The Spite House(7)

Dess rubbed at the imaginary bug crawling on her neck, and was glad when Stacy broke the silence.

“Look, Dad,” Stacy said, showing off her bow and flowers.

“I see,” Eric said. “What’s all this for?”

“The waitress lady saw me making flowers and asked me to make a bow for her daughter.”

“That’s so cool,” Eric said. He looked at Dess. “Waitress sounds friendly.”

Dess said, “Yeah, but I think it’s ninety-nine percent the accent, though. Everybody down here sounds like they want to call me ‘sugar.’”

“They don’t all sound like that, believe me.”

“Yeah, nah. I’m going to keep thinking it’s all ‘howdy’ and ‘sweetie’ and all that other stuff. Especially since we’re probably going to be here awhile, right? Even if we went straight through it still takes like five years to get out of Texas, don’t it?”

“Five years?” Stacy said.

“I’m being silly,” Dess told her sister. “It would take us a while, though.”

“And we might be here longer than you think,” Eric said. He took the newspaper from her hands and tapped a finger on the headline of the ad beneath the picture of the strange, narrow house.

Paranormal documentarian needed.

Serious inquiries only. No experience required.

Dess shook her head. “This isn’t for real, is it?”

“I just called and talked to them about it. They seem sincere. Urgent, too. They want to interview me tomorrow. I told them I needed to check with my daughter to see if it was okay first, and they were good with that.”

“Okay, hold up, wait. This is wild. So you talked to somebody already? When did that happen?”

“Maybe ten minutes ago. I called them and they called right back.”

“And we’re just gonna go there? Where’s it at?” Dess checked the ad again. “Where is Degener?”

“About two hours away. Not that far.”

“What if these people are like, you know…” She glanced at Stacy and tried to think of how to say what she wanted to say without scaring her. Then she thought, screw it, they’d been in survival mode since they had hit the road and Stacy was a part of that. There were certain risks and concerns she needed to understand. “Do they know what we look like?”

“I brought it up,” Eric said. “The lady I talked to, her last name is Cantu, so that made me feel better already. She just kind of chuckled when I mentioned it and said it’s not an issue.”

Dess’s eyes widened a little. “First off, she could’ve married and divorced that last name and be a whole damn racist by now. And she laughed when you brought it up? Dad, that sounds suspect as hell.”

“It wasn’t an evil laugh from a movie villain, Dess. It was more, ‘Oh, that’s nothing.’ And then she said, ‘That’s not an issue at all.’ That’s a direct quote.”

Dess shook her head and checked to see if Stacy understood the conversation they were having. She’d been paying attention to them but wasn’t the type of kid to speak up just to be heard. She had a question in her eyes, though, Dess saw.

“What does ‘paranormal’ mean?” Stacy said.

“It means, um, unusual,” Eric answered. He threw a look across the table at Dess that she read to mean, Don’t mention ghosts. She tossed a look back that she hoped said, Yeah, nah, I’m not stupid.

“Are they talking about the house? Why do they say it’s unusual? Because it’s so skinny?” Stacy said.

“I think so,” Eric said.

“Why is it like that?”

“That’s a good question. I don’t know. You want to go there and find out?”

Stacy tapped her chin like she was thinking it over, then nodded and grinned. Eric smiled and looked at Dess, who was about to accuse him of playing dirty, getting Stacy interested in this weird place before they had a chance to talk it all the way through, when Tanya returned to take Eric’s order—chicken strips, fries, water with lemon. Tanya saw the bow Stacy had made and thanked her. “What’s your name, darling?”

“Stacy.”

“Oh, I love that name. Well my little girl is named Libby, and she is going to love this. And I am going to make sure she thanks you by name when she says her prayers tonight.”

“Thank you,” Stacy said.

After Tanya left, Eric said, “Maybe Degener’s full of people like that.”

The ad had stolen Dess’s attention again, so while she heard him, she didn’t react to what he said. She was fixated on the promised payout upon “completion of the assignment.” Six figures at minimum, with the potential for more. “There has to be a catch, right? I mean, I know it says we don’t need experience, but this is a lot of money. Why would they pick us? What do we even know about these people?”

He slid two more pages across the table, an article with the title “Merchant Saint and Mercurial Queen of the Hill Country.”

“It doesn’t go into detail about it,” Eric said, “but that mentions that the house is owned by a very rich woman named Eunice Houghton.”

“You think this is real?” Dess said while scanning the article.