The Spite House(38)
No, she couldn’t do that. Consider all valid perspectives. She had whipped together a paper on that subject back in her freshman year of high school, a frivolous, irreverent few pages centered on a character of her own making misunderstanding the word “bad” as it related to her father’s favorite song, “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” She’d written it to reinforce a point she’d argued with her parents about recently, that the most sensible answer could still easily be a wrong answer. Her teacher had graded it a B-plus and held her after class to say, “I know you barely even tried with this one. Imagine how good you’d be if you worked at it.” Within days she had gotten started with the school newspaper and wouldn’t stop doing the work, at various publications across the country and outside of it, for the next forty-four years. Even after leaving Dallas to retire to her hometown, she felt obligated to write one last piece.
When she had left Degener, the Houghtons were respected and prominent. When she came back, there was only one of them left, Eunice, with whom she had exchanged letters for nearly the duration of her career. Eunice had shown up at a few ceremonies to see Emily receive awards. They had shared drinks at fundraisers and after-parties. Millie used to be one of Eunice’s select confidants, and after hearing about the supposed Houghton curse, Millie facilitated Eunice’s first meeting with Neal Lassiter, hoping he could gradually steer her away from believing she was destined to die screaming. She’d worried then that she was risking their friendship, but to her surprise it thrived as Eunice took a liking to Neal. What their friendship could not survive was Emily’s return to Degener and the full, undistracted realization that Eunice owned the town. Worse yet, that the rest of Degener was too beholden to her and blinded by the prosperity she brought them to care that they lived under another citizen’s rule.
So she had written what she’d written, submitted it to The Texas Tribune, and accepted the severance of her relationship with Eunice. In hindsight, maybe she should have worked harder to stay in her life. Maybe she could have done better work from the inside, talked Eunice out of some of her worst decisions, such as letting the last couple who stayed in the spite house—the Renners—remain there so long even after it was clear that their health was worsening daily. And now, less than a year later, she brought someone else to the house. A man with children no less. Eunice was letting children live there. She was even further gone than Millie had thought.
Millie did not believe the house was haunted, but there had to be something about it that drove people away from it, and drove them to the brink when they were in it. She’d never seen anything in her work and travels to convince her that the supernatural was real, but she’d seen things that made her think that the nature of some dangers was hard to explain, and that the cost of examining some threats was too great. Was knowing the exact mechanics of how the spite house had hurt the Renners worth creating another set of victims? Hell no, it wasn’t.
Jane and Maxwell Renner, a husband-and-wife team of “paranormal researchers,” had shown signs of withering within three days of their stay. They had visibly lost weight as though ill, she more than he. Bags dragged their eyelids down, added years to their faces. How they behaved was even more concerning. When they drove into town to eat or seek interviews, those they got close to said they appeared increasingly disoriented, unable to stick to a topic. They smelled like layers of sweat, dust, and must. The last people to see them at Jake’s Cakes and Waffles said they came in that morning wearing clothes too heavy for the summer and sat trembling together on the same side of a booth. Max held Jane and talked to her while she looked around like she didn’t know where she was. They put off ordering anything for several minutes, then left in a hurry, practically shoving their waiter aside when he tried to ask what was wrong.
That night they left the house and drove to the nearest major hospital, twenty minutes southwest of Degener. Word of what happened to them leaked from the hospital and made it to town. Eunice could intimidate the mayor, the shopkeepers, and even the sheriff into falling in line, but she couldn’t squash gossip, especially not when it was this good about something so bad. Each of the Renners had suffered unusual, severe nausea and arrhythmia symptomatic of extraordinary stress. Worse than that were the sporadic spells of aphasia and dementia symptomatic of strokes. Jane Renner apparently endured the worst of it.
If it had all been an act on their part, it had been a convincing one that they never tried to capitalize on. Millie had tried to track the Renners down to speak to them for a follow-up article, but the couple had taken down their website, scrubbed their social media profiles, and changed all of their contact information.
She couldn’t let what had happened to the Renners happen again. She had called Neal twice since she came home from seeing Eric. He hadn’t answered, so she left voice messages and sent a follow-up text. Eunice wouldn’t speak to her, but she still liked Neal. If Millie could get hold of him, catch him up on everything, he could get in Eunice’s ear and convince her to stop what she was doing. He wouldn’t have to sacrifice his trademark skepticism to believe the house posed a danger based on what had happened to the Renners.
Millie had calmed herself down enough to make a late lunch when she heard a car door close in front of her house. She lived on the northside on two acres of property, amid neighbors who all had a couple of acres apiece as well. There was no mistaking that sound. Somebody was on her property.