Home Before Dark: A Novel (26 page)

After leaving Dr. Weber’s office, I head back to Maple Street in search of Bartleby’s public library. The doctor’s mention of Baneberry Hall’s history beyond the Carver family has me curious to find out more. As an added benefit, it will take my mind off Mister Shadow. Something I desperately need. I long for the quiet camaraderie only a library can provide.

Except Bartleby’s library no longer exists—a fact I learn when I pop into a beauty salon to ask for directions.

“That closed years ago,” the hairdresser says while not so subtly eyeing my split ends. “There was a fire, which destroyed almost everything. The town voted not to rebuild.”

I thank her and move on, declining her offer of a trim. Without a library, there’s only one place else I know to go for information—the
Bartleby Gazette
.

The newspaper’s headquarters are located in an unassuming office building on the southern end of Maple Street. Outside, a newspaper box displays the latest edition. The headline running across the front page is in letters so bold they’re practically screaming.

BODY FOUND IN BANEBERRY HALL

If the headline of every article was this sensational, then no wonder Allie was worried. I’d be alarmed, too.

A subhead sits below the main headline, not as large but equally as intriguing.

Remains discovered in notorious house allegedly girl missing for 25 years.

Included with the article, written by none other than Brian Prince, are three photos. One is an archive image of Baneberry Hall, probably taken around the time the Book came out. The other two are my father’s old author photo and a faded yearbook shot of Petra Ditmer.

Seeing that front page makes me loathe to enter the office. But the sad truth is that I need Brian Prince more than he needs me. So enter I do, finding myself in an office that’s less like a functioning newspaper and more like a hobby. A solitary one. The newsroom, if it could even be called that, is filled with empty desks on which sit computers probably unused since the Clinton administration.

Sitting opposite the front door is a grandmotherly receptionist with the requisite bowl of hard candy. When she sees me, her mouth forms a tight
O
of surprise. “Mr. Prince is—”

I quiet her with a raised hand. “He’ll want to talk to me.”

Hearing my voice, Brian pops his head out of an office conspicuously marked
EDITOR
. “Maggie,” he says. “This is certainly a surprise.”

I can’t argue there. I’m just as surprised as he is, especially when I say, “I need your help.”

Brian’s smirk is brighter than his bow tie. “With what?”

“I want to search your archives.”

“Everything the
Gazette
has published in the past twenty years is
archived online,” he says, knowing full well that’s not what I’m looking for.

We stare at each other a moment—a silent face-off. I blink first. I don’t have much of a choice.

“Help me, and I’ll give you an exclusive interview,” I say. “Nothing’s off-limits.”

Brian pretends to think it over, even though his mind’s already made up. The ruthless glint in his eyes gives it away.

“Follow me,” he says.

I’m led to a door in a back corner of the newsroom. Beyond it are a small hallway and a set of steps that go to the basement.

“This is the morgue,” Brian announces as we descend the stairs. “All our old editions are here. Every single one.”

He flicks a light switch when we reach the basement, brightening a room the size of a double-wide trailer. Running along the two longest walls are rows of metal shelves. Bound volumes fill them, each the height and width of a newspaper page. Printed on the spines are the years of publication, beginning with 1870.

I go straight for the one marked 1889. The year Indigo Garson died.

“What other years are you looking for?” Brian says.

I’ve read the Book so many times that I’m able to rattle off all the dates my father mentioned. Brian collects them all. Five volumes from four different decades—a load that leaves him red-faced and huffing.

“When are we going to do that interview?” he says as he plunks them down on a metal desk at the far end of the morgue.

I sit and open the first volume—1889. “Now.”

While a clearly flustered Brian Prince runs upstairs to retrieve a pen and notebook, I page through brittle copies of newspapers a hundred years older than I am. Because the
Gazette
has always been a
weekly paper, it doesn’t take me long to find an article about Indigo Garson—
TOWN MOURNS GARSON HEIRESS
.

I bristle at the headline’s many indignities and implications. That heiress had a name, and it would have been decent of them to use it. Then there’s how the headline pulls focus away from Indigo and directs it at Bartleby itself, as if a dead sixteen-year-old doesn’t matter as much as the town’s pain.

The article is equally frustrating. It reveals few details about how Indigo Garson died, yet takes great pains to mention that her father remained locked in his bedroom, inconsolable. The meat of the story doesn’t arrive until a few issues later, with the shocking report that a maid at Baneberry Hall claimed to have seen William Garson carry the house’s namesake berries up to his daughter. Two weeks after that was the headline my father had mentioned in the Book.

GARSON DEEMED INNOCENT IN DAUGHTER’S DEATH

He hadn’t been lying. All of this was true.

I’m already moving to the next volume—1926—when Brian returns to the morgue. Leaning on a shelf with his pen and notebook, he says, “Are you ready to begin?”

I nod while flipping through pages filled with ads for ladies’ hats, Model T cars, and the latest motion pictures playing at the town’s Bijou Theater. It’s not until I’m well into May that I see an article about a Garson family member killed in a car accident.

Truth number two.

“Do you think your father killed Petra Ditmer?” Brian asks.

“I hope he didn’t.”

“But you
do
think he did it?”

“If I do, you’ll be the first to know.” I open the collected newspapers from 1941. “Next question.”

“Do you think Petra’s death is why your family left Baneberry Hall so suddenly?”

“Maybe.”

I find the article about the bathtub drowning that occurred that year. A third truth. The four and fifth ones come a few minutes later, while I scan the volumes from 1955 and 1956. Two bed-and-breakfast guests died, one in each of those years.

All the while, Brian Prince keeps lobbing questions at me. “Do you know of another reason you and your family fled the house?”

“It was haunted,” I say while reaching for the papers from 1974. “Or so I’ve been told.”

I’ve just found the article I’ve been looking for—
FATAL FALL AT BANEBERRY HALL
—when Brian slams an open palm across the page, blocking my view. It doesn’t matter. Just seeing the headline confirms that my father hadn’t been lying about any of the deaths at Baneberry Hall.

“You’re not upholding your end of our deal,” he says.

“You’re interviewing me, aren’t you?”

“It’s not an interview if you refuse to answer my questions.”

I get up and leave the desk, heading to another shelf of newspaper volumes. “I am answering them. I truly hope my father didn’t kill Petra Ditmer. And, yes, maybe her death was why we left. If you want specifics, you’ll need to talk to someone else.”

“Just give me something I can use in next week’s edition,” Brian says as he follows me to a row of bound volumes spanning two decades ago. “A legitimate quote.”

I grab two more volumes, one from twenty-five years ago, the other from the year before that, and carry them back to the desk.

“Here’s your quote: Like everyone in Bartleby, I’m shocked and saddened by the recent discovery inside Baneberry Hall. My deepest condolences go out to the family of Petra Ditmer.”

While Brian scribbles it down in his notebook, I open the volume
from the year my family fled Baneberry Hall. The article about our departure is easy to find—it’s splashed across the front page of the July 17 issue.

THE HAUNTING OF BANEBERRY HALL

Fearing for their lives, new owners flee historic estate.

The story that started it all.

I’ve seen it before, of course. Scans of the article are all over the internet. That tabloidy headline and photo of Baneberry Hall—eerily similar to the one currently on the front page of the
Gazette
—have been preserved forever.

So has the name of the man who wrote it.

“Still my finest hour,” Brian Prince says as he peers over my shoulder to see his byline.

“And my family’s darkest,” I reply.

I read the article for what’s probably the hundredth time, wondering what my life would have been like had it never been written. I’d have had a more normal childhood, that’s for damn sure. No being an outcast. No being teased and tormented. No Goth freaks trying to befriend me because they mistakenly thought I was one of them.

Maybe I would have become the writer my father wanted me to be. No article would have meant no Book, which is what steered me away from the profession in the first place.

And maybe my parents would have stayed happily married, our family intact, my holidays and summers not spent being tensely shuttled from one home to another.

But the article exists. Wishing otherwise won’t change that. Until the day I die, I’ll be associated with my father and what he claimed happened at Baneberry Hall.

I stop at a choice quote he gave to Brian.

“People will laugh,” he said. “People will call us crazy. But I’m
certain there’s something in that house—something supernatural—that wants us dead.”

Reading it, I can’t help but think about my conversation with Dr. Weber. She was convinced I had been telling the truth. That I believed what I saw inside that house.

Something was haunting you.

I slam the volume shut, no longer wanting to look at that article, even though I can probably recite it from memory.

I grab the second book I took down from the shelf. The previous year.

Again, it’s not hard to locate the article I want. I know that date as well. When I get there, the first thing I see is a headline brutal in its simplicity.

MURDER-SUICIDE AT BANEBERRY HALL

Below it is a photograph of the entire Carver family—a regular sight during my obsessive teenage Googling. Only this time I’m struck by how similar the Carvers were to my family. Just alter the faces slightly and I could be looking at a picture of my parents and me during our time at Baneberry Hall.

But the real shock comes when I see the byline accompanying the article.

Brian Prince.

Two families with two vastly different experiences at Baneberry Hall. And Brian wrote about both of them.

I turn to the reporter still standing behind me. The interview is about to resume. Only now I’ll be the one asking the questions.

Jess shoved the Ouija board into the trash can, making a show of pushing it deeper against the garbage already inside the bin. She topped it with the remnants of our breakfast—runny oatmeal, scrambled eggs, and crumbs of toast scraped off plates.

“We’re done with this, Ewan,” she said. “No more talk of ghosts. No more talking
to
ghosts. No more pretending there isn’t a logical explanation for all of this.”

“You can’t deny what’s happening,” I said.

“What’s happening is that our daughter now spends every waking moment in this house terrified.”

That I couldn’t argue with. We’d spent most of the night consoling Maggie, who refused to go back to her room. Between crying jags and bouts of panicking, she told us she had been asleep when the armoire doors flew open. Then Mister Shadow stepped out of it, sat down on the edge of her bed, and told her she was going to die soon.

The story never changed, no matter how many times she told it.

My reaction was to be more concerned than ever before. I was convinced some form of ghostly entity was occupying our house, and I feared for the safety of our daughter.

Jess had a different reaction: denial.

“You can’t keep entertaining the thought that any of this is real,” she said as she prepared for a day of work on next to no sleep. “Until you stop, Maggie will continue to think Mister Shadow is real.”

“But last night—”

“Was our minds playing tricks on us!” Jess shouted, her voice echoing off the kitchen walls.

“Our minds didn’t move that thing all over the board.”

“That was us, Ewan. Specifically
you
. I’m not an idiot. I know how Ouija boards work. It’s all subtle direction and power of persuasion. Everything spelled out on that board was exactly what you wanted to see.”

Jess was wrong about that. I didn’t
want
any of it. But it was happening anyway. For instance, once she and Maggie managed to fall asleep, curled up together in our bed, I stayed awake, listening. First came a familiar sound in the hallway.

Tap-tap-tap.

It was followed by a snippet of music from the study above.

“You are sixteen, going on—”

The song was then cut off by the noise that always arrived at 4:54 a.m.

Thud.

Those sounds were real. They were happening. And I needed answers as to what was going on and how to stop it.

“We can’t ignore this,” I said. “We don’t have a choice.”

Jess took an angry sip of coffee and looked down at the mug clenched in her fist.

“There’s always a choice,” she said. “For example, I can choose to ignore my urge to throw this mug at your head. That would be the rational thing to do. It would keep the peace and prevent a big mess that one of us will have to clean up. That’s how I
want
to handle this situation. But you continuing to think this house is haunted would be like this.”

Without warning, she flung the mug in frustration. It sailed across the room, trailing dregs of coffee before exploding against the wall.

“The choice is yours,” she said. “But you can be damn sure that if it’s the wrong one, I’m not going to stick around to help you clean up the mess.”

Jess went to work. I cleaned up the broken mug and splashes of coffee. I had just dropped the glass shards, unlucky so far, into the trash when bells on the wall began to ring.

Four of them.

Not at once, but individually.

First was the Indigo Room. No surprise there. It was always the most active.

Following it was the fifth bell on the wall’s first row—the great room.

After that came the last bell on the first row, which rang twice. Two short peals in quick succession.

The last bell to ring was the only peal from the second row. The third bell from the left.

The ringing continued in this manner. Four bells tolling a total of five times. Repeating itself in a distinct pattern. After watching the same combination of bells, I began to suspect that this wasn’t just random ghostly ringing.

It seemed like a code. As if the bells—or whatever was controlling them—were trying to tell me something.

I dug the Ouija board out of the trash, wiping away a stubborn splotch of oatmeal before placing it on the kitchen table. As the bells continued their insistent pattern, I studied the board in front of me. I realized that if I assigned a letter to each bell, I might be able to decipher what the bells were trying to say.

A wall-size Ouija board.

I began with the first bell on the first row. That was
A
. I continued matching bells to letters for the first row, which ended in
L
. Then I started in on the second row, beginning with
M
. The only wrinkle in this theory of mine was that the alphabet has twenty-six letters but the wall had only twenty-four bells. To solve that problem, I assigned the last bell on the second row the last three letters of the alphabet.

XYZ

I had no guarantee it would work. I assumed it wouldn’t. It was ridiculous to think a ghost was spelling out words for me to decode. Then again, it was also ridiculous to believe in ghosts at all. Since I’d long ago gotten over that impossibility, I decided to keep an open mind.

The first bell rang. Eighth from the left on the first row.

H

The second bell was also on the first row, five spots from the left.

E

Next came the bell that always rang twice. Last one on the first row.

LL

By the time the sole bell in the second row rang, I’d already matched it to its corresponding letter, spelling out the full word.

HELLO

“Hello?” I said, ignoring the absurd fact that not only was I right about a spirit spelling out words, but I was now also speaking aloud to said spirit. “Who is this?”

The bells rang again, this time in a different configuration.

Third from the left on the first row.

C

Fourth from the right on the second row.

U

Various bells continued to ring, spelling out the name I’d already suspected.

CURTIS CARVER

“Curtis, did you speak to my daughter last night?”

The last bell on the second row chimed. Two more followed, one on the first and one on the second.

YES

“Did you tell her she was going to die here?”

The same three bells rang in the same order.

YES

I took a gulp, bracing myself for the question I didn’t want to ask but needed to.

“Do you plan on killing my daughter?”

There was a pause that might have only lasted five seconds but felt like an hour. During that time, I thought of what Curtis Carver had done to his daughter. The pillow over her face while she slept. How horrible it must have been for her if she woke up, and I’m certain that before the end came, Katie Carver
did
wake up. I pictured the same thing happening to Maggie and became seized with panic.

Then a bell rang.

Second row.

Not at the very end but on the other side, second from the left.

N

The bell immediately to its right chimed next.

O

I exhaled—a long, heavy sigh of relief in which another question occurred to me. One I’d never considered because I thought I knew the answer since before we even moved into Baneberry Hall. But after seeing those two bells tilt out their song, I began to doubt that what I’d been told was true.

“Curtis,” I said. “Did you kill your daughter?”

Again, there was a pause. Then two bells rang—the last sounds any of them would make for the rest of the day. But it was enough. Curtis Carver’s answer was absolutely clear.

NO