No One's Home Page 24

  Benny’s eyes widened as she backed out of the room. She’s afraid of you, the watcher in the back of his mind whispered. He stumbled after her in protest, forcing his legs to move, forcing his arms open. No. No. NO.

  She slammed the door before he could reach her and threw the dead bolt.

  All the life drained from Benny’s gaze, leaving nothing but the spasm in his optic nerves. His muscles seized one by one in a slow-motion attack, and his body fell against his bed and then onto the floor.

  Out in the hallway, Frannie backed away from the dull thump thump thump of Benny’s poor head on the floorboards, stifling her sobs with the back of her hand. She gazed out the two-story leaded glass window at the police cars across the street. No doubt the officers were running the blood samples from the sidewalk to a lab at that very moment. Samples that would link her son to the scene. She looked back at the bedroom where he’d scribbled his confession on the walls.

  “Everything alright up there?” Bill called from the kitchen.

  Frannie wiped the tears from her cheeks and put on a smile. “Everything’s fine. He’s just . . . you know. A bit upset.”

  Thankfully, the thumping on Benny’s floor had stopped. The searing pain in his skull from the previous night quieted all the voices. He lay frozen, staring up at the ceiling with dead eyes, brain bruised, hearing everything and nothing at once.

  “Why don’t you head on home?” she said to Bill now at the bottom of the stairs. She forced a lightness into her voice. “Benny and I will be fine tonight.”

  Bill raised an eyebrow and studied her. He’d seen boys like Benny hurt by those who were supposed to love them most. He’d seen kids like him nearly strangled to death. These kids, they take it out of you, Ms. Klussman. Believe me. I’ve seen it. Sometimes the best thing is to walk away a bit and cool down. Don’t go in there unless you ready. He’d given her this caution a few times in the last twelve months. But he’d never seen Frannie lift a finger against her child. Not once. “You sure about that? It was a pretty long night last night.”

  She nodded again. “And thank you for letting me sleep. That nap made all of the difference. Please. Go home to Jackie and give her my best.”

  Bill nodded slowly. The timbre of her voice no longer had a shake in it. He watched her walk steadily down the winding front stairs. Her eyes, still swollen from crying, were crinkled in a warm, motherly smile. “Really, Bill. I’m fine.”

  He let out a long sigh. “Alright. But I’m gonna keep my pager on me. You have any problem, any problem at all, I want you to call me.” He gave her a practiced look, hard enough to mean business but not so hard as to scare a white lady. “For real. Any time of night. You call.”

  She nodded slowly, pressing her lips together, almost losing her composure. “I will. I promise.” She placed an awkward hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze far too familiar for his taste. “Thank you so much, Bill. Really. Thank you for everything you’ve done these past few months. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  It was a goodbye, and part of him knew it. It registered in the slight softening of his brow and the stolen glance up to Benny’s bedroom. “Just my job,” he said, taking a step toward the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow? Same time?”

  She nodded. “That would be great. See you then.”

  Frannie watched the home health aide leave before heading back up the stairs to her son.

  Benny lay still on the other side of his door, head throbbing, waiting for the needle to come, waiting for the ambulance. For something. This time was different. The watcher knew. His glassy eyes drifted from one horrid image he’d drawn to the next. The terrible markings on his walls looked down at him in judgment. The girl. The girl. The girl. Her memory raced by him on her bicycle, swerving her way past his window forever. He didn’t dare move.

  Frannie stared at his closed door a moment. It had been her playroom door. Decades earlier, when she’d only been six years old, she’d played with her dolls in there, sung songs, and screamed at Matthew, her older brother, when he’d beaten her at Go Fish. The shadow of the girl she’d been skipped past her down the hall to her old bedroom. She followed it, as though in a trance. The sounds of her mother baking cookies in the kitchen below—pans clanking, bowls hitting the counter, the wall oven ticking—echoed in the walls beneath her.

  She passed the bedroom where her mother had died eight years earlier, back before Frannie’s husband had given up on her and Benny, before he’d moved into the guest room over the garage, back when they were still a family of sorts. She paused and looked in at the sad twin bed under the window to the backyard. Her poor mother, Helen Bell. Breast cancer had reduced her to nothing but gray skin and hollow bones by the time it was done.

  This can’t be good for Benny, her husband had complained.

  What am I supposed to do, Hank, just dump her in a nursing home? She gave us this house. It’s the least we can do.

  That of course had sparked another fight. Hank had never wanted to live at Rawlingswood in the first place. If he’d been anything other than a midlevel accountant for some midlevel company, he might’ve insisted on moving elsewhere, but as it was, they’d inherited a veritable palace in a good school district. A school district they’d never had the chance to use in the end.

  Frannie sank down onto her mother’s deathbed and gazed out at the bird fountain in the backyard. They’d tried for years to fill the bedrooms of the house with children. So many doctors, so many fights, and finally Benny.

  A tear slid down her cheek as she saw the girl she’d been out there in the yard, planting her pet flower patch, digging in the dirt with her mother trying to get carrots and tomatoes to grow. The dried well of the birdbath gazed up at the sky, empty.

  Back out in the hallway, she passed the door to her old bedroom, still painted pink with flowered curtains. She’d always hoped to fill the room with a little girl of her own. Her favorite books and dolls still lined the shelves, waiting for her phantom daughter to come along. Now at the ripe age of fifty-nine, she’d stopped waiting. She’d stopped hoping after Benny’s yearlong stay in the hospital. She’d stopped hoping the day Hank had screamed, Are you married to me or Benny? Because I’m tired of coming last!

  It had taken him another ten years to get the guts to actually walk out the door for good, but he’d already left them both. He’d left them the day the pediatrician declared that nothing could be done.

  Frannie stopped outside her brother’s old room and hesitated before opening the door. It was just as he’d left it all those years ago. Hank may have been a bastard, but he’d never pushed her to repurpose the room. Dust covered the photographs, the baseball trophies, his bed. At just eighteen years old, he’d been one of the last American soldiers to die in World War II. She was fourteen when he’d enlisted against their parents’ wishes. Such a goddamn waste! If the stupid son of a bitch had just waited six more months! Her father had slammed his fist into the wall of the foyer when the notice came. The folded flag delivered with the news sat on the shelf over his bed.

  She’d always been afraid to touch it. Even at that moment, she couldn’t bring herself to hold the last memento of her brother.

  Do you really have to go? She’d sat at the edge of that very bed, teary eyed, gazing at her hero and savior the day before he left. She sank down onto the same spot and imagined him sitting next to her.

  Yeah, I do. He’d slung an arm over her shoulder. This life, this house, this town . . . this isn’t the real world, Frannie. Don’t you ever get that feeling? That this is all just a pretty picture we’re living in, that this is all make-believe? People are dying out there. People are starving out there. I’m not going to sit here in this playhouse and drink tea.

  Four months later, there had been a knock on their door.

  Her eyes circled the room, and she whispered, “This is all make-believe.”

  Her mother had left the original hand-printed wallpaper on his walls. Beneath it hid the
plaster, the stone wool insulation, the wires, the pipes, and the wooden bones inside the walls. This building, this “childhood home,” was just a pile of wood, a carefully constructed lie.

  She buried her face in her hands and stifled a sob, rubbing the tears back into her eyes. Her brother, Matthew, had known it at eighteen years old. Surely she could face the same truth at fifty-nine. It was just a room. It was just a house. She grabbed a small framed photograph of her brother—it was his last picture from Shaker Heights High School—and tucked it under her arm.

  Back out in the hallway, she didn’t bother with the other rooms. The guest room where Bill sometimes spent the night was just a shell. She hated the suite over the garage where Hank had slept bitterly for those last few years, too guilty and too cowardly to leave. His voice still hovered in there. You’re not going to make me the bad guy here!

  She stormed past the memories of her ex-husband to the attic door. Her father had never allowed any of them up there. It’s just not safe. You’ve got exposed wires, loose floorboards . . . The one time he’d caught her and her brother up there exploring, he’d taken the strap to them both.

  Back in 1936, when her father, Marcus Bell, bought the place, he decided to keep the home’s bloody history to himself. He never told Frannie’s mother about the murder in the attic. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? he told himself when the bank handed him the keys. He’d bought a mansion at pennies on the dollar.

  Of course, all the neighbors had been too polite to bring up the subject of the murder to his wife’s face. Helen Bell was left to wonder why her invitations for tea or dinner parties were always politely declined. When she complained to her husband, Marcus just brushed it off. You know how the snooty types can be. Don’t like Catholics. Don’t like Jews. Don’t like new money. You just keep your chin up, sweetheart. They’ll come around.

  Marcus was one of the few to have come out of the Great Depression ahead. He’d bought up a bankrupt tool-and-die operation down in the Flats. His wife’s family was as Irish Catholic as they came, and Helen and Marcus had spent the next twenty-odd years trying to prove themselves to the neighbors.

  Frannie pulled the key to the attic down from the top of the doorframe and considered it a moment. She glanced back at Benny’s room and listened for him to stir.

  He didn’t move. He just lay there counting her steps, listening to the way they sounded in different rooms, wondering when they’d come back for him.

  She turned the key, and the dead bolt gave way with a wiggle and a nudge. The stale air from the attic fell down into the hallway as she opened the door—mothballs and dust and trapped sunshine and dried tree sap and death. Her footsteps creaked up one step at a time, and the dust motes swirled in the air. She hadn’t set foot up there in over ten years. There had never been a need, and she still feared her father’s wrath even after all those years.

  Marcus Bell had abandoned Frannie and her mother two months after her brother had died. All her mother would ever say on the matter was, He was a good man. He took care of us, Frannie. He paid off this house and paid the taxes on it every year until you were married.

  At the top of the stairs, Frannie let her eyes roam the main room of the attic. A tin can sat on the floor outside the bathroom, filled with ashes. In the two smaller rooms a few tattered remains lay strewn. A torn silk slip. An empty apple crate. Filing boxes. Mouse droppings littered the corners of the floor. The windows gazing out over the yard were muddied with cobwebs and soot.

  Frannie’s tracks through the dust mingled with her brother’s and little Walter’s as she stood among the footprints of the past. What do you think is up here? Wanna play hide-and-seek? What if they catch us?

  Turning back to the main room, she eyed the closed door at the far end. It was the door to the bathroom. After a moment’s hesitation, she crept over and turned the stiff doorknob. The door swung into a tangle of spiderwebs lit by a small window. Rusted porcelain fixtures lined the walls, and a foul odor hung between them. She stepped back with a hand over her nose and mouth to block the smell. The room hadn’t been opened in decades, not since the police had found little Walter facedown on the floor.

  The caretakers the bank had hired back in 1932 had drained and winterized the attic bathroom along with the others, and her father had never dared to recommission it. Dust, plaster debris, peeled paint, and dead flies littered the room. A large stain darkened the grout lines between the porcelain floor tiles.

  Frannie grimaced and backed away from the abandoned washroom. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find up there. Buried treasure? Answers? Her brother’s ghost? There was nothing to take with her. After fifty-three years living in the house, there was nothing she really wanted besides her brother’s picture.

  Her gaze fixed on a crawl space door. They’d never told a soul about the gun they’d found. The shock of holding it, so cold and heavy in her hand, had felt like a crime. Fifty years later, she still felt guilty.

  The gun must still be there, she realized. All these years, it had waited in the back of her mind as a last resort. A door she’d never open unless . . .

  A floor below, Benny stared up at the ceiling as though he could see her standing above him. Frannie grabbed the handle of the crawl space door and closed her eyes a moment as though in prayer.

  I won’t let them lock him up.

  A tiny shoe lay on the ground just inside. A little boy’s shoe. She froze, undone at the sight of it. A little boy scampered across her mind, a little boy with a broken smile clutching a yellow truck. A little boy without a cruel bone in his body. She slammed the door and ran back down the steps with nothing but her brother’s picture in her hand.

  Benny heard her feet racing to his door and her hands fumbling with the key and braced himself for the needle, for her horrified face, for whatever terrible thing was coming.

  Falling to her knees next to him, Frannie lifted his bruised head into her arms and kissed his forehead. “Benny, oh, my sweet, sweet boy. Whatever you did, I don’t care. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to go someplace new. Someplace nice and warm where we can see the ocean. Won’t that be nice? I’ll find you a really big window, sweetie. I promise. One way or another, it’s going to be fine.”

  Benny couldn’t move or respond. All he could do was stare over her shoulder at his scribbled drawings of the girl. She glided past him on her bicycle again and again. All he could do was watch.

  48

  The Spielman Family

  August 10, 2018

  An hour later, Myron lurched in through the back door, stopping in the cramped mudroom off the garage with his phone pressed to his ear.

  “What do you mean, they want another deposition?” he demanded, glancing into the kitchen and relieved to find it empty. He dropped the shopping bag in his hand. “How much more information could they possibly need? The mortality and morbidity hearing was eighteen months ago, George. I was cleared . . . No. My leaving was voluntary. You know the board, damn it. It was political, that’s all . . . What do you mean, there’s new evidence? What evidence? . . . Oh, for fuck’s sake. They’re just looking for a bigger payout, okay? . . . Do I need to find better representation? . . . No, I’m asking you to do your damn job!”

  He hung up and ran both hands over his red face, then punched the wall hard enough to leave a dent. The burst of pain in his knuckles cleared his head. He stood there silently talking to himself, coaching, calming, and straightening until he’d regained the better part of his composure. He checked his hand for signs of fracture and saw none. Only then did he set foot in the kitchen.

  “Anybody home? Margot?” It was more a privacy check than a greeting.

  No one replied.

  Relieved, he staggered to the den and the liquor cabinet. The empty decanter on the coffee table was the first thing to catch his eye, then the fact that someone had left the television on. Frustrated and mildly concerned at the missing whiskey, he walked with greater purpose into the foyer a
nd shouted up the stairs. “Hey! Anybody home? Margot? Hunter?”

  The house answered with cavernous silence.

  “Thanks for leaving me a drink, you bastards,” he muttered under his breath.

  A flash of white in the living room turned his head. Then it was gone, but the air buzzed with movement. A thump to his right sent him running into the dining room.

  A white cat was standing on the buffet.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” he hissed at it.

  It took a few quick maneuvers to catch hold of its tail. The beast bared its teeth and scratched his arm.

  “Ow! Dammit!” He grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, catching two more swipes of its claws. He marched it to the front door and tossed it out. An empty bowl sat on the front stoop. He snatched it up and muttered, “God damn it, Margot.”

  Back in the den, Myron dug out another bottle of brown liquor and didn’t bother to decant it into a more decorative container. He’d never cared for the formality anyway. It was all Margot’s doing—setting up the silver tray, displaying the crystal. Myron slapped the bottle down on the table and slammed back a double. It’s not like we ever have guests, Margot.

  That’s not true, the Margot in his mind argued back. The fight from a few days earlier replayed itself in his head. We’re having a dinner party next week. You didn’t forget, did you?

  Next week had turned into tomorrow night. The last thing in the world he needed at that moment was to entertain guests. “Fuck the Zavodas!” he muttered, examining the thin lines of blood leaking from his forearm.

  He poured another three fingers’ worth into a glass and slumped into the leather chair behind the desk. Then he noticed the gun.

  Walter Rawlings’s silver pistol lay casually on the leather desk blotter as though it were an afterthought. Myron set down the drink and picked up the gun as the shock of it buzzed through his veins. He stood up slowly and walked, trancelike, to the drawer where he’d hidden it, yanking it open to find the cigar box right where he left it. But now it was empty. The bullets.