The Girl on the Stairs

by V. J. Chambers

  Patrick started up the steps towards the front door, which was padlocked.

  Sam went after him. “It looks locked up.”

  “Yeah, they try to keep people out,” said Patrick. “Kids come out here at night to go through the murder house. They throw parties, drink beer. But there’s a way in through the basement if you want to go in.”

  Sam held up a finger, waiting. He tried to picture this house the way it would have been years ago, cheery and well-kept. When Nicholas Todd came, it would have been dark. Where had he parked his car? In front of the house? Or further away? Had he walked in?

  They knew that Todd had come in the front door, using the key from the wind chime.

  Sam walked up to the front door. The wind chime was gone, but he tried to picture it hanging near the entrance. He imagined Todd finding the key, opening the door.

  “Hey,” said Patrick. “I can’t stay long. I’ve got to get to work soon.”

  “Right, sorry.” Sam turned from the door and followed Patrick.

  Patrick led him around to the back of the house. Here, the basement was exposed, concrete blocks covered with dingy white paint. There was a door, its windows boarded over. Patrick pulled aside one of the boards and reached inside. He unlocked the door and opened it.

  Patrick gestured. “After you.”

  Sam hesitated.

  Patrick smirked. “You’re not scared, are you?”

  Sam laughed. “No.” He entered the house.

  It was pitch black inside the basement.

  He heard Patrick close the door behind him. A flashlight clicked on, illuminating a tiny circle of light.

  Patrick shone the light around the basement, revealing more old beer cans, more graffiti, and the remains of some toys. A bicycle with no wheels. An old doll with its arms ripped off. “So,” said Patrick, “you still think that Nick was a bastard who beat Lola up or something?”

  Sam looked at him sharply. “I don’t think I said anything about Nick beating her. Why would you put it like that?”

  Patrick handed him the flashlight. “Whatever, man. I got you in. Look around, okay? I’m going to go to work.”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” said Sam.

  “You’re going to do what you’re going to do,” said Patrick. “I told you what I could. You want to believe that bitch, then I can’t stop you.”

  “I don’t know what I believe,” said Sam.

  Patrick opened the basement door. “Hope you figure it out.”

  “Me too.”

  “Hey, uh, lock the door on your way out?”

  “Sure,” said Sam. “You want me to bring you your flashlight back?”

  “Nah, it was sitting inside the door. Someone else must have left it here.” Patrick disappeared, shutting Sam up in the basement.

  Sam stood his ground, swinging the light of the flashlight around.

  There wasn’t much to see down here. He read a couple other pieces of graffiti, but they were nothing interesting. Kathi loves Jimmy 4-ever and always. Jones wuz here.

  He settled the flashlight over the steps and started for them.

  But as he moved, he heard a noise above him. The floorboards creaked.

  He stopped short.

  It could have been an animal, of course. But it didn’t sound like one. Animals, at least ones that could get into abandoned houses, were usually small creatures. They moved on tiny legs, skittering over floors.

  The sound upstairs had been slow. Slow and heavy.

  He waited to see if he heard it again.

  At first, there was nothing. Then, he heard movement again.

  It definitely sounded like footsteps. Someone was moving around upstairs.

  A squatter? A kid here to mark the place with more graffiti?

  Or… a ghost?

  He swallowed.

  Sam didn’t believe in shit like that. He didn’t think that dead people moved around in places where they’d been killed.

  He shone the flashlight up on the ceiling, as if he could see through to the next level. Of course, he could only see insulation, pink like cotton candy, hanging down from the slats above.

  He took a deep breath.

  He was going to have to go upstairs and investigate.

  If it was a squatter or a kid, he’d scare them off. He could act official, make them believe that he belonged there and that they didn’t.

  And that’s all it would be.

  There wouldn’t be anything else up there. Couldn’t be.

  He stepped on the first of the steps and began his ascent.

  The stairs groaned under his weight.

  Sam heard the footsteps again. It sounded like they were moving across the floor to the basement door.

  He couldn’t help it. He pictured Paula Ward, her body riddled with stab wounds, her skull bashed in where Todd had taken a baseball bat to her. She was dragging herself across the floor, her mouth slack, her eyes glassy and dull.

  Sam shook himself.

  The door above him opened.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sam yelled. He started to fall backwards on the steps, and he grabbed onto the railing to keep himself upright.

  “Sam?”

  He looked up to the top of the steps. Lola was standing there.

  He let out a noisy, relieved sigh. “Jesus Christ, you scared me to death. What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here?” she said. “This is my house. What are you doing here?”

  “Research.” He bounded up the rest of the stairs, his flashlight bobbing crazily against the walls.

  Lola had a flashlight too.

  When he got to the top of the steps, he emerged into the kitchen. It had been gutted—there were only bare spots where the stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher had been. The cabinets overhead were covered in more graffiti. The sink’s faucet gleamed dim in the flashlight.

  “They fucked it all up,” said Lola.

  “Yeah,” said Sam quietly.

  She wandered out of the kitchen. Sam went after her.

  They went into an empty room. It must have been the living room, but there was no carpet anymore, just bare wood on the floor.

  Lola pointed her flashlight at a dark stain in the corner, near the stairs. “That was where he did it to my dad.”

  Sam grimaced. That stain was blood?

  She tracked her flashlight up the stairs. “He got my mom up there. She was coming down the stairs, but Dad was yelling at her not to. He was screaming, ‘Paula, don’t come down here! Paula, get Lola and run!’”

  Sam shivered at the thought of it. He imagined someone coming into the house when he and Daphne were sleeping. He imagined not being able to stop the intruder, struggling to fight the man off, all the while knowing his wife wasn’t safe. That he wasn’t protecting her.

  They were both quiet.

  Then Lola’s voice. “I guess you want me to tell you about it.”

  “Yes,” he said, but his throat had closed up and his voice came out like a croak.

  “Come on,” said Lola. She crossed the room and went up the steps, carefully maneuvering around the stain.

  Sam couldn’t move for several seconds. And then he followed her.

  Lola was going back down the hallway. There was still carpet here on the second level. It was a periwinkle blue color, but it was stained, and there was more trash everywhere. Broken bottles, crushed cans, crumpled fast food wrappers.

  Lola went to the end of the hallway and opened the door there. “This was my bedroom.”

  The room was empty, but it was painted pink. There was a wallpaper runner around the center, pretty pale flowers.

  She shone her flashlight around. “I hated that it was still pink. I covered everything with posters of bands I liked and stuff. I had a black light in one of my lamps. I used to turn that on and lie on my bed and pretend that the world was all that color. I thought I was so miserable here.”

  Sam didn’t respond.

  Lo
la went over to the closet and threw it open. There were things inside. More toys. Dolls tumbled out. Fake plastic food.

  Lola kicked it. “I never took anything out of here.” She turned to Sam. “People must have stolen it.”

  “You own the house?”

  She nodded. “It wouldn’t sell. I could have used the money, but it never sold. Eventually, I just gave up.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, I was in here when it started. I was asleep. It was a Sunday night, and I was supposed to go to school in the morning. I hadn’t talked to Nick in days because I was grounded and I couldn’t use the phone or get on the Internet. I could only use the school Internet to get in touch with him. I had no idea he was coming here.” She turned to Sam. “Really. No idea. You have to believe that.”

  “I do,” he said. He did. At that moment, he did.

  “Well,” she said. “I woke up when I heard my dad yelling. At first I was scared, and I didn’t do anything. I pulled the covers over my head, and I listened. He was yelling, and things were breaking, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything.

  “But then he started yelling for my mom to run, to get me and run. And the door opened to my bedroom. And my mother was there. She was in her nightgown, and she grabbed me and dragged me out of bed. She was scared too. I could tell. She was saying that we needed to get a phone, we needed to call the police. But there wasn’t a phone upstairs. Not a landline phone. And my parents had taken my cell phone, and I guess she didn’t know where hers was. I don’t know. I don’t know why no one called. Someone should have, because Nick didn’t even think about that happening. He didn’t plan anything at all. He just ran in here and did it.”

  Lola went back into the hallway. “So, my mom dragged me out here. But there was nowhere to go. My dad was yelling that we should run, but we were stuck upstairs. There was nowhere to run. So, my mom and I stood up at the top of the steps and… and we watched.

  “That was when I figured out that it was Nick,” she said. “Before I didn’t know, but then I saw him. He had a baseball bat that he brought with him, but he’d gotten a knife from our kitchen. The baseball bat was on the floor. He was stabbing my dad over and over and over again.

  “But my dad wouldn’t die. He was still screaming. He was still fighting. It went on for a really long time. And I didn’t know what to do. I should have said something or done something, but I didn’t. I didn’t yell out to Nick to stop. I didn’t run down there and try to pull him off. I don’t know if it would have made any difference, but I didn’t even try.

  “Of course, my mom didn’t either. She stood up there and cried and cried and yelled my dad’s name. But she didn’t try to stop it either.” Lola frowned. “No. No, I guess that’s not right. She stood there for a while. She was holding onto me really tightly. Her fingers were digging into me. And then she let out this kind of strange noise—this yelling, throaty thing—and she flung herself down the stairs at Nick.

  “Nick stopped doing what he was doing to my dad, and he picked up the baseball bat. He went up the steps after her, and he raised it over his head, and then…”

  It was quiet.

  Sam stared down at the dark stains on the steps.

  Lola took a deep breath. “But I still didn’t do anything. I stood there. I watched.” She moved her flashlight, illuminating the steps, then the hallway, then back to the steps. “She twitched a little bit. My mom. Even though her head was all messed up. Then she stopped. I was still frozen. Staring down at all of it.

  “Nick had blood all over him. It was on his face, and in his hair. He was wearing this gray hoodie, and he’d made these holes in the bottom of it so that he could put his thumbs through them. So it went down all the way over his hands. Only the tips of his fingers stuck out. And the hoodie was all bloody. The sleeves were bloody. He dragged his bloody sleeve over the wall.” Lola shone her flashlight.

  Sam could see a faint dark streak on the wall.

  “He came the rest of the way up the stairs to me. He was grinning, but it wasn’t a grin exactly, it was kind of… His teeth… His eyes… And he came to me, and he said, ‘I did it for you, baby.’ Like he expected me to be proud.”

  Sam let out a breath. It echoed in the stairway.

  *

  There were things Sam should have asked Lola. He should have asked her why she didn’t call the police then. He should have asked how Nick got her to leave with him. Was she so numb and in shock that she let him take her without a fight, or did he have to subdue her somehow, force her out of the house?

  But he knew he couldn’t ask her those questions then.

  It would have been rude and disrespectful.

  Now, back in his hotel room, alone, though, he wondered. What happened after that?

  And he wondered about the way that Lola had told him the story. No emotion. He supposed that could have been because she couldn’t talk about it unless she turned off her feelings. Maybe she’d been so horrified while it was happening that she hadn’t been able to feel anything right then. Maybe talking about it put her back in that place.

  Or maybe she was so calm and blank because she was making the whole thing up. Maybe she was playing him.

  Maybe that wasn’t how things had happened at all.

  He had the transcript of Todd talking to the undercover cop, which he’d found on the Internet. In it, Todd explained everything he’d done, not seeming to notice that his new cell buddy was asking really leading questions.

  He hadn’t recorded Lola’s detailing of the murder, and he could kick himself for that. But it had seemed like it would have been rude to pull out the recorder. Still, the minute he’d gotten back here, while it was all fresh in his mind, he’d written it down. He was pretty sure he had it fairly accurate.

  So now he was sprawled on his bed in the hotel room, checking Todd’s testimony against what Lola had said. Looking for glaring inconsistencies.

  Todd’s explanation started a little earlier in the evening. He explained how he’d gotten the key and had entered the house, carrying a baseball bat. He talked about going into the kitchen to get a knife.

  He said that it had been his plan to go upstairs and kill both of the Wards in their sleep, but that he must have been too loud, because Eric Ward woke up and came down the stairs.

  He and Eric had struggled. Todd reported being worried that he wouldn’t be able to kill the older man, who’d put up quite a fight. He said that he’d started stabbing like crazy, that he’d been in a frenzy, because he’d actually been afraid for his own life. “I mean, it was kind of self-defense, you know?”

  No, it specifically doesn’t work that way, buddy, Sam thought grimly. Nice try, though. Self-defense didn’t apply when you put your own life in danger by initiating a crime, which Todd had done. He’d come into that house armed, with the express purpose of killing the Wards.

  When he thought of the silent, abandoned house, Sam felt cold all over.

  Anyway, what Todd and Lola said seemed to be matching up thus far. They agreed on the order in which Todd had killed the Wards and the positioning of the bodies. But it was hard to deny that, what with the big blood stains in the house.

  But Todd said that after it was over, he’d started to feel kind of sick. “I had a lot to drink before I did it,” he’d told the cop. According to Todd, he’d gone into the bathroom upstairs and vomited. When he came out, Lola was on the steps, sitting next to her mother, staring at the body with wonder on her face.

  According to Todd, she’d looked up at him and said, “I can’t believe you did this for me, baby.”

  There weren’t enough differences in the story to assume that either of them were telling big lies.

  And even the similarity of the quote they both attributed to the other seemed to point to the idea that someone had said it.

  But which one?

  Todd maintained that Lola had seemed grateful for his actions, that she’d wanted him to kill her parents, and that she had been glad he had. “She onl
y wished I would have warned her, because I kind of did it as a surprise. She said it could have been planned out better.”

  Sam thought back to Lola going on about how Todd hadn’t planned anything. Why had she felt the need to point that out? Was that something that a grieving victim would think to say? Sam wasn’t sure. He went back to Todd’s account.

  Todd was shocked when Lola ran away from him the first chance she got. He didn’t understand it. At first, he claimed he thought it was all part of some master plan on the part of Lola. He was still in love with her, and he said that he’d covered up any part she might have had in the murders, taking full responsibility. But when he realized that Lola was more than willing to go along with his guilt, that she was in fact laying the crimes all at his feet, that she wasn’t even going to visit him in prison, well… That was when he knew she’d betrayed him. At the time of the transcript, he said he hadn’t told the police yet, but that he was going to. He was going to be completely open about how involved Lola had been.

  Sam got up from the bed and started to pace. The thing that bothered him the most was that he felt like Todd’s version of things made sense. On the other hand, Lola’s version also made sense. There was no clear way to catch either of them in a lie.

  If Lola had asked Todd to kill her parents, but Todd hadn’t told her when he was going to do it, then she still would have been shocked when it happened.

  Of course, it was possible that they were both telling the truth. Maybe Lola’s description of her offhand comment about not being able to have sex until her parents were dead was all that she’d said on the subject. Maybe Todd had been warped enough to think that she actually wanted them dead. Maybe the discrepancies were all in interpretation.

  But there were things that they disagreed on. Todd claimed he’d had sex with Lola. After the murders, in fact. Lola claimed she wouldn’t let him touch her after what he’d done.

  Both of those stories couldn’t be true.

  Sam flopped back on the bed. His brain hurt. He grabbed the remote and flipped on the television. He’d indulge in some mindless entertainment for an hour or so. Maybe he could come back to the problem fresh.