Interstitial

Thanksgiving 1954 Washington, D.C.

Don’t leave me , Briarwood House begs its boarders silently. Promise you won’t leave me.

The house doesn’t have hands to wring, but it’s certainly wringing its curtains over the idea of losing its ladies. Of being sold off by Mrs.Nilsson and turned into a furniture showroom. How can this be? This entire first floor might very well be gutted, stripped of the well-worn floorboards that give it charm, the chandelier that was put in when the first Roosevelt was inaugurated, the elaborate banister down which both Pete and Lina slid as children (behind their mother’s back). Stripped out for living room sets , of all things. No abomination like a showroom full of living room sets , the house thinks, rucking up the hallway runner just to trip the policemen as they go back and forth. A showroom is a facsimile of life, dead furniture on which no lovers have ever kissed, no children have ever flopped with a Baby Ruth and the latest Superman comic, no cats have ever curled and purred. If this place becomes a showroom, the house will die. It knows that. It knows right down to its baseboards.

Briarwood House will die when it ceases to be a home.

Don’t let that Nilsson cow sell me , it implores the Briar Club, but they don’t have any control over that, and besides, they’re too tense with fear over their own futures. The detectives are interviewing them one at a time now, calling them one by one into the sitting room to answer questions. “This is bigger than just jail,” one whispers to another on a walk down the hallway to the bathroom. “This could mean the electric chair. For all of us.”

“Don’t be dramatic...”

But the fear is palpable.

If the house could die, well, so might the people in this house who know what really happened here tonight. And Briarwood House does its best to soothe them all, but the house is shivering deep in its foundations, and so are all the women in the kitchen. I’ll take care of you , the house wishes it could promise, but the promise is futile and the house knows it, thinking helplessly of that first murder inside the green-vined walls of 4B, the one that kicked it all off.

The corpse with its red hair surrounded by a halo of blood.