Elyna nodded. He eyed her thoughtfully, then nodded.
He cleared his throat. “There were others after that, just a couple. The ones we talked about while we worked. Like the well-connected lawyer who liked to pick up hookers and beat them to death. Fell down his stairs and died a month or so back. That was you, too?”
She ducked her head. “Vampires don’t have to kill people,” she told him. “Especially once we are older, more in control of ourselves. I try not to. But . . . it doesn’t bother me very much, not when they are”—she looked him in the eye and gave him an ironic smile—“evil.”
“In my business,” Peter said slowly, “you come into the job seeing the world in black and white. Most of us who survive, the good cops, learn to work in shades of gray.” He smiled slowly at her. “So, Ms. Gray. What have you decided about the lighting fixtures in the kitchen?”
The brass lights are nice, but I think the bronze will look better, Jack whispered, his lips brushing the edge of her ear.
“I think I like the bronze,” she told Peter.
Squatters’ Rights
ROCHELLE KRICH
In the beginning she heard them inside the bedroom wall.
The sounds originated above Eve’s head and had kept her awake for countless hours every night since she and Joe had moved into the house three weeks ago.
Scratch, scratch, scratch . . .
Mice, Eve had thought the first night, but she hadn’t found droppings in the bedroom or anywhere else in the house, where speckled beige tarps had formed hills over their furniture and the stacks upon stacks of boxes filled with their belongings.
Joe hadn’t heard a thing.
“It’s all in your head, babe,” he told her, his sympathy thinned the third time she woke him—at two in the morning, so she couldn’t blame him. “The house was just fumigated, right? Even if something was in the walls, it isn’t there now.”
Unless it was a ghost.
The thought was ridiculous, and Eve was pretty sure believing in ghosts didn’t fit with Judaism, although hadn’t King Saul asked a witch to summon the spirit of the prophet Samuel?
Eve wouldn’t have thought about ghosts at all if the broker hadn’t told them the previous owner had killed her husband and herself, in the house.
“By law I have to inform you,” the broker had said, his shrug and rolling of eyes inviting Eve and Joe to share his opinion of said law. He was a tall, wiry man with silver hair and a restless habit of bouncing from foot to foot that made Eve think of a Slinky. “It’s morbid, I’ll give you that, but a lucky break for you guys. This place is selling way below what it’s worth. I’m sure you’ve seen the comps, so you know.”
Bad mazel, both sets of parents had said. Eve and Joe had dismissed their forebodings, swayed by the potential in the three-bedroom, two-bath fixer-upper on Bellaire Avenue in Valley Village, and by the price. They had the down payment, most of it money Eve had inherited from her grandmother, but even with two incomes—Joe was a nursing home administrator, and Eve taught kindergarten at a private Jewish school—it was unlikely that they could afford another house in the foreseeable future, if ever, unless they were willing to leave Los Angeles, which they weren’t. Their jobs were here, their friends, family. Eve’s parents lived in Beverlywood, a thirty-minute drive from Valley Village. Joe’s parents lived in San Francisco, where housing was even more out of reach.
To save rent, Eve and Joe planned to renovate the house after they took occupancy. It had made sense to have the hardwood floors refinished while the house was empty, and they painted the master bedroom themselves the Sunday before they moved in.
That first evening, while Joe and his cousin Marty were returning the U-Haul in the city, Eve stood inside the bedroom. It looked just as she had imagined—beautiful, serene, a haven where she and Joe could retreat during the many months the house would be undergoing work. She would have placed the full-size beds on the wider east wall, but two closet doors made that impossible. So the beds were on the south wall. Eve had chosen the bed near the windows that looked out on the yard even though it was farther from the closets and connecting bathroom.
The bathroom was their first project. The chipped porcelain finish on the tub and sink was ringed with rusty Rorschachs, and a leaking shower pan had caused dry rot in the floor joists and mud sill. Earlier that day Eve had yanked off half a panel of blistered, peeling wallpaper but stopped when she saw ominous Technicolor patches of mold and an accompanying cloud of dust.
Eve made numerous trips hauling armfuls of clothing to the bedroom closets, dresser, and armoire, the furniture’s matte espresso stain rich against the Benjamin Moore Kennebunkport Green, which looked gray in the fading light. She considered moving some of the dry and canned goods into the kitchen, but she didn’t have the energy to line the pantry and cabinet shelves. She took a box of Raisin Bran for Joe and instant oatmeal packets for herself. She gave up looking for the coffeemaker. She’d ask Joe to do it.
Even with the windows open, the house was warm. Eve felt sticky and grimy. Project number two, she decided: air-conditioning. After a quick shower in the guest bathroom (she made a mental note to tell the plumber about the weak water pressure), she put on coral capri pants and a white tank top and unearthed a tablecloth and two place settings, including goblets for the wine chilling in the fridge next to a bottle of Fresca and lunch leftovers from a nearby kosher pizza shop. Humming Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House,” she arranged everything on the small drop-leaf faux butcher block table in the dark ocher breakfast nook, which would look cheery and cozy when it was painted, maybe a buttery yellow.
Joe surprised her with sunflowers.
“You are so, so sweet,” Eve said, standing on tiptoe to kiss his lips and nuzzle his cheeks, a little rough and darkened by two days’ growth of beard and smudges of dirt, but she didn’t care.
“You smell great,” he said, his strong hands on her hips. “You look great, too.” His smile was intimate, inviting. “You showered, huh? Guess I’ll do the same.”
Before Joe, Eve had felt self-conscious about her body, which fluctuated between a size ten and twelve, huge by L.A. standards. Joe made her feel beautiful, sexy. He loved her curves, he told her, and wide hips were great for having babies.
“How was the shower, by the way?” he asked.
She told him about the water pressure. “It’s fine for now.”
While Joe showered, she found a vase, a wedding gift from her best friend Gina, who had posted Eve’s profile on J-Date. Eve had sworn off J-Date and other Jewish online dating sites after thirty-plus dates ranging from painfully boring to disastrous. She had initially declined to answer Joe’s post, but she didn’t want him to think she was rude, and (she hadn’t admitted this to Gina) she was taken by his humor and his photo, even though photos usually lied. She and Joe, as it turned out, had much in common. They were twenty-nine years old, both only children committed to modern Orthodoxy, family, and sushi. They enjoyed hiking, word games, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. From their phone calls she discerned that he was smart and funny and self-deprecating. He had been married briefly at twenty-two—“We were both too young,” he’d told Eve—and was ready for a serious relationship. Two weeks after their first post they met in the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Larchmont. She caught her breath when she saw him coming toward her, six foot three and good-looking with wavy thick dark brown hair and okay, a small paunch, but his smile! His smile made her palms sweat and her stomach muscles curl. Pilates for the heart, she thought.
The sunflowers brightened the ocher walls. Over dinner, salmon fillets and tomato-and-basil angel hair pasta that Joe had picked up from the Fish Grill on Ventura, Joe uncorked the Asti. They toasted Gina and their good fortune in having found each other and the house. They drank a second glass of wine. They joked about the house’s many defects and, after a third glass that made them giddy, about its macabre history. Joe said, “Promise you won’t kill me, babe?” and Eve said, “Not tonight, I have a headache,” and they groaned with laughter until tears streamed from their eyes. When the meal was over and the bottle empty, they were suddenly mellow. They held hands across the table. Joe fingered her wedding band and said, “I can’t imagine life without you,” and Eve was so happy she almost cried.