than the fire department — glows orange over the bandstand, and four hundred adults cheer like it's the moon landing.