Breathing fast, she ran her hands along either wall as she walked. The hall ended. She slammed her forehead—bonk!—and reeled back. The den door creaked open. A rectangle of midday light shone through the turret and illuminated the hall just enough for her to see the movers’ shapes. They blended together with the piano like a single, lumbering beast.
She found the light and flicked it. Everything got bright. The men blinked like moles. Their faces sagged in this less-forgiving light, and she realized they weren’t as young as she’d thought.
“Where?” Boss Guy growled. They were sweating. They were pissed.
“Oh, right!” she said, after she caught her breath. She pointed to the buckle in the middle of the den. “Sorry about the light. You can wheel it right to this hole in the floor. I think somebody had a piano here before. Or something heavy, at least.”
All three of them chose this moment to roll their eyes at her, like it was her fault that pianos are heavy. Then they wheeled it into the room.
After they made two more trips, Hot Guy finally spoke. “This place isn’t right,” he said. He wore a cigarette behind his ear and a pack of Pall Malls rolled into the short sleeve of his sweat-stained undershirt. “Do you know what I mean?”
“What’s not right, the piano?” she asked. “Where else should I put it?”
He was a good-looking guy, and from the way he posed, cross-legged against the wall, she got the feeling that he was accustomed to the attentions of the fairer sex. “My cousin lived in a place like this,” he said. “His dog used to bark all night long at the fireplace, like it saw something there. Then my cousin saw it, too. An old guy’s face, watching him. All red-eyed and crazy-like. Turned out, some guy’d been murdered in the house, then buried under the fireplace with some extra bricks. His wife did it. Happened a hundred years before, and nobody who’d lived there after that had ever noticed anything wrong. Something about my cousin brought it out. Or, hey, maybe it was the dog that brought it out.”
She decided he’d smoked a bowl before reporting to work. Who else but a stoner would say something so stupid to a woman about to spend her first night in a new apartment, all by herself?
“Did something bad happen here?” he asked.
A shelf dropped in her stomach. She thought about four children. Acknowledged the thing she’d been denying. She’d read that Clara DeLea hadn’t emptied the tub from one child to the next. At those tender ages, they could not have understood what death meant. Had only learned what it looked like as their mother had plunged them underwater, and they’d witnessed its wild-eyed mask on their siblings’ rigid faces.
Hot Guy pressed his ear against the plaster and listened. Then he ran his piano-string-greased hands up and down the walls, as if feeling for a vibration. She thought about tiny fists and pictured the monster, Clara DeLea, crawling across the apartment one night and sneaking up on her children while they slumbered. Her knees would have left an imprint on the old carpet. A slightly darker hue, where she’d pressed the nylon the wrong way. Or worse. Maybe, like a witch, she’d crawled along the walls, and her greasy, bloated body had left snail trails that hadn’t been washed clean but instead painted white. They were coming through that paint now, psychic residue, in the form of this mover’s dirty paws.
Audrey pointed. “You’re making a mess!”
Startled, Hot Guy dropped his hands. His smears were everywhere. Nobody looked angry. Just uncomfortable. She tried to think of an explanation: I’m feeling a little fragile…I just broke up with my boyfriend…Of course it’s haunted. A woman slaughtered her four children here!
Hot Guy looked like he was going to say something, but the boss interrupted him. “Look at what you did to the nice lady’s wall, you mucker! Go get a rag.”
When they were done, she handed them each a ten-dollar tip. “Don’t listen to these numbskulls,” Boss Guy said, pointing his thumbs at his accomplices. He waited until Audrey cracked a smile, then added, “You know the magic formula, don’t you, sweetheart? If you want to be happy here, you will.”
“Thanks. I’ll make sure to tap my ruby slippers,” she said, regretting her rudeness even as she spoke.
Boss Guy raised a puzzled eyebrow. “Uh, yeah,” he said, and left without another word.