Molly Harper - Better Homes and Hauntings

In her head, she could hear screaming.

Nina had bolted upright, clawing at her throat and gasping for breath. She’d fought against the urge to turn on the little bedside lamp. The light would disturb Cindy, an admittedly light sleeper, slumbering just across the hallway, door wide open. Nina didn’t want to explain why, at thirty-one, she needed a night-light. It was just anxiety, she’d assured herself. Just a new job and frayed nerves. She had nightmares all the time, and they had nothing to do with her surroundings. She’d sworn off the Xanax before arriving on Whitney Island, but sitting in the dark room with tension gnawing at her chest, she had wondered whether she should restart the pills.

HOURS LATER, IN the light of day, surrounded by freshly turned earth and mulch, it felt silly to have been so frightened by a bad dream. Nina pushed up from her knees, pressed her hands to the small of her back, and stretched, ignoring the house that loomed behind her. It was easy enough to do, since she didn’t actually have to work inside the house—for which she was eternally grateful. She kept her eyes trained on the fountain, which, as it turned out, featured a beautifully rendered stone water sprite underneath a cocoon of brambles. She refused to look anywhere near the roof. She would not have a repeat of her shadow-person sighting. She would get through this first day, and then the next, for the rest of the summer, without having a ghost-based nervous breakdown in front of the rest of the staff, ruining what little reputation she had left.

Behind her, a smooth voice sounded. “That looks really nice.”

Nina yelped, whirling around, clippers in hand. Deacon’s eyes showed alarm, and he stepped out of range. “Sorry, sorry!” he exclaimed, holding up his hands in a defensive, please don’t clip me gesture. “I thought you heard me.”

Awesome. She had threatened her boss with sharp implements.

Despite the implement swinging, Nina was starting to like Deacon. He was kind and careful with the people around him. She’d read that when EyeDee first monetized and the worth of the company skyrocketed, Deacon gave out stock options to every employee, from the cleaning lady up. Increased shares were given to employees who had been with him since the company had started in Deacon’s dorm room. Jake was given stock just for being the one who made sure Deacon occasionally ate and showered when he was doing the initial programming. And despite his financial difficulties early on, Deacon had never opened up the Crane’s Nest to tours. He never let in one of those “paranormal hunters” reality shows, even though it would have been pretty lucrative for him to do so. That showed a certain amount of character.

“No, I’m sorry. I was in the thinking zone.” Nina sighed, dropping the clippers into her tool basket and wiping her hands on her faded jeans.

“I get that way at work,” he said, rubbing his hand against the back of his neck. “Back when I first started out, I’d stay up for three days straight, hopped up on Mountain Dew and espresso jelly beans, writing code. Jake said he could have thrown a brick at my head and I wouldn’t have noticed. I guess I’m lucky he never tried.” When she didn’t respond, he cleared his throat a little and added, “Because, you know, damaged gray matter doesn’t produce good HTML. It produces . . . something else . . .”

Nina’s brow furrowed. Awkward small talk seemed to be something of an issue for Deacon. “Was there something you needed, Mr. Whitney?”

“Oh, I was just finished with my conference call and wanted some fresh air. The work you’re doing, it looks nice,” he told her.

“I’m just clearing away the weeds,” Nina told him.

“Still, you’re making a lot of progress for the first day,” he said, nodding to the water sprite. “I remember her from the few times my parents forced me out to the house when I was a kid. She’s Metis, one of the primordial figures in Greek mythology—”

“The first wife of Zeus,” Nina said, yanking loose brambles away from the fountain and tossing them into a pile. “After he had his wicked godly way with her, Zeus feared a prophecy that Metis would give birth to children powerful enough to overthrow him. Of course, it didn’t occur to him to worry about that before he had his wicked godly way with her, but that’s beside the point. To work his way around the prophecy, he drank Metis in as water. A little while later, he had a splitting headache, literally, and Metis’s daughter, Athena, sprang out of his skull and took her place as the goddess of wisdom and battle strategy.”

Stop talking! Stop talking! Stop talking! Her brain screamed at her. He’s a product of several very fancy private schools, and he probably doesn’t appreciate a lecture on stuff he learned in kindergarten!

But there she was, giving him a speculative look, practically daring him to scoff at her retelling of one of the less offensive birth stories in the Greek canon.

Looking mildly impressed, Deacon pursed his lips. “I suppose with a company name like Demeter Designs, I should have known you would be familiar with Greek mythology.”

“Ever since I was a kid,” she said with a nod.

“That’s sort of a weird subject for a kid to be interested in.”

She gave a shrug that personified the word noncommittal . “Not really.”

Deacon waited for a long moment, staring at her expectantly. “This would be the part where you tell me how you became interested in mythology.”

Nina’s full lips quirked, but she resisted the urge to smile. “It would be.”

“Pardon me for saying so, Ms. Linden, but you seem a little . . . ‘Twitchy’ would be an offensive term to use, wouldn’t it?”

Nina’s first instinct was to snort-giggle, but she tamped it down. “Yes.”

“OK, you seem edgy, then, and not just in the ‘spending extended amounts of time with one of the Forbes top ten entrepreneurs’ way. Like in an honest, ‘I am so uncomfortable right now, I wish your face would melt like something out of Flash Gordon ’ sort of way.”

She sighed. “I never pictured your face melting like General Kala’s.”

An impish grin brightened his whole face, and she felt the tension in her shoulders relax by degrees. “You know Flash Gordon ?”

“My mom had an abiding, irrational love of Queen’s music,” she told him, narrowing her eyes. “Did you really just drop that Forbes reference on me?”

“I think in some cases, I should be allowed to use that Forbes reference,” he said, shrugging. “It makes some people nervous.”

“So why would you bring it up?” she said.

“A little conversational quirk of mine,” he muttered. “No matter what I’m talking about, if I start thinking about the things I don’t want to say, that’s what I blurt out. I think, ‘Don’t try to impress her with lame media references,’ and that’s the first thing that pops out of my mouth. It’s made meetings with investors a living hell.”

She laughed.

“So, I’ve shared one of my psychologically formative secrets with you, not to mention made myself sound like a bit of a tool with the Forbes thing. The least you can do is tell me how young Nina Linden became so interested in Greek mythology that she named her business after the goddess of the harvest.”

She offered him a shy smile. “When I was seven, I got the chicken pox. It was just awful, one of the worst cases my pediatrician had ever seen. I had them in my ears, on the soles of my feet, just everywhere . I was miserable and itchy, and I was making my parents equally miserable. And one day, my dad brought home a big stack of videos from the Rental Hut. Annie , The Apple Dumpling Gang , Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , anything to keep me quiet and still for a few minutes at a time. But the one I watched over and over, to the point where my mom was afraid that I was going to wear the tape out, was this weird animated collection of Greek myths. Hercules and the twelve labors. Icarus and his melting wax wings. King Midas and the golden touch. And my personal favorite, Hades tricking Persephone into staying in the depths of the Underworld three months a year, making her mother, Demeter, so miserable that she kills off all the plants and creates winter.”