It was their dream house. Both of them had each grown up with fantasies of living in a house with secret passages and hidden doors, with buried treasure and dumbwaiters and sliding panels and trapdoors.
Tish and Leo found that dream home exactly one month after Leo surprised Tish with an antique engagement ring baked into a chocolate souffle. On weekends, the two spent their afternoons driving around town on old back roads, admiring the old brick homes and older trees that lined the sidewalks. Tish liked to make up stories about the families that lived in the houses, populating the buildings with flappers and ghosts and suppressed housewives and seances and mysteries and murders. Leo filled them with moonshiners and gangsters, with detectives, with elegant dinner parties gone terribly, satisfyingly wrong.
On one Sunday afternoon in September, the air still a little heavy with the last bit of summer haze, they found it. Leo saw the For Sale sign first. He yanked the car out of the lane and pulled up at the house's curb. Tish leapt out as soon as the car came to a halt. She stood in the yard with her hand outstretched and waiting for Leo's.
Three stories tall, swaddled in the shade of a dozen tall oaks, their house's doors and windows winked from beneath the branches like conspiratorial eyes. Tish stared at it and knew in her bones that it was meant to be theirs. She breathed in and felt the house breathing with her, felt its hollow spaces, felt the deep and secret rooms that matched the deep and secret places in her heart.
Leo locked the car and took hold of Tish's hand. He could feel her tension. She was trembling, resonating like a plucked string. Her face was suffused with something serene and heartbroken. She looked the way she sometimes did when Leo woke in the middle of the night, finding her sitting up in bed, staring at nothing, eyes open but still asleep. Leo thought he loved Tish best at moments like this, when she was far away and strange, warm and close but somehow impossibly remote, like the moon.
He reached out and gently brushed at her hair. She blinked and sighed. "We're home," she said, squeezing Leo's hand.
Three and a half weeks after that day, they were. The house stretched their budget, but they funneled money away from the big lavish wedding Tish's parents wanted her to have, and got married in the courthouse instead.
Every closet had a trapdoor that led to the attic, which was cobwebby and bright, lit by skylights and a big stained glass window. There wasn't a dumbwaiter, but there was an old laundry chute with little brass doors opening onto each floor. In the kitchen, the pantry door was molded right into the wall, no edging, with a piece of wainscoting going right across the middle of it.
Leo found the crawlspace. He edged between the brick exterior and the interior plaster walls, moving between the studs, catching glimpses of light through old picture frame nail holes. Tish nearly had a heart attack when a disembodied knock sounded from inside the bedroom walls. She chased Leo through the house, smacking the walls, following his self-satisfied boyish cackles from room to room. When he emerged covered in dust and drywall and spiders, Tish demanded to be shown the entrance.
They spent the rest of the evening haunting each other.
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