Hunter scanned the article for any mention of a ghost or foul play and found nothing but teachers remembering what sort of students they’d been and friends insisting that neither of them had had a real drug problem. The rest of the article cited recent statistics of the opioid crisis in Cuyahoga County, a crisis that had left families in ruins and children stranded in the overcrowded foster care system.
Hunter rubbed his chin, pulling on the sparse hairs, then spun in his chair to face the door. He wasn’t sober enough to face either of his parents. He pulled the razor out of his pocket and studied it again, wondering if maybe his father had inherited it from his own father or bought it at a shop, or . . .
The floor creaked outside his room.
The electric current of another person only twelve feet away charged the air, creeping up his back as a shadow hovered on the other side of his door. The feel of it strummed his nerves as he sat there waiting for something to happen.
“What do you want?” he finally asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
There was no answer.
Hunter could feel something or someone squinting at him through the keyhole. Reflexively, he gripped the razor tighter.
The shadow creaked away toward the attic steps, and the sensation of being watched released its grip. He stood up but stayed put. Jumbled thoughts flashed behind his eyes. This is stupid. I should call the police. If it’s a person, they’re trespassing, and if it’s a dead person . . .
But his head was still not properly attached. He squeezed his eyes shut and blinked them open again. The whites still burned red. He couldn’t call the police in the state he was in. He couldn’t even talk to his parents. He might’ve imagined the whole thing. Then a more coherent thought flashed through his mind.
The camera.
Hunter spun back to his computer and enlarged the feed from the webcam to see his own face gaping at the screen. Then he rewound the footage to earlier that day, not sure what he was hoping to find. His doorway stood empty on the screen. He sped up the recording. Nothing. Nothing. Wait.
He backed up until he found it. His door swung open on his screen. The hallway outside was dark and grainy, but something moved—a slip of white fabric. He backed up the video feed and slowed it down. A shoulder. A white nightgown. A strand of blonde hair. Then nothing. No face. He tried adjusting the exposure but got nowhere.
“Shitty camera!” he hissed.
It could’ve been his mother; that was what everyone would say. But staring at the frozen profile, his nose an inch from the screen, he knew it wasn’t.
30
The Martin Family
February 15, 2014
Ava woke to the sound of footsteps coming down the crooked hallway toward her door. She could hear the heavy footfalls even over the whirring box fan next to her bed.
“Ava, honey? You awake?” Papa Martin whispered through the open door. “I thought I heard you crying.”
She didn’t answer. Silently, she slipped from her bed and crept on cat feet toward her closet in the far wall, not breathing.
The key rattled in the lock. The noise gave her cover as she closed the closet door behind her. In the breathless dark, she pushed through the hanging clothes to the laundry door set two and a half feet above the floor. The wood panel opened into a laundry chute. The shaft of cold basement air chilled her skin as she reached through the wall chase to push open the laundry door on the opposite side. It swung into the adjacent walk-in linen closet with a faint squeak. Ava cringed at the sound.
The door to her bedroom creaked open, and she felt Papa’s footsteps shake the floor as he lumbered into the room. “You okay, girl? Mind if I lay down here awhile? The bed is so empty when Maureen’s out of town . . . Ava?”
The laundry door was just wide enough for her tiny frame to squeeze through, and she silently thanked God she’d stayed so small. Even at nearly sixteen years old, she was often mistaken for a much younger girl and kept her curves hidden under loose clothes and a self-conscious slouch. As silently as she could manage, she pulled herself across the twenty-foot drop to the basement and into the oversize linen closet on the other side. The shelves of folded sheets, towels, and blankets muffled the sound of her body spilling headfirst onto the floor.
The closet door behind her swung open before she could pull the laundry door shut. Too late.
“Ava? What the hell are you doing?” Papa Martin’s voice boomed through the closet. Hangers screeched as he shoved the hanging clothes aside. A meaty arm thrust through the laundry door and nearly caught her nightgown as she slipped out of the linen closet and took off running down the hall.
“Ava!” he hissed after her.
She didn’t look back. Her feet flew down the hall to the back stairs. Outside, the snow was falling, and her feet were bare. She wouldn’t get far, she realized, running down the steps and into the kitchen. She opened the side door anyway and peered out down the driveway. The snow fell in big flakes, melting on the dark pavement. Good. No footprints.
She grabbed her shoes and coat from the rack and left the door standing wide open. Then she slipped down the basement stairs as quietly as she could. Papa Martin wouldn’t have heard her anyway over the furious thump of his feet or the angry huff of his breathing.
“Dammit, Ava!” he bellowed down the back stairs. Mama Martin was out of town, so there was no one to wake except Toby. The thought of the boy locked in his room and wondering at the commotion sent a knife through her as Ava ran down into the basement.
But Papa has never raised a hand to the boy, she reassured herself as she stashed her coat and shoes in one of the storage closets and herself in another. What the hell am I doing?
Papa lumbered through the kitchen and crashed open the storm door. “Ava?” he called down the driveway. Waking the neighbors wouldn’t do at all, he realized and closed the door. “Jesus Christ!”
He stormed back into the kitchen and picked up the phone. His voice traveled down the basement stairs to Ava’s hiding spot, where she cowered next to his coveralls and tools. “Al? Yeah, this is Clyde. Listen, could you send a car by around here? Ava snuck out of the house . . . Hell if I know! I think it’s some boy from school . . . Believe me, she’s gonna be grounded for a month. Just have the fellas keep an eye out for her . . . See you Saturday at the range? Okay. Thanks.” He hung up the phone.
Ava sagged against the closet wall. Now what? His police buddies would surely believe Clyde’s version of the story. She didn’t know if she’d even have the nerve to tell anyone the truth anyway. She’d had chances.
In the musty air of the storage closet, she listened as Papa Martin pulled a beer from the fridge, then slammed the door shut hard enough to shake the floorboards. His angry feet stomped away from the kitchen. The television clicked on in the den, and the muted sounds of a game show filtered down to where Ava crouched, debating what to do next. Run? What about Toby? Call someone? But who?
The endless questions and dead ends swirled around her in the suffocating darkness until she lost all sense of time. Consciousness wound out of her head as she descended into a nightmare of terrible possibilities. Ava trapped in the backseat of a police car. Toby lost in the woods. Papa Martin’s hands squeezing her neck until she couldn’t breathe. Ava drowning in a black, black sea.