Page 1 of A Heart So Haunted
Before
The house wanted to eat the child. Swallow her whole, keep her near, like a sock flitting from the clothesline in an unexpected breeze.
Keep keep keep.
She’d come back. The very floorboards of the house expanded when her mother had dropped her off. Could the little girl feel it, like it could? Surely, if she was here, thatmeantsomething.
“Get in the car, Landry!” the woman called. The woman, the house knew, was the child’s mother. Harthwait never deigned her worth remembering.
“We’re gonna be late!” The girl’s mother stood with a cigarette between two fingers by a rickety sedan. A back tire sat deflated, the rear windshield marred by a large crack. It slithered from the upper right corner, to the bottom crease where carpet interior met glass. She tapped a cherry nail on the crack, like she might tempt fate, then pushed herself up from the trunk lid.
The house felt the girl. Her pink shoes on the front porch step, hesitant. Hovering. Staring up at Cadence with one hand fisted in the fabric of her dress. Her little knuckles whitened to snowcapped mountains. Onher shoes were daisies. One hung crooked, a petal missing, dried and rinsed and repeated from her bout with the mud pit in the backyard.
She wiggled in place, jumped. Almost lost her balance.
“Why can’t I stay with you, Aunt Denny?” the little girl asked. She clutched the porch railing with her free hand. “You promised we’d finish the puzzle.”
Cadence looked at Landry like one might examine an adult. The girl stood taller, puffed out her lip, furrowed her brow. Cadence stepped through the front door, onto the porch, as if she might humor the child.
She wouldn’t.
Still, Harthwait couldn’t complain about Cadence. She fixed what was needed. Kept the windows greased. Replaced the roof a few years ago. Children, however, were not as easy to manage.
“Because my house isn’t pretty after dark,” Cadence said.
Maybe it would complain after all.
“Mommy’s house isn’t pretty, either. There are bugs. I wanna stay with you,” the girl urged. A damp, soon-to-be summer breeze tickled the hem of her dress, caressed the house’s siding.
“Landry!” the woman, who drooped over the back of the car, called again. She exhaled a long stream of smoke. It twirled around her nostrils, her ears. The house could have sworn even the tree branches recoiled.
Aunt Cadence sighed.
“Please? Please,please? I’ll be good, I promise! I won’t—”
Upstairs, a door slammed shut. Cadence flinched, but the child didn’t. She was too focused on Cadence, on the way her jawticked ticked tickedlike the grandfather clock in the foyer, how her eyes wavered between the mother, who now stomped out the cigarette in the driveway gravel, to the little girl with doe eyes and a massed tangle of red hair.
“Lanny. Honey. Your momma makes the decisions. You know this.”
The girl slumped. “But you said no last time and that maybe this time I could—”
“Keep your head up, chickpea.” Cadence bent down to her niece, both hands landing on the girl’s shoulders. Bony, pointy little things. “I’ll come pick you up tomorrow,” she assured her. The girl looked like she could jump into Cadence’s words—right off the top of the bridge and into the water below.
“But tomorrow is too late. You’ll finish the puzzle without me,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Landry!”
Cadence’s spine curled in. “It’ll be fine. Promise. Won’t even touch what you left. I’ll keep it on that very table you were using in the library, okay?”
The sun heated Harthwait’s roof. Warmed it, straight to its bones. But there was something in Cadence’s voice that wobbled. Like a lie. Like there lay finality in her words.
That couldn’t be, though. The little girl would come back, she’d stay one day—at the very least, return for a moment or two.
Harthwait’s floorboards contracted a bit, irritated.
Shehadto come back.
“You promise?”
