To be honest, I didn’t think the kids would break in a second time, though I was wrong. This had often been the case with our own son — my misguessing. Caleb was now making a fortune in Silicon Valley, driving a Beamer convertible, and engaged to an extremely interesting girl, a biologist who’d graduated from Harvard. One of the things I hadn’t thought Caleb would do, years ago, was act on his intense hatred of the local high school, let alone blow up the toilet in the teachers’ bathroom. Also, I hadn’t expected that when he had a teenage crush on a tourist, he’d hitchhike to Colorado to see her — or that had been his intention until the police picked him up. I could give other examples of him just being a boy, but since his life has worked out fine, best to forget — including what he did to the leftover anatomy lab frogs.
When they broke in the second time, Ted, Genevieve, and Blake tried to be as quiet as possible, but Rollins the dog — who lived in the house next door to Jon Enders’s — saw them and began barking and wouldn’t stop, which drew my attention to what might be happening. Sure enough, when I walked a little way down the road I could see that the door was wide open. There was no light when I entered the house, just Ted shining his flashlight around the walls, and Blake running into the beam of light whenever she could, pretending that Ted was trying to put her in the spotlight. Once I stepped inside, he turned off the flashlight pretty quickly, and that left whatever moonlight seeped though the door and windows. For a split second it was my impulse to turn and run. I thought I’d walked into some Jeffrey Dahmer ghoulishness. Somehow, they’d pried open the padlocked door and heads were everywhere, though the lampshades put them into some perspective. “You came! You came!” Genevieve said, once they’d gotten over their fear that I was the police. Closer inspection (Ted leading the way) revealed what I’d seen to be busts of Elvis, arranged every which way on metal tables — the long kind that people use outside for buffets. Some were chipped, missing a chunk of nose, or a bit of white showing through pink lips. Hardly any depiction seemed exactly right, though as they circled and examined the lamp bases they instantly started a game, as Ted’s flashlight danced over them: Find the Best Elvis. There would be a scratched cornea, just when Blake thought she’d won, or Genevieve would point out a missing black curl behind an ear. The lamp bases were about three feet high, minus their shades: Elvis in sunglasses; Elvis wearing a high white ruffled collar; Elvis with glitter on his cheekbones; Elvis with superlong eyelashes, a mascara fanatic’s dream.
They began snapping pictures with their cell phones. Elvis made his way across the universe in seconds. He went (OMG!) to girls in boarding school and to Blake’s half brother in Austin; he appeared in selfies with Ted, who tousled his own longish hair and did a pretty credible job of imitating Elvis’s expression before relaying it to his basketball coach. The kids mugged and held their fingers up behind Elvis’s head. They grouped some duplicate busts together and took turns crouching behind them, intruding their own faces into the lineup for the photograph. They thought all the Elvises were awesome. What did it mean? Genevieve wanted to know. Genevieve was pictured kissing him on his pink plaster lips. She ran home and got her mother, who was at first really perturbed to know she’d crept out of bed and broken into the house again, but by the time Mr. DuPenn got there, damp from the shower, his wife was walking around the tables with me, mon dieu—ing. “You put all these back the way they were,” her husband said to Ted, trying to sound stern.
“What do you think they’re all doing here, was he some big Elvis fan or something, I guess?” Ted said.
“I don’t think they’d be here otherwise,” I said.
“Oh no, this is wrong of us to be here,” Marie DuPenn said. “We must go!”
“Come on, enough of this nonsense. It’s after midnight,” my husband said.
Blake wouldn’t budge. She said it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen, even better than the first field of fireflies she ever saw. She stroked one Elvis’s brow, her fingers lingering on his dark brown curls.
“That guy got really fat out in Vegas,” Ted said to me. “They had to like sew him into his costumes like trussing a turkey, and I think he popped out one time. Yeah.” My husband asserted again that we had to get moving. Already, there were responses to the photos: a smiley face icon made out of a colon and close parenthesis; OMG LOL; xxURnutsxxbandsupercul!:)huuuunh?
Nobody had to walk more than a few blocks home. The kids left by the front door, Blake grudgingly, Ted with a lot of bravado. As he tried to close the front door tightly, the top hinge came out of the doorjamb, and Ted said, “Bummer!”
My husband doubled back to inspect the problem. “Oh, hell, now I feel like it’s my responsibility to fix the door,” my husband said. “Is everybody satisfied now? You’re going to be my assistant tomorrow, Ted, and we’ll get that room padlocked again while we’re at it.”
“Yo, world, the King is back!” Ted hollered, hardly worried about what he’d done, pumping his fist in the air. “Long live the King!”
“Shut up, Ted, you are so rude!” Blake said, kicking some pebbles aside.
“Hey, we could sell them on eBay and make enough money to go see an Elvis impostor in Vegas!” Ted said. He was quite keyed up. “All the food’s free in the casinos. One of them just kicked out Ben Affleck for like forever, because he was memorizing the cards played, or something. He won hundreds of thousands of dollars. I read about it in the doctor’s office.”
“I’m surrounded by morons,” Blake whispered harshly, seeming to be speaking to the moon. She looked over her shoulder at us, then picked up her pace and jogged toward home, head averted, hands clasped in loose fists in front of her.
I was just glad they were basically good kids. And I was glad, too, that there hadn’t been a refrigerator full of decapitated heads. It was so harmless — someone’s collection of Elvis lamps. Who wasn’t eccentric? This was really a modest collection, considering some of the things people amassed: Nazi helmets; pictures of freaks; old dental instruments.
“Mr. Duncan, that guy was gay!” Ted said.
“Well, what if he was?” my husband said.
“Gay!” Ted repeated. “Blake didn’t even get it that he was gay!”
My husband looked at Ted. I could almost hear him thinking, though I couldn’t read his mind. Finally, he said, “It certainly was something to see.”
“I’ve got to take really good photographs with my Nikon, Mr. Duncan,” Ted said. “Also, we didn’t search the cellar. Do you think there might have been real bodies down there?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my husband said. He turned to me, gesturing toward the Magerdons’ side yard. Andrea Magerdon was getting chemo in New York. We’d heard she was doing fine, but she wouldn’t be back until August. “Look at how well that trumpet vine’s growing,” he said. “Mine can’t even find the post.”
The following morning, though my husband left Ted two messages, he went back to the house alone to make the repairs, pretending to be more put out than he was. I walked partway with him, carrying a plastic gallon jug of water. The trumpet vine had been doing okay on its own, but the least I could do was pour some water on it, since the Magerdons obviously couldn’t. A month earlier I’d thought of watering what remained of their garden, but the water had been turned off.
Who should my husband run into, of course (I saw this from afar, and was glad I hadn’t accompanied him), but Barbara Gillicut, just starting up the walkway. “Hey, ho!” he called. “Barbara, please, a word.”