The Spite House(40)
Eunice had loaded a response to Dana’s last comment and was dying to pull the trigger, Lafonda could see it in her face, the blue-flame heat in her gaze. Before she spoke next, she rubbed her brow and wiped some of the animosity off her face.
“Dana, I almost just fired you.”
“For real, this time?”
Eunice hissed her disapproval, and Lafonda realized that, in these meetings, these moments weren’t uncommon. This reinforced that Lafonda was right to recommend more yoga, despite Eunice’s preference for the punching bag. What she really needed was an extended vacation that might turn permanent, ideally on one of those islands she liked to talk about, where people lived longer and stressed themselves less. Lafonda made a mental note to bring that up later when the time was right.
Dana told Eunice, “The only thing you’d have to worry about her saying is something you already got ahead of. Because you told Eric about what happened with the Renners, right?”
“I did. It’s one of the first things I told him. I told him twice, in fact, because I reminded him of it again last night.”
You’re lying, Lafonda thought, and brought her hand halfway to her mouth as if to catch the words in case they came out. Eunice spotted this, but said nothing. Years of hearing people make excuses for skipping a workout or cheating on their meal plan had made Lafonda surprisingly adept at identifying someone’s “tell.” Eunice’s was overexplaining. If she had really told Eric about the Renners, she would have left her answer at “I did.” Lafonda knew that. What she didn’t know was what exactly Dana and Eunice were talking about.
She had come on board a few weeks after the Renners had left the Masson House. She’d overheard their names in conversation a few times and knew they’d left early, their work unfinished, but she hadn’t asked about them. She was too busy minding and maintaining her own business. Still, stories about them were in the air among the people of Degener during her first month on the job, and sometimes she’d hear about how bad they looked within their first two weeks of being in the house, how people had known early on that it would be bad for them there.
Sometimes, the fate of the Renners came to Lafonda under the guise of concern and questions. “Please tell Miss Houghton I’m happy to make deliveries for the next people she gets to stay in the house,” the grocer told her once. “That last couple looked like they got themselves so busy they forgot to eat when they were there.”
When she accompanied Eunice for her checkup, she heard her physician say, “I’m going to write up your prescription so that you have some extra, in case you need to share a few with whoever else you get to stay in the Masson place. The two that just left, if they hadn’t been so sleep-deprived, I think maybe things would have gone better.”
Lafonda hadn’t taken the bait to overshare in the former instance or ask Eunice any questions in the latter. She’d already felt comfortable in her role and in town by then. Eunice could be a little testy when Lafonda wouldn’t let her have her way, but she was earnest about being healthy, which made her easier to work for than many of the people she’d worked with and for previously. And she paid extraordinarily well.
Better than that, though, Eunice was good on her promise that the people of this small town would welcome her warmly. Even if they hadn’t, Lafonda had been confident she could endure. Her skin was thicker than it was dark, and she was practiced in giving hate the response it deserved. There was no hate to be found in Degener. People were so friendly at first she was sure it was some kind of setup, but she soon learned that it was consistent. Nonetheless, as well as she got on with Eunice and with the locals, she didn’t feel comfortable enough to say anything to Eunice about the Renners. It wasn’t part of her role here, and what she had heard of it was surely exaggerated anyway. The people of Degener, kind though they might be, spoke of the Masson House as though it were an active thing.
Lafonda, in her interview with Eunice, had called herself a “practical agnostic” when asked about her belief in the supernatural. “I wouldn’t spend a night at Triple-Six Lucifer Lane or anything. That’s the practical part. Otherwise, though, I’ve never been moved to feel strongly one way or the other.”
Even after hearing of the Renners’ hasty exit from the property, she didn’t come closer to viewing the spite house the way the locals did. Perhaps if she lived here long enough, that would change. Throughout Degener, people struck her as superstitious more than religious. If she drove past any of the local churches on Sundays, their parking lots might be half full on the busiest days. Decent attendance, but not full attendance. Nonetheless, most of the cars that didn’t have a cross stuck to the bumper had one dangling from a string on the rearview mirror. The relatively few people who didn’t have one or the other typically wore a cross around their necks, though some of the younger locals were content with a tattoo of a cross on their shoulder, forearm, or wrist. Lafonda could count on one hand the number of people she’d seen in Degener who had none of the above. She imagined most of the houses had at least one wall devoted to a collection of crosses.
On its own, this might not have stood out. But there were also an inordinate amount of good-luck charms, and not little trinkets like a rabbit’s-foot key chain or a four-leaf clover. Many people in Degener, men and women, wore jewelry adorned with sigils. Lafonda had looked some of them up online, and they seemed to be symbols meant to ward off spirits. When she realized this, she guessed there must be a store in town that specialized in this sort of thing and everyone was just being supportive, but no, there was no such store. These people had gone out of their way to acquire these items. It was like they all thought they might bump into a ghost, not just at the spite house, but anywhere in town.