It grinned.
Reaching over the bag of Hot Wheels, she used the screwdriver to scrape the face, feeling a rush of satisfaction as the features devolved under her hand. With her first swipe, she scratched off half of one eye, then part of the mouth, then a portion of the other eye, then another part of the mouth, until the mold no longer looked like a face. But she didn’t stop, and though she was pressing so hard on the screwdriver that her hand hurt, she continued scraping, bits of mold falling onto her hand, white scratches on the wall contrasting sharply with the dull gray of the surrounding cement.
Finally, Claire stepped back. She was sweating from both the exertion and the still, humid air of the basement, but she felt good as she looked at the spot where the face had been. She felt as though she’d accomplished something.
Walking back up the stairs, she found Julian in the kitchen, standing by the sink. He’d been looking through the window at the backyard, but he turned to face her as she closed the basement door. For a moment, both of them stared at each other, neither speaking. Claire saw from the look of devastation on his face how much she had hurt him, and she was about to apologize, but it was he who spoke first.
“I lied,” he admitted. “I do feel it. I have felt it.”
The words, completely unexpected yet gratefully welcome, acted like a ray of sunshine slicing through darkness. She felt as if a great burden had been lifted from her. She wasn’t alone; she wasn’t crazy. He knew what she was talking about. He understood.
But the pain in his face was almost too much to bear, and she was filled with remorse and self-loathing as she ran over and threw her arms around him. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, hugging him tightly. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” he assured her, and there was a noticeable catch in his voice.
She wasn’t sure their apologies were in any way commensurate, but she wasn’t about to hurt him again by bringing up anything to do with Miles. Maybe his unbending reticence and their unspoken agreement never to broach the subject weren’t psychologically healthy, but it worked for them, and the guilt she felt for crossing that line far outweighed any argumentative points she might have scored.
They remained in each other’s arms, not moving, not speaking, until the phone rang several moments later and she broke the embrace to answer it. Megan was calling, and she wanted to know whether she could stay at Zoe’s for the rest of the day. “They invited me to go with them to the water park,” she said. “I’ll be back in time for dinner,” she added quickly. “I promise.”
“Okay,” Claire told her. “Are you going to stop by and get your swimsuit?”
“I already packed it. I have it with me—” Megan abruptly stopped speaking, as if her mother had interrupted her, though Claire hadn’t said a word.
“Did you know about this ahead of time? Were you planning this all along?”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you. But I really want to go. I promise I’ll be careful. Please, Mom? Please?”
Claire couldn’t help smiling. “All right,” she said. “But no secrets next time, okay? You tell us everything that’s going on.”
“I will, Mom. I will. Thanks!”
Claire hung up the phone to face a quizzical Julian. “She wants to go with Zoe’s family to the water park. I said she could.”
He nodded his agreement, and they hugged once more. She gave him a quick kiss. “Everything good?” she asked.
He smiled wearily. “Yeah.”
Robbie’s father dropped off James an hour or so later, while she was weeding the flower beds out front, and as Claire watched her son get out of the car, thank Robbie’s dad for letting him stay over and then walk toward her up the driveway, she realized how big he was getting. He looked more like Julian now than he did her, though that hadn’t always been the case. It made her feel sad.
She stood at his approach. “Let’s go out for lunch today,” she suggested.
“Where?” James asked.
She smiled at him. “Your choice.”
Twelve
Since it was Julian who suggested they should invite the neighbors to their housewarming party, it was his responsibility to ask them. The Allreds and the Harrisons, two older couples from across the street, agreed to come, as did two younger couples from down the block, although the only family with children, the Armados, bowed out due to a scheduling conflict.
As usual, the neighbors to either side of them weren’t home.
Or weren’t answering their doors.
Julian suspected the latter. Cars were parked in both driveways, but drapes were drawn and front doors were shut. He knocked, he rang, he waited, but no one came out. He had no idea why the neighbors might be trying to avoid him, and he even hinted around about it to Cole Hubbard, the single man who lived in the small house on the other side of the Ribieros. Cole said that the Ribieros, at least, were probably scared. “Ever since that homeless guy died, they’ve been a little freaked-out, I think.”
Julian frowned. “What homeless guy?”
“You don’t know?” Cole seemed surprised. “I thought real estate agents had to reveal that kind of stuff.”
Julian was starting to feel uneasy. “What kind of stuff?”
“Deaths, murders, suicides.” Cole sipped from the Starbucks cup he was holding. “He died in your basement. It was all over the newspaper. I’m surprised you didn’t read about it.”
Our basement? Julian thought of Claire. “When was this?”
“It was a few years ago now. Before the previous owners.”
“So the house was empty and this guy just—”
“No,” Cole said. “That’s the weird part. It wasn’t empty. The couple was home. Robert and Shelley Gentry. They’re the ones who were living there then. Nice people. They were in bed, asleep, when the homeless guy broke into their house—I keep calling him ‘the homeless guy’ because I don’t think anyone ever found out who he was. The door was unlocked. … He broke a window. … I can’t remember exactly how he got in. But the Gentrys didn’t wake up, and he just went down into the basement and … died.”
“He killed himself?”
“Not exactly. He just … died. He took off all his clothes, sat down in the corner, and when they found him in the morning, he was dead. There were no marks on the body; he didn’t hang himself; I don’t think they even found any drugs in his system. It was as if he knew he was going to die that night and for some reason wanted to die in your basement. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it. It was kind of a big deal.”
Julian thought maybe he had read something about it in the paper, but there were so many deaths reported these days, so much crime and tabloid news not only nationally but locally, that everything kind of blurred together and he didn’t really pay as close attention as he used to.
He wondered which corner of the basement the man had died in. The one where he’d stacked the boxes of the kids’ old children’s books?
He needed to keep this from Claire. At least for the time being. She was already stressed out and thought the house was haunted. If she found out that someone had died in their basement, she’d want to sell the house immediately.
“Anyway,” Cole continued, “Robert and Shelley moved soon after that, and those other people bought the place. I’m not even sure anyone in the neighborhood ever met them. They really kept to themselves. I don’t even know their names. But I gather they had some kind of run-in with the Ribieros, who were already freaked-out by the homeless guy. Bob and Elise have never talked about it, but … something happened.”