Page 1 of The Boo Next Door

Chapter 1

Lila

The key won't turn.

I have driven eleven hundred miles with everything I own and a cat who yowled his opinion of me through four states, and the house I inherited is refusing to let me in.

"Okay, Lila." I jiggle the key the way Grandma Bee used to, a little up, a little left, like the lock is a slot machine that owes you. "You grew up picking this lock with a library card. You can do this."

The lock does not care about my history with it.

From inside the carrier at my feet, Beetlejuice makes a sound like a chainsaw giving up. Twenty-two pounds of black cat, zero pounds of patience.

"I hear you," I tell him. "We're both tired. But one of us screamed through Pennsylvania, so one of us doesn't get a vote."

The key turns on the fifth try, the door swings open, and the smell hits me before the light does — lavender and old wood and something underneath that is just Bee, like the house has been holding its breath since March and finally let it out.

I stand on the doormat for a long minute and let it hurt.

Then I carry the cat inside, because grief is a thing you do while carrying something.

The kitchen still has her handwriting in it. Grocery list on the fridge. Reminder taped to the coffee maker that says FILTERS ARE NOT OPTIONAL, LILA, from the summer I was nineteen and made coffee that could patch a driveway. Fourteen years that note has survived. The woman archived my failures like they were love letters.

I let Beetlejuice out of the carrier. He flows onto the counter like an oil spill with opinions, sniffs the air once, and then goes still, staring down the hallway toward her bedroom.

"I know, buddy." My throat does something inconvenient. "Me too."

My phone rings. Halverson and Pruitt, Attorneys at Law, which sounds fancy for an office above the hardware store with a window air conditioner older than me.

"Miss Merriweather." Mr. Halverson has the voice of a man who delivers bad news at a volume suitable for funerals. "You made it in. Wonderful. Did the roofer's estimate reach you?"

"It reached me." It reached me the way a piano reaches the sidewalk. "Eighteen thousand dollars. Which is funny, because the estate has, what⁠—"

"Two thousand, one hundred, and change. After the taxes."

"Right." I look up at the kitchen ceiling, where a brown stain in the plaster is shaped exactly like Florida, which feels personal, since Florida is where my job used to be. "And the part where I don't have it either, because my entire division got, and I'm quoting the email, sunsetted."

"There is no shame in selling, Miss Merriweather. Houses like this⁠—"

"I'm not selling." The words come out before I decide to say them, which is how I know they're true. "I'll figure it out. I'm very resourceful. I once built a nineteen-foot animatronic yeti out of pool noodles and a defunct golf cart."

A pause. "I don't know what to do with that information."

"Nobody ever does, Mr. Halverson."

We hang up and I stand there doing math that refuses to add up no matter how nicely I ask, and that's when the dragon rises over my back fence.

I want to be clear about this, because for one full second I question every decision that brought me here, including being born. A skeletal dragon. Two stories of vertebrae and wing struts, hauled skyward on a winch, its bone jaw swinging open over my grandmother's hydrangeas like it plans to eat the property line.

"What," I say to the kitchen window.

The window does not answer. Beetlejuice, who has watched all twenty-two pounds of dignity leave my body, yawns.

I go out the back door in the October cold in my Florida clothes, and there he is. The neighbor. Up a ladder in a canvas jacket, bolting a floodlight to a bracket like it's nothing, like his yard isn't turning into the set of a movie I would absolutely pay to see if it weren't happening forty feet from my dead grandmother's garden.

He sees me. Climbs down without hurrying — one of those men who has never once hurried, because the world waits — and walks to the fence.

"You must be with the estate sale," he says. "House stuff goes Saturday. If you're here for the shed, it's not part of it."