The Woman in Our House

by Andrew Hart

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  ANNA

  I went through the house room by room with Vronny, trying to make a game of our search to show that Oaklynn was nowhere to be found. Veronica looked under beds and in closets, calling Oaklynn’s name, and—at last—laughing at the idea that she was hidden away somewhere, and at herself for imagining she had seen her.

  When the phone rang, I thought it would be Josh, but I knew from the slight hesitation when I answered, the chatter in the background, that it wasn’t. A part of me had been dreading a call from Mary Beth, but I knew it wasn’t her either. I was just about to hang up on what I assumed was a telemarketer when a deep male voice said, “Hi, Mrs. Klein? This is Officer Randall from the Charlotte Police Department.”

  Given the way our last conversation had ended, I was surprised to hear from him.

  “Yes,” I said. “Hi. Is there news about Oaklynn?”

  “Not about her current whereabouts, no.”

  “Have other people come forward? Previous employers?”

  “No, Mrs. Klein, but they wouldn’t be relevant to your situation even if they did. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I made some preliminary inquiries as to Ms. Durst’s possible whereabouts based on the information you gave me, treating the matter initially as a missing-persons case . . .”

  “Missing persons?” I exclaimed, indignant.

  “Hold on there, Mrs. Klein. My point is that in the course of some routine conversation with the placement agency and the Utah church headquarters that was listed under her contacts and references, we encountered an anomaly.”

  “What kind of anomaly? And why are Oaklynn’s previous employers not relevant to my situation?”

  “Because, Mrs. Klein, you never met Oaklynn Durst. The woman those previous employers hired never worked for you. That woman, the real Oaklynn Durst, is currently on a mission trip with her husband to Japan, a trip organized by the Church of Latter-day Saints.”

  I stood where I was, staring blindly into the middle distance, the phone mashed against my ear, saying nothing.

  “Mrs. Klein?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “So what I’m saying is that the woman you knew as Oaklynn Durst was an impostor. We don’t know who she really is or what she was doing, but she seems to have committed a pretty thorough form of identity theft of the real Oaklynn Durst’s particulars: bank details, the works. We are actively looking for her, and though there’s no reason to think that she will come back to see you, if she does, you need to call us right away. You understand what I’m saying, Mrs. Klein? Until we know what this woman’s motives are, she should be treated with extreme caution. If you see her, don’t interact with her. Keep your distance, and call 911 immediately. You got that?”

  I stayed home all day, never leaving the girls, barely taking my eyes off them except to look through the windows to the road, so that Vronny took to smoothing my hair and asking if I was all right. It was a relief to put them to bed, but even then, I found myself pacing the house, flattening my face to the windows and peering out into the dark.

  When I eventually went to bed, I lay awake, listening to the low hum of the baby monitors and thinking how best to purge the house of the presence of the woman who had called herself Oaklynn Durst. It was important to me that we went into the holidays free from her, and that meant getting rid of any lingering sign of her time with us, however small. Vronny would resist, but that would pass. The girls were becoming thinking, hopeful children. That meant that they were—I was almost ashamed to admit it—interesting and fun in ways they had not been as babies. They were ready to appreciate joy and wonder, and, come hell or high water, I was going to give it to them.

  We would get a Christmas tree. We would trim the house and make seasonal cookies, candy, peppermint bark, and whatever else we could salvage from Josh and my inadequate holiday traditions, neither of which had exactly embraced the holiday. We had both been parts of immigrant families who regarded the Christmas fuss with a kind of studied indifference, as if it was something for other people, a quaint and mystifying delusion. Well, not anymore. I was determined to make this a special time for all of us, a family time. We’d play festive music on the radio and watch White Christmas and Elf, or whatever the kid equivalent was. Maybe we’d even go to church. Perhaps there would be a kid-friendly version of A Christmas Carol we could watch or read together.

  I hesitated over that one. Oaklynn—or whatever her real name was—had loved Dickens. Or claimed to. Maybe that, too, was a lie.

  In any case, we would close ranks against the stupid and insidious world and—above all—against Oaklynn. She had to be banished, exorcised from the house like an evil spirit.

  The ceiling above me creaked. Something had moved up there in the dark space of the roof. I listened, and it came again, a groan of pressure, not the gnawing and scratching I had heard before but a shift of weight on the unfinished timbers of the attic.

  Too big for a squirrel. A raccoon? A possum?

  My stomach squirmed, but I got up and padded to the bathroom. I pulled the little Maglite from the drawer by the sink and moved softly to the bedroom door. I didn’t want to wake the girls, but I was struck by annoyance and determination, a strange certainty that the time for waiting around for other people to fix my problems was over. I needed to take the bull by the horns and push things into resolution.

  I needed closure.

  A portion of my life was ending. I had to wrap up all the old problems and embrace the future. I clicked the flashlight on, cycled through its odd flashing settings to a solid beam, and moved silently along the hardwood floor to the hatch up into the attic, reaching up on tiptoes to pull the rope that opened the panel with the fold-down stepladder. It squealed as it dropped into position, and I shuddered at the cold of the darkness above. It seemed to flow down through the rectangular opening like liquid.

  I wasn’t sure what I would do if I came face-to-face with a raccoon or—worse—a possum. Hopefully, the light would be enough to spook it, send it scurrying out the way it had come in. I wondered vaguely if I should have brought the crossbow, but I couldn’t load the damn thing even if I could aim it, and it was too big and clumsy to use up there, anyway. I wasn’t even sure where it was.

  Just the flashlight, then. And yelling if necessary. Enough to scare the thing out.

  Then tomorrow I would call animal control, find a company to come and set traps or whatever they did. I didn’t want poison in the house and couldn’t deal with the idea of Veronica seeing some cute woodland creature being carried out stiff and dead, but one way or another it—they?—had to go. The house, though it still felt huge after our New York apartment, was, paradoxically, not big enough for anything beyond the four of us.

  So I made my way gingerly up the creaking ladder, the cold dark looming above me, and I poked my head up and in, clambering awkwardly up the final steps. I kept the flashlight’s narrow beam low so that I could see where the floor was solid. I had taken a couple of steps back in the direction of the bedroom, where I had heard the noise, when something struck me as strange.

  I froze, trying to place the feeling, unsure whether I had heard something. It certainly hadn’t been something I’d seen, since my eyes were on the plywood-paneled flooring in front of me. I looked up, splashing the tight blue-white shaft of the Maglite’s beam around and finding the long metal trunk of the heating and air system, its silvery ductwork spreading out like tentacles burrowing into the cotton-candy pinkness of the insulation. The place smelled of wood and dust and . . . something else I couldn’t place that touched some primal nerve center in my head and made me afraid.

  There was something here.

  Not a raccoon or a possum.

  I fiddled with the flashlight, trying to expand its narrow beam, and in the process, somehow set it to flashing again so that the attic seemed to strobe in and out of existence. Somehow, though, my eyes
made sense of what I was seeing scratched onto the joists and roof timbers crisscrossing the space, the words written over and over in a variety of pens and pencils. I stared, aghast, as I read, and the words came out of me unbidden and aloud.

  “Hell is empty.”

  I felt the presence behind me before I heard the answering voice and turned, the Maglite still flashing the world in and out.

  Oaklynn was nestled toad-like in the dark, cradling the crossbow in her powerful hands as she spoke.

  “And all the devils are here.”

  Chapter Fifty

  ANNA

  “Get out of my house.”

  My words hung in the chilly darkness of the attic, and I was amazed by how calm they sounded, how deliberate. I felt neither. The only light was still my uncannily, maddeningly blinking flashlight, fastened as it was on “Oaklynn’s” blank, washed-out face, her steady, dead eyes. I wasn’t sure if she could see the way I was trembling. A terror had gripped my heart, and all I could think of was the precise distance between where we stood and the rooms where my daughters slept.

  It was not nearly enough.

  Oaklynn spoke, but the flashing light confused me, and her voice was low.

  “What?” I said. My voice quavered, but I found a little defiance through my fear.

  “I can’t,” said Oaklynn. She looked down at the crossbow in her hands. It looked big, dangerous. “I can’t leave. There’s nowhere for me to go.”

  I stared at her, the cold of the attic seeping into my bones like dread.

  “That’s not my problem,” I said.

  She looked up at me again and smiled a hard, bitter smile. She looked like someone I had never seen before.

  “Actually,” she said, “it is.”

  I had no idea what she meant by that and barely heard it. She was between me and the hatch with the ladder, which was the only way down and out.

  “I called the police,” I said.

  “I know. But that was hours ago. They aren’t here now.”

  “I can bring them back. They know you aren’t who you claim to be.”

  “Yes?” she half turned away, as if she had heard something somewhere else in the house. “OK. I’ll go to prison. If I’m lucky.”

  “Still not my problem.”

  “No. You have a different problem.”

  “When you’re gone,” I said, my eyes on the crossbow, trying to decide if it was loaded, “I won’t have a problem.”

  She looked down again then and made a long, slow noise that was half sigh and half groan. She shook her head.

  “Yes,” she said, “you will.”

  “I’m going down now,” I said, trying to sound confident.

  She shook her head again, more fervently this time, and she looked up. The flashing of the Maglite was driving me crazy, but I didn’t dare try to reset it in case I turned it off. I couldn’t be alone with her up here in the dark.

  “Yes,” I said. “Step away from the trapdoor.”

  She didn’t move, and I knew it had been a stupid thing to say, revealing how little I had to threaten or bargain with. Oaklynn was close to twice my weight. She was solid and strong. I couldn’t possibly fight her.

  God, I thought, my heart hammering. Let it not come to that.

  “So if you aren’t my problem,” I said, stalling, “what is?”

  She stared at me as if I were stupid, and her face lit with a sudden mad fury that was terrifying to see.

  “Him!” she said. “Who do you think?”

  I shook my head dismissively, exasperated.

  “I’m going down,” I said again, trying to sound like I didn’t care what she did. Down meant being closer to the girls, to the phone, to the street. If it came to it, we could run . . .

  “Fine,” she said. “But you’re going to have to listen to me.”

  She stepped abruptly aside, clearing my way to the ladder, and dropped her eyes once more. She looked so unlike herself that I did not know what to do. She seemed surly but also defeated, caught, quite unlike the smiling, chipper Oaklynn who had lived with us.

  “I know,” she added, seemingly on impulse and with an effort, as if the words were hard to find, “that I’m not right.” She kept staring down the square of light that was the hatch to the upstairs hallway. “In the head. I know I’m not quite right. I can’t help it. It doesn’t feel wrong to me. It’s just how I am. Who I am.” She added that with a bleak grin at her own expense, looking sad and sour at the same time.

  “You shouldn’t be around children,” I said.

  It was probably a stupid remark, but I couldn’t help myself. It just spilled out on a wave of conviction.

  She nodded vaguely, as if considering this seriously, then said, “I do love them, though.”

  My conviction hardened, turned into something colder, angrier.

  “People don’t hurt the things they love,” I said.

  She looked back at me then, still thoughtful, as if we were debating some abstract issue or idea.

  “Don’t they?” she said. “Perhaps in your world. In my world, love always comes with pain. With hurt.”

  “That doesn’t justify anything,” I shot back. “My children trusted you. I trusted you.”

  She nodded again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am. I never meant them any harm. Or you. But now . . .”

  “You never meant them harm!?” I said, my voice rising as indignation got the better of me. “What did you think was going to happen when you poisoned my baby daughter, or drove the screw through the slide Veronica was about to use? You broke her arm! You didn’t mean to hurt her? I don’t care what’s in your head. I don’t care what happened to you when you were little, or whatever the fuck you use to justify the monster you have become, but don’t stand there in front of me and say you didn’t mean it.”

  I was trembling more than ever now, but it was less fear than it was rage, and that felt good. I thought she might attack me then, or plead some twisted justification, but she frowned and shook her head.

  “I didn’t poison your baby. I would never . . .”

  “You think I forgot the fevers, the hospital visits? You think I’m that big of an idiot?”

  She just stood there, still shaking her head, her expression fixed like an automaton.

  “She wasn’t sick,” she said at last. “The temperatures, the bloody diapers: none of it was real. I just . . . I wanted her to see the doctor. I lied. I admit that. But none of it was real. I made it up.”

  “Grace was feverish. I felt her.”

  “I put her on a hot water bottle for a few minutes. I would never have hurt her.”

  I glared at her but, for a moment, could think of nothing to say.

  “And the screw?” I said at last. “The swing you sawed through so Veronica would fall.”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “It was in our yard!” I shouted. “Who else would do it?”

  “Carl.”

  I stared.

  “What?”

  “Carl,” she said again, her voice flat. It sounded like a litany, a repeated response in church. It unnerved me, even as I refused to believe her.

  “Who the fuck is Carl?” I shot back, defiant rather than inquiring. “What are you talking about?”

  “Carl. We were together once. Long ago. I left. But he keeps looking to take me back.”

  More insanity. More evasion.

  “Whatever,” I said again. “I’m going down.”

  Wordlessly, she thrust a hand out toward me, and I flinched away, half expecting a knife to come jabbing into my midriff. But it wasn’t a knife. It was a sheet of paper, creased and ragged.

  “What is this?” I said, taking it from her.

  “He left it for me the day you fired me,” she said. She sounded chastened, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Carl left it.”

  “You broke my daughter’s arm,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “That was him.”r />
  I shook my head in exasperation, but before I could say anything else, my eyes fell on the piece of paper. At last, I had the composure to click the switch on the Maglite till I got a solid and wide-angled beam. I turned it onto the paper and looked at it.

  It was a photograph, slightly out of focus and printed in color on a home inkjet printer. It showed, I realized, the back of our house as seen from across the creek. The focus was the swing set and the pecan tree, and there were three figures in the garden: Veronica in her yellow sundress, no cast on her arm; Grace toddling in her wake; and Oaklynn standing beside the tree, smiling. The old Oaklynn. The lie.

  I would have known my children anywhere, even though their eyes were obscured by a pair of angry X’s scored so deeply in red ink that the paper had puckered and torn under the pen. Their bodies had been dotted with cartoon wounds that issued grotesque spouts of blood. Under the atrocity of a picture were words scrawled in the same red capitals:

  FUCK WITH MY LOVE AND I’LL FUCK WITH WHAT YOU LOVE.

  It curdled my guts, leaving me sick and outraged.

  “What is this?” I spat, revolted, nausea and rage jockeying for place in my trembling voice.

  “I told you,” she said. “Carl.”

  “Bullshit!” I replied, incapable of real thought, wanting nothing more than to shut it all out, to get away.

  “Look at it!” said Oaklynn. “I’m in the picture. Look where it was taken from. It’s him. It’s Carl. He’s been watching, waiting. That’s why I came back. I couldn’t leave the girls alone. He’ll go after them. You have to believe me. I know him.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “I don’t believe any of it. You have to leave my house. Now.”

  And as I said it, a new voice joined the conversation coming up from the floor below.

  “Mommy?” said Veronica, sounding bleary and confused by sleep. “Who are you talking to?”

  The sound of her, so plaintive and vulnerable, transformed me, sweeping away all my other anxieties and sending me into surging motion. I strode toward Oaklynn, swallowing down my trepidation at her closeness, and clambered down into the hatchway. For a second, I had my back to her, hands and feet occupied as I tried to find the steps of the ladder, utterly at her dubious mercy, and then I was stumbling clumsily down, half falling down the bottom step and into the hall.