Page 3 of The Boo Next Door

I grew up on this green. Cider in paper cups, someone's dog wearing a costume, the smell of woodsmoke and fry oil and cold coming down off the hills. Bee used to hold my hand through the whole thing and narrate which of her neighbors were cowards.

Tonight I stand at the back alone with a cider I can't taste, and it's the first time the town has seen me since the funeral, which means I get The Face from everyone. The tilted head. The soft eyes. Marge Okafor from the hardware store hugs me so hard I hear a rib file a complaint, and says, "Oh, honey," into my hair, twice.

"Hi, Marge."

"You staying? Tell me you're staying. That house needs a Merriweather in it. And you missed everything. We got a coffee place now. Frankie's. Where the video store was. Girl makes a thing with maple foam that would make you fight your family."

"I'm staying," I say, and Marge lights up so hard it's embarrassing, and I don't have the heart to add: if I can find eighteen thousand dollars in a month, anyway.

Up on the bandstand, Dottie Pruitt taps the microphone the way she's tapped it for forty years, three sharp cracks, like the microphone owes her money.

"Founders' Fright registration closes tonight," Dottie announces. Dottie is eighty pounds of cardigan and authority, and the green goes quiet for her. "Entry forms at the table. Judging is Halloween night, as always. And this year." She pauses. Dottie has never in her life rushed a piece of news. "This year, with thanks to our sponsors at Hollow Creek Savings, the Golden Gourd carries a prize of ten thousand dollars, and the winning home will be featured on the Haunted Homes Tour of New England."

The green makes a sound like a struck hive. Ten thousand dollars. I do the math against a roof that costs eighteen and change, and it's not everything — but it's the size of a miracle, and it comes with a tour feature that has commissions written all over it for someone who builds monsters professionally. Or did. Before the sunsetting.

"The prize money's new," says a voice at my shoulder. Marge, materializing the way she does, like town gossip has a teleport function. "You know who's won it three years running? Since Bee passed on the crown?" She points her cider cup across the green.

Of course.

Of course it's the bone dragon guy, standing near the bandstand with a firefighter jacket over his shoulder and half the town orbiting him — someone's kid on his shoulders, someone's dad shaking his hand, everyone's grandmother handing him something baked. Golden retriever in human form. Big, easy, beloved.

"Grady Ellis," Marge says, with the reverence this town usually saves for hurricane season. "Contractor. Volunteer fire. Fixed my gutters in the rain once and wouldn't take a dime. His display last year had a dragon that breathed actual fog, honey. There were traffic cones. We needed traffic cones."

"He told me his compressor runs at six a.m."

"That's him being neighborly."

"That's what I was afraid of."

The registration table is manned by a teenager who cannot possibly care less, which I respect. The form is the same form it has always been. Same off-white card stock. Same line at the top.

And there it is. In the box for RETURNING ENTRANT, in the pre-printed list the committee never bothered updating, her name: MERRIWEATHER, B. — 13 FOXGLOVE LANE. Twelve-time champion. The reason there's a rule about extension cord gauge. The woman who once made the front page of the county paper standing inside a papier-mâché moon.

They never took her off the form.

My eyes go hot, and I'm not going to cry at a folding table in front of a teenager, I am not, so instead I pick up the pen that's tied to the clipboard with kitchen string, and I cross out the B.

I write LILA above it, in handwriting that only shakes a little.

"You entering?" The teenager looks at the address. Looks over at the crowd around Grady Ellis. Back at me, with the first flicker of interest he's shown in his whole shift. "You know you're next door to⁠—"

"Yeah."

"He has a winch."

"I once made a haunted mine collapse on schedule, twice a night, for four years." I hand back the clipboard. "Tell the committee the Merriweathers are back."

Walking home, I catch my own reflection in the dark window of Frankie's coffee place — a woman in the wrong coat for the weather, carrying a cider she never drank, grinning like she just did something stupid. Because she did. There's eleven months of savings in my checking account if I'm careful, no job, a roof with a Florida-shaped hole in its future, and I have just declared war on the town saint over a fiberglass pumpkin.

Bee would have loved every single part of this.

That's the thing I can't get around. That's the thing that keeps my feet moving past the green, past the Hendersons' place on the corner — where, I notice, an inflatable graveyard is already installed, eleven sagging tombstones and a reaper listing hard to the left like it's had a long day — all the way to Foxglove Lane, where the porch light of number thirteen is somehow still the warmest light on the street.

Next door, the dragon stands against the stars, huge and patient.

Grady Ellis has no idea what's about to happen to him. He met a tired woman at a fence this afternoon. He has not met the woman who is going to take that Gourd off him with her grandmother's name on the form and her grandmother's tools in the shed. Tomorrow I make an inventory. Tomorrow I find out what's left in that workshop.

Tonight I stand in the yard where I learned every kind of October there is, and I make the same promise out loud that I used to make when I was nine and she'd hand me the good paintbrush.