No One's Home Page 25

  The color rushed from his face as Myron carefully opened the cylinder. The butts of three bullets stared back at him from their chambers. Not four. One was missing. Hands trembling now, he dumped the remaining bullets out into the box. He quickly shut the drawer and turned around to survey the room. The books were still in their places. The lamp wasn’t broken. The television was fine. No holes in the windows. No blood on the floor. The desk—

  He froze, looking at the desk with fresh eyes.

  Papers had been strewn about, papers he hadn’t noticed because of the gun. Moving closer, he saw that they all came from the same file. The manila folder read Allison Lordes Spielman in a doctor’s hand. Myron sank into the chair again and took stock of all the medical bills, the death certificate, the paperwork from the funeral home, the death notice with his little girl’s picture that Margot had insisted on clipping from the Boston Chronicle. Myron ran a hand over his face, grabbed his tumbler of whiskey, and drained it.

  “Jesus, Margot. What were you doing?”

  Shaking his head angrily, he gathered up all of her papers and stuffed them back into their file, pounding the edges of paper together on the desk until he bent a corner. He studied the damage he’d done, running his finger over the edge, smoothing it, staring into the dead space between the desk and the floor. Then it hit him.

  He shot up from the chair and took off running. “Margot!”

  He flew up the front stairs, shouting her name. He flung open the door to their bedroom to find the bed made. In the bathroom, spots of blood marred the tiles on the floor. Blood in the sink. Drops of blood on the carpet in her closet. “Margot!”

  He ran down the hall, checking room after room. Each empty. Hunter’s door stood open, displaying his usual mess. The boy had left his dirty clothes lying on his bathroom floor, but there was no sign of him. Or her.

  “Margot? Where are you?”

  Myron’s face had gone nearly purple with exertion and panic, his lips white and thin as he yelled her name over and over. Up the attic stairs two at a time, he rushed into the hot room, a cold sweat dripping down his back. The rooms were empty, empty, crawl space empty. The bathroom light was on again. That ridiculous stupid fucking light.

  In a rage, he slapped the switch off and unscrewed the hot bulb, burning his fingers. The bulb smashed into the sink, shattering the onionskin glass in a tinkling cascade.

  “God damn it!” he bellowed loudly, then caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. The late-afternoon sun out the window cast half his crazed face in shadow. He looked like a wild-eyed maniac. It had come to this.

  Adrenaline seemed to plummet from his bloodstream as something heavier and far more permanent took hold. A sense of doom. His wife wasn’t there. She hadn’t really been there in years. But where . . .

  Out in the main attic, he lurched toward the stairs. The dormer windows projected the low sun in glowing golden rectangles onto the far wall, and Myron in his state didn’t see it at first.

  A small figure stood in the shadow at the top of the stairs. It was the shape of a girl. Her white slip of fabric stood luminous against the dark wall.

  “She left,” the girl said. “They both left. You should leave too.”

  He gaped at her, stunned still.

  “If you stay, this place will kill you,” she whispered, then vanished down the steps.

  “Hey!” he screamed after her. “Who the fuck are you?” He stumbled blindly across the floor to the stairs. The heat of the attic pressed down on him, quickening the liquor. He nearly fell. His shaking hands caught the railing just in time.

  A faint melody came from somewhere below.

  Myron lurched up and ran down to the second floor and then the back steps into the kitchen, then the den, the dining room, the living room, and back to the kitchen. The basement door beckoned him down into the bowels of Rawlingswood. He stopped at the top of the steps and listened.

  Silence.

  “What are you doing in my house?” he shouted down into the cold.

  He flipped on the light switch and scanned the unfinished space from the top of the steps. Nothing moved. Climbing down slowly, he stopped again at the foot of the stairs, listening to the sound of the slop sink dripping. No one was there.

  A few bottles sat on the floor of the wine room, empty. Myron frowned at them and closed the door.

  A tickle at the back of his neck sent him spinning around only to find another blank masonry wall, the white paint flaking and sweating off the blocks as the damp earth on the other side seeped through. He ran a trembling hand through his hair and surveyed the exposed pipes and beams overhead. No one was there. Not Margot. Not Hunter. Not the strange girl.

  But she had been there. He was sure of it.

  He climbed back up out of the ground and ran to the mudroom, where he’d set down a shopping bag. He dumped the contents out onto the floor. Security cameras. Wireless alarms.

  “I’m going to catch you, whoever you are,” he muttered under his breath.

  He spent the next sweaty, frantic hour setting up four wireless cameras to watch over the first floor. They connected to his smartphone, and he checked each one twice. Every creak of the house made him jump and brandish the butcher knife he’d grabbed from the kitchen. It was Hunter’s knife, and he looked like a lunatic holding it.

  At the fifth jump, he finally stormed into the den to get the gun. Could he bring himself to use it? he wondered, weighing the pistol in his hand. Could he really shoot a young girl? A girl who looked so much like . . . her.

  No. He couldn’t.

  He put the gun back in the desk drawer and glanced down at his watch. Surely, Margot would be home any minute, wondering what the hell he was doing with a knife and why his hands were sweaty and shaking. The nausea creeping up into his gut finally eclipsed the fear, twisting it in another direction.

  He couldn’t let Margot or Hunter see him like this—sick with withdrawal. He couldn’t call the police like this. Call the police and tell them what?

  “What did you see, Myron?” he whispered to himself. “What can you prove?” He checked the cameras again with his phone. Nothing yet.

  Myron climbed up the stairs and down the long hallway to the inner sanctuary of his closet. He needed medicine. Just a small dose would set him straight. Closing the door behind him, he sat down on the wood floor of his closet and pulled his gym bag out from behind the hamper. He’d run out of pills days ago, and it appeared that no more sample boxes would be coming. Someone must’ve noticed.

  He pulled out a small zippered leather case. Inside it lay a syringe, a spoon, a lighter, and a little plastic bag of brown powder. With clammy white fingers, he prepared the injection, dosing out the brown powder, tapping the air bubbles out of the needle. How much is too much? He contemplated the milliliters. Sweat beaded on his upper lip as he worked. His ears stood sentry over the hall outside, the foyer, the garage, the front door. He removed his left sock and stuck the needle into a fat vein on the top of his foot.

  Then everything slipped away. Too far. Too fast. Too much. His expression went slack as the heavy dose flooded his brain. His body sank to the floor. Breathe. Keep breathing, he told himself as his eyes rolled in his skull.

  From deep down in his stupor, Myron felt a shift in the air. He heard a click of a door. He felt a shadow moving nearby, but his eyes couldn’t focus. His lips mumbled something as he heard the zuzz of a zippered case winding shut.

  Long hair dusted his face, and the shadow of a head loomed over him. A cold finger pulled his left eye open, letting in a painful blast of white light. Then his right eye. The dangling hair and the smell of sugar swept away from him. As he lay there, not asleep but not awake, he heard a voice singing softly.

  . . . And when they lie upon your grave

  The leaves will fall, the trees will wave . . .

  Myron lay pinned to the floor as Ava wandered down the hall toward the guest wing over the garage with the zippered case in her hand.


  “Poor Hunter,” she whispered to herself, pausing at the sight of his open door. He had no idea how bad things were about to get.

  She turned the corner and headed to the part of the house no one used. No one but her. The contractors had left the plumbing access door in the guest bedroom untouched, not considering the space behind it was large enough for a person to stand in, unseen. No one had noticed the plumbing chase leading up into the attic over the garage, not even the home inspector.

  The girl opened the half-size door and retreated into the narrow space, pulling a flashlight from her pocket. If she had been any larger, she wouldn’t have fit. The back of the cast-iron tub sat behind a network of pipes. Dried plaster bulged and dripped between the wood slats. The two-by-four blocking between the wall studs formed a makeshift ladder that creaked as she climbed up next to the cast-iron vent stack and onto the makeshift floor of the unfinished attic over the garage. Piles of rags, clothes, and stolen food sat to one side of the plumbing chase and a makeshift bed to the other. She sank onto the pile of cast-off blankets and sleeping bags and considered the zippered case in her hand.

  The wood shifted on the other side of the house, and she shined her flashlight into the framing of the main attic. The beam of light shimmered through the dust and cobwebs, through the forest of rafter ties and braces, to the unfinished sides of the main attic walls. She scanned the two access doors that led to the servants’ rooms beyond, holding her breath and listening.

  “Toby? Is that you?”

  49

  The Murder House

  August 5, 2017

  “What’s the story with this place?” a teenage boy asked as a pack of kids crept through the overgrown backyard. They scanned the houses on either side, listening for the slam of a door or the shout of a neighbor. Who’s out there?

  “I dunno. It’s been empty for over a year. Heard the last owner died or something.”

  One of them, the one smoking a cigarette, led the group to a side door with a broken window panel. He reached inside the cracked pane of glass to unhook the chain and open it.

  “Watch your step,” he whispered, pointing to a drop in the floor. “Those stairs go down to the basement.”

  One of the girls curled her lip. “It smells terrible in here! Are you sure this is a good idea? It’s so dark.”

  “You scared?” the leader teased her. The whole expedition was a dare.

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned to the only other girl with pleading eyes. “Do you think this is a good idea?”

  The girl with dyed-black hair just shrugged. Her ears were pierced multiple times, and her lipstick was blood red. “Let’s check it out.”

  Six intruders stumbled past the basement steps and across the kitchen floor. Two used their cell phones as flashlights to guide the way. One tried the light switch, which clicked back and forth dumbly to no effect.

  They made their way to the living room, where the streetlights along Lee Road lit the floor in long rectangles beneath the windows. The previous owners had left a couch and a few straggling chairs that someone had dragged into a circle by the fireplace. Pieces of a broken dresser sat half-charred in the firebox.

  “Whoa. Look at this place . . . Is someone living in here?” One of the kids pointed to the abandoned fire.

  “Nah. People just come here to party.” The leader smirked and lit another cigarette. He dropped his backpack to the ground and plopped onto one of the couches.

  “Niles,” the nervous girl whined. “I don’t want to get jumped by some homeless junkie. This is crazy.”

  Niles pulled a bottle of whiskey out of his bag along with a six-pack of beer and offered her one. “There’s like six of us. You really think a drugged-out dude is going to jump all of us? C’mon. Relax, Sammy. I was just here with some friends the other night.”

  Sammy sank down onto one of the splintered chairs and opened her beer. The other girl distanced herself from the worrywart by plopping down next to Niles. The three other boys scattered around the room, reading the graffiti on the walls, pounding their beers. Their voices echoed off the bare plaster and up the front steps to the second floor.

  “Looks like somebody stripped the house. All the radiators are gone. Wonder if they took the pipes too.”

  “Hey. Somebody wrote Murder House in here! Check it out.”

  “Someone got murdered here?” The boy let out a Halloween cackle.

  “Knock it off, Steve! You’re going to give Sammy a heart attack.”

  “Fuck off, all of you!” Sammy protested, sipping her beer.

  “Who brought the party favors, man?” one of them asked as they wandered back to the dead fire.

  Niles pulled a plastic baggie from the front pocket of his schoolbag. He produced a tightly rolled joint and lit it up, passing it to his right, and then lit another and passed to the left. “Cheers.”

  The kids took turns puffing and coughing out skunky clouds of smoke. After a few minutes chatting idly about the origins of the weed (it had come from a friend of Niles’s brother), the quieter boy asked, “So where do you think the guy died?”

  Sammy blew out another shallow hit and made a face. “What guy?”

  “You know. The last owner. Do ya think he died in here?” The kid spun around slower than a sober person might, studying the walls and ceiling. “I heard you totally shit your pants when you die.”

  “That’s real nice, Cliff,” the girl with the piercings said, taking a swig from the whiskey bottle.

  “That’s nothing. Wanna know what I heard?” Niles said, pausing for maximum effect. “I heard a kid died in here. Got murdered by his parents.”

  “No. You made that up,” Sammy protested.

  “Swear to God. I heard they killed the kid upstairs in the attic, like in some sort of sick ritual where they tried to conjure the devil. He bled to death all over the floor.” He took another deep swig of whiskey and then continued his ghost story in a hushed tone for effect. “Supposedly, every kid that’s lived here since has died. They got sick. They killed themselves. None of them made it out of here . . . alive.”

  The taller boy started laughing. “Bullshit! You saw that in a movie or something.”

  “Okay. Maybe . . . but don’t you want to go check it out?” Niles raised both eyebrows and stared down the three other boys.

  The tall one glanced over at Sammy, who was sitting rigid on the edge of her seat. “Shouldn’t one of us stay here and keep watch?”

  Sammy’s shoulders went slack with relief. “I’ll stay if someone stays with me.”

  “Whatever, pussies.” Niles laughed. “The rest of you up for some exploring?”

  “Sure,” one answered.

  The other shrugged.

  “How ’bout you, Natalie? You game?”

  The girl with the piercings nodded slowly, stoned, and pulled herself to her feet. “Sure. I love haunted houses.”

  “Alright. We’ll catch up with you bitches later.” With that, Niles led his expedition through the foyer and up the front stairs.

  Sammy watched them leave, chewing on her lip. Her worried eyes darted to the street outside and then to her newfound partner on the couch.

  “So.” The tall guy flashed her a grin. “You gonna sit all the way over there?”

  She blushed at herself perched on the edge of her seat and went over to the empty cushion next to him. To prove she wasn’t a total loser, she picked up the whiskey bottle and took a long drink.

  He cocked a half grin at her and helped himself to a shot as well. “You likin’ Mr. Aldridge’s class?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Chemistry. I sit three rows behind you.”

  “Oh. Yeah. It’s fine, I guess.” Her eyes wandered back to the foyer, where her other friends had vanished. She tried not to stiffen when the boy next to her draped his arm over her shoulders.

  “You know. I always thought you were sort of pretty.” He smiled at her lazily, his eyes drifting from her mouth to her
chest and back up again.

  Upstairs, the four others wandered down the long hallway, opening door after door. One room was empty. One was half-filled with boxes. One had a dirty mattress on the floor. Smatterings of graffiti scarred the walls. The door at the break in the hallway led up to the attic.

  “Hey, guys,” Niles called to the others. “Go check it out up there. There’s something I want to show Natalie here.”

  “Yeah. I’ll bet,” Cliff muttered under his breath. He pulled out his cell phone, turned on its high beam, and headed up the stairs with the other kid.

  Niles wrapped an arm around Natalie’s waist.

  She turned to him with a smirk. “What do you wanna show me?”

  “I brought something special, just for you,” he whispered back, pulling her toward the room with the mattress.

  “Wow. You really think it’s that easy, huh?” She took a step back and crossed her arms. The smile dancing on her lips combined with the short cut of her skirt suggested it just might be.

  “That’s not what I’m saying, okay?” He held up both hands. There was a small plastic bag in one of them. “I just figured you might be interested in taking this party up a notch.”

  She eyed the little bag and then him. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Only the best.”

  She followed him into the room with the mattress and closed the door.

  Niles sprinkled the powder onto a crumpled piece of foil he’d pulled from his pocket and handed her a glass tube. Natalie took in a shallow puff of smoke while Niles held a lighter against the back of the foil. “Go easy. They promised this was some good shit.”

  Within two seconds, Natalie’s muscles went limp. She sank down onto the mattress as the acrid smoke rushed her brain.

  “It’s good, right?” Niles chuckled before inhaling his own hit.

  Up in the attic, the two other boys pointed their phones at the walls, where someone had written words in light pencil.