Three Story House: A Novel (14 page)

“Proof that I can do more than act,” Isobel said in what Lizzie knew was her television voice. Like any normal child, she’d bragged to all of her friends about having a cousin on
Wait for It,
but the actual process of watching the show had been difficult. The girl Isobel played on television was like somebody in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. Little Gracie Belle looked exactly like Isobel, but she spoke in a much more affected manner and moved her face in ways she’d never seen in her cousin’s expressions. Through the veil of the screen, it came across as endearing, but here in Spite House in front of this little man, Lizzie was less charmed than she was frightened.

As quickly as they’d appeared, Isobel’s visitors had been ushered off the porch and upstairs to the cupola. Over her shoulder, with that expansive smile still plastered on her face, Isobel said through gritted teeth, “For Pete’s sake, agree to talk to them. And tell them how down-to-earth I am. Just like a real girl.”

“I can’t. I’ve got a date,” Lizzie said to her cousin’s retreating back.

Elyse arrived home in a whirlwind of activity. “Did I miss them?” she called as she came around the back of the house. “I lost track of time at the bar, and if I missed them—”

“They’re here,” Lizzie said from her spot on their newly sodded backyard. After surveying the house, Craig had sent one of his men to the nearest home improvement store for two Adirondack chairs. Then he’d told Benny’s crew to rip out the row of azalea bushes blocking the view to the river. The chairs were carefully positioned so that when the camera framed them, the Mighty Mississippi remained visible.

“This is nice,” Elyse said, sinking into one of the chairs. “Do we get to keep these?”

“Benny’s pissed,” Lizzie said, bending her knee several times to keep her leg from growing too stiff. “He left early after I screamed at him about the ant problem.”

“We have ants?”

“Don’t open any cupboards.”

“I guess we’ll order pizza then.”

“Not for me. Rosa May’s having me over for dinner.”

“T. J. going to be there?”

Lizzie shrugged. She wasn’t sure what to do with T. J. She knew he wanted their relationship to be something more, but she couldn’t explain how scared she was to take that step. Instead, she hung out at his sister’s house and played Madden football when he came over. They talked about the house—endlessly discussing the particulars of the code violations and the requirements they needed to meet to stay in the house. The truth was, she’d jumped at the opportunity for this dinner to get away from Isobel’s cameras.

Elyse tilted her neck back to stare at the roof. “That’s them up there?”

Isobel stood with her back to them, her hair tucked under the back of her shirt to keep it from blowing. The man in the denim shorts was winding up the cord to the camera, and Craig pointed out various items to his helpers. From this distance, Lizzie thought they looked like dolls. Action figures moving in stiff spurts. “I’ve got to go,” she said, putting her feet on the ground. “They were supposed to talk with me, but now that you’re here maybe I can get out of it.”

“Don’t you want to be on television?”

“It’s not that fun,” Lizzie said.

“Oh, that’s right. I guess when you played—” Elyse trailed off, looking at Lizzie’s knee and then obviously not looking at her knee.

“Isobel’s up to something,” Lizzie said, breaking their rule about talking about each other.

“She’s always up to something. Behind her laid-back, sleep-’til-noon attitude is a woman who would take over the world if she could.”

“I mean it.”

“What makes you say that?” Elyse twirled her hair around her finger, leaving little ringlets at the edges.

“The way she’s been so coy about this crew coming and all that business about none of it being that big of a deal.” Lizzie continued, listing off her other concerns, including the fact that the producer Craig knew far too much about them. She tried to explain the bad taste she had in her mouth, but it felt too silly to say aloud. “They’re friends,” Lizzie said of Craig and Isobel, “but he’s far too interested in us for that to be all there is to it.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions.” Elyse had a habit of always thinking the best about people. “Being around all those gossipy teenagers has turned you paranoid.”

“Maybe,” Lizzie said.

“Definitely,” Elyse said, offering her hand to help Lizzie up. “You’re going to be late.”

“You should put some lipstick on. For the cameras,” Lizzie said, pulling up the hem of her T-shirt and rubbing at her mouth. At some point during the long day, Isobel had pulled her aside and put a dash of mascara on her eyes and forced her to smack her lips on a napkin. She’d changed a few minutes earlier into her workout clothing. “Isobel says to tell them she’s a real girl. As normal as you or me or—”

“So she wants us to lie?” Elyse grinned. How was it she was still so much like the little girl that Lizzie had first met that day at the beach? “Because if that’s normal”—she gestured to the roof—“then the rest of us are crazy.”

B
ecause it was April Fool’s Day, Lizzie didn’t believe Benny when he told her about the hidden door. With the outside of the house nearly complete, the crew had started work on the interior—specifically the electrical. The house still had the original knob and tube wiring, which meant they’d been forced to install an entirely new electrical system. At least when it was all over, they’d have overhead lights and enough outlets to power all of their modern conveniences. In the time the Triplins had lived in the house, they’d each learned what they could plug in where without blowing a fuse. There’d been so little that ran on electricity when her grandfather built the house.

Since moving into Spite House, Lizzie had become more interested in the lives of her grandparents. Why had Mellie married a man who was so much older than her? And how come it took them so long to have children? And why just the one? When Benny came into the kitchen to tell her about the hidden room, she’d been underneath one of the kitchen cupboards trying to flush out the last of the ants. She’d barely listened to him, thinking that there’d been no end to the jokes and puns Isobel and Elyse had come up with once they found out that the pests invading their kitchen in Memphis were indeed pharaoh ants. For a solid week, they’d taken turns walking like an Egyptian. Benny’s poison hadn’t killed any ants; spraying had divided the colony and the ants had multiplied. Either way, following Isobel’s television interview, Lizzie had taken everything out of the kitchen cupboards and sealed the jars and cans in plastic bags or Tupperware. She’d had Benny pull out the fridge so she could see behind it and she’d baited the entire kitchen. Elyse and Isobel ganged up on her one night, telling her she ought to call the pest service, but she felt certain that getting rid of the ants was something she ought to be able to do on her own.

After a particularly long pause in Benny’s explanation, she backed out of the cupboard and straightened up, pleased that her knee hadn’t stiffened in the few minutes she’d been on the floor.

“Do you?” Benny asked.

“Do I what?”

“Wanna see what’s in there before we start working back there?”

“Let’s go,” Lizzie said, taking a few steps, trying to convince herself that her leg was improving. The last few appointments had been a disappointment to Lizzie. After getting the go-ahead to jog, she’d made little progress on her flexation, and although she didn’t like to admit it, there was a tightness in her knee that seemed to be growing.

“What are you smiling for?” the electrician asked as Lizzie and Benny crawled past him in the narrow low-ceilinged closet space off the receiving room.

“All of it,” Lizzie said. The electrician, Elton, had been a delightful addition around the house. He had an enormous yellow-white mustache and called all the women “dahrling” in a drawl that was distinctly not Memphis. Isobel was almost smitten with him and excited because once the wiring was done, they’d finally be able to patch the plaster on the third floor and paint. That would allow them to move on to the second-floor renovations. Benny liked him too, which made all of their lives easier. The last few days, instead of day laborers, Benny had showed up with two coffees. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was working for Elton who, before becoming an electrician, had been a stage manager for a few big-name bands. The cachet seemed to impress Benny enough to at the very least have him feign a work ethic.

As they neared the back of the closet, Benny shone a flashlight ahead of them. “There’s a whole bunch of them boxes,” Benny said. “Like the ones you pulled out of the cupola.”

“Why wouldn’t my grandmother or my mother have ever mentioned the door?” she asked Benny.

“This is one strange house,” Elton muttered, focused on the fuse box.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Benny said, sitting cross-legged and reaching across Lizzie to push at the wall. “I know it’s here someplace.”

The cigar boxes, moved into Lizzie’s bedroom for safekeeping, hadn’t been touched in months. At first, they’d each take a box at night and sort through its contents, throwing away receipts and sorting the photographs by decades. But sometime during February they’d fallen out of the habit. The randomness of the contents depressed Lizzie. In one box they’d find photographs from Grandma Mellie’s childhood and ticket stubs from the early 1980s. In another, they’d find two dozen buttons, coupons clipped from stores that no longer existed, and a pair of rusty nail clippers. It reminded her of the time capsules that Andy Warhol had left behind. She heard they opened up one of them and found dirty underwear. At least she hadn’t experienced that particular horror. Benny continued to push against different parts of the wall.

“I bumped up against it with my tool belt when I was tracing down a wire for Elton,” Benny said, gesturing to a small hole in the wall where he’d sawed through the paneling and the plaster behind it.

Lizzie looked at the hole and eyed Benny, making an educated guess as to where the secret press would be that opened the hidden door. She brushed her fingers against the wall and then pushed firmly. The wood paneling opened with an audible pop and the smell of mildew drifted out. “I’ve got it,” she said to Benny, reaching for his flashlight.

He sneezed three quick times, not once covering his mouth, and then crawled back toward Elton, who was humming to himself. The rise and fall of his voice was too muddled to be understood. The boxes were similar, but unlike the ones they’d found in the window seats, these were dust covered. They hadn’t been disturbed in a great many years. She opened the first one she touched, which featured a picture of a man in green pants with the word “Cremo” above his head. Inside she found a stack of what appeared to be index cards, but they weren’t like the ones you could buy at an office supply store. The unlined, cream rectangles had a single hole punched on the bottom, and as she held them, they felt smaller than the cards she was more familiar with. She grabbed a small stack and rifled through them. Each had a number on the front, and the back contained writing and sometimes a photograph or ticket stub adhered with a yellowing piece of tape.

She stuffed the handful of cards into her apron pocket and then crawled out of the space. Benny slouched in the hallway outside the closet listening to Elton talk about Isaac Hayes. “He was bigger than you’d think,” Elton said, taking out a fuse and then putting it back. They looked up as Lizzie dusted herself off. “Bring the rest of the boxes to the kitchen.”

Benny groaned and popped his knees before crawling back into the room.

Elton’s mustache twitched. “Your problems aren’t as bad as they seem,” he said.

“Benny’s not a problem,” Lizzie said, taking the weight off her bad knee out of habit.

“I mean with the electrical.” Benny nodded at the panel. “I’ll install an updated system next to this one and then when we’re ready, I’ll switch the power from one box to the other.”

“How long?”

“Depends,” Elton said, stepping away from the panel and running his hands along the walls.

Lizzie’s face colored watching Elton caress the walls. It had been months since she’d been touched as intimately as that plaster. Rosa May had kept urging her to give her brother another chance at a date, but Lizzie couldn’t find the energy in herself to care about T. J. and the house. She told Rosa May that once the house passed inspection, she might give him a try. But now when she thought about it, all she felt was the overwhelming sense of dread. She pictured his clipboard and felt failure settle around her like a heavy winter coat.

Benny emerged from the space carrying at least ten of the cigar boxes. In the light of the hallway, Lizzie could see that different years had been written on the sides of many of the boxes. The ballpoint ink had faded on most of them, and what was left behind looked more like chicken scratch. She reached for the top box, which had a date of 1982, three years before she was born. As she touched its lid, Benny let out a horrifically loud sneeze that sounded like a jet engine, and the boxes fell to the ground, the individual cards scattering and falling around them like snowflakes.

“Shit,” Elton said.

Benny dropped to his knees, frantically gathering cards and mashing them into stacks.

“Stop it,” Lizzie said, reaching out for Benny’s arm. “I can do it. I’m not even sure what they are or whether they’re worth keeping.”

“You two look like you spilled gold dust.” Elton took a card that had landed on his shoulder. “Whatcha got here anyway?” He shook the card, labeled 359 on the back and read the front to them: “Momma says Santa’s coming. She’s lying.”

Lizzie took the card from Elton and looked at it in the hazy light of the foyer. While they’d been in the room, a spring storm had gathered over the area and it was nearly as dark as it was during twilight. She squinted at the handwriting, turning it sideways and then running her finger over the lettering.

“I’ll get you an overhead light wired in here,” Elton said, looking up at the ceiling, “and enough volts to run air if you ever decide to put it in.”