But there was more keeping Lance from worrying about possible nighttime assailants. He was too distracted. His mind was still coming down off the high of discovering, after all these years, that there were others like him. At least one, anyway. But if there was one … it only fueled the theory that there would be more. Out there somewhere. All probably wondering the same things as Lance. Wondering if they were alone and questioning everything they were and desperately seeking any sort of answer, explanation, and, most importantly, camaraderie.
Lance sighed and sat down at the table, pulling his last bottle of water from his backpack and cracking the top. He took a small sip, then a full gulp, and then another. It was tepid, but it also seemed to help cool his thoughts, allow his body and mind to slow down, his heart rate to steady and his breathing to normalize. He took another swallow and then refastened the cap and said, “Okay.” He stared down at the wooden table, refocusing his mind. “What do I do now?”
The list that had magically ended up in his bag from the sheriff’s office was on the table, refolded and looking innocuous. After Jacob and Ethan had left, and Lance had regained enough control of himself to have a conversation with human beings again, he’d told Susan that he had reasons to believe that anyone on that list might have some sort of insight into what happened the night the Benchley family was killed.
Susan’s eyes had scanned the list, not even flinching when she saw her own name, and then nodded. “Makes sense,” she’d said. “Where’d you get this?”
Lance shook his head. “Nope. Remember, you’ll just have to trust me.”
Susan didn’t take offense. “Well, I suppose you’re curious as to why I’m on here. But I’ll tell you right now I’m not surprised.”
Lance waited. Said nothing.
“Sheriff asked me to come in to answer some questions a couple days after it all happened. I was happy to help, of course. Or at least try to. And, well, I mean, I wasn’t worried or anything. I knew I didn’t have anything to do with…” She looked around the room, as if suddenly remembering where she was. “I knew I had nothing to do with what happened here.”
Luke was leaning against the kitchen counter again, but now he stood straighter, curiosity burning in his eyes. “So why’d they want to talk to you, Suze? You’ve never told me this.”
Susan shrugged. “I haven’t really told anybody. My parents, of course, but that’s it. It was a long time ago.” She paused, took a deep breath and said, “Apparently, I’m the last person in town to talk to Mary Benchley before she went away. Like, literally. The last words she spoke to anyone before she was gone —anyone that’s come forward, that is—were to me.” Susan must have seen the surprise in both Lance’s and her boyfriend’s eyes, because she quickly laughed and held up her hands. “Calm down now, boys. Do you want to know what she said? She said, ‘Thank you.’”
Lance and Luke looked at each other, clearly disappointed in the revelation. Lance repeated, “Thank you?”
Susan nodded. “Yep. I’d just started working at Mama’s, and Mary had come in to pick up a pie to go that her mother had called in an order for. I’m the one who gave it to her. She came in the restaurant, we chatted for just a minute or two—just general chitchat—and then she thanked me and she was gone. Sometimes I replay it in my head, that scene. I try to glorify it and convince myself that maybe she had a different look in her eyes, that her voice carried more meaning than just thanking me for handing her a pie. Like maybe she was thanking me for being her friend, not being part of the immature cesspool of rumors and rude remarks that is high school. But honestly, the more I replay that moment—and trust me, I’ve done it a lot over the years—I’m not sure she even really saw me that night. Truth is, she looked distracted. Vacant. Like she had a lot on her mind. I gave her the pie and she left. That’s exactly what I told the sheriff.”
Lance nodded, filing away the bit about Mary looking distracted. He supposed that the knowledge that she was about to be shipped off to a boarding school might weigh heavily on a teenage girl’s mind. But maybe it was something else altogether.
“And what about Jacob Morgan? Why’s his name on there?”
Luke’s eyes grew a little harder. “Yeah, I’m wondering the same thing.”
Lance suppressed a chuckle. Luke was jealous.
Susan didn’t seem to notice. “Oh, I thought you knew,” she said to Luke. She turned to Lance. “Jacob’s the one who called it in. He’s the one who found them the next morning.”
Lance put the rest of the pieces together before Susan had finished explaining. Statistically, it all made sense. Jacob Morgan was the closest neighbor the Benchleys had had, as far as Lance knew. Either something sent up his hackles, and he sensed something was wrong enough for him to make the short hike to check on the family, or maybe he was supposed to be there for some other reason. Had had his morning plans quickly and grotesquely derailed.
“He’d been headed out of town for a week or so to help a friend do some renovations on a new house,” Susan said. “He was stopping by before he left to ask Mark Benchley to keep an eye on his place while he was gone. Apparently they did these favors for each other. Joan tells me that Mark and Jacob were fairly good friends, despite the age difference. Used to have lunch together a lot in town. Anyway, he got here and … well. You can imagine.”
Lance could.
“The police took him right in. I remember that morning, because things felt electric. Like you could feel the current of gossip pulsing around town. By lunchtime, everybody was convinced Jacob was the killer, not knowing it was actually him who’d found him and called it in. But by later in the day, after the police had done their thing and examined the crime scene and whatever else they do, they had let Jacob go and the finger was pointed squarely at Mark Benchley. Which of course, given his reputation, didn’t surprise too many people. Not as much as it should have, anyway.”
Lance soaked in all this information. Processed it and tried to categorize it into mental filing cabinets for further review. There were more questions he wanted to ask, but he was tired … and his mind kept drifting back to Ethan.
Susan and Luke had left then, leaving Lance with the house and his thoughts. They’d told him to call them if he needed something, or wanted to hang out again, and Lance could sense the excitement in them, see the flash in their eyes. They believed he was going to figure this out, like they were playing a game of Clue and all Lance had to do was keep eliminating things until nothing was left but the truth. And they were enjoying playing the game.
He’d seen the same thing in Leah’s eyes back in Westhaven. She’d had a personal stake in the game, sure, but the excitement and enthusiasm were all the same. Maybe it was something about small towns, the lack of other things to do, that made people so willing to jump into a murder investigation. For them, it was an episode, an excursion away from a mundane reality. For Lance, it was a way of life. They didn’t understand that. Couldn’t understand that.
Leah had started to.
And then he’d left her.
Lance downed the rest of the water and tossed the bottle at the sink. It missed, the bottle striking the counter and then bouncing on the floor with sharp crackles as plastic met wood. He sighed, stood. Retrieved the bottle and set it on the counter. He rested his hands on the edge of the counter and stretched his back, arching it until it cracked and loosened. He stared into the window above the sink, at the reflection of—
The door to the basement was open.
Lance spun around and looked.
The door was closed. The bolt still locked.
He looked back to the window and saw it was still closed there as well.
He sighed. “Okay, I get it,” he said, as if capitulating to the house.
He dug in his backpack until he found the small flashlight he carried. A tiny thing powered by one AAA battery, but powerful all the same.
Then, exhausted and wanting nothing more than to sleep, he opened the basement door
, clicked on his flashlight and started down the steps.
25
The steps were old, and they creaked and squealed with every slow step Lance took, but they were built solid all the same. Plenty of support beams and a smattering of nails that almost made the wood look speckled in the bright cone of light thrown from Lance’s flashlight. There was no railing to grab hold of for balance, just the walls on either side for the first few steps down and then you were on your own. Just you and the boards and a fight with gravity you hoped to win.
Lance checked again for a light switch on his way down. Found nothing. Let his flashlight swish and swoosh in wide arcs, sweeping across ceiling and walls and steps, illuminating clouds of dust and a latticework of cobwebs.
The boards whined and dust puffed from his shoes as he stepped, leaving behind a ghost trail of prints.
The air was thick with earth and soil and stone. Cool, but somewhat unpleasant.
It smelled like a tomb.
If this were a horror film, right about now would be when the door slammed shut behind me and my flashlight went out, Lance thought.
Not that he honestly expected those things to happen. While Lance did find the spirit world to conform almost comically to many of the tropes displayed in Hollywood, it almost never did so on cue. Sometimes, he wished it would. Everybody loves the familiar.
No, the door did not slam shut. And, no, Lance’s flashlight did not suddenly need a change of bulb or battery. In fact, when Lance reached the bottom step and then stepped softly down onto the hard-packed dirt floor, something brushed across his ear and, after a mini-heart-attack that he was glad nobody was around to see, he shined his flashlight to his right and found a pull cord attached to a hanging overhead light. He reached up and tugged it, expecting nothing but thrilled to see a single uncovered bulb spark to life. It was dull and had the same yellowed tint as the lights in the aboveground portions of the house, but in the basement, it might as well have been the sun, forcing the bad things to retreat back into the shadows.
Lance lowered his flashlight, leaving the beam on and burning bright in case the old bulb hanging from the ceiling decided it had had enough and winked out. He stood in place and did a slow circle, examining the room.
The basement was empty except for a well-worn wooden workbench against the wall to Lance’s left, long devoid of any tools but scuffed and scarred and full of cuts and nicks and evidence of heavy usage from a time before. In the back corner of the room, behind the stairs and nestled in the shadows where the light didn’t quite fully reach, were mounted rows of what looked like metal shelving spanning from waist height to nearly above Lance’s head. The shelves were bare, except for a single gallon paint can sitting on one of the midlevel shelves, its outside dotted and splashed with dried remnants of a dull white color Lance suspected was the original color of the farmhouse’s exterior.
But there was nothing else. No spirits standing and waiting patiently for him, ready to spill their secrets and help him make everything right in the world. No monsters lurking in the dark ready to drag him down into the depths of places unknown. Just a dirt floor, a lonely workbench, and a single can of old paint on shelves that had likely not held anything important since the Benchley family had been killed and their belongings purged from the house. And probably never would again.
Lance called out, “Hello?” He waited, then tried, “I … I think you know I’m here to help. Can you speak to me?”
There was nothing but the muffled creaks of the house upstairs as a gust of wind blew across the top of the hill outside.
Lance looked around the room, turning slowly and trying, for some reason, to appear unaggressive. Friendly. He received no answer. No words, no messages, no prickle of electricity like he’d experienced earlier when…
He tried again. “The boy,” he said. “Ethan. He could hear you? Sense you?” Then Lance took a gamble, hoping he was right about his earlier assumption about whom he might actually be attempting to contact. “Mary, how did he know? Is he like me? And why could he hear you, but I couldn’t this time?”
A flutter, small and tickling in Lance’s stomach. A slight buzz in his ear, like a gnat had just flown in one side and out the other. Followed by a pang of absolute sadness, no more than half a second at most, but deep and strong enough that Lance felt at once completely consumed by the grief, his eyes suddenly full of tears and his heart pleading for relief.
And then it was all washed away in the blink of an eye, and Lance stood in the basement in the dull yellow light with the flashlight at his side and a desire to see his mother’s face again trumpeting in his mind like a full-blown marching band.
He coughed and took a deep breath and shook his head, forcing himself to process what had just happened.
He’d managed to get through. Something he’d said. Was it calling Mary by her name? Was it the mention of Ethan?
“Mary,” he tried again. “What happened here?”
The basement was silent, and Lance’s frustration bloomed.
“Then why am I down here if you don’t want to help me?”
He thought of the reflection from the kitchen window, the open basement door. It was an invitation. It had to have been. Whether sent by a friendly spirit or an evil one, there was no other explanation. Something had wanted Lance to descend the steps and see what was down here.
He walked the perimeter of the room, sweeping his flashlight beam across the floor and ceiling and corners. He stopped at the workbench and ran his hand over the surface, feeling the smooth wood and the pockmarks from tools. He searched for a drawer or a compartment. Found none. Looked for scribbled or carved messages. A clue. Any clue. Anything at all.
But the basement was empty.
Lance tugged on the pull cord too hard as he made to leave and head back up the steps, and it snapped at the chain. He let the cord fall to the floor at his feet and walked back up to the kitchen, closing the door behind him.
He headed to bed. The house seemed to be finished speaking to him for the time being. Lance figured it would know how to wake him if it changed its mind.
In the morning, he’d walk down to see Jacob Morgan. Talk to the man and see if he knew what his nephew really was. But more importantly, Lance hoped to chat with Ethan alone.
Lance carried to bed with him a glint of hope, an excitement that, if not for his mental exhaustion and many miles walked and an entire hillside climbed, would have likely made it difficult to sleep. He wished the sun was up and the day started so he could spend more time with Ethan immediately.
But along with the hope, being dragged behind it like a ball and chain, was the nagging, unmistakable sense that he was missing something.
Lance kicked off his shoes and fell onto the bed of a dead girl. Sleep grabbed hold within minutes.
26
There were no dreams this time. No riding on empty buses. No men with their faces blown off. The sleep was deep, and it was purely black. A long blink of the eyes, only to have them open to the faint early-morning light highlighting the window around the blinds in Mary Benchley’s old bedroom.
Lance rubbed sleep from his eyes and yawned, sitting up on the bed and taking stock of himself. He was still in one piece, with no visible injuries he could see or feel, so he was happy to know his idea that the home invader would not strike again so quickly was accurate. It had been a calculated gamble.
He stood and stretched and padded over to the window in his socks, peeking out the blinds. Mary’s windows overlooked the driveway and front yard, and while there was a hint of sunlight still hidden behind the crest of the trees in the distance, the sky was mostly overcast. Lance could feel the chill from the window. Breathed out onto the glass and drew a smiley face in the condensation with his finger. “Good morning,” he said to the face. “Sleep well?”
The face did not answer.
Lance looked down to the driveway again and noticed that Victoria Bellows’s Mercedes was gone.
“Well,
you know what they say,” Lance said to his finger-drawn friend, who was beginning to fade away. “The early bird gets the luxury SUV.”
He turned and grabbed his toiletry kit from his backpack and went to the bathroom.
The upstairs bathroom had a shine to it that it hadn’t the day before. The sink and tub were a brighter color, and the faucets and fixtures had a new life to them. The ring around the toilet bowl was mostly gone. There was the artificial smell of pine in the air. Victoria Bellows had done a good job. Lance hated that she’d been attacked. He felt he owed her more than a bouquet of flowers.
He brushed his teeth and flossed, then looked into the mirror in order to assess whether he needed to shave or not. He could usually pull off a few days’ stubble without feeling gross or thinking he looked like a fool. He ran a hand over his cheeks, feeling the roughness that had grown, examined the five-o’clock shadow look he had going. He chose not to shave.
He splashed some warm water on his face, still clean and refreshing in smell and taste, and then dried off with his t-shirt. And when his eyes met his reflection in the mirror, he was hit again with that strange prickling at the base of his skull, a repeat of yesterday morning’s episode, when he’d foolishly tried to reach his hand through the mirror’s glass because he felt it had been calling out to him, urging him to take action.
And here the feeling was again. He couldn’t deny it was real, present and suggesting. The tingle at his neck grew, and his stomach fluttered with an anxiousness that was clearly fabricated. Something was tugging at his gut; something was drawing him closer to the mirror again. Lance stood and stared. Turned his head from side to side, raised himself up and down on his toes. He followed his face in the mirror, then focused his eyes on the background as he moved, looking for some anomaly between the mirror’s reflection and the reality of the bathroom.
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