No One's Home Page 3

  Walter cast her a hard glance and cleared his throat, unwilling to discuss his own unease at the sudden downturn in his fortunes. His palatial home had been built on borrowed money and dubious investments. Creditors had been calling the house.

  “Well, I think we would all be well served to just remain calm and go about our business,” her husband said with the authority of a banker, scolding her with his eyes. “The stock market has been known to fluctuate. The last thing this country needs is a panic. Don’t you agree, Paul?”

  “Absolutely.” The banker nodded.

  Walter joined in the agreement and took another healthy swig of scotch. Don’t panic. He’d overextended himself on several business ventures in recent years, including a small bank, and those were just his legitimate investments. You don’t climb the hill from the tenements to Shaker Heights without bending a few rules. That’s what he told himself.

  “Oh, will you listen to you two? Our guest of honor certainly could not care less about the stock market,” Ardelia chided them all and turned back to Ninny. “I must apologize for these bores, my dear. Please go on.”

  Ninny looked up from her untouched soup at the wealthy woman. Dressed in a maid’s plain clothes, the old Shaker sat uneasily among the fashionable diners assembled there. “How shall I go on?”

  “Please, Miss Boyd. Do tell us why the dead are restless.” Walter tipped back his cup, eager to change the subject.

  “I fear . . . they died the wrong way,” the old woman said softly. Her gaze wandered out the window to the street beyond the trees. The same road had run through the heart of the Center Family settlement eighty years earlier. The ghost of the old gathering house reflected in her pooling eyes. It was burning. Flames ripped up into the sky as timbers cracked and fell. The floorboards above them shifted and creaked nervously.

  Georgina reappeared in the doorway and hurried back to her place at the table. Her cheeks were flushed pink where she had pinched them hard and splashed cold water onto her face. “Forgive me, everyone. What did I miss?”

  “We were just asking Miss Boyd about the poor souls that died the wrong way.” Ardelia grinned, pleased at the intrigue. “Was it murder, Miss Boyd?”

  The old woman’s clouded vision fixed on the road outside as though she could see the chaos of that night. The children running. The Elders with their hands raised in protest. She flinched at a remembered gunshot.

  “God left this valley years ago. He abandoned these trees, these stones, the ground beneath our feet.” She leveled her eyes at Georgina trembling in her seat. “I pray you all do the same.”

  4

  The Spielman Family

  May 5, 2018

  “Somebody tried to warn you, huh?” The contractor motioned to the graffiti scrawled over the woodwork in the living room. Murder House! 666! “We doin’ an exorcism?”

  The Spielmans led the fat man holding a clipboard into another room. It had been a week since they’d gotten the keys. Their all-cash offer had been so low they both were still dazed that it had been accepted at all.

  The man let out a low whistle. “You sure you don’t want a full gut?” he asked halfway through the tour. His voice rasped and rumbled like a chain saw. A cloud of stale cigarette smoke followed him as he circled the breakfast room. “Might be cheaper in the end.”

  “We’re sure,” Myron said with a stiff smile. He and his wife had squabbled over that very point in the foyer right before the contractor had shown up. It’s all cracked and warped, sweetie. Do we really want to spend a small fortune and be stuck with cracked plaster?

  Near tears, his wife had bit back, You dragged us all here, Myron. You picked this creepy house. You saved all that money on the deal. Now let me make this nightmare a home, okay? Please?

  “Drywall just isn’t the same quality as hand-laid plaster. Our decorator is set on keeping as much of it as possible,” Margot explained for the second time and shot her husband a look. Just be on my side for once. Her stiletto heels clacked loudly over the floors, leaving tiny dents in the wood. Her eyes darted to the corners of each room as though expecting something or someone to jump out at her. She tightened her fists and pressed on. “The kitchen of course will have to be taken down to the studs and expanded. I want these walls down. It needs to be much more open.”

  She strode from the breakfast room past the butler’s pantry and into the humble kitchen at the back of the house, explaining their plans for custom cabinetry, double sinks, a wine fridge, a microwave drawer, recessed lights, a massive island to seat seven, and another island for food preparation.

  “Are you familiar with the Home Network show Dream Kitchen?” Margot turned to the fat man, who was furiously writing down his notes. In the sudden absence of her chatter, he glanced up and nodded. “Well, that’s the feel we’re going for. Marble and natural wood. Classic. Early American.” The vision of the perfect kitchen smoothed the lines in her forehead. If they could just get the house right, everything would be okay.

  The bathrooms would also be full guts, she explained. Hand-pressed subway tile, honed marble, frameless glass—she rattled off the finishes up the back stairs.

  “This will be Hunter’s room,” she announced as the procession continued into the first bedroom. “We’ll close off the access to the bathroom here and put in a linen closet to make it a true hall bath.”

  The contractor nodded and made a note.

  Margot opened the closet door for the first time to take stock of the storage space and startled at what she found. Giant letters screamed in red crayon wax:

  DeAD GiRL!

  DeAD GiRL!

  RuN!

  A flurry of other pencil marks and crayon scarred the walls, slashing angrily over the spider-cracked plaster. Hundreds of words large and small scribbled in a childlike hand.

  I KiLLeD iT! BAD BeNNy! BAD!

  MusT TeLL MusT TeLL

  HeLP HeR!

  She drew in a ragged breath.

  “What, no closet space?” Myron came up behind her with a knowing smile that dropped at the sight of the words. He opened his mouth to say something, but Margot slammed the closet door shut before he could speak. I hate this creepy house! her expression shrieked at him.

  “What would you like for the closet, ma’am?” the contractor asked, pencil in hand.

  Margot blinked away her horror and cleared her throat, visibly shaken. “Wallpaper. Old-fashioned prints. Like . . . hatboxes. We’ll, um . . . we’ll send you the patterns.”

  He nodded. After the couple stepped out of the room, he cracked the closet door back open to take a few quick measurements. “Dead girl,” he muttered to himself. “That’s real nice. Jesus Christ.”

  Out in the hallway, Margot stared blankly down the long, dark row of doors as though expecting to see the specter of a dead girl standing there. The lines of her forehead deepened, and she suddenly looked much older than her girlish hair and figure would admit. What have we done? her face seemed to ask. Every toned muscle in her body tensed to run out the door and never look back, but it was too late. They’d paid cash for the place.

  Her husband placed what was meant to be a reassuring hand at the small of her back. She recoiled as though struck.

  “Hey.” He tried again, holding both hands up as a peace offering. “It’s just some sick kids playing games, hon. Nothing to worry about. I promise.”

  Her jaw tensed as she debated the wisdom of screaming, of crying, of slapping him across the face. You did this! Now we’re trapped here!

  The fat man appeared just in time. “So what’s next?”

  She shut her eyes and forced air in and out before rattling off the next series of instructions. Fresh paint in every room. Reconfigure the master suite. Repurpose that bedroom. Move the master bath. Build his-and-hers walk-in closets. Refinish the wood floors. All signs of vandalism would be eradicated. Everything would be brought up to date and rehabilitated. Every demon exorcised. Every ghost chased out.

  Margot stopp
ed their procession at the top of the narrow attic stairs. At the far end of the long, empty expanse that would have been the maid’s living room, a light bulb was still burning in the bathroom. It cast a sickly yellow glow onto the dusty wood floor.

  I told them to turn the light off last week. Her eyes flashed with irritation. Her upper lip curled at the porcelain floor tiles of the grungy bathroom. Dozens of filthy footprints loitered there. Squatters, vagrants, drug addicts. The grout lines ran black with a hundred years of dirt. She shrank from the room as though she could sense something terrible had happened there.

  “And what would you like to do up here, ma’am? Paint?” He motioned to faint pencil markings on the wall—and we shall plant four trees—but the lady of the house wasn’t looking.

  She turned away from the filthy bathroom floor and straightened her back. “Not much . . . we’ll just use it as storage.”

  The fat man clomped over to one of the half-size doors on the left and popped it open. Dust rained down from the rafters as the door slapped against the knee wall. He shined a flashlight into the unfinished crawl space under the eaves between the window dormers. “We could run our AC ducts through here,” the man said and pulled a tape measure from his belt. He poked the cold metal line up and down, side to side, tearing through the cobwebs.

  Margot squinted into the cavern, braced for bats or rodents to come skittering out. The roof rafters sprang from the far edge of the floor, disappearing under the plaster over her head. Orange sap beaded up on the faces of the wood boards. The beam of the man’s flashlight hovered over a spot on the floor where a small leather shoe lay in the dust. From the cut of it, it was at least sixty years old. Margot frowned, debating whether to pick it up.

  It had belonged to a boy.

  “Can even fit the air handler, I’d bet.” The contractor clicked off the light and slapped the door closed again.

  Margot shook the image of the little shoe from her head. The attic left its impressions all over her face. Unsettled. Sad. Lonely. Haunted. The sales agent’s warning rang true in that moment: The house is cursed. She rubbed her arms as though cold.

  The contractor turned to the two small bedrooms facing the backyard. The door on the left was locked. He jiggled the handle and asked, “Anyone give you the master key?”

  Margot glanced from the locked door to her husband.

  Myron raised his eyebrows and said, “Nope. They sure didn’t.”

  “We’ll have to call a locksmith.” Max made a note on his clipboard and moved to the next small bedroom, taking a quick inventory.

  The locked pine door cast a sinister shadow in Margot’s mind. She studied it warily as though she could sense something or someone on the other side of it, listening. “What do you think is in there?”

  “I don’t know.” Myron cocked a teasing eyebrow. “Indian Head pennies? Buried treasure? Jimmy Hoffa?”

  Unamused, Margot pushed past her husband and away from the mysterious door. A blemish in the ceiling over the stairs caught her eye. She squinted at the pinpoint of daylight leaking in from outside. The plaster had blistered and yellowed around it. “Is that a roof leak? Myron, was this in the home inspector’s report?”

  Her husband looked up from his cell phone with a defensive scowl. “No, I don’t think so, but I’m sure if it was a major concern, they would’ve said something. Max? Can you weigh in on this?”

  The contractor straightened himself and walked over to the spot the woman was pointing to with an accusing finger. He squinted at the round hole in the ceiling, no bigger than a dime. Fine cracks radiated from it like a broken spiderweb. Bullet hole? his face asked, but what he said was, “That shouldn’t take much to patch. We’ll have our roofer go up and take a look.”

  Myron nodded, relieved. “Good. So when do you think we’d be able to move in?”

  Max flipped through his clipboard and began to talk numbers.

  Ignoring them both, Margot wandered toward the first small bedroom on the right and peered into where a maid had once slept. Inside, a tiny window looked out onto the overgrown backyard. Pale flowered wallpaper still clung to the walls. She stepped into the room and ran a finger down a puckered seam. It was hand-printed paper, not machined vinyl. Clearly, the room hadn’t been touched in nearly one hundred years. The sloped ceiling was slightly yellow in the corner. The pine casements and baseboards had been left unpainted. She eyed the round buttons of the antique light switch next to the door and the shadow of a narrow bed on the floorboards.

  An envelope lay facedown in a corner, and she stooped to pick it up. It was a letter from Ohio University that had never been opened. The name above the address was “Ava Turner.”

  “Hon?” Myron called from the main living space. “You ready to get going?”

  Margot emerged from the maid’s room holding the envelope. “What? I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. How many days are we looking at?”

  “Max here says about four months or so.”

  Worry knit her brow. “Really? That long?”

  “Well, we could move in after the demo is completed . . . along with the work in the bathrooms. Are you willing to live off paper plates and takeout for a month or two?” Myron flashed his wife a grin that looked more like a dare.

  She sighed. Her flawless makeup and manicured fingernails sent the clear message that she was not one to rough it. Her heel tapped pensively against the floor. “I hate the idea of Hunter being stuck in some hotel . . . and classes start in August.” Her glance fell on the offending light bulb still burning in the maid’s bathroom, then back to the contractor. “What do you think you can get done in eighty days? That’s when we close on the Boston house, right, Myron?”

  “July tenth,” Myron said with a nod.

  “I tell ya, we can focus on getting the second floor finished and the bathrooms up. But that custom kitchen’s gonna take some time.” The man scratched his head with his pencil and reviewed his notes again. “Cabinets alone might take two months to come in. Electrical wiring, reinforcing the floor . . . You got any plans for the basement? Rec room? Man cave?”

  Margot shook her head. “Just get the laundry up out of there and update whatever needs to be updated. We never plan to go down there. Do we?” She turned to Myron for confirmation.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” The doctor’s eyes circled the attic, taking mental measurements for some plan he didn’t dare share with his wife. “Maybe a game room for Hunter? A place to hang out with his friends?”

  “With all this space? I’m sure we can find a place aboveground for whatever Hunter needs. Lord knows we’re spending enough money, right?” This was a direct appeal to Myron’s frugality, and she fixed him with those wounded eyes. Please just make this easier for me. She turned to the builder. “So . . . can we say we’ll be done by early August?”

  Max took a moment to study his notes again and let out a tortured sigh. “We can try. But there is a saying in this business, you know. You can have it fast. You can have it good. Or you can have it cheap. But not all three. I’d have to factor in an escalation fee if we’re gonna push the schedule.”

  Myron raised his eyebrows at this and opened his mouth to protest but thought better of it. Margot’s pained expression hung like a weight around his neck. “Fine. Let’s just get it done.”

  An uncomfortable sweat had sprung up on Margot’s brow and the small of her back. It was more than a lack of air circulation. It was more than the dust motes and cobwebs hovering around the yellow glow of the bathroom or the dull sky leaking in through the windows. She cocked an ear and turned as if she’d heard something. But what? The slightest chill prickled her skin despite the heat. Her fingers grazed the base of her neck, stopping at the vein pulsing against her throat.

  “I think that’s it,” Myron said. “Right, hon?”

  “Mmmm?” She turned to him blankly, then recovered herself. “Right. I can’t think of anything else.”

  The doctor clapped a hand on the contractor’s
shoulder and said, “So when can we expect an estimate? I have to decide how many organs to sell.”

  Max laughed.

  Margot ignored the two men as they tossed barbs back and forth. Goose bumps had risen over her skin. The college acceptance letter addressed to some strange girl still sat in her hand. Glancing down at it, she shook her head at either herself or the men and headed toward the stairs, not waiting for a lull in the conversation. “Could one of you do me a favor?”

  The men stopped talking and turned to her. They had already said everything that needed saying anyway.

  “Please get the light on your way down.”

  5

  A crew of workers showed up three days after Myron Spielman signed the contract to gut half of Rawlingswood down to the studs.

  Within a week, everything that could go wrong did. Power tools went missing in the middle of the night. Mold was discovered in all three bathrooms on the second floor. Asbestos crumbled from the boiler lines, causing a work shutdown for a week. The cast-iron waste stacks fell apart during the plaster demolition. Flashings leaked around the chimneys. The water main burst in the basement on the sixth day of the work.

  “It’s like this damn house is fighting us every step of the way!” Max threw up his hands every time he had to call the Damn Doctor. “Yes, we have contingency funds, but this is like Armageddon here. Just one thing after another. I’ve never seen anything like it . . . Save money? We could lose that ten-thousand-dollar refrigerator to start.”

  There was a long pause as he listened to the doctor on the other end of the line.

  “Of course. We’ll give the lady what she wants, sure, but I’m telling you . . . Yes. I know it’s in the contract, but these are hidden conditions. Did you see me pull out my x-ray goggles when we were doin’ the walk-through? . . . Lookit. I don’t see through walls, and I don’t have a crystal ball.” The fat man blew out a stream of cigarette smoke into the gutted kitchen and listened some more. “Why don’t you and the missus discuss it and get back to me? . . . Fine.”