Interfictions 2 by Delia Sherman Read Free Book Online Page B

Local Girl Missing for Three Days, ” reads Amanda. The house remembers that, all right. Policemen walking the streets, swinging their lights from one side to the other, calling out her name. Women gathering in clots on each corner, whispering with their hands held to their mouths. Cub Scouts crawling in the bushes. Teenagers in trucks rumbling by late at night, chuckling over their dark jokes.
    The house, of course, could do nothing to help.
    Jeremy reads the next: “ Body Found in Crawl Space by Detectives. ” That actually wasn't true. A police bloodhound named Jenny dragged Kathy Henderson's bludgeoned body out from under the house while the detectives gaped. The dog pulled and pulled, and the house wished someone would just help, would just break through the rest of the rotten lattice to get her out. But they all just stared, and of course the house could do nothing.
    Mrs. Macek fainted on the porch. Mr. Macek had a lot of questions for the police, but they didn't speak Polish. Not that they were listening anyway.
    " Foreign Handyman Arrested, ” says Michael. He would pick that one, wouldn't he, the article with the picture of Mr. Macek being dragged from the house in his grey overalls, squinting in the flash bulbs, wincing as cops twisted his arm more sharply than they had to? There were lots of boys like him back then, too. They just happened to be wearing uniforms.
    The house remembers the casseroles brought for Mrs. Macek and her children right after the arrest, the offerings of neighbors who didn't believe her husband could do such a horrible thing.
    " Immigrant Pleads Not Guilty to Child Murder, ” crows the next headline in Michael's voice. “Dude looks crazy.” He sidles closer to Amanda, but she sidles just as far away. “The kind of guy who'd kill a girl and stuff her under the house."
    " Crazed Handyman Offers Garbled Defense at Trial, ” whispers Jeremy.
    The house remembers, too, how the casseroles came fewer and fewer, stopping altogether when the autopsy photos were shown. The Macek daughters came home from the park crying, and the Macek boys came home from the baseball diamond angry.
    Amanda doesn't have to read the last one: Guilty. It's from August 9th, 1938, and nobody bothered to cut it from the newspaper like the others. The kids can read advertisements for $50 refrigerators if they want to, but they're all just staring at Mr. Macek's horrified expression instead.
    August 9th, 1938—the day Mrs. Macek, mortified by her husband's guilt and their neighbors’ reaction, ordered the children to take whatever they could carry and stuff it into the car. The day they left everything behind, not just dishes and pictures but questions, too. The day the doors clattered, the lights dimmed, and the house was left to itself.
    "Cool!” says Michael. “It's a Kill House!"
    The house hates to be called that.
    "I wonder where he did it.” He looks around, grinning. “I bet there's a ring of blood still in the tub."
    He leaves to go check and Amanda follows.
    Jeremy squints at the newspapers and says to nobody, “Wait. These newspapers are from Ohio."
    He follows his friends, silent now as though afraid to wake up the house, and steps gently down the hallway, looking into each of the bedrooms. Blank patches on the yellow wallpaper show the ghosts of pictures fallen from the walls.
    The first bedroom looks like three boys shared it, two in bunk beds and one in his own. Their dresser drawers are still open with pants and sweaters spilling out of them, and metal toy soldiers lie wounded on the floor. Jeremy picks one up but then puts it back.
    The second bedroom seems to have been for the girls of the family, two of them if the beds are any sign. They'd left everything behind like their brothers had: a few drawings from school hang crookedly above one bed, and a bundle of letters tied in a pink ribbon rest on a nightstand beside the other. The letter on top