Tearing Up, Tearing Down

He couldn't accuse her of following him around the house, but that's what it felt like. Half the jobs he set out to do, Sylvie just happened to be waiting right there when he arrived with his tools. It always made him want to turn around and go find something else to do, but he couldn't work that way, ducking out of sight whenever she was around. Yet he couldn't bring himself to bark at her either. She always seemed so glad to see him. It must have been lonely here, hiding out in an empty house behind boarded-up windows. Maybe when the novelty wore off she'd leave him alone.

The water was hooked up and it was time to run the faucets to check for obstructions and leaks. Some fixtures he wouldn't even try—the cracked toilet would never have water in it again. But the upstairs bathtub, where he first found her, that one would probably end up being the one they used.

He caught himself thinking: We'll have to use this tub. It came too naturally, to think "we" instead of "I." And there was nothing wrong with it—as long as Sylvie was in the house, she was going to use the same tub and sink and toilet as him. So why not think of them as "we"?

Because that's how I thought of me and my ex-wife and our—my little girl. My child, my house, my tub. I'm alone here, despite the presence of this uninvited guest. And all the more alone because she's here, to make me say "we" and remember how empty that word is, what a nothing word, impermanent. How it evaporates and carries everything away with it.

There she was, doing situps in the hall outside the upstairs bathroom when he came up to run the water. So of course she quit and stood in the door, then at the foot of the tub as he turned on the cold water faucet.

"Oh, good, a bath," she said.

"Not till we get a hot water heater."

"Cold showers, then?"

"Whatever turns you on," he said. The faucet sputtered and knocked. Brown gunk squirted out, splashing all over his pants. She shrieked and backed up.

"It's just water and rust," he said. "You won't melt."

"How do you know I'm not the Wicked Witch of the West?"

"Because she was green."

"So's that stuff. Gross."

It was as gross as she said. Deep brown, a sickening color. Don stepped over and turned on the cold water tap in the bathroom sink. It did its own knock-and-sputter routine, and then choked out even nastier-looking gunk that splattered them both.

"Oh, this is an improvement, all right," she said, looking at her clothes.

"Nobody asked you to stand in here when I'm working."

She said nothing and he didn't look at her. The water wasn't getting any clearer in the sink or the tub. He didn't like the silence. But why should he let it make him uncomfortable? She needed to learn not to hover.

Instead of leaving, though, she broke her own silence. "You sure they didn't hook these pipes up backward?"

"It's just been standing in the pipes. Run it for a while, it'll clear out."

"Looks like the house has dysentery," she said.

"Don't use this toilet," he answered. "Look at the crack. I'm not putting water in it."

"Is there one I'm supposed to use?"

"Downstairs in the north apartment."

"Will the water look like this?"

"Till the pipes clear."

"If they ever do."

"Water heater should be hooked up tomorrow. Let it fill and heat, then we can bathe."

"Sounds indecent."

He looked sharply at her. She was joking, probably, but even so it was repugnant, having a woman so dirty and unkempt acting flirtatious. There was a reason people became homeless. In her case, it could easily be her bad taste.

He left the bathroom.

Sylvie called after him. "When do I turn this water off?"

"When it looks drinkable."

"I will never drink this!"

He was already halfway down the stairs, so he didn't bother answering. He didn't want to establish the precedent of shouting through the house. He could just imagine her screaming, "Don! Oh, Dahahn!" for the whole neighborhood to hear.

He went downstairs and turned on the toilet and sink in the bathroom he intended to use. Those and the outside hose were all he'd need, so there was no point in testing them until he had new fixtures hooked up to the plumbing. The drain in the downstairs bathroom sink was plugged up, so he did a little work opening the trap to drain into a bucket. A real stink. Wouldn't you know it. A mouse had gotten caught in the trap and drowned. But once it was cleared and reattached, the sink drained fine. Which was good, because in cold water with no soap it took three scrubbings before his hands felt clean again. He didn't put the mouse corpse in the garbage can in back—the last thing he needed was to attach that smell to anything that was going to stay around. Instead he flung it off the edge of the gully in the back yard. It flew ten yards out and twenty yards down, pitching lazily end over end as it fell, till it fetched up about halfway down the gully wall.

As he came back into the house, he knew there would be no more delaying it. He had to choose which section of the house to renovate first. Of course, ideally he would do the whole house at once. All the stripping, then all the breaking down of walls he didn't want to keep, then breaking open the rest of the walls for wiring and plumbing, phone lines, intercom, maybe lines for a computer network if he thought the money would hold out for a luxury like that. It was easier and cheaper to do each job for the whole house all at once. But that wouldn't give him a place to live while it was going on; and just as important was the fact that he needed the small payoffs of having finished this room and that room to keep him going.

Not the main floor. Couldn't do the north side upstairs, because that's the side Sylvie's apartment was on. South side upstairs, though, would be fun. Tear out the add-in walls, and it went from being two lousy bedrooms, a living/dining room, and a kitchen, to being two large bedrooms. They wouldn't do at all, of course, since they were too big to be practical and ended up wasting a lot of space. So he would open up the wall between them and put in a bathroom and two wide, deep closets. And in the back bedroom, which didn't have the fancy bay window the front one did, he'd open a ladder to a part of the attic, which he would make into a loft. In a house like this, every room should have individuality. No, more than that—it should have panache.

Armed with his prybar and a tough carpet knife, he went upstairs and began stripping the floor. It was a tough, durable carpet but it had been installed a lot of years ago, and under it the padding was a mass of decomposing filth. Dead insects made another carpet under that.

"How did all those bugs get under there?" Sylvie stood in the doorway.

Don stopped pulling the carpet. "What do you need?" he asked.

"Just curious. I've been walking on those bugs, I just wonder how they got there."

This was not science class, it was sweaty, nasty labor. What made it bearable was the trance of concentration he drifted into while his hands worked on. She had broken that, and for what? And after how many requests that she stay away from him? "I work alone," said Don.

Sylvie shrugged as if to say, Who, me? "So, I'm not trying to help you," she said.

"Exactly my point," said Don.

"All I did was ask how the bugs got there."

"The crawlers crawled, the wrigglers rigged. Now I've told you, let me work."

She looked angry for a moment, but then she backed away out of sight. Not for a moment, though, did Don imagine the struggle was over. She was a shmoozer. He was going to have to be rude to her again and again, just to get some peace, and he hated being rude for any reason. But this woman just couldn't keep a promise or follow instructions. What did he expect? If people like her had skills like that, they most likely wouldn't be homeless.

He got the carpet rolled up and tried to hoist it up onto his shoulder. He could have done a clean-and-jerk with more weight than this, but there was no good handhold on the thick carpet roll, so he ended up having to drag it. This got tricky at the door, where he had to bend it to get it out into the hall and down the stairs. For a moment he thought of calling Sylvie to help, but then realized that if he ever asked her for something, that would open the floodgate. She would be sure that he needed her and she would hover until the house was finished.

So he went back and forth from end to middle to end of the carpet, bending, pulling, bending more, pulling more, until it was finally out in the hall and headed down the stairs. From there it was a simple matter to drag it out the front door, off the porch, and out to the junkpile on the curb.

Coming back in, he glanced over at the carriagehouse. There on the porch sat Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea, eating delicate little triangles of cucumber sandwich with the crusts cut off. He imagined a huge bowl of bread crusts and cucumber peelings being carried upstairs to Gladys, who for all he knew was an omnivorous crocodile or a large fat sow, eating whatever slops came her way. They waved cheerily at him. He waved back, not cheerily.

Dismantling kitchen cabinets was always a pain. It was easiest, of course, to remove each piece as a unit, but not always possible. Though the kitchen in the south upstairs apartment was a dark, narrow, makeshift affair, whoever installed the cabinets was apparently trying to make them tornado-proof. Don crawled into the cabinets every which way, removing every screw and nail that connected the cabinets to the back wall and to each other, but still they wouldn't come out. Finally he had to resort to the wrecking bar, and even then the cabinets didn't come away clean. Someone had replaced the lath-and-plaster walls with two-by-four studs and glued the cabinets directly to them, in addition to nailing and screwing them. Fortunately, the studs weren't structural, so it didn't matter if his wrecking bar chewed them to bits. By the time he had the last cabinet detached from the wall, the upstairs kitchen looked like a tornado had struck after all. Studs were broken, gouged, or sticking out like snaggle teeth. Didn't matter. He'd be taking them all out. He would entirely take down the new wall that separated the kitchen from the parlor, rejoining them into one room; the studs between the original timbers he would replace with new ones on 12-inch centers. Don's standard of sturdiness was even higher than that of the guy who installed the cabinets.

He'd never dismantled an upper-story kitchen before, and it was backbreaking work to get the cabinets down the stairs without dinging anything. He could have used another pair of hands and a strong back to help, but dammit, he worked alone.

Standing at the junkpile, which now looked like a madman's kitchen, Don wanted to go back inside and lie down and sleep. Wasn't this a whole days work? Hadn't he done enough?

But it was only three in the afternoon, and he knew that the temptation to knock off early and take a nap or go for a walk would be with him more and more if he ever gave in to it. There was always another job to do. He had to put in at least eight hours no matter how tired he got. That was the rule. And most days he tried for ten. That's how he could get the house finished even though he worked alone.

That was the main thing an assistant was good for anyway. In Don's experience you usually ended up having to redo the assistants work or supervise so closely you might as well have done it yourself. But having someone there, watching, was an incentive to keep plugging away. Didn't want to look like a slacker in front of somebody else. Don couldn't stand the thought that he might only be working for show, to impress someone or keep their good opinion. He worked for the job's sake, or for his own self-respect. And so he did not, could not lay off early, take a day off, or even call in sick. Who would he call? He had the sternest boss in town—breaks he would routinely give to an employee he never allowed himself.

Except there by the fence stood Miz Evelyn, holding up that metal pitcher with water beading on the outside so fast it looked like it was raining, all those drops forming, running down the sides, dripping off the bottom. Whatever was in that pitcher must be really cold. And even though it wasn't all that hot of a day, no more than eighty-five degrees, he wanted that pitcher right then with all his heart and soul. Enough to accept it from a crazy woman.

"Yoo-hoo!" she was calling. "Mr. Lark!"

He sauntered over to the fence, trying not to look too eager. She held out a tall metal glass, which was sweating almost as much as the pitcher.

"I've never seen a body work so hard," she said.

"Helps me sleep at night." He drained the glass almost in one draught. It was lemonade, just a little tart, not too tart: just a little sweet, not too sweet. It was a good thing neither of these ladies was his grandma. He'd have moved in with her long ago.

"You can take the whole pitcher if you want."

He wanted. "Thanks," he said, and now, drinking from the rim of the pitcher, he tanked it down so fast it gave him a headache. But the headache wouldn't last, he knew, while the lemonade rushed through his system so fast it caused sweat to bead up on his brow almost as fast as water had beaded up on the pitcher. The pitcher empty, Don wiped his mouth on the upper part of his sleeve, which was marginally cleaner than the forearms.

"Oh my," said Miz Evelyn.

"Sorry. I've got a working man's manners."

"Not to mention a working man's appetites."

He patted his stomach, which now sloshed with liquid. "Nice of you to share that with me."

"We're just glad that you came to see it our way."

Uh-oh. "But I didn't," said Don.

She gestured toward the junkpile. "It looks like you're tearing it all apart in there."

"Just clearing out the ugly stuff." She looked a little disappointed. "I'm going to knock down the added-in walls, too. But the structure of the house—I'm not touching that. In fact I'm restoring it."

"Oh."

"So I guess I got the lemonade under false pretenses."

"You got the lemonade because you needed it and we're Christians."

"Well thanks. I did need it." One good turn deserves another, that's how Don was raised. So: "As long as I'm here, if you ladies need any work done on your place, let me know."

"The only thing we need is for that house to come down." She pointed a bony old finger at the Bellamy mansion.

"Then you should've bought it and hired a demolition crew."

He drained the last bit from the pitcher and handed it back to her.

"Thank you kindly, ma'am," he said. He touched the brim of an imaginary hat as he had seen his father do, as salute or farewell, whichever. Then he turned and headed back for the house.

"Don't you think we would've done it if we could?" she called after him.

Why didn't they just put up signs on houses like this? BEWARE OF STRANGE OLD LADIES AND DISAPPEARING SCREWHOLES. WATCH OUT FOR THE DEADLY LOOMING HOMELESS WOMAN. And—mustn't forget—NO KISSING IN NONFUNCTIONAL BATHROOMS.

Once inside, he had to decide what to do next. Strip off the remaining lath and plaster? Take down the stud wall dividing the upstairs kitchen from the rest of the room? He still didn't feel much like heavy work, though the lemonade had refreshed him.

Maybe it refreshed him too much. He headed for the bathroom at the back of the house.

He was still in there when he heard a loud, insistent knocking on the front door. Hang on a minute, for pete's sake. Stubbornly he rinsed his hands instead of running for the door. Had to remember to buy soap, pick up a couple of towels. He came down the hall drying his hands on his pants when he heard the door opening and Sylvie greeting whoever was there. By the time he got to the parlor where all his tools were, Cindy's next-desk neighbor at the realty was peering around to look for him.

"Hi, Mr. Lark," the guy said. What was his name? As if he heard the question, the man said, "Ryan Bagatti, remember?"

"Who could forget?" said Don. He walked past Bagatti to the entryway, where Sylvie was standing on the third and fourth step—poised to flee. "Thanks for letting a total stranger into my house," he said.

"Nice for you," said Bagatti. "Having your housekeeper living here while you pile up junk on the lawn."

"I'm not the housekeeper," said Sylvie.

"She's the nothing," said Don. "She came with the house. But she's got things to do."

"Cindy know about her?" asked Bagatti, all wide-eyed innocence.

"Bet she will in about fifteen minutes," said Don.

"Aw, man, you're too judgmental," said Bagatti. "I came here because I'm Cindy's friend, you know."

"In other words, she doesn't know you're here?"

"I got a call at the office, she was out. She's been out sick, you know. Ever since you closed on this house."

"Sorry to hear that. Hope she gets better."

"Yeah, send a card or something."

"You got a call," said Don. Whatever this was about, he knew it would be nasty, and he wanted Bagatti just to get on with it.

"From the guy who used to own this place. Actually, from his lawyer. Seems he was suspicious about the way Cindy was handling the sale and how low the price was that she was insisting on. He wanted eighty, you know."

"House isn't worth eighty."

"Well, I guess that's for the courts to decide, don't you think?" Bagatti shook his head. "I mean, that's how the guy's lawyer puts it. He put a detective on her. Got pictures of you going into her house. Coming out of her house. Kissing in the car. Figures it'll prove collusion."

"You seen the pictures, Bagatti?" asked Don.

"Why would I have seen them?" said the realtor.

Don picked him up by the shoulders and jammed him against the wall. His head made a kind of bounce against the plaster, and he lost his silly smirk. "I guess I didn't ask sincere enough," said Don. "You take those pictures, Bagatti?"

"Like I said, a private detective. This is assault, you know."

"Got pictures?" said Don.

"All the guy did was call me."

"So why you telling me and not Cindy?"

"He's gonna name both of you in the suit. But he said, like, maybe it could all go away."

"He said? Or you say?"

"What do you think? What are you talking about?"

"Blackmail," said Don. "Extortion."

"Not me," said Bagatti. "But maybe him."

"Maybe?"

"He said twenty thousand. You still get the house for ten thousand less than he asked for. It's a bargain, right?"

"But I bet he doesn't want to go back and adjust the price on the records, right?"

"Why screw up everybody's taxes?" asked Bagatti. "You'll still get a profit on the house."

"And you came to me?"

"Cindy's got no money," said Bagatti.

"How do you know that? She wouldn't tell you where to point your dick when you pee."

"Like I said, the guy has a private investigator. Man, you're hurting my shoulders."

Don let him slide down the wall to stand on his feet. But when Bagatti made as if to go for the door, Don bounced him back against the wall again. And, again, his head did that little rebound from the plaster. "Careful," said Don. "This is a bearing wall, I don't want to have to replace it just because you put a dent in it with your head."

"Look, Mr. Lark, I'm just a messenger."

"Tell me the lawyer's name."

"He didn't say. He said he'd contact you."

"I don't want any lawyer dust in this house. I'll go to his office and we'll work this out, or he can go ahead and take us to court, because nothing illegal happened."

"I'll tell him."

"No, I'll tell him. Give me his number."

"He said he'd call me back. Didn't give me a—"

This time his head didn't bounce as much. "Don't hold your neck stiff when I do that," said Don. "It'll just make it hurt worse later. Stay loose."

"You're hurting me, man."

"His number."

"Let go of me and I'll write it down."

Don stepped between Bagatti and the door and watched while he pulled out a business card and with trembling hands struggled to write the phone number.

"Memorized it, huh?" said Don. "From calling it so much?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you're the office sneak. You're the one tipped him off that maybe Cindy and I liked each other. And he must have got you to hire the detective. Fast work, getting those pictures only a couple of hours later."

"So what? The ice queen starts getting lovey with a client, I get suspicious, and it turned out I was right, wasn't I? Getting a thirty-thousand-dollar discount on the house. So don't get all righteous with me, calling me a sneak when you're a thief."

Right then. That was when Don could have crossed the line. All these years of self-control. All those months when he wanted to go kidnap his daughter and hide her in Bulgaria or Mongolia and he didn't do it. All those months, all those years afterward when he wanted to find his ex-wife's lawyer and smash the sanctimonious snake's head into splinters against a lightpost, and didn't do it. All the violence that had gone unexpressed, he wanted so badly to let go... and didn't.

Bagatti must have guessed at the decision he was making, because he cowered, watching Don's eyes. And when Don finally stepped back against the outside wall, letting Bagatti pass, the realtor bolted like a squirrel, out the door, down the porch steps.

Don held the card with the lawyer's number. Another lawyer. Another attempt to destroy him. When you kill, Don, kill the right guy. Life in prison for killing a realtor? Come on. One dead lawyer is worth ten dead realtors any day.

He locked the door, got in the truck, and drove. At first he thought of driving to Cindy's. But what would that accomplish? Either she knew about the threat from the previous owner, or she didn't. Either she would be embarrassed about their near-tryst or she wouldn't. No possible meeting would work out happily for either of them.

So he drove. Up to some of the new housing developments around some of the lakes north and west of the city. Houses for doctors and lawyers, executives and car dealers. Big houses, on huge wooded lots, designed to have great views and to give them, too. From the road over there where the common people drive, this house would look like a slavery-era plantation house, and that one like a Federal mansion, and this other one like a Hollywood extravaganza, and that last one like an escapee from the ugliest part of the 1950s. Taste didn't come with money. Nor restraint. Nor even common decency. I used to build their houses, thought Don. I used to try so hard to please them. Excellence that they didn't understand and didn't want to pay for. I built their house as meticulously as I would hope they did surgery, or handled legal cases, or whatever. Was I the only one who cared that much? The only one who wanted to do good work even where it wasn't on display?

He came out onto Lake Brandt Road, and then took the left fork onto Lawndale. He stopped at Sam's and got out and used the payphone to call the lawyer's number. He recognized the name of the firm when the receptionist said it. They didn't have the best reputation in town, but extortion was a new specialty for them.

"He's with a client," said the receptionist.

"Get out of your chair," said Don, "and go tell him that either he talks to me on the phone or he talks to me in person ten minutes from now."

"We do not respond to threats, sir."

"It says a lot about your law firm that you have a policy about that," said Don. "Don't waste my time, I'm calling from a payphone."

It only took a moment for the lawyer to get on the phone. "Most people make appointments," said the lawyer.

"What you and your client are doing is extortion," said Don.

"No it's not," said the lawyer. "It's fair warning."

"But if I give you twenty thousand, the whole problem goes away."

"It saves everybody a lot of unnecessary legal fees and court costs," said the lawyer. "It's called settling out of court."

"Then in exchange I get a quit-claim that specifies the amount I paid you."

"No you don't."

"Then go to court, and I'll testify that only your unwillingness to have a legal document with the amount of money on it stood between us and settlement."

"That's a privileged matter."

"There's no privilege because you're not my lawyer," said Don. "I'll be at your office at eight-thirty in the morning. The check will be made out to your client."

"It will be cash."

"No it won't. Again, I'm happy to testify in court that your client wanted to leave no paper trail."

"Cash or no deal."

"I'll be there at eight-thirty with the cashier's check. You be there with the quit-claim specifying the amount of money and making no assertions about any kind of relationship between me and Ms. Claybourne. Or you can sue your brains out."

"Apparently you don't know what a court action like that will involve, Mr. Lark, or you wouldn't talk so blithely about getting into one."

"I spent a quarter of a million dollars on assholes like you, trying to get my daughter back. And other assholes who were even assholier than thou managed to keep me from getting her back until my ex-wife got them both killed. What exactly do you think I'm afraid of now?"

"You're afraid of Cindy Claybourne losing her job."

"Not really," said Don.

"So chivalry is dead?"

"No, I'm just not afraid of her losing her job. You and your client picked the wrong targets here. Ms. Claybourne and I have both lost about all we have to lose. You don't have it in your power to do more than inconvenience us."

"So why are you agreeing to the twenty thousand?"

"Because if I don't get this whole thing to go away right now, I'll probably end up losing control and killing somebody."

"Now who's the extortionist?"

"Yeah, that's it, I'm trying to force you to accept the twenty thousand dollars you demanded from me. Eight-thirty in the morning. Check made out to your client. Quit-claim. No mention of Ms. Claybourne or of any improprieties."

"I won't accept anything but cash."

"Fine. I'll have a dollar in cash, too. The check or the buck. Your choice. See you in the morning." He hung up. He was shaking as bad as Ryan Bagatti had been. It did no good to talk tough with a lawyer, he knew that. They just smirk at you and think of new ways to make your life a living hell. But Don's life was already a living hell. Lawyers had lost their last hold over him.

He went to the bank where his renovation money was and withdrew the twenty thousand in the form of a cashier's check. On the bottom of it he wrote, "For quit-claim on Bellamy house and all related matters." Then he put the check, folded, into his shirt pocket and returned to the house.

The front door was locked, just as he had left it. Of course. Sylvie didn't have a key.

Sylvie didn't have a key, but she had let the Helping Hands guys in.

No. He must have forgotten to lock the house up. That was the morning of the closing, after all. He left the door unlocked.

Okay, so maybe he did lock it. She picked it, that's all. It's not like he'd paid Lowe's for some fancy unpickable lock or anything. She was a burglar, probably, that's how she paid money to support the drug habit she doesn't have.

He thought of the missing screwholes in the door. This house was going to get to him pretty soon.

He took the check out of his pocket, tucked it under the screwdriver he'd used on the kitchen cabinets, and then, wrecking bar in hand, went upstairs and tore off lath and plaster until he was covered in white dust and sweat.

It had been a hot day. The water wouldn't be all that cold. He went down the hall to the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, shook off as much dust as he could over the tub, then got into the shower and rinsed himself off. The water was running clear now, but that just increased its resemblance to a mountain stream. He took it as long as he could, then turned it off and stood there shivering and shaking off the water until he was as dry as he was likely to get. Only then did he remember that he wasn't alone in the house. He hadn't seen Sylvie since he got back from his phone call and from the bank, so he'd forgotten about her. But he couldn't very well parade naked through the house. But he also couldn't put back on these clothes covered in plaster dust. So he compromised. He put back on his briefs and carried the rest of his clothes downstairs.

Of course she was standing in the entryway to watch him come downstairs. "Water's pretty cold, isn't it?" she said.

Wordlessly he passed by her. The fury of his confrontations with Bagatti and the lawyer swept over him, and he wanted to shake her and scream at her to give him some privacy. Instead he walked to his suitcase and got out what was now his cleanest set of clothes. He had to do a laundry, there was no doubt about it.

"What was that guy here for?" said Sylvie. "He sure took off out of here. But then, so did you right afterward."

He didn't owe her any explanation. Especially when he was doing his best not to erupt in fury. So he turned his back to her and hooked his thumbs under the elastic of his briefs and said, "I'm changing my clothes. I prefer to do it alone, but I can't seem to do anything alone in this house." Then he pulled off his briefs and turned around. She was gone. Finally.

He got dressed in clothes that were pretty rank, even for him. It was nearly seven, and even though it was still daylight savings time, it would be dark soon. He took everything but his dirty clothes out of his suitcase and left the house. This time he didn't bother to lock the door behind him. That way he wouldn't have to wonder how she got it open, if he found she had let yet another person into the house in his absence.

When one batch of clothes was washed and dry, he picked a pair of underwear, some socks, and a pair of pants and a shirt, went into the restroom at the laundromat, and changed into them. Then he came back out and put the dirty clothes he'd been wearing into a washing machine together.

A tired-looking middle-aged woman in a grocery checker's outfit was the only other person in the laundry, and apparently it irked her to see a man put underwear and socks in with blue jeans and a red shirt. "Didn't anybody ever tell you to separate whites and coloreds?" she demanded.

"They did, but America is past that now," he said. When she finally realized he had deliberately misunderstood her, she huffed a little and left him alone. If only a little snottiness would work as well on Sylvie.

When everything was clean and dry, it was nearly ten. He stopped at Pie Works and got a pizza and took it back to the Bellamy house. It was late for him, the house was dark, and he wasn't even sure he was hungry, just knew he had to eat in order to keep working again tomorrow. He came in, turned on the worklight in the parlor, and went to set down the pizza on his workbench when he saw the check. He had left it folded, tucked under the screwdriver. Now it was open, tucked under nothing. Sylvie just couldn't stand not prying, it seemed. And she didn't even have the decency to hide the fact that she'd done it by refolding the check and putting the screwdriver back on top of it.

Twenty thousand dollars. Now he'd have to redo his budget. But he could juggle the figures till he was blue, there wouldn't be enough money. He'd have to borrow against the house after all. Not till near the end, though. To buy the countertops and chair rails, the carpet and window treatments. Twenty thousand dollars. That was the most expensive love affair he ever heard of that didn't actually include any sex.

Why am I doing it?

Not for Cindy. Nothing chivalrous about this. I'm just buying my way out of death row. I really am ready to kill somebody. I'm paying them to get out of my life so I don't have to kill anybody.

He sat on his cot eating the pizza as mechanically as if he were driving nails. He heard the telltale footsteps on the stairs. She was making another foray into his territory. She seemed determined not to learn.

But instead of barking at her he just closed the pizza box and slid it across the floor. It stopped right in the doorway between the parlor and the entry. He saw her appear behind it, looking at him gravely.

"Nothing special, just pepperoni and sausage," he said. "I've had all I want."

"Thanks," she said.

"Yeah yeah."

"Why can't I say thanks and you just say you're welcome like a normal person?"

"Why can't I just..." He had meant to say, Why can't I just say leave me alone and have you go away like a normal person.

"Why can't you just what?"

"Finish the pizza, it's still warm."

"No thanks," she said. "I'm not hungry."

"Then don't eat it," he said.

"I just came down to say I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"For always wanting to watch what you're doing. I can't help it, nothing's happened in this house for so long."

"I ought to sell tickets."

"And the work you do, it's kind of dangerous, isn't it? Like you're tearing up the house."

"It's safe enough." Especially if you stay out of the room while I'm working.

"No, I mean, dangerous to the house. It feels like it's being knackered, you know? Cut up and boiled down for glue and fertilizer."

"I know what knackering is," said Don.

"You're not hurting it?"

"The lath and plaster is nothing. It has to come off so I can bring the house up to code. I'll put new studs in between the timbers to take nails for, like, hanging pictures or whatever. And for outlet and switch boxes and TV cable outlets. Then I'll put on wallboard and it'll be good as new. Better."

"I don't know how it could be better than new," she said. "It was so beautiful then."

"You weren't there," said Don.

"But can't you just feel it, here in the house? How he loved her?"

"Who?"

"Dr. Bellamy. He built this for his bride. I looked it up in the library, back when I was a student here. That's what I majored in, you know. Library science. I was going to take a job in Providence, Rhode Island. I was about to get my master's degree."

"And?"

"Oh, I found all kinds of wonderful things about the Bellamys. They were so much in love, and so much a part of life in Greensboro. Soirees, parties, dances. Not a month went by without some mention of him or his wife or their house in the newspaper."

"Any pictures?" asked Don.

"Some lovely ones. When they were young. And later, too, when they were getting into late middle age. Not a one when they were old. When they died they ran youthful pictures of them. I think that's the way everyone thought of them their whole lives. Forever young."

"I meant, any pictures of the house. To help in my renovation."

"No," she said. "Except the outside, but I don't think that's changed all that much."

"I suppose not. No obvious add-ons, anyway."

"Sorry I couldn't help."

"No, it's fine. I'm not restoring the place anyway, I just thought if there was some special touch or something—doesn't matter."

"There are all kinds of wonderful things in this house," she said. "But the house keeps its secrets." Then her face darkened. "I'm sorry I've been bothering you. I know it drives you crazy, but I just can't seem to stop myself. My old roommate Lissy used to do that to me. Sneak up behind me while I was studying or something. And all of a sudden I'd sense she was there and nearly jump out of my skin."

"Well, you've never done that to me."

"Of course not, but you know, looking over your shoulder—that drives you crazy."

He waved it off as if it were nothing. Then cursed himself silently for being a hammered man. Grow up Southern, and you just can't help but do the polite thing even when you've already decided not to do it.

"Drives everybody crazy," she said. "Lissy was just... difficult."

She had been going to say another word. Something nastier.

"So why did you room with her?" said Don.

"Younger girl, took her under my wing," said Sylvie. "She was a senior, and I don't think she would have graduated."

"Would have?" asked Don.

"She left," said Sylvie. "She was never that serious about school."

"But you didn't finish either?"

Sylvie shook her head.

"So you were close after all? I mean, why else would her leaving cause you not to finish your program and go take that job?"

Sylvie shook her head. "My life story is too boring for anyone to waste a minute on it." She smiled wanly. "I hated her at the time, but you don't know how often I've wished I could just see her again. Now that she's not annoying me, you see. I miss her a little. She was so exuberant. Headstrong. She found this place. The owner was going to close it down, but she was able to talk him into letting us stay here till we both graduated at the end of the next year."

"What did your family think when you dropped out?" asked Don.

"They did what they always do. They stayed dead."

It sounded like a joke, and then it didn't. "Do you mean that?" he asked. "They're dead?"

"I'm an orphan. Put myself through school. I had a scholarship, but housing and books and food and all that, I earned it all. And grad school, I worked for every dime. And I wasn't in debt, either. I paid my way."

Well, not anymore, Don thought churlishly.

"Dr. Bellamy and his wife lived here until they died in the flu epidemic in 1918. But they were so old by then it wasn't sad, really, it was kind of sweet that they went together, so neither one had to stay behind and grieve."

Don had nothing to say to that. How often had he wished he could have died in the same car that killed his baby?

"But how awful of me," said Sylvie. "I was forgetting. Your wife and daughter."

"What do you know about them?" he snapped at once. Then relented: "I'm sorry. I just don't talk about them usually."

"No, I just... your engineer friend told that realtor lady the first day you came here. How your ex-wife got custody of your daughter and then they died in a car accident."

"What the newspaper didn't tell you was that my wife was so drunk and drugged up she didn't even fasten the car seat to the car."

"Was it in the papers?" asked Sylvie. "I don't get a paper."

Don could hardly imagine how isolated her life in this house had been.

"How many years have you been living like this?" he asked.

"I don't know. A long time."

"What happened to you? I mean, you were in grad school, you were going somewhere. You had a job lined up."

"They were expanding the children's section of the city library, starting some new programs with grade school kids. That was my thesis project, kind of. The effects of competitive versus cooperative reading programs for children in community libraries."

"So why didn't you finish your degree and take the job?"

"For a man who lives and works alone, you sure have a lot of questions."

"Look, I didn't start this conversation," said Don.

She glared at him, then turned and stalked upstairs. Don looked at the pizza box on the floor. Keep up your strength, even if you're surrounded by hypersensitive crazy people. He got up and brought it back to the cot and ate another bite. It was cold now and tasted nasty.

Why should he feel bad because he offended Sylvie Delaney? She was the one who kept intruding on him.

Yeah, right, it's always other people's fault, isn't that right, Don.

In frustration he took the biggest surviving piece of pizza and flung it against the wall. He had expected it to stick, at least for a minute. But it didn't even leave a stain, just bounced off and fell down among his tools.

Got to stop throwing things against the wall.

He went over and found the piece of pizza, put it back in the box, and carried the whole thing outside to the garbage can. It was late. He had to get up and pay off an extortionist in the morning.

11

Hot Water

In the event it turned out to be no big deal. The lawyer was in a suit, a youngish guy who looked like his life was full of disappointment. As if his smile had once been eager, but now it was wry, and soon it would be cynical. He wasn't going to live like the dudes in L.A. Law. He was just going to meet working-class guys in parking lots and take their hard-earned money from them as a payoff to ensure they didn't get sued by some faceless jerk in Florida. Not much of a career, really.

The lawyer had the quit-claim. It said the right things. No tricks as far as Don could see. The lawyer didn't even mention cash. Extortionists generally don't want trouble. Nobody knows better than a lawyer how much pain a lawsuit can be. Twenty thousand without a court struggle is better than a hundred thousand with. Such was Don's upbringing that when he handed over the cashier's check, having satisfied himself that the quit-claim was legitimate, he actually said, "Thanks very much," before he could stop himself.

Yeah, that's why my mama taught me to say yes sir and no ma'am and please and thank you. So I could show grateful courtesy to a lawyer who's helping somebody take away my independence.

Back in his truck Don found that for some reason there was a lump in his throat and his eyes were filling with tears. He had to pull into the parking lot at Eastern Costume and sit there till he could see straight.

It made no sense for him to cry now. What was this, just twenty thousand dollars? He'd cry over that? He'd lost a hell of a lot more than that. He'd cried when his daughter died, cried off and on for days, cried till he could only just sit there with bloodshot eyes wishing he could cry but there was nothing more. His diaphragm ached from sobbing. He couldn't go out in the sunlight, his eyes were so raw. He honestly thought, when that time was over, that he'd never cry again, that there'd never be cause again for tears, compared to that. And now here he was, crying over twenty thousand dollars.

No. He was crying for his freedom. He had thought this was it, he was over the top. That house was his return to life. No debt. When it was done, when it was sold, he'd have enough, free and clear, to start a business, to start a real life. And now, what had he lost? Not everything. So he'd take out a twenty-thousand-dollar mortgage. That was nothing compared to the value of the house when he was done with it. Pay some interest, but he wouldn't get the mortgage till it was almost ready to sell, so he could handle that, too. He'd come out of it OK.

Why did it hurt? Because he had been beaten. And how had he been beaten? Because he let himself go. He let himself maybe start to almost love a woman. She didn't mean him any harm, and she didn't even cause it, really. But it was because he was drawn to her and she to him that he was beaten today. Even though his romantic feelings toward her were gone he still felt protective toward her, and they had used that against him. The way this world worked, the decent people had to live by the rules of honor, while the sons-of-bitches could run around biting them on the butt every chance they got. And yet when he thought of becoming like them, becoming a real son-of-a-bitch himself, it just made him sick inside. It came down to this: If his daughter was still alive somehow, in heaven if there was one, and if she knew what he was doing, or if he was maybe going to see her again someday, he wanted her to be proud of him. A woman needed him to protect her. A decent woman being treated badly because she dared to reach for love. Then she needed money and he had some, and so he shared. If his daughter lived with Jesus like they said, then maybe she knew he did that and she was proud of him.

So he did it for his little girl. And now that he knew that, or at least could talk himself into almost believing it, it was OK again. He didn't feel like crying anymore.

When he got home the Carville Plumbing and Heating van was parked in front. This time, though, Sylvie hadn't let him in. Young Jim Carville—young only compared to his seventy-year-old father—was sitting in the front of his van, smoking. When he saw Don, he put the cigarette out and sauntered over to the pickup. "Not many guys I'd wait for," said Carville.

"Sorry I kept you waiting," said Don. "You couldn't possibly be early, could you?"

"Yeah, job fell through."

"Well, mine didn't, and if you got the time I'd like you to inspect the pipes and tell me what I need to replace."

"Plenty of time," said Carville. "You want to give me a hand bringing in the new water heater?"

Don went up and unlocked the deadbolt, then went back to help him get the water heater out of the van. It wasn't really all that heavy. Carville could've done it alone, but why not help? On the way in, Carville said, "That girl you're letting stay with you, you sure have got her scared to do wrong."

"Oh?"

"I told her who I was, but she wasn't letting me in without your say-so. Next time you ought to tell her when you got a contractor coming."

"I knew I'd be back two hours before you were scheduled."

"When you're dealing with Superman, you better plan on him showing up early."

When they had wrestled the thing down the cellar steps, Carville checked out the old installation and pronounced that this would be a breeze and no, he didn't need any help till it was time to carry the old lime-silted water heater out of the building. "And for that you might need three more guys, a winch, and a thousand-pound chain."

"It's that old?"

"And none of the water ever softened. I'd be surprised if this old heater can hold more than a cup of water at a time. The rest of it is one big stalagmite."

Don went back upstairs and thought of doing some sweaty job and then realized that when this one was done, there'd be hot water for a shower. So maybe he should go now, before he got himself all filthy, and buy a few little things like soap and towels and, since he had company in the house and the working shower was upstairs, a bathrobe.

Friendly Center had most of what he needed, between Harris Teeter and Belk. Then he trucked up to Fleet-Plummer to buy a couple of soap-dishes and a shower caddy and to get an extra key made. When he got home, he stocked both bathrooms with soap and laid out the towels, a set of them for her, a set for him. He put up a new shower curtain, laid down a bath mat. Downright domestic. Then he went in search of Sylvie to give her the key.

She wasn't on the ground floor or the second floor, and she wasn't in the cellar. But when he got into the attic he didn't see her there, either. Not that the light was all that good, coming in slantwise through the filthy porthole windows in the gables. "Sylvie?" he said. "You here?"

No answer. Called again, no answer. Had she left? Just when she'd finally got it through her head not to let people in, now she slips out of the house when he's downstairs or out shopping? It shouldn't have bothered him, but doggone it, he'd just gone and bought some towels and a bathrobe he didn't need if she wasn't living there. People ought to be consistent, at least, even if they were consistently annoying.

He was about to head back down the steps when he heard her voice from the darkest of the four wings of the attic, the one with no window at all. He hadn't looked real close back there because he didn't think she'd be there in the dark. She picked her way through the scattered junk—even Helping Hands didn't want this stuff—so quickly and deftly that it was like she could see in the dark. But come to think of it, she'd had plenty of time to memorize where everything was.

"You were looking for me?" she asked. He couldn't blame her for sounding incredulous.

"I wanted to tell you the water heater's being installed and after the water has a chance to heat up, you can get a real shower."

"I bet I need one."

"It'll feel good whether you need it or not." As if there was a chance she didn't have years of sweat and grime caked on her. "Got soap there, if you don't mind sharing a bar of it with me."

"No problem," she said.

"And you can take your pick of towels, I'll just use the other set."

"You got me a towel?"

"Can't very well hang you out the window to dry, can I?"

"All I meant was. Thanks." Again, that tone of surprise.

"Also," he said, pulling out the extra housekey "It isn't safe for you to be in here with the deadbolt fastened and no key. Plus if you went out, you shouldn't have to knock or wait for me to get home."

She looked at it without taking it. "It's not my house," she said. "It's yours."

"I got title to it," said Don. "But I could've lost that just now, if some lawyer really wanted to go to town with me. So the way I see it, we're both squatters here, really. House still belongs to that Dr. Bellamy guy."

"Oh, he's forgotten all about it by now," she said.

"I expect so," said Don. "Him being dead and all."

"Funny how he made such a strong house out of love for his wife, but that's the thing, the house didn't really have a hold on him at all, ever, because it was her that he loved. I think that's romantic."

"Are you taking the key or not?"

"I don't know. I don't know if it's right for me to have it."

"I say it is." And as he said it, he found that he pretty much believed it. "Now that you're following the rules. Not letting people in."

"Would you mind setting the key by the door to my room?"

He looked at her for a minute. What was this game? Didn't she recognize victory when she had it? Did she have to rub it in by making him deliver the key?

"Really," she said. "I don't know if I could even hold the key. I'm kind of shaking right now. I guess what I'm saying is, please take the key and leave it there for me because I don't want to cry in front of you, I'm shy about that."

"Didn't mean to make you cry."

She shook her head and turned her back. He went down the attic stairs and laid the key in front of her door and then headed on to the cellar to see how Carville was doing.

Only when he got down the stairs to the entry hall, he could see through the glass in the door that somebody was standing on the porch, pacing nervously. In the attic he wouldn't have heard any knocking. He opened the door. It was Cindy.

"Hi," she said.

"Sure," he said. "Come in." He had a sinking feeling that she had heard what he did for her and she was there to thank him and he didn't want that scene. But he'd rather have that one than the scene where she tries to pick up the romance where it was when it got sidetracked back at her house.

"You can relax," she said, coming inside. "I know it's over between us."

"I suppose maybe so," he said.

"You have no idea how I've replayed that day in my mind, wishing I could..."

"No point in that, Cindy," he said.

"And now I've cost you money."

"They had no business telling you about that."

"Ryan doesn't know how not to tell what he knows. He doesn't understand that that's why he's not a very good spy. It doesn't give you any advantage to know a secret if you blab it as soon as you find it out."

"Ryan needs to have his head shoved up his butt."

"Might as well," she said with a wan smile. "It's always up somebody's."

He couldn't argue.

"Anyway, Don," she said. "I'll pay it back to you. You have to let me."

"You've got other places for that money to go."

"But I know what having this house free and clear meant to you."

"It's OK," he said. "The thing is, I'll only have to borrow for a few months and that's nothing. And I kissed you for the camera as much as you kissed me."

"But you didn't know how I'd bullied him into dropping the price."

"But see, here's the thing, Cindy. You did it because you liked me. So when it comes right down to it, the owner was right. I was getting a special advantage. I would have bought this house anyway, even at seventy thou. It would have taken me a few days to decide, maybe, but I would have bought it. So in a way, the only loser is you, because you didn't get your whole commission."

"Don't you dare even think of paying me a—"

"I got kissed by a beautiful lady," he said. "I found out I could feel things I thought I couldn't feel. That's not about money."

"That's it," she said. "That's how I feel too. And please don't think for a moment I'm upset that you already have a girl here."

"There's a girl here," said Don, "but I don't have her. She came with the house."

"No, no, you don't have to explain anything. I know whatever you did, it was the kind of thing a kind and generous man would do. For all I know, she's just another broken-hearted woman like me. Maybe you're just a trouble magnet, Don."

"Or maybe there's no such thing as a person without troubles, so I'm just lucky to know somebody like you."

She shook her head, holding back tears. "You know too much about me to believe that, Don."

He went to her and put his arms around her and held her again. She clung to him, tight, and now with her body against his he couldn't help but feel some of what he'd felt before, that longing for her.

"You can hold me when you know what I did?" she whispered.

"What you almost did," he said. "What you made damn sure you would never, ever do. That's all that counts. What we do, not what we think of doing or even want to do."

"But see, I lied to you," she said. "I did put the pillow over her face."

It struck him like a blow; his knees gave a little.

She pulled away from him, studying his face, tears flowing down hers.

"Did you... hurt her?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Only for a minute. And that's the truth this time. Now that I know you already have somebody else, I can stand to tell you that last little bit. That I was doing it."

"But you stopped."

She nodded.

"And your baby wasn't hurt at all."

"She cried cause I scared her, but no, she wasn't hurt. It really was only a minute. Less than a minute. But that's how close I was. It's awful, Don, knowing I could come that close."

"We can all come close to something ugly," he said.

"Not that, though," she said. "You could never even come within a thousand miles of that. And that's why you can't love me."

"I think... that's not fair, Cindy. Don't judge yourself by me. I lost a little girl. I've got scars of my own. That's all that's happening here."

"No, I know better, Don. The kind of man that's the only kind worth loving, when I tell him that story, he'll never be able to love me."

"You don't know that."

"Because how could he ever trust me? How could he ever leave our kids alone with me, without wondering? And a man like that, Don, he's going to want kids. A man who's a natural husband and father."

"I don't know, Cindy. I know we mean something to each other. That's better than anything I had for the last couple of years."

"Me too."

"So there," he said. "That's love too. It ain't sex, and maybe that's too bad, but you know, Cindy, when a man and a woman care for each other, that doesn't always mean they have to sleep together or live together."

She nodded, then glanced toward the stairs and gave a little half-smile.

He didn't bother to answer her, to insist that there was nothing between him and Sylvie. Because how did he know? Maybe there was something between them. Maybe he was finally back to a place in his life where he could mean something to people and they could mean something to him. He didn't owe Cindy any explanations. And she wasn't asking for any, either.

"Anyway," said Cindy. "I'm going to start another account. I'm going to fill it up with money till it's at twenty thousand dollars. If you won't take it from me, then I'll call it my Don Lark fund and I'll try to use it as kindly for someone in need as you used it for me."

"That money was as much to get me out of hot water as it was for you," he said.

"Yeah, right." She laughed. "You wouldn't have lost your real estate license."

"Well, just so you don't think I'm too noble, Cindy, I got to tell you that right now what I want more than anything in the world is to kiss you."

"Me too."

"A better man than me would just let that feeling pass."

She stepped to him, put her hands on his chest, let him enfold her in his arms again, and gave back a warm sweet kiss. Not like she kissed him in the bathroom or in the car, none of that hunger. It was good-bye. But it was also love, and he had needed that from her and she gave it, and she needed it from him, too, and they were maybe just a little bit more alive, a little bit closer to happiness because of that. So the kiss lasted a long time. But when it ended, she was out the door really fast.

And there, leaning on her car, was Ryan Bagatti. All smiles. "Interesting diner you found for your lunch hour," said Ryan. "What's on the menu? Must be fast food." He was looking at Cindy. Maybe he didn't even realize Don was standing there. Didn't matter. He'd gone too far this time. Don was down the porch stairs before Bagatti could hold his hands out and insist, "Just kidding! Just kidding!" And then he cowered as Don loomed over him.

"Don, don't!" cried Cindy.

Don didn't need the warning. He had the desire, but not the intention of harming Bagatti. But he did stand close, as close as he could. Bagatti straightened up a little, but found himself forced to lean flat against his car or he'd have had Don's chest in his face.

"Hey, back off, man," said Bagatti. "Can't you take a joke?"

Don just stood there, looming. Waiting for Bagatti to act.

It didn't take long. A guy like Bagatti, when someone didn't fight back, he assumed they were afraid to hurt him. So now he started acting cool again. "Get a sense of humor, man," he said. And then he laid his hands on Don's chest and pushed, just a little. "Give me some space."

That was what Don needed. He snatched both of Bagatti's hands and held them, using his own hands like pincers, his thumbs in Bagatti's palms, his middle fingers pressing the other side. And he squeezed. Bagatti yelped. In reply, Don held his hands out to both sides, spreading Bagatti like a crucifix and bringing his face right up against Don's chest. Bagatti struggled to get his hands free, but the more he resisted, the tighter Don squeezed. "You're killing me!"

"Not yet," said Don. Then he bent his head down to speak directly in Bagatti's ears. "Listen tight," he said softly. "I'll say this once. No more jokes, no more teasing, no more following Cindy anywhere. You see her at work, you treat her politely. You never criticize her or even discuss her with others. No nasty tricks, no rumors, no sneaking, no telling tales about her. You getting this?"

"Yes," said Bagatti.

"You're the kind of bully who picks on somebody just because they can't fight back. Well, you were right about Cindy. She can't fight you. But now she doesn't have to. Cindy and I are not now and never have been lovers, not that it's your business. But we are friends. And I take care of my friends, Mr. Bagatti."

"Right, yes," said Bagatti. "I'm getting this. I got this."

"I'm not sure," said Don. "You seem to me to be a slow learner."

"I'm a quick learner."

"But the minute I let you go, you're going to forget."

"No, I'm not."

"The minute I let you go, you're going to start yelling about how I've been threatening you and assaulting you and if I think I've heard the last of this—"

"No, I won't say that."

"Then I can let you go?"

"Definitely. Yes. This would be a good time."

Don released Bagatti's hands. It surprised him how much tension had been in his grip. The lad was going to have bruises. Indeed, Bagatti slumped back against the car and cradled one hand in the other, then switched them, then held them both in front of him as if they were stumps. "Look what you've done to me."

"As far as I'm concerned," said Don, "you did this to yourself. If you hadn't come here to taunt Cindy Claybourne, your hands would not be in pain right now."

"This is a crime you committed here, buddy," said Bagatti.

Immediately Don seized the man's hands and Bagatti shrieked and tried to snatch them back. "You promised me," said Don.

"Yes. Yes, I did. I do. No crime. It's fine."

"What you have to remember is that I'm crazy," said Don. "Whatever I do to you, I'll get off."

"Yeah. You won't have to do anything to me. Please."

By now Don wasn't squeezing his hands or anything. Bagatti could have pulled them back. But he wasn't trying to. He was submitting. Don had won. It should have felt good. And it did, a little. Because Bagatti might actually leave Cindy alone. Maybe he had done what it took to protect her.

What didn't feel good now was how good it had felt to squeeze the man's hands, to hurt him. Don had squeezed harder than he meant to. Hands that had worked pipe wrenches and hammers, hands with an iron grip, and he had found a fleshy gap between the long fingerbones in the hands and driven his fingers into that space like nails and while he was doing it he had felt so good.

And Cindy had watched him do it. Had watched him use that kind of violence. What did she think of him now? He was ashamed.

Bagatti slid out from between his car and Don's unmoving body. Without looking at either Don or Cindy, he scurried around the front of his car, got in the driver's side, and drove off. Quietly. No aggression left in the man. For now, anyway. Don noticed that he was steering with the edges of his palms. Those hands were going to be sore for a while.

Cindy stood off near her car. Looking at Don.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You told me not to hurt him, and then I did."

She took a few steps toward him. He met her halfway.

"It's been a long time," she said softly, "since anybody stuck up for me." She took his hands, one at a time, and kissed them.

"Tell me if he gives you any trouble."

"He won't," she said. "You can be pretty scary."

"You heard what I told him?"

"I didn't have to. I watched his face while you whispered in his ear."

"I'm not a nice man, Cindy. That's what you didn't know about me till now."

"A man who stops a bully from picking on somebody who's down? I call that nice."

"What you don't know," said Don, "is how much I wanted to smash his face into his car. Just use his face to make dents until the bodywork on the car would cost more than the deductible."

"I know I'm not what you wanted, Don," said Cindy. "But I've got to tell you this, you are what I wanted. But that's OK. Now that I know I'm ready to try, I'll find somebody else. I can settle for less than the best. I help my customers do it all the time. They all want perfect houses but sometimes all they can afford is a fixer-upper."

"There's a lot of guys around who are better for you than I am."

"Well, that's good to know," said Cindy. "Maybe I'll get lucky and meet one of those." She smiled. She even laughed. "In a pig's eye!" she said. Then she got into her car, gave him one last little wave, and drove away.

He watched her out of sight. As he did, he could feel a kind of tingling in his hands, in his legs. Not like a tickle or an itch or a trembling, not even the prickly feeling when your leg's gone to sleep and it's waking up again. This was deeper, right to the bone, just a hunger to do something. It was maybe his rage at the owner of the house and his pet lawyer. Or rage at Bagatti. Or rage at the death of his daughter and all the things that had gone wrong and the people who had screwed up. He needed to kill somebody, to tear them apart, only there wasn't anybody to kill.

So he charged back into the house, picked up his skillsaw and his two longest extension cords, and ran a powerline up to the room he was working on. Then he went back down and got a sledgehammer and brought it up, too. Time for this added-in wall to go. He set to work with the wrecking bar, peeling back the drywall on both sides, hacking it away, exposing the studs and the lousy wiring job that had been done to hook up the fridge and the stove. Should've been a fire years ago.

With the studs exposed, it was time for the skillsaw. He plugged it in, turned it on, and it began to roar. Then he bit it into one of the studs at about chest height, and the roar became a whine, the sound of wood being killed.

Down in the parlor, Sylvie was sitting on his cot when the skillsaw started up. She often sat there, leaping up and hiding in the other room when she heard him coming, so he wouldn't find her there, wouldn't accuse her of snooping. Because she wasn't a snoop. She just liked to be here. It was as if some of his warmth, some of his life clung to the cot after he slept there and lingered all day, fading slowly until he returned and replenished it with another night of his dark, hot sleep. He was a strange sleeper, this Don Lark. Not that she'd seen many men sleep in her life, but Sylvie Delaney had never felt such intensity in anybody who was sleeping. She'd stand there sometimes at night and watch him from the doorway, careful not to make any noise and waken him.

It was so confusing since he came to the house, because sometimes she could walk around as soundlessly as ever, and other times it seemed like every move she made echoed through the house. But watching him sleep, she was silent then. She could hear how he sort of panted and gasped in his sleep. Bad dreams. She knew about bad dreams. She had had a few of those herself. Lived in one for a long time, come to think of it. But she couldn't sleep like this man. It was like he attacked sleep, a frontal assault, took it by the throat and forced it to yield him the rest he needed. Rest, but no peace.

So there she was soaking up his warmth like some people soaked up a suntan, when that roaring began from upstairs, and then a second later a high-pitched whine like a scream, like the house was screaming, and she could feel the house around her suddenly flinch. It didn't understand. How could it? It was like surgery without anesthetic. All that tearing down Don had been doing, ripping out cabinets, extra studs, lath and plaster, the house was writhing with the pain of it like having its teeth pulled, and now this, whatever he was doing, this new sound, the house was in pain.

Don's toolbox slid across the floor, then stopped abruptly; his favorite hammer toppled out of it onto the floor.

"Stop it," she said.

The hammer trembled and rattled and danced. She knew what the house was telling her to do. After all, she'd done it before, hadn't she?

"He's making everything right again, don't you see? You've just got to trust him."

The hammer bounced upward, then clattered back to the floor. Behind her the workbench slid slowly, then rapidly toward her, stopping right at the edge of the cot. "Cut it out!" she demanded. "I'll see what he's doing, I'll make sure he isn't doing anything bad."

The hammer leapt into her hand. She gripped it, then deliberately dropped it back into the toolbox. "And stay there," she said. Then she ran for the stairs.

Don had cut through most of the studs when he saw Sylvie burst into the room, looking as agitated as if the house were on fire. He took his finger off the trigger of the skillsaw. The blade howled and moaned on down to nothing.

"What are you doing?" Sylvie demanded.

Was he supposed to clear his day's assignments with her? "Working," he said.

"It feels like you're tearing the house down," she said.

He wanted to blow her off, but she looked really upset. "Look," he said, "this isn't even part of the house. The real walls are timber-framed with lath and plaster. This is a modern wall, it was just added in by some landlord trying to squeeze a few more bucks out of the house by splitting this room in two. See? It just butts up against the ceiling. A real wall would be joined to the joists above, but this one is just tucked in under the plaster of the ceiling."

"Oh," she said.

"So I'm putting the house back the way it ought to be."

"I've never seen anyone do this kind of thing before," she said. "Please can't I watch?"

"Not if you're going to go on some save-the-two-by-fours kick."

"I'll be quiet. I just want to see."

But he didn't want her to see. He was using this destruction as therapy. With her watching, he'd have to act professional and cool. But what could he say? Sure, he could tell her, Get out, I work alone. But they were already past that. He'd given her a key. And it's not like this job took any concentration. "Watch if you want," he said.

He turned on the skillsaw again and polished off all but the two end studs. With them there was the danger of biting too deep and damaging the structural timber behind them. When the studs were reduced to a row of stalactites dangling from the ceiling and a row of stalagmites rising up from the floor, Don set down the skillsaw and picked up the sledgehammer. Positioning himself like a golfer, standing between studs, he took aim and swung, striking a stud low, near the floor. The nails gave way and the stud flew, clattering against the kitchen wall. He struck again, again, again, ducking and dodging the dangling studs as he went. To get the last few, though, he had to face the other way. "You got to move now," he said, "or one of these suckers is going to hit you."

"I'm quick," she said. "I can dodge."

"Nobody's that quick and just humor me, OK?" He felt the anger building back up inside him.

Maybe she felt it too, because she ducked back into the doorway. That was enough for a margin of safety. He knocked out the last two stalagmites. Then he started in on the dangling studs, swinging high like a lousy Little Leaguer who hasn't learned not to try for obvious over-the-head balls. Each stud clattered across the floor until they were all gone. Now what remained were two long strips of wood screwed to the floor and spiked to the ceiling, with bent nails sticking out of them where the two-by-fours had been attached. Don pried them away from the house with his wrecking bar, then peeled the two end studs away from the walls, and the room was one big space again.

Don stood there, panting a little, sweating. He looked over at Sylvie. She smiled at him and said, "The superhero saves the room."

"Just call me Hammer Man," he said.

She walked into the room and turned around, arms wide as if reaching for the walls. "It's so big."

"This is the room that Bellamy built." Don looked around at the timbers, denuded of lath and plaster. "Of course he meant it to look a little more finished, but the size is right."

"So from now on," she said, "you'll be putting things back in this room instead of tearing it apart."

"A little more tearing," he said. "Here and there. Get the lath and plaster off the walls. Remove the moldings, get the drywall up. But yes, when I'm done it'll look as good as it did when Bellamy brought Mrs. B. upstairs for the first time."

"There," she said. "I thought so."

Yeah, she was still a loon.

He gathered up two-by-fours and carried them down in armfuls and heaped them on the junkpile. As for the ones with nails sticking out, he took the time to remove what nails he could and hammer the others flat. No point in getting sued by the parents of some kid who got a spike through his foot because he couldn't stay off the junkpile.

It was probably his next-to-last trip to the curb when he came back into the house to find Carville in the entryway, sitting on the bottom step. "I'm ready to haul that old water heater out," he said. "Actually, I was ready a while ago, but I been inspecting the rest of your plumbing and heating while you calmed down some."

"Calmed down?" asked Don.

"When I came to the door to get you a while back it looked like you was having a scene out there with some guy in a suit. Admit it, you was just showing off for the woman."

Don was embarrassed. Cindy hadn't been the only one watching. "You just saw what I do when I don't kill a guy."

"There was a minute there when I thought maybe he wished you would."

"I just don't know my own strength."

"Good thing, cause I was right about that water heater. So limed up we oughta have a winch to get it out."

"Instead you've got the Man of Steel." Hammer Man, he thought, and almost smiled.

"Batman and Lark."

"Funny."

Down in the basement, the old water heater lay like a corpse on the floor. Carville shone his flashlight around the pipes amid the joists overhead. "These are solid. You might as well keep using them, because taking them out wouldn't be worth the pain."

"They're strong then? Nothing corroded through?"

"If a nuclear bomb flattened this whole town, these pipes would still be hanging up there in the air."

"Yeah, they built this place solid."

"Any new pipes, now," said Carville. "Some of these bathrooms and kitchens was put in more recent than the others. Got cheaper pipes running along here and over here."

"Yeah, but I won't need those now, they'll come on out."

"You didn't need me to tell you this stuff."

"Wanted to make sure I was right," said Don. "And I'm not a furnace guy."

"Yeah, well, this gas furnace, don't ever hook it up, it'll kill you the first night."

"Bad, huh?"

"I sealed off the line till you can get a new one installed." Carville walked over and rapped his flashlight against the ancient coal furnace that must have been put in when the house was first built, because there was no way it could have been brought down the stairs. "This coal furnace," said Carville. "Man, it's big enough to heat one of those college buildings."

"Yeah, I figured I'd just leave it down here."

"Good choice. You know, I bet it would still work great. If you could stand shoveling the coal."

"Or find anybody to deliver it," said Don.

"Oh, they still do, you know. There's still a few coal trucks in the world." Carville walked around behind the furnace. "What I can't figure out is what this was for."

"What?" asked Don. He followed Carville and saw at once what he was indicating. There was a gap in the foundation behind the furnace. It was filled with rubble, but not haphazardly—somebody had plugged a hole. No, a doorway.

"I never actually looked back there. I mean, who'd break the foundation behind the furnace?"

"It was probably a root cellar or something," said Carville.

But Don knew that nobody would put a root cellar where you had to walk behind a blazing furnace to get to it. "Couldn't be a coal bin either, could it."

"No, the chute's over there. Oh, well, you never can figure out some of the weird things people do with their houses."

"It doesn't weaken the foundation, does it?"

"Not with that beam over the gap. Looks to me like this was here when the house was originally built. It wasn't added in later."

"Well, someday when I'm feeling more ambitious I'll dig it out and see what's behind there," said Don.

"Tell you what, don't call me in on that job."

"I wouldn't dream of it. All that's back there is Al Capone's vault anyway."

"Nice working with you, Geraldo," said Carville. "Now pick up your end of this chunk of limestone and let's get it out of here."

They were both strong men but they had to rest twice, getting the old water heater out. And getting it onto the junkpile had them both dripping with sweat and panting like fat old men jogging for the first time.

"I've been younger," said Carville.

"Yeah, but you were stupid then."

"But I didn't know I was stupid," said Carville. "I knew you were stupid, though."

"Go home, man, you've given me half the day, I can't afford any more."

"Hot water'll be ready in an hour or two."

"You did the electrical too?"

"I'm a full-service heating and plumbing and air-conditioning guy."

"That's why you're such a babe magnet."

"Naw. It's my pipe wrench."

"Take your tiny little pipe wrench and go," said Don.

A few more dumb jokes and Carville was on his way. It was a friendship that began in high school, and that was the level it was still at. Which was OK. That was all he needed from the guy.

The shower was all he'd hoped it would be. The new shower head didn't pulsate or anything like that, but it delivered a stream of water so intense it tingled and that was fine with Don. It was nice to shower in a tub he'd cleaned himself, instead of those truck-stop showers, which always felt kind of clammy and slimy and fungusy.

And then to pull back the shower curtain and dry off on his own clean new towel and put on a new bathrobe and slippers—it was downright domestic. From now on living here wouldn't feel like camping anymore.

Down in the parlor, he was just finishing buttoning his shirt when he heard Sylvie's voice from the hall. "Knock knock?" she asked.

"I'm decent," he said.

She came in. He sat down on the cot and started putting on socks. "Clean clothes," he said. "You ought to try it sometime."

"The dress isn't as dirty as it looks," she said. "After a while, the old grime builds up so thick the new grime just brushes right off. Sort of Teflon clothes."

"Bet we can market that and make a killing."

She smiled wanly.

"I left the soap and shampoo in the shower. Be careful cause it gets really hot now."

"I can hardly wait," she said. "You clean up nice."

He didn't know what to say. "Thanks." And then he had to change the subject. "Now that I'm cleaned up, I'm going over to call on those old ladies next door."

"I thought you said they were crazy."

"Yeah, but they really cook. Want to come, see if we can wangle two snacks for the price of none?"

She shook her head. "I'll stay here."

"They told me I could ask them if I had any questions about the house. They used to live here. Before you"

"What question are you going to ask them?" asked Sylvie.

"There's a gap in the foundation behind the old coal furnace. Might have been a root cellar or something."

"It's nothing."

"People don't leave a gap in their foundation for nothing, Sylvie." His shoes now tied, he got up and headed for the door. "I'm locking up behind me," he said. "You've got your key?"

She took it out of the wilted little pocket in her sad blue dress and held it up for him to see. "Thanks," she said.

He stepped out and closed and locked the door.

Sylvie listened to the dead-bolt close. She didn't need the key. She knew the house would open for her whenever she asked. But it still mattered to her. The key meant that he was admitting she belonged there.

But just because she felt better about things didn't mean the house did. She had tried and tried to calm it all afternoon, but the removal of that wall had been traumatic. "It's cosmetic surgery," she explained. "That wall was a goiter. It hurts to have it removed, but you're glad it's gone. The room is beautifully proportioned now, and the windows are in just the right places on the wall."

She heard a sliding sound and turned to see Don's wrecking bar creeping toward the hall. "Stop it," she said. "He'll just find it anyway, and he'll think I moved it."

The wrecking bar stopped.

"I've got to look into this shower thing," she said. "I vaguely remember that cleanliness was next to godliness. But will it ruin the bounce in my hair?" She walked out of the room, up the stairs.

As soon as she left, the wrecking bar slid on out of the room and down the hall. And the workbench moved even closer to the cot, butting right up against it, sliding it an inch or so out of position. Then all was still in the parlor once again.

12

Garlic

The Weird sisters acted as if Don's coming over that afternoon were a visit from royalty. Well, to a point—presumably they wouldn't have had Prince Charles sit down in the kitchen with a cup of tea while he watched them prepare bread and a bean-and-bacon soup for that night's supper. But apart from the setting, they couldn't have fussed more over him or spoken more solicitously if he had been the prince himself. Don couldn't decipher their game, other than his certainty that they still hadn't given up hope of him abandoning his renovation of the Bellamy house.

"The secret," Miz Evelyn was saying, "is to use only a dash of seasoning, just the faintest hint of it. That way you don't smother the natural flavors of the stock and the vegetables."

"Miss Evvie," said Miz Judea, up to her elbows in bread dough, "will you be a dear and put away the flour and sugar bins for me so I have room to lay out the loaves?"

Miz Evelyn stepped away from the stove and picked up the two bins from the table. As she headed for the pantry, she went on with her commentary. "If I let Miss Judy here make the soup, she'd drown everything in garlic and peppers."

While Miz Evelyn was out of sight, Miz Judea rushed to the spice rack, grabbed a jar of garlic powder, popped off the shaker top and poured about a third of it into the soup. Then she replaced the top, set it back in its place on the rack, and returned to her bread before Miz Evelyn came back in from the pantry.

"Miss Judy's a wonderful cook," said Miz Evelyn, "but she has no subtlety."

Miz Evelyn stirred the soup pot, then lifted the wooden spoon to take a taste. "There," said Miz Evelyn. "Just the right amount of garlic. You can only just barely taste it."

"That's why Gladys likes Miss Evvie to make the soup," said Miz Judea. "Garlic makes her fart, the poor dear." She looked at Don with a steady gaze—did not so much as wink.

There is no untangling the complicated webs they weave in this house, he thought. Maybe it was time to get down to business. "You ladies told me that if I have any questions about that house..."

"Oh, we'll know the answer," said Miz Judea. "Or Gladys will, anyway."

"Well I was down in the cellar with the heating and plumbing contractor, and we noticed there was a break in the foundation behind the old coal furnace. It's all plugged up with rubble, but I wondered if maybe it was a root cellar or—"

"He found it!" crowed Miz Evelyn with delight.

"Took you long enough," said Miz Judea.

"Well I wasn't looking for it," said Don. "What is it?"

Miz Evelyn's voice got low and conspiratorial. "A rum runner's tunnel."

"That house was a speakeasy during Prohibition," said Miz Judea. "They'd sneak the booze up the tunnel from that gully out back."

"And whenever the cops raided the place," said Miz Evelyn, "they'd sneak the city council out through the tunnel."

The two of them broke up laughing at the memory.

"Oh, those were the days, those were the days," said Miz Judea.

"You were here then?"

Miz Evelyn answered him. "Both of us came here in '28. Shared a room upstairs."

"The one you been tearing apart," said Miz Judea. "Feels so good."

"You lived in a speakeasy?" asked Don.

"We weren't in the speakeasy part," said Miz Judea.

"We were in the bordello part," said Miz Evelyn.

Don couldn't think of a thing to say about that. But his silence was an answer all the same. Miz Judea laughed and hooted, while Miz Evelyn clucked her tongue and shook her head.

"What's so shocking?" said Miz Judea. "We were ladies of the night. It got me out of a sharecropper's cabin and it got Miz Evvie down from the mountain."

"Sorry," said Don. "I... you just don't look like..."

"He can't imagine us being young and pretty enough," said Miz Evelyn.

Judea slapped another loaf into shape and dropped it into a well-oiled pan. And another—slap slap slap slap slop and she slid the breadpan aside and pulled over the next.

"It was fun at first," said Miz Judea. "An adventure. All those men with money, clean-smelling. You got to remember where we were from. But when we got tired of it, lo and behold, the house wouldn't let us go. Prohibition ended and it became just an old whorehouse and the men got worse and worse and we were stuck. Then my young cousin Gladys came looking for me."

"It was Gladys who got us out," said Miz Evelyn.

"The house still holds onto us, though," said Miz Judea. "We could never get farther than this carriagehouse."

"Not for long," added Miz Evelyn.

"Once a strong house like that gets hold of you, it takes real power to get free. Gladys, now, she—"

Don set down his teacup. "Ladies, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but have you really been living next door to that house all these years because you believe it has some kind of magical hold over you?"

"Oh, he's an educated man," said Miz Evelyn, as if this were a well-known joke.

"I know, I know," said Miz Judea. "Young and skeptical."

So they were back to the mumbo-jumbo. Well, Don knew what he had come to find out—that gap in the cellar wall was a secret back door with a tunnel leading down to the gully. Someday it might be worth digging out the rubble and exploring it, but in all likelihood it had long since collapsed inside and what he really ought to do was seal it over so it didn't make a prospective buyer nervous. He pushed back his chair. "Thanks for answering my question, ladies. And for the tea."

Miz Evelyn was crestfallen. "Are you sure you won't stay for some of this soup?"

"No, sorry," said Don. "Too much garlic. Makes me fart."

Miz Evelyn looked shocked and offended. Out of the corner of his eye, Don caught Miz Judea's glare—she could no doubt cook a goose in flight with a look like that, and baste it, too. So Don grinned at Miz Evelyn and rose from the table. "I was joking, Miz Evelyn. I have no doubt your soup would be so good I'd eat it all and leave nothing for the two of you."

"Three," said Miz Judea, a bit of acid in her tone.

"Oh, Mr. Lark, you joker!" said Miz Evelyn. "What a caution!"

Don tipped his nonexistent hat to Miz Judea, then to Miz Evelyn. "Ladies, you are a constant marvel and I'm glad to have you as neighbors, even if only for a year."

Miz Evelyn giggled, and as he left Don heard her saying, "He makes a pretty speech, don't he, Miss Judy." He didn't hear Miz Judea's reply.

Don was hungry and he figured Sylvie must be, too. Whatever she'd been scrounging for food over the years, it was about time she stopped and got something decent. As long as she was his tenant, after a manner of speaking, he couldn't very well let her starve or risk food poisoning. So he drove down to the new standalone Chick-Fil-A on Wendover south of I-40 to buy a few dozen nuggets. Which wouldn't be as good as the Weird sisters' soup, maybe, but also wouldn't leave him beholden to anybody, which was just as important.

He couldn't get over the old ladies being prostitutes. What kind of perversity was it regarded as, in those days of deep Jim Crow, to have a black whore and a white whore sharing a room? He couldn't help wondering if men paid to get them both at once, or if the room was partitioned off somehow. But then the very thought of those old ladies naked or, worse still, prancing around in merry widows or negligees made him faintly ill, and he drove the image from his mind.

Or tried to. Why did they always have to tell him things he didn't really want to know? However things went in the Bellamy house during its bordello days, it was still a fact that they had come out of the whole affair as friends, and if there was a little underhanded conflict between them, like that garlic business, it didn't make them any less close. And Gladys got them free somehow. That's the part he couldn't understand. These ladies were sensible. In fact, they were smart. Yet they still believed in magic and houses having a hold over people and...

And he remembered the missing screwholes on the front door. And how Sylvie, who didn't seem crazy at all, had somehow decided she had to stay in that house rather than go out and face the world. Maybe they were the sensible ones indeed, and he was the one so superstitiously bound to the folklore of science that he couldn't admit the obvious. Those old ladies had been stuck and were still tied to the house, and Sylvie was stuck right now and couldn't get free. The way she ran into the upstairs room when he was butterknifing through the two-by-fours—did the house send her to find out what he was doing, cutting into it that way?

Could the same thing happen to him? Could he also get stuck in that house?

I'm surrounded by crazy people and now crazy is beginning to seem normal. Houses don't hold people, and I covered those screwholes with the deadbolt and just remembered it wrong.

When he got back with the bag of nuggets, having snitched only a few, he went through the house calling Sylvie's name, but she didn't answer. Not even in the attic. It was the first time he'd been in the house that she hadn't also been there. So he sat down and ate the nuggets himself. He was hungry enough to polish them off without trouble, and the fries, and both lemonades. Then, because he hadn't really done his day's quota of work yet, he went room to room tearing up carpets and hauling them out to the curb. No reason not to bare the floors everywhere in the house, get the carpets all hauled away with the first load. When he tore up the carpet in the room that had Sylvie's bed in it, he couldn't help noticing that the bed was all she had. No other furniture. Not so much as a book to read or a nightstand.

It was dark when he finished. He was sweaty and dusty and worn out. So much for his shower. But he didn't have the energy for another one tonight. Besides, his towel wouldn't be dry yet.

When he came into the house from the junkpile out front, he heard water running in the house. So she had come back while he was outside. Must be using the back door. Or... the tunnel? Was there room enough to squeeze through over the top of the rubble, if somebody really wanted to?

Tired as he was, curiosity got the better of him and he went down the stairs into the cellar. He had left a worklamp hanging in the cellar, but even after he found the power strip and turned on the overhead, he still needed his flashlight to see behind the coal furnace. The rubble didn't quite reach to the top of the gap in the foundation. Depending on how skinny Sylvie really was, maybe she could do it. But there was no sign of anybody climbing there—not that he knew what such a sign would be. A footprint? Not likely. Fallen rocks? It was a pile of rubble, for heaven's sake. How could he tell which rocks were fallen because of somebody climbing over? So what did he know now? Maybe she used the tunnel, maybe she didn't. And what did it matter?

He was tired. It was dark outside. Time for sleep, so he could be up at dawn. He stopped in the bathroom at the top of the cellar stairs in order to use the toilet and to wash his hands and face, then ducked his head down to splash water onto his hair to rinse out the worst of the dust, then toweled his head so he wouldn't soak his pillow. He still felt filthy but at least his face didn't feel cemented over with carpet dust. The water was still running upstairs. He wondered if he might have caused Sylvie's shower to turn cold when he washed up or hot when he flushed the toilet. It had been thoughtless of him not to wait till she was done. But then, it was kind of a long shower she was taking and he needed to get to bed. He'd ask her in the morning whether the downstairs bathroom affected the upstairs shower.

He went into the parlor without switching on the light—he could see well enough by the streetlight to take off his shoes and socks and lie down on his cot. So he followed his ritual and pried each shoe off with the toe of the other foot, then sat down to take off his socks.

But when he leaned back, he cracked his head hard against something. It was so painful, so sharp a blow that he almost blacked out. He had to lie down until he could see again, and when he felt the back of his head it was wet. Which meant he had just got blood all over his pillow. Of course he knew at once what he had hit. Lying there on the cot, the workbench fairly loomed over him.

He tried to stand up but again almost fainted. So he crawled to the power strip and turned on the light. The workbench was almost malevolent in its placement, right up against the cot, at exactly the middle, where he sat every night to take off his shoes. Why did she move it? And why to that exact spot? It was impossible to imagine that she actually meant him to hurt himself, and yet it couldn't have been more perfectly placed to achieve that end.

His head was clearing. When he looked at the pillow he could see that there really wasn't much blood, just a dot of it. His fingers had felt the liquid, but of course his hair was still wet from the washing up he did. That's what he had felt. Mostly. But there was a goose egg growing on the back of his head.

He pulled and then pushed the workbench away from his cot. The strain of moving it made his head throb. Damn her anyway for touching his stuff. Didn't they have a deal? He wasn't going to let this pass. He wasn't going to be calm and reasonable about it, either. She had drawn blood, for pete's sake.

He strode to the stairs and started to take them three at a time. The pain in his head immediately let him know that this was not a good idea. One step at a time he finished the ascent, then walked to the bathroom door.

It stood ajar by a couple of inches, and inside he could see fog swirling. He raised his hand to knock—or to push the door open? What was he thinking? She was taking a shower, which meant she was naked in there. Just because he had bumped his head didn't give him the right to violate her modesty. Time enough for this discussion in the morning.

He made his way downstairs gingerly, because each jolting footstep rang through his head. This was going to slow him down tomorrow, he knew it. He rummaged through his suitcase and found some extra-strength Tylenol, then went to the bathroom and took four of them with a few handfuls of water. Had to get some paper cups.

Back in the parlor he switched off the light, then felt the back of his head to see if it was still bleeding. It felt like it had scabbed over. Not much of an injury, really, though the swelling was pretty high. If he was suffering from concussion, how would he know? He should go to the hospital. But what would they do? Tell him to take Tylenol and go to bed. He could do that without paying for a doctor and waiting for three hours in the emergency room.

Maybe he'd die in his sleep tonight. So what? Let Sylvie figure out what to do with his body. Let the Weird sisters cover him with garlic and bury him in the back yard. He was too sick and tired of everything to care what happened. You help somebody a little, and look what happens. Twenty thousand dollars because of Cindy. Now concussion and possible death because of Sylvie.

Don't be such a baby, he told himself. You're going to be fine.

He lay on his side, his head throbbing. Come on, Tylenol, don't fail me now.

The water stopped running. How nice. Sylvie had apparently drained the hot water tank and would now go blissfully to bed, clean for the first time in years, no doubt, while he suffered alone downstairs because of her negligence.

A few moments later, he heard soft footsteps on the stairs. Was she coming down to inspect the damage? No, he shouldn't leap to conclusions. No doubt she'd have some reason why she moved the workbench and then forgot to put it back. He should be fair and hear her out.

Like a good father.

The words in his own mind made his head throb even more. He wasn't her father. He wasn't her anything, not even her landlord, since she wasn't paying rent. And yet he was thinking of her as a daughter, wasn't he? Because when he knew that she was taking a shower, when he stood there at her door, it was her modesty that he cared about, that he wanted to protect. What he didn't feel was desire. She was not in the category Cindy Claybourne had been in, when Don kissed her, when he felt himself swept away with desire for her. He and Cindy had met as equals. Sylvie was a waif; Don had her under his protection. The way Cindy was now. Off-limits.

Only he had still felt desire for Cindy today. It had taken willpower—not a lot, but some—to keep from trying to reopen that closed door.

It didn't matter. Sylvie was coming down the stairs and he'd have to deal with her now whether she was in a daughter role in his unconscious mind or not. Painfully, slowly, he rose to a sitting position.

She emerged from the shadow of the entryway into the light slanting in from the streetlamp. Her hair hung straight and wet, with just a hint of curl in it where a few strands had dried. She had apparently decided against the bathrobe he bought for her—she was back in the same faded blue dress. But in this light, cleaned up, the hair no longer stringing across her face, she was almost pretty in a forlorn, dreamy sort of way.

"You're still awake?" she asked softly.

"Don't you mean still alive?" he asked.

"What?" she said. "I just thought I heard you upstairs when I was showering. Did you want something?"

"You were gone when I got back with dinner," he said. "Nuggets from Chick-Fil-A. I called through the house but you didn't answer so what can I say. We don't have a fridge or a microwave and they're nasty when they're cold. So I ate them."

"That's OK."

No, it wasn't OK. That wasn't what he meant to say to her at all. He was going to chew her out about her carelessness. It was the headache. He couldn't think straight.

He reached down and held out the pillow. Not that she could see it in the dark.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Nothing much. Just my blood."

"You hurt yourself?"

"No," said Don. "You hurt me. By moving my workbench right up against my cot."

"No," she murmured.

"Smacked my head on it when I sat down to take off my socks. Almost knocked me out."

"You should go to the hospital."

"No, I've decided to die at home," he said nastily.

"Concussions can be dangerous."

"So why didn't you think of that when you moved things around down here? I thought I asked you not to touch my tools."

"I didn't," she said.

"Who else, the tooth fairy?" he asked. "Come on, you can't move the workbench halfway across the room and then forget you did it. It's heavy."

"I didn't move your workbench," she said. "I'm sorry you were hurt."

She turned abruptly and left, pattering up the stairs.

He had no sympathy for her. Imagine denying it. How stupid did she think he was?

Couldn't deal with it now. Thinking about her only made him angry, and that made his head hurt worse, and he didn't need that. Had to sleep this off so he could get to work the next morning.

At the top of the stairs, Sylvie slapped the newel post. Without a sound she formed words and spoke them. "Stupid, nasty... what are you doing? What are you thinking of?"

She walked into the room Don Lark had stripped and opened up. "How many times do I have to tell you, he's not hurting you?"

She strode to a bare timber, a thick vertical post, one of the ancient bones of the house, and pressed her head against it. "No more of this. No more hurting him. Ever." The house seemed to her like a little child going to the doctor. Lashing out in terror of the needle. You couldn't get angry, you just had to explain. "Don't you see he's going to make you whole again? It hurts now, but soon he'll make you stronger. You have to trust me."

13

Daughters

Tearing out walls, ripping up carpets, stripping lath and plaster off the old timbers, those were the dramatic changes, requiring hard labor and little skill. But those jobs were soon done, for the moment at least, for that first upstairs room. Don paid to have the junkpile hauled away; then he settled in to the routine of turning that upstairs room back into the graceful, comforting space it was meant to be.

He went back and forth over whether to add another bathroom upstairs. Now was the time to do it, or at least to rough it in between the back bedroom and the front one. On the one hand, plumbing it would be expensive and difficult, since no pipes ran to that region of the house. And it would cut into the nice proportions of one room or the other—or both, if he made it into a huge, two-window bathroom. So his inclination was to leave it out.

On the other hand, Americans seemed to be in the middle of an intense love affair with the bathroom. Not only were bathrooms getting larger in both size and number, people weren't even frosting the glass anymore, and often didn't even allow for window coverings. Heather and Chuckie next door could look out their window and watch whatever you were doing in the Jakes. Don didn't get it. Some of the bathrooms he'd seen looked like water shrines. One bathroom he saw, in a development just off the Algonkian Parkway in northern Virginia, was exactly as large as the master bedroom. All the normal accoutrements were scattered around the edges of the room, and in the middle was a huge Jacuzzi that looked like an altar to some pagan god. He could imagine some priest in gold lame sacrificing a virgin or a sheep.

For people who needed porcelain temples, would one small bathroom cut into the hall at the head of the stairs do the job for the entire second floor? He could hear the househunting couples already. "The children would fight constantly over the bathroom. And what about guests? It would be so awful trying to get the kids to keep their bathroom clean enough for company."

Even money wasn't a reliable guide. Putting in more bathrooms would make the house easier to sell, especially since the original bedrooms were so large that there was room to tuck a good-sized bathroom in every one of them. But not putting in more bathrooms would save him a lot of money, which he wouldn't have to borrow from the bank, and that would allow him to charge maybe a little less for the house, which would make the house easier to sell. He couldn't lose. Or couldn't win, depending on how you looked at it.

In the end he followed his own preferences and opted to keep the simple purity of the original design. In other words, he saved himself a lot of bother and expense. He would still cut into the bedroom space to put in a beautiful closet that would look more like fine furniture than architecture. But it wouldn't rise to within three feet of the eleven-foot ceiling, so the proportions of the room would still be visible and have their effect on the dweller. As for the cost, building an elegant closet was entirely a matter of carpentry, which he would do with his own hands.

The decision was made, and he set to work.

The rough framing always went fast, even working alone. Then wiring to bring the whole thing up to code—that took time, but the payoffs were immediate, as he was able to get rid of the extension cords running up the stairs and plug things directly into the new outlets. The wallboard got the fastest results of all, making things look so close to being done.

But that was just when the real work began. Any hardworking, careful guy could put up a stud wall and wallboard, then mud it and prime it. Any competent electrician could install a slew of outlets. But there weren't many people left in America who still knew how to make elaborate wood trim out of fine hardwoods, which were stained, not painted, so the grain showed and no knots or other flaws could be tolerated. Crown moldings, a picture rail, wainscoting, and baseboards were all turned out by Don's own hand.

With Sylvie watching.

There was no escaping her and he no longer tried. Partly because he was trying to be decent about it, but even more because she really wasn't intrusive. Most people who watched others work were extraverts, insisting on constant engagement, asking questions, offering opinions, or, worst of all, trying to carry on involved conversations about things that had nothing to do with the task at hand. Sylvie just sat there, virtually unnoticeable. When she did speak, it was to ask questions that—to Don's surprise—were worth answering. Like, How did carpenters make moldings before the invention of the router? Why wasn't wallpaper put on first so the moldings and chair rail could cover the edges and keep them from peeling? Because the questions came rarely, they were a pleasure to answer.

And now and then Don would ask a question of his own. He began to build up a picture of Sylvie's life. An only child, orphaned in her teens, she got a friendly foster home with the parents of a friend, but it was always more a room-and-board arrangement than a family relationship, and after high school graduation they quickly drifted apart. Sylvie had no money—either to inherit or from insurance. She earned a scholarship to UNCG and worked hard to pay her own living expenses. It was a solitary life; between work and school she had no time for dating and no particular interest in it, either. "If I met a guy who seemed like he might be as good a man as my father, then I started comparing myself to my mother and realized I wasn't worthy of a guy like that." She laughed over it, but Don understood the pain under the laughter. Squatting here in the Bellamy house hadn't been that big a change for her, except for matters of personal hygiene.

Felicity Yont changed all that. Lissy was the extravert Sylvie wasn't. They were close enough to the same size that they could trade clothes, but mostly Lissy made Sylvie borrow her more stylish outfits so she wouldn't look so mousy. Lissy changed Sylvie's hair, drew her into some double dates, even got her to sleep in t-shirts instead of her dowdy flannel nightgowns. Never mind that Sylvie's t-shirts were all shapeless oversized men's shirts, while Lissy always managed to find shirts tight and short enough that she couldn't have scotch-taped a rose petal to her skin without making a bump. It was still a lifestyle makeover for Sylvie.

Except it didn't take. Sylvie was older, had a keener sense of responsibility. Maybe she had always been older. But she knew her grades had to be good enough to win her a solid job offer upon completing her master's degree. So despite many changes in Sylvie's look and habits, Lissy couldn't change the big one: Sylvie's need to work every possible moment. Sylvie thought it was a big deal to go out and frolic once a month. Lissy thought her life was over if she only went out on weekends. "Oil and water but our life was exciting," said Sylvie. "Mine was certainly more interesting than the average librarian-to-be."

So after that first year as friends, when Lissy proposed they share a large apartment on the ground floor of a decaying but gorgeous old house, Sylvie was game. What could go wrong?

"What did go wrong?"

"You're going to laugh, but it was when she started watching every move I made. It used to be she was so free and I was the stay-at-home stick-in-the-mud. But then that last semester she stops seeing her boyfriend Lanny so much and there she is hanging around the apartment, looking over my shoulder, reading my textbooks. It's as though she suddenly realized she was about to graduate with about a C average and nobody was going to want to give her a job worth having. While I had a couple of offers, including that Providence job. I think she wanted to learn how to study, only it was too late."

"You miss her."

Sylvie looked away. "She wasn't a nice person. But no worse than me."

From then on it was impossible for Don to see Sylvie as a homeless waif. She was a person with a past, with friends found and lost, with emotions that could be stung into life by a memory.

Conversations like that were pretty rare, though, during the couple of weeks Don worked on that one room. Mostly Don just worked as Sylvie watched from across the room. Mostly he forgot she was there.

In fact, they evolved a kind of signal. Don plugged in his cheap boom box during the jobs that didn't involve power tools. Music gave a kind of rhythm to the work, made it feel like he was flowing a little faster through the minutes and hours of the day. He tuned to 98.7, which used to be a hard rock station but now played the new-country format. First time it drove Sylvie out of the room, which annoyed Don a little. Couldn't help but take it as an insult to his taste. But then she gradually sidled back in, listening to the music. While the music was playing, she never talked. But when Don was tired of the station and turned the boombox off, she usually had a question or comment stored up. Often enough it was country music she wanted to talk about. "Once you get used to the twang," she said.

"Some of us don't hear it as a twang," said Don.

"Don't tell me John Anderson sounds natural to you."

"I give you John Anderson."

"'Swangin,'" she sang.

He laughed.

Gradually he got a feel for the kind of music she liked, and one evening after work he went to Borders and came back with a fistful of CDs. Garth Brooks was too plastic for her; Lyle Lovett was too weird. But she liked Martina McBride and Lorrie Morgan, Trisha Yearwood and Ronna Reeves, liked them a lot. Don tried to figure out what it was that she liked so much about their music. Heaven knows they were twangy enough, and pretty plastic too, sometimes. She couldn't put it into words. "It's like their lives are full of tragedy and yet they can sing about it with so much energy. Instead of being depressed, they turn it into music."

"Is that what you are?" asked Don. "Depressed?"

"No. I'm just plain old-fashioned sad." And then she got up and wandered off. He couldn't figure out why she left when she left. There didn't seem to be a pattern to it. Sometimes she'd answer the most personal questions—not that he asked her anything that private. Other times the most innocent, general comment would make her wander away. Now and then Don would feel a little stab of annoyance at her moods, but then he remembered how he let his own moods control her, too, what with turning the radio on when he didn't want to talk and taking off to run errands when he needed to be alone.

The longer he worked on refurbishing that upstairs room, the more she warmed up. She finally started taking a little food now and then. Never more than a bite or two when Don was looking. She'd chew it like it was the best thing ever cooked. But she'd leave the rest. "You're going to waste away, you keep eating like an anorexic."

"You can't eat like an anorexic," she said. "You can only not eat like one."

"Well pardon me while I go puke like a bulimic."

"That's the room that's missing from this house. A vomitorium." Then, because he had no idea about Roman culture, she explained to him how the Romans would feast and feast, then duck into a vomitorium to puke it up.

"How does the chef tell the difference between a compliment and a criticism?"

"If you go back for seconds."

Times like that, there was a lot of silly joking, easy laughter. The kind of chatter that could go on while Don was working, without him missing a stroke or a cut.

One time after they heard Ronna Reeves sing "Man from Wichita," Sylvie started talking about her parents. "I don't know why that song reminds me of them. The song's got nothing to do with parents."

"It's got to do with missing someone so bad you want to die," said Don. "My folks didn't die on me when I was young, but it still hurts."

"I know," said Sylvie. "You fight with them because they're always trying to control your life, you want to break free. And then... I was free. And I thought: Why isn't this more fun? Isn't this what I always wanted?"

"Of course it wasn't."

"I don't mean them being dead, I mean the freedom. I wanted freedom. But it was... what. Empty."

"Me too," said Don. "It's like, anything you do when your parents aren't there to watch, it didn't really happen."

"People aren't supposed to lose their parents so young."

"In the old days most people lost one or the other. Childbirth. Sickness. Industrial accidents. Every time I cut myself on something, I think, there but for antiseptics and modern hygiene would be my last injury. Gangrene."

"Half the people I knew in school had lost a parent."

"Yeah but that was divorce, right?"

"My parents fought sometimes," said Sylvie. "But I don't think they would have gotten divorced, even if they hadn't died."

"Mine were solid, too."

"I had to keep imagining my mother was checking on me," said Sylvie. "The whole time I was working on my schooling and all, I'd keep imagining her just out of sight, watching." She laughed derisively. "Turned out it was only Lissy."

"But why shouldn't your mom be watching you from... wherever she is."

"Heaven is the word you're looking for," she said.

"I didn't know if you, you know, believed."

"In what?"

"The afterlife."

"Maybe the word 'belief' is too strong," she said. "I hope."

"Me too."

"It ain't your parents you're missing, Don Lark."

"Careful, Sylvie. You're starting to talk like a hick. 'Ain't,' indeed. Too much country music. It's getting to you."

She ignored his attempt to change the subject. "I try to imagine what it would be like to have a child, and then lose it."

"I didn't lose her," said Don. "She was stolen away from me."

"I try but I can't do it," said Sylvie. "Either one. Can't imagine either one."

"Having one is the best thing in the world. Losing her is the worst. After that, you've seen the best, you've seen the worst."

"So you're scared of nothing?"

"I look like a damn fool to you?"

"Only when you're holding up a slab of wall-board with that toe-lever thing and pressing your whole body against it to get it set in place. Then it looks like you're praying to the wall."

"Or flirting with it."

"What you do is way beyond flirting."

"Way beyond praying sometimes, too," he said.

"See, Don, what I wanted to say was this. Even if you get mad at me. I've got to say it. Your little girl. She had from you the thing that matters more than money or 'quality time' or anything. She knew she was seen and known and admired and loved and... respected by you, she knew that, didn't she?"

"I don't know. She was so young."

"She knew. You think a kid has to be able to talk before they can know?"

And they got off on something else and then after a while fell silent and that moment was over. There weren't many of those times, but there were enough of them that by the time Don was pretty much through with that room, he didn't feel like he'd really finished it until he had Sylvie come in for a formal inspection and guided tour. "You're my surrogate parents," Don said. "I need to have you look at what I did so it will all turn real."

"Bibbity-bobbity-boo," said Sylvie. "You're now a real boy."

"You're thinking of Pinocchio but quoting Cinderella."

"I'm thinking of the sequel. Pinocchio tries to put the slipper on Cinderella and she gets splinters in her foot."

"I don't leave splinters," he said.

"So show me, and I'll make the room turn real," she said.

He led her to the room and opened the door, feeling silly as he did it. Hadn't she seen this room every day while he was working on it? But she came inside and turned around and around, like a child dancing, seeing it all as if for the first time. "Oh, Don, it's so beautiful."

"It was a well-designed space to begin with," he said. "All I had to do was keep from screwing it up."

"It makes the rest of the house look so drab."

"That's why I finish one room before doing anything else. I like to see the contrast."

Sylvie ran to the closet and opened the doors. Though on the outside it looked like an armoire, it was deep, a walk-in, with gentle lights that came on as soon as a door was opened. She turned around, reached out, and closed the doors. He stood in the middle of the room, waiting for her to reopen them. Waiting. "Sylvie?" he said. Then he began walking to the closet, wondering what could possibly be keeping her inside it so long. Couldn't she figure out that you opened the doors just by pushing them?

Just as he was about to reach out for the handles, the doors were flung open and Sylvie bounded out, right in front of him, and shouted, "Boo!"

Don made a great show of clutching his heart, but that was only to cover the fact that she really had frightened him. She almost collapsed with laughter, and he couldn't help laughing with her. Then she ran to the window and touched the natural-wood frame, the blinds, the fabric texture of the wallpaper.

"You can almost feel the house getting younger," she said.

Then, because she insisted on it, he gave her the guided tour, explaining what he had done—and what some builders might have done but he chose not to, so the space would be better proportioned or truer to the original concept or more functional. The inside story. And she listened to him. The way a daughter might have done, if she had lived long enough to grow up to be a homeless student of library science living in an abandoned mansion.

This idea stopped him cold, his thoughts spinning.

"What?" she asked, looking at him with some concern.

"What what?" he said. Then he realized that he must have been standing there in sudden silence. "Don't worry, when I have a heart attack I'll clutch my chest and grunt and fall down."

"I was thinking more of a stroke. Paralyzed on the spot. Turned to stone."

"A pillar of sawdust."

"What were you thinking?" she asked.

He hesitated a moment. His normal impulse would be to fend her off with a joke. But instead he found that he wanted to talk openly to her. No jokes. "I was thinking that this was like, you know... that showing you this room, I might have done that with my... daughter, if she had lived. Shown her my work like this."

She took a step back from him. "I'm not your daughter," said Sylvie.

So it had been a mistake to open up that far. It always was. "I just meant that I was imagining what it would be like if you were."

"I'm nobody's daughter." She said the last word with such vehemence that Don wondered if there might be something more to her relationship with her parents than their early death.

He almost apologized, but then stopped himself. What had he actually done to her? "What do you care if I think of you as a daughter?"

"I don't need a father," she said coldly.

"And I don't need a houseguest," said Don. "I've got no room in my life for what you actually are, but I do have this huge empty space for a daughter and if that's where I find a little room for you, what do you care?"

"My father left me, and my mother, and I did just fine."

"Oh, yeah, look at you, you've done so well."

His words visibly stung her and he regretted saying them. But he wasn't going to apologize. She was the one who decided to turn a contemplative moment into a quarrel.

"What happened to me in college has nothing to do with losing my parents," she said.

"Yeah, well, my letting you stay here has everything to do with losing my daughter, so learn to live with it, kid."

"What are you, the ancient of days or something? I'm twenty-four, not four years old. You can't be my father."

"Give me a break," said Don. "Twenty-four? How old were you when you got your doctorate?"

"I never got it," she said. "Remember?" But then she realized what he was asking. "I meant—I mean, I was twenty-four when I would have gotten my degree. But now I'm... even older."

"How much older? Don't you even know?"

"Look around, how many calendars do you see?"

"There are seasons, you know. You go outside, there's snow or ice, think winter. It gets like an oven in here with everything boarded up, you can figure you're having summer."

"I was going to get my degree in '87." She looked away from him, and he could see that she was afraid of what he was going to tell her.

"Ten years," said Don. "You've been squatting here for ten years."

"It's 1997?" she tried to look nonchalant. "My how time flies."

"You don't even know who's president, do you?"

"They never invite me to the White House anyway, so what do I care?"

"Doesn't this bother you?" But he could see that it did, that she was frightened by what had happened to her, the years lost in whatever funk had kept her in this place.

"I had no idea," she said. "All those years." She gave a little cry, maybe a sob, then gasped, trying to calm herself.

Don reached out his hand, rested it lightly on her shoulder. It dawned on him that it was the first time he had ever touched her. Have a woman living in your house, it wouldn't do to touch her; but Sylvie needed comfort, not the tongue-lashing Don had been giving her. He was thinking: What kind of father am I?

But she recoiled from his touch as if he were some sort of disgusting amphibian. "I told you!" she screamed at him. "I'm not your daughter!"

"Damn right you're not!" he snapped. "There's not a chance in hell I would have let a daughter of mine end up like this, trapped in an abandoned house so you don't even keep track of how many years you've been wasting your life!"

"How old are you, Mister Wisdom, Mister I-Would-Have-Made-Everything-All-Right-No-Matter-How-You-Screwed-Up?"

"Younger than you," said Don. "And a hell of a lot older."

"Well, Daddy, don't swear at me." She made daddy sound like an epithet.

"Don't call me that," he said.

"I thought you wanted me to be your daughter, what happened to that?"

"When she called me Daddy it didn't sound like that." And then he heard her voice in his mind, the voice of his little girl when she was barely a year old, just walking, just able to say Mama and Daddy, before she was taken away from him. Daddy. And the floodgates opened. Sobs took over his body like a convulsion and he sank to the floor, trying to twist his body away from her so she wouldn't see how the tears leapt from his eyes and splashed on the light lustrous finish of the delicately whitewashed wooden floor.

But she saw, of course. He heard her step toward him. Felt her hand on his head, patting him. A light touch, like a child's. It burned through him, lightning through his body. "Don't touch me like that!" he cried.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"You're not my daughter, all right?" He tried to get control of his voice. He couldn't look at her, couldn't show his face contorted, tear-soaked like this. "She's dead and I'll never see her again and you're not her so get out! Get out!"

She left the room. If she went right on and left the house, that would be fine with him too. He should never have let her stay. He should never have let anybody get this close to him. He lay down on the floor, curled up like a child, crying, saying her name over and over. He hadn't let himself think of her name in years but he had lost control anyway, and so he might as well say it, over and over like a prayer, like the refrain of a sad half-forgotten song, "Nellie, Nellie, Nell."

It didn't last long, really, considering how many months, years, his feelings had been pent up. He lay there for a while, then rolled onto his back and stared up through sore, wept-out eyes at the ceiling he had finished only a few days before. The warm natural-wood molding. The closet that looked more like an armoire than a built-in. He turned his head to the windows. The wooden Venetian blinds sliced the afternoon sunlight into thick buttery bands. A room for playing, for dreaming, for resting, for life.

After all the rooms he had created out of nothing, out of junk, with this room he finally understood what it was he was making. Safe spaces. Comforting refuges. He was making rooms for Nellie.

Only Nellie would never set foot in any of them. Never in this room. So what was it for?

He got to his feet, a little sore from lying on the floor. He walked out into the hall, down the stairs, out the front door without ever seeing Sylvie. Maybe she was gone. Good.

No, not good. Not good that he could build a place like that and then drive her out of it. Surely that wasn't what he had intended. Surely it was for her that he had built it. When he was through showing her the room, he had meant to tell her that it was hers until the house was sold. Her bright safe place, after all these years in a dark, dirty, hot-or-freezing house. Not that he had admitted this plan even to himself. But that was where today was heading before it turned into that stupid, meaningless fight, into this emotional disaster.

The leaves were all turned to autumn colors now, and they still festooned the trees, except for a copious sprinkle across the lawns. But there was a wind picking up and the sky was lowering. The leaves would go tonight, the bulk of them, blown off the trees and then matted down to the ground by cold, pounding autumn rain. He walked in the chilling air, breathing in the smell of impending weather, letting the color wash over him. He had spent too long indoors. And even indoors he had not looked out the window half enough. Running errands, he hadn't seen the world he was moving through.

It was Sylvie's room. That's who he had made it for. He knew that Nellie was dead and would never live there. He knew that Sylvie wasn't his daughter. But she was someone who needed his protection. He hadn't wanted to take her into that place, but she was there, and the room was for her, had always been for her. For herself, not for some imagined surrogate of his daughter.

When she moved into that room it would no longer be his. He would knock at the door if he wanted to speak to her. If she invited him in then he would go, but as a visitor. That was the way of it, for a builder like Don. You made beautiful spaces, you built with your whole heart, and then you invited someone else into the space you had made and gave them the keys and locked yourself out of it forever. But you were still there, that was the secret. Don was still there in all the houses, watching out for the people, enclosing them, sheltering them. He was still there, soothing their eyes, stilling the sounds of the outside world, framing their lives so that all their dreams could be contained in a place where they had only to reach out and touch them and they would come to life again.

He headed back to the house. Jogged back, the tape measure and wallet and keys bouncing in his pockets. He had left the front door unlocked; he burst through it, calling out to her. "Sylvie!" His voice echoed through the house. It sounded so empty. "Sylvie, are you here?"

He ran up the stairs, tried all the doors on the second floor. Up into the attic. "Don't hide from me in here, Sylvie," he said. No answer, she wasn't there, or if she was he couldn't find her.

She'd come back. She'd hidden before, stayed out of sight for a while. But she came back. Ten years she'd been trapped in this place, it's not likely that one quarrel would drive her out, was it? He tried to fill himself with confidence as he went back down the attic stairs, then down the wide staircase to the main floor. Maybe she was in the cellar.

No. She was in the parlor. Lying on his cot. Asleep on his cot. Hadn't she heard him calling? He'd been so loud. Nellie had been like that. When she slept, she slept.

He thought of waking her, apologizing to her, telling her what he had realized, that the room was for her all along, that she was welcome here as long as the house belonged to him. But he couldn't bring himself to disturb her.

He went upstairs to the bedroom she had been sleeping in, to the one shabby bed remaining in the house. He took the mattress off the bed, blankets and all, and dragged it into the new room; the sagging box springs came next. Then he knocked apart the bedframe and carried in the four parts and reassembled them, put on the springs and mattress, and neatly made the bed. It looked so small in that large space, like a child's bed, though it was a regular twin. And so tatty compared to the glowing perfect finish of the room. He thought of buying her a new bed, a queen-size perhaps; a canopy bed, or a brass one, or a four-poster. But no, that would feel too permanent. A waste of money in a house he was going to sell in a year. This shabby old bed would have to do. It was the space around the bed that mattered. What she would see in the morning when she opened her eyes. The bands of light through the windows. The closet where she had already played like a child. She owned nothing with which to fill this space. So instead she would own the space itself.

He heard a sound from the hall outside the room. A footstep. He turned around and there she was.

"My bed," she said.

Suddenly he was shy about what he had done. "I needed to have your stuff out of the other room before I worked on it."

She stepped into the room and looked at all of it again, turning around once, twice. "I get to sleep in here?"

He nodded.

"I've never had a room like this." She laughed, a low sound, deep mirth; and then another laugh, cascading, the music of delight. "I know, it's only for a little while, but—thank you."

And with that the room was no longer his. He had bestowed it. He smiled at her, tipped his invisible hat, and went away downstairs.

14

Wrecking Bar

Don went to sleep that night feeling better than he had for a long time. Embarrassing as it had been to break down like that in front of Sylvie, he knew that it had been a good thing. A wall inside himself had been broken. He could think of Nellie's name again, say it to himself. Something had been given back to him. And because Sylvie had been part of it, there was something between them now. A bond of loss, if loss could bind. He could share this house with her, for the months ahead, because they were no longer strangers.

In the morning, though, with the emotions of the day before faded, he began to think of other things. Bleaker things. Had the sight of his weeping diminished him in Sylvie's eyes? He remembered standing there watching Cindy weep. Touching her as Sylvie had touched him. It had meant the end of his relationship with Cindy. Not that the situations had been analogous. It was the passion that ended between him and Cindy. There had never been any such feeling between him and Sylvie. On the contrary there had been suspicion and hostility and dread. The transformation could only be for the better.

Yet his suspicion grew as he climbed the stairs, heading for the shower, and glanced at the door to her new room. Closed. Getting her own room—that was a victory he had simply handed to her. Now could he ever get her out of there? Why had he done something so foolish? Yesterday, caught up in emotion, he had felt protective, expansive, even grateful to her for her show of kindness. Today, the emotions spent, he could see that he had only complicated things worse. She was still a stranger. But now she was a stranger who was bound to think she had a hold on him. Loneliness had driven him to do foolish things, and now he would have to face the consequences.

Sooner than he imagined, in fact. For once he was showered, ready for the day, his first task was to look for his wrecking bar. He hadn't needed it since he tore out the walls in the room that was now Sylvie's. Which meant it should have been where he always kept it, in the long green toolbox. It wasn't there.

At first he thought perhaps he had put it away somewhere else. But it didn't take long to eliminate all the possibilities. Don was meticulous about putting his tools away. There was no reason to think he had done anything unusual with the wrecking bar.

He didn't want to suspect Sylvie, but what if she had moved it awhile ago, before their reconciliation? It was still annoying that she might have been doing things like that, but at least it wouldn't be a complete repudiation of the kinder, gentler relationship that was established yesterday. He wouldn't hold such a prank against her. As long as she gave the wrecking bar back to him.

He went upstairs and knocked on her door.

"Yes?" Her voice came only faintly through the closed door.

"Have you seen my wrecking bar?"

"Just a minute."

He waited. After a few moments, she opened the door. Wearing her dress, as usual. He wondered if she slept in it. Probably not; it was faded but not terribly wrinkled. So she must sleep in her underwear or in the buff—on bedding that couldn't have been washed more recently than her dress. "Listen," he said, "I'm going to do a laundry today, you want me to take those sheets?"

Her face brightened. "Sure. Thanks."

"Um, I could... that dress. If you wore your bathrobe while I'm gone, I could take that dress and wash it."

She shook her head. "No thanks. Really. It's all right."

"It wouldn't be any trouble. Or I'd get it dry-cleaned."

"I don't... that's kind of you, but I just... it's not dirty."

He didn't bother to argue. "Whatever," he said. "But anyway, what I actually came up here for, I wondered if you knew where my wrecking bar is."

"Wrecking bar?"

"That black metal prybar I used for popping off wallboard. All-purpose breaking and ripping-up tool."

"I don't remember it."

He drew it in the air. "Shaped like this."

"OK, yes, I think I remember. What about it?"

"Where is it?"

"Where did you put it last?"

"I put it away in my long green toolbox."

She gazed steadily at him for a long moment before answering. "Don, you told me not to touch your tools and I don't touch them."

So much for a more forthright relationship between them. "What was it, killer moths? Fairies? Elves?"

She sighed and leaned her head against the doorpost. "Please," she said. "I thought we were friends now."

"So did I. But I need my wrecking bar. I've got to start on another room. Tearing out a stud wall and stripping the old lath and plaster."

"I'll be glad to help you look, as long as we don't start from the assumption that I know where it is but I'm just not telling you. Because I don't know. If I knew, I'd tell."

Don turned away from her, exasperated, then turned back. "All right, play it how you want. Help me look for it. Just remember that I really need it. This isn't the only room I have to finish."

"Now that my room's done, what do I care?" she said. And then, because he no doubt looked outraged, she reached out and touched him lightly on the arm. "A joke, Don. That was a joke."

"Please, just... help me look."

"OK," she said. "Let me guess. You want to search in my room first."

"Why not?" he said. "We're already here."

She led the way, opening the closet, making a show of looking in ludicrous places, like the light fixtures and the Venetian blinds. "Not here. Not here. Not here."

"OK, so you're offended," Don finally said. "But the wrecking bar didn't just walk off, somebody had to move it."

"Why is that? What makes you so sure of that?"

"So sure of what?" For a moment he had no idea what she was asking him.

"That somebody had to move that wrecking bar?"

"Because objects made of solid metal don't move unless something moves them."

"Something."

Now it dawned on him. "Oh, some supernatural force did it. The house did it."

The sarcasm stung her. "I don't care what you believe. Why should I help you look? If I'm the one who finds it, you'll assume I put it there."

"Put it where?"

"Where I find it. If I find it. Promise you won't accuse me of that."

"I promise."

"I don't believe you." She wasn't joking. But then, neither was he.

"I just want my wrecking bar!"

"And I want to be trusted."

He thought of a lot of rejoinders that would have made him feel a little better while making the situation quite a bit worse. Instead he answered, quietly, "Please help me look for my wrecking bar."

"If I find it," she said, "it will be because I've lived in this house long enough to know where stuff collects."

"Collects?"

"Where it drifts to. Lost stuff."

"This isn't a lake. Things don't drift."

"Then we won't find the wrecking bar in any of those places." She sounded amused, but her eyes were on fire.

"This is worthless," said Don. "I'll just hunt for it alone."

"Do you want my help or not?"

"I want my wrecking bar. If you can help me find it, please do. Otherwise, stay here with your bizarre fantasy life. It's done you so much good up to now."

He headed out of the room.

She called after him. "Maybe you better make sure you know what reality is before you start talking about my fantasies!"

He kept walking, into the hall, down the stairs.

"How do you know you didn't just put it somewhere yourself and forgot where?"

That was too much. "Because I always put my tools away."

"Always?" She was standing in the hall, leaning over the banister to look down at him on the stairs.

"Always."

"Your mom must have loved raising you. All of Don's little toys put neatly away. A place for everything and everything in its place."

"Exactly," said Don. He headed back into the parlor and began rummaging through all his toolboxes again. He heard her coming down the stairs. If he turned around, he knew he would see her leaning against the doorframe, her arm flung up high, like a dancer, like a drawing from the flapper era. Oh, wait, it's the Weird sisters who were flappers. Sylvie is from the eighties. Got to keep my insane women straight.

He had to look. And yes, there she was, leaning on the doorframe, her arm up over her head, stretched along the white-painted wood. Then she bent her arm at the elbow and it arched over her head like a dancer's or a skater's. The image of grace.

"I thought you said the wrecking bar wasn't in your toolboxes."

"I already looked," said Don. "So I'll look again."

"Unbelievable."

"What?"

"That you actually have enough self-doubt to check. I thought you were above such weakness."

"What exactly have I done to you that I deserve to be mocked? Did you think I was the kind of guy who'd accuse you before I checked up on myself? The back of my head is still tender from the time you moved the workbench, but I'm not supposed to wonder if you touched my wrecking bar?"

Her face darkened. She ducked away from the door. He took a few steps after her. "That's right, hide from me, that's mature of you. Don't face up to anything. Isn't that what your life in this house is all about? Hiding!"

When he got to the entry, he saw her leaning against the other doorjamb, the one leading into the apartment on the other side of the stairs. Only this time it wasn't in that carefree, graceful pose. She was facing the wall, her face turned down, the top of her head in full contact with the wood, her body angling away. Like a goat charging. As if she were trying to push her head into the wall.

"There's maybe something in the cupboard in the kitchen," she said. "Far right, up high in the back corner. The cupboard over the fridge space."

"Which kitchen?"

"Lissy's and my kitchen. The one with the big table."

Don strode down the narrow hall to the kitchen at the back of the house. The top shelf of the cupboard was up high, and because it was over the refrigerator gap, there was no counter under it. Don had to stand on the counter next to the gap and lean over, holding onto the cupboards, and even then he had a hard time reaching in. How did she know what was up here? More to the point, how did she get it here?

He got down and pulled the heavy table over to the counter. It was hard to move and it scraped noisily on the floor. Once he was standing on the table, there was no need for leaning. He could reach right in, could look in.

No wrecking bar. But there were several boxes of nails and screws. The Lowe's price tags were still on them. He got them down, set them on the table, then opened them up. Each one was filled with a confusing assortment of all kinds of hardware, including a lot of old nails and screws that Don had taken out of the walls. What infuriated him, though, was the number of shiny new screws and nails that had obviously been pilfered from his supplies in the parlor.

"Sylvie!" he called.

From the door of the kitchen she answered softly. "It wasn't there?"

"What are these doing here?" he demanded. "What is this?"

She came over, peered in the boxes. "A nail and screw collection?"

He wanted to scream at her, but he kept his voice low. "Is this a joke?"

"I don't know," she said. "Is it funny?"

He held up a bent nail with plaster still clinging to it. "What did you expect to do with this?"

"I thought you threw all of those away," she said.

"You didn't scavenge this and hide it away?" he said sarcastically.

"Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know you don't intend to believe it?" Her face was sullen now. Defeated.

Well, he was pretty near defeated, too. "Sylvie, where's the damn wrecking bar?"

Her answer was a whisper. "I don't know. There are some places I can't see."

"So tell me the places you can't see and I'll look there."

She turned her face to the wall to hide from his wrath. Touched her forehead to the wall. "The old furnace," she whispered.

"I've got to get inside that?"

"Behind it," she said.

"Why couldn't we just have started with this?"

No answer. She just stood there, looking beaten. Well, she had been beaten, hadn't she? Though truth to tell he had no idea what the game had been.

Don clattered his way down the basement stairs. "I don't like wild goose chases," he said, not loudly, because she looked too defeated for him to want to rub it in; but not softly, either, because he was really annoyed.

He hadn't brought a flashlight, and of course the worklight didn't cast anything but black shadow behind the old furnace. He'd have to go back up. But when he turned, there she was, standing on the bottom step, clinging to the two-by-four banister as if it were the only thing standing between her and disaster. He didn't want to go near her right now. If the wrecking bar was behind the furnace he could find it by feel. He stepped into the darkness. And sure enough, the moment he disturbed any of the rubble, he heard the clang of metal on stone. Or stone on metal. Unfortunately, some of the rubble fell on top of it, so he had to do some rummaging, but at last he got the wrecking bar out.

Now he was filthy with clammy dust. Whoever stacked the rubble did a lousy job. It hadn't taken anything at all to dislodge the pile and tumble enough of it down that it was spilling out around the furnace on both sides. The gap at the top must be bigger now, though he couldn't see it in the darkness. One thing for sure: He couldn't ignore the tunnel forever. If he wanted it sealed off, he'd have to remove the rubble and build a proper masonry wall.

Well, that wasn't the job for today. He had the wrecking bar. He was going to take out a wall. And man, would it feel good to hack into the lath and plaster. He was in the mood for some serious hacking.

When she saw him come out with the wrecking bar, Sylvie visibly relaxed. "Oh, good. You found it."

"Why couldn't you just tell me in the first place?"

She turned away and started up the stairs. "I knew you'd accuse me if I helped."

"Or better yet," he said, "why didn't you just leave it where it was?"

She stopped on the stairs, her head hidden now by the ceiling. "I didn't take it. And if I did, I wouldn't have put it there."

"You have better hiding places?"

She sank down and sat glumly on the landing. Now he could see her face again. She looked really upset. "I don't go there."

"Why? It's nothing. The old ladies next door said it was a rum runner's tunnel. They said this place used to be a bordello." He slapped the wrecking bar against the palm of his other hand. It felt good to have it in his hands.

"How interesting," said Sylvie, not sounding interested. "A tunnel. Who would have guessed it."

"Sylvie, what is it with you? Why can't you just say you're sorry you hid my wrecking bar and you won't do it again?"

She looked up at him with anger in her eyes. "When I do something wrong, I say I'm sorry."

In disgust, Don pushed past her to go up the stairs. "Then I guess you must have done this just right." A few steps above her, he stopped and turned. "Aren't you a little old to be playing the bratty little sister?"

"I'm nobody's sister!"

He continued up the stairs. He heard her calling after him. "I'm not your daughter! I'm not your sister! I'm not your anything!"

Time to get rid of the wall separating the stairs from the south parlor. This one had been built earlier than the other dividers in the house. Probably dated from the twenties, from the bordello days. So it wasn't a stud wall, it was as thick as the wall on the other side, with the same kind of molding. And it wouldn't be drywall, it would be lath and plaster. A messy job, but he was already filthy from the dirt behind the furnace.

He swung the wrecking bar and it went deep into the wall. He pulled it away, and laths gave way and chipped out like broken ribs, with plaster dust flying back into his face. He ought to have his safety glasses on, but he was too mad and it felt too good to be tearing at something. He took another swing at a spot about a foot over, but this time the bar rang against thick hard wood. It surprised him, to find a timber only three feet from the end of the wall. Nobody put vertical posts that close together, not even in bearing walls. He moved farther over, swung again, and this time a huge chunk of plaster gave way and shattered onto the floor. The laths behind it were easy now to pry away from the timbers. Sure enough, it looked as though there were heavy timbers every three feet. Ludicrous. What were they thinking?

"What are you doing!" cried Sylvie. She stood in the doorway, panic on her face.

"What does it look like?"

"You can't tear down that wall! It's the... it's the spine of the house!"

"Look, Sylvie, it's a nothing wall. See how the front door is off-center to the house? That's so the load-bearing wall can run right down the middle of the house and hold the floor joists for the second story. This wall isn't holding anything up, it was just added so they could put a door between the entry and this apartment. Or maybe so they could get customers up the stairs to the prostitutes without everybody in the parlor seeing them."

"You're wrong," said Sylvie. "It's holding everything up! If you break that, you'll—you'll paralyze the house, you'll—"

"You ought to give lessons to those loons next door," said Don. His patience was gone. "This is a house, not a person." He tore out another lath.

Sylvie ran over and gripped one of the thick vertical timbers. "Feel this! Can't you feel the tension in it? It's holding up the whole weight of the house. It's trembling under the weight."

"The engineer said the other one was the—"

"He didn't look, he assumed. Like you did." She touched one timber after another; four of them were exposed now, at his shoulder height, so she had to reach up to touch them. "So many of them. Why would they put in so many timbers? Like the masts of the ship. Why would they put them in if they weren't holding up the house?"

She was right. It made no sense. And Jay Placer hadn't actually inspected the walls. He just pronounced the north wall to be the load-bearing one and that was that.

Well, there was one way to be sure. Don walked past her, grabbed a flashlight out of the north parlor, and soon was back down in the basement. This time, though, his attention was to the east. The basement was under the back half of the house; the front half had only a crawlspace, and it wasn't easy finding a place to get over the masonry foundation and up under the front of the house. When he did, he regretted it. This was spiderweb country, and all the crawling things that had lost their homes under the carpets in the old house had apparently moved down here. It would take a couple of showers before he felt clean again. But this was part of the job. You didn't rebuild a house without getting filthy and disgusted.

Once he got to the place, it was obvious. The heavy timbers from the south wall were the ones that came down to stand on a foundation of huge cut stones, a row of masts, just like Sylvie said. A bed of stone like the shoulders of the earth. Whoever built this thing understood the terrible strains he was putting on that way-off-center wall, and he made sure the foundation was up to the task. Eight posts, but not evenly spaced. The first one was set back far enough from the front of the house to allow for the entryway. Then there were four posts, three feet apart. The other four were spaced at a more normal but still extra-sturdy six feet. Then, just before the crawlspace opened up into the basement, the whole load-bearing foundation shifted over to the exact center of the house. Well behind the stairs, Don realized. But back here apparently there was no need for the extra-long and extra-heavy floor joists.

Don crawled back out. Once he was out in the basement, he tried to brush away all the webs on his skin, but he couldn't wipe away that creepy feeling. His own dripping sweat felt like insects crawling on him. Get a grip, he told himself.

On the way back up the stairs Don realized how close he had come to stripping out the backbone of the house. If he had cut through those timbers, the whole thing would have come crashing down around his ears. He should have realized it the moment he saw how closely the timbers were spaced. If he hadn't been so angry, if he hadn't been so eager to sink that black iron tooth into the house, he would have stopped and thought about it and checked it out.

And he would have realized it anyway, eventually. Using the skillsaw, he would have felt the tension in the timbers. Wouldn't he? He would have sensed that these were load-bearing posts.

Or maybe not. The one certain thing was that she had sensed it.

He set the flashlight aside and walked back into the south parlor to retrieve his wrecking bar. She was still there in the room, but in the far southeast corner, sitting small against the bare walls. He said nothing to her. She said nothing to him. He took the wrecking bar out of the room. That was a clear enough message about what he had found.

He pulled his stuff away from the wall that he had thought was load-bearing, pulled his bed out of the way, too. Didn't want plaster dust where he had to sleep. When he had a good fifteen feet clear, he swung at the wall. He still expected lath and plaster. But no, the bar bit into wallboard. And when he had pulled enough of it away, he could see that this false wall had been built a good eight inches away from the stairway. This was what had fooled him and Jay Placer both—it made the wall look as thick as the bearing wall on the other side of the stairs. No, thicker. But why? Since the wall ran right up the stairs, it meant using twice the materials to build this wall as were needed. Why leave the gap?

Because there was something there, that's why. Don got the flashlight again and shone it through the hole he had made. And gasped. Because now he could see the face of the stairway. It was polished walnut, deeply and delicately carved. Pillars about two feet high, stepping up the stringer, and behind them, in deep recesses, beautifully carved classical figures, sculpted to suggest Italian Renaissance paintings. Venus on the half-shell, or whatever it was called. Adam reaching to pull God's finger. All the jokes from college art appreciation class came back to him. Only this was no joke. This was a million-dollar staircase. This was the treasure of the house. And even though some landlord was stupid enough to cover it, at least he wasn't so callous, so barbarian that he let anybody nail directly to this masterwork. He had boxed it in, kept it from being touched. He must have known that someday this house wouldn't be a cut-up rental. Someday it would be a house again, and this stairway would be the walnut jewel in its crown.

There was no more swinging of the wrecking bar. Don worked very carefully, prying away wall-board, pulling out nails. No skillsaw and sledgehammer this time—he took each stud out of the false wall one at a time, then worked his way up the stairs, removing the wall on the other side, which was seated on the steps rather than touching the carved stringer. He should have seen that too, how the banister could not be the original, how the box around the stairwell had been extended inward by four inches, how the cheap molding could not have been the original. Why hadn't he seen it?

Because it was pretty well done, that's why. And he wasn't looking for it. This was where the bearing wall should be, so a bearing wall is what he saw.

But she had known.

"Sylvie," he called. "Sylvie."

He heard her padding across the floor in the other parlor. Coming through the entry. Then she was in the north parlor. He pointed to the beautifully carved stringer. To the polished wooden bench around the walls of the alcove under the stairs. She touched the pillars, looked in at the figures behind them. "You," she said to each one. "You."

She had seen all she could see at her height. "Want a boost to see the rest?" he asked.

She nodded. He knelt down under her, got her sitting on one shoulder, and stood up. She was so light. So small. Like a child. "You," she was saying. "Hiding here all this time." To help her see the last ones, he gripped her thighs and got her standing on his shoulders like an acrobat. Not dangerous, because she was leaning for balance against the stairway. When she said to, he took another step, another step, sidling along in front of the alcove, until she had seen all the carvings. Fourteen-foot ceilings. An extravagance, Don had thought. Useless, meaningless in rooms this size. But now, as he helped Sylvie glide along the stairs until she was bent over enough that he could hoist her down, he began to wonder about the rest of the room. It made no sense, it had never made sense, for the ceilings to be so high down here. This stairway now ruled the room. It was beautiful, but it was also too much for a room this size, just as the ceiling was too high. Nothing else in the house was so badly out of proportion. What was the builder doing?

Sylvie couldn't take her hands off the wood. She walked around under the stairs now, into the alcove. She sat on the wooden bench, slid along it like a child trying out every possible place to sit. Then she swung her legs up onto the seat and gripped her knees.

Exactly the pose that he had seen Cindy take, there on the untouched couch in her living room.

"I dreamed about this place," said Sylvie softly. "And candles everywhere." She reached up and touched the sloping underside of the staircase. Don stepped into the alcove behind her and saw that set into the wide expanse of walnut was a painting, one that could only be seen by someone sitting in the alcove. A double portrait. A man and a woman. Youngish but not young. The style of the painting made it of the era of Gainsborough. Or at least in imitation of that period. Sentimentalized. But Don knew, looking into the eyes of the woman, that it was for love of her that this house was built. And looking at the man, whose eyes were turned to look at the woman, Don knew that he was the builder. "Dr. Bellamy, isn't it?"

"And they left it here," she said. "Even when it was a whorehouse. That was an awful thing to do, to make them watch what their house had become."

"But it would have been worse to tear them out of it," said Don.

"I guess."

"And the whorehouse was upstairs. Down here it was just a speakeasy."

"I wonder if my father loved my mother like that," she said.

"Nobody ever knows the truth about their mother and father. What they really felt. Easier to see Elvis than to know your parents' hearts."

She chuckled. He liked that low chuckle.

She laughed, a cascade of mirth like water over mossy stone. He liked that, too.

"How do you know this stuff?" asked Don.

"What stuff?"

"How did you know that was the bearing wall?"

"Live here long enough, you get a feel for the house," she said.

But that wasn't it. He knew now. The Weird sisters were right. You could get caught by this house. It could hold you. That's why Sylvie was here. The house had her and she couldn't get away. But in return, the house talked to her. The house revealed itself to her. She knew where everything was. She didn't put it there, she just saw it.

I'm falling into their madness, thought Don. I'm getting caught myself, but not by the house.

Then he laughed at himself. "Why am I so certain of my doubt?"

"What?" she said.

"Why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other people's beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our questions. We think our questions are answers."

"We?"

"Me. I. I think that. I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"For thinking you were crazy."

"Don't apologize for that." She smiled wryly.

"For what then?"

"For thinking I was lying."

"I'm sorry."

"You're welcome." She giggled. "Or whatever I'm supposed to say."

Sitting there beside her in the alcove, the painting above their heads, he suddenly wanted her to lean back against him.

Instead she swung her legs off the bench and turned to face him. "I think I am crazy, Don. I think I really am."

He shook his head. "Like that makes you different from the rest of us."

She buried her face in her hands. "You like me now, don't you, Don."

"Yes."

"Because I stopped you from wrecking the house."

"No. I liked you a long time before that. Now is just when I could admit it to myself."

"But you shouldn't," she said. "You shouldn't like me."

"Oh, right. OK. Whatever."

She laughed a little. But maybe it wasn't a laugh.

"If you knew what I did. What I've done. You wouldn't like me."

He could feel it coming. Another confession. Like Cindy's.

"Well then don't tell me," he said. "I don't want to know."

"I don't want to tell you."

"So don't, then! Why do people have to confess things? I'm not a priest! I'm just a guy with an incredibly screwed-up life who's trying to maybe fix it up into something, and every time I turn around somebody's laying their own screwups on me, and I don't want to hear it!"

She was starting to cry. Dammit, he didn't want to make her cry.

"Look, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't believe you before. I'm sorry you've been shut up in this place for—ten years? Why did you stay here for ten years? You had everything going for you. A degree. A job. Providence, right? It was a job you wanted, right?"

She nodded.

"But here you are. What is this, then? Penance? What crime did you commit that was so terrible you should be put away for ten years? In solitary confinement, it's a miracle you didn't go crazy. In this house, prowling around, letting it get under your skin, letting it get into you. What did you do that deserves this?"

In reply, she bent over and buried her face in her hands and wept.

"Your turn now," he whispered. "First me, now you." The family that cries together... what? Dies together? Fries together? Lies together? He shook the thought out of his mind. We're not a family. We're the opposite of a family. We're people so lonely that when we're together we make a black hole of loneliness and everything else gets sucked down into it and is never seen again.

Black hole.

He thought of the tunnel under the house. The one thing she didn't know about. The one place she couldn't see.

15

Tunnel

"Okay, look, I'm not doubting you now," he said quietly. "I think this house does some weird things. OK? And you have this sense of the house, right? Like—what, like it's part of you, right? Or you're part of it."

She nodded.

"But you really didn't know where my wrecking bar was, did you?"

She shook her head.

"The stuff high in that cupboard over the fridge, you knew about that. It sort of washed up there. Washed to shore, so to speak."

She nodded.

"So why couldn't you see behind the furnace?"

No answer. No movement.

He'd have to try another tack. "Why didn't you ever get to that job in Rhode Island? Why didn't you go? You were so close."

Still no answer.

"And you never got your degree. After working on it for so many years."

"Some of us don't suffer from completion anxiety."

Good. She was talking. She was joking a little. "What held you here, Sylvie? There were other people living in this house that last year before the landlord closed it down. I bet some of them even lived here longer than you. They were able to leave. The house didn't hold them. Your roommate, Lissy. She left, right? Got her degree?"

Sylvie shrugged.

"But you stayed."

"I guess I washed up here." She wasn't crying anymore. That was good, too.

"The whole house, you feel it, the shape of it, the strong points, the weak points. All the... moods. Of the house."

"Maybe. I feel things, anyway. Nobody knows everything about anything."

"Why not that tunnel in the basement?"

"I don't like the cellar," she said. "So sue me."

"It's more than that, Sylvie," he said.

"The house wants to be beautiful again. The tunnel doesn't have a thing to do with that."

But it did. He knew that. Whatever was holding her here had something to do with that tunnel. She couldn't go near it, but she couldn't get too far from it, either. He thought of how the tunnel had been closed off. The rocks piled up, yes, but placed lightly, balanced, not a solid barrier, not enough to contain anything large or strong. Just enough to keep from having to see what was down there. Or to keep something down there from seeing in.

"I thought for a while you were getting in and out of the house through that tunnel."

She shook her head. "Please just forget about that. It's nothing."

Forgetting it was the one thing he couldn't do. He was already filthy from plaster, from the dust of the rubble. He might as well do it now. He was going to have to do it eventually. "Look, just stay up here, OK? Nothing down there can hurt you." He got up from the bench and stepped through the newly disarranged piles of his tools until he found the pick.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Like you said, it has nothing to do with you. I'm going to walk the tunnel, see if it's caved in. See if it's a hazard. If it is, I have to seal it off for real."

"It's no hazard."

"Forget about it. It's nothing. Like you said." He grabbed his flashlight and headed down the hall for the cellar stairs.

She ran after him down the hall. "Please," she said. "Leave the tunnel alone."

He didn't pause in his stride. "I have a feeling that tunnel's the most interesting feature of this house."

"It's not. It's just damp and dirty."

"So you have been down there." He jogged down the basement stairs.

"Yes. But I stopped going because it isn't safe, it could cave in on you."

Don reached up and switched on the basement worklight. "Fess up, Sylvie. What are you hiding down there? You keep your stash down there?"

He meant it as a joke, but she wasn't laughing. "There's nothing down there that belongs to me," she said.

"Then stand back and watch the rubble fly."

Now, with a light, he could see how much the barrier had collapsed from his previous foray here, searching for the wrecking bar. The gap at the top was now several feet high. He could crawl over. But he didn't want to do that. He'd have to clear the rubble away to seal up the gap or to open it permanently. Either way, the job needed doing.

He set to work with the pick. Mostly he just used it like a scraper, drawing the stones away from behind the furnace. As he cleared them away, more fell from the barrier. "Look at this," he said. "Easy. Not much of a barrier at all."

He turned to face her. She stood half-hiding behind the furnace.

"Flimsy," he said. "Like it was built by somebody little and not very strong."

Finally it had collapsed as much as it was going to. Then the work got tedious and slow as he bent over and picked up the stones and pitched them or hiked them across the cellar out of the way. Sylvie backed out of range. He was vaguely aware of her waiting by the stairs.

By the time the job was done, his back was aching from holding that bent-over pose. But the door into the tunnel was clear. Taking up the flashlight, he took a couple of steps into the tunnel.

"Wait!" Sylvie called from behind him.

He turned back, found her standing between the furnace and the foundation.

"I'm begging," she said. "Don't go." She looked almost frantic, and yet she spoke quietly.

"Tell me why not," he said.

"Because I like you."

"What, there's something terrible down there?"

"Yes."

"Some kind of monster?" He said it mockingly. "I'm not much afraid of a monster that couldn't get through that barricade."

"There's no monster now."

His patience was wearing thin. "Stop the mysteries and tell me!"

Sylvie started crying and leaned against the furnace, her head bowed.

This again, thought Don, too tired now to be sympathetic.

"I'm going, OK? I'll be fine."

"I know you'll be fine," she said, trying to control her crying. "My roommate's down there, all right? Lissy's down there."

If there was one thing Don didn't expect, it was that. And yet it fit. Why she couldn't leave. Why she hated the tunnel. "I don't think you mean she's living there."

"She was cheating," said Sylvie. "She spent all her time that last semester with her stupid boyfriend, she was going to flunk out. So she started stealing my work and copying it to write papers for her own classes. If she got caught we'd both be kicked out! Nobody would believe I wasn't helping her cheat."

"You killed her for cheating?"

"I didn't mean to!" Sylvie turned to face him. "You think I'd plan something like that? She was always in the tunnel. Our apartment was the only one with access to the basement. So she did keep her stash there, her stash, I never used that stuff. But she had pot, sometimes coke, and she and her boyfriend would go down there to get high and... so I knew where she was. I was just going to talk to her. Lay it on the line. She had to stop or I was going to the dean with it."

Sylvie didn't like to go down the tunnel when she knew Lissy was there, mostly because she could never be sure Lanny wasn't there too. He often came up the tunnel the other way to join Lissy there, so Sylvie had no way of knowing if they were together or not. That was a scene she didn't want to walk in on. Sex didn't bother her, or even the idea of seeing people doing it—you don't go to college for this many years without getting an eyeful now and then. What she didn't like was to see Lanny and Lissy doing it. She'd heard it often enough in the next bedroom. Lissy was a squealer and Lanny was a grunter. It sounded like a pig farm and it nauseated her. She couldn't shake the memory of Grandpa's pig farm, back when she still had family. She stood on the second rail from the top, with her daddy holding her up to make sure she didn't fall into or out of the sty. She must have been all of four years old. The pigs were all bigger than her. Like elephants, that's how they seemed. Huge fat muddy pink backs lurching and trotting around in the mud, muzzling the trough, making hideous noises, grunts and squeals. And there was Papaw, teasing her by telling her not to fall in, those pigs would be just as happy to eat little girl as slops. In memory she knew he meant well enough. He'd forgotten the terrors of childhood, the credulity. But at the time she had no perspective. She believed in the danger, and for weeks after that she had nightmares about the pigs looming and grunting over her. They'd be trotting past, back and forth, and then all of a sudden one would notice her and start to squeal. Mud sharks, that's what pigs seemed like to her. So the sounds she heard from Lissy and Lanny, they weren't erotic, they were disgusting and, when she admitted it to herself, terrifying.

But tonight was the last straw. Lissy wasn't even bothering to paraphrase now. She had taken Sylvie's old paper on the system of filing active documents during World War II—her senior thesis, for heaven's sake—and turned it in for a history class. She probably thought it was safe because Sylvie was in library science, not history, but there was a history professor on her evaluating committee and the paper was on an eccentric enough topic that it would be remembered. She had to find out if Lissy had already turned the paper in. If she had, then she had to withdraw it. If she hadn't, then she could take the incomplete and write another. That was it. There would be no compromise, no sweet-talking, no tears that could soften the hardest heart. It's not my heart that's hard, anyway, thought Sylvie. It's hers. Having no concern for what she's doing to me, the risks she's making me take against my will. My whole future down the toilet. She can marry Lanny, but my career is all I've got. My education and my career.

Midway down the tunnel, in the level stretch, Lissy had her candles lit, four of them, perched up on the two stone walls that lined the tunnel. She was alone, lying on a dirty old mattress, wearing only a t-shirt. Hadn't she worn more than this to come down here? But there were no other clothes visible. The things Lissy did when she was high.

"You missed the party," said Lissy. She started to laugh.

Don listened to the story, liking Lissy less and less—but how else could Sylvie tell the story? Turn the girl into a saint or something? Still, he believed her. Believed her, but also hated hearing the tale. He didn't need another dark story wrenched out of somebody's humid conscience.

"I confronted her about cheating," Sylvie said. "About how she had no right to put my whole life at risk, everything I worked for... I got emotional. That never worked with her, but I couldn't help it."

"Lighten up, Sylvie," Lissy said lazily. "You take it all too seriously." She settled back down on the mattress as if she meant to go to sleep.

Sylvie was used to Lissy's selfishness. It used to be that was part of her charm. Her unconcern, her childlike innocence of the complicated moral questions that plagued more responsible people—Sylvie used to admire it, back before they lived together. Used to laugh with Lissy about some fretful teacher or heartbroken ex-boyfriend. "Why do they have to get so intense?" Lissy would always ask.

Well, now Sylvie knew. They got intense because Lissy was so destructive. She wasn't childlike, she was devilish. Because she knew exactly what she was doing. She enjoyed it. Sylvie understood that now. Lissy had used Sylvie's senior thesis, not because she didn't know the harm it could cause, but because she did know. She liked the risk. She loved dragging Sylvie into it.

"You've got to live more on the edge," that's what Lissy always said. But Lissy herself, she never seemed to get near the edge. She lived on other people's edges. And when they fell off, she'd admire how pretty they looked as they fell.

So Sylvie lost it. She'd spent her life being quiet and well-mannered. She had to, with no parents to look out for her. If she pushed people, they slapped her down. But if she was quiet and endured all things patiently, yes, they took advantage of her, but they also tolerated her. Didn't throw her out. Let her stay in places where they didn't really want her. That strategy had suited her fine, for many years, until Lissy. Quiet endurance was over.

Sylvie had slid down the furnace and was sitting on the floor, her toes pressed against the basement wall. She didn't look at Don as she told her story.

"I screamed at her and finally she sobered up enough to scream back at me and one thing came to another."

"It always does," said Don. But the truth was it didn't always. As Sylvie talked about reaching the end of her rope, Don wondered: Why hadn't he ever reached the end of his? Sure, yesterday he had broken down and cried, but when did he ever just lose it and start screaming? Maybe if he'd gone a little crazy, he could have broken through the barriers that kept him from justice.

Of course, look what "losing it" did for Sylvie.

"She accused me of the most terrible things," said Sylvie. "She called me everything, she said no wonder my mother died, no wonder my father died, anything was better than living with me. She wasn't my friend anymore, you know? She wasn't even human. Her face all twisted up, screwed up, her mouth open, her teeth like—it was like the monkey island at the zoo. An animal. She didn't justify herself, she didn't argue, she just went on the attack, saying I was worthless and boring and nobody liked me till she took me on as a project, to try to prove that there was nobody so lame and hopeless that she couldn't bring them out and give them a life. I tried to scream back at her about how she wasn't giving me a life, she was taking it away, but she never heard me. She wouldn't shut up and listen at all, and I admit it, I was an animal too. We were both animals right then. And there was a loose stone. Lots of loose stones. I just wanted to shut her up, to hurt her. But I'd never hit anyone before. In my whole life, Don. Never hit anybody. And I'm not very strong. So I didn't know how hard to hit. I just swung with all my might. The rock hit her in the side of her head."

"Bet it shut her right up," said Don.

Sylvie nodded. "You see people get knocked out on TV all the time. They go unconscious and then they get up and in the next scene they aren't even groggy."

"I take it she wasn't groggy, either."

"I shook her and shook her and she didn't wake up. It was terrible, what she'd been doing to me, the things she said to me, but she didn't deserve to die."

"You're sure you killed her?"

"There was so much blood."

"There always is, from head injuries. But it's usually just from the skin."

"You think I didn't try to feel her breath? Her pulse? I screamed at her, I slapped her, I got her blood all over me trying to wake her up and nothing worked. And then it finally dawned on me what I had done. My life was over, too. I couldn't live with it. Don't you see?"

"No, I don't. Why wasn't there an investigation when she disappeared? Why weren't you arrested?"

"Nobody knew. She didn't have any family, either. Just like me. And her boyfriend, Lanny—he never came back. Can you believe it? What a jerk. She disappears and he doesn't even look for her. Doesn't even ask."

"And you never left this place."

"The landlord gave up on the house that summer. It stood empty. What could I do? Go out and live my life as if I hadn't committed murder? Take the job? I didn't have the heart for it. I couldn't even go pick up my diploma. I already defended my dissertation. I was done. But I couldn't bear to go out there and... be alive. When I had killed her."

"So you stayed there by her body? You checked her? You buried her in the tunnel?"

She looked horrified. "Of course I didn't," she said. "When I knew she was dead I ran out of the tunnel. I... put up that barricade. From stones near the entrance. I was crying the whole time, it kept collapsing, I kept piling it up. And then suddenly the stones started staying where I put them. Balancing themselves. The house was helping me, you see. Because now I belonged to the house. I was never going to leave."

"So how do you know she didn't wake up two hours later and go out the back way?"

"She was dead, Don!"

"That would explain why the boyfriend never came back. She went and met him and told him how you were going to turn her in for cheating and they split."

"It didn't happen that way. I wish it had!"

"But how do you know it didn't happen?"

Sylvie looked at him, horrified at a possibility she had never considered. "She had to be dead. I had hit her so hard."

"Like you said. You never hit anybody before. You're not very big. Getting blood from somebody's scalp is easy. Killing them isn't." Don knelt in front of her. "She isn't down that tunnel, Sylvie. She's out there, alive. For ten years she's been out there having a life and you've been in here doing penance for a murder that never happened."

"She is dead! How would you know anything! You weren't there!"

"But I'm here now," he said. "And I'm going to go down that tunnel and see for myself."

She started to cry again. "She haunts me, don't you get it? When I sleep, I dream of her coming for me, dragging me down in the tunnel, strangling me. I wake up, I can't breathe, because she's come to get even with me."

"She doesn't haunt you, Sylvie, you haunt yourself. You're doing all this to yourself." He picked up the flashlight and started down the tunnel.

It felt old to him. Dank, heavy, cool. No, cold. It had been sturdily built. The stones formed into walls on the left and right weren't structural, they were more like a retaining wall to keep the sides of the tunnel from eroding when it rained. The real structure was wood as thick as railroad ties, vertical posts every four feet or so, bridged by wood the same thickness, and then the whole tunnel spanned by more railroad-tie-sized beams forming a continuous ceiling. This was a lot more tunnel than any rum runners would need, he thought. Like the house, it was built to last forever. But why would Dr. Bellamy need a passage like this? It made no sense.

He could hear Sylvie behind him. She was coming down the tunnel after all. Well, good. She should see for herself. If Lissy had really died, there would have been an investigation. Policemen would have come to the house, asking Sylvie questions. Since that never happened, Lissy didn't disappear. It was Sylvie who disappeared, hiding out for years. But no one came looking for her because the diploma really doesn't matter. In fact they probably mailed it to her. They probably thought she was off in Providence, Rhode Island, starting her new job. Maybe some professor was a little hurt that she never wrote to him. Maybe at some professional conference, years later, somebody from UNCG met somebody from Providence and asked how Sylvie was working out and found out that Sylvie had never shown up for the job. But by then where would he start looking? The house where she used to live was boarded up. She had no family to write to. And in the end there was no reason for anyone to search for her.

She sacrificed her life for nothing.

The tunnel had sloped downward rather steeply, but now it began to level out.

"Don, please!" she called from behind him.

He stopped to wait for her. "Come with me if you want," he said. "Or not. But I think it's about time you faced what you did. Or what you didn't do."

She came into view, stumbling in the darkness. "Don't project your own problems onto me. You're the one who's eating himself alive with guilt over what he didn't do. You didn't get your daughter away from your ex-wife legally, and you didn't kidnap her in time, either."

Lissy wasn't the only one who went for the jugular. "Don't talk about things you don't know anything about."

"It's you who needs to face the fact that you couldn't help what happened, you didn't do anything wrong. Not me! I killed her!"

"I haven't seen a body anywhere down here," said Don. He turned away and continued down the tunnel. Four candles up on the stone retaining walls, right? That's what he was looking for now.

And there they were. The flashlight beam found the burnt-out stub of a candle, and a quick pass of the light showed the other three candles. For a moment he couldn't bring himself to point the flashlight downward, or even to look down in the spilled light. For all his bravado, he wasn't at all sure what he'd find.

Then he looked. And now he was sure. There was the mattress lying on the packed dirt, and on the mattress was a desiccated body, skin like parchment, lying on its back, rictus smile staring upward.

"Oh," he said.

He heard Sylvie coming up behind him, picking her way through the darkness again. He moved the flashlight away from the body.

"Sylvie, I was wrong," he said. "She's here. You don't want to look."

"After all these years, I've come this far. It's time. Show me."

How could he have doubted her? She said she knew what death was. And she was right. He was the one who had never faced death. It happened at a distance for him. It happened on the TV news. She had held death in her hands.

Even in the darkness, she knew where to look. He turned from her and shone the flashlight onto the corpse.

"Listen, Sylvie," he said. "Whatever you did, you've been paying for it, don't you see? Trapped in this house. It wasn't first-degree murder, it was in a rage, I'm no lawyer but it was probably only manslaughter, you would have been out of prison before now."

She didn't say anything, just panted. Then groaned, a sound torn from the depth of her soul. Was she all right? He turned the flashlight from the body on the mattress to Sylvie's face. It wasn't grief or guilt that he saw there. It was horror. As if she were seeing this scene for the first time. She pointed at the corpse.

"What is it?" Don said. "She can't hurt you now, Sylvie."

"What she's wearing," said Sylvie, her voice weak. "Look what she's wearing."

Don shone the flashlight back on the body. He looked closely this time. The clothing was dark with tunnel grime, but as he stepped closer he could see that it wasn't the t-shirt Sylvie had described. It was a dress. A faded blue dress. He turned the flashlight back on Sylvie. She was plucking at her skirt like a little girl. The identical skirt.

"Same dress," said Don stupidly, trying to make sense of it.

"That's not Lissy," said Sylvie.

She sank down against the stone wall.

"It's me," she whispered.

16

Ballroom

It took Don a moment to realize what she was saying. "How could it be you?" he said lamely.

"I thought it was a dream," she said. She was shaking, leaning against the stone wall of the tunnel. The flashlight in his hand made her look like she was on stage, with a tight but feeble spotlight picking her out of the darkness. "I dreamed I came back down the tunnel and I was shaking her again, trying to wake her even though I knew she was dead, and then her hands... shot up and took me by the throat and I tried to apologize, I said I was sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to hurt her, but then I couldn't breathe and it hurt and I kept thinking, any time now I'll wake up, any time."

"She strangled you."

"Her face. So hateful. I thought it was what I deserved. I thought it was her ghost, haunting me. I've dreamed it a thousand times since then. I thought I was dreaming then. Because. Because it all went black, and then I woke up and it was dark because the candles had burnt out but I tripped over a body, lying on the mattress, a body right where I had left her body, I tripped over my body." She turned and looked over toward the corpse on the mattress. "Show me," she whispered. He turned the light toward the body. She crawled over. Touched it. Touched the parchment skin of the bare leg. Touched the damp rotting fabric of the dress. Then touched her own dress, the same dress, but not rotting.

"How can a..." How could he ask her this?

Her head sank. She didn't look at him.

"How can a ghost trip over a dead body."

She shook her head.

"You touched me. I touched you." He reached out to prove it to her.

"No!" she cried, recoiling from him, scurrying back to the wall.

"You're real," he insisted.

She cried again.

He reached out to touch her and this time she endured it. And yes, there was resistance, he could feel the skin of her arm.

And then he couldn't.

And then he could, but his finger was about a half-inch deep in her arm. He cried out in horror and pulled his hand away. She raised her face to look at him. "The house," she said. "I've got to get back inside the house."

"No, you've got to get away from this house."

"We're not in the house," she said. "Shine the light, show me the way back. I'm losing it."

He shone the light up the tunnel toward the basement. Sylvie got up. Too far up—she rose from the ground and drifted. She wailed in fear.

"My hand," he said. "Take my hand."

"I'm not here, Don! I'm not real, I can't—"

"You are real," he said. "You're Sylvie Delaney and you live in the old Bellamy house. In that new room, you've touched the walls of that room. You hid in the closet that I built and..."

And he felt her hand in his. He didn't look. He simply led her up the tunnel. He didn't want to see if she was walking or floating or if there was anything of her but that hand. That living hand.

They came out into the rubble-strewn basement and now he could hear her footsteps. He turned around and faced her. "You're all right," he said.

"I'm inside the house again."

"It sustains you."

"The stronger the house is," she said, "the realer I am."

"So if you know that," he said, "how could you not have known it was your body down there? That you were—Sylvie, you're dead. How could you not know?"

"I was still here, that's why I didn't know. The house held on to me." She walked toward the stairs. "But there were times when I felt... soft. Unreal. Puncturable." She walked up the stairs. Her hand was so solid on the two-by-four banister. He couldn't help it, he had to reach out and touch her again. She stopped walking. Stopped and waited, his hand touching hers.

"Sorry," he said, thinking she was offended.

"Oh, no, please," she said. "Oh, please, you're so warm. Don't let go." She burst into tears again and turned to face him, almost fell into his arms. He gathered her into an embrace; she wept against his shoulder. Her tears soaked through his shirt. How could she not be real? He got one arm under her legs, lifted her, carried her carefully up the stairs.

"Take me to the nook under the stairs," she said. "The heart of the house."

So once again they sat on the bench, with the portrait of the Bellamys looking down at them. She would not let go of his hand. "She left me there, Don."

"It explains why you never had any inquiries about her death."

"But what about my death?"

"She must have told them something. That you left. Went home. Went on to that job in Providence."

"When I thought I killed her, it destroyed me."

"Maybe it destroyed her, too," said Don.

"Now I know why I couldn't leave the house," she said. "I tried, early on. When they were closing it all down. I hid from them but then when they left I tried to leave. I'd get out onto the porch. Or out in back. And I'd get so faint."

"Faint?"

"I mean like I was going to faint. Light-headed. It frightened me. I thought it was my guilt holding me. I couldn't face the world. I had no right to be out there if Lissy couldn't go too. But she did go. So I did have the right."

"But the house held you."

"Held me, but it also kept me alive. Without the house I'd just be... gone. I think I was going anyway. All those years when the house was weakening. I was weakening too. Till you came. The sound of you walking through the house. As if it woke me from a long sleep. I was in the attic, listening to you talking to that guy and that woman. And she left because the dust was getting to her. Talking about how strong the house was. And how you could fix it up again. You don't know how that... it filled the house with hope. Me with hope."

"So you were there," he said.

"But maybe I wasn't even... visible? Maybe I was... sometimes I felt like I was the house. Like the timbers and beams, they were my bones, and the outside walls were my skin, and this place, this invisible place was my heart, beating, beating. Can't you feel the pulse here?"

He reached over and laid his fingers against her throat. The pulse was pounding there. "A ghost can't pump blood like that."

"Imitation of life," she said. "Mimesis. That's all I am. Plato said we were all shadows. Me more than most."

"Not as long as you stay here."

"Now when you sell the house, do I have to leave?" She laughed, but it quickly turned to crying again. Again he held her, his arm around her shoulders, her face turned in to his chest. "I've really screwed things up now. You can't sell a haunted house, Don."

"You think I care about that?"

"Yes."

"Sure, yes," he said. "But not as much as the fact that your body is down there. And she got away with it."

"I think I always knew," she said. "I knew I was dead. My life was over. I knew I wasn't hungry. I kept thinking, sometime along about now I ought to get something to eat, I'm going to die if I don't, and then I just never... I never even got thirsty. You think I didn't wonder about that? But then I'd think, Don't think about it, you'll just make it worse if you think about it. So I didn't. I'd sleep. Inside the bones of the house. I hid from it. Because if I knew the truth, then I'd fade. If I knew I was a ghost, I'd start having to live like one. Invisible. Going through walls. Appearing and disappearing."

"But you did that anyway."

"But I didn't know. I could still believe. And now I can't."

"Yes you can. You are real. How else could I know you if you weren't real?"

She looked up into his eyes. "That's true," she said. "You aren't by any chance dead yourself, are you?"

"Despite my fondest wish on many a dark night, no, I'm not dead."

"Maybe the house kept me here so there'd be someone living in it. Maybe it kept me alive so I could keep it alive."

Don reached up and touched Dr. Bellamy's face.

"OK, buddy, what did you put in this house? What's the plan?"

"It won't answer," she said. "It doesn't talk. It doesn't think. It just is."

"It's been keeping you alive all these years, trapped here, for a reason."

"Reason," she said scornfully.

"Purpose," he said. "I'm not saying it's rational, but maybe if we could figure out what the house wants, it would let you go."

"It isn't a letting-go kind of place," she said.

"So you'd rather stay here? What if you're supposed to be in heaven?"

"Don't be silly," she said. "God's forgotten me, if he ever knew I was here."

"Maybe you're the lost sheep, and he's out looking for you."

"Maybe you're the one he sent to find me." She giggled.

"The repairs I made," he said. "The room upstairs. The house didn't want me to do that. But when I finished, it made the house stronger, didn't it? It made you more real and solid, didn't it?"

She got up, took a few short steps out into the room. "I took a shower, Don! I felt the water against my body! I washed. And that Coke you brought me, I tasted it. Oh, Don, I felt it in my mouth, fizzing. I felt the sheets of the bed you moved for me. I ate that pizza. A bite of it, anyway. I chewed it. The cheese was stringy, Don. How would I feel that if I'm not alive?"

She turned around slowly, around and around.

"How would I dance here in this room if I weren't real?" She closed her eyes, her face upturned, spinning slowly. "O house, big old house, why did you keep me alive? Why didn't you let me go?"

He saw her turning and turning, and he imagined seeing her by candlelight, reflected in mirrors between the windows. A very clear picture. Why would he imagine something like that? Then it suddenly came to him, the reason why this house was shaped so oddly.

"It's a ballroom," he said.

"What?"

"This room. Look. It isn't a parlor. It never was."

"But it's too small."

"No," he said. He ran to the back wall of the room, thumped it with his hand. "It's plaster," he said. "But that doesn't prove anything. When it was a speakeasy, they didn't need the ballroom. They needed more walls, more private rooms. The two bedrooms—they're both part of this. That narrow hall, it's part of the ballroom."

She walked over to join him. She touched the wall. "When I read about the Bellamys, back in college, when I read about them they were having dances all the time. They had ball after ball. It's what they did. Dancing."

Of course. It was dancing that they loved. It was for dancing that the house was built. "The wall's not tied to the house, is it? Nothing's resting on this wall."

She leaned her head against it. "You're right," she said. "It's just... it's nothing. This wall is in the way."

"And the next one? Between the bedrooms?"

They went down the hall, verifying that the bedroom walls were add-ins, just like the north wall of the passage. But the south wall was real, as was the wall between the kitchen and the back bedroom.

"It was a huge room," said Don.

"He built it for her," said Sylvie. "Can't you feel it? She loved to dance, and he built her a dancing place."

"Well, now we know," he said. "Why the house is so off-center. I can't believe I'm worrying about that right now, though. I mean—what does it matter? After what happened to you?"

"But I'm tied to the house," she said. "Now that I'm facing the truth, I might start fading. So the house needs to be stronger."

"If you want to stay," said Don. "The Weird sisters next door, they kept telling me to let the house go. Leave it alone or tear it down. What if they were trying to set you free?"

"Free?" said Sylvie. "I don't want to be free, Don, I want to be alive!"

"But I can't do that."

"Yes you can," she said. "The stronger the house, the realer I get. Tear out these walls, Don. Please."

He studied her face. Her body. Incredible that this might be only spirit. He reached out and touched her again. Her cheek. She brought up her hand and held his.

"Let me dance in this room," she said. "Make me real."

He let go of her and went in search of his wrecking bar.

It took until well after dark. Past midnight, into the small of the morning. Tearing down huge chunks of plaster, then prying out every lath. Then the skillsaw through the timbers—though these were nothing like as heavy as the great masts of that bearing wall beside the stairs. The sledgehammer blows shivered him to the shoulders, to the spine, but the timbers came free of the ceiling, came up from the floor, and he hauled it all outside, a huge pile of junk out by the curb.

Still he wasn't done. He gathered up all his tools, his boxes of supplies, his suitcases, his cot, and moved them all into the south parlor. The real parlor. So nothing was left on the floor but the fragments of plaster and a few eight-penny nails from the laths.

And still there was a job to do. He found his broom and swept the whole floor, it felt like acres of wood, but he swept it all till it was clean.

Only one more job. He found all the nailholes where the new walls had been fastened down to the polished wooden ballroom floor, then filled them with putty and sanded them smooth. It was three in the morning. He was exhausted. He turned to her, there in the alcove, where she had sat as she watched the whole job, her eyes shining.

"How's that?" he asked.

In reply she smiled at him. "Aren't you going to ask me to dance?"

He laughed. "I'm a sack of sweat right now. I must have chalkdust sticking to me all over."

"It just makes you all the more real."

"I'm not the one who felt unreal," he said. But the moment he said it, he wasn't altogether sure it was true. How real had he been, before he found this house?

He walked over to her and held out a filthy hand. "Miss Sylvie Delaney would you be so kind?"

"I think it's a waltz," she said.

"Could well be."

"I'd love to waltz with you."

He pulled her up from the bench. Her hand was solid in his. So was her delicate hand resting lightly on his shoulder, her girlish waist under his hand. He pressed with the heel of his right hand, to let her feel which way they were going, and she followed his lead. One-two-three.

"We need music," she said.

"So sing," he said.

She began to hum, then to sing wordless tunes. He recognized them. The Emperor Waltz. Blue Danube. And others that he didn't know. They danced around and around. He should have been too tired to dance. Or maybe he was only just now as tired as he needed to be, to forget his exhaustion and go on dancing and dancing.

And in his mind, in his weariness, he began to hear, not Sylvie's voice, but an orchestra. And to see, not the light from the worklamp, but the light of a hundred candles in sconces on the walls, in three great chandeliers overhead. Around and around the room, great sweeps of movement, and Sylvie's dress swayed as if there were a bustle under it, exaggerating the movements of the dance. So did all the other dresses in the room, all the men in tails, whirling, whirling. No faces, Don couldn't see any faces because everything was moving so fast; nor could he see the musicians, though he caught the movement of a bow, the flash of light on a trombone slide every time he passed the bandstand against the wall separating the ballroom from the serving room. Servants moved in and out of that room with drinks on trays, hors d'oeuvres on platters. Onlookers smiled and laughed, and Don wasn't just imagining it, they did look up whenever he and Sylvie danced past them. Thank you for this party, they were saying with their silent eyes. Thank you for inviting us. For the lights, the food, the champagne, the music, and above all the grace of the dancers, skittering over the floor as lightly as the crisp leaves of autumn, around and around, caught in a whirlwind, making a whirlwind, churning all the air of the world...

And then they clung to each other, no longer dancing. The room still turned dizzily around them, but then even that held still. The music was over. The orchestra had disappeared, and all the onlookers, and the other dancers. Only Sylvie and Don remained, holding each other in the middle of the room. Don looked at the windows and saw that a gray light was now showing.

"We danced until dawn," he said.

She said nothing. He looked down at her and saw tears in her eyes. "They danced again in their house tonight," she said.

"And the house is strong," he said.

She nodded. "It's the Bellamy house again. It has the right shape for its real name."

"And you," he said. "You're strong, too." Her face so ethereal, her skin so pure, so translucent. Her lips still caught in the memory of a smile. He bent and kissed her lightly. She laughed, a low chuckle deep in her throat.

"I felt that," she said.

He kissed her again.

"I felt it to my toes," she whispered.

He wrapped his arms around her, picked her up, spun around and around. Her legs swung away from his body. Like a child, around and around, flying. Then he carried her to the threshold of the front door. Reached down and opened it.

"Don," she said.

"This is the only test that matters, Sylvie," he said.

"No, it's the one that doesn't matter."

"If you can leave, then you're alive," he said.

"Isn't it enough that I'm alive inside?"

"No," he said. "It's enough for me, but it's not enough for you. Unless I can give you back what Lissy took from you."

"You can't," she said. "Put me down, Don."

"Flesh and bone," he said. "Heart's blood and mind's eye."

"Oh, Don," she said. "Is it true?"

In answer, he opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. It wasn't true dawn yet. Just the faintest of the early light. No lights shone in the neighborhood except the streetlights, and they were shrouded in the morning mist. Don stepped down, one, two, three steps. Onto the mown weeds of the yard. Out toward the junkpile, out toward the street. She clung around his neck.

And then she didn't.

There was nothing in his arms.

"Sylvie!" he cried out.

Almost he let his arms drop, because he couldn't see her. But he knew: If she was anywhere, she was here, in his arms. He had to get back to the house. "Sylvie, hold on to me! Hold on!" He ran back.

"Don!" he heard her call. As if from a distance.

He looked and couldn't see her. Not in his arms, not anywhere.

"Don, wait!"

He retraced his steps, felt with his arms. Brushed against something. Nothing he could see, but something. "Hold on to me," he said.

"Slow," she whispered. It sounded like her voice was in his ear. "Slow."

Trying to gather her like wind, he walked backward, slowly, toward the house. And the closer he got, the more he could feel her. Her hands, clawing at his sleeves, her feet dragging in the weeds. Now he could get his arms around her. Could hold her. Draw her along, then get his arms under her, lift her up again, carry her up the stairs. He could do that, he did it, he brought her to the front door and took her inside and closed the door and then they collapsed on the floor, exhausted, clinging to each other, crying, laughing in relief.

"I thought I lost you," he said.

"I thought I was lost," she said.

"The house can't make you real except inside."

"That's enough for me," she said.

"Not for me," he said. "Not while she's alive."

"Who, Lissy?"

"She killed you with her bare hands. Not just one blow struck in anger. It takes a long time to strangle somebody to death, five minutes of tightly gripping your throat. She could have stopped any time, Sylvie. But she never stopped. She hung on even after you were unconscious. She hung on till she knew you were dead."

"So what can we do about it?" she said. "We have this house."

"I want you to have your life back."

"How?"

"I don't know," he said. "But I know who might, if anyone does." He got up and walked to the door.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Next door," he said. "The Weird sisters." He turned away, started through the door, then stopped, turned back inside.

"Please," he said. "Be here when I get back."

"Cross my heart," she said.