Page 12 of My Favorite Lost Cause
“Elijah,” he says, extending his hand. “I worked here with Charlie one summer. You must be Charlie’s…” He glances at the massive rock on her finger.
“Sister. Hi, I’m Maren. And are you trying to tell me that Charles Dalton actually did good, honest work at one point in his life?”
“I’m not sure howgoodit was,” Elijah says with a laugh, putting his boot down hard on a joist, watching the boards sag in response. “And I’m pretty sure he was here under duress—you’d gotten a DUI or something, right?”
I throw a hand over Maren’s mouth, anticipating the motherly scolding she’s about to offer. “Before you start, I got a DUI on agolf cart, which I didn’t even know was a thing. You can apparently also get a DUI while on a bike or horseback.”
Maren pushes my hand away. “These are things only Charlie would know,” she says to Elijah. “You must have learnedso muchfrom him that summer.”
“I aged about a decade over three months,” he says, “but that was mostly due to Charlie’s haphazard building skills.”
He’s grinning; Maren’s laughing. She’s already doing it—making everyone fall in love with her. This place is actively falling in on itself and she’ll soon have him claiming it just needs a fresh coat of paint.
It’s irritating. And cute. It irritates me that I find it cute.
“Okay, let’s take a look,” he says. “I’m sure you’re aware this place already needs a new porch and a new roof. Hopefully that’s the worst of it.”
“Clearly you haven’t seen the interior, then,” I reply, and Maren elbows me.
“This place is amazing,” she gushes. “Obviously, you’ve been inside, so I don’t even have to tell you how stunning it is, but?—”
“Maren,” I growl. “Stop. Let him decide for himself.” Because the next words out of her mouth are definitelymoney’s no objectorI’ll just die if we can’t fix it. And if he’s half as weak as me, he’ll find himself offering to take the job on for free just to make her smile.
On second thought, maybe Ishouldlet her talk.
Elijah walks through the house, knocking on walls, stomping on the floor, examining the windows, and flipping on light switches—Maren wants to believe this is all about tearing out some shitty carpet and replacing the wallpaper, but the cosmetic damage is the least of my concerns. Half the floors in the house sag when you put any weight on them, and I don’t know much about construction, but I doubt that’s a good sign.
“There are problems,” Elijah says, “but the real issue will likely be the basement.”
I frown. “It has a basement?” This seems like something I’d have known.
“A house this old probably has a root cellar rather than a real basement. You’d access it from the outside.”
We go out back to a trap door that abuts the house, one I somehow never noticed during my few visits here.
Elijah climbs down a ladder in the darkness and turns on a flashlight for us.
“You don’t need to come down,” I tell Maren as I begin my descent. “It’s probably pretty creepy.”
Her eyes light up.Creepyis apparently an enticing word for her, which perhaps explains how she wound up with Harvey.
I reach the basement—dirt floor, dirt walls with plant roots bursting through—and turn to follow Maren’s descent. Her shorts are riding up just enough to spy the curve of her ass. I cut a warning glance toward Elijah, and he politely looks away.
“Wow,” Maren whispers, taking it in.
“Until about 1920 or 1930, most homes didn’t have refrigerators. This was where they stored stuff to keep it cool. If you could afford it, you’d get a big block of ice delivered and keep it in sawdust to lower the temperature.”
“I can’t imagine, even with ice, that it got that cool,” says Maren.
Elijah shrugs. “Dairy and meat were mostly fresh or could survive a day down here. But other stuff would last a lot longer. Canned goods, vegetables ...”
“Bodies,” I add.
Maren’s head jerks from me to Elijah. “That was a joke, right?”
He shrugs. “Until a couple decades ago, it was sort of the norm around here to store a body in the house until burial.”
Maren’s eyes go wide. “And…didpeople die in this house?”
