Three Story House: A Novel (34 page)

As old as Isobel got, she never understood her mother’s decision to leave. That day, after the sound of the cab’s engine blended into the noise of the main street, she sat down in the gravel, unable to make herself return to the house. Her father, similarly broken, stayed on the porch crying. Isobel wished she could cry, but the emotion inside of her refused to break the surface. Instead she spoke about the shark’s fin. Her words carried over the empty yard and bounced off the trees that lined the property. Around her, she felt Lizzie and Elyse picking up pieces of the envelope she’d torn and scattered. Their bodies moving close to hers, but leaving enough space so that she didn’t feel the need to run.

She didn’t know how long she sat in the gravel. When she was done talking about the shark, she’d started piling up the stones—seeing how many bits of rock she could stack on top of one another before they fell over. Her father stopped crying and went inside the house. From behind her she felt her cousins approach, their tread soft in the gravel. They reached down in a way that felt choreographed and linked their arms through hers, lifting her in one motion from the ground. For a moment she felt weightless. Then her feet touched the ground and several of the rock towers fell over. Those that didn’t topple she kicked at and then smoothed her toe over the gravel until all the signs of a disturbance were leveled.

“We’re going down to the beach,” Lizzie said.

“Thought you should come with us,” Elyse added.

For the first time Isobel could remember, the parking lot at the beach was empty. Large handwritten signs explained that the area had been closed due to shark sightings. There were a handful of other people on the beach—most of them had binoculars and were scanning the water for signs of the shark. Every ten minutes or so, the lifeguards played a prerecorded message reminding people to stay out of the water. The cousins laid out their towels and settled in. They exchanged little conversation—passing sun block when asked or offering the headphones when a favorite song played. The sun began to set and Isobel sat up watching its slow descent. The beach emptied, with the last lifeguard telling them to keep out of the water before he packed up and left.

When they were alone on the beach, Lizzie put down the book she’d been reading. “Feel like talking?”

“We could go for a swim,” Elyse said. “I always feel better when I’m weightless—like all the stuff I’m worried about drifts off and leaves me alone.”

As an answer, Isobel stood and took off the hoodie she’d been wearing over her suit and walked toward the water. Her cousins followed. They knew, without speaking of it, that they would be safe in the water—that after what had happened back at the house, there could be no more tragedy in their life. In the water, Isobel floated on her back and talked at the stars about her mother, about what she’d seen over the last few years and about what it meant now that she was gone. Her cousins listened and whatever she said, they agreed with her.

I
’ve never understood Columbus Day,” Isobel said, staring at the enormous stack of pancakes in the middle of the table. For once everyone had the day off and Elyse had insisted on starting the day with a proper feast. “What exactly are we celebrating? It’s not like he really discovered America. I mean, the people who were here, they knew it existed, right?”

T. J. nodded. “It’s no stranger than Labor Day. If you ask me, people need a day off from work every now and then. Makes the job a little sweeter. Without good ol’ Columbus and his three ships, we’d be staring at a long stretch of uninterrupted work days.”

“Gift horse, mouth,” Elyse said, setting the last of her cooking mess in the sink.

“I can’t eat another bite,” Lizzie said, pushing her plate away.

The half-finished kitchen made Isobel feel like she had an itch she couldn’t scratch. In the last few weeks, she and T. J. had inspected the house from top to bottom looking for weaknesses that Benny had overlooked or covered up. The production crew had gathered enough material for the sizzle reel and retreated to the warmth of Los Angeles.

Elyse took an envelope from her pocket and slid it over to Lizzie. “There’s nearly a thousand for the cookbooks,” she said, gesturing to the empty shelves on the baker’s rack. “The library is going to have me do some demonstrations next weekend with the waffle iron and talk about a few other historic ingredients.”

“Good for you,” Isobel said, marveling at how much growth her cousin had shown in the last few weeks. She wasn’t sure what Landon had said to her, but whatever it was had given her the closure she’d been looking for.

“Maybe you should think about starting that ice cream and pie shop,” Lizzie said, pocketing the envelope.

“How about you?” Isobel asked, looking at the dark circles under Lizzie’s eyes. “How are you?” She and Elyse had expressed concern about Lizzie to each other in the weeks since Benny’s firing and the discovery of the damage he’d done to the house. Lizzie had grown increasingly erratic in her behavior. She blamed it on the impending arrival of her parents, whom she refused to speak to on the phone, and on worries about money.

Despite this undercurrent of tumult, none of them spoke directly about what Benny had done, how Isobel had fired him, or about Lizzie’s obvious distress. It was one of the benefits of being around people you’d known your whole life. With her cousins, she didn’t need to provide context or background for her actions. They understood the unspoken and were able to act without being asked, like trapeze artists. The moment one of them went sailing into the open abyss, the other two were present with either outstretched arms or a safety net. Isobel wasn’t sure which one Lizzie needed—maybe both.

“She’s fine,” T. J. said. He took Lizzie’s hand and kissed the back of it.

“Ready?” Isobel asked T. J.

Today they were crawling underneath the house to inspect the floor joists and the plumbing although, since neither of them knew much about plumbing, she didn’t know what they’d be looking for. If she didn’t feel so damn guilty about firing Benny, she’d let T. J. crawl under the house himself and she’d spend the day putting the cabinets back on and installing the shelving above the sink.

He nodded. “You probably want to put on long sleeves and thicker pants. I’m not sure what’s down there. At the very least ants, at the very worst raw sewage.”

Like many houses in Memphis, Spite House didn’t have a basement. Instead it sat on a raised cement foundation with a crawl space underneath. Isobel adjusted her headlamp and watched T. J. shimmy his way into the narrow space. They’d left Lizzie and Elyse painting the second floor of the house, which felt safe now that they’d been over the roof to make sure there weren’t any more unrepaired leaks. “Do you think Benny even went down here?” she asked.

“Hard to say. I do know you all were out of town when the plumbing repair was done, so it seems like we should check the work.”

“I guess so,” Isobel said. The dirt felt cold and for the first time in her life, she realized why people had root cellars. She let T. J. get ahead of her and looked up at the subfloor, trying to guess what part of the house they were in. The entry to the crawl space was on the back end of the house, underneath the large windows. Her line of sight was interrupted only by a few cement footings and the distance the light from her headlamp would travel. T. J. had crawled off toward what Isobel guessed was the kitchen area. She moved to where the house narrowed, inspecting the space where Elton and Benny had found the hidden room.

“Where are we at with the judge?” she asked, breathing in the musky air.

Although she hadn’t talked to him directly about the issues that had arisen with the occupancy permit, Lizzie had told them that an investment group headed by the city’s former mayor had been interested in developing the empty property next door. Once T. J. had been removed as their inspector because of his relationship with Lizzie, they had an old friend who worked in code enforcement take over and he made it his business to remove any obstacle they might have—including Spite House.

“He’s backed off. Judge Hootley never could stand Mayor Tortinger. So that helped you guys.” T. J.’s voice echoed as if they were in a tunnel. “I told Lizzie that her family might not have to worry about it this year, but that at some point when the financial incentives were high enough, they’d have to fight to keep the place. They should sell it now and get out before that happens.”

“I doubt they ever would,” Isobel said, listening to the echo of her own voice.

“Damn it,” T. J. said. “Damn it.”

“Something bad?” she asked, trying to back out of the narrow passageway. “Something expensive?”

“Those shoddy plumbers Benny hired cut into the floor supports to run the new pipe.”

Her heart sank at the thought of the time and money it would take to add additional joists to the floor. “Does the pipe look good at least?”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to tear up your beautiful kitchen tile,” T. J. said. He fished around in the toolbox he’d pushed through the crawl space and then hammered a nail up through the floor. He crawled back toward the entrance. “You coming?”

“I’m going to keep looking,” she said. “Don’t do anything to that floor until I get out of here.”

He grunted and shimmied his way out of the crawl space. Isobel started to follow him but instead found herself crawling along the southern exterior wall toward the front of the house. Her headlamp was less effective in this portion of the crawl space because of the adjacent building that blocked any light from filtering in through the small access gaps. Her father had insisted that his children create structurally correct buildings from their Legos or Lincoln Logs. How mystified other children had been watching her snap together floor joists and footings. Sometimes these buildings sat for months on their kitchen table, a visual reminder of the permanence of strong foundations. And then her mother, with a carelessness they never expected, would sweep the houses, apartments, skyscrapers, and log cabins into a large plastic storage bin.

The floor beneath the stairwell sagged and her head scraped against the unexpected change in elevation. She flattened herself to the floor and then rolled onto her back to inspect the subflooring. Above her, she heard the doorbell and then T. J.’s heavy step as he walked from the kitchen to the front of the house. She couldn’t hear the exchange of voices, but wondered, as dust floated down, the specks illuminated and made into spots of brilliance in the glare of her headlamp, who it could be. What was it they said? That dust was mostly dead skin. She pushed against the warped floorboards. There was almost no give—as if whatever heavy load had been pressing on the boards all these years remained. Puzzling over what it could be, she became aware of a stench and the feeling of something wet against her back. Slowly, she rolled back onto her stomach and pulled up onto her hands and knees, backing away from the spot where she’d been lying. At the edge of where her light reached, she glimpsed a bit of movement and leaned forward to make it out. Maggots crawled over the remains of a dead rat.

She screamed.

Above her, feet pounded on the boards at the same time that she scrambled backward as fast as she could move on her hands and knees. Coming to the exit of the space, she clawed at her shirt and pulled it over her head, afraid to even look at the wet spot on the back of the shirt. Instead she threw it aside and crawled over to a patch of grass, rubbing her back against it as if she were a dog trying to scratch an itch. “Get it off, get it off, get it off,” she said, pounding her fists against the ground and fighting the urge to throw up.

“What happened?” T. J. asked, standing above her.

“Are you okay?” Tom asked, crouching beside her. “Are you hurt?”

“Dead rat,” she gasped, realizing as the feeling of wanting to retch passed that she wore only her bra and a pair of jeans. She sat up and crossed her arms over her chest.

“I got off work early and wanted to see if you were free for a late lunch,” Tom said, taking off his hoodie and passing it to her. T. J. pretended to be interested in the view from the backyard.

She nodded, trying to think of anything other than the rat.

“We’re about done,” T. J. said. “I’ve got to find a way to sister the two joints that the plumbers cut into—”

“I can get my dad to do it when he comes out for Thanksgiving,” Isobel said. She knew that Lizzie felt strange about T. J.’s putting too much into Spite House—partly because he worked for the same unit that had been giving them such a hard time and partly because he and Lizzie hadn’t worked out whether their relationship had a future.

As if reading their minds, Lizzie stepped onto the porch and asked what all the screaming had been about. Elyse showed up a few seconds later, a paint brush still in hand. “Are you okay? We heard you screaming, and I thought you’d been stabbed.”

“I can’t even talk about it,” Isobel said. “You’ll have to get T. J. to explain it to you. I’m taking a break—but first a long hot shower.”

Tom’s face reddened at the mention of her bathing. They’d taken the physical part of their relationship slow. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen her with her shirt off, but they hadn’t yet slept together, and Isobel wasn’t sure they would. She’d felt over the last few weeks that he was withholding something from her. “Want some help around here?” he asked T. J.

“I’ll only be a few minutes,” Isobel said, walking into the house. Behind her everyone started to discuss the issue with the flooring, each of them assuring the others that tearing up the kitchen floor to get to the subfloor would be the last option. She walked by the stairwell, running her hand along the enclosed space and considering how she could open it without doing too much damage to the wall. There didn’t appear to be an obvious point of entry. It would be another problem for her to solve.

After her shower, she picked up the pile of clothing she’d dropped on the floor, which included Tom’s sweatshirt. Thinking it might be contaminated by the rat guts she’d had on her back, she carried it downstairs to the washing machine, emptying the pockets of everything out of habit. She pulled out a matchbox car and two ticket stubs from the local movie theater. Glancing at them as she started the washer, she paused. They were from an earlier showing that day. She was sure he’d said he’d be busy with work most of the day.