After he’d walked through the whole house, he said, “I have a few questions.” With purpose, he strode over to the fireplace and gestured to the walls that we had replaced. “What is happening here? I need to verify that the structure is intact after the chimney fire.”
“We removed all the plaster and none of the structure was damaged, so we replastered,” I said. “You can see that this is new.”
“I can’t clear this building without seeing the structure.”
“But we fixed everything.” It looked perfect.
“I recorded the entire process,” Heaven said. “You can actually see every step.” On her phone she pulled up a reel of the two of us peeling the plaster off the walls with Rihanna singing “Work, work, work, work, work, work” in the background.
With a smug little laugh he said, “That’s very cute, ladies, but I don’t believe this will satisfy the official requirements of the city code.” He pounded on the wall. “I need to be able to see the structure for myself and verify its integrity.”
“You can!” she said. “We removed the wall, checked for damage, and repaired it—all while being recorded.”
Wayne watched the video of the two of us dancing and goofing off, looking unimpressed. I wanted to slap the judgmental look off his face.But I bit my lip.
“Girls,” he said like he was schooling us, depriving the wordgirlof all its power, “this is not professional. This is not the way you pass an inspection.”
Heaven looked like she wanted to do more than slap him. She looked ready to make use of that coffin right now.
“And what kind of screws did you use on the deck?”
Tyrone had given us a box of screws earlier. It was still sitting around. “These.”
“The code specifies that you need to use galvanized deck screws.”
“Okay, so what do we do?” I asked. “If we have to, we can add more screws and peel back the wallboard.”
“You still technically have a few days, but there is the matter of the illegal canid. Something in this house bit me.”
“Like I said, Tyrone shot a coyote on the property. Would you like to see it?”
“Yes.”
Tyrone put the poor animal in our deep freezer. It made me sick to think of the coyote frozen stiff and lifeless in there. It had died to protect our lie. I had let it happen.
Maybe Vlad was right to tell everyone what we were. No one else would have to die. I was already dead. I should have turned to dust hundreds of years ago.
Heaven walked Wayne to the deep freezer on the back porch.
I fought my impulse to put Wayne in it.Keep it together, Tiffenie. Pass this one inspection and never worry about Wayne for the rest of his life, which will be relatively short.
The back porch was a little room off the kitchen, unheated with a lot of windows and all-season carpet. In the summer it might be nice (if we got rid of the carpet), a place you might put a small table where you could drink coffee, or at least drink out of a coffee mug, and read a book. But this time of year, it was nothing but a cold room filled with boots andcoats, the windows covered in frost that crept all the way up the panes in a crystalline stained-glass effect. The off-white Frigidaire deep freezer was against the wall.
“It’s in there,” I said. My stomach twisted at the thought. I didn’t want to touch it.
Wayne nodded and lifted the lid. We only used the freezer for blood and the coyote. The blood was underneath the coyote and stored in a cardboard box. He shouldn’t notice it.
Tyrone had wrapped the animal in a blanket before putting it in the freezer. Wayne tried to peel the cloth away, but it had frozen to the fur. This was so undignified, so unnecessary. I didn’t know how he would determine if this animal bit him. I, of all people, knew that looking dangerous meant nothing. Sure, the coyote had teeth and a bad reputation, but that didn’t mean it was the bad guy.
Wayne narrowed his eyes. “So there was a coyote in your living room?”
I stared at him with dead eyes. What did he want me to say? If he didn’t want to play along with the coyote story, then this was it.
Heaven said, “Um, why not? We just got here. The house had been vacant. A lot of things were living in here.”
He grunted. “I don’t think this is what bit me.”
How could he tell?
