Just Like Home(56)
She would have understood if the basement had remained untouched. But this. This was worse. Her mother had come down here to let people in so they could carefully measure the room, so they could preserve it under perfectly clear, perfectly cut tiles of plexiglass, screwed and sealed into place so that the violation of this space by the police—and later, by Hammett Duvall—would be preserved forever.
Vera stepped around an empty lipstick-stained paper coffee cup on the stairs, her eyes casting hungrily around the room. The police had left more of themselves here than of Francis, and after them had come the guests, curious, poking, prodding, pulling, taking. All in the name of inspiration. The marks of the former were under the plexiglass—cigarette butts and bootprints, numbered paper stickers and mildew-blotches of fingerprint dust. The marks of the latter were on top of it—scuffs and smudges, scraps of paper, splotches of paint.
The things Francis built with his strong hands were gone, pulled up out of the floor and off the wall a little at a time. His toolbench was still there, but the drawers were open and empty. Some of them were missing, leaving gaping hollows like the sockets of pulled teeth. Those gaps were smooth, every loose splinter of wood long-since claimed by visitors who had never met Francis. Never spoken to him. Never felt the warmth of his strong hands.
There was ash on the floor, the faint odor of stale smoke.
There were holes in the cement beneath the plexiglass, where the police had pulled up the anchors Francis Crowder had sunk into the floor back when he was building this basement, back before Vera was born, back when she was just a plan her parents were making, one of them enthusiastic and the other reluctant.
Between the police and the visitors, they’d pulled those anchors up and taken them, along with everything that her father had loved best about this room, and they’d left their garbage and their filth behind.
“Animals,” Vera muttered, kicking at a tangle of light blue nitrile gloves splotched with crusts of paint. She looked up at the grid of pipes on the eastern side of the ceiling. There were eight lengths of one-inch-diameter pipe in all, fixed together with ceiling anchors and plumber’s tape into a six-foot-square grid. The pipes were mostly black with grease but broad stripes of them were shiny and silver, the grease worn away in places by long hours of friction. The shiniest sections were at the four places in the middle of the grid, where the pipes intersected to form a stable, strong, foot-wide square.
They hadn’t taken those, at least. They hadn’t understood why those pipes might be important. They hadn’t spotted the polished sections of the metal.
The pipes hung just six inches from the plaster surface of the ceiling, which was painted black. That, Vera supposed, was the only explanation for how her father had forgotten about what was in the center of that stable, foot-wide square in the middle of the grid. Or maybe he’d just thought it didn’t matter—maybe he’d thought he was the only one who would ever notice the hole.
The room below the stairs had been his office until the summer Vera was eleven, when she and Francis had traded spaces. Daphne didn’t like the noise that Vera’s open bedroom window let in, back when Vera’s bedroom was upstairs, just down the hall from the bedroom Daphne and Francis shared; Vera couldn’t stand the idea of sleeping with the windows closed. So they swapped. Her bedroom upstairs became his office, and his office downstairs became her bedroom.
He couldn’t have planned for Vera to be in that bedroom, not when he built the house. He also couldn’t have come up with an excuse not to switch with her without acknowledging the reason for the hours he spent locked away in his office.
And he couldn’t have known that she would find the hole under the pillow-end of her bed. He couldn’t have. What kind of person would foresee that and let it happen anyway?
She’d thought it through a thousand times, and in the end, she’d had to decide what to believe. The safest thing was to trust that there was no way he could have anticipated that she would get so invested in the floor of her bedroom, in the search for that gap between the boards that had seemed to hold her hand when she was afraid.
And that meant that he couldn’t have planned for her to spot the faint thread of light around the loose floorboard beneath her bed. He couldn’t have planned for her to squeeze herself between the bedframe and the floor with a butter knife to pry that floorboard up. Vera remembered how cartoonishly pleased she’d been with what she found beneath the wood. It was made of a lens set into a stainless steel tube. It smelled ever so faintly of sweet wood and sweat. Only in hindsight did she recognize it for what it was—a peephole, just like the one in the front door, the one that was too high up for Vera to look out of.
It was made for watching. It was made for peeking.
So Vera had peeked.
She only saw shadows that first night. She took too long to get the floorboard up, and at some point while she’d been working, the basement lights turned off. Without the glow of the fluorescents, it was too dark for her to see anything worth looking at. She’d gone back to bed bored and disappointed, and frustrated with the world for being a boring, disappointing place.
She’d almost forgotten about the lens, until the night a few weeks later when she’d heard scrabbling, groaning noises below her bed, and she’d recalled what her father had once told her about the animals in the basement.
Possums, he’d said, and racoons, and their babies.