Did people even use clipboards anymore?
Stride confidently. That’s the other thing Parker had taught her. Susan tried to stride confidently, but it was a challenge since it was raining pretty hard and she had to tramp through a lot of dead weeds to get up the overgrown front walk.
The house, up close, was even worse off than it looked from the street. The porch, along with the stairs up to it, leaned slightly to the right, while the house itself seemed to lean slightly to the left. Susan walked around the side through knee-high grass. She put the clipboard under her arm. It was pointless. No one could see her anyway. Behind the back of the house she saw what she was looking for—a piece of plywood lay on the ground in front of a basement window that had been broken. You couldn’t keep people out of abandoned houses. Not in this neighborhood.
Susan got her flashlight out of her purse, flipped it on, and squatted near the window. The broken glass had been knocked out clean, so the window frame was free of shards. The natural light coming through the window illuminated a diffuse rectangle of concrete and broken glass below. Susan poked her head in, bracing herself on the window jamb with one hand, and reached the flashlight in as far as she could. It didn’t reveal much. Pipes.Ducts.Concrete. It looked . . . basementy.
“Hello?” she said into the darkness. “Did someone here order a pizza?”
The only sound she heard was a bus going by at the next intersection. Was it breaking and entering if the window was already broken? Or was it just entering? If she went in and didn’t find anything, she’d go straight to the paper and never tell anyone. Susan couldn’t believe she was actually considering this. And at the same time, she felt a shiver of delight. Six months ago, she was writing human-interest stories about zoo animals. This was a lot more exciting.
“I’m coming in,” she said. She stowed the flashlight back in her purse, dangled her legs through the window, and dropped down to the floor below. Broken glass crunched under her boots.
The house was quiet. Weirdly quiet. No central air, no water heater, no humming fridge, none of that ambient house sound.
She got the flashlight out again and turned it on. The flashlight illuminated so much dust in the air that the beam looked almost solid. A corner of the basement floor was flooded with brackish groundwater that had seeped in through the foundation. Beer cans, cigarette butts, and broken liquor bottles littered the floor. There was a vague smell of urine.
Susan shuddered. Suddenly covering an elephant’s birthday party didn’t seem so bad. She looked longingly up at the window she’d just come through. The sill was chin-high. She was skinny, but not strong. There was no way she’d be able to lift herself up to climb out. She was committed.
She took a few tentative steps and aimed the flashlight up the stairs. There were lots of things that could kill you in a house: radon, asbestos, toxic mold, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, lead, polyurethane foam, fiberglass insulation. This house wasn’t any more dangerous than any other.
“Anyone home?” she called. “I’m gathering signatures,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow and nervous. “To legalize pot?”
Nothing.
She saw something move. Just a flash. She jerked the flashlight beam to the left just in time to see the back end of a rat skitter past a beer can.
She made it halfway up the stairs in two steps. Not that she was scared of rats, she told herself—she was just suddenly in a very big hurry. The stairs led up to the kitchen. With all the windows covered, the first floor was even darker than the basement. She knew it was the kitchen only because of the cracked speckled linoleum on the floor. There were footprints in the dust on the floor, seemingly dozens, in random patterns, like there’d been a scuffle there, or a square dance.
There were no appliances in the kitchen anymore, just empty wooden cupboards and fittings for gas pipes sticking out of the wall where an oven used to be. The sink was filled with more beer cans. There were no dead bodies.
Susan squeezed the flashlight in her armpit, and got her notebook and pen out of her purse. She had to hold the flashlight under her chin to see what she was writing, but she managed to take a few notes. Footprints. Miller High Life cans. Really fucking spooky.Also, rat.
She put the notebook and pen away, took the flashlight back in her hand, and followed the beam out of the kitchen into a dark hallway and toward the front of the house until she came to a bedsheet that blocked the entrance to the next room. The sheet had been nailed to the ceiling and hung to the floor like a makeshift door. Classy.
Rat-borne illnesses killed almost thirteen thousand people a year.