Home Before Dark

by Riley Sager

  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.

  JULY 10

  Day 15

  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.r />
  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

  Eighteen

  I didn’t know you wrote the original article about Curtis Carver,” I say.

  “I did.” Brian Prince grins in a way that makes my stomach turn. He’s proud of this fact. “It was my first big story.”

  I return my gaze to the article, preferring the picture of the Carver family over Brian’s morbid smugness. “How much do you remember about that day?”

  “A lot,” Brian says. “Like I said, I was fairly new to the Gazette, even though I’ve lived in Bartleby my whole life. The paper was bigger then. Every paper was bigger in those days. Because a lot of the older, veteran reporters were still around, I was relegated to fluff pieces. Dog shows and baking contests. I interviewed Marta Carver a few days before the murder. She took me on a tour of Baneberry Hall and told me all the things she planned to do with the place. I wanted to do a similar story with your mother, but your family wasn’t there long enough for me to get the chance.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t see any ghosts on your tour,” I say.

  “Not a one. Now that would have been a story.”

  “What was Marta Carver like when you interviewed her?”

  “She was nice. Friendly. Talkative. She seemed happy.” Brian pauses, a thoughtful look settling over his features. For the first time today, he looks almost human. “I think about that day a lot. How it might have been one of the last happy days she ever had.”

  “She never remarried? Or had another child?”

  Brian shakes his head. “Nor did she ever leave town, which kind of surprised everyone. Most people thought she’d move someplace where no one knew who she was or what had happened to her.”

  “Why do you think she stayed?”

  “She was used to the town, I guess,” Brian says. “Katie’s buried in the cemetery behind the church. Maybe she thought that if she moved, she’d be leaving her daughter behind.”

  I look to the photo on the page in front of me—Curtis Carver standing apart from his family. “Curtis wasn’t buried with h
er?”

  “He was cremated. At Marta’s request. The rumor is that she dumped his ashes in the trash.”

  The urn carrying my father’s ashes sits in the back of a closet at my apartment in Boston, still in the box the funeral home handed to me as I left his memorial service. The plan was to scatter them in Boston Harbor at some point this summer. If it’s proven that he killed Petra Ditmer, I might abandon that idea and take a cue from Marta Carver.

  “It’s got to be hard on her,” I say. “Even all these years later.”

  “Every town has that one person something bad happened to. The one everyone else pities,” Brian says. “In Bartleby, that’s Marta Carver. She handles it with dignity. I’ll give her that. What she endured would have crushed most other people, and the town admires her for it. Especially now.”

  It’s something I hadn’t thought of—how the current news surrounding Baneberry Hall also affects Marta Carver. Another dead girl was discovered in the very house where her own daughter died. That’s got to dredge up a lot of bad memories.

  “My father wrote that she left most of her belongings inside Baneberry Hall,” I say. “Is that true?”

  “Probably,” Brian says. “She never went back to that house, I know that. After she found her husband and daughter dead, Marta called the police in hysterics. When the cops got there, they found her in a daze on the front porch and took her to the hospital. One of her friends told me she’s never set foot inside Baneberry Hall since.”

  I lean in, getting close to the photo, studying Marta Carver’s face. There isn’t much to see. Her features are blurred. Nothing but dots of aged ink. But she has a story to tell.

  “I need to go,” I announce as I get up from the desk, leaving behind all the bound volumes of newspapers from the past. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Thanks for the interview,” Brian says, putting air quotes around the word to underscore his sarcasm.