Home Before Dark

by Riley Sager

  “Fuck this house,” she said.

  Eleven

  I sit on the front porch, unsure if I’m allowed to go back inside Baneberry Hall. Even if I can, I don’t want to, despite being in desperate need of cleaning up. My hair is powdered with dust, and my face is a grimy mess. I also smell. Like sweat. Like drywall. Like puke, because that’s what I did a few minutes after seeing what slid out of that sack. Which was canvas, by the way. I learned that a few hours ago. A canvas duffel bag into which the body had been stuffed.

  I’ve learned a lot of things in the six hours I’ve spent on this porch. I know, for instance, that Baneberry Hall is now considered a crime scene, complete with yellow tape stretched over the front door and a state police tech van parked in the driveway.

  I know that when a skeleton plummets from the ceiling onto your kitchen table, you’ll get asked a lot of questions. Some you’ll be able to answer. Like, “What caused the ceiling to collapse?” Or, “After finding the skeleton, did you do anything to the bones?” Others—such as “How did a skeleton get into your ceiling in the first place?”—will leave you stumped.

  And I know that if two of you happen to be present when bones inexplicably drop out of your ceiling, you’ll be questioned separately to see if your stories match up. That’s what happened to me and Dane, who was taken to the back of the house for his interrogation.

  Now Dane is gone, having been sent home by Chief Alcott. I remain because this is technically my house. And when human remains are found inside a house, the police make sure the owner sticks around for a bit.

  Chief Alcott, who has been entering and exiting the house for hours, emerges wearing rubber gloves on her hands and paper booties over her shoes. She joins me on the porch, snapping off the gloves and wiping her hands on the front of her uniform.

  “You might want to start thinking about finding a place to stay for the night,” she says. “It’s going to be a while. The crime scene guys have finished gathering all the remains, but there are still rooms to be examined, evidence to be collected, reports to be filed. The usual red tape. Hopefully after all this, we’ll be able to figure out who it is.”

  “It’s Petra Ditmer,” I say.

  She’s the only person it could be. The girl who’s been missing for twenty-five years. The girl who never came home the same night my family left ours.

  The girl who most definitely didn’t run away.

  “I’m not jumping to any conclusions,” the chief says. “Neither should you. We won’t know anything for a day or so. The remains will be going to the forensics lab in Waterbury. They’ll sort through everything, check dental records, try to make a positive ID.”

  It would be nice to think I could be wrong. That those bones belonged to someone else and not a sixteen-year-old girl. A particularly loathsome member of the Garson family, maybe. An unknown victim of Curtis Carver.

  But I’m sure it’s Petra.

  “Were you able to tell how the body got into the ceiling?” I say.

  “From above,” Chief Alcott says. “We found a section of loose boards on the first floor. Four feet by three feet. They could be lifted right up and put back into place without anyone noticing. Add in the rug that covered it, and you have yourself a perfect hiding spot.”

  I know. My father had mentioned it in the Book. Until now, I thought he had made it up.

  So many thoughts run through my head. All of them horrible. That there were human remains inside the house the entire time I’ve been here. That those remains used to be Petra Ditmer, Chief Alcott’s wait-and-see approach be damned. That her body had been stuffed into a duffel bag and shoved under the floorboards. That I probably walked over her dozens of times without even realizing it.

  “What room was this in?” I say.

  “Second one from the front. With the green walls and the fireplace.”

  The Indigo Room.

  The same place Elsa Ditmer was roaming when I returned to Baneberry Hall. Maybe she’s not as confused as we all think. There’s a chance that, despite her illness, she knows more than everyone else and is struggling to find the right way to tell us.

  “Listen, Maggie,” Chief Alcott says. “I’m going to be honest with you here. If this does turn out to be Petra Ditmer—”

  “It is.”

  “If it’s her, well, it’s not going to look very good for your dad.”

  She says it gently, as if I haven’t been thinking the same thing for the past six hours. As if my father’s last words haven’t been repeating themselves in my skull the whole time, like an echo that refuses to end.

  So. Sorry.

  “I understand that,” I say.

  “I’m going to need to ask you this sooner or later, so I might as well do it now. Do you think your father was capable of killing someone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It’s a terrible answer, and not just because of how noncommittal it is. It’s terrible because it makes me feel like a shitty daughter. I want to be like those children of suspected killers I’ve read about in tabloids and seen on Dateline. People who are certain of their parent’s innocence.

  My father wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  He’s a gentle soul.

  I’d have known it if he was capable of murder.

  No one ever believes them. I never believe them.

  I can’t bring myself to be so adamant about my father’s innocence. There was a body in our ceiling, for God’s sake. Then there are his last words, which are so damning I’m glad I never mentioned them to Chief Alcott. I don’t want her mentally convicting my father before we know all the facts. Especially when the facts we do know make him look guilty as sin.

  But then I think about my conversation with Brian Prince, when he all but accused my father of causing Petra’s disappearance. At that moment, I was more certain and quicker to defend. What I said then still holds up. We left Baneberry Hall together. That’s indisputable fact. My father couldn’t have killed Petra and hidden her body while my mother and I were inside the house with him, and he wouldn’t have had a chance to return once we were ensconced at the Two Pines.

  But he did return. Not then, maybe, but later, coming back on the same day year after year.

  July 15.

  The night we left and Petra disappeared.

  I have no idea what to make of that.

  I’m on the verge of telling Chief Alcott about those visits, hoping she’ll have a theory about them, when the front door opens and state police investigators emerge with the body. Even though there’s nothing left of its human form, the skeleton is removed from the house like any other murder victim—in a body bag placed on a stretcher.

  They’re carrying it down the porch steps when a commotion rises from the other side of the driveway. I turn to the noise and see Hannah Ditmer pushing her way through the crowd of cops.

  “Is it true?” she asks everyone and no one. “Did you find my sister?”

  She spies the stretcher with the body bag, and her face goes still.

  “I want to see her,” she says, heading straight for the body bag.

  One of the cops—a doe-eyed kid who’s probably working his first crime scene—puts both blue-gloved hands on her shoulders. “There’s nothing left to see,” he says.

  “But I need to know if it’s her. Please.”

  The tone of that word—ringing with both determination and sorrow—pulls Chief Alcott from the porch steps.

  “Open it up,” she says. “It won’t hurt to let her take a look.”

  Hannah makes her way to the side of the stretcher, one hand fluttering to her throat. When the doe-eyed cop gently unzips the body bag, the sound draws others like flies to honey.

  Including me.

  I stop a few yards away, aware of how unwelcome my presence might be. But, like Hannah, I need to see.

 
; The young cop opens the bag, revealing the bones inside, arranged approximately the same way they’d be if the skeleton had been intact. Skull at the top. Ribs in the middle. Long arms resting beside them, the bones still connected by pieces of blackened tendon. The bones are cleaner than when I’d found them, some of their grime having been wiped away in the kitchen. It gives them a bronze-like sheen.

  Hannah studies the remains with intense concentration.

  She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t scream.

  She simply looks and says, “Did you find anything else in there?”

  Another cop steps forward, dressed in civilian clothes and a state police baseball cap.

  “These were in the bag the body was found in,” he says as he holds up several clear evidence bags.

  Inside them are pieces of clothing that time has turned to rags. A scrap of what appears to be plaid flannel. A T-shirt darkened by stains. A pair of panties, the strips of fabric barely clinging to yellowed elastic, and a bra that’s mostly now wire. Chunks of rubber in another bag indicate they had once been a pair of sneakers.

  “It’s her,” Hannah says with a swallow of grief. “It’s Petra.”

  “How can you tell?” Chief Alcott asks.

  Hannah nods at the smallest of the evidence bags.

  Inside, as clear as day, is a gold crucifix.

  JULY 4

  Day 9

  Walt Hibbets’s gold tooth was on full display as he stared openmouthed at the hole in our kitchen ceiling.

  “Snakes did all that?” he said.

  “You should have seen it yesterday,” I replied. “It looked worse then.”

  With the help of Elsa Ditmer, Jess and I had spent the previous afternoon cleaning the kitchen. As Petra babysat Maggie, we shoveled debris, swept floors, scrubbed the table and countertops. We were exhausted by the time we were finished, not to mention dirtier than I think we’d ever been in our lives.

  Now it was time to patch the formidable hole in the ceiling. For that, I enlisted Hibbs, who brought a boy from town to help because the task was too big for just him alone. Together, they moved the kitchen table out of the way and placed a ladder under the hole. Hibbs climbed it until his head and shoulders vanished into the ceiling.

  “Hand me that flashlight,” he said to his helper.

  Light in hand, Hibbs swept the beam around the depths of our ceiling.

  The rest of us watched, our faces raised. Me, Jess, Hibbs’s helper, and Petra Ditmer, who’d ostensibly dropped by to see if we again needed someone to watch Maggie during the cleanup. It was clear that morbid curiosity had drawn her. She hadn’t checked on Maggie once since her arrival.

  I had taken the camera down from the study the day before, snapping a few pictures in case the insurance company needed proof of the damage. That morning, I picked it up and took a shot of Petra and Jess staring at Hibbs on his ladder. Hearing the click of the shutter, Jess looked my way, then at Petra, then back to me. She was about to say something, but Hibbs beat her to it.

  “Well, the good news is that there doesn’t seem to be any other damage,” he announced. “Beams look good. Wiring is fine. Looks like there’s still some nest up here, though.”

  He swept the remnants of the nest onto the floor. Dust mostly, although I also spotted cobwebs, crinkly strands of dried snakeskin, and, most disturbingly, the bones of a mouse.

  “Now that’s strange,” Hibbs said. “There’s something else in here.”

  He descended the ladder holding a tin box that looked to be as old as the house itself. He handed it to Jess, who took it to the kitchen table and used a rag to wipe away the dust.

  “It’s a biscuit tin,” she said, turning it over in her hands. “Looks like it’s from the late 1800s.”

  The tin had seen better days, even before it somehow found its way into our ceiling. A prominent dent marred the lid, and the bottom corners were edged with rust. But the color was nice—dark green accented with golden curlicues.

  “Do you think it’s valuable?” Petra asked.

  “Not really,” Jess said. “My father sold ones just like it in his shop for five bucks a pop.”

  “How do you think it got up there?” I asked.

  “Floorboards, most likely,” Hibbs said. “What room is above this one?”

  I spun in place, trying to pinpoint our exact location within Baneberry Hall. Since the kitchen ran the width of the house, that meant either the great room or the Indigo Room.

  It turned out to be the latter, as Hibbs and I found out when we went upstairs to check. We had been roaming both rooms, tapping the floor with the toes of our shoes, when a section of boards in the Indigo Room made a hollow sound.

  Both of us dropped to our hands and knees by the boards, which were partly covered by an Oriental rug placed in the dead center of the room. Together, Hibbs and I rolled the rug out of the way, revealing a section of boards about four feet long and three feet wide that wasn’t connected to the rest of the floor. We each took an end and lifted. Inside was a clear view to the kitchen, where Jess and Petra remained huddled over the biscuit tin.

  It explained a lot. Not just how the tin got into the ceiling but also how a snake had gotten into the Indigo Room our first day there. It had somehow slithered up through the loose boards.

  Jess, startled to see us leering down at her from the ceiling, said, “Come back down. There’s something inside this tin.”

  By the time Hibbs and I returned to the kitchen, the biscuit tin had been opened and its contents laid out on the table. Four envelopes, turned yellow with time.

  Jess reached into one and removed a sheet of paper folded into thirds. The page made a crackling noise when she smoothed it out. Like the crunch of leaves in autumn.

  “It’s a letter.” She cleared her throat and began to read. “‘My dearest Indigo. I write these words with a heavy heart, having just spoken to your father.’”

  Petra grabbed it from her hands, the paper crinkling. “Ho. Ly. Shit,” she said. “These are love letters.”

  “It looks like they were sent to Indigo Garson,” Jess said.

  “Dearest Indigo,” Petra said, correcting her. “Can I have them?”

  I almost told her no. That I wanted to take a look at them first. I was stopped by Jess, who shot me a warning look, reminding me of the promise I’d made.

  The past is in the past.

  “Pretty please?” Petra said. “I’m, like, obsessed with old stuff like this.”

  “I suppose that’s fine,” I replied, eliciting a satisfied nod from Jess. Still, I couldn’t help but add a caveat. “Let me know if there’s anything of historical significance in them.”

  Petra gave me a wink. “I promise to tell you if I find anything juicy.”

  * * *

  • • •

  That night, I dreamed of old envelopes sitting in front of me. Each one I opened contained a snake that slithered into my hands and curled around my fingers. Yet I kept opening envelopes, praying at least one would be empty. None were. By the time the last envelope had been opened, I was covered in snakes. A wriggling, hissing blanket I couldn’t shake off.

  I woke up in a cold sweat, just in time to catch a familiar sound fill the house.

  Tap.

  I looked to Jess, fast asleep beside me.

  Tap-tap.

  I sat up, listening as the sound made its way up the hallway.

  Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

  A flurry of them flew past our bedroom door.

  Then it was gone, replaced by music, distant but unmistakable.

  “You are sixteen, going on seventeen—”

  I sat up in bed, all memories of that awful dream banished from my mind. All I could think about was that song, playing in spite of the fact I had put both the record player and the albums back in the closet.
/>   “Baby, it’s time to think.”

  What followed felt like a dream. A recurring one that wouldn’t go away no matter how much I wanted it to.

  I got out of bed.

  I traversed the hallway, bare feet on hardwood.

  I climbed the steps to the third floor, rising into a confounding chill emanating from the study.

  The déjà vu continued as I entered the study and saw the record player sitting on the desk, looking as though I had never moved it.

  “Better beware, be canny and careful—”

  I plucked the needle from the album and turned off the record player. I then stood there, completely still, wondering if it really was a dream and, if so, when it would finally end.

  Twelve

  The sign outside the Two Pines Motor Lodge is already aglow when I pull into the parking lot, its neon trees casting a sickly green light that spreads across the asphalt like moss. When I enter the motel office, the clerk doesn’t look up from her magazine. A blessing, considering I’m sweaty, disheveled, and still coated with dust.

  “A room is fifty a night,” she says.

  I dig out my wallet and place two twenties and a ten on the front desk. I assume this isn’t the kind of place that requires a credit card. Proving me correct, the clerk takes the cash, grabs a key from the rack on the wall next to her, and slides it toward me.

  “You’ll be in room four,” she says, still not making eye contact. “Vending machines are at the other end of the building. Checkout is at noon.”

  I take the key, and a puff of dirt rises from my sleeve. Because the house was still crawling with cops when I left, I have no fresh change of clothes. Just a bag of travel-size sundries I bought at a convenience store on the way here.

  “Um, are there any laundry facilities here?”

  “Sorry, no.” The clerk finally looks at me, her expression slanted and bewildered. “But if you rinse all that in the sink now, it might be dry by morning. If not, there’s a hair dryer attached to the wall.”