No One's Home Page 12

  Margot glanced at the crumpled tissues in the trashcan, and her nose wrinkled in disgust. She and Myron had staged a half-hearted fight about whether to allow a computer in Hunter’s room when they’d moved him in.

  You know what he’s going to do up there.

  Relax, Margot. He’s going to do that anyway. He’s a boy. That’s what they do.

  Stepping over to his dresser, she surveyed the detritus—cologne samples, deodorant, science fiction books, comics. Opening the drawers, all she found were crumpled clothes and an unopened pack of condoms. No cigarettes. No weed. No missing jewelry. No cash. No guns. No needles. Finished but not satisfied, she turned to his closet, wedged half-open with dirty clothes. She clicked on the light and took inventory of his one suit, his old school uniform, four pairs of pants he’d outgrown that summer, a ski jacket, a snowboard shoved in the corner, three pairs of dress shoes already too small, a Boston Red Sox jersey, and a file box of old school papers and hand-drawn comics. Nothing of interest. Except—

  DeAD GiRL

  She squinted at the writing on the closet walls, pushing the clothes aside. “Goddammit, Max!” she hissed, reading more and more, her pulse quickening. “I said to wallpaper the closets, you son of a bitch!”

  BAD BeNNy BAD

  DeAD GiRL

  She shuddered before clicking off the light. What psycho lived here? she wondered. And why didn’t Hunter say anything about it? She stood there contemplating the thought, tapping her foot. What else is he hiding?

  On her hands and knees, she checked under the bed and found nothing but dirty socks and more crumpled tissues. Hiding spots exhausted, she brushed invisible cooties off her yoga pants and closed the door.

  Margot padded down her $3,000 handwoven carpet runner toward the master suite. She debated lying down a moment but turned to Myron’s open closet door behind her instead. Running a finger down the neat rows of suits and dress shirts, she stopped a moment to scan the shelves. The briefcase full of torn pill boxes had vanished without ever being discovered, but something in the room seemed off to her. The smell of his deodorant and cologne mixed with something else. She eyed the laundry hamper and lifted the lid to be greeted by the pungent smell of gym sweat. Frowning, she lowered it again and turned toward the master bath.

  Her gaze wandered idly for a moment before locking in on an item on the counter. A bottle of perfume, lid off, standing slightly out of place. Head tilted, she walked over to it and picked up the bottle. She gave the ionizer a sniff and replaced the lid, setting it back into its proper spot alongside four other seldom-used scents.

  The door to Myron’s medicine cabinet stood slightly ajar. Reflexively, she pressed it closed. Then, thinking better of it, she opened it back up again and peered inside. Toothbrush, razor, deodorant, acne cream, hair-growth tonic, and three brown prescription bottles. Her eyes narrowed at the medical terms and instructions. She picked up one of the bottles and turned it over in her hand. Levothyroxine 25 mcg—take one daily as needed. She glanced at the other two, brow slightly bent, curious but not really concerned: Sertraline 50 mg, Sildenafil Citrate 10 mg. The words meant nothing to her.

  She closed the cabinet with a soft click.

  Bored but uneasy, she checked her reflection in the giant gilded mirror and retrieved her lip gloss from a deep drawer in her vanity on the other side of the bathroom. The drawer was filled with hundreds of dollars of magic potions meant to hide and reverse the fine lines that had collected around her eyes and mouth over the years, lines that Margot had spent a half hour studying the night before, wondering if it was finally time for injections.

  Still unsettled, she strode through the master bedroom to her own closet, lined in pink damask wallpaper. Another crystal chandelier hung over a hundred square feet of custom cabinetry. It was laid out like a boutique, with her favorite shoes arranged on display shelves. On an ordinary day, Margot would circle the room, slowly taking inventory, making mental lists of what to buy next, cataloging scarves and dresses until she’d settled on the perfect thing to wear. Sexy? Sassy? Sophisticated? Sporty? Some days she might try on four outfits before settling into her character.

  But something was wrong, and the worry line marring her forehead deepened. A shoe out of place. Hangers pushed to one side. A blouse on the floor. The expensive fabric lay puddled on the refinished wood like refuse. She snatched it up, clutching it to her chest. She turned slowly around the room. A tiny plaster cast of a child’s hand lay on its side instead of in its usual spot next to a row of necklaces. A little girl’s hand. She picked it up gently and held it a moment before carefully setting it back on its stand. She looked over her shoulder at the closed door that led out to the hallway.

  A drawer was slightly ajar.

  Pulling it open, she checked the contents. Silk and lace nightgowns, one, two, three . . . not four. She slammed it shut. Not four. She threw the blouse in her hand onto its hanger, slapping it back in place, then dumped the contents of her laundry basket onto the floor. Not four.

  She opened the surrounding drawers—stockings, bras, socks, panties, but no nightgown.

  Flummoxed, she stormed back into her bedroom and checked under pillows, then under the bed, then in Myron’s hamper. It had up and vanished in a flicker of white silk.

  Hunter? she wondered. But why would he?

  Perplexed, she headed back down to Hunter’s room. She searched it again, this time being careful to check each and every drawer, under his pillows, beneath his mattress. Has he taken other things in the past? She couldn’t think of any.

  “Mom?” His voice startled her out of her reverie. He was standing in the doorway with his backpack on his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  The look of shock and betrayal on his face struck her hard. She dropped the unopened box of condoms in her hand back into the drawer as if she hadn’t touched or seen it. Guilt swept over her face.

  “I was just looking for something. Have you seen my nightgown?” The question sounded stupid the instant she said it.

  “Your what?”

  “Nothing. I just . . . I want you to clean this mess up, okay?” she said, smoothing her motherly visage back into place. “Laundry is Thursday, and this place is a mess. Louisa can’t even get a vacuum in here.”

  He glowered at her in a barely contained rage. Get out of my room, Mom! But all he said was, “Okay.”

  Margot wiped her hands on her yoga pants as though she’d just been dusting and stepped past her son out into the hall. “Okay. Good.”

  Hunter grabbed the door with white knuckles, eager to slam it in her face.

  “So.” She struggled to change tack. “Where’d you go this morning?”

  He didn’t want to answer. A thousand choice words died on his lips before he forced out a mumbled response. “Library.”

  “That’s nice, honey. Did you meet anyone there?”

  Her sunny, condescending voice made him cringe. To prove he could manage his own social life, he said, “Sort of. There’s a guy that hangs out there sometimes.”

  “Really? Does he go to your school?”

  “Nah. I think he goes to the public high school.”

  “Well. Maybe you could invite him over.” She attempted a smile, but she could see the resentment bleeding off him in waves. Daunted, she tried again. “Say, why didn’t you tell me about the closet?”

  His eyes bulged at her, enraged she’d snooped in there as well. “What about it?”

  “Max didn’t finish the work. Do you want me to get somebody back here? You know, to paint?”

  “I dunno. I don’t care. It’s just a closet, right?”

  She shrugged sheepishly and left him fuming, his room tossed over like a crime scene. He slammed the door behind her and turned to the mess she’d rifled through. His mess. He kicked half of the crumpled clothes into the closet and shut the door, but not before reading the inscriptions again.

  BAD BeNNy

  BeNNy KiLL

  Back at his des
k, he checked his computer for signs of her snooping, then pulled a small spherical camera from his desk drawer. Hunter’s face appeared on the computer screen as he plugged it in and adjusted the camera to watch over his room, his door, and the hallway outside.

  21

  The Martin Family

  November 10, 2014

  “Ava! Ava, look what I found!” Toby called out to her from one of the crawl spaces in the attic.

  Ava set the yellowed newspaper down on the floor of the storage room midsentence:

  “No one but a maniac could have inflicted such wounds as I found on the boy,” the coroner . . .

  She carefully hid the page where her little brother wouldn’t see the 1931 headline. Toby had enough trouble sleeping already without knowing the terrible things the newspaper said. The things that had happened up there in the attic. She poked her head out into the main room. “What?”

  “Come here. You gotta see this.”

  She crossed the cold expanse of the attic to the miniature door on the other side. She poked her head into the crawl space. “What’d you find?”

  In the incandescent glare of the bare light bulb, he showed her. It was a gun. He pointed the barrel at the far wall as though it were a toy. “You think it’s real?”

  “Oh my God, Toby! Give me that.” She carefully removed the heavy gun from his hand, aiming the muzzle at the floor. “Where’d you find this?”

  “Over there.” He pointed to the gap between the roof rafters at the eave where the floorboards didn’t reach. “It was in that fluffy stuff.”

  “You mean the insulation, dopey?” She popped open the chamber and saw the silver butts of five bullets. “Oh my God! This thing’s loaded! Toby, you could’ve shot your face off!”

  “Wow. What should we do with it?” he asked, crouching next to her. Ever since they’d come to the gloomy house five years earlier, they had been a we. He followed her around like a shadow and hated to leave her side. He would sleep in her bed every night if Mama and Papa would let him.

  “I dunno. We can’t exactly say where we found it, can we?”

  They weren’t allowed in the attic. Papa was at work, and Mama had gone to the grocery store, leaving Ava in charge of her younger brother. Remember the rules. Don’t leave the house. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t answer the door. No friends over. You can do that for Mama, right? Can I trust you, sweetie?

  The attic was strictly off limits, so the minute Mama Martin had left the house, the two children scrambled to the attic door. Their parents kept it bolted, but Ava had become quite proficient at picking locks.

  “Maybe we should hide it,” Toby said, eyes trained on the gun, both hungry and fearful. She knew what he was thinking. Ava had found him hiding under his bed the night before, convinced a monster was hunting him. I saw it, Ava. The monster was in my room.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” She weighed the metal in her hand. She didn’t dare tell him the terrible thoughts racing through her mind—thoughts of how Toby could never be trusted with the gun by himself, thoughts of Papa and the trouble she’d catch if he ever found out they’d been up there snooping. Thoughts of what the gun could do.

  “We can’t tell anybody about this, Toby,” she finally said, studying his face carefully. “Nobody at school. Not Mama or Papa. Nobody. You understand?”

  The boy nodded, the gravity of their shared secret like a heavy weight in his clutched hands.

  “Good. I want you to go downstairs and into my room. Okay?”

  “But—”

  “Go downstairs, Toby. I stashed some cookies in my sock drawer. You want them?”

  The thought of such a rare treat almost made him forget the gun and what she might do with it. Any time she invited him into her big bedroom over the garage, he jumped at the chance. He scrambled to his feet and gave the gun one last glance before bounding down the stairs. “I’ll save you one!”

  “Thanks, kiddo!” she called back.

  They would spend the next hour listening to the radio and playing their favorite game—Do You Remember? Toby hardly remembered a thing from their life before the house. Ava was his memory, and she made all the memories happy ones. Do you remember when Mommy made you that blue birthday cake? Do you remember when Mommy bought you that big yellow truck for Christmas? Do you remember the way Daddy liked to tickle your ribs before bed?

  He never noticed the tears that would collect in the corners of her eyes as she recounted all the good times they’d never had together. He would just curl into the crook of her arm and fathom a time before the big house on Lee Road. A time when monsters didn’t lurk in dark corners.

  Once he was safely out of earshot, Ava set about finding a hiding place for the gun. She scanned the unfinished walls and floorboards of the crawl space, considering the loaded weapon in her hand again. Whatever thought passed in and out of her mind made her flinch. It was a bad idea keeping it. Suddenly uncertain and afraid, she looked over her shoulder. She should tell someone. She should, but then she would have to tell them everything.

  Pressing her lips together in a determined line, she continued her search until she found a loose board next to the knee wall. She pried it up and buried the gun under the loose gray insulation. As she pushed the board back into place, a creaking sound behind her made her jump.

  She spun to face the main room of the attic.

  “Toby?” she said softly, her heart pounding in her throat. Papa? She poked her head out of the storage space and surveyed the enormous emptiness under the roof. The feeling that someone or something was watching her lifted the fine hairs on her arms. “Hello?”

  But no one was there.

  22

  The Spielman Family

  August 7, 2018

  “Are you awake?” a voice whispered.

  Warm air fluttered down the canal of his inner ear, tickling his brain. Hunter recoiled, wanting to swat at it, but his sleeping hand lay paralyzed. All he could manage was a mumble. “Mom?” The feeling of someone else in the room, a shadow hanging over him, pulled his mind toward the surface of whatever deep ocean he’d dreamed into.

  Wake up.

  Hunter’s gummy eyelids peeled themselves open. The room was a gauzy blur of gray and blue with the sound of cicadas trilling outside and . . . someone breathing?

  A dark shape moved.

  The boy pushed himself up onto an elbow. He fumbled for the light on his nightstand. A painful burst of light sent the shadows running out into the hall. He squinted in the glare.

  No one was there.

  His eyes darted about the room from one corner to the next, lingering on the creepy fireplace. Raccoon? The gerbils were nested in the wood chips, noses twitching at whatever had woken him. He rubbed his ear, still tingling with the hot breath of a whisper and put his bare feet on the ground.

  The bedroom door was cracked open. It had been shut when he fell asleep.

  Gangly frame hunched and uncertain, Hunter got up and inched his way to the door. His crooked nose poked out into the dark hallway, followed by a matted nest of brown hair. He studied the open gap in the wall where the back stairs led down to the kitchen. Then he panned to the right past the split in the hallway that led over the garage, past the rows of closed doors, past the bluish glow of the front stairwell, to his parents’ bedroom. The door stood open.

  Mom? Was that you?

  He crept toward her door one tentative step at a time, ears perked and listening for telltale footfalls, for the annoyed clearing of a throat, for rustling of sheets, but there was none.

  Three steps closer, Hunter froze, muscles tensed at the top of the monumental stairs, as though expecting to find someone standing at the bottom. The leaded glass window over the two-story foyer lit part of the hall, its thin diamond stripes slashing over the awkward angles of his skin. Hunter glanced back at the dark tunnels behind him, one leading down to the kitchen, one leading over the garage.

  Empty.

  Turning back to his parents’ room, he p
added softly to the door and creaked it open three more inches. Inside, two lumps lay as far apart as possible on the king-size bed. His father was snoring in fits and starts as though trapped in some terrible dream. His mother lay on the opposite side of the mattress, facing away from the door. The duvet moved rhythmically up and down as she breathed. Hunter crept closer and closer to her until he reached the foot of the bed.

  He reached out a hand as though to wake her. After a moment’s indecision, he withdrew it and whispered a barely audible, “Are you awake?”

  His father sucked in a breath as though startled but settled back into an uneasy rhythm. Neither parent stirred. Hunter stood over them another five heartbeats before retreating back into the hallway, silently closing the door.

  He was halfway back to his room when his mother sat up with a gasp, searching the room. Margot rubbed her face, not knowing what had roused her. Bad dream. She curled onto her other side and fell back to the steady breath of sleep. Myron mumbled something and rolled to his back, brow furrowed.

  Hunter had reached the door to his own bedroom when he heard it. A dull thump from below. Kitchen? He snapped his head toward the back stairs and froze, uncertain, ears cocked, waiting for a reply.

  A small click answered, and strange footsteps vibrated through the wood frame of the house and up his legs.

  Eyes wide, he covered his mouth and glanced down the hall at his parents’ door. Should I wake them? The murky light of the big foyer window shifted. A dark shadow drifting over the plaster. He gaped at it and crept closer. Is it something outside? Out the enormous window over the entryway, he only found the same tall trees and sky that had been there moments earlier. He searched the long shadows of the foyer, but nothing was there.

  His friend Caleb’s words repeated in his head. What if your house was built on top of all those dead bodies? Hunter shook his head. No bedsheet ghosts would be found skulking around the halls, no face-eating clowns. That was ridiculous. But there was something. A feeling. A sense that he wasn’t alone.