No One's Home Read online

  The tinny voice drifted out the open door and down the long hallways of Rawlingswood.

  Two minutes later, men in uniforms burst into the house in a thunder of voices and pounding feet. The girl listened to them come and go as she lay curled inside a closet next to her brother. She whispered in his ear, “Shhh . . . it will be okay. Mama’s just not feeling well . . .”

  45

  The Spielman Family

  August 10, 2018

  “Mom!” Hunter called again, banging on the door. “Are you okay?”

  Margot turned her head toward the sound. She didn’t want to see him. Not like this. She swallowed a sob and called out, “Stop! Just stop, Hunter! I’m fine!”

  Hunter quieted at the muffled sound of her voice. He slowly lowered his fist but hesitated to leave. She didn’t sound fine. He reached for the doorknob but stopped himself. She’d be furious if he barged in.

  Margot turned back to her pale reflection in the bathroom mirror and opened her cabinet to get bandages for her hand. Beige tape and ointment and wrappers scattered over the counter as she wrapped her wounds. A small brown bottle marked “Benzodiazepine” sat on the top shelf. She reached for it and gave it a shake. Empty. She popped the lid and stared into the empty bottle, not remembering the last time she’d taken them. Yesterday? The day before? She looked up at the dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep or too much vodka or both. Scowling, she tossed the empty bottle into the wastebasket and shuffled into her bedroom. Another brown bottle lay tucked in her nightstand. She popped a large dose and closed the drawer.

  The tears in her palms had already bled out to the edges of the bandages.

  “Why?” she whispered, glancing up at the now-silent door. She hoped Hunter had just taken the hint and left her in peace. The roses. She had to stop the roses from coming again before something worse happened. Before Myron found out. Before . . . she didn’t dare guess.

  I don’t live that far away.

  Margot padded into her closet and shut the door. Sinking onto the soft beige carpet with her phone in her hand, she didn’t know who to call. The closet held a host of strangers—someone confident, someone glamorous, someone fun, someone flirtatious, someone younger, someone who still had her daughter. But all those people she longed to be were missing, hacked apart, shuffled together in a random, grotesque collage of silk and wool and cotton.

  Margot lost a breath as the realization hit her. Someone had been in there. Someone had rearranged her clothes. Blouses hung out of sequence. Skirts had been shuffled. Shoes had been toppled over.

  It’s a message, she thought, gaping at the rumpled mess. It said, Get out!

  Ten feet away, Hunter stood outside her door, debating whether he should go in and talk to her. Somewhere above him, a board creaked. He turned and wrapped his towel tighter around his waist, scanning the hallways and doorways.

  The house held still, waiting, waiting, waiting.

  The air-conditioning whirred to life, and the hairs stood up on his arms and legs in the sudden cold draft. Exposed and naked, he pressed his ear one more time to his mother’s door. The water had stopped running. He heard her voice coming from the closet to his left.

  “Myron,” she said into her cell phone. “I need you to come home. Okay? I’m freaking out . . . I know. I will. Okay.”

  She hung up and staggered back into the bedroom, voices buzzing in her head. The dead boy in the attic. Her dead daughter. Myron’s dead patient. Her dead marriage. Myron’s odd expression the day before. He knows something.

  Relieved his father was on his way home, Hunter shuffled to his room. He slid his bookcase back in front of the door, then did a quick search for the strange girl. Under the bed was clear. The closet was empty, and he scanned the creepy writing once again, wondering if the finer notes belonged to her.

  When you see the dead, do the dead see you?

  “This is nuts!” He wiggled the mouse and pinged Caleb.

  While he waited for a response, he opened the folder of lost mail his mother had given him. Expired pizza coupons, lawn services, painting ads, a cable bill addressed to Clyde Martin—he sorted through the junk until he found something useful. An Ohio University admissions letter addressed to an “Ava Turner.” He opened it.

  Dear Miss Turner,

  It is our distinct pleasure to welcome you to Ohio University. Based on your early application . . .

  It was an early admissions letter dated December 1, 2017. Hunter read the name again and opened a web browser. As he was typing the name “Ava Turner,” Caleb’s grinning face appeared in the corner of his screen.

  “Hey, dude! You get axe murdered yet?”

  “Not yet, but almost.” Hunter filled him in on Roger, the two dead teenagers, and the girl in his basement.

  “Dude. Either you’ve got a ghost, or there’s a squatter in your house.” Caleb’s glib laugh made it clear that he didn’t believe a word of it. “Is she hot?”

  “Shut up,” Hunter hissed and threw a glance at his closed door. “I’m not kidding. I think she used to live here. She said some pretty weird shit about how the house kills people and drives them insane. She really wants us to leave.” Before it’s too late.

  “Whoa. Are you shitting me?” Caleb’s smirk fell a bit. “So what are you gonna do? Call the cops on her?”

  “No.” Maybe it was the loneliness of the house or the town, but he wanted to talk to her some more. He wanted to know who she was, this girl. The only girl Hunter had talked to face-to-face in months. He shuddered slightly at the memory of her warm breath on his cheek. “I think her name is Ava Turner. I’m googling right now . . .”

  Random girls named Ava came up with profiles in various social media sites, but none seemed to match.

  Caleb began clicking away on his computer as well. “How old is she?”

  “She said she’s nineteen.”

  “If she has a record, it’s probably sealed.” Caleb kept tapping away at the keys. His father was a lawyer, so he figured himself an expert on most things. “Why was she living with the Martins?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t really say. I asked if they’d kidnapped her, and she said, ‘Not exactly.’ What the hell do you think that means?” Hunter scanned the next page of searches and tried another thread. No luck.

  “Was she adopted?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hmm . . . according to this website here, adoptions are closed records, really hard to trace without a court order.”

  “But wouldn’t she have been listed as a next of kin in Clyde’s obituary if she’d been adopted? Wouldn’t she have changed her last name?” Hunter eyed the letter again.

  “Yeah. Probably. What about . . . could she have been like a foster kid?”

  “Maybe. That would make sense, right?”

  “Yeah. I just saw some FML article online about foster kids turning eighteen and ending up homeless because they age out of the system. They have no family . . . no money.”

  Hunter began slowly nodding. “Oh my God. She’s nineteen.”

  “Exactly! It fits. But foster care is some pretty touchy shit. I don’t think you’re going to find those sorts of records online or in the newspapers. You may have to call social services and see if they’ll talk to you . . .” Caleb’s voice trailed off as he kept typing. “Hey, check it. I think I found her. I’m sending you a link.”

  The message blipped onto Hunter’s screen. It opened a missing persons database from the website of the Ohio attorney general. A photograph of a waifish blonde girl with a nose ring appeared under the name “Ava Turner.”

  Missing since October 29, 2015. Missing age: sixteen. Current age: nineteen.

  “Is that her?” Caleb asked, leaning in. “She’s kinda hot.”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe.” Hunter squinted at the girl’s face. Her light eyes avoided the camera, wary and watchful. There was a phone number to call for the Cleveland Police Department. “She said she was here because she was waiti
ng for something.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “Got me.”

  Hunter sank back from the girl’s face on the screen, digesting it all. Foster care. Runaway. Homeless. Poor Ava.

  “So do you think she’s nuts?” Caleb asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know.” Hunter fought the urge to check the hall outside his room. “She says some pretty strange stuff about hearing the dead speak.”

  “Dude. What if she’s like a schizophrenic? Don’t they see and hear stuff?”

  “Yeah. I think so.” Hunter tapped a few words into his keyboard, and a new web page came up. “Auditory hallucinations are common. ‘Teenagers are most likely to develop symptoms in times of severe stress.’ Here, I’ll send you the link.”

  Is she crazy? Hunter frowned and shook his head. He didn’t want her to be.

  Caleb’s eyes scanned the article. “Uh-oh. Says here that marijuana can bring on the first psychotic break, so we’re fucked.”

  “Shut up.” Hunter rubbed his face and tried to take stock of what he knew. “Clyde Martin died at the end of 2014, and Maureen Martin got hauled off to a psychiatric ward for refusing to vacate the property in 2016. If Ava was staying here like alone with a crazy woman for over a year, it might’ve messed her up. But it would mess anyone up, right? I think this girl is smart. She got into college.” He held up the acceptance letter for Caleb to read.

  “Early admission. Impressive . . . Wait. You are just fucking with me, right, dude?”

  “Nope.”

  “You mean you actually have this chick holed up in your attic right now?” Caleb eyeballed Hunter a moment. “Holy shit. This is crazy! You need to call the cops before this bitch like slits your throat in your sleep.”

  “Shh! Fuck off, Caleb.” Hunter glanced over his shoulder at the closed door again. “I don’t think she’d do that.”

  “How can you know what the fuck she’d do, huh? She’s hiding in your fucking house, man. This is not normal.”

  “No shit. But maybe she needs help. Shouldn’t I try to help her?” Hunter clicked back to the footage from his webcam and scrolled through the hours until he found her. A girl in a white nightgown slipping past his room. He stared at her frozen on his screen a moment with morbid fascination, until Caleb’s voice snapped him out of it.

  “You fall asleep?”

  “No . . . I was just thinking. I mean, if she wanted to kill me, she would’ve done it by now. Right?”

  “If you say so, dude.” Caleb tapped the webcam with an annoyed finger. “Hey. Don’t you even want to hear about the other one?”

  “What other one?”

  “Your boy, Benny. I found him.”

  Hunter straightened up in his chair and minimized the image of Ava on his screen. “You found him? How?”

  “Benjamin Thomas Klussman, age twenty-four, checked into St. Dominic’s Hospital in El Paso, Texas, October 15, 1990. Severe lacerations to the face, whiplash, unresponsive. His mother, Frances Jane Klussman, was pronounced DOA. Car accident.”

  “Damn. How’d you find that out?”

  “Newspaper search. My dad has a subscription.”

  “So he was in the hospital in 1990. Then what happened to him?”

  “It was kind of a big deal. They didn’t know what the fuck to do with him, right? His mom was dead. They couldn’t locate a father. He couldn’t talk. They said he had cerebral palsy and a bunch of other shit wrong with him.” Caleb rattled off the facts through the speakers. “They couldn’t find any family or friends in the area. It looked like Benny’s mom was making a run for the border. They found suitcases and cash in the car. They ran ads in the paper and over the wire for a few weeks.”

  “No shit.” Hunter slunk back in his chair and shifted his gaze to the closet door. DeAD GiRL. “I wonder if he really killed her.”

  “Killed who?”

  “Katie Green. That’s supposed to be the name of a girl that died across the street. You know, if we believe anything Ava says.”

  Caleb tapped out the name on his keyboard and scanned an article. “Katie Green was stabbed to death on September 14, 1990. Shit. That’s pretty fucking gruesome. Girl sneaks out of her house to visit her boyfriend and is found dead in the bushes . . . Dude!”

  “What?”

  “It says here they never found her killer. And we’ve got Benny and his mom speeding out of the country with all their shit a month later. It doesn’t look too good, right?”

  Hunter shook his head. “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “Last article I found said that some special home in California offered to take him in. A place called Golden Heart Ranch in Pasadena.”

  Hunter wrote it down.

  “You gonna call?”

  Hunter stared out the window, Benny’s window, at the bushes across the street. This house is bad for men, for boys. They all die here.

  “Yeah. I need to know what happened.”

  46

  “Golden Heart Ranch, can I help you?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so.” Hunter cleared his throat. “I’m looking for Benjamin Klussman?”

  “Which unit would he be in?” the woman asked in a pinched voice. “Long-term care? Daycare?”

  “I’m guessing long term?”

  “Let me transfer you. Please hold.”

  Hunter kept his cell phone on speaker and set it on his desk while the synthesized Muzak piped into his room. On his computer screen, he continued typing in search engines for Ava Turner, finding nothing.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice boomed through the phone.

  “Yeah. Hi. I’m looking for Benjamin Klussman?”

  “Benny? You’re lookin’ for Benny. Oh my gawd! This is unbelievable! Do you know he’s been here almost thirty years without a single phone call or visitor? How on earth do you know my sweet, sweet Benny?”

  “I don’t. Not really. It’s sort of . . . complicated. I live in his old house back in Cleveland. I found some notes he’d left on the walls, and I’ve been trying to find him. Is he really there?”

  “Well, yes, he is. But you are not family. Is that right?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “And he doesn’t know you at all?”

  “No.” Hunter winced. The whole thing sounded nuts.

  “So . . . why do you want to talk to Benny?”

  “It’s just that he used to live in my house. He, um, left some strange messages about a girl.” Hunter didn’t say the rest. A girl he might’ve killed.

  The phone stayed quiet a moment. “Lord, Benny. I’m not sure this is such a good idea.”

  “Is he . . . allowed to talk on the phone?”

  “Well, of course he is! This is an assisted living facility, not a prison. It’s just he doesn’t do so well with surprises. He has troubles.”

  “He has cerebral palsy. Is that right? Is he . . . mentally disabled?”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t really discuss a patient’s issues with you, HIPAA and everything. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Okay. Well. What should I do?”

  “Why don’t you give me your name and number, and I’ll get back to you in a few days.”

  Hunter provided the information.

  “And you said this is something about a girl?”

  “Yeah. A girl in Shaker Heights. Katie Green? I think maybe he knew her.”

  As Hunter hung up the phone, he heard a creak outside his doorway. He silently rose from his chair and crept toward the door as quietly as he could. Crouching down, he put his eye to the keyhole to peer out.

  A pale blue eye stared back at him.

  “Jesus!” He fell back onto his ass, heart pounding. It took several ragged breaths to regain his nerve and stand up. She’s just a girl. She’s just a girl. He shoved the bookcase aside and opened the door.

  She was gone.

  “Ava?” he hissed after her. “Where are you?”

  Halfway down the hall, he stopped at the soun
d of his mother’s door opening. Margot emerged haggard and red eyed. “Who are you talking to, sweetie?”

  He studied his mother’s worried expression. Can you keep a secret? “Uh. Just a girl. On the phone.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket as proof. “We sort of had a fight.”

  Margot puzzled at him a moment but decided to let it go. “What do you say we get out of here for a while? Any place you want to go? I’ll drive.”

  Hunter thought for a moment. A pale eye stared at him through a keyhole in his mind. “Yeah. I’d love to get out of here.”

  47

  The Klussman Family

  September 15, 1990

  Hand aching, Frannie studied the bloodied bandage on her palm where she’d cut herself that morning. It took her a moment to remember how it had happened. She’d scraped it on purpose while talking to the boy cop. About the girl. The dead girl.

  She sat up in bed and stared at the far wall toward Benny’s room. Remembering she’d locked his door, she bolted out of bed with the guilt only a mother could feel. How many hours has he been locked in there? How could I leave him alone like that? How could I let him get out of the house?

  When she reached Benny’s room, she fumbled with the key, calling, “Benny? Benny, Mommy’s here. I’m sorry you were left alone. Are y—”

  Her words dropped away when she opened the door. Angry black marks slashed across the walls. Giant, crooked letters screamed.

  GiRL! BiKe! DeAD! BusHes!

  Black and green crayon and pencil scratchings attacked every solid surface. Even the windows. Girls rode across the walls on bikes.

  “Benny!” She breathed in the word as though it were a noxious gas. “What are you doing?”

  Benny was standing with the side of his face pressed against the far wall. He dropped the crayon in his hand and turned to face her. His mouth opened to explain and then shut again. The words would never come. Instead, he pointed out his window at the police cars gathered across the street and groaned loudly, his eyes rolling desperately in his head. Tell them! Tell them! “TEEAAWW!”

  Frannie took a step backward, her face slack. “What have you done, Benny?” Tears blurred the words screaming over the walls as she backed away from him. Terrified.