Page 29 of The Boo Next Door

"Saturday." He says it like a man handing over the murder weapon, because it is one and he knows it. "After the judging. When it couldn't read as a tactic. There's a whole — Bee left instructions, there's a letter⁠—"

The word lands in the garage like the tarp coming off everything at once.

"A letter."

He goes very still, the stillness of a man watching a load shift off its rigging with his hands already full.

"She wrote to you?"

"Lila—"

"She wrote to you." Fourteen months of not visiting, and March came, and there was nothing with my name on it, no envelope, no voicemail, nothing but a house and a binder and a note about porch wiring — and he has a letter. The one person she — I hear the sound I make and I hate it, it's not even anger, anger would have some dignity to it, it's the sound of the actual wound, the one under the contest, under the roof, under everything: she picked him. To trust. To train. To write to. The stranger with the garage. Not me. And why would she, says the cold voice that has been waiting fourteen months for its opening, you were in Ohio, building a coaster queue, being too busy for the only person who — "What does it say?"

"It's — there's context⁠—"

"What does it say." The second time it comes out flat and wrong, a load tone, and it moves him back half a step, helmet and all.

"It says don't let you win out of pity." It comes out of him like it's under pressure, and I watch him hear it hit the room, watch him try to gather it back with both hands. "That's one line. There's — it says look after you, it says keep the Fright alive, there's a whole system, Lila, the money. I need you to sit down for the money part, it's not what it looks like, none of this is what it looks like⁠—"

"It never is, with you. That's the product." I'm cold everywhere now, cold like the professional, and I hear myself get quiet, which is worse than the shouting, we both know it's worse. "Don't let her win out of pity. Great. Message received, three years early. Here's mine: I withdraw the pity concern. You're going to need the streak tomorrow, champ, because I'm going to be up all night with a sewing machine, and then I'm going to beat you and your dragon and my own grandmother's ghost squad, square, on the merits, the way the letter wants." I'm past him at the side door, out into the cold, and I stop, because there's one more, and it's the one I'll wish back for the rest of my life or maybe the opposite, I genuinely can't tell yet. "You know the worst part? I told you I'm bad at the staying part. Filed the paperwork right on your chest. And the whole time, you were the one already gone."

I cross the property line. I do not look at the dragon.

Here's what the yard looks like at two in the morning, for the record, since Denise's cameras are all pointed at livelier things.

One woman. One work light. One sewing machine set up on a sawhorse table in the cold, running seam after seam through slashed scrim while her breath smokes. One cat, on the porch rail, on duty, having appointed himself, watching the street with his ears back like he understands the assignment now, too late, like all of us.

The tea's gone cold in the mug on the walk where I set it down at midnight. Behind me the broken door wheezes through its cycle, open, shut, open, welcoming nobody, and I sew, and across the fence his garage lights burn on and on and on, and neither of us knocks.

In my head, on a loop, the registration form. The pre-printed line: MERRIWEATHER, B. The pen tied on with kitchen string, and my own hand crossing her out.

I couldn't beat her. Twelve years running, nobody could, I grew up inside the proof. And it turns out I can't even beat the man she chose instead of me — the one she trained, armed, funded, and wrote to — because this town only ever had one real champion, and she's gone, and everything since is just her estate, competing with itself.

At two forty, headlights swing up Foxglove, and it's Frankie's hatchback, and she gets out in pajama pants and her dead father's hunting coat carrying a thermos the size of a scuba tank.

"Denise posted your yard," she says. "The chat's at three hundred messages. Ruth is organizing a casserole response like it's a house fire. The Henderson twins are claiming alibi — bowling league banquet, forty witnesses, which, devastatingly for the narrative, appears to check out." She surveys the sewing operation, the work light, the broken door wheezing through its cycle. Then she looks at my face, and Frankie has known my face since it was nine years old, and she puts the thermos down slowly, like a weapon she's decided against. "Okay. That's not vandal damage. What's the rest?"

"The rest is I'm fine."

"Lila."

"He has all of it, Frankie." The seam runs out from under the needle and I just sit there, hands flat on the scrim, and it comes up my throat sideways, half laugh, worst laugh of my career. "Bee's props. Every piece. His garage looks like the Smithsonian of her, staged for load-in. She gave it to him — gave, in writing, in the ledger, I found it Saturday and I've spent a week auditioning literally any other answer. And there's a letter. She wrote him a letter, Frank. Him." My voice does the thing, and I let it, because it's Frankie, because it's two forty, because the door won't stop welcoming nobody. "Fourteen months I didn't come home, and she died, and there was no letter for me. There was a note about porch wiring. I got the wiring note, and the man next door got — he got her."

Frankie doesn't do the thing where a person rushes to fix it. She unscrews the thermos, pours a cup of something that steams, and hands it over, and sits down on the cold sawhorse bench with me and the ruin.

"One observation," she says, eventually. "As your counsel. You found out he has the props. You didn't find out why." She holds up a hand before I can load anything. "I'm not defending him. He built a museum of your grandmother forty feet from your bed and said nothing for a month — that part's indefensible, and when this is over I will personally help Marge deny him popcorn. But you're the woman who taught me the thing, back in the spring, about your ex. What did you tell me? People don't get to be found guilty on⁠—"

"On the evidence I was angriest about. I know. I said that. I was very wise in the spring, I'd just been dumped, it was easy." I drink whatever's in the cup. It's hot chocolate with a criminal amount of something in it. "He had a month of days, Frankie. He watched me look for that moon."

"Yeah." She looks at the garage lights burning across the fence. "He did."

She stays until four. She threads bobbins, which she does incorrectly, God bless her, and I fix them without telling her, and we sew my ghost family's world back together in the cold, two women and a thermos, and it is not nothing. It's the opposite of nothing. It's the only architecture that held tonight.

After her taillights go, the needle jams. I clear it with fingers I can't feel, and Beetlejuice makes one low sound from the rail, the testimony sound, and I answer him out loud, because that's who I am, that's who I've always been, a woman alone in a yard at four a.m., talking.

"I know, buddy." Seam ninety of two hundred. "Me too."

Chapter 12