A House with Good Bones E-Book

T. Kingfisher

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 346

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Dark and twisted family roots threaten to strangle their home's foundations in this chilling haunted house novel from the award-winning master of modern horror, T. Kingfisher. In this ordinary North Carolina suburb, family secrets are always in bloom. Samantha Montgomery pulls into the driveway of her family home to find a massive black vulture perched on the mailbox, staring at the house. Inside, everything has changed. Gone is the eclectic warmth Sam expects; instead the walls are a sterile white. Now, it's very important to say grace before dinner, and her mother won't hear a word against Sam's long-dead and little-missed grandmother, who was the first to put down roots in this small southern town. The longer Sam stays, the stranger things get. And every day, more vultures circle overhead…

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

The First Day

1

2

The Second Day

3

4

The Third Day

5

6

The Fourth Day

7

8

The Fifth Day

9

10

The Sixth Day

11

12

13

The Seventh Day

14

The Eighth Day

15

16

17

The Ninth Day

18

19

20

21

22

Day Or Night Or Nowhere

23

24

25

26

Days Later

27

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by T. Kingfisher

Nettle & Bone

What Moves the Dead

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A House with Good Bones

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781803364339

Broken Binding edition ISBN: 9781803366302

Forbidden Planet edition ISBN: 9781803366319

Australian edition ISBN: 9781803365466

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803363370

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition March 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2023 Ursula Vernon. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

This is for my grandmother,who was actually pretty awesome

THE FIRST DAY

WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL: An old-fashioned English shrub rose. Grows to four feet high and four feet wide. Produces masses of large, loose-petalled white roses, occasionally with a touch of pink. Fragrant. Repeat bloomer.

1

There was a vulture on the mailbox of my grandmother’s house.

As omens go, it doesn’t get much more obvious than that. This was a black vulture, not a turkey vulture, but that’s about as much as I could tell you. I have a biology degree, but it’s in bugs, not birds. The only reason that I knew that much was because the identification key for vultures in North America is extremely straightforward. Does it have a black head? It’s a black vulture. Does it have a red head? It’s a turkey vulture. This works unless you’re in the Southwest, where you have to add: Is it the size of a small fighter jet? It’s a California condor.

We have very few condors in North Carolina.

“I bet you have some amazing feather mites,” I told the vulture, opening the car door. The vulture tilted its head and considered this, or me, or my aging Subaru.

I took out my phone and got several glamour shots of the bird. When I tried to upload one to the internet, however, my phone informed me that it had one-tenth of a bar and my GPS conked out completely.

Ah yes. That, at least, hadn’t changed.

My mother lived on Lammergeier Lane, which made the vulture even more appropriate, although we don’t have Lammergeiers—“beardedvultures”—in North Carolina either. They’re a large species of vulture from Africa and Eurasia that eats bones. Why would you name a private road after a bone-eating vulture from a different continent? I looked it up one day when I was bored, and discovered that the developer of the subdivision had been obsessed with birds. His first project had been Accipiter Lane, then Brambling Court, then Cardinal Street, and so on through the alphabet until Whip-poor-will Way, whereupon he died, presumably so that he would not have to come up with a bird for X. (The correct answer is Xantus’s murrelet, but I admit it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.)

Lammergeier Lane was a type of subdivision that we have all over the South, although I don’t know if they’ve migrated out to other areas. You’ll be driving along a rural road, surrounded by trees, cow pastures, and the occasional business that sells firewood, propane, and hydraulic repairs. Then you’ll see a dilapidated trailer and a sign for a private drive. You turn onto the drive and suddenly there are a dozen cookie-cutter houses lining the street, all with neat lawns. The road either terminates in a cul-de-sac or links up to another, even more rural road.

You are required by tradition to have the dilapidated trailer, which is generally owned by a grumpy survivalist who refuses to sell. Otherwise the residents will have nothing to complain about and will become fractious.

My grandmother, that odd, frustrating woman, had bought the third house on the right side of the street and lived there for a number of years. We moved in with her for a year when I was ten, then Mom managed to get us an apartment and we moved out again. Then Gran Mae died when I was fourteen and we moved back in. Now I was thirty-two and here yet again.

The subdivision looked exactly the same as it had when I left. It had hit that stage where all the covenants have lapsed and someone has put in a chicken coop and someone else’s lawn is going to seed—I approve of this, it supports far more insect life—and there’s a truck on blocks tucked almost out of sight behind a shed. Subdivisions can persist in this particular developmental stage for decades before they finally pupate into their adult form and become a neighborhood ripe for parasitizing by developers.

I looked across the street at Mr. Pressley’s house. Was he still alive? He had to be in his eighties by now.

Yep, sure enough, the curtains on the big window were just slightly cracked, and I could make out the outline of a pair of binoculars. Mr. Pressley was a one-man neighborhood watch, whether the neighborhood wanted it or not. He was convinced that rural North Carolina was a hotbed of murderous activity. If I didn’t get moving soon, he’d probably call the cops on me.

“Put out an APB on the fat woman with curly hair,” I muttered to myself. “It was malicious standing, Officer, I saw it with my own eyes! And parking her car with intent!” There aren’t many social advantages to being fat, but I’ll give it this, nobody ever thinks you’re a cat burglar.

So Pressley was still alive and the trailer was still there. Cell coverage still shaky. My grandmother’s front yard was still covered in roses. (Despite my mother having lived here for nearly two decades, I still thought of it as my grandmother’s house.) About the only thing that had changed on Lammergeier Lane was that the Bradford pear trees had mostly died and been replaced with crepe myrtles.

And, apparently, vultures.

The vulture in question was still sitting on the wooden crosspiece behind the mailbox. I had no idea if it was hostile, nervous, or about to launch itself at my head. They don’t have facial expressions like mammals. Mind you, I’m not that great with mammals either.

The screen door slammed and I heard my mother calling. “Samantha! Samantha, you’re here!”

“Hi, Mom,” I said, not taking my eyes off the bird. “Did you know you’ve got yard vultures?”

“Don’t mind them. They belong to the lady down the street,” Mom said.

I turned to stare at her. “They what?”

“Well, not belong, exactly. There’s a tree.” She waved her hands toward the end of the street. “Oh, never mind, I’ll explain later. Don’t worry, they’re harmless.”

“Don’t they puke when they get upset?” This is just about the only fact I know about vultures, and only because an ex-boyfriend of mine got too close to one once and found out the hard way. In retrospect, the vulture may have had the right idea.

“Oh yes!” Mom beamed at me. “One threw up all over the Goldbergs’ beagle.”

Fortunately, this vulture did not seem particularly inclined to vomit. I backed away until the car was safely between us, then turned and hugged Mom.

“It’s so good to see you, honey,” she said. I didn’t say anything, because I was just realizing that she had dropped a scary amount of weight since the last time I’d seen her. The women in our family are either fat or skeletal, and it felt like she had switched sides in the last year. I could feel her ribs and the knobs on her spine.

“Good god, Mom,” I said, stepping back. “Are you okay? You don’t have cancer or something, do you?” (Tact. I do not have it.)

“No, no.” She smiled, but her face had gotten as thin as the rest of her, and I couldn’t tell if she looked worried or if it was just the new lines around her mouth. “I’m fine. Do you know how long you’re staying?”

“Haven’t a clue,” I admitted. “They found human remains on the dig, so we’re all furloughed until it gets sorted.”

“I’m so sorry.” She grabbed one of my duffel bags out of the car. “I know you were excited to work on this one.”

“Eh, they’ve promised to bring us all back on. Hopefully it won’t take too long.”

I’m an archaeoentomologist. It’s fine, you’ve never heard of me. I study insects in archaeological remains. Actually, if you’re in the field, you probably have heard of me, because there’s hardly any of us. You’ve almost certainly heard of Dr. Wilcox, my boss, who did all that amazing work with sawtoothed grain beetle larvae found in food storage from the Viking era.

Anyway, my job is mostly spent either sitting in a room sifting through dirt from digs looking for dried-out insect husks or staring at photos somebody else took of dried-out insect husks, fiddling with the brightness and contrast to see if I can make out any details. Occasionally I do get out to dig sites, which I enjoy a lot more. My particular specialty is Pacific Northwest Paleo-Indian middens, but I get dirt samples from all over because, as I said, there aren’t that many of us.

It was a dig that had brought me back home. Start of the season, the promise of a whole lot of hands-on time in the dirt instead of staring at photos. I’d told my roommates I wouldn’t be back for six months, shoved my furniture into storage, and went off to play in the Paleolithic midden. And then, like I told Mom, somebody found human remains. On the third day of serious digging, no less.

Well, that was the end of that. The whole project was on hold until the Native American Heritage Commission could sort out what tribe the bones belonged to and if they had any living relatives who would want them back for burial. Some archaeologists get bitter about these sort of regulations apparently, but I personally don’t want to muck around with anybody’s ancestors. It seems rude, and just generally tacky.

Anyway, give me a trash heap over a grave any day. A grave tells you how people act when they’re on their best behavior in front of Death. Trash heaps tell you how they actually lived.

The problem was that I’d announced a six-month absence, and my roommates had already sublet my bedroom to an exchange student. Also, I had no real idea when the litigation would get resolved—sometimes they can sort these things out in a couple of weeks, if all parties are trying hard to get along, and sometimes they drag on for years and the person in charge of the dig tells us to take other jobs and they’ll call back. So, I called up Mom and told her I needed to come back home for a bit, and of course she had alternated between concern and enthusiasm, which is Mom’s normal state of being.

“I’m so glad to see you, honey,” she said again, giving me a worried look over her shoulder. The line between her eyebrows had grown deeper since the last time I’d seen her. “I just wish it didn’t have to be here.”

“Here?” It seemed like an odd thing to say.

“Oh, you know.” She opened the door and waved me inside. Laden with all of my clothes and about half my worldly possessions, I inched past her and set my duffel bags down with a grunt.

“Uh . . .”

“Well, just because your dig was canceled.” She hugged me again. I had a feeling that it wasn’t what she’d planned to say.

My brother, Brad, had said that he thought we needed to check in on Mom more often. At the time, I’d thought he was just worrying too much. Now, seeing how thin she was and how harried she looked, I started to think he should have called me sooner.

“Are you sure everything’s okay, Mom? I don’t mean to impose, it’s just that Brad and Maria have no space, and I figured it had been a while . . .”

“No, no! You know this is your home too.” And she hugged me again, which is Mom all over—always anxious to make sure that no one feels unloved for even an instant.

“Sure, but I don’t want to interrupt any hot dates.” I grinned at her. “If you need me to get lost some evening . . .”

She swatted clumsily at me with a duffel bag. “Pff! Thank you, no. All the single men my age want either a trophy wife or a housekeeper, and I’m not doing either.”

“Awwwright,” I drawled. “Two sexy single ladies living the fabulous single lifestyle, then.”

Mom gave me a droll look. “So . . . boxed wine and binging British crime shows?”

“It’s like we’re related or something.” I turned toward the stairs and stopped. Something had been bothering me since I stepped in, but it wasn’t until I saw the wall over the stairs that I realized what it was.

“You repainted everything.”

Mom has always loved bright colors. We’d painted almost as soon as we moved into the house after Gran Mae died—bright yellow in the kitchen, lime green on the staircase, deep blue in the downstairs bathroom. In a way it had primed me for living in Arizona, with all its rich terra-cottas and turquoise. But now I was standing in the house and the walls were . . . white. Eggshell. Ecru. All the various shades that are just white under different names.

“Oh. Well,” said Mom, sounding embarrassed. “I thought it was time for a change. And you know, all those colors, some people might think they were a bit much.”

“It’s your house,” I said. “Who cares what other people think?” Then it occurred to me that there’s usually only one reason you repaint all the walls white. “Are you thinking of selling?”

“No!” said Mom, nearly a yell. I blinked at her and she flushed. “Sorry, honey, I didn’t mean—I’d never sell. Of course I wouldn’t.”

“Okay. That’s fine.”

“I’m sorry. That didn’t come out like I meant.” She was getting flustered, and I tried to salvage the situation.

“No, Mom, really, I wasn’t judging. It just surprised me, that’s all. It looks very bright and airy.” I also thought it looked very generic Suburban White People Chic, but I kept that to myself.

She led the way upstairs to my old room and pushed open the door. I paused on the threshold. She’d repainted here, too, but not ecru.

“Antique Rose,” Mom said.

“It’s almost the same color as it was when we moved in when I was a kid, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” She frowned. “I don’t remember.”

“I think so.” I set my bags down on the bed with a whump. “It looks nice,” I added, since Mom had the line between her eyebrows again. I actually preferred the old color, which had been a restful blue, but I hadn’t lived here for years. It wasn’t my place to police what color Mom painted her guest bedroom. Or the rest of her house, for that matter. Still, ecru. It’s like if you couldn’t decide on white or beige and combined the two for maximum blandness.

There was a doily on the chest of drawers. I eyed it warily. I have nothing against doilies, but they’re a slippery slope. You start with doilies, then pretty soon it’s crocheted table runners and then it’s a short step to antimacassars. As if doilies are some kind of larval form, and the table runners are an instar in their development. But then are the antimacassars the adult form, or just a later instar? Perhaps the adult form of the doily bears no resemblance to its juvenile stages.

“Mom,” I said, cutting off this chain of thought before it got any weirder. “I love you to pieces but I’ve been driving for three days and I think I need a nap. I’m getting loopy.”

“Oh honey, of course. You must be exhausted.”

“Eh, you know.” The one good thing about the dig being put on hold only a few days in was that I hadn’t yet made the drive up from my apartment in Tucson to the dig site in Oregon. (The phone call had literally caught me heading to the car that morning.) So instead I’d taken my already packed-up car and driven from Tucson to North Carolina, which is a longer trip, mostly involving Texas.

God, there’s just so much Texas. I could handle all the other states, but Texas lengthwise really breaks you. I attempted to express this to my mother, which mostly involved wild arm gestures and the words El Paso uttered at intervals.

“Take a nap,” Mom advised. “I was going to order a pizza for dinner.”

“You are a saint,” I said, collapsing onto the bed. “An absolute saint. Did someone start delivering way out here?”

“There’s a place in Siler City that will. Do you still like ham and pineapple?”

“Very much so.”

Mom closed the door. I rolled onto my side, still thinking vague thoughts about doilies pupating. I had just gotten to the point of wondering if I could get a grant to study the life cycle of crocheted tablecloths when sleep overtook me.

2

For a moment when I woke, I had no idea where I was. No, that’s not quite accurate—I had no idea when I was. I knew that I was in my bedroom in my grandmother’s house, but the rose-colored walls meant that I must be ten years old and Gran Mae was alive and I would go downstairs for breakfast and Mom would make eggs and Gran Mae would look disapprovingly at me and ask if I wouldn’t like some nice low-fat yogurt instead and I would shake my head and eat my egg. Brad would sit across from me, sixteen and already nearly six feet tall, shoveling in three eggs to my one, but Gran Mae never asked him if he wanted yogurt. Sometimes I wished I was a boy.

If I didn’t answer her, she eventually stopped talking at me and started talking to Mom, saying that maybe she shouldn’t feed me so much. That was easier. I could pretend they were talking about some other girl and it had nothing to do with me. Mom would say that the other girl was growing and needed protein, and then she’d put the pan in the sink and wipe her hands and say that we had to leave for school. Unless it was Saturday, and then Brad and I would watch cartoons and Mom would be at her other job, so we ate cereal. Mom hadn’t come to wake me up, so maybe it was Saturday, and I could go watch The Smurfs and The Real Ghostbusters. I wanted to be Egon when I grew up. Egon was cool.

I stared at the rose-pink wall and part of me was ten years old and another part of me was thirty-two and had a doctorate and had written a thesis on the spread of seed weevils through North American sunflower crops. I had a sudden horrible fear that maybe the ten-year-old was the real one and I had just had a particularly vivid dream and now I would have to go and live my entire life all over again. I put my hand to my forehead and said, “Fuuuuck . . .” which ten-year-old me would not have said.

Gran Mae did not teleport to my location to say, Samantha Myrtle Montgomery, you know what happens to little girls who swear. (Yes, Gran Mae, I know. The underground children get them.) This was proof positive that she was dead.

I sat up, looked down, and saw that I had breasts bigger than my head, which ten-year-old me most definitely did not have. Right. Thirty-two. Did not have to rewrite my thesis. Thank you, Jesus.

I slid out of bed and staggered down the hall to the bathroom. The underground children. Heh. I hadn’t thought of that in years. Gran Mae’s personal answer to the boogeyman. The underground children got you if you swore, if you disrespected your elders, and possibly if you didn’t clean your room, although demands that I clean my room had usually been met with the aforementioned disrespecting of elders, so I wasn’t entirely clear on that one.

I pulled open the bathroom drawer, looking for aspirin, and caught a whiff of my grandmother’s scent. Something powdery and floral; not roses, but something else. Freesia, maybe. Some of her powder must have spilled in the back of the drawer years ago. How strange that I’d lived in the house for years and it had been our house, not hers. And now, with one coat of paint and a remembered scent, it was like being back at her house all over again.

Getting maudlin, I thought. Must be low blood sugar. Dry-swallowed the aspirin, grimaced, reminded myself for the hundredth time to never ever do that again. Blech. I straightened up and saw a note on the mirror at eye level, in my mother’s neat handwriting: REFILL TP BEFORE SAM GETS HERE.

I chuckled. My mother leaves notes to herself everywhere. She is meticulous and keeps a planner for work, but at home, the entire house becomes her planner. My brother and I grew up surrounded by her notes to herself: on the refrigerator, on the bathroom mirrors, on end tables and nightstands and tacked to the back of the front door so she’d remember before leaving the house. I checked the strategic toilet paper reserves and found that they were indeed low.

I looked past the note to my reflection in the mirror. I looked pretty rough by my personal standards, but pretty good for having driven across Texas, so I’d call that a win. I tucked a couple stray bits of hair behind my ears. They wouldn’t stay. They never do. My hair is a comb-eating monster that is technically “curly,” in the same way that a cassowary is technically a bird. It’s factual, but leaves out a lot of the kicking-a-man’s-bowels-out-through-his-spine bits. Not that my hair has ever done that. To my knowledge.

I galloped downstairs. My legs still remembered the rhythm of the stairs, tha-thump tha-thump tha-thump, which my grandmother had always said sounded like a herd of mustangs in the house. Brad had started it, but I picked it up from him out of a combination of sibling hero-worship and solidarity, and here I was, thirty-two years old, doing it again instinctively.

“I’m in here,” Mom called from the living room. I swung by the fridge to grab a can of something cold and carbonated and admire the notes currently adorning the door. CHECK WATER FILTER FEB/AUGUST. GET MONEY FOR PHIL. DON’T BUY HUMMUS W/ RED LID—EVIL!

I knew that Phil was the guy Mom hired to cut the lawn, who I’d never met, and the water filter seemed self-explanatory. I was contemplating the potential sins of hummus as I stepped into the living room, then I stopped dead and stared.

There was an old painting over the fireplace, one that had hung there as long as my grandmother had been alive. It was oil paint, or at least trying to look like oil paint, and featured an old-timey bride and groom standing together under an arbor of pale pink roses, gazing into each other’s eyes with expressions of wistful bliss or blissful wist or whatever the hell you call that particular sappy expression.

This would have been merely tacky if it had been an ordinary bride and groom, but the groom was wearing a military uniform in Confederate gray, which made it tacky and racist. My most vivid memory of the painting was the day that my mother and I moved into the house after Gran Mae died, when Mom took it down from the wall and replaced it with a large woodcut of a fish.

“Mom,” I said, struggling with that same sense of double vision, as if I was seeing the bones of my grandmother’s house under this one. “What’s with the painting?”

“Huh?” She looked around, puzzled. I pointed to the Confederate wedding. “Oh.” Her eyes slid away from mine. “Well. Your grandmother loved it, you know . . .”

“Yes, but you hate it. You called it Lost Cause bullshit. I thought you threw it away.”

“I’m sure you must have misheard me,” she murmured, looking into her wineglass. “I wouldn’t have thrown that away. Not when Gran Mae loved it so much.”

She looked so worried that I tried a different tactic. “What happened to the fish?”

Her gaze sharpened unexpectedly. “You remember the fish?”

“Of course. It was a great fish. And there was a hellgrammite in the stones, and nobody ever draws hellgrammites.”

Mom’s whole face lit up. I don’t know how, but suddenly she looked a decade younger and much more like her old self. “I can’t believe you remember that! My friend Theo made it in college, and I carried it around for years.” She beamed at me. “It’s still in the attic.”

“We should put it back up.”

“Would you like that?” A trace of the worry crossed her face again. “Well, I . . . well, let’s see if I can find it again, maybe we can figure something out . . .”

“I’d love that,” I said, deciding on positive reinforcement. Was I doing this right? I strongly believe that you have to confront your older relatives about racist behavior, but I admit, it seemed this was a much easier position to hold before I actually had to do it. Mom was deeply, profoundly liberal, and the Confederate wedding painting shocked the hell out of me. A couple years back, she’d driven the thirty minutes to Pittsboro to join the protests demanding they take down the Confederate veteran statue. So what the hell was this painting doing hanging on her wall?

“Pizza should be here soon,” said Mom. She raised a wineglass in my general direction. “I’ll be out tomorrow night. I have a client coming in on an early flight the next day, so I’m going to spend the night in Raleigh. I ordered enough pizza for leftovers, but you might still need to go to the store.”

“No worries. I’ll make a grocery run tomorrow so I’m not eating you out of house and home. Enjoy your escort mission.”

Mom is quasi-retired, but she isn’t good at it so she works as a media escort these days. Media escorts are basically people wranglers for minor celebrities, keynote speakers, lifestyle gurus, authors on book tours, that sort of thing. Anybody who has a publicist but not a personal jet. She meets these people at the airport or the hotel, has their itinerary all printed up, and drives them to where they need to be. She also handles emergency laundry, makes sure they’ve got bottles of water, mails packages, makes sure they eat, things like that. Then she drives them back to the airport and sees them off to the next stop. It always struck me as a weird job, but Mom is very good at mothering strangers and accommodating their various requests, and she can make small talk all day long, which is a skill I did not inherit.

“Anybody exciting?” I asked, meandering into the kitchen and locating the box of wine. “Martha Stewart? Salman Rushdie?” She won’t gossip about her charges, but I do get tidbits occasionally. Apparently motivational speakers are the absolute worst. Her all-time favorite was a man who wrote a book on bondage for beginners, who she said was genuinely delightful and made his audience give her a round of applause for all her help.

“No, no. A celebrity chef. He’s doing a cooking demo and a radio interview, and he specifically requested a case of Cheerwine.”

“His funeral.” (I know, I know, many North Carolinians will go to bat for Cheerwine. I am not one of them. The stuff tastes like carbonated maraschino cherries.) “Well, good luck. They can’t all be Bondage Guy.”

Mom giggled, sounding much happier than she had a few hours ago. “He really was just the sweetest. And he still sends me a Christmas card every year.”

“Ask if he’s single!”

“He’s not even forty.”

“So?” I squeezed out a generous portion of the finest Malbec cardboard can buy.

“Someday you’ll get to an age where you die a little whenever someone doesn’t get your movie references.” Mom sighed. “The last time I went on a date, I said something about Silent Running and he thought I meant the one about the Jamaican bobsled team. I could actually feel the gray hairs sprouting.”

“Heh.” I dropped onto the couch, checked my phone, remembered that there’s no signal worth a damn on Lammergeier Lane, and spent five minutes trying to make it talk to the house internet. (Which is also terrible out here, don’t get me wrong. Nobody is running cable down rural roads unless they have a pressing reason.) My phone informed me that it was absolutely talking to the internet, it was happy to talk to the internet, it loved talking to the internet, then as soon as I tried to check my email, it told me it had never heard of the internet and wasn’t entirely sure it existed. I dropped the phone on the coffee table and tried to remember how to make conversation like a normal person.

“So what was the deal with the vulture?” I asked.

“Oh! Gail, the woman who lives just around the bend at the end of the road? She does wildlife rehab, or she used to, I think. She says a whole flock lives in a tree on her property. A roost tree, she called it.”

“That’s cool. A lot of people would freak out having vultures living in their backyard.” As a biologist, I disapprove of those people on principle. Scavengers are essential to a tidy planet. Do you really want all the deer that get hit by cars to lie around in the ditches for months on end? No, of course you don’t.

“She’s an interesting person.”

Something clicked. “Wait—the woman at the end of the road? Who owns the big property there? Not the one Gran Mae used to call the old witch?”

Mom stared into her wine. “I’m sure she never said anything so unkind.”

“Yes, she did! Don’t you remember? She was always saying that her garden was a weed pit and . . .” I trailed off because the expression that had crossed Mom’s face was actually scaring me. She had looked worried before, but for a moment, she looked genuinely frightened.

“I said,” said Mom, in the tone that she used when I was a small child and was Not Getting The Hint, “I’m sure Gran Mae never said anything like that.”

I swallowed. That tone of voice was the parental equivalent of a shotgun being cocked. Mom hadn’t used it on me since before I was old enough to drive. “Uh,” I said. “Maybe I’m misremembering.” But I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t.

She slugged back her wine like a frat boy chugging vodka. “I should check and see if the pizza guy is on the road.”

“Maybe I’m misremembering,” I repeated, trying to sound conciliatory. Jesus, this was strange, though. Mom hanging up Gran Mae’s old painting, and now trying to pretend the “old witch” stuff hadn’t happened? Gran Mae had hated that woman. I’m fairly certain she only called her an old witch because bitch was not a word that Gran Mae allowed to pass her lips, or anyone else’s. (Brad had once engaged a family friend in conversation about his dog-breeding business, specifically to watch her flinch at the dinner table.)

Mom couldn’t possibly have forgotten. It was one of Gran Mae’s favorite topics of conversation. If you mentioned that Gran Mae’s roses were looking nice, she’d tell you it was all down to bonemeal and careful tending, which is what it took to make a garden, not just letting it go wild like some people did. “Why, Father would never have stood for it for a minute, rest his soul!” she would say. And if you even so much as grunted in a conversational manner at that point or, God forbid, said, “Oh?” she’d be off and running about the woman at the end of the road who called her garden “cottage style” but it looked more like a trailer park what with all the junk in it and the weeds everywhere and at that point you might as well just grow geraniums in a toilet and embrace that you had no class at all.

Gran Mae felt very, very strongly that the world was divided into those with class and those without. I can’t remember if she believed in the Rapture, but if she had, only the classy would be saved. I don’t know what happened to the non-classy in her cosmology. Possibly the underground children got them, or possibly they were just doomed to live out their days in a giant Walmart of the Damned.

I stared at the Confederate wedding and thought dark thoughts. Gran Mae had been racist, in that Southern heavily-in-denial way, where you think watching Oprah counts as having a black friend. When I had been doing my history homework at the dinner table once, she’d muttered that Dr. King was “just a rabble-rouser,” and Mom had given me a grim look over her shoulder and mouthed, That’s not true.

Fortunately the pizza arrived before I could go too far down that unpleasant memory lane. Mom seemed relieved that I didn’t press the issue of the old witch but devoted myself to appreciation of pineapple on pizza.

I had a slice halfway to my mouth when Mom said, “Oh! We should say grace, I think.”

I paused. A piece of pineapple slid slowly from the tip of the pizza and landed on the cardboard. “Really?” I said.

We are not a family that says grace over food. Gran Mae always insisted on it, but Mom’s Christianity has generally been limited to a fondness for Jesus Christ Superstar. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sat at a table where someone prayed over the food. No, wait, I could—it was when Brad’s in-laws came to dinner one time in Tucson and they’d done it, while Brad and his wife and I sat around trying to pretend that we were absolutely devout people who prayed all the time, yes sir, no heathens here.

“I’d feel better,” said Mom firmly.

Right. Okay. Brad had said there was something odd going on with Mom, and apparently he didn’t know the half of it. I set the pizza slice down and folded my hands.

“Lord, bless us for this food we are about to receive . . .” Mom intoned.

As a child, when Gran Mae would say grace, Brad and I would stare at each other across the table. This is why one has siblings, after all. Without Brad to look at, I stared at my folded hands and wondered what on earth was going on.

Had Mom gotten religion suddenly? Was that why Brad thought she’d been acting oddly? It was possible. Still, Christianity doesn’t make you repaint the house ecru, as far as I know.

“Amen,” said Mom. We carried the boxes into the living room and sat on the couch, eating pizza.

“You told me what a hellgrammite was once, but I forgot,” said Mom, as we munched straight from the box. “I know it was the larval form of . . . something.” I’d just taken a bite of pizza, so she continued. “Hellgrammite. It sounds like something out of a horror movie.”

I swallowed. “Looks like it too,” I said. “Very chompy.” I made clacking mandible motions at her. “Hellllllgrammiiiiite.” Mom grinned and refilled my wine. “The adults are dobsonflies. They’re pretty freaky too, if you’re not a bug person.” Normally I’d have pulled up pictures at this point, but I’d have had to get my laptop out to access the internet. It was probably just as well for Mom’s digestion that my phone didn’t like the Wi-Fi. Dobsonflies are glorious, but not exactly an entry-level species.

She shook her head, clearly bemused. “You got your father’s hair and his sense of humor, and I like to think you got my brains—”

“And stunning good looks.”

“—but I have no idea where the bug thing came from.”

“Clearly a recessive gene. An extremely cool recessive gene.” I considered this. “Of course, I also had to get my love of dirt from somewhere. I spend enough time in it. Did Dad . . . ?”

“I assume he made mud pies as a baby, but no, not that I know of.” She smiled fondly. “He used to say that he could kill a plastic houseplant.”

Dad died when I was nine, which was why we eventually moved in with Gran Mae. You don’t have to feel sorry for me, it’s fine. I mean, obviously it sucked, but I lived through it and it’s ancient history now. Mind you, I had a counselor at school who always wanted me to talk about my feelings, and my feelings even then were pretty much “yeah, it sucks.” I’m not great at performative emotions.

“Well, maybe it was Gran Mae, then,” I said. “All that gardening was bound to have involved dirt in some fashion.”

Mom’s smile slipped and she stared into her wine.

Dammit, I’d said something wrong again. Should I just not talk about Gran Mae? But she’d hung up that damn painting, which might as well have been a portrait of the old woman. And she’d defended her commentary on the vulture woman at the end of the road. That didn’t sound like she was upset with Gran Mae. Unless she really truly had forgotten about the “old witch” thing. And she’d painted the house the same colors that Gran Mae had, and was saying grace just like she had . . .

Good lord, was Mom somehow in belated mourning? For a mother who had died nearly twenty years ago? But why? Granted, she was about the age that Gran Mae had been when she died, that might have shaken something loose, but still . . . (NowI sounded like the school counselor.)

The thing is, Mom survived the loss of her husband and raised two kids, lived through her childhood with Gran Mae, which could not have been terribly easy, had a career, took early retirement when the factory shut down, and then started a second career. Successfully, no less. Mom is tough. It’s easy to think that sweet people are weak, but if you look at all the stuff Mom’s lived through, she’s nearly indestructible.

Mourning for Gran Mae? Now? Really?

Was this what Brad had meant when he said that she was acting odd?

I refilled my wine from the box and wondered what to do. Did I bring up Gran Mae more, try to see if Mom was having genuine lapses in memory or was just seeing everything through rose-tinted glasses? Did I not mention her at all? I didn’t want to upset her. She is a genuinely kindhearted person and a champion worrier. If there was an Olympic sport for worrying, Mom would win the gold and then give it to the silver medalist because she was afraid that they might feel bad for losing.

Either way, I wasn’t going to do it tonight. I was tired, and I was probably going to be here for weeks. I had plenty of time to get to the bottom of things, hopefully without upsetting Mom.

“So how about a nice British murder?” I said. Mom turned on the TV and we spent the rest of the evening saying, “Oooh! I bet he did it! Because he’s holding a grudge about the car accident twenty years ago!” and, “She had to kill him to cover up the way she’d tampered with the wine bottles!” and thoroughly enjoying being proved wrong.