Interstitial

Thanksgiving 1954 Washington, D.C.

The smell of blood is hanging in the air again, and the tension inside Briarwood House has grown thick enough to cut with a knife. A second body discovered—the police are rushing about hysterically, wringing their hands and getting in one another’s way (no surprise there, the house thinks), and all the women in the kitchen who had been dismissed at the beginning of the night as too emotional to be interviewed yet are still sitting there, cool as cucumbers.

That’s my ladies for you , the house thinks, fanning the smells of burnt turkey and blood into the hallway and away from their noses. When exactly had the house started growing fond of the boarders here? For decades it had barely bothered noticing the people who tramped in and out over the threshold. One set of feet feels much like another. But around the time the wall vine started growing down from the fourth-floor landing, around the time holiday decorations and tasty dinner smells started to be the rule and not the exception—well, the house had begun paying attention to the different footsteps skipping up and down its worn stairs. Each set different, after all. Each footfall treading heavy or light, depending on the worries they carry with them.

Right now, the feet resting on the kitchen floor are all braced for disaster.

“When I say things like clear the house , that means check every goddamn room ,” the detective is hissing meanwhile at his crestfallen team. “That means every goddamn nook, every goddamn closet, every goddamn cranny! For Chrissake, how did you clowns miss that ?” He jabs a finger through the open door to the parlor and the slumped, bloodied figure clearly visible on the rug.

Everyone immediately begins mumbling I thought someone else and Not my fault! “Who do we like for the second murder?” the detective’s partner asks, sounding ingratiating, but only gets a glare in return. “I mean, this isn’t the same work as the upstairs killing, right?” the man persists. “Up in 4B there was blood everywhere. Things overturned, the walls a mess—”

My wall vine , the house mourns.

“The scene down here, it’s cleaner,” the detective’s partner goes on. “More calculated. Corpse in the middle of the floor, bashed on the head, one blow with a blunt object. That seem like the same person who went into a slashing frenzy four floors up?”

Back in the kitchen, Mrs.Nilsson is shrilling, “My parlor rug!” Good riddance , thinks the house, who has been trying to get rid of that horrible hooked rug (spilled cups of coffee, mud helpfully coming off shoes) for absolutely years. No more hooked rug, and after all these tramping official feet, the hideous hallway runner is probably a goner, too—but the house can’t quite manage to rejoice yet. Not with the way the tension just keeps rising and rising among the people in the kitchen; all these covert looks of fury and grief and helplessness flying back and forth...

“Murder weapon on the second killing certainly can’t be the same,” the detective says grudgingly, looking around the parlor. The weapon upstairs has already been noted and logged: a short-handled garden sickle Pete sometimes uses to cut weeds out back. The house had thought about hiding the sickle, whisking it off between some loose floorboards, but that might have raised more problems than it solved. “This one doesn’t look—” The detective breaks off: the engorged silence in the kitchen has finally shattered, and an earsplitting wail carves the night. “Dammit, will someone shut that kid up?”

“She’s very upset!” All the women have clustered around the little girl; the house can’t tell which of them is speaking up. “Angela, honey, stop crying—”

The house sends a lot of soothing little flurries toward Angela in her frilly dress, the best it can manage in the way of an incorporeal there, there . But there’s very little even a half-century-old sentient house with three wars and ten presidents under its belt can do when a child decides it’s Had Enough, and Angela Orton has very definitely Had Enough, wailing exhaustedly with a face gone red as a tomato. The tension has finally boiled over and she isn’t stopping anytime soon.

“Give her to her mother,” the detective snaps, getting red in the face himself as the women all simply stare at him. “Come on, now. Where is her mother?”