No One's Home Read online

  The kid clapped him on the shoulder. “You want more, you know where to find me, right?”

  Hunter nodded blindly and waited for the spots to clear.

  A wide grin split the kid’s face in two. “You might wanna take a minute and get yourself straight. I’ll see myself out.”

  Before Hunter could collect his voice, the kid had bounded down the steps. “Wait,” he called after him weakly. He staggered to the stairwell, his head floating two feet above his shoulders.

  His friend was gone.

  He hardly knew him, and now the guy was wandering the house and possibly talking to his parents. High as a kite. “Roger?” he hissed into the empty stairwell.

  At the bottom of the steps, he saw his mother’s door standing open at the far end of the hallway. He scanned the front stairs, the foyer, the front door—there was no sign of Roger. Hunter caught a glimpse of his own face in the hall mirror and thought better of talking to his mother in the state he was in. He turned toward the back steps and headed down to the kitchen.

  Margot was standing in front of the refrigerator, holding the door open.

  “Oh . . .” Hunter said, taking a step backward, fretting dizzily that he reeked of smoke. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi.” She hardly glanced at him, keeping her eyes on the fridge, trying to hide the fact that they were swollen from crying. “Did you eat dinner?”

  He paused a moment, waiting for more questions. Who’s your friend? Have you been smoking drugs? If he hadn’t been in a panic of his own, he might’ve noticed the stilted tone of her voice, the broken lines in her face. “No, I’m not really hungry.” He lurched past her toward the front door as casually as he could. “Have you seen Dad?” Or my high friend?

  “Your dad? Oh. I think he’s napping in the den.”

  Hunter wasn’t listening. The foyer was still empty. He spun back toward the den on the other side of the kitchen, the walls rushing past in a blur. The television was still flashing blue and green images. Creeping a bit closer, he could see the open bottle of bourbon on the coffee table and his father’s cashmere feet propped up on one end of the couch. Over his shoulder, Margot was still staring into the refrigerator, letting the cold air soothe her swollen face.

  There was no sign of Roger anywhere.

  A door slammed at the top of the steps.

  A lanky figure rushed down the stairs and out the front door in a startling blur.

  Dazed, Hunter stumbled after it to the open doorway. Roger’s black T-shirt vanished behind the trees, and Hunter ran out onto the front sidewalk after him. “Hey! Where the hell are you going?”

  After a gaping pause, he scrambled back into the house and shut the door.

  “Somebody here?” his mother asked from the edge of the kitchen.

  “Uh. Yeah. A friend stopped by.” He kept his back to her so she wouldn’t see the unfocused panic distorting his face. What was Roger doing up there?

  “Oh, that’s great, honey. I want to meet him sometime.” Margot gave a little nod and shuffled back into the kitchen.

  Relieved she didn’t want to discuss it further, Hunter followed the trail of pot fumes back up the front stairs to his mother’s bedroom. The feeling something was terribly wrong twisted inside him. The walls seemed to undulate in and out with his breath.

  In his mother’s bathroom, he found both medicine cabinets flung open and pill bottles scattered over the marble vanity.

  “Shit! Roger?” he hissed, grabbing one bottle after another. Empty. Empty. Only one rattled in his hand. Frowning, he frantically shoved them all back into their proper places. Closing his dad’s medicine cabinet, he caught a glimpse of something or someone in the mirror. A flash of white silk.

  When he spun around to the closet doorway behind him, it was gone.

  You ever see her?

  He started after whoever or whatever it might be, but a flash of red in his mother’s soaking tub caught him midstep. The room reeled as he took in the color. A small splatter of red puddled near the drain. Next to it, an open straight razor gleamed silver in the light.

  Blood.

  Hunter grabbed the counter to steady himself as the walls breathed in and out. It was the old-fashioned type of razor that no one used anymore. Except in horror movies. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead.

  Whose blood? Roger had taken off down the street with his pilfered stash of pills. His mother was in the kitchen.

  With an unsteady hand, Hunter turned on the tap and watched as the water in the bathtub swirled red and pink until it ran clear. He slid the razor into the hot stream using a shampoo bottle, not daring to touch it until it had been rinsed clean. Then he picked it up, folding the blade against the handle. The weight of it in his hand focused his bloodshot eyes.

  He shoved the razor into his back pocket and hurried down the hall to his room. After barricading the door, he paced the floor. He picked up his cell phone and began to dial and then set it back down again. What would the police do? What if it’s Mom’s? What if she tried to . . .

  He shook his head violently at the idea.

  He sank down onto his chair and picked up the phone again. He scrolled through the numbers saved on the screen until he found the right one. After a full minute of listening to the other line ring, he got voicemail. “Hey, Roger! What the fuck just happened, man? This is Hunter. Call me.”

  He took a minute tapping out the same message into a text, then clicked on his computer. A search engine popped up, and he typed in Roger’s name. Nothing came up except a few defunct social media accounts. No police record, Hunter mused, but how old is Roger anyway? What the hell am I going to tell my parents about the pills?

  Hunter considered calling the police again. No. The weed. I’m stoned. Shit.

  To busy his twitching fingers, Hunter entered one of the names Roger had rattled off, Niles Gorman Shaker Heights. A series of results flickered onto the screen. Football stories. A Facebook page. A story in the high school student paper titled “Opioid Crisis Hits Shaker.” Hunter clicked on it.

  Families mourned the loss of SHHS senior Niles Gorman and junior Natalie Cain last week. Both students died of what appeared to be a drug-related overdose . . .

  The bodies were found in a vacant house on Lee Road known to be a nuisance property. Police are working now to secure the house . . .

  Hunter scanned the article for any mention of a ghost or foul play and found nothing but teachers remembering what sort of students they’d been and friends insisting that neither of them had had a real drug problem. The rest of the article cited recent statistics of the opioid crisis in Cuyahoga County, a crisis that had left families in ruins and children stranded in the overcrowded foster care system.

  Hunter rubbed his chin, pulling on the sparse hairs, then spun in his chair to face the door. He wasn’t sober enough to face either of his parents. He pulled the razor out of his pocket and studied it again, wondering if maybe his father had inherited it from his own father or bought it at a shop, or . . .

  The floor creaked outside his room.

  The electric current of another person only twelve feet away charged the air, creeping up his back as a shadow hovered on the other side of his door. The feel of it strummed his nerves as he sat there waiting for something to happen.

  “What do you want?” he finally asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  There was no answer.

  Hunter could feel something or someone squinting at him through the keyhole. Reflexively, he gripped the razor tighter.

  The shadow creaked away toward the attic steps, and the sensation of being watched released its grip. He stood up but stayed put. Jumbled thoughts flashed behind his eyes. This is stupid. I should call the police. If it’s a person, they’re trespassing, and if it’s a dead person . . .

  But his head was still not properly attached. He squeezed his eyes shut and blinked them open again. The whites still burned red. He couldn’t call the police in the state he was in. He couldn�
��t even talk to his parents. He might’ve imagined the whole thing. Then a more coherent thought flashed through his mind.

  The camera.

  Hunter spun back to his computer and enlarged the feed from the webcam to see his own face gaping at the screen. Then he rewound the footage to earlier that day, not sure what he was hoping to find. His doorway stood empty on the screen. He sped up the recording. Nothing. Nothing. Wait.

  He backed up until he found it. His door swung open on his screen. The hallway outside was dark and grainy, but something moved—a slip of white fabric. He backed up the video feed and slowed it down. A shoulder. A white nightgown. A strand of blonde hair. Then nothing. No face. He tried adjusting the exposure but got nowhere.

  “Shitty camera!” he hissed.

  It could’ve been his mother; that was what everyone would say. But staring at the frozen profile, his nose an inch from the screen, he knew it wasn’t.

  30

  The Martin Family

  February 15, 2014

  Ava woke to the sound of footsteps coming down the crooked hallway toward her door. She could hear the heavy footfalls even over the whirring box fan next to her bed.

  “Ava, honey? You awake?” Papa Martin whispered through the open door. “I thought I heard you crying.”

  She didn’t answer. Silently, she slipped from her bed and crept on cat feet toward her closet in the far wall, not breathing.

  The key rattled in the lock. The noise gave her cover as she closed the closet door behind her. In the breathless dark, she pushed through the hanging clothes to the laundry door set two and a half feet above the floor. The wood panel opened into a laundry chute. The shaft of cold basement air chilled her skin as she reached through the wall chase to push open the laundry door on the opposite side. It swung into the adjacent walk-in linen closet with a faint squeak. Ava cringed at the sound.

  The door to her bedroom creaked open, and she felt Papa’s footsteps shake the floor as he lumbered into the room. “You okay, girl? Mind if I lay down here awhile? The bed is so empty when Maureen’s out of town . . . Ava?”

  The laundry door was just wide enough for her tiny frame to squeeze through, and she silently thanked God she’d stayed so small. Even at nearly sixteen years old, she was often mistaken for a much younger girl and kept her curves hidden under loose clothes and a self-conscious slouch. As silently as she could manage, she pulled herself across the twenty-foot drop to the basement and into the oversize linen closet on the other side. The shelves of folded sheets, towels, and blankets muffled the sound of her body spilling headfirst onto the floor.

  The closet door behind her swung open before she could pull the laundry door shut. Too late.

  “Ava? What the hell are you doing?” Papa Martin’s voice boomed through the closet. Hangers screeched as he shoved the hanging clothes aside. A meaty arm thrust through the laundry door and nearly caught her nightgown as she slipped out of the linen closet and took off running down the hall.

  “Ava!” he hissed after her.

  She didn’t look back. Her feet flew down the hall to the back stairs. Outside, the snow was falling, and her feet were bare. She wouldn’t get far, she realized, running down the steps and into the kitchen. She opened the side door anyway and peered out down the driveway. The snow fell in big flakes, melting on the dark pavement. Good. No footprints.

  She grabbed her shoes and coat from the rack and left the door standing wide open. Then she slipped down the basement stairs as quietly as she could. Papa Martin wouldn’t have heard her anyway over the furious thump of his feet or the angry huff of his breathing.

  “Dammit, Ava!” he bellowed down the back stairs. Mama Martin was out of town, so there was no one to wake except Toby. The thought of the boy locked in his room and wondering at the commotion sent a knife through her as Ava ran down into the basement.

  But Papa has never raised a hand to the boy, she reassured herself as she stashed her coat and shoes in one of the storage closets and herself in another. What the hell am I doing?

  Papa lumbered through the kitchen and crashed open the storm door. “Ava?” he called down the driveway. Waking the neighbors wouldn’t do at all, he realized and closed the door. “Jesus Christ!”

  He stormed back into the kitchen and picked up the phone. His voice traveled down the basement stairs to Ava’s hiding spot, where she cowered next to his coveralls and tools. “Al? Yeah, this is Clyde. Listen, could you send a car by around here? Ava snuck out of the house . . . Hell if I know! I think it’s some boy from school . . . Believe me, she’s gonna be grounded for a month. Just have the fellas keep an eye out for her . . . See you Saturday at the range? Okay. Thanks.” He hung up the phone.

  Ava sagged against the closet wall. Now what? His police buddies would surely believe Clyde’s version of the story. She didn’t know if she’d even have the nerve to tell anyone the truth anyway. She’d had chances.

  In the musty air of the storage closet, she listened as Papa Martin pulled a beer from the fridge, then slammed the door shut hard enough to shake the floorboards. His angry feet stomped away from the kitchen. The television clicked on in the den, and the muted sounds of a game show filtered down to where Ava crouched, debating what to do next. Run? What about Toby? Call someone? But who?

  The endless questions and dead ends swirled around her in the suffocating darkness until she lost all sense of time. Consciousness wound out of her head as she descended into a nightmare of terrible possibilities. Ava trapped in the backseat of a police car. Toby lost in the woods. Papa Martin’s hands squeezing her neck until she couldn’t breathe. Ava drowning in a black, black sea.

  Hours later, a sudden rush of air and a burst of light woke her like a slap. She blinked her eyes in the sudden glare to see the barrel chest of Papa Martin standing in the open door.

  “There you are,” he said.

  31

  The Spielman Family

  August 8, 2018

  Bleary eyed, Myron studied himself in his bathroom mirror, searching for jaundice, weighing his thoughts. He really needed to stop. He knew this but opened the medicine cabinet despite himself. Tomorrow. He’d do better tomorrow, but today of all days . . .

  He picked up a brown bottle and shook it in his hand. The bottle that had been full of white pills of various sizes two days earlier was now nearly empty.

  “Damn it! Who’s been in my things?” Myron spun around in the empty room, looking for someone to blame. The small digital clock by the sink blinked 11:27 p.m.

  A floor below, Margot was asleep on the couch thanks to the two martinis she’d had with dinner. Home Network reruns lit her face in tasteful shades of sage and mushroom. He didn’t have the nerve to wake her or risk rousing her suspicions.

  Red faced, he stormed down the long hall to Hunter’s bedroom and threw open the door without knocking. “Hunter!”

  The boy jumped in his computer chair and fumbled to get the article he’d been reading about poltergeists off the computer screen. “What?”

  “Don’t what me.” Myron brandished the near-empty pill bottle at his son. “Have you been stealing my meds?”

  “What?” He shrank from the accusing look on his father’s face, eyes darting from the bottle to his father’s bloodshot face. Dammit, Roger!

  “I said. Have you. Been stealing. My pills?”

  “No!” Hunter’s face went pale. The pot he’d smoked with Roger the Thief had mostly worn off, but he panicked anyway.

  Myron charged forward and clamped a manicured hand onto the boy’s arm. Hard. “Don’t lie to me. Did you take them?” He searched the boy’s face for signs. Obfuscation? Intoxication? Addiction? “If you have a problem, you need to tell me, son. Taking other people’s meds is dangerous. It can ruin your life. Even kill you. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hunter said, trying hard not to show his terror at being discovered. The small bag of marijuana was tucked into his box of gerbil food.

  “Do I need to g
et you drug tested?”

  “What?” Hunter’s mouth hung open, aghast. Oh, God! “No! Dad! I’m not on drugs!”

  And he wasn’t really. Not normally. Hunter’s only addiction was glowing behind him with the lurid promise of everything his fevered brain wanted to see and plenty that he didn’t.

  Myron probed the boy’s eyes like the doctor he was, looking for the telltale signs. Pupils. Skin color. Balance. Eye movement. Not trusting him for a second.

  Hunter sat there squirming under the microscope until his father finally released his grip.

  The man straightened himself, perhaps realizing how this might look from the boy’s point of view. The slight tremor in his hand, which he quickly concealed by shoving both fists and the bottle into the pockets of his bathrobe, was a dead giveaway. Myron fumbled for the voice of an exasperated father. “I don’t like you spending so much time in here. The first couple weeks? Fine. But this is getting ridiculous! Your mother and I are both worried sick.”

  The boy’s gaze immediately turned inward. His father’s disapproval wrote its damning words all over Hunter’s face. Failure. Weak. Disappointment. Loser.

  “I want you to get out of this damn room tomorrow. Go outside. Walk around. Meet some people your own age. Stop haunting this place like Eddie Munster. Alright?”

  The condemnation cut the boy in places no one would ever see. Hunter nodded, not looking at his father. He didn’t bother arguing that he’d spent the whole afternoon outside the house or that he’d met a friend who had turned out to be a thief.

  The shame he’d just inflicted made Myron grimace. More furious at himself than Hunter, he didn’t bother parsing the two feelings. He reached past his son and grabbed the boy’s wireless keyboard. “I’m taking this until you can show me you’re responsible enough to have it back. Got it?”

  Hunter gaped at the keyboard and then his father. Anger overtook the humiliation of his father’s dressing down. “Hey! That’s mine.”

  “No, son. It’s mine. Who do you think pays for all this, huh?” Myron waved his hand over the room with its posters, books, creepy fireplace, and gerbil maze. “We have a deal, remember? You do your job, and I’ll do mine. And right now, my job is to get you the hell out of this room. And your job is to stop frying up your brain. Now, get some sleep! And stay the hell out of my medicine cabinet!”