Page 16 of The Boo Next Door

"Bee would have liked him," I finish, and neither of us says anything, and someone's oat milk screams in the pitcher like it understands me.

Tuesday night, pre-cutting done, I pack my drill, and that's when I see it — up on the high shelf above the lumber rack, back in the shadow between two totes, a curve of pale gray.

A crescent. Papier-mâché, big as a bicycle wheel, the surface hand-textured in little overlapping strokes, and there's a chip out of the bottom edge of the smile.

The chip is what does it. Somewhere below my conscious floor, a filing cabinet drawer rolls open. A ladder in the dark. Cocoa. Face the porch so I can see them from my chair.

"What's that?" My voice comes out normal. Genuinely normal. I'm as surprised as anyone.

He follows my eyes to the shelf, and there's a beat — a held sixteenth note, nothing, you'd need to be a person who reads rooms professionally to catch it — before he says, "Came with the house."

"Huh," I say again.

I carry my drill home through the fence gate, and I stand in my own yard, and the maple's dropping leaves on the ruins of the fog war, and I run the math like a person checking a lock they already know is locked.

Bee's moon is in her shed. I inventoried the shed my first week — well. I started to. I opened the door, and it smelled like lavender and sawdust and her, and I closed it again and called it triage. But the moon is in there. It's in there under a tarp with everything else, because where else would it be.

I know that moon from somewhere. I know it the way you know a smell.

But Bee's moon is in her shed. Obviously.

Obviously it is.

Chapter 6

Grady

She asked about the moon, and I said it came with the house, and I've been carrying the lie around since Tuesday like a hot coal in a work glove.

It's not even a good lie. It's a lie with a shelf life. There are photographs of that moon in the county paper with her grandmother standing inside it. Marge could date it from across the street. The lie has one job — buy time until after the contest, when the truth stops looking like sabotage — and every evening this week I've watched her clock that shelf on her way out of my garage, not staring, just filing, and I know exactly what a Merriweather does with a file once it's open.

So of course, this is the week I go down.

Not the ladder. Me.

Wednesday morning, in the bay, Ravi corners me at the turnout rack with the face he uses on homeowners who want to reset their own breakers.

"Heard you're in that garage every night with the neighbor."

"Co-chairs. It's a committee sentence. You were there when Dottie⁠—"

"I heard you built a cat bed."

"It's a shop blanket."

"Denise says it's fleece." He racks his coat and stands there, arms crossed, nine years of friendship assembling itself into a wall. "Grady. The moon's still on your shelf. The tarp's still on the rest of it. And now you're spending every evening twelve inches from that girl over a table saw, and she still doesn't know her own grandmother wrote you into the will of this whole town." He lets that sit. "Tell her about the letter before the letter tells her about you."

"After the contest."

"Why."

"Because right now the truth looks like a tactic." I've built the argument so many nights it comes out pre-fabricated. "Three weeks before judging, the guy she's trying to beat says, by the way, your grandmother trained me, funded the whole event through me, and left me her prop collection — what does that sound like? It sounds like the incumbent showing the new kid whose town it is. She'd fold or she'd blow up. Either way I've kneecapped her, with a letter, in her first October in that house. After the contest, it's just history. Before, it's a weapon."

Ravi looks at me for a long minute.

"That's a real nice load calculation," he says. "You run it for her side? Because from where she'll stand, it's going to look like you had a hundred chances to say one true sentence, and you picked the version where you win first."

The tones drop before I have to answer that. Medical assist, Route Nine. Saved by the bell, if the bell is somebody's chest pains.