Page 5 of The Boo Next Door

She's on her porch when I come around the fence line, halfway up a stepladder with a staple gun, running an extension cord along the gutter. One extension cord. Orange. The kind they sell in gas stations for people whose needs are modest.

Plugged into it: a power strip. Plugged into the power strip: another power strip.

My eye starts doing something involuntary.

"That's a daisy chain," I say.

She doesn't turn around. "It's ambition."

"It's a National Fire Protection Association violation."

"You know the fire code by heart. Of course you do." She staples the cord to my blood pressure. "Let me guess. You're also in a barbershop quartet and you coach youth soccer."

"I don't sing."

"But you do coach youth soccer."

I don't say anything, which is answer enough, and she makes a small victorious sound and comes down the ladder, and this close, in daylight, I finally see what the photos flatten out. She's got paint on her hands already. Day two in town. There's a pencil shoved through the dark knot of her hair like a structural element, load-bearing, and her eyes are Bee's eyes, that same brown that catalogs everything and files most of it under evidence.

"Your porch panel is sixty years old," I tell her. "Fuses, not breakers. Whatever you're planning, that panel won't hold it, and I'd rather not cut you out of a house fire in a month. Professionally speaking."

"Professionally speaking."

"I'll take a look at it. Won't take an hour." And because Bee is standing somewhere behind my ribs with her arms crossed, I add, "Honestly, you'd be doing me a favor. I've been meaning to check where her service line⁠—"

"There it is." She points the staple gun at me. Not loaded, probably. "That's the move. Bee warned me about you."

Everything in my chest stops. "What?"

"Ask Grady before you rewire the porch," she quotes, and her mouth twists on the name like it kept a seed in it. "He'll act like it's a favor to him. She left a note. So whatever this is — the aw-shucks, the neighborly, the youth soccer — you can retire it. You're the competition. I've been beaten to death with charm by professionals, and I quit my whole life to come here, so."

She stops. Recalibrates. I watch her decide she said more than she meant to, and I watch her decide to double down instead of retreat, and God help me, it's the exact sequence Bee used to run.

"So I'm going to win the Gourd," she says. "And you're going to watch it happen from inside your fog."

The wind moves. Up the street, one of the Hendersons' inflatable tombstones deflates with a long sigh, like even the decorations are tired of the Hendersons.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay?" She squints. "That's it?"

"That's it."

"You're not going to do a speech? Defend your title? Nothing?"

"Panel's still going to fail," I say, and I walk back around the fence, and I don't smile until there's lumber between us.

Marge's hardware store smells like every good decision I've ever made. Cut pine and machine oil and the popcorn machine by the register that Marge runs year-round on the theory that popcorn moves paint.

I'm at the counter with a spool of low-voltage wire and sixty feet of chain when Dottie Pruitt appears at my elbow. Dottie doesn't arrive places. She's suddenly present, like weather, like a clause in a contract you should have read.

"Grady." She examines my purchases over her glasses. "Chain. For the dragon's articulation, I assume."

"Wing joints."

"Mm." Dottie has a way of saying mm that files paperwork. "The committee had our little meeting Sunday. Behrens wanted to know if we should just engrave your name on the Gourd now and save the man at the trophy shop the rush fee in November."

"Tell Behrens I said that's premature."