I’m hanging my towel and getting ready to enter the stall when I hear a woman calling my name. “It’s Mallory, right? The new sitter?”
I turn and see the Maxwells’ next-door neighbor hurrying across the lawn, a short old woman with wide hips and a wobbly gait. Caroline has warned me that she’s very flaky and rarely leaves her house and yet here she is, dressed in an aquamarine muumuu and covered in jewelry: gold necklaces with crystal charms, big hoop earrings, jangly bracelets, and gemstone rings on her fingers and toes. “I’m Mitzi, honey, I live next door? And since you’re new to the neighborhood I want to give a bit of friendly advice: When those landscapers come around? You shouldn’t sit out by the pool. With everything on display.” She gestures at the full length of my torso. “This is what we used to call a provocation.”
She steps closer and I’m hit by the skunky smell of burnt rope. Either she needs a bath or she’s very high, or possibly both. “Excuse me?”
“You got a nice figure and I understand you want to show it off. And it’s a free country, I’m Libertarian, I say do what makes you feel good. But when these Mexicans come through, you need to show a little discretion. A little common sense. For your personal safety. Are you following?” I start to answer but she keeps talking: “This might sound racist, but it’s true. These men—they’ve already broken the law once, when they crossed the border. So if a criminal sees a pretty girl all alone in a backyard, what’s stopping him?”
“Are you serious?”
She grabs my wrist to underscore her remarks, and her hand is trembling. “Princess, I am serious as a heart attack. You need to cover your fanny.”
Above us, Teddy calls through the screen of his open bedroom window, “Mallory, can we have Popsicles?”
“After my shower,” I tell him. “Five minutes.”
Mitzi waves to Teddy and he ducks out of sight. “He’s a cute kid. Such a sweet face. Not a big fan of the parents, though. A bit uppity for my taste. Do you get that sense?”
“Well—”
“The day they moved in, I baked a lasagna. To be neighborly, okay? I bring it to their front door and do you know what she says to me? ‘I’m sorry but we can’t accept your gift.’ Because of the chopped meat!”
“Maybe—”
“I’m sorry, honey, but that is not how you handle that situation. You smile, you say thank you, you take it inside, and you throw it away. Don’t fling it back in my face. That’s rude. And the father’s even worse! He must drive you crazy.”
“Actually—”
“Ecch, you’re still a child. You can’t read people yet. I’m a warm person, very empathetic, I read auras for a living. You’ll see clients knocking on my door all day long but don’t worry, there’s nothing shady going on. I lost all interest after my hysterectomy.” She winks at me. “But how do you like the guest cottage? Do you ever get nervous? Sleeping out there all alone?”
“Why should I be nervous?”
“Because of the history.”
“What history?”
And for the first time in our conversation, Mitzi finds herself at a loss for words. She reaches for a lock of her hair, twisting it in her fingers until she’s isolated a single strand. Then she yanks it from its root and tosses it over her shoulder. “You should ask the parents.”
“They just moved here. They don’t know anything. What are you talking about?”
“When I was a kid, we called your cottage the Devil House. We’d dare each other to peek through the windows. My brother offered me quarters if I would stand on the porch and count to a hundred, but I’d always chicken out.”
“Why?”
“A woman was murdered. Annie Barrett. She was an artist, a painter, and she used your house as her studio.”
“She was murdered in the cottage?”
“Well, they never actually found her body. This was a long time ago, right after World War Two.”
Teddy’s face reappears in the second-floor window. “Has it been five minutes yet?”
“Almost,” I tell him.
When I look back at Mitzi, she’s already backing across the yard. “Don’t keep the little angel waiting. Go enjoy your ice creams.”
“Wait, what’s the rest of the story?”
“There is no rest of the story. After Annie died—or went missing, who knows—her family turned the cottage into a garden shed. Wouldn’t let anyone stay out there. And it’s been that way ever since, seventy-some years. Until this month.”
* * *
Caroline comes home with a minivan full of groceries, so I help her unload and unpack all the bags. Teddy is upstairs in his bedroom, drawing pictures, so I use the opportunity to ask about Mitzi’s story.
“I told you she was cuckoo,” Caroline says. “She thinks the mailman steams open her Visa bills so he can learn her credit scores. She’s paranoid.”
“She said a woman was murdered.”
“Eighty years ago. This is a very old neighborhood, Mallory. All these houses have some kind of horror story.” Caroline opens her refrigerator and loads the crisper drawer with spinach, kale, and a bundle of radishes with soil still clinging to their roots. “Plus the previous owners lived here forty years, so obviously they didn’t have any problems.”
“Right, that’s true.” I reach into a canvas grocery bag and pull out a six-pack of coconut water. “Except they used the cottage as a toolshed, right? No one was sleeping out there.”
Caroline looks exasperated. I sense she’s had a long day at the VA clinic, that she doesn’t appreciate being ambushed with questions the minute she walks through the door. “Mallory, that woman has probably done more drugs than all my patients combined. I don’t know how she’s still alive, but her mind is definitely not right. She is a nervous, twitchy, paranoid mess. And as someone who cares about your sobriety, I’m going to strongly suggest you limit contact with her, okay?”
“No, I know,” I tell her, and I feel bad, because this is the closest Caroline has ever come to yelling at me. I don’t say anything else after that, I just open the pantry and unpack boxes of arborio rice, couscous, and whole grain crackers. I put away bags and bags of rolled oats, raw almonds, Turkish dates, and weird shriveled-up mushrooms. After everything is unpacked, I tell Caroline I’m heading out. And she must sense that I’m still upset because she comes over and rests a hand on my shoulder.
“Listen, we have a terrific guest bedroom on the second floor. If you want to move over here, we’d be thrilled to have you. Teddy would go bananas. What do you think?”
And somehow, since she already has one arm around me, it turns into a kind of hug. “I’m fine out there,” I tell her. “I like having my own space. It’s good practice for the real world.”
“If you change your mind just say the word. You are always welcome in this house.”
* * *