He never noticed the tears that would collect in the corners of her eyes as she recounted all the good times they’d never had together. He would just curl into the crook of her arm and fathom a time before the big house on Lee Road. A time when monsters didn’t lurk in dark corners.
Once he was safely out of earshot, Ava set about finding a hiding place for the gun. She scanned the unfinished walls and floorboards of the crawl space, considering the loaded weapon in her hand again. Whatever thought passed in and out of her mind made her flinch. It was a bad idea keeping it. Suddenly uncertain and afraid, she looked over her shoulder. She should tell someone. She should, but then she would have to tell them everything.
Pressing her lips together in a determined line, she continued her search until she found a loose board next to the knee wall. She pried it up and buried the gun under the loose gray insulation. As she pushed the board back into place, a creaking sound behind her made her jump.
She spun to face the main room of the attic.
“Toby?” she said softly, her heart pounding in her throat. Papa? She poked her head out of the storage space and surveyed the enormous emptiness under the roof. The feeling that someone or something was watching her lifted the fine hairs on her arms. “Hello?”
But no one was there.
22
The Spielman Family
August 7, 2018
“Are you awake?” a voice whispered.
Warm air fluttered down the canal of his inner ear, tickling his brain. Hunter recoiled, wanting to swat at it, but his sleeping hand lay paralyzed. All he could manage was a mumble. “Mom?” The feeling of someone else in the room, a shadow hanging over him, pulled his mind toward the surface of whatever deep ocean he’d dreamed into.
Wake up.
Hunter’s gummy eyelids peeled themselves open. The room was a gauzy blur of gray and blue with the sound of cicadas trilling outside and . . . someone breathing?
A dark shape moved.
The boy pushed himself up onto an elbow. He fumbled for the light on his nightstand. A painful burst of light sent the shadows running out into the hall. He squinted in the glare.
No one was there.
His eyes darted about the room from one corner to the next, lingering on the creepy fireplace. Raccoon? The gerbils were nested in the wood chips, noses twitching at whatever had woken him. He rubbed his ear, still tingling with the hot breath of a whisper and put his bare feet on the ground.
The bedroom door was cracked open. It had been shut when he fell asleep.
Gangly frame hunched and uncertain, Hunter got up and inched his way to the door. His crooked nose poked out into the dark hallway, followed by a matted nest of brown hair. He studied the open gap in the wall where the back stairs led down to the kitchen. Then he panned to the right past the split in the hallway that led over the garage, past the rows of closed doors, past the bluish glow of the front stairwell, to his parents’ bedroom. The door stood open.
Mom? Was that you?
He crept toward her door one tentative step at a time, ears perked and listening for telltale footfalls, for the annoyed clearing of a throat, for rustling of sheets, but there was none.
Three steps closer, Hunter froze, muscles tensed at the top of the monumental stairs, as though expecting to find someone standing at the bottom. The leaded glass window over the two-story foyer lit part of the hall, its thin diamond stripes slashing over the awkward angles of his skin. Hunter glanced back at the dark tunnels behind him, one leading down to the kitchen, one leading over the garage.
Empty.
Turning back to his parents’ room, he padded softly to the door and creaked it open three more inches. Inside, two lumps lay as far apart as possible on the king-size bed. His father was snoring in fits and starts as though trapped in some terrible dream. His mother lay on the opposite side of the mattress, facing away from the door. The duvet moved rhythmically up and down as she breathed. Hunter crept closer and closer to her until he reached the foot of the bed.
He reached out a hand as though to wake her. After a moment’s indecision, he withdrew it and whispered a barely audible, “Are you awake?”
His father sucked in a breath as though startled but settled back into an uneasy rhythm. Neither parent stirred. Hunter stood over them another five heartbeats before retreating back into the hallway, silently closing the door.
He was halfway back to his room when his mother sat up with a gasp, searching the room. Margot rubbed her face, not knowing what had roused her. Bad dream. She curled onto her other side and fell back to the steady breath of sleep. Myron mumbled something and rolled to his back, brow furrowed.
Hunter had reached the door to his own bedroom when he heard it. A dull thump from below. Kitchen? He snapped his head toward the back stairs and froze, uncertain, ears cocked, waiting for a reply.
A small click answered, and strange footsteps vibrated through the wood frame of the house and up his legs.
Eyes wide, he covered his mouth and glanced down the hall at his parents’ door. Should I wake them? The murky light of the big foyer window shifted. A dark shadow drifting over the plaster. He gaped at it and crept closer. Is it something outside? Out the enormous window over the entryway, he only found the same tall trees and sky that had been there moments earlier. He searched the long shadows of the foyer, but nothing was there.
His friend Caleb’s words repeated in his head. What if your house was built on top of all those dead bodies? Hunter shook his head. No bedsheet ghosts would be found skulking around the halls, no face-eating clowns. That was ridiculous. But there was something. A feeling. A sense that he wasn’t alone.
The house was watching.
The boy wiped a hand over his face and leaned against the wall, trapped in uncertainty. His lanky frame sagged with interrupted sleep. The clock next to his mother’s pillow had read 4:16 a.m.
After standing there for three more minutes, Hunter forced his feet back into his room. In his wake came a thread of song so faint he could barely hear it, if he was hearing it at all. He stopped, wide eyed, as a quavering voice wound its way up the back stairs from somewhere below.
’Tis the gift to be simple,
’Tis the gift to be free,
’Tis the gift to come down
To where we ought to be . . .
The words trailed off, leaving only a lilting hum like wind whistling in an abandoned churchyard or the creak of an empty swing.
Hunter slipped down the narrow kitchen stairs, chasing after it as it faded, not really believing he’d heard it at all. Surely, if he’d really heard it, he’d raise the alarm and wake his parents. Phone the police. Something.
Instead, he followed the sound down into the kitchen, where the light over the newly installed industrial stove cast a warm glow. The workers had nearly finished assembling his mother’s dream kitchen. One of the pantry cupboards stood open.
Who doesn’t know how to close doors around here? Margot had asked him more than once. Hunter instinctively pushed it closed and turned around in the cold expanse of marble and stainless steel, trying to pick up the song he’d lost.
The hint of a faint melody seeped in from beneath the shut door to the basement. Hunter spun toward it, but the refrigerator compressor kicked on, drowning it out with a mechanical hum. Inside the freezer, a tray of ice turned itself out with a cascade of falling glass, followed by the crystalline splash of water filling it back up again.