If You Ever Tell

by Carlene Thompson

  Teresa remembered that the next-door neighbors—the ones who’d made the 911 call the night of the murders—had put up their house for sale two months after the murders. Unlike the Farr house, theirs had sold in less than a year.

  “My husband told me to mind my own business, but I thought I should tell someone I’ve seen lights on in this house the last two nights in a row. Not bright lights—soft, glowing lights. Really just one light moving from room to room upstairs. It doesn’t go fast like someone is carrying a flashlight and looking for something. It stays in a room for up to an hour. But I never see a car come or go and I don’t see anyone come into the house or leave. Last night I stayed up until three o’clock watching. My husband said if it happened again tonight, then I could call the realty company and let them handle it. He’s a great believer in me not getting involved.”

  Fear whispered at the back of Teri’s mind. A soft light glowing through the upstairs windows? The last two nights? A real estate agent wouldn’t be showing the house in the wee hours, and people wouldn’t linger for nearly an hour in each room. This was beyond odd—it was definitely a sign of trouble, even if someone was just prowling around inside the house out of curiosity. No one should have a key to the house except Kent, Teresa, and the realty company.

  “You probably think I’m exaggerating or I just imagined something, but I know what I saw,” the woman said defensively, as if Teri had argued with her. “I have insomnia and I’m up almost every night until three or four in the morning. My husband says I’ll just die from getting so little sleep, but I can’t help it.

  “Anyway, while I’m up at night, I spend most of my time looking out of my windows,” the woman said confidentially. “I have to say most people would be shocked if they saw all the peculiar things that happen on this whole street! I’ve seen the strangest comings and goings, midnight assignations, people carrying odd things into their houses under the cover of darkness. It’s true! Oh, the stories I could tell! But I’m not going to tell you everything. I just want you to know about your house. The rest I’ll keep to myself for a while—for the sake of safety, you understand.”

  Abruptly, Teri felt her fear dissolving as the woman turned and skittered back across the lawn, then stealthily opened her front door and darted inside as if she were in imminent danger. She was sleep-deprived and paranoid at the very least, Teresa thought. The poor thing sat up nights thinking she saw all kinds of suspicious activities on this street that to Teresa’s knowledge had only seen violence once. The woman had certainly heard about the Farr murders—she definitely knew who Teresa was—and no doubt spent many nights creating fantasies about the house next door.

  Teri shook her head as if clearing it of the uneasiness the woman had generated and walked purposefully up the two porch steps. She set down her boxes, put her key in the lock, swung open the front door, and stepped inside.

  For a moment, Teresa felt overwhelmed by a sense of intrusion, as if she were violating the house’s solitude. She had a flashing thought that if it could, the house would physically eject her, sending her sprawling back onto the lawn. She knew the idea was ludicrous, but the sensation lingered, causing her to stand rigid and breathless just inside the doorway, fighting the instinct to run to her car, drive away as fast as she could, and never look back.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, telling herself to calm down, to think rationally and get control of herself. This was just a house—an inanimate structure of wood and brick with no soul and no memory. She was the one who felt she didn’t belong here, not the house. The house felt nothing, and the memory of what happened that awful night eight years ago was hers.

  But as Teresa took two more steps into the house, she was sure that even after eight years the aura of fear, violence, and death lingered. She stood in the foyer beneath the sparkling crystal chandelier and looked at the big grandfather clock with its raised brass numerals, image of the moon phase, and beveled glass front. She remembered it tolling three times as she crept through the house that awful night, finding the bodies of Hugh and Wendy, and luckily interrupting the killer before he got a chance to finish off Celeste. Perhaps it would be natural if for her the clock symbolized everything terrible that had happened that night, but she’d loved it too long not to want it now. She definitely wanted it moved to her house tomorrow.

  Teresa’s gaze traveled to her left. Beyond the arched doorway, the living room stretched large and cool with its dove gray carpet, soft gold and rose tapestry-covered antique sofa and wing chairs, shining walnut tables, and the big fireplace topped by a wide marble mantle. Wendy had wanted to refurnish this room as well as the master bedroom, but Hugh had forbidden it, insisting that the room looked “classy” even if Marielle had been its decorator. If they had lived, Wendy would have eventually gotten her way, Teresa thought.

  Teri looked away from the living room. If anything of Marielle’s was left in the house, Teresa knew she wouldn’t find it on the first floor. Resolutely, she picked up her boxes from the porch and carried them inside. She couldn’t force herself to close the front door, though, and shut out the warmth and comfort of an ordinary sunny July day. It would be like shutting herself into a family crypt, she thought, and shivered. The door would stay open a couple of feet, she decided, even if a few flies made their way into the house. She wouldn’t have to worry about them—she would be leaving as soon as possible.

  Teresa began climbing the stairs to the bedrooms. When she was halfway up the staircase, her mind filled with the image of a figure dressed in black gliding down the stairs. Roscoe Lee Byrnes didn’t look like he was capable of gliding. Thinking of his bulky frame, overly large head, and fat hands, she could only picture him clumping his way through life.

  But Byrnes couldn’t be as slow and clumsy as he looked, she reminded herself. He’d committed all of his murders in houses he’d entered so quietly and swiftly he’d been able to take at least twenty people by surprise. Twenty-two people if he truly had killed her father and Wendy.

  When Teresa reached the top of the stairs, she once again stood still, not certain which bedroom she could bear to enter first. Her own, she decided. No one had been murdered or injured there. For some unknown reason, she had been spared—spared to be suspected of attacking everyone else in the house.

  She walked into the bedroom she’d abandoned eight years ago. The day after the murders, she had come back with Carmen to gather up some clothes and toiletries. She’d felt dazed and had blundered around the room, not sure what she needed, opening and closing drawers, staring blindly into her closet, until Carmen had taken over and packed enough to get her through the next couple of weeks.

  After the arrest of Byrnes, when Carmen had invited her to stay with her until she left for college in September, she and Carmen had visited the house once more to collect the rest of Teresa’s belongings. She had not been in the house since then, and her room looked almost the same with its cherrywood dresser, chest of drawers, and nightstand, light green bedspread, and a couple of rock band posters that clashed badly with the framed Degas prints her mother had chosen. Teri couldn’t imagine herself ever having loved this room or found it a safe haven after her father had married Wendy. It now seemed like a room she’d merely seen in a magazine—a place she remembered but that aroused no emotion in her.

  Her father and Wendy’s bedroom was another matter. Teresa stood in the doorway and stared at the bed where the couple had been stabbed so many times that not only the bedding and mattress had to be thrown away, but even the carpet—that horrible hot pink carpet—had to be removed and destroyed. After the house had been released as a crime scene and Aunt Beulah had claimed she wanted nothing to do with a house where murders had been committed, both Teresa and Kent had asked Carmen to help them, and the first thing she had done was hire a cleaning company and order them to “pull out all the stops” when it came to washing away traces of that horrible night. No detergents or special cleaning solutions could remove all the bl
oodstains, though. The wallpaper had been stripped and the walls painted an innocuous eggshell white.

  But Teresa imagined she could still detect the coppery scent of blood—so much blood—that she’d smelled the night she’d slowly entered this room and put her hand on what was left of Wendy’s abdomen. Police had wondered how two people could have been stabbed so many times and apparently made no sounds. They believed that when one was being stabbed, the other would have awakened.

  At the time, Teresa had thought that although she was pregnant, Wendy had taken at least one of the sleeping pills to which she was addicted. The killer must have first slit Hugh’s throat, so he couldn’t scream, then stabbed him seven more times in the neck and torso. Teresa thought the killer had moved on to Wendy, who no doubt slept the sleep of the drugged, and proceeded to slash repeatedly the area of her uterus, where a fetus grew, her chest, and finally mutilated her pretty, vacuous face.

  Teresa had not volunteered her theory about the order of the killings because she thought it made her sound too familiar with the mechanics of the crime, as if she’d known Wendy would be sleeping more deeply than was natural, so Teri’s father should be eliminated first. Later, toxicology reports showed that Wendy had taken two of her pills. When the police announced that Hugh Farr had been murdered first, while his drugged wife slept, Teresa was relieved she’d said nothing.

  Although Teresa had disliked both of them—detested them, actually—the natural humaneness in her cringed at the image of two people, lying oblivious and vulnerable in sleep, being viciously ripped and torn until their life blood soaked the carpet and splattered across the walls. Her father had hurt and humiliated her mother just as Wendy had hurt Jason by taking his daughter, but neither of them had deserved to be murdered, Teresa thought, surprised by the tears now rising in her eyes. What kind of monster could have enjoyed killing two people with such savage rage?

  Teresa darted out of the room, glancing at her mother’s Tiffany-style lamp still standing on the small table near the bathroom, and made a mental note to collect it before she left the house. Then she moved on to Celeste’s room at the end of the hall, facing the front of the house. Here, too, the bedding and carpet had been removed, as well as the toy chest in which the child had hidden from the killer.

  Teresa’s gaze flew to the place where the night-light Snowflake had been plugged into a wall socket. No Snowflake. She would have considered the possibility that Jason had retrieved it for the child or that someone else had taken it as a harmless souvenir, but she was certain the person who’d left the night-light on her porch had meant it to stir up painful memories and instill fear in Teresa.

  She told herself to stop wasting time in these rooms that held nothing for her. Also, the house had an unpleasant, deserted smell she found almost noxious. Teresa wanted to open windows and let clean, sun-warmed air into this monument of tragedy. But the house wouldn’t like that, she thought. Eight years ago, the house had closed in on itself, clutching its memory of terror and carnage, and it did not want to be disturbed.

  Teresa jerked as if awaking from one of her nightmares. “You sound as crazy as the woman next door, Teri Farr,” she said aloud, somewhat reassured by the sound of a human voice even if it was her own. “I have work to do.”

  After Hugh married Wendy, Kent had refused to stay in the house when he came home from college every three weeks to see Sharon. He’d stayed in the home of a friend, and Wendy had unofficially turned his bedroom into a storage room. Even now, the door was kept closed. Teresa opened it and a musty smell washed over her. The door should have been left open and the house aired out more frequently, she thought in annoyance, almost stomping into the room. The real estate people had to know the mustiness would not make the house more appealing to prospective buyers. Apparently, the smell hadn’t bothered the new owner who wrote horror novels, though. She was glad he’d bought the house but almost repulsed that part of the house’s “charm” for him lay in its grim history.

  Teresa was surprised by the number of boxes in the room. After Wendy had commandeered it for storage, Teri had never opened the door to Kent’s bedroom and she’d had no idea how much had been stashed in here. She now walked purposefully to the first stack of boxes and saw that every one of them bore a label. She instantly recognized Wendy’s rounded, almost childish handwriting on one reading: current events. Teresa couldn’t resist looking in to find a collection of tabloids and popular magazines full of gossip about celebrities and pictures of movie stars’ magnificent homes. So this is what Wendy considered to be worth cherishing, Teresa thought with a mixture of ridicule and pity. Another box labeled: clothing held a collection of midriff-baring tops and low-slung jeans—clothes Wendy must have worn before she married Hugh and could not part with although she then wore clothing more suitable to her new station in life.

  Teresa had glanced at nearly twenty boxes before she found one labeled simply: M. Marielle, she thought. “Well, Mom, Wendy reduced you to M,” Teresa said. “How petty and how like her.”

  The box held books. Marielle had been an avid reader. Her constant reading had annoyed Teri’s father. He’d always asked his wife if she didn’t have anything better to do than stick her nose in a book. Teresa glanced over the hardcover copies of works from Jane Austen to a couple of murder mysteries only nine or ten years old. Teresa set the box in the hall to take home.

  She expected to find at least one more box full of books. When she found none, she was furious. Wendy had thrown them away or delivered them to Goodwill, probably playing grande dame to the hilt and pretending the books were hers.

  The next box labeled M held newspaper clippings and photocopied articles about local events. As she riffled through them, she realized they were research for a book her mother had wanted to write. Her doctor had thought the project would be good for her, and she’d dived into it with an almost manic fervor that had lasted for nearly six months. Teresa remembered both worrying about her mother’s abnormal fervor and being relieved because for the first time in years Marielle had seemed happy. Then Hugh had announced that he wanted a divorce, and Marielle’s project and her happiness had crashed to a halt.

  Teresa’s mother had always wanted to write and she’d been fascinated by Point Pleasant history—all of the strange events that had happened as well as the eerie sites in the area that had given Point Pleasant a reputation for being “haunted.” She had decided to write her book about the town and its history.

  Teresa picked up an article about the Shawnee leader Chief Cornstalk, who had tried to prevent the invasion of Virginians into his tribe’s hunting grounds by leading a group of Shawnee and Mingo warriors at the Battle of Point Pleasant in present-day West Virginia. Later, in 1777, Cornstalk visited Fort Randolph in Point Pleasant. The fort commander detained him and when an American militiaman from the fort was killed by Indians, soldiers executed Cornstalk and his son Elinipsico. Supposedly, Cornstalk cursed the area, and many people believed the curse was responsible for tragedies that later happened around Point Pleasant.

  More clippings covered the collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967, a disaster that claimed the lives of forty-six people. But most of the clippings and articles covered “Mothman,” the creature many local people claimed to have seen in 1966. The creature, described as being about seven feet tall and shaped like a man with wings and large, burning eyes, was said to have taken refuge in one of the boiler houses in the vast deserted area where, during World War II, TNT—trinitrotoluene—had been manufactured and other explosives stored in concrete “igloos.” The place stood on a web of underground tunnels people believed the creature used to travel without being seen.

  Teresa remembered that her mother had been amused by the stories of Mothman, and thought about how much she would have enjoyed the movie The Mothman Prophecies starring Richard Gere. Marielle had been fascinated by the history of the entire Point Pleasant area, though. She had often talked Carmen into visiting what was commonly known as the TNT Are
a, actually now the McClintic Wildlife Preserve. Teresa even remembered several photographs Carmen had taken of Marielle standing by one of the unsealed igloos, an igloo Marielle had loved to explore and had even insisted Teresa, Kent, and Sharon come with her to inspect. Marielle had been so disappointed in Kent’s and Sharon’s reaction to the place that later Teri and Mac had nearly begged her to show them the igloo, and when they’d explored it, they’d acted as thrilled as if they were seeing the Tomb of Tutankhamen. They’d even taken an entire roll of film of the three of them feigning awe and fear inside and around the igloo.

  Teresa now opened the third box labeled M. It contained picture albums and videotapes her mother had made. Even when she was depressed, Marielle had rallied enough to drag out the video camera to tape important events in her children’s lives. Every tape was labeled in Marielle’s elegant, sloping handwriting: Kent learning to ride a bicycle; Kent’s high school graduation; Teresa and Kent going on rides at Disneyland on one of their rare family vacations; Teresa’s dancing school recital; every birthday party Hugh had allowed Marielle to hold for the children.

  Teresa looked for the tape of her sixteenth birthday party, her favorite because Hugh had been out of town, so Teresa had been able to invite more people than usual. They’d danced out on the patio until evening, and both Emma and Marielle had seemed relaxed and happy, having almost as much fun as the teenagers, while Hugh was gone. Unfortunately, that tape seemed to be missing. Teresa went through the collection a second time. “Damn,” she muttered. “Of course my very favorite would be the one to go missing.”

  Teresa wanted the contents of all three boxes. She could carry the box of tapes and albums and the box of newspaper clippings at the same time, she decided. She’d take them down to the car right now, Teri told herself, spacing out her trips so she wouldn’t find the task of loading this stuff so tiresome. It had nothing to do with her uncanny feeling that the house was holding its breath, waiting for something.