by Riley Sager
I walk to the display case, ready to tell the woman adjusting pastries inside it how much I like the design. The compliment dies on my lips when the woman rises from behind the counter and I see who she is.
Marta Carver.
I recognize her from the pictures I saw when I was a House of Horrors–obsessed tween who hoped Google would help fill the gaps in my knowledge. She’s older and softer now. Fiftyish, brown hair graying at the roots, slightly matronly in her yellow blouse and white apron. Her glasses don’t help—the same unflattering spectacles she wore in all those photos.
I’m apparently not the only one who’s done some Googling, because it’s clear she knows who I am. Her eyes widen just enough to register her surprise, and her jaw tightens. She clears her throat, and I brace myself for an angry tirade about my father. It would be justified. Of the many people in Bartleby who hate the Book, Marta Carver has the biggest reason for doing so.
Instead, she forces her lips into a polite smile and says, “What can I get for you, Miss Holt?”
“I—”
I’m sorry. That’s what I want to say. I’m sorry my father exploited your tragedy in his book. I’m sorry that because of him the whole world knows what your husband did.
“Coffee, please,” is what I end up saying, the words tight in my throat. “To go.”
Marta says nothing else as she pours my coffee and hands it to me. I muster a weak “Thank you” and pay with a ten-dollar bill. The change goes into a tip jar atop the counter, as if that seven dollars can make up for twenty-five years of pain.
I tell myself there’s no need to apologize. That it was my father, not me, who wronged her. That I’m just as much a victim as she is.
But as I leave that bakery, I know two things.
One, that I’m a coward.
And, two, that I hope to never see Marta Carver again as long as I live.
* * *
—
I return from the grocery store with a dozen paper bags in the back of my pickup. Because Baneberry Hall’s kitchen leaves a lot to be desired, I stocked up on food that’s easy to prepare. Canned soups, cold cereal, frozen dinners that can be zapped in the ancient microwave.
When I pull up to the house, I find a Toyota Camry also parked in the circular drive. Soon a man appears from the side of the house, as if he’s just been roaming the grounds. He’s in his early fifties, trim, with a tidy beard, a checked sport coat, and a matching bow tie. The outfit makes him look like an old-timey salesman. All that’s missing is a straw hat and a bottle of snake oil. As he approaches with one hand extended and another gripping a reporter’s notebook, I realize exactly who he is.
Brian Prince.
I can’t say I wasn’t warned.
“Good to see you, Maggie,” he says, as if we’re old friends.
I hop out of the truck, scowling. “You’re trespassing, Mr. Prince.”
“My apologies,” he says, doing a half bow of attrition. “I heard you were back in town, so I decided to drive out here and see for myself. When I saw the front gate open, I realized the rumors were true. Hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”
I grab a grocery bag from the truck and carry it to the porch. “Will you leave if I say yes?”
“Grudgingly,” he says. “But I do intend to come back, so you might as well get it over with now.”
“Get what over with?”
“Our interview, of course,” he says.
I return to the truck and grab two more bags. “I’m afraid I’m not very newsworthy, Mr. Prince.”
“Oh, I beg to differ. I think the community would be very interested to know that a member of the Holt family has moved back to Baneberry Hall.”
“I’m not moving in,” I say. “In fact, I’m moving out. There’s your article in two sentences.”
“What are your plans for the house?”
“Fix it up, sell it, hopefully walk away with a profit,” I say, nodding toward the equipment on the lawn as I make my way to the porch. First the table saw. Then the electric sander. Then the sledgehammer.
“The fact that Baneberry Hall will soon be back on the market is newsworthy in itself,” Brian says.
Deep down, I know Brian Prince is blameless. He heard a juicy story about a haunted house, interviewed my father, and wrote down what he said. He had simply done his job, just like Tess Alcott had done hers. The only two people responsible are my parents, and even they had no idea the story of Baneberry Hall would grow into the unruly phenomenon it became. That still doesn’t keep me from wanting to grab the sledgehammer and chase Brian Prince off my property.
“Newsworthy or not, I don’t want to talk to you,” I say.
“Your father did,” he says. “Sadly, he never got the chance.”
I lower the bags on the porch, my legs wobbly with surprise. “You communicated with my father?”
“Not often,” Brian says. “But we continued to correspond on and off over the years. And one of the things we discussed shortly before his illness took a turn for the worse was him coming back here to do an interview with me.”
“Your idea, I suppose.”
“Actually, it was your father who suggested it. He pitched it as an exclusive interview. Him and me talking inside this house, twenty-five years later.”
It’s yet another thing my father never mentioned, probably because he knew I would have tried to talk him out of it.
“Did he tell you what the gist of this conversation would have been?” I say, toying with the possibility it might have been an attempt to finally come clean after all these years. A confession, of sorts, taking place at the scene of the crime.
That idea is immediately shot down by Brian Prince.
“Your father said he wanted to reaffirm what he had written in his book.”
“And you were just going to go along with it?” I say, my opinion of Brian Prince swiftly changing. Maybe he’s not as blameless as I first thought. “Listen to my father tell a bunch of lies and write it down as fact?”
“I wasn’t planning on going easy on him,” Brian says as he fussily adjusts his bow tie. “I was going to ask some tough questions. Try to get at the truth of the matter.”
“The truth is that he made it all up,” I say. “Everyone knows that.”
“I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” he says.
Because Brian Prince shows no sign of leaving anytime soon, I take a seat on the porch steps. When Brian sits next to me, I’m too tired to shoo him away. Not to mention a tad curious about what he thinks is the real reason we abandoned Baneberry Hall.
“Did you investigate his claims?” I ask.
“Not back then,” Brian admits. “I didn’t have access to this house, for one thing. Plus there was other news to deal with.”
I roll my eyes. “It must not have been too important. The Gazette put my father’s bullshit story on the front page.”
Which, I wanted to add, was the reason other news outlets paid so much attention to it. If Brian’s article had been buried inside the paper, no one would have even noticed it. But by splashing it across the front page, along with a particularly sinister photo of Baneberry Hall, the Gazette had provided validation for my father’s lies.
“If our deadline had been a day later, your family’s story probably wouldn’t have even made the paper. But I didn’t hear about the Ditmer girl’s disappearance until the morning after that issue had gone to press.”
My body goes rigid at the mention of Petra. “I thought she ran away.”
“I see you’ve already talked to Chief Alcott,” Brian says, flashing me an unctuous smile. “That’s the police’s official line, by the way. That Petra Ditmer ran away. I guess it sounds better than saying a sixteen-year-old girl vanished under mysterious circumstances and they were too inept to find out what really happened to h
er.”
“What do you think happened?”
“That’s one of the things I wanted to ask your father.”
An uneasy feeling floods my gut. Although I’m unsure where Brian is going with this, his tone of voice already suggests I’m not going to like it.
“Why ask him?” I say. “My father didn’t make Petra run away—”
“Vanish,” Brian interjects.
“Vanish. Disappear. Whatever.” I rise, heading back to the truck, no longer wanting to hear what else Brian has to say. “My father wasn’t involved in any of that.”
“I thought that, too,” Brian says, still on the porch steps, still smiling, still acting like this is just a friendly visit when it’s clearly not. “It wasn’t until later—long after your father’s book came out—that I began to suspect they could be related.”
“How?”
“For starters, Petra Ditmer was last seen on July 15—the same night you and your family left this place. That’s a bit too strange to be a coincidence, don’t you think?”
The news hits me hard. There’s a dizzying moment in which I think I’m going to faint. It comes out of nowhere, forcing me to lean against the truck to keep from falling.
Petra Ditmer vanished the same night we fled Baneberry Hall.
Brian is right—that does feel like more than just a coincidence. But I don’t know what else it could be. Petra certainly didn’t run away with my family. That’s something I would have remembered. Besides, Chief Alcott was inside our hotel room at the Two Pines that night. Surely she would have noticed if a sixteen-year-old girl had also been there.
“I think you’re overreaching,” I say.
“Am I? I’ve read your father’s book many times. In it, he had lots to say about Petra Ditmer. Considering their age difference, they seemed quite close.”
He puts a lascivious spin on the word that makes my blood boil. Yes, Petra was mentioned frequently in the Book, often at key moments. That can’t be denied, especially when I now have the photos to prove it. But that doesn’t mean she and my father were, to use Brian’s euphemism, close.
I knew my father better than he did. Ewan Holt was a lot of things. A liar. A charmer. But he wasn’t a creep or a womanizer. I know that as sure as I know that my mother, had she been cheated on, would have taken my father for every cent he was worth. Since she didn’t, I have to believe we left Baneberry Hall for other reasons.
“Most of what’s in my father’s book is verifiably false. You can’t trust a single thing he wrote. Including how much time he spent with Petra Ditmer. My father wasn’t a stupid man, Mr. Prince. He certainly wouldn’t have written so much about Petra—in a book that hundreds of thousands of people have read—if he was the one who caused her disappearance.”
“Now you’re the one who’s overreaching. I never said he caused her disappearance. What I’m suggesting is that they’re related. Your family fled Baneberry Hall at almost the exact same time Petra Ditmer vanished without a trace. That’s not normal, Maggie. Not here in Bartleby.” Brian stands and makes a show of wiping his pants, as if merely sitting on Baneberry Hall’s porch steps has somehow dirtied him. “Something strange happened the night your family left, and I fully intend to find out what it was. Now, you can help me or hinder me—”
“I’m sure as hell not going to help you,” I say.
Even though Brian Prince and I share the same goal, it’s clear we’re each looking for different results.
“Although that’s not the answer I wanted to hear, I respect it nonetheless,” Brian says. “But just so you know, I will uncover the truth about that night.”
“You’re going to have to do it off my property,” I say. “Which means you need to leave. Now.”
Brian makes one last adjustment to his bow tie before getting into his car and driving away. I follow behind him, walking the long, curving road down the hillside to the front gate. Once I’ve made sure he’s gone, I close the gate and lock it.
Then it’s back to the house, where I’m finally able to carry my groceries inside. Burdened with bags heavy in both arms, I get just past the vestibule before noticing something wrong.
It’s bright in here.
Way too bright.
I look to the ceiling and see the chandelier burning at full glow.
But here’s the weird thing: when I left the house, it was dark.
While I was gone, it had somehow been turned on.
JUNE 30
Day 5
Thud.
Just like three nights before, the sound rattled the house and jerked me from sleep. Turning over, I looked at the digital clock on the nightstand, the numbers glowing green in the predawn darkness: 4:54 a.m.
The exact same time I’d previously heard the noise.
It was unnerving, yes, but also helpful, because it let me know that it hadn’t been a dream. This sound was real, and coming from the third floor.
Despite the ungodly early hour, I slipped out of bed and made my way to the study upstairs. Inside, nothing seemed amiss. The doors to both closets were closed, and the record player was silent.
As for the noise, I had no idea what it was. I suspected the house was responsible. Most likely something to do with the heating system resetting itself at a designated time. Granted, just before five in the morning was an odd time for that, but I saw no other possibilities for what the noise could be.
Rather than go back to bed, I went downstairs before dawn for the second time since we moved in. Once again, the chandelier was lit. I would have continued to think it was the wiring if I hadn’t heard the record player the night before. Clearly, both were the work of my unusually sleepless wife.
When Jess joined me in the kitchen after six, I greeted her by saying, “I never knew you were a Sound of Music fan.”
“I’m not,” she said, the second word stretching into a yawn.
“Well, you were last night. I don’t mind you going into the study. Just remember to turn off the record player when you leave.”
My wife gave me a sleepy-eyed look of confusion. “What record player?”
“The one on my desk,” I said. “It was playing last night. I figured you’d had trouble sleeping, went up there, and listened to music.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jess said as she made her way to the coffeepot. “I was asleep all night.”
It was my turn to look confused. “You weren’t in my office at all?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t turn the record player on?”
Jess poured herself a cup of coffee. “If I had, I certainly wouldn’t have picked The Sound of Music. Did you ask Maggie? She likes that movie. Maybe she was exploring?”
“At midnight?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Ewan,” Jess said as she sat down at the kitchen table. “Did you have it on at some point?”
“I did,” I said. “But that was two days ago. Right before Maggie hurt herself.”
“Did you turn it off?”
I didn’t know. All I could remember was hearing screams in the woods and bumping into the record player before running out of the study. Between taking Maggie to the emergency room and exploring the cemetery in the woods, I’d never had time to return there until the night before.
“Now that you mention it, I don’t think I did.”
“There you go.” Jess drank heartily from her mug, proud of herself. “You left the player on, and something bumped the needle back onto the record. Then the house was alive with the sound of music.”
“But what could have bumped it?”
“A mouse?” Jess suggested. “Maybe a bat? It’s an old house. I’m sure there’s something scurrying around inside these walls.”
I winced. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
Bu
t think about it I did. It was possible that an animal could be living in the study. After all, there had been a snake in the Indigo Room. Although I found it highly unlikely any animal could accidentally play a record.
After breakfast, I returned to the third floor and examined the record player. Everything looked normal. Turned off, record on the turntable, no sign a rodent had been anywhere near it. I bumped the arm, just to see if it could easily be moved by man or mouse.
It couldn’t.
So much for Jess’s theory. That meant the culprit had to be Maggie.
Before leaving, I unplugged the record player. Just in case. Then I made my way to Maggie’s wing, prepared to tell her she needed to ask permission before entering my study. It struck me as the only way to prevent it from happening again.
I found Maggie alone in the playroom next to her room. Only she didn’t act like she was alone. Sitting on the floor with an array of toys in front of her, she appeared to be talking to an imaginary person across from her.
“You can look, but you can’t touch,” she said, echoing something Jess told her nearly every time we went shopping. “If you want to play, you’ll need to find your own toys.”
“Who are you talking to?” I asked from the doorway. In Burlington, Maggie hadn’t shown any signs of having an imaginary friend. The fact she had one now made me wonder if it wasn’t a by-product of having Elsa Ditmer’s daughters here three days before. Now that she had finally experienced some companionship, maybe Maggie longed for more.
“Just a girl,” she said.
“Is she a new friend of yours?”
Maggie shrugged. “Not really.”
I stepped into the room, focused on the patch of floor where her imaginary not-friend would have been sitting. Even though no one was really there, Maggie had cleared a space for her.
“Does she have a name?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “She can’t talk.”
I joined her on the floor, making sure I didn’t invade the space of her imaginary friend. I still felt guilty about when I’d accused Maggie of lying about the girl in the armoire. She hadn’t been lying. She was pretending.