Home by Stacia Kane Page A

leaning in. Like she and Chess were pals or something. “I’ve seen the ghost. In their kitchen one night. In the living room another. All hours of the night it’s wandering around in there, glowing just like it has a right to be there. Just like it isn’t disgusting to—”
    “How did you see this?” The last thing Chess needed was for Mrs. Brent to go off on an indignant little tangent. The sun had just started to set and the Runners were playing at Chuck’s later, and she was going to meet Terrible there and needed to get ready first. The sooner she left Mrs. Brent’s self-righteous pseudo-mansion the better.
    The woman colored slightly beneath her stiff, ultra-frosted blonde hair and matching stiff, ultra-frosted makeup. “My kitchen windows face their house. I’ve been working on tracing some more ancestors lately—we go back over two hundred and fifty years, isn’t that wonderful?—so I’ve been in there working, making tea and such, you know. And from my desk there I can clearly see that ghost running around their house. It’s terrifying.”
    Finally. “Can I see the kitchen?”
    “Of course.”
    Chess followed her down a hallway lined with posed family photos: Mrs. Brent, a balding man running to floridity and fat, two kids with toothy grins. Typical family. Typical house. So average they could move out and another family could move in and no one would even notice. Just being there made Chess itch.
    “See? Right here. This is my desk.”
    Not so much a desk as a section of granite countertop without a cabinet below, really, and two small drawers. Neat stacks of paper sat next to a closed laptop computer. The Brents were online, then. Good. Chess made a quick note in her pad: Check internet records re Brents . It wasn’t unheard of for people to conspire together, after all.
    “When I sit here I see right through their windows, see?”
    Right through was a bit of an exaggeration. Mrs. Brent wasn’t that much taller than Chess’s own five-foot-six, and Chess had to hold herself in a hunched sort of squat over the chair as if it were a public toilet in order to see the Solomon house. So Mrs. Brent was nosy. Not a surprise.
    “I saw it more than once.” From her stack of papers Mrs. Brent produced what appeared to be a list, all typed out on plain white paper, printed in a “cheerful” font in bright green ink. “I’ve noted all the dates and times here, as you can see.”
    Chess scanned it, pretended she cared. “Can I take this?”
    “Of course, sure. That’s going to help you, right? I can testify. I’m ready to testify anytime. Those Solomons, her with her jingly jewelry and her tacky long skirts, and him, he’s some sort of…some sort of hippie, or something, he owns some organic store or something. Just look at their cars.”
    Chess couldn’t. The house blocked them. Nor could she see in any other windows of the Solomon home, which belied Mrs. Brent’s statement, but whatever. Busybodies liked to exaggerate. It made them feel important. “Are there any other windows that face their house?”
    “Just the landing.”
    “Can you show me?”
    Mrs. Brent kept up her stream of brittle chatter as she led Chess back down the hall and up the stairs—not about the Solomons anymore, but about the country club and some ball being held there, and her children’s school, and whatever other shit Chess didn’t give a fuck about. But from the landing Chess could indeed see into the Solomons’ living room, which Mrs. Brent termed “ghastly,” presumably because the Solomons had used colors that didn’t match their skin tone.
    A little blue sportscar sat out front. That must have been the vehicle that annoyed Mrs. Brent, although Chess couldn’t figure out why. She supposed it looked like some sort of superfast threat, but only to someone who didn’t know anything about real cars. What it actually looked like was a midlife crisis. Terrible’s Chevelle would leave that thing in the