Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, a little voice inside my head kept saying.
“What about that house?” I asked.
“Long time ago . . . ,” the ringleader said dramatically.
“Yeah, long ago,” another child chimed in.
“. . . a man murdered his family in that house. His whole family.”
The other children nodded.
“Kids, pets, even the pizza delivery guy.”
“Yeah,” the girl continued. “One of the kids tried to escape—”
“He climbed out the window!” a redheaded boy missing two front teeth added.
“Yeah, he fell!” the girl continued.
“And broke his neck!” the ringleader concluded. “Everybody died!”
“Not everybody,” the girl said. “The boy got away.”
“And a girl got away.”
“A boy and a girl got away.”
“Yeesh,” I said, hoping they were exaggerating. “Lizzie Borden only killed two people, and we thought she was bad.”
“Who?” The kids stared at me.
“That song you were singing? We used to sing it about Lizzie Borden.”
They gave me a skeptical look.
“You sayin’ it’s a remix?” the ringleader asked.
Modern music loved to piggyback on the old standbys. Why not kids’ rhymes, too?
“Never mind,” I said. The last thing these kids needed was another grisly tale to excite their imaginations.
“What are your names, anyway?”
“I’m Kobe,” said the ringleader.
“I’m Kaitlyn,” said the girl.
“Ryan,” said the redhead.
“I’m Mel. Nice to meet you all. Now I better get back to work.”
“It don’t look like you’re workin’,” said Kobe.
“That’s because I’m the supervisor.”
He looked at me askance. “You’re sayin’ supervisors don’t gotta work?”
“Oh, we work. We work plenty. But it’s a different kind of work. Instead of doing it all myself, I tell other people what to do. I coordinate things.”
“You mean you order people around.”
“Okay, yep, I order people around. Plus, I get paid more. Not on this job, where nobody’s getting paid. But in real life, the super does less work and gets paid more.”
The kids seemed mesmerized; apparently, this had never occurred to them.
“That’s why you have to stay in school,” I said, launching into a public service announcement. “That way you get the good jobs and get paid more.”
Okay, it was a bit simplistic, but overall it was a pretty good assessment of how the world worked.
“So tell me more about the house next door.”
“Not much more to tell, ’cept it’s haunted now.”
“Mmm,” I said. “So you say there was a man and a woman? How old was the daughter?”
Shrug. “I dunno, not a kid.”
“A teenager?”
“I guess.”
“What did she look like?”
He looked at me askance. “Geez, lady, you seem kinda into it. Prob’ly there’s a YouTube or somethin’ if you’re that curious.”
How could I explain that I wasn’t some gruesome thrill seeker, but was only trying to identify the ghostly face I’d seen in the windows? But he was right—it would be better to just look it up online. A murder-suicide was bound to have made the news.
“When did all this happen?” I asked.
“Dunno. Long time ago. In the eighties. Can we have a bagel?” he gestured to the table laden with food donated by local businesses or baked by volunteers: bagels and cream cheese, Blue Bottle coffee, chips, energy bars, cookies. Luz and Stephen had not only begged and cajoled any number of local businesses into donating food and drink but had also organized a schedule of cookie drops. Folks who wanted to contribute but couldn’t dedicate the whole weekend baked cookies and dropped them off every hour, on the hour. My team might be falling behind on the actual construction, but we were hands down the best-fed group in the program.
“Or cookies!” suggested Ryan.
“The food’s for the volunteers. You have to work for it.”
“What we gotta do?” asked Kobe.
I eyed him and his motley crew. Technically, only those fourteen years and older were allowed on the jobsite, and strictly with a release form signed by their parents. But there was a lot of debris in the front yard of the house that could be tossed into the Dumpster. . . .
I glanced at Luz, who was signing out a circular saw. Luz hadn’t known a monkey wrench from a Phillips screwdriver when she started, but she was a quick study. And since she’s naturally bossy, in addition to being Tool Czar I had her check everyone in, get them to sign waivers, and assign them to work teams.