by D. M. Pulley
“You are quite right, I’m sure. I will go. I just . . . I thought you ought to know.” Ninny hung her head and began her limping shuffle toward the street. It had been a mistake to come. It didn’t solve a thing. She had nothing to offer the dead or the living.
As she gazed up at the house one last time, the feeling of it gazing back stopped Ninny in her tracks. Fieldstones lined the chimney caps and the flower beds. Sandstones held the corners of the foundation, the same size and shape as the ones the Believers had used to build the millhouse and the foundations of the school.
“They took the stones,” she whispered to herself.
“Excuse me?” Georgina demanded. She’d been following the old woman out to the driveway.
Ninny cleared her throat. “Your builder. Where did they get the stones?” The image of three headstones formed in her head. Mother and Child, one read.
“Why, I have no idea.” Georgina cowered under the chimney caps and windowsills as though they might fall on her head. “Why on earth do you ask?”
“Perhaps it is nothing.” Ninny shook her head and kept limping down the driveway.
“Wait!” Georgina called after her, her peace of mind utterly upended.
Ninny stopped walking.
“What is your name?”
“Ninny Anne Boyd. Forgive me for disturbing you.”
“Mrs. Boyd, I’m Georgina Rawlings. Please forgive my rudeness. You just gave me quite a shock. I want to ask my husband about what you said. How can we reach you?” Georgina stood like a wraith in the driveway, nearly translucent.
The old woman gave the name of a rooming house.
Georgina made a mental note of it, not certain whether to thank the woman for her time. Proper etiquette for the circumstances failed her.
Ninny stopped at the sidewalk and gazed up once more at the towering mansion behind the trees. An electric light burned in the attic window, casting a yellow glow onto the reflection of the midday sky.
Little Walter, having escaped his reading lesson for the day, pressed his nose to the glass and waved.
59
The Spielman Family
August 12, 2018
“Hunter?” Margot whispered from the doorway.
The clock by his bedside table read 3:15 a.m. She’d crept into the house a few minutes earlier, her eyes black with smudged mascara and red from crying. She sank onto the edge of his bed in the dark, not daring to turn on the light, not wanting him to see what the last few hours had done to her.
The boy stirred from a heavy sleep.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” She patted him on the arm.
“Mom?” He sat up and studied the shape of her in the dark. “You’re back. What time is it?”
“It’s late. Don’t get up. I just wanted you to know I made it home. I’m so sorry, honey. I’m so sorry for everything that happened.” She swallowed to keep her voice from cracking. “Your father is going to be fine. I talked to the doctor, and he’s okay.”
“Okay. That’s good.” And it was, but there were no words for what he felt toward his father. His cheek was swollen. He had bruises on his shoulders from the man’s grip.
A small figure lay next to Hunter in the bed, listening but not moving. Margot noted the shape of a girl there under the covers but said nothing. “I didn’t want you to worry. Everything is going to be alright. I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but we’ll figure it out. Go back to sleep, honey. We’ll talk in the morning.”
“Okay.” Hunter sank back down to his pillow, his arms stiff and sore from hours of digging in the backyard. He’d have to explain it all in the morning. “Hey, Mom?”
Margot stopped in the doorway. “Yes, sweetie?”
“It wasn’t me, you know. Those drugs you found. It wasn’t me.”
“I know it, Hunter. I know. You’re a good kid. I really don’t know what I would’ve done if anything had happened to you.” She sniffed and collected herself. “Now, go back to bed.”
Hunter rolled over, and Ava curled into the crook of his arm. Neither of them said a word as his mother staggered away and down the hall. He pressed his lips to the back of her neck. She stiffened but made herself kiss his arm back. Hunter is a good kid, she told herself. He’s nothing like him.
As Hunter drifted back to sleep, Ava lay there petrified. The boy’s tender affections unearthed so many feelings she needed to keep buried. The bone Hunter pulled from the ground earlier that night resurfaced in her mind. Dead. He’s really dead. I’ll never see him or talk to him or hold him again. Her lifeless eyes stared blindly into the dark, listening to the heartbreaking silence of the house.
Margot collapsed onto her bed without bothering to undress or close the door. She lay there catatonic, trying to not think and to think at the same time. What would they do? Where would they go?
A soft mewing sound caught her midthought. She bolted upright and flipped on the bedside lamp to see a white cat curled on the upholstered bench at the end of the bed. The hand clutching her chest dropped, and she slowly exhaled.
“Kitty, you scared me.”
Crawling over the duvet, she lifted the cat up onto her lap and held it until her blood pressure had fallen to an almost normal level. “Who let you in here, huh?”
The feral cat just fixed her with its sphinx eyes.
Margot chuckled and buried her face in its fur. “Well, I’m glad you’re here, sweetie. I’m really, really glad.”
For the rest of the night, the house stood still, and the attic lights stayed dark.
60
Late the next morning, Hunter woke to an empty bed.
He sat up and felt the spot where Ava had been sleeping. It was cold. He surveyed the room, hoping to see her sitting in his computer chair or reading the closet walls. His gerbils, Samwise and Frodo, shuffled through one of the long plastic tubes toward Base Camp 1.
“Where did she go?” he asked them.
Frodo just twitched his nose.
Hunter ran a hand through his rumpled hair and grimaced at the pain in his shoulders. His fingernails were still black with dirt. He fell back against his pillow as the consequences of the previous night hit him all over again. He’d have to explain what he’d done to the backyard. He’d have to call the police about the bones he’d found. He shuddered and rolled under the covers.
Where did she go?
His cell phone pinged with a new message. At first, he couldn’t bring himself to look. He just lay there, wishing sleep would take him far from that moment, from that house, from that life. The cell phone pinged again.
He grabbed the phone and scrolled through the messages. One of them made him sit up and dial the phone.
“Good morning. Golden Heart Ranch,” a voice said over the speaker.
“Good morning.” Hunter cleared his throat and head. “Can I speak to Maurice in long-term care?”
“I’ll put you through.”
Digital music filled the silence.
Hunter climbed out of bed and woke up his computer. The article about Toby Turner’s death filled his screen. He glanced back at his empty bed and skimmed the words again. Toby had been found in an abandoned car in a Cleveland Metropark by the lake. He was described only as a runaway. The paper had published Toby’s last school picture. A smiling twelve-year-old boy gazed out from his computer screen. He looked no different than any other boy in the yearbook Hunter had stolen from the library. From the outside, no one would suspect a thing.
Hunter’s heart broke for Ava all over again.
“This is Maurice,” a musical voice chimed from his phone.
“Yeah. Hi. This is Hunter Spielman. You left me a message.”
“Yes, Hunter. How are you doing this fine, fine day?”
Hunter minimized the news clipping on his screen and tried to shake Toby’s hopeful smile from his head. “Okay, I guess. How’s Benny?”
“Well, he is just beside himself! He cannot wait to talk to you! It’s gonna take us a few mi
nutes to get it set up. Do you Skype?”
“Uh, yeah. I can.”
“Give me your email address, and I’ll patch in a link to you. He can’t really talk due to his disability, but once we got him his modified keyboard, we could not shut him up!”
Ten minutes later, the face of a scruffy older man appeared on Hunter’s screen. Scars drew deep lines over his forehead and down one cheek. At fifty-two years old, his spiky hair had gone gray, as had the stubble on his chin, but Benny’s eyes lit up like a five-year-old’s at the sight of Hunter on his screen. Benny waved at him with a slightly curled hand and a crooked grin.
Hunter waved back. “Hi, Benny!”
Gripping a pencil in his hard fist, Benny began typing on an oversize keyboard.
Ben33: Hello
Ben33: How are you?
“Okay. How are you?”
Ben33: Happy to see a new face. What is your name?
“My name is Hunter. Hunter Spielman.”
Benny’s eyes drifted to the ceiling as he checked his memory for any such name.
“Yeah. You don’t know me. My family moved into your old house on Lee Road. I think I’m in your old bedroom.” Hunter picked up the webcam and gave Benny a sweeping view of the room. Then he opened the closet door and scanned the writing on the walls, lingering on the words DeAD GiRL.
When Hunter sat back down, the older man had stopped smiling. His face screwed into a spasm, and his fists lifted off his keyboard. A nurse rushed to his side and talked in his ear a moment. Benny shook him off. No. No. After a few moments collecting himself, Benny slowly uncurled his arm and started typing with his pencil again.
Ben33: Benny didn’t do it. But I saw. I saw her through the window.
“What did you see, Benny?”
61
The Klussman Family
September 15, 1990
He wasn’t supposed to be awake.
Benny knew it the moment he looked at the clock. It was past midnight, and the house stood silent. The only sound was the ticking of the clock in the hallway—a heartbeat that never matched his own no matter how hard he tried. Under the ticking, he could hear the unwinding of a spring, the unevenness of the motion of the second hand. Every other second hung a synapse longer than it should before the wheel turned. There was a small burr in the gears. The unevenness grated on his nerves, but he didn’t know what he would do without it. The tick tack of it comforted him like the sound of his own breathing in his ears.
The downward pull of the sedative his mother had given him had let go, and he felt his body resurfacing from the depths of the sea back onto his bed. He sat up. Yellow light from the streetlamps streamed in through his window.
The nighttime world was his favorite world. Quiet. Slow. Benny’s body worked better at night with no one watching. His muscles stayed smooth and even. He was more himself at night. The bright, blinding lights and deafening sounds of daytime pinned him against the wall of his mind, a squirming insect. The watcher did more than helplessly whisper in his ear at night. Alone in the dark, he was the watcher and the watcher was him.
Benny sat up and listened to the clock in the hall and, under it, the creak of the wooden bones of the house, straining to hold up the ceiling above him and the floor beneath him.
Careful in the silence, he stood up and went to his desk. Papers had been taped down onto the wood for him to draw and write. Under his mother’s pained watch, he could hardly hold the pencil. Let’s try again. This is an A, Benny. A is for apple. He wanted so much to do it correctly that he’d break the pencil in his hand. His failures registered in the darkening flecks of her irises. Hopeless. But she’d smile at him. That’s okay, sweetie. Let’s try again.
It was better when she read. On a good day, lessons abandoned on the desk, she’d sit next to him with a book and read him the pages, hoping against hope that he was following along as her finger traced the sentences set in small, even typeface. He was indeed following her words and reading and rereading the ones that came before and after. Reading at a pace far faster than hers. He wanted to show her. He wanted her to know that he could do it, but no words would come from his mouth except a barbaric groan that convinced her he was in pain. She would put the book down and gaze at him with that smothering concern and anguish that made him want to beat his brain against the wall. And sometimes he did.
She hadn’t read to him in weeks.
Benny grabbed a pencil from the desk and scanned the papers covered in torn letters. The paper was always too thin to hold up for long. Chalkboards were better, but he couldn’t bear the shrieking, and the chalk always broke in his hand. He turned away from his tortured markings to his closet door. She’d get angry if he wrote on the walls. He knew this, so he wrote where she wouldn’t see.
Inside his closet, there was nothing but a few hanging garments he would never wear. All his regular clothes were free of buttons and zippers and snaps and anything that could be swallowed or used to scratch or cut or maim. A dress shirt and pants hung there, three sizes too small. There were outgrown shoes with no laces in a pile on the bottom; each new size had brought his mother new despair. His mother hadn’t opened the closet in months.
He pushed aside the sparse items and clicked on the bare light bulb by awkwardly pulling its string. He liked the buzz of the filament. He liked the yellow light hanging over him like a tiny sun. It belonged to him, unlike the sun outside that reeled over the sky, too bright, too loud, making him shudder as he waited for it to fall. Sitting on the closet floor, he wrote in a crooked hand:
SePteMBeR 14 1990:
two LADieS MissiNG toDAy.
oNe HAt. two Boys.
18 cARs.
soMetHiNG is wRoNG
It felt better getting the words out of his head. Putting his worries onto his walls got them all the way out where he could see them. He scanned his notes from the last month, searching for a pattern. The green car had been missing for four days in a row. It had reappeared looking cleaner, and he decided that it must’ve been taken to the shop, like Bill’s car the month before. He didn’t know exactly what a shop was, but Bill had said his Toyota was “like new” when they were done. The green car looked like new too.
The lady with the flowered purse had missed the bus seven times in the last month. He worried she might be sick. His own mother had left for eight days once the year before. Bill and the night nurse, Faye, had said she was sick, but she’d be better soon. No one had said the word hospital, but he knew his mother wasn’t home. The watcher could tell by the sound of the floor, the smell of the air, and the tilt of the walls that she was gone. His muscles had knotted with worry she’d never come back. They’d had to give him the needle every day until she returned home.
Benny scanned the notes again, comforted by the proof that he existed. A part of him wanted to show her, wanted her to find his notes and see what he could do, but the other part was terrified. The watcher could see it gave her some comfort to believe he couldn’t really feel or really know what was happening to him. In a way, thinking he was still a baby inside made her happier. She could hold a baby. She could rock a baby. She could love a baby.
Benny clicked off his light and slid his feet silently and slowly along the floorboards to his window. Outside, Lee Road stretched out into the night in both directions, empty. The streetlights blinked red at the South Woodland intersection. Benny counted the intervals between the lights and the ticking of his clock. When they converged, a jolt of satisfaction tightened his fists. Fifteen cycles until the patterns intersected. He counted off again.
A movement down the street caught his eye. A bicycle. Benny pressed his nose against the windowpane and watched, mesmerized, as the thin line of the ten-speed traced a long sine wave along the sidewalk, weaving and gliding. Then it stopped.
Benny jerked back from the window.
A figure got off the bike. It was the shape of a girl with a long ponytail. In the streetlamp he could see her red sweater and brown hair.
Pretty. Like so many girls he’d seen walk past in packs and sometimes alone. The alone ones worried him. Where are her friends? Where is her mother? Girls never walked under his window alone at night. Almost never.
He squinted at her through the glass. It had been months since he’d seen her. Screwing up his face, he strained to remember the date. It had been spring. April fourth. She’d ridden her bike up the driveway of the house across the street past midnight; the memory of it etched his forehead. It had upset him then. His mother had come running into his room to find him pounding on the windowpane. He’d worried for several nights that spring that the girl was out there when he was sleeping, with only the empty windows keeping the watch.
Aghast, Benny watched her guide the bike into the six-foot-high hedge of bushes across the street, a bigger house looming darkly behind its trees. She reappeared on the sidewalk without the bike. That’s not right. He scowled, fists clenching. Bikes don’t go in bushes. Bikes don’t go in bushes. Bikes d—
A tall figure appeared on the sidewalk in front of her. It was a man from the size of it. Tall. Thick. Dark hair. Big jacket. He’d come from the driveway. She seemed startled to see him, her body shrinking and backing away. The man grabbed the back of her neck. A high-pitched scream launched Benny from his chair.
He stumbled back against his bed, incoherent thoughts flashing in his eyes. Bike. Bushes. Girl. Bad Benny! He shouldn’t have been watching. He shook his head back and forth, nearly wrenching himself into a knot. Another muffled scream hit his windows. His eyes swelled in his head. He forced himself upright. The watcher knew that grown-ups should do something. The grown-ups should call for help. He waited a moment for the sound of his mother running, for the explosion of sirens that would make him scream as they pummeled his ears, but he heard nothing but the house, aching under its own weight.
Help us! Someone, please!
He lurched up and ran stiffly to his door. Frannie never locked it overnight. It was a fire hazard, and she knew it. He pushed through it and lurched down the hallway and then the front steps, knees locking and unlocking in awkward cadence as the screams in his head grew louder.