The Woman in the Dark

by Vanessa Savage

  Three people died in the house, but there are six cold spots. It makes me imagine undiscovered bodies rotting in the garden. When I wake up at night with the wind from the sea rattling the window, I wonder if there are hidden bones under the floorboards. Some nights I swear I can hear scratching from under the floor. Like bones scraping at wood. Is that what keeps Mia awake too? I can’t tell any of this to Patrick.

  “Close it down, Mum—it’s giving me the creeps.”

  I’m washing up when the phone rings. I go to answer it, wiping my hands dry.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  “Hello?” I say again. I press the handset closer to my ear. Is Patrick right—is it someone in a call center in India, dead air as another call connects first, or do I hear breathing at the other end? I disconnect and turn away, spotting an envelope on the mat. I frown and glance at the clock—it’s five, way too late for the postman. Leaning to pick it up, I see the envelope is blank but sealed. It makes me think of the letter that started all this, the one to Patrick from the estate agent. My hands are shaking as I tear open the envelope.

  There are two pages from a newspaper folded up inside, and I sink onto the bottom step to read them. Inside the Murder House, the headline reads, with a small inset photo of our house. It’s the bigger photographs that make my hands shake even more, the interior photos, barely recognizable as this house, even the state of it when Patrick and I first looked around.

  They’re grainy, black-and-white, but I can see what look like holes in the walls, as though someone has punched through them; floorboards are pulled up, carpets stained, curtains torn. I can’t quite read it, but it looks like there is writing on the walls in the hallway.

  What I can make out easily is the police tape across the open front door, but there’s no way to say how much of this was done in the course of the police investigation or how much before the murders were discovered. All the newspaper articles I remember from back then, all the websites I’ve visited, talk about the Evans family as loving and happy, making the murders so much more tragic. It doesn’t marry with the photographs on these pages, which are also a million miles from the pristine Paradise in which Patrick grew up. The newspaper’s title has been ripped off, but the date is still visible, timed to just after the murders. Who put this through the door? Why? Was it one of Mia’s new school friends, a cruel teenage joke?

  I reach out a hand to touch the wall that, in the newspaper report, has a hole punched through. Is there a dip? A fist-sized curve in the wall that’s since been filled in?

  When Patrick comes in, he finds me still sitting on the stairs, newspaper article in one hand, the other feeling the wall. “Someone put this through the door,” I say.

  He takes the newsprint pages, his face expressionless as he looks at them.

  “The state of the house in these photos… Was all this done after the Evans family moved in?” I can’t correlate these photos, the way the house was when we looked around, with the beautiful family home Patrick used to describe.

  “They were here for two years after my parents moved out,” Patrick says, his face still blank, not really answering my question.

  “I think he put this through the door,” I say. “I think it was Hooper.”

  Patrick sighs and rubs a hand across his eyes. “This again? Sarah, it wasn’t him. How can it have been when he—”

  “When he what?”

  He sits down next to me on the step. “Do you think I haven’t seen the websites you’ve been looking at? All those clickbait stories, all rubbish. They’ve made you paranoid, thinking Ian Hooper’s waiting around every corner.”

  “Come on, Patrick—you can’t expect me not to be worried. He murdered three people.”

  “There’s no need to worry. What you don’t know is how the town reacted after the murders. Hooper’s family was practically forced to leave.”

  “By local people? What did they do?”

  Patrick smiles faintly. “Nothing really bad, apart from some idiot throwing a brick through their window. It was more things said, ranks closing, problems for the kids at school, Hooper’s wife losing her job for no reason.”

  He folds the article and puts it back in the envelope. “My point is, what do you think would happen if Hooper came back? Do you think no one would notice? Do you think he could check into a B-and-B, shop at the mall, drink in the pub? Everyone who lives here, everyone who remembers, would shout and be dialing the police at any hint he was around.”

  I look at the torn envelope, held loosely in Patrick’s fingers.

  “It’s not him,” Patrick says in a softer voice.

  “Then who? Someone was watching the house, we’ve had dropped telephone calls, and someone…” I was about to mention the shell, but I didn’t tell Patrick at the time. “Someone put this through the door,” I say instead.

  “A local gossip, probably. Or a kid trying to scare us for a laugh.”

  “Patrick?” I say as he gets up. “How come you know so much about what happened afterward here?”

  He stops in the kitchen doorway. “My parents were still around. Not in town, but close by. News spreads.”

  But he’s never mentioned any of this to me before.

  I trudge upstairs with a basket of clean laundry, knock on Mia’s closed door, and push it open. The room’s empty and I lay her pile of clothes on the end of her bed.

  I’m almost out of the room when something at the corner of my eye catches my attention. There’s a pile of papers on the edge of her dressing table. I assumed when I came in that it must be homework, or revision notes, but that photo on the top page—I’ve seen it before, downstairs on the computer. It’s Ian Hooper. I go back into the room and pick up the pile of paper. There are printouts of stories about the murders, dozens of them, not just the ones I found earlier. Ian Hooper’s face, the same photo, staring out of all of them.

  “They give me nightmares.”

  Mia’s voice makes me whirl around. She’s staring at the pages in my hand.

  “They give me nightmares, but I can’t stop reading about it.”

  I know exactly what she means. I keep going back to that same website, that same newspaper story. It’s their eyes, I think. Their faces. Ian Hooper’s eyes seem to burn into me, and the Evans family looks so happy, unknowing and innocent, no idea what’s to come. But I can’t say any of this to Mia, can’t let her see her own worries reflected in my eyes.

  “I know,” I say. “But it was a long time ago. You were a baby when it happened. There’s nothing to be scared about anymore.”

  “Every night I have horrible dreams about it,” Mia says. “It happened right here, Mum. In my bedroom. This is where he killed her. Sometimes I’m watching as he comes in and murders them, but I can’t move or say anything. Sometimes I’m one of their family, or it’s us, our family, but we’re living in the house back then and Ian Hooper comes in with a knife and it’s us he’s here to kill…”

  I let the papers drop onto the bed, go over to her, and pull her into a hug. I stroke her back as if she were a much younger child.

  “I’m so tired, Mum, but I dread going to bed every night because of the wind… and something keeps rattling my window, and I know if I go to sleep with that howling and rattling, I’ll fall straight into those nightmares. I’ve spent more time in Joe’s room than mine—I might as well move my bed in there.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, tracing slow circles across her back. “It’ll be summer soon, lighter nights and fewer storms. We’ll cut away the brambles by the windows and I’ll ask your dad to see if he can do something about the rattling.”

  Mia pulls away, rubbing eyes that seem more dark-circled and bloodshot every time I look into them. “Then I’ll just get to sleep quicker and have more time for bad dreams.”

  “Come and wake me if you have nightmares again. I’ll make you hot chocolate, like I used to. I’ll sit with you until you get back to sleep.” I reach past her and pic
k up the pile of papers. “I’ll take these away. Maybe if they weren’t lying around your room, you’d stop having bad dreams.”

  She nods, then reaches into her dressing table drawer for a book she holds out to me. “You’d better take this as well.”

  I flinch at the title—Murder Houses of the UK. It’s a thin book with a flimsy cover, no sign of a publisher’s name. There’s a black-and-white picture of a Victorian house on the front, not ours, but similar enough to make me look twice.

  “Someone left it on my desk in school as a joke,” Mia says.

  “Not a very funny one,” I say.

  “Not really—especially as we’re in there. Well, the house is. This place has its own chapter.”

  I almost drop the book, fumble, and manage to bend the cover before I have hold of it again.

  “Page forty-three,” Mia says. “There are photos and everything. Some of the things this bloke says… I mean it’s obviously rubbish and all made up, but he talks about the history of the house.” She stops to take a breath. “His theory, if you can call it that, is that there’s something wrong with the murder houses themselves. That some evil exists in them to make awful things happen.”

  “That’s—”

  “Crap. I know. It’s rubbish, but he mixes all the crap up with the truth and then I got to reading the newspaper stories.”

  I tighten my grip on the book. “I’ll throw it away.”

  She nods. “Okay. Yes. Please do. Thanks, Mum.”

  I go straight out into the back garden with the intention of putting the book and all the pages Mia has printed into the bin. Glancing up, I see her watching me from Joe’s room and I wave as I lift the lid and stuff the pages deep inside. I go to drop the book in too but pause. Mia has disappeared from the window. I don’t know why, but instead of putting the book into the bin, I hurry back into the house and shove it to the back of one of the kitchen drawers.

  In the living room, I try to reassure myself of our new start, that the past really can be erased. The decorating is only half-finished, but with the pretty wallpaper, the cushions, the flowers in the window, it’s clearly not the house in the newspaper pictures anymore. It’s not. It’s what it should be—a home, a place we’ll be happy. It’s hard, though, to put the pictures and stories out of my mind, when in the corner of my eye, a faint height chart still shows through the paint, when I know that somewhere under the butterfly wallpaper, under the layers of old lining paper, the Evans family left their marks, their stories.

  And, God, those pictures. How could the Evanses have been the happy family the press said they were if the house was in that state? I can’t stop thinking of what Mia read in that book, and what I see in my mind is Marie Evans doing what I’m doing, pretending everything’s normal—height charts, children playing with Star Wars figures upstairs—while someone punches holes in walls and the house rots around them.

  My throat tightens as I stare at the wobbly letters on the height chart. I have to know when and why the house turned from happy family home into… into the Murder House.

  I push open the estate agent’s door. The girl behind the desk looks up with a bright smile. “Hi, can I help?”

  “Um, I’m not sure. I’m Sarah Walker—we just moved into the… into the house on Seaview Road?”

  Her smile dims.

  “I had a few questions,” I say, “for the previous owner. I was wondering if I could…”

  Her smile has turned into a frown. “I can’t give out client information.” Her tone is abrupt and I wonder if she believes me or if she thinks I’m a journalist or a ghoul looking to harass the Murder House survivor.

  “I know, and that’s fine,” I say. “Can you just give him my details? Ask him to get in touch with me?” I scribble my name and cell phone number on a piece of paper. “Tell him…” What can I say that would make him ever want to speak to me? I think of the Star Wars figures. “I found some things in the house that might have belonged to him. Him and his brother.”

  It’s changed, the house that, once upon a time, was just a house, then the Murder House, and now… What is it now? Painted French furniture and Farrow & Ball colors, cans of white paint stacked in a hallway that was once dark and bare.

  But look closely and there are black spots in the paintwork, the wallpaper’s peeling at the edges. Look closely and she’s biting her lip, her shoulders hunched and rigid with tension.

  There’s a photo on the wall behind her, two toddlers, could be twins, different coloring but matching smiles. How stupid—haven’t you realized? Hasn’t she realized?

  It’s not a house for kids.

  CHAPTER 12

  I watch Mia mooching around the kitchen, opening and closing the cookie jar without taking one, opening and closing the fridge. I took a couple of boxes upstairs this morning and her room smelled of cigarettes. In the old house, her walls were covered with photos of her and her friends, but this morning I found most of those photos torn up in her bin. She looks tired, thin under her baggy school sweater.

  She goes to the table and picks up the two Star Wars figures I’ve put there. “Playing with toys now, Mum?”

  “No—I found them upstairs. I thought they were your father’s but… Did you find them somewhere when you were unpacking?”

  “Not me.”

  When I asked, Joe said it wasn’t him either. But they definitely weren’t there when we looked around the house or on the day we moved in. I would have noticed, wouldn’t I?

  Mia pulls out of the fridge the remains of the pie Anna brought and puts it on the table. “Where did this come from?”

  “What?” I pull my thoughts away from those little plastic toys. “Oh, a friend brought it around. It’s a welcome-to-town offering.”

  “A friend?” She picks a bit of pastry off the edge.

  “Her name’s Anna. I met her in town—she works in the café. We’ve been meeting for coffee.” I push the plate closer toward her. “Want some? It needs to be finished.”

  She pulls a face and shakes her head.

  “How’s school going?”

  She gives me that look of hers, the blank one without any hint of a smile or even a scowl and somehow more hostile for it. “What do you think?” she mutters.

  “Have you made any friends?” I grimace. I sound like I’m talking to a five-year-old.

  She glares at me, and when she opens her mouth I’m expecting abuse. Then she stops and smiles, a new smile I haven’t seen before. “Yeah, I’ve made a friend. He didn’t turn up offering me pie, though.”

  I swallow a dozen questions. “I’m glad. I was worried.”

  She gives a snort of laughter and takes an apple out of the bowl. “Worried. Right.”

  “I am. Of course I am. All I want from this move is for you and Joe to be okay. To be happy. You look… tired.”

  She puts down the apple, one bite out of it. “I’m still having bad dreams.”

  I think of my own dreams last night, half-forgotten, splashes of blood on walls, bones under floorboards. I wonder if Joe has the same dreams, if he lies awake at night in his room, that tree tapping on his window. “The same dreams?”

  She nods. “This house. Them. The Evans family. In the night, the sea sounds like whispering.”

  I shiver, see goose bumps rising on her arms as well as on my own.

  She picks up the apple, rolling it between her hands. “I think I shouted out in one of the dreams last night. Dad must have heard me. He came in to check on me. He said we could maybe swap rooms. But the sea would be just as loud in your room, wouldn’t it?” She laughs. “I wish me and Joe were little kids again. Then we could share a room.”

  Patrick didn’t say anything to me this morning, about talking to Mia during the night—and he definitely didn’t mention changing rooms.

  “I guess, though, it’s not really the sound of the sea, is it? It’s not the sea making the cold spots or giving me nightmares.”

  “Of course we can ch
ange rooms. We can do it this weekend, if you like. And remember what I said—if you have more bad dreams, why don’t you come and wake me up? We’ll break open the hot chocolate and I’ll sit with you.”

  She looks at me incredulously for a moment, then lets the apple drop with a thud. “Oh, please…”

  “What?”

  “Forget it,” she says, leaving the room and running up the stairs.

  I see the shell as I go to check on her. It’s sitting on the hall table and looks like the one I found on the doorstep but smaller, more like the shells the children would collect on seaside trips when they were younger. I pick it up to look closer and a spindly leg and a red claw brush my hand. Hermit crab. I drop the shell with a clatter, letting out a small scream.

  “Christ—what now?” Mia has come out of her room and stands, half in shadow, at the top of the stairs.

  “Did you put this here?” I say, pointing to the crab. My heart is racing. The unexpectedness of those skittering legs scrabbling at my hand. Worse than a spider. Worse than that beetle I once found in my shoe that made me scream the house down.

  Mia shrugs. “Not me.”

  It must have been Joe. I thought I saw him on the beach earlier, talking to some boy from his class, huddled together against the wind. I was so glad to see he had a friend. He must have brought home the shell, not realizing it had a resident.

  A piece of the shell broke off when I dropped it and now I can see the crab’s body, vulnerable, exposed. My bitter friend, guilt, makes a fresh appearance. I’m a home wrecker.

  I’m setting the table for dinner when the door slams. I go to the window and see Mia marching down the street toward town. She’s wearing a short black skirt I haven’t seen before and high heels. I glance at the clock. It’s getting dark but only eight o’clock, and she hasn’t eaten.