Home Before Dark: A Novel (33 page)

Half a dozen emergency vehicles sit outside Baneberry Hall, their flashing lights painting the house in alternating shades of red and white. In addition to Chief Alcott’s cruiser, there’s an ambulance, three more police cars, and, just in case things really get out of hand, a fire truck.

I watch from the porch as Dane is loaded into the ambulance. He’s strapped to a stretcher, a brace around his neck. His fall through the floor didn’t do much damage, all things considered. As the EMTs wheeled him out, I heard murmurs of broken bones, maybe a concussion. Whatever happened to him, he was injured enough to allow me to flee the house and call the police.

Now Dane is on his way to the emergency room and then, presumably, jail. He stares at me as the stretcher is pushed into the back of the ambulance, his expression pained, his eyes accusing.

Then the ambulance doors are slammed shut and Dane vanishes from view.

As the ambulance departs, Chief Alcott emerges from the house and joins me at the porch railing.

“Did he confess?” I say.

“Not yet. But he will. Give it time.” The chief removes her hat and runs a hand through her silver hair. “I owe you an apology, Maggie. For saying those things about your father. For thinking he did it.”

I can’t be mad at her for that. I thought the same thing on and off throughout this whole ordeal. If anyone should be ashamed, it’s me.

“We’re both guilty on that front,” I say.

“Then why’d you keep looking?”

I’ve been asking myself that same question for days. The answer, I suspect, lies in something Dr. Weber told me. That it was my way of writing my own version of the story. And while I did it for completely selfish reasons, I realize now the story isn’t solely mine.

Petra’s a part of it, too. It doesn’t change what happened. Elsa’s still without her older daughter, and Hannah no longer has a sister.

But they have the truth. And that’s valuable.

I should know.

Chief Alcott departs with the rest of the emergency vehicles. They form a line down the driveway, their sirens on mute but their lights still flashing.

Another car arrives before they fully vanish down the hill, its headlights unexpectedly popping over the horizon. For a brief, blinding moment, it’s a kaleidoscope of lights as the two cars slow down and pass each other. Blue and red and white. All flashing through the trees in spinning, disco-like fury. The emergency lights disappear. The headlights grow brighter as the car rounds the driveway and comes to a gravel-crunching stop.

I can’t see who’s inside. It’s too dark, and my eyes are still stinging from the lights of the emergency vehicles. All I can make out is a person behind the wheel, sitting in complete stillness, almost as if they’re tempted to start driving again.

But then the driver’s-side door swings open, and my mother steps out of the car.

“Mom?” I say, shocked. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

She remains in the driveway, looking exhausted in her travel clothes—white slacks, print blouse, a pair of strappy sandals. Shed of their sunglasses, her eyes are bloodshot. Dark half-moons droop beneath them. She carries no luggage. Just a purse that’s about to slip from her shoulder.

“For God’s sake, Maggie,” she says. “Why did you come back here? What did you think that was going to accomplish?”

“I needed the truth.”

“I
told
you the truth,” my mother says. “But you couldn’t leave well enough alone. Because of that, I had to fly halfway around the world, and then I get here and see all those police cars. What the hell have you been up to?”

I bring her inside. There’s a moment’s hesitation at the front door, making it clear she has no desire to enter Baneberry Hall, but she’s too tired to put up a fight. Once inside, the only thing she insists on is going down to the kitchen.

“I don’t want to be up here,” she says. “Not on this floor.”

Down we go, into the kitchen, taking seats across from each other at the butcher-block table. There, I tell her everything. Why I decided to come back. What happened when I got here. Finding Petra’s body and suspecting my father and realizing the true culprit was Dane.

When I finish, my mother simply stares at me. She looks so old in the harsh and unsparing light of the kitchen. It illuminates the ravages of time she usually tries so hard to cover up. The wrinkles and age spots and gray strands sprouting along her hairline.

“Oh, Maggie,” she says. “You really shouldn’t have done that.”

Unease slams onto my shoulders, so forceful that all of Baneberry Hall seems to shake.

“Why?” I say.

My mother’s gaze flits around the room, making her look like a trapped bird. “We need to leave,” she says.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“We need to leave and never come back.”

My unease grows, pouring into me, weighing me down. When my mother stands, it takes all the effort I can muster to also get up and push her back into her chair.

“We’re staying right here. We’re going to sit here and talk, just like normal families do.” On the way back to my seat, I spot the cherry pie on the counter. “Look, there’s even dessert.”

I grab the pie and drop it onto the table. It’s followed by two forks, which clatter across the tabletop. For show, I grab one, cut off a huge chunk of pie, and stuff it into my mouth.

“See?” I say, gulping it down. “Isn’t this nice? Just a mother-and-daughter chat that’s been a long time coming. Now talk.”

I take another massive bite, waiting for my mother to speak. Instead, she picks up a fork and digs out a tiny piece of pie. She tries to take a bite, but her hands are shaking so much that the pie falls from her fork. A gelatinous blob the color of blood splats onto the table.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she says.

“The truth. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” I take a third bite of pie. Proving that I’m capable of doing something she can’t. “You need to tell me every fucking thing you’ve been hiding from me for the past twenty-five years.”

“You don’t want to know the truth. You think you do, Maggie. But you don’t.”

My mother’s birdlike gaze comes to a stop at the hole in the kitchen ceiling. That’s when I realize I was wrong about Dane. I might be wrong about everything.

“Is this about Dad?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did he kill Petra Ditmer?”

“Your father would never—”

“It certainly feels like he did,” I say. “All this secrecy. All these lies. It makes me think he really did kill a sixteen-year-old girl and that you helped him cover it up.”

My mother slumps in her chair. Her hand, placed palm-down on the table, falls away in a long, exhausted slide.

“Oh, baby,” she says in a voice made jagged by a hundred different emotions. “My sweet baby.”

“So it’s true?” I say.

My mother shakes her head. “Your father didn’t kill that girl.”

“Then who did?”

She reaches into her purse and pulls out a large envelope, which she slides across the table toward me. I open it and take a peek. Inside is a stack of pages. The top one bears an unexpected heading.

To Maggie

“Your father and I prayed this day would never come,” she says.

“Why?”

“Neither of us wanted to tell you the truth.”

“Why?”

“Because it wasn’t your father who killed Petra.”

My eyes remain locked on the page in front of me. “Then who did?”

“You did, Maggie,” my mother says. “You killed her.”

To Maggie

I’m writing this for you, Maggie, although I hope to God you never see it. If you do, it means your mother and I have failed.

For that, we are profoundly sorry.

By now, you already know some of the truth about what happened the night we left Baneberry Hall. This is the rest of it. And while it is my greatest hope that you don’t read beyond this paragraph, I already know you will. You are, after all, my daughter.

We never planned to leave Baneberry Hall the way we did. We never planned to leave at all. Maintenance issues and prior tragedies notwithstanding, it was a lovely home. And it could have been a happy one if I hadn’t become fascinated with the history of the house.

I admit I had an ulterior motive when I convinced your mother to buy it. I wanted a house with a past that I could research and write about and, hopefully, end up with a nonfiction account about being a beleaguered freelance writer who restored the fixer-upper he unwisely purchased.

But once I learned the circumstances surrounding the death of Indigo Garson, I realized I had stumbled upon an even better idea for a book. I was
going to be the beleaguered freelancer who solved a murder at the fixer-upper he unwisely purchased.

I ended up writing a far different book.

A word about House of Horrors: Much of it is true. A lot of it is not. We did discover letters written to Indigo Garson by the man who wished to elope with her. Petra Ditmer and I did research those letters, discovering other tragedies that had occurred in the house over the years.

But for every truth, there was a lie.

There were no ghosts, of course, although you did have several imaginary friends. Mister Shadow was one. Miss Pennyface was another. Although they were figments of your imagination, they seemed to frighten and fascinate you in equal measure. So much so that we sought out help from Dr. Weber.

There were also no portraits of William and Indigo Garson over the fireplace. Besides the deaths of Katie Carver and Indigo—who I do believe was killed by her father and was what I set out to prove in my book—all the other deaths at Baneberry Hall were simply tragic accidents and completely unrelated.

All of them but Petra Ditmer’s.

The guilt I feel about what we did hasn’t lessened one bit in the twenty-four years since she died. She was a bright young woman. She deserved better.

I know I’ll never forget that night, even though it’s all I want to do. I suspect it will take my death to erase that horrible night from my memory. Even then, I’m not so sure. I know we leave our bodies when we pass on. I hope we can choose to leave certain memories behind as well.

That night was supposed to be a good one—a much-needed
break from the daily strife of Baneberry Hall. The house and all its problems had taken its toll on your mother and me. We could feel ourselves drifting apart a little more each day. The spark had gone out of our marriage, and we desperately needed to get it back.

To do this, we decided to have a “date night,” which is a polite way of saying we rented a room at the Two Pines with the intention of fucking like
teenagers. We needed to be away from not just the house and its myriad issues but from you as well. Just for an evening. That sounds more harsh than it really is. You might be a parent yourself when you read this, in which case you’ll surely understand.

To get away, we hired Petra Ditmer to babysit. Thanks to your antics on the night she and her sister came for a sleepover, Petra had been forbidden from visiting Baneberry Hall and told us she’d need to sneak out in order to babysit. Your mother and I debated the ethics of this, deciding that since it was only for a few hours, a little dishonesty on Petra’s part was worth a night to ourselves. We needed it. Both of us agree about that. We needed time alone, to be us again.

Petra snuck out of her house and arrived shortly after eight. Your mother and I went to the motel, where our goal was achieved multiple times. We left the hotel at midnight, relaxed and happy. The happiest we’d been in weeks.

It ended the moment we entered Baneberry Hall and saw the body of Petra Ditmer.

She lay in a heap at the bottom of the steps, her arms and legs twisted under her like a pretzel. So twisted that at first I couldn’t tell what were legs and what were arms. Nothing seemed to be in the right place.

I knew she was dead, though. It was obvious. Her neck was also twisted. Turned at an angle so unnatural that I feel sick just thinking about it. Her right cheek lay flat against the floor, and her hair lay across most of her face. But I saw her eyes peeking out between the strands. Two large, shocked, dead eyes.

I couldn’t stop staring at them. It was too horrible to look away. I had seen dead people before, of course. But not one so young. And definitely not one so assuredly dead. All the other corpses I’d seen looked like they could have been sleeping.

Petra definitely wasn’t asleep.

You sat at the top of the stairs, gently sobbing. When we asked you what happened, you looked up at us and said, “It wasn’t me.”

You kept repeating it, almost as if you were trying to convince yourself as much as us.

“It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.”

At first, I believed you. You were my daughter, after all. I knew you better than anyone, even your mother. You were sweet and kind. You wouldn’t purposely hurt anyone.

But then I thought about how you had punched Petra’s sister in the face during the sleepover. It shocked me then and shocked me again in recollection. It was proof that anger boiled just beneath
your placid demeanor.

There was also physical evidence. Petra’s shirt had been torn. There was a gap in the seam at her shoulder, exposing pale skin. Just above it were three scratch marks on her neck, as if she’d been attacked. You also had a cut—a bad one under your left eye. I could only assume it was caused by Petra, fighting you off.

Still, you kept denying it.

“It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.”

“Then who was it, Maggie?” I asked, wishing with all my power that you’d give us a logical response.

But you only looked us in the eyes and said, “Miss Pennyface.”

I remember that moment like it just happened. It was the moment I realized that my fears were correct. Since Miss Pennyface didn’t exist, that meant it was you who had killed Petra.

Things would have turned out very differently if Petra’s mother knew she was at Baneberry Hall. We would have had no choice but to go to the authorities. But no one else knew she was there. No one but us.

So when your mother tried to call 911, I stopped her before she could dial.

I told her we needed to think long and hard before we did that. That it might not be in our best interest to get the police involved.

“A girl is dead, Ewan,” she said. “I don’t care about our best interest.”

“What about Maggie’s?” I asked. “Because whatever we do next, it’s going to affect her for the rest of her life.”

I explained that if we called 911, the police would take even less time than it took us to see that this wasn’t an accident. Petra’s torn shirt and the scratches on her neck indicated far worse.

It showed that you had pushed her down those stairs.

I didn’t know what precipitated it. I didn’t want to know. I realized that the less I knew, the better. But I knew I still loved you, in spite of what you had done. I thought there was nothing you could do that would make me love you less. But I worried that knowing the details of what happened had the potential to change that thinking. And I didn’t want to see you as a monster, which is what everyone else would have thought if word got out that you had killed Petra.

It was that argument that finally convinced your mother to go along with my plan. I told her that perception is a tricky thing. When people think of you a certain way, it’s almost impossible to put that genie back in the bottle. And when the world considers someone a monster, people treat them like one, and it isn’t long before that
person starts to believe it as well.

“Is that what we want for Maggie?” I said. “For her to be locked up in some juvenile detention center until she’s eighteen? Then to spend the rest of her life being judged by people? No matter what she does, for the rest of her life, people will look at her and only see a killer. What do you think that will do to her? What kind of life will that be?”

I’m not proud of what I did that night. The shame I carry weighs on my heart and keeps me up at night. But I need you to know that we did it for you. We wanted to spare you from the brutal existence you certainly would have had if the police got involved.

So we decided to keep it a secret.

While your mother took you upstairs to dress the wound on your face, I disposed of the body. Even though writing those words just now made me nauseous, that’s exactly what I did. This wasn’t an act of burial. It was disposal, pure and simple. I put Petra’s body in a canvas knapsack left over from my days as a traveling reporter. I dropped it into the hole in the floor
where we’d found the letters to Indigo Garson, replaced the boards, and unrolled the carpet over them.

Just like that, Petra was gone.

It was your mother who demanded we leave Baneberry Hall. The two of you came downstairs, you with a bandage on your cheek and she carrying the teddy bear Petra had brought with her that night.

I suspect it was the bear that caused what happened next. It jerked your mother out of her shock, making her realize it wasn’t just a random person we had buried beneath the floorboards, but a young woman. Someone smart and sweet who still slept with a teddy bear.

“I can’t be here,” your mother gasped as the full weight of our actions sunk in. “Not knowing she’s here. Not after what we’ve done to her. I just can’t.”

I understood then that we had no choice but to leave. In a daze, I hid the bear in the closet of my study. We then piled into the car without packing a thing and went back to the Two Pines motel.
Thanks to a shift change, there was a new clerk at the front desk. And since we’d paid with cash, there was no record we’d ever been there earlier that night.

“I’m never going back there,” your mother said once we were in our room. “I can’t, Ewan. I’m sorry.”

I, too, felt it wise not to return. We’d gotten away with a heinous deed. Going back to Baneberry Hall would remind us daily of what we’d done. All I wanted to do was forget.

“We’ll never go back,” I told her. “None of us will ever go back there.”

“But people will be looking for Petra,” your mother said. “Once they realize she’s missing, they’re going to ask why we’re here and not at Baneberry Hall. We need to give them a reason.”

I knew she was right. We needed to come up with an explanation for why we left. A solid one. An innocent-sounding one. But that wasn’t easy. Especially once people started looking for Petra. I knew that the police would search the house to back up our claim. All it would take was a half hour and a search warrant.

But inventing another calamity in the house was out of the question. There couldn’t be a burst pipe or another snake infestation. Our reason for leaving had to sound appropriately extreme while also being completely invisible.

It was you, ironically, who came up with the idea. Half-asleep in front of the muted motel TV, you said, “When are we going home?”

“We’re not,” your mother answered.

Your response prompted all that followed.

“Because Miss Pennyface scared us away?” you said.

At first, the thought of claiming we abandoned Baneberry Hall because it was haunted struck me as preposterous. No one would believe it. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. It would be impossible to prove that we were lying. Plus, by that point I knew enough of Baneberry Hall’s history to spin a decent tale. Then there was the fact that, because the idea of a haunting was so ridiculous, it might distract from the bigger secret hidden inside the house.

We went with it. We had no other choice.

Not that there was much time to think about it. I knew that, in order to deflect suspicion from us, we needed to be on record claiming Baneberry Hall was haunted before word got out that Petra had vanished.

I called the police to report a disturbance at the house. Officer Alcott came to the motel soon after. And for the next hour, I told her about Mister Shadow and Miss Pennyface and the horrors we’d endured. I knew the officer didn’t believe me, especially after she
went to the house to check things out.

When she returned to say everything looked fine, I knew there was a chance that we would actually get away with it. We would move to another town. Settle in a place far away and pretend the incident at Baneberry Hall never happened.