Home Before Dark: A Novel (18 page)

“You tell us, right this goddamn instant, what other problems are hiding inside that house, or I swear to Christ I’ll make sure you lose your Realtor’s license.”

Jess’s voice, already loud whenever she got angry, grew in both rage and volume as she spoke on the phone to Janie June.

“You’re damn right, I’m serious!” Jess yelled in response to something Janie June said. “Just like I’m serious about suing you for everything you’re worth.”

All were empty threats. There was nothing we could legally do. When we agreed to buy Baneberry Hall as is, all of its problems became our problems. We also had the house inspected, which found nothing to indicate there was a family of snakes living in the ceiling. This was simply a case of Mother Nature being an utter bitch.

Yet Jess continued to shout at Janie June for another fifteen minutes, her voice ringing off the wood-paneled walls of our room.

Even for a cheap roadside motel, the Two Pines Motor Lodge had seen better days. The rooms were minuscule, the lighting was poor, and an unpleasant combination of cigarette smoke and industrial-strength cleaner clung to every surface. Had there been anywhere else in Bartleby to call home for a night, we would have gone there. But the Two Pines was the only game in town. And since our house was overrun with snakes, we couldn’t be picky.

Still, we tried to make the best of a bad situation. After checking in the day before, Jess left to raid the vending machines. She returned with an armful of stale crackers, candy bars, and lukewarm sodas. We ate them sitting on the floor, Maggie all too happy to be having candy for lunch. After dinner at a diner a half-mile down the road, we spent the night crowded onto one of the twin beds, watching a TV that flickered with static no matter what channel we landed on.

Now it was morning, and all attempts to make the best of things had completely gone out the window. Not that the windows in the Two Pines could be opened. They were sealed, making the room stuffy as well as loud as Jess continued her tirade.

I was relieved when Officer Alcott knocked on our door right before we were due to check out, telling us the snakes had all been cleared and that we could return home.

“What kind of snakes were they?” Jess asked after hanging up on Janie June.

“Just a bunch of red-bellies,” Officer Alcott said. “Completely harmless.”

“You didn’t have one swimming in your coffee,” I replied.

“Well, they’re gone now. Animal control rounded them all up. But I have to warn you—your kitchen now looks like a disaster area.
Thought I should give you a heads-up before you return, just so you’re prepared.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.

After Officer Alcott left, we said goodbye to the Two Pines and wearily went back to a house we weren’t sure we wanted to return to. I drove us home in silence, feeling stupid for never considering how the reality of owning Baneberry Hall would be far different than the fantasy I’d created in my head. But now we were faced with nothing but reality. It had taken just over a week for the dream of Baneberry Hall to curdle into a nightmare.

And it did indeed feel like a nightmare when Jess and I descended the steps into the kitchen.

Officer Alcott had been wrong. The place didn’t look like a disaster area. It felt more like a war zone. London during the Blitz. The snakes were gone, but the debris remained. Chunks of ceiling. Splinters of wood. Cottony bits of insulation that probably contained asbestos. I covered my nose and mouth and told Jess to do the same before we stepped into the thick of the mess.

A good idea, it turned out, for a strong and nasty odor filled the air. It stank of dust and rot and something vaguely sulfurous that hadn’t been there the day before.

I walked through the rubble with a sinking feeling in my stomach. This would be a major cleanup. A costly one. I wanted to grab Jess by the arm, turn right around, and abandon Baneberry Hall for good. It was too big, with too many problems and far too much history.

But we couldn’t. We’d sunk pretty much all our money into this place. And even though we didn’t have the burden of a mortgage to deal with, I knew we wouldn’t be able to sell it. Not this quickly and certainly not in this condition.

We were stuck with Baneberry Hall.

Yet that didn’t mean we had to like it.

Jess summed up my feelings perfectly as she stared into the gaping hole that used to be our kitchen ceiling.

“Fuck this house,” she said.

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.