The Shape of Night(11)

Billy grins at me with a mouth full of cake. “Thank you, ma’am! First time any client’s baked a treat for us!”

“Actually, this is my job,” I tell him. “I’ve collected a long list of recipes I need to test, and I certainly can’t eat everything I cook.”

“Are you a baker by trade?” asks Ned. Silver-haired and serious, he strikes me as a man who considers every word before he speaks. Everywhere I look in this house, I see the evidence of his meticulous craftsmanship.

“I’m a food writer. I’m working on a book about the traditional foods of New England, and I need to test every recipe before I include it in the book.”

Billy raises his arm. “Private Billy Conway reporting for duty. I volunteer to be your guinea pig. You cook and I’ll eat,” he says, and we all laugh.

“How much longer until the deck’s finished?” I ask, pointing to the widow’s walk.

“It should take us another week or so to replace the boards and put up the new railing,” says Ned. “Then we need to get back to work in here. That’ll take us another week.”

“I thought you were all done with this turret.”

“We thought so, too. Until Billy swung a plank and accidentally punched into that plaster.” He points to a gouge in the wall. “It’s hollow back there. There’s a space behind it.”

    “How big a space, do you think?”

“I looked in with a flashlight and I can’t see the opposite wall. Arthur told us to open it up and find out what’s back there.”

“Arthur?”

“The owner, Arthur Sherbrooke. I’ve been keeping him up to date on our progress, and this has got him real curious. He had no idea there was anything behind that wall.”

“Maybe it’s a secret stash of gold,” Billy says.

“Just as long as it isn’t a dead body,” grunts Ned, clapping crumbs from his hands. “Well, we’d better get back to work. Thanks for the cake, ma’am.”

“Please, call me Ava.”

Ned politely tips his head. “Ava.”

They’re both heading back to the widow’s walk when I call out: “Did either of you happen to come by the house Sunday morning?”

Ned shakes his head. “We don’t work here on weekends.”

“I was walking on the cliff path when I looked up and saw someone on the widow’s walk.”

“Yeah, Donna mentioned you’d seen someone, but we can’t get into the house if you’re not here. Unless you’d like to leave us a key like the last tenant did.”

I stare out at the widow’s walk. “It’s so strange. I can swear he was standing right there.” I point to the edge of the deck.

“That’d be mighty foolhardy of him,” says Ned. “The deck’s just about rotted through. Wouldn’t support anyone.” He grabs a crowbar, ventures out on the new boards they’ve nailed into place, and pokes the crowbar into one of the old planks. The metal sinks in, punching straight through rotted wood. “If anyone stepped out here, the boards would’ve collapsed right under him. Truth is, it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. The owner should’ve had this deck repaired years ago. He’s just lucky there hasn’t been another accident.”

    I have been staring down at the disintegrating wood, and his words take a minute to sink in. I look up at him. “Another accident?”

“I didn’t know about any accident,” says Billy.

“?’Cause you would’ve been in diapers. It happened twenty-something years ago.”

“What happened?”

“The house was already in rough shape when Miss Sherbrooke died. I used to do odd jobs for her, but the last few years she was alive, she didn’t like folks coming around to fix things, so everything sorta fell apart. After she died, the house sat empty for years and became a magnet for the local kids, especially on Halloween. Kind of a rite of passage to spend a night in the haunted house, drinking and making out.”

My hands suddenly feel cold. “Haunted?” I ask.

Ned snorts. “Empty old houses like this, people always think they’re haunted. Every Halloween, kids’d break in and get themselves plastered. That year, one fool girl climbed over the railing, got onto the roof. Those tiles are slate, so they’re wicked slippery when they’re wet, and it was drizzling.” He points to the ground far below. “Her body would’ve landed down there, on the granite. You can see no one would survive the fall.”

“Jesus, Ned. I never heard that story,” says Billy.

“No one likes to talk about it. Jessie was a pretty little thing too, and only fifteen years old. What a shame she was hanging out with a bad crowd. The police called it an accident, so that was the end of it.”

I stare out at the widow’s walk and imagine a misty Halloween night and a booze-fueled teenager named Jessie, clambering over the railing and dangling there, high on the thrill. Was she startled by something she saw, something that made her lose her grip? Was that how it happened? I think of what I experienced last night in my bedroom. And I think of Charlotte, packing in haste, fleeing this house.

    “They’re sure the girl’s death was just an accident?” I ask Ned.