No One's Home Read online

  Once she’d cleared the ashes from her face and mouth, she pressed her forehead to the sash and yelled, “Hello? Anybody? Help! I need help up here! Hello?”

  The only answer was the rush of the cars and the screech of brakes from a commuter bus. The house next door sat quiet. The Spielmans had never invited the neighbors over, never said hello or called them. The people next door worked late and traveled a lot. The only sign of life from the other house was the team of gardeners who came to groom the lawn every week.

  “Hello? Anybody? Help! Ple—” Her voice cut off as she caught sight of a strange man walking along the sliver of sidewalk between the trees. She stiffened and glanced down at herself standing there. Nude.

  “Shit.” She stepped away from the window and sank down on the toilet seat. The dark stain in the grout lines spread out before her in a dried puddle. Mold? Raw sewage? A wisp of cool air blew in through the window.

  “What the hell am I going to do?” she whimpered, stepping over the stain and onto the wood floor outside the bathroom.

  The ceiling rafters above her creaked as they stretched in the heat of the August sun. Margot lurched at the sound and spun around as though expecting to find someone standing there. Hunter brandishing a knife. Myron with her phone, pointing to some private message he wasn’t supposed to see. “Kevin” holding the roses.

  There was no one there.

  Her bare skin prickled with the feeling of being watched. She turned another slow circle, debating her options. No phone. No neighbors. No key. No Hunter. Louisa wasn’t due to come for another day. Alone. Alone. Alone. Her only hope was to pick the lock or break down the door.

  She stormed into Ella’s old room, searching for a tool of some kind. The only item in the room was a bare curtain rod. Margot pulled the rod off the wall and searched it for springs, screws, anything. It was just a steel rod, but as she weighed it in her hands, she realized it might be enough to break the door or pry off the jamb. She set it against the wall as a last resort and continued her search into the other room.

  The box that had toppled over with a loud thump lay on its side, waiting for her to right it. She tiptoed across the dusty floor and crouched down. Loose twine sat in a puddle around the flaking cardboard.

  She scanned the other six identical file boxes stacked up in the corner. None were labeled. There was nothing else in the room besides an ashtray with six cigarette butts that looked recently smoked. Margot narrowed her eyes and added them to her inventory of complaints to the contractor. On the wall above her, a round hole the size of a salad plate punctured the plaster. She stood up and peered into the darkness behind it to find unfinished attic space and the shadow of a brick chimney. She picked at the torn wallpaper around the edges, wondering. It was too neatly cut to be an accident. Soot darkened the edges of the hole. Woodstove?

  She gave up on the mystery and tipped the fallen box back upright. Yellowed newspapers spilled out the top. Margot let them go, lifting several more out of the box, searching for a screwdriver, an awl, a skeleton key. Evening editions of the Cleveland Press and the Plain Dealer fell to the floor. They were all dated from the late 1920s and early 1930s.

  Under the papers, she found a large brochure for the Van Sweringen Company. She opened it to find hand-printed etchings and calligraphy promising a life of tranquility away from the bustle and grime of the city.

  To Where, Beyond the City, There Is Peace.

  Margot gazed forlornly at the 1920s notions of grandeur and wealth. White servants. White gloves. White pillars. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. What would they think of a lapsed Catholic and nonpracticing Jew living here now? she wondered with a smirk.

  Still, the land-company brochure was a sort of quaint notion to Margot—the idea of a utopia just outside of Cleveland, Ohio, of all places. Her friends back in Boston would get a kick out of it, she decided and set the brochure aside.

  The bottom of the box contained a slew of unopened mail all postmarked between 1929 and 1932. Most envelopes were addressed to Walter Rawlings. A few letters were addressed in a beautiful hand to Georgina Rawlings. Unpaid bills. Christmas cards. Birthday cards. With guilty hesitation, Margot opened one postmarked January 5, 1930. It was a handmade card with a praying angel in cream and gold. Inside it read,

  Dearest Georgina,

  We were heartbroken to hear the news. May the new year find you well and keep you better. May God have mercy on us all through this terrible winter.

  Much love to you and little Walter,

  Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cline

  Margot tossed the card back into the bin and shoved a few more aside. Amid the cards and bills, she found an old wooden cigar box. It felt unusually heavy in her hands as she pulled it out and set it in her lap. She flipped it open and drew in a sharp breath.

  A gun. Four bullets rolled loose next to it.

  Horrified, she slapped the lid closed and shoved it back under the bills as though the box contained a live snake. A gun. In the house. Not acceptable. Shaking her head, she gathered the old newspapers into a pile, having mental arguments with Myron as to when and how they’d get rid of the thing. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you donated to charity. They didn’t have a permit or a license or whatever it was one needed to even transport the thing.

  Her nervous hands stopped moving as her mind took a moment to catch up to her eyes. The headline on the paper in her hand read:

  WIDOW KILLS SON AND SLASHES SELF

  Sickness and Money Troubles Blamed for Rawlings Suicide Attempt

  She read the name again. Rawlings. Margot picked up the paper and continued to read:

  The attempted suicide of Mrs. Georgina Rawlings and the body of her murdered son, Walter Rawlings Jr., 6, were discovered last night at 14895 Lee Road, Shaker Heights. That the child made a struggle against his mother’s insane attack was indicated by numerous deep cuts on the boy’s hands and fingers, according to Coroner Pearse.

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

  “My God,” Margot whispered, reading the story for a second time under her breath. “The boy was found lying facedown on the floor of the servants’ washroom.”

  Murder House!

  Her gaze shifted toward the bathroom and the dark stain on the bathroom floor behind her. Breathing shallow sips of air, her heart drummed in her ears as she realized what caused it. My God. It’s blood.

  A muffled voice wormed its way through the seams in the floorboards from down below. Margot stopped breathing to listen. It was singing.

  . . . where we ought to be,

  And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

  ’Twill be in the valley of love and delight . . .

  The voice drifted away with the almost imperceptible shifts in the wood framing as footsteps moved along the second floor hallway. The paper in her hand dropped. Someone was in the house, and it wasn’t Hunter.

  The vibration of another human being walking down the hall below her inched its way up Margot’s stricken spine. She bolted up and closed the door to the storage room, then slid the stack of heavy boxes in front of it. Grabbing the gun from its wooden cigar box, she backed herself into a corner. The gun trembled violently in her fingers as she trained it on the door. Panicked, she realized she didn’t even know how to work the thing. Is there a safety? Are there even bullets in the chamber? She was shaking too hard to check and realized she might as easily shoot herself as anyone else. She set the thing down and stifled a sob.

  Myron will be home in a few hours, she told herself, squeezing her eyes shut, praying whoever it was wouldn’t find her up there naked. Just a few more hours. Margot hugged her knees to her chest, the gun by her side, her mind curling into itself. A dream. This is all a terrible dream. The voice. The song. The blood. The murder.

  The stifling heat of the storage room kept climbing above ninety degrees as the afternoon sun beat down harder on the roof. Margot lay there,
baking with the old newspapers as scenes from 1931 played in her head again and again. He was just a little boy.

  Ten feet below her, a shadow wandered from room to room, humming softly to itself.

  34

  The Rawlings Family

  January 24, 1931

  Georgina Rawlings woke to the sound of singing. She sat up in bed and held her breath, listening. It was coming from the backyard.

  Standing at the window, she pressed her nose to the cold glass and looked out over the blanket of snow that covered her garden. The roses had been cut back to dead twigs. The tulips and daffodils lay sleeping beneath the snow. She searched the perfect plane of white for signs of life, footsteps, or shadows and saw nothing. With her eyes open, the singing was almost impossible to hear, so she shut them, her lids squinting to catch what wasn’t there.

  Under the inaudible melody, the steady rhythm of marching feet vibrated deep in the ground, up through the stones in the foundation, through the hewn wood. Eyes shut, her face went slack as though seeing it all laid out before her. The chanting of the Believers as they marched in their circle under the stars, pleading with their angels to deliver them a message. The Shaker schoolhouse and gathering house burning.

  They died the wrong way.

  She opened her eyes with a start as if expecting to see the Believers marching in their slow circle down in the garden. Her skin glowed pale in the light of the full moon. It gazed down at her with the unblinking eye of heaven. There were no clouds to hide what had happened there, and she stared back into the light until her eyes watered. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  A faint laugh burst somewhere above her beyond the ceiling, and Georgina woke from her trance. A pair of footsteps padded lightly overhead. The lady of the house stumbled away from the window, clutching her nightgown to her chest. The laugh came again, clearer now, mocking her.

  The old Shaker woman had warned them. The dead do not rest easy here.

  It all made sense to Georgina now after hearing Ninny’s stories. After her husband’s horrible death and the financial ruin that followed. After all the babies she’d lost. After reading the beautiful Shaker tales of the angels that sang and the Second Coming. The truth had come to her in waves of recognition one after another as she’d sat and read and let the fever open her mind.

  She put a hand over her mouth to keep it quiet. “They’re here . . . they’ve come for us,” she whispered into her palms, backing herself into the corner, searching the darkened room for signs of them.

  At the opposite end of the house, little Walter sat up in his bed. He’d stopped sleeping through the night when they’d found his father dead in his office. Wide awake at 2:15 a.m., he sat there in the dark and listened too.

  Georgina opened the door to her bedroom and peered out into the hallway. The fear on her face mixed with anticipation as she searched the darkened foyer below for signs of Ninny’s dead or her husband’s hulking shadow. Puddles of moonlight collected on the stairs and on the polished wood floors of the foyer. The carved railing threw long dripping shadows onto the walls.

  The laughter fell from the ceiling once again, deeper now. Sinister.

  Georgina shrank against the wall, her heart rattling her ribs. The deep timbre of a man’s voice sounded in the dark, its words muffled but the intent clear. Listen. Obey. Her eyes widened. Walter has come back from the grave. Heavy footfalls thumped over her head, and what blood she had left dropped from her heart to her feet.

  “Dear God. What do you want from me?” she whispered and stifled a sob with the back of her hand. Then, breathing deep, she recited a verse from the Shaker prayer book sitting by her bedside. “The dead come unto me so that I might see. His angels bear golden fruit from the tree of paradise and word from the kingdom of heaven . . .”

  She took a brave step down the hallway. Drifting toward the attic door, Georgina appeared to be a ghost herself. Floating past Ella’s back hallway in her white nightgown, pale skin drawn tight over her thinning frame, her eyes were two hollows peering out from the bone.

  The maid didn’t stir. Exhausted from a day of worry and secrecy spent waiting for the hard fist of the law to pound on the front door, Ella simply rolled over in the middle of a dream and continued to snore in a low and even saw.

  Little Walter stiffened at the sound of footsteps outside his bedroom door and slid down from his perch on the pillows. Squinting through his keyhole, he glimpsed a shroud of white and his mother’s thin hand as it turned the corner to the attic. The ring his father had given her caught a sparkle of moonlight.

  Ella had locked the attic door as usual that evening, leaving the key resting on the casing above it. Georgina felt the ledge over her head before even trying the handle. They’d kept the door locked ever since Ella had found Walter hiding in the crawl space with his father’s gun.

  Behind the door, low voices whispered to one another. She pressed her ear to the wood, listening to the dead as they conspired together. Angry. Vengeful. What do they want from us?

  They went silent when she rattled the key into the lock. They held still as she swung the door open and mounted the steps toward the yellow glow of a single incandescent bulb burning at the other end of the attic.

  Georgina didn’t notice the small face of her son appear at the bottom of the stairwell. His worried eyes peered up the steps after her. Mother?

  35

  The Spielman Family

  August 9, 2018

  Margot woke with a start. Hot air rushed into her lungs, thick and soupy. Her naked body muddy with sweat and dust, she gaped at the unfamiliar walls until it all came back to her. The attic. The murder. The song. The intruder. The gun on the floor.

  Horror and confusion lined her face. Have I lost my mind? She pulled herself to her feet, eyeing the barricaded door. Is someone still out there?

  Myron’s muffled voice came from two floors down. “Hello? Margot? . . . Anybody home?”

  Her entire body went slack. Thank God. She pushed the boxes to the side and flung open the door to the storage room. “Myron! Myron, up here!”

  She ran across the attic floor to the stairwell, nearly tumbling down the steps. When she reached the door, she pounded it with her bruised fists. “Myron! Help! I’m up here! I’m locked in!”

  “What?” The sound of feet rushed up the back stairs, then pounded into the hall. “Margot?”

  The knob turned, and the door flung open with ease. A rush of cool air hit her in the face. Her mouth fell open, and her naked body recoiled in surprise. It was unlocked?

  “What the hell were you doing up there?” Myron looked dumbfounded at her sweat-smeared face and naked body and picked her towel up off the stairs. “Jesus. Are you okay?”

  He looked at her as though she’d sprouted another head. Her eyes had gone feral. Her hair was a matted mess. Her hands were blackened with dust and newsprint. Margot snatched the towel from his hand and struggled to recover herself. Utter relief twisted into abject fury.

  “No! No, I am not fucking okay! Someone locked this fucking door! I’ve been trapped up there for hours!”

  “But . . .” Myron pointed at the doorknob, which had clearly not been locked, and raised his eyebrows at her.

  “But what?” she shrieked. “Are you suggesting that I stayed up there for hours for no fucking reason? Are you insane?”

  Myron didn’t answer, but his face made clear he doubted her sanity altogether.

  Apoplectic, Margot stormed down the hallway back to her room. Myron reluctantly followed. The bathtub was still filled with water that had long gone cold. She pulled the plug and tapped her foot to keep from kicking something.

  “Someone was here!” she seethed. “I heard them in the house! Someone locked me in the attic.”

  “Whoa. What are you talking about?” Myron held up his hands as though approaching a loaded gun.

  “Someone was here!” she barked. “Someone must have found the skeleton key for this fucking place. Did Max s
ay anything about the key?”

  He just stared at her as though she were speaking in tongues. “No. He didn’t. We haven’t been able to find the key. You know that.”

  “And! That real estate agent lied to us, Myron! She fucking lied. This place isn’t just rumored to be haunted or cursed. The first owner killed her son! She killed him in the attic! There’s still a bloodstain on the goddamn floor! No wonder no one wanted this goddamn place!” She pointed an accusing finger at him. “You just had to have it. Such a great price. What an investment! Fuck, Myron! A six-year-old boy died up there! Six!”

  Her face had gone red, and she was shouting so loudly he could barely follow what she was saying. Murder? Boy? All that was clear was that she blamed him for it somehow. It was all his fault.

  He finally gained control of his slackened jaw and managed to speak. “Hey! I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but you need to calm down.”

  “I need to calm down?” she shouted. “I—fuck you, Myron! Just . . .” She began to shake. Her towel dropped to the floor, and her body followed it, sliding down against the wall.

  “Hey, hey.” His voice softened. “Take it easy. Let me look at you.” He tipped her red face up toward his. The doctor in him examined her. Dried, cracked lips. Dilated pupils. Flushed skin. Incoherence. “You’re dehydrated, and probably starving. Here.” He stepped over to the sink and filled a glass of water for her.

  She took the glass and spilled tears into it as she held it up to her lips. The feel of his doctor’s eyes watching and making notes as she talked, his ears perked for any sign of lunacy, delusion, or schizophrenia, undid her. The glass tumbled from her hands.

  Utterly disarmed and dismayed, he picked it up. He found a place on the bath mat next to her and put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her to him. She didn’t have the energy to resist. “Okay. Just breathe. Let’s start from the beginning, okay?”

  By the time Margot had told him the whole story and had taken a hot shower, Myron was the one coming unhinged.