“See?” Alice points through the dining room window, which provides a direct sight line into the kitchen. “It’s almost noon. There’s no way her mom wouldn’t be in there making lunch for the two of them.”
“This is not a household where lunch is eaten together or served on time,” I say, quietly deadpan.
“I haven’t been inside Liv’s house since her ninth birthday party,” Alice says, too loudly, peering in.
“I remember that birthday,” I admit.
“I was dying to see the inside of the Gingerbread House,” Alice recalls.
I’d forgotten they called Liv’s house the Gingerbread House, and the glamour that went along with it. With its salmon-colored boards that divided the house into bright yellow puzzle-pieces with dark green trim, it was conspicuously cheerful.
“I totally forgot people called it that,” I say.
“My mother didn’t. She called it the Painted Lady. Said it was garish,” she says.
“It’s actually a stick-style Victorian.”
“Sticks because of the boards?”
“Yeah.” I rise on my toes to see plates in the sink and the coffeepot on its burner, half full. “You can read the inside from the outside. The boards are just decoration to symbolize where the supports are.”
“You know a lot about architecture.” Alice looks at me, with her lack of filter, and that absolute sincerity that is somehow endearing. “You know a lot about everything. I kind of forgot that about you.”
I look down at the brown lawn, embarrassed. “Someone told me that.”
Alice gazes up at the house for a minute, considering. “If that’s where the supports really were, the house would fall right down.” I’m still staring at the sticks and lost in the wonder that is Alice when she points at the foundation. “Check out that crack. It goes right up the side of the house.”
A zigzag fissure runs from the bottom center to the top right, just under the gutter, in the shape of a staircase.
“What do you think it is?” asks Alice.
“I don’t know. Something’s wrong with the foundation. All the rain, maybe.” As I say it, a wind picks up and a slant of rain falls from the trees, pelting us.
Alice shivers. “It’s like the Gingerbread House is about to crack in half.” Alice suddenly looks at me. “What would it take to do one of those well-check things?”
“You mean like they do for old people and shut-ins who don’t answer their door? Proof that something is wrong, I suppose. Unless you had a friend in the police department. And I don’t think I do, at least not these days.”
“Maybe you could do it anonymously.”
I bite my lip.
“Or we could ring the doorbell.”
“I really just want to make sure she’s okay,” I say. Because I’m furious with her. But I also need to know she’s alive.
“Then ring the doorbell and say that.”
I stand there for a minute, shifting around in my coat, shoulders shoved around my ears.
“If you’re not going to ring the doorbell, can we go? I’ve kind of got the creeps.”
I laugh lamely. “Worse than when we visited Yvonne Jessup?”
Alice nods seriously. “Actually, yeah.”
We trudge across the yard together, feet sinking in the loam. I feel eyes on my back, but maybe it’s just the Amityville windows, or the rain that has started again, harder this time. Alice wants to go to the new coffee shop on the outskirts of town where everyone hangs after getting kicked out of the downtown coffee shop for overcrowding it. Alice, with her outsider’s curiosity of things insiders do. Socializing is the last thing I’m in the mood for, but she begs, and I’m afraid she’s starting to feel like the girl I secretly hook up with when no one else is around. It shouldn’t take long to get there, but it does, because miserable cops in yellow slickers are redirecting cars around holes in the street.
Alice slips into the past. I half listen. The skies have opened and my wipers can barely keep up. It’s hard not to fixate on the streaming rivulets instead of watching the road.
“I remember Liv’s third-grade birthday party so clearly. I thought Mrs. Lapin was the prettiest mom I’d ever seen.”
I snort.
“You’re not a fan. But all things considered, she is an attractive woman,” Alice insists.
I raise my eyebrows.
“Okay, whatever. I was eight. Anyway, I kept wishing I could sneak upstairs to Liv’s bedroom to see the carousel horse her father gave her,” Alice says.
I laugh. “She never had a carousel horse in her bedroom. That was a rumor.”
“You remember it though,” she says.
“I remember the rumor,” I say.
“Was the canopy bed in the shape of a pumpkin carriage true?”
“She had a canopy bed. It was not in the shape of a pumpkin.”
“The slide from the hole in her bedroom floor that led to the playroom?”
“Liv’s house doesn’t even have a playroom.”
“What about the secret eaves through her closet? A whole room where you could play, and no one could find you. Like Narnia.”