Page 9 of The Boo Next Door

"Okay." She straightens up, and just like that we're operational again. "Then don't get disqualified doing crimes. Win it on the build. You're the only person who's ever lived here who does this for an actual living. Make the town cry, take the check, fix the roof." She points a portafilter at me. "And stop giving Mr. July free material. He doesn't need to be funnier. He's already tall."

The hardware store on a Saturday in October is Hollow Creek's true town hall, and Marge Okafor presides over it from behind a register with a popcorn machine going and loyalties for sale to no one.

"Fuses," I say. "The ceramic screw-in kind. All of them. Whatever you have."

"Box of twenty do you?" Marge is already reaching, because of course she stocks them. Half this town's wiring predates the moon landing. "You know these keep blowing because⁠—"

"Because my panel is a sixty-year-old antique. I've been told. By everyone. The panel has a fan club."

"I was going to say because you're running two fog machines on a fifteen-amp circuit, honey. But sure, blame the panel." She rings me up, then leans on the counter with the unhurried menace of a woman who knows everything and bills nothing. "Heard about the skeletons."

"Which part?"

"All the parts. Denise got pictures before you woke up. The G alone." She fans herself with a paint stirrer. "I laughed so hard I had to sit on a riding mower."

"You know he shops here too."

"Everybody shops here. That's the beauty of it." Marge gestures at her kingdom, aisles of rope and rakes and murder-adjacent implements. "I'm Switzerland. Beautiful, neutral, extremely well-armed. He buys chain, I sell him chain. You buy fuses, I sell you fuses. Then I go home and tell my sister everything, because neutrality ends at six p.m."

"What's he buying, Marge."

"Nice try." She drops a candy pumpkin in my bag, on the house. "But I'll say this much, because your grandmother would've wanted you to have it." She lowers her voice to the register-adjacent whisper that carries exactly as far as she intends, which is the whole store. "Whatever he's building this year, he ordered parts in August. August, honey. You're not fighting a man. You're fighting a supply chain."

Wonderful. I have eleven months of savings, a cat, and a wig stand.

"One more thing," Marge calls as I hit the door. "He asked what gauge you were running." A beat, savored like the last popcorn. "Sound familiar? You two are the only people in forty years who ever asked me that question, and the other one raised you."

Back home, I re-stage the fleeing séance guests, and because morale matters in wartime, I name them as I go. The face-down defeated one becomes Gary. The two from the disgraceful G become Mitzi and Roland, and I position them mid-scandal at the far end of the porch where the church crowd won't linger.

"Nobody surrenders," I tell the troops. "We are professionals."

The troops rattle in the wind, which I choose to hear as applause. Beetlejuice, from the porch rail, surveys the whole operation and then very slowly closes his eyes, which is the most honest performance review I've had in years.

Win it on the build. It's good advice. I am full of maple foam and good advice when I get home, ready to be a professional, and I remain a professional right up until sunset, when Grady's projector comes on.

Every night, he tests his projection loop on the big blank side wall of his garage. Ghostly forest, moving shadows, something with wings. Tonight, from my porch, I watch it cycle, and I notice — professionally, the way a locksmith notices a bad lock — that his projector sits on an unsecured tripod eight feet from the fence line, angled by hand.

I do not steal his electricity. I don't touch a single cord.

I just hop the fence at nine, rotate the projector eleven degrees, and go to bed like a woman at peace.

Eleven degrees puts the ghostly forest, in its full cinematic glory, on the front of the Hendersons' garage across the street — directly over the inflatable graveyard, which as of this week has thirteen tombstones and a reaper that Denise's group chat says is visible from the water tower. The Hendersons have been escalating unopposed for years. Let the two great powers meet.

I sleep like a baby.

Or I would, except that at some point after midnight I surface halfway out of a dream, and through the window the projection is still cycling across the street — wings moving over thirteen tombstones — and in the dream-logic margin before I go back under, my brain serves me a memory without asking. Bee at that same window, some October when I was small enough to fit on the radiator cover, watching the Hendersons of her era over-decorate, saying, Never interrupt an enemy who's making a mistake, Lila-bug, and then, we'll interrupt them anyway, it's funnier.

I wake to my doorbell at seven forty and a voice I already recognize saying, from my own porch, perfectly level, "I know it was eleven degrees, because I had to re-level it."

I open the door in yesterday's paint shirt. Grady Ellis stands there holding my orange extension cord, coiled, like a man returning a library book, and behind him on the street I can see Mr. Henderson out photographing his own garage with his phone.

"Morning," I say. "Sleep okay?"

"Henderson thinks the projection was a gift. He's asking where to rent one." A muscle in his jaw does something expensive. "He wants my ghost forest on his garage nightly. He's offering me forty dollars."

"That's below market."

"I know it's below market."