Three Story House: A Novel (8 page)

Unlike that of his partner, his uniform fit well. “Will that help?” she asked.

“Standard procedure in situations like this”—he gestured toward the ceiling, indicating where, she presumed, his partner and the enforcement officer were cataloging violations—“is to cite you and escort you off the property.”

Lizzie didn’t listen closely to the rest of what he had to say. She put her head in her hands and held her breath in a vain attempt to hold back the tears. Her knee twitched with pain. The larger officer put his hand on her arm. His palm felt rough and calloused against her skin.

The laughter of the other men echoed above them. He stepped away from her. “It’s not so bad as you think.”

The back door opened, and a rush of wind blew dead leaves and small clumps of dirt over the threshold. Isobel threw out her arms, and said, “I’m here. Elyse is in the car calling some lawyer she knows in Boston.”

“It’s hopeless,” Lizzie said.

“Nonsense.” Isobel shrugged out of her coat and took off her sunglasses. She appeared oblivious to the officer, who hadn’t stopped smiling since her cousin entered the house. If Lizzie were a gambler, she’d bet that he’d seen every episode of her cousin’s show. Like most child actors, Isobel was often recognized but not identified. People tended to think she was someone they knew in school—a familiar face from their childhood. And in a way she was, especially for anyone close to her age. From the time Isobel was eleven until she was twenty, she’d played Gracie Belle Wait on
Wait for It
—one of the first attempts by a cable network at a sitcom.

She turned toward the officer. “What can we do to fix this?”

He looked over his shoulder and then in a low voice said, “Play dumb and flirt a little. Code enforcement spends their days dealing with slumlords and squatters. Pretty women like you ought to be able to change T. J.’s mind.”

The tinkle of the beaded curtain announced the arrival of the other men. Lizzie watched her cousin transform into someone else. She pulled her shoulders back and lowered her chin, striking a pose that made her breasts seem larger. The officers snuck quick glances at her chest and, as if to encourage them, Isobel leaned toward them as they spoke. Lizzie saw that by closing the space between them, her cousin had made the men seem like old friends. She lowered her voice when she introduced herself; instead of shaking hands, she ran her hand down each man’s arm and then gripped his outstretched hand in both of hers.

By the end of the visit, T. J. Freeman had explained their options—which consisted of paying a $500 fine for contempt and asking Judge Hootley, who ran the court where their case would be heard, for an appeal of the court’s decision to auction the property. As he spoke, T. J. kept wiping his shaved head with his hand and then drying it on his front-button shirt. Unlike the other men, he didn’t look at Isobel. Whenever Lizzie glanced at him, she found he was already looking at her. Before he left, he pressed his card into Lizzie’s hand, urging her to call him if they ran into any further problems.

Elyse came in the back door. “I saw them leave,” she said, before looking at Lizzie. “What in the hell are you wearing?”

Lizzie pulled self-consciously at the satin dress, getting a scent of mothballs as she did so. “It’s too much to explain. We got lucky, though.”

“I didn’t even notice the fox,” Isobel said, reaching for the shrug, which had been dropped on the table and then hugged it to her chest before responding to Lizzie’s earlier comment. “That’s because he liked you.”

“Hardly,” Lizzie said, pulling her hair out of its ponytail. “You’re the one they kept their eyes on.”

“She’s right,” Elyse said. “You’ve got a vulnerability right now that’s working for you. In fact, I’ve never seen it in you before. You’ve always been so damn self-sufficient that a man can’t fathom how he fits into your life.”

“So, the way to find a man is to fall on your ass in front of him?”

“Not all men, some men. Men like T. J. are providers by nature. You’ve mostly dated takers.” Too often, Elyse’s assessment of the cousins proved uncomfortably accurate.

“Let’s not talk about it.” Lizzie gathered the memorabilia she’d been absorbed in earlier that day, dumping the whole lot of clothing into the give-away pile. Isobel helped, stacking photographs into tidy piles.

“Your grandmother was a hottie,” Elyse said, thumbing through several postage-stamp-sized pictures. “She’s got that thing where you don’t want to look away.”

“Charisma,” Lizzie said, putting the last of the pictures back in the trunk.

Isobel buttoned the fox around her shoulders. “Can I keep this?”

Lizzie nodded. “I was planning to dump all this stuff at Goodwill.”

“Let me ask you something.” Isobel leaned close. “What’s the plan here? If I learned anything today, it’s that we need to be serious with this. Do we have enough money in your grandmother’s trust to hire someone to work on this place?”

Elyse interrupted. “What do your parents have to say about this mess? I mean, it really is their mess when it comes right down to it.”

“What Mellie left should be enough—especially if I have the two of you helping with the stuff we can do. But when the money’s gone, it’s gone. You know how my parents are about debt.”

“They still think credit cards are the sign of Satan?” Isobel asked.

“They’re not that bad. I can’t ask them for money—not after all the sacrifices they’ve already made so I could play.” One of the guilt trips that Lizzie’s mother often laid on her was what it had cost the family to support her in soccer. They’d added it up one time and it totalled nearly fifty thousand dollars when they took into account fees and travel. “And I had this idea that if I do this, then my mother will finally owe me something.”

“They really sold their house and used that money to pay for this mission?” Elyse asked.

“Called of God is called of God,” Lizzie said, echoing what her mother always said. “I don’t have any money either, I mean not really. They don’t pay you to play soccer—at least not anymore.”

“Let me at least pay rent,” Isobel said.

“I’ve been thinking about getting a job,” Elyse said. “I could use the distraction.”

Lizzie argued with Isobel. “We talked about this. Doing what you’re doing—taking charge of the stuff I don’t know about is enough. When we really get into the fixing stuff, then you’ll have to earn your keep—you know, look over the shoulder of whoever I hire to do this stuff and make sure he’s not cheating us.”

“You got someone in mind?” Isobel backed down, and Elyse followed her lead.

She nodded. In the last conversation she’d had with her parents, her mother had suggested a man she went to high school with who’d worked on the house over the years for Grandma Mellie. He worked cheap and he knew the house, which Lizzie guessed was what they needed. “Enough about money. It’s fine. Or rather, it’ll be fine.”

“You’ve got to stop saying that,” Elyse said, touching Lizzie lightly on the head. “If I could change one thing about this world, it would be the need for everyone to hide their panic.”

On the third floor, in the ceiling above the landing, there was a metal pull that concealed the stairs to the cupola. Since arriving in the house, Lizzie had tried in vain to get the stairs to pull down. With their first meeting with the contractor scheduled for the next day, getting into the cupola and then out onto the roof felt like a mandate. Isobel took the rope from Elyse and tied it to the brass ring. Lizzie stepped back, wondering at her cousin’s confidence.

“If we all put our weight on it, the stairs will have to come unstuck,” Isobel said, grabbing the rope at a point near the top. The others copied her and on the count of three, they pulled down sharply and lifted up their feet.

The stairs popped and then slid out with excruciating slowness. They made Elyse go first since she put up a fuss about climbing the backless stairs. Isobel followed, carrying a broom. Lizzie had tried to warn them about how small the space was, but when she finally made it up the stairs, she found Elyse marveling that by stretching her arms, she could touch all sides of the cupola. Behind them, a second room expanded the area beyond the telephone-booth-like space that the stairs opened into. The larger room had a barn door on rollers and window seats. There were a few cast-off items littering the floor, including a smaller replica of Spite House that, if she remembered correctly, had once been a mailbox. The prisms that were so much a part of Lizzie’s childhood remained in place. Isobel pushed through both rooms, spilling out onto the roof with the relief of someone who didn’t like small spaces.

“Did I hear you on the phone with that inspector last night?” Elyse asked, stepping out behind her onto the roof.

Lizzie shrugged. He’d called officially a few days earlier to help her file the paperwork to get the utilities turned on and to get their property removed from the auction listing. The conversation had surprised her by feeling familiar and by the end of it, he’d given her his cell number and she’d called, at first to ask about garbage pick up, but mostly to hear his voice.

“I told you he liked you,” Isobel said, turning and looking back at the cupola, holding her hands out in a frame and then walking around the structure. “Flat roofs are so much trouble. You need an angle, something for all of this crap to roll off of.”

“When will anything not be trouble?” Lizzie asked, her good foot kicking at the muck of decomposing leaves that lined the outer edges of the roof.

“Don’t you want gloves?” Elyse offered a pair to Lizzie before working the handle of the broomstick under the layer of debris on the easternmost corner of the roof and watching as several beetles crawled away after having their soft bellies exposed.

Lizzie grabbed a handful of leaves and threw them over the side of the house, wiping her hands on her jeans before putting on the gloves.

“What’s the story with this house anyway?” Elyse asked when the debris was mostly cleared.

“My grandfather’s brother gave him a piece of land that he thought useless. And instead of letting it go fallow, he built this house.”

“No romance? No illicit activity? Places like this always have a bit of scandal attached to them.” Elyse took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her hands. “It smells strange.”

“That’s the scent of a storm. Winter rains clean off the dirt in preparation for spring,” Lizzie said, echoing a phrase of her grandmother’s. She stood the broom against the cupola and turned toward the horizon, watching dark clouds roll across the sky from Arkansas. The broom fell with a clatter that made them jump.

“Rain’s back,” Isobel said. “I guess the storm is moving faster than predicted.”

“This wasn’t the end of the storm, it was a break,” Lizzie said, picking up the broom and sweeping furiously at the edges of the flat roof.

“Do you get tornados out here?” Elyse asked, using the edge of her dustpan to clear acorns piled against the roofline.

“Who’s to say? People around here believe that the bluffs keep tornados from hitting Memphis, but a few years ago we had one take out part of the mall, so you never know.” A wet drop stung Lizzie’s cheek. It was followed by the long boom of thunder rolling across the sky.

“Too much uncertainty for me. I’m beginning to feel like this end of days stuff is something I should take seriously,” Elyse said. She’d always been more worried about natural disasters than most people were. It had something to do with never having lived in a place where natural disasters happened. Both Lizzie and Isobel had spent much of their lives living on fault lines—the San Andreas and the New Madrid.

“We haven’t even talked about earthquakes. The last one reversed the direction of the river and rang the Liberty Bell all the way up in Pennsylvania.”

Isobel continued to stand too close to the edge of the roof. “Stop scaring her.”

Elyse pulled up the hood on her sweatshirt as protection against the increasing rain. “So, this whole place could fall? Collapse the sixty feet down to Front Street?”

“You worry too much. There would be signs. Nothing happens unexpectedly. The trick is to know what you’re looking at,” Lizzie said.

“I’m never sure what any two things add up to,” Elyse said.

“Come on, we can watch the storm from the cupola.” Lizzie covered her head with her arms. She held the door open for them and they settled onto the window seats that had been built along three of the walls. Sometimes the rain fell so heavily that they couldn’t make out the river, and other times piercing lightning exploded in the sky. All the while, Lizzie talked about what she knew of Spite House’s history.

“Is that a leak?” Elyse asked, pointing to a thin line of water running along the inside of the glass. Each of the windows was divided into a dozen rectangles, and the glass in each portion held slight imperfections.

“It could be condensation,” Isobel said. She showed her cousins the imperfections. “All of this was hand blown.” She touched the few panes of bull’s-eye glass. The slight outward bowing of the glass was where the glassblower had separated the melted glass from his wand.

“It’s pretty,” Elyse said, pointing out two more on her side of the cupola, “like someone started to form a bubble and it froze in mid-blow.”

“You never see it anymore. Most builders considered it imperfect, and when they cut the glass, they put these in out-of-the-way places, like barns or back rooms,” said Isobel.

Lizzie placed her palm flat against one of the rectangles until the outline of her hand appeared. “I didn’t think you’d remember so much about houses. Your father stopped taking you out on jobs with him when you started the show, right?”

“Memory is a funny business.” Isobel stood on the window bench to better inspect the ceiling. “So this house sits at the very southern end of what would have been your family’s land?”

In answer, Lizzie blew on the window and then in the spreading of fog traced a rough sketch of the property lines. The warehouses to the north of the house had all been torn down, and the rail yard that had been to the south of the property had been developed into the kind of homes NBA stars and Cybill Shepherd lived in. She explained how her grandfather had worked out a way to build a house that mimicked the shape of the river. “See, the skinny part of the house is like the thin trickle of the start of the river, and then it explodes outward as it reaches the edge of the bluffs—like the delta.”