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She left then, retreating quietly down the hall.

At first, I dismissed what she told me. Maggie was my daughter, not hers. And I wasn’t about to pretend to believe made-up things just to appease her. But that night, I couldn’t stop replaying Elsa’s words in my head.

Especially when the noises returned.

Not just the usual sounds of a house settling in for a long summer night, but the dreams as well. The bumps and thumps of doors, cupboards, closets opening and closing. The cacophony filled my sleep, silencing itself only when I woke a few minutes before midnight.

Sitting up in bed, I looked to the bedroom door, listening for the slightest hint the noises were real. All I heard were sleep-heavy breaths from Jess and a chorus of crickets in the woods outside.

I immediately thought of Maggie and how Elsa Ditmer had—quite rightly—pegged her as sensitive. It dawned on me that her advice about believing Maggie in reality meant seeing things through my daughter’s eyes. To understand that, even though I knew these were the sounds of a house settling, they could seem quite menacing to someone so young. And if they were keeping me awake, then it was possible Maggie also couldn’t sleep. Which is why I decided it wouldn’t hurt to check on her.

Sliding out of bed, I crept out of the room and down the hallway to Maggie’s room. As I approached, I saw the door—which, at Maggie’s insistence, had been left open after we kissed her goodnight—suddenly close with a soft click.

So she was awake.

I opened the door a crack, expecting to see Maggie climbing back into bed, preparing to read one of her picture books by moonlight. Instead, I saw that she was already in bed, covered by her sheets from toe to shoulder. She was also, it seemed, fast asleep. By this point, both Jess and I could recognize when she was faking sleep. The shallow breaths. The flickering eyelids. The exaggerated, stone-heavy stillness of her limbs. This was the real deal, which prompted a single, worrisome question: Who had just closed her bedroom door?

The girl. The one Maggie said she saw.

That was my first thought. A crazy notion, immediately dismissed. There was no girl. As for the bedroom door, that had closed on its own, be it from a draft or from loose hinges or from the simple fact that it had been hung wrong when it was installed all those decades ago.

But then I looked to the armoire. The place where Maggie said this imaginary girl had disappeared.

Both of its doors were wide open.

Five

The armoire doors are closed.

No surprise there. It probably hasn’t been opened in twenty-five years.

What does surprise me is that someone—my father, I assume—has nailed the doors shut with a pair of two-by-fours. The boards crisscross the split between doors, giving it a distinctly forbidden look. Like a haunted house on a trick-or-treat bag.

Appropriate, I guess.

Also ridiculous.

Then again, the same could be said of my choosing to sleep in my old bedroom. There are plenty of other places where I could set up camp while I’m here. My parents’ old bedroom being the largest and, presumably, the most comfortable.

But it’s this room that speaks to me after I haul my luggage upstairs. No. 4 on the wall of bells in the kitchen. I’d like to think that’s due to familiarity. In truth, I suspect it’s simply because the room is nice. I can see why my dad chose it be my bedroom. It’s spacious. Charming.

Except for the armoire, which is the opposite of charming. A hulking, ungainly thing, it dominates the room while also feeling like it belongs somewhere else. The parlor. The Indigo Room. Anywhere but here.

The way it’s been boarded up doesn’t help matters. I can only guess as to why my father felt the need to do it. That’s why I go back outside, retrieve a crowbar from the truck, and pry off both boards in four quick pulls.

The wood clatters to the floor, and the armoire doors pucker open.

When I open them all the way, I see dresses.

They’re small. Little-girl dresses in an array of Easter-egg colors. Flouncy and frilly and cinched at the waist with satin ribbons. Shit no self-respecting child should ever be forced to wear. I sort through them, the fabric slightly stiff, dust gathered on the shoulders. On one, a strand of cobweb runs from sleeve to skirt. That’s when I realize these dresses are mine, meant for a much-younger me. According to the Book, my mother hung them here with the hope I’d one day want to dress like a Stepford Wife. To my knowledge, I never wore a single one. Which is probably why they’ve been left in the armoire, unused and unloved.

But when I move to the closet under the eaves and open its slanted door, I find more of my clothes inside. Clothes I’m certain I did wear. They’re exactly my style. Sensible jeans and striped T-shirts and a pair of sneakers with a wad of gum stuck to the left one’s sole. It’s a lot of clothes. My whole five-year-old wardrobe, it seems, is contained in this room.

In the 60 Minutes interview—the same one with shy little me and my awful bangs—my parents claimed we had fled Baneberry Hall with only the clothes we were wearing. I’ve watched it so many times the exchange is permanently etched in my memory.

“Is it true you’ve never been back to that house?” the interviewer said.

“Never,” my father said.

“Ever,” my mother added for good measure.

“But what about your things?” the interviewer asked. “Your clothes? Your possessions?”

“It’s all still there,” my father answered.

As with most things related to the Book, I never believed it. We couldn’t have left everything behind.

Yet as I stare into a closet filled with my old clothes, I start to think that maybe my parents had been telling the truth. That suspicion is heightened further when I go from the bedroom to the adjoining playroom. The floor is scattered with toys. Wooden blocks. Chunky Duplo bricks. A naked Barbie lies facedown in the carpet like a murder victim. It looks like a little girl had suddenly left the room mid-play, never to return.

I try to think of why my parents would have done such a thing. Why deny their only child her clothes? Her toys? Surely, I must have loved some of them. A favorite shirt. A beloved stuffed animal. A book I’d made my parents read to me over and over again. Why take that away from me for no good reason?

The best answer I can come up with is that it was for verisimilitude. That no one would have believed my parents if they had returned to grab that Barbie, for instance, or those gum-marred sneakers. That, in order for this long con Chief Alcott talked about to work, they needed to willingly abandon everything.

I guess my parents thought it was a sacrifice worth making. One they later made up for by lavishing me with things following the Book’s success. My father was especially fond of spoiling me. I was the first girl in my school to have a DVD player. And a flat-screen TV. And an iPhone. When I turned sixteen, he gave me a new car. When I turned seventeen, he gave me a second one. At the time, I chalked up the gifts to post-divorce guilt. Now I think it was a form of atonement for making me live with the Book.

Call me ungrateful, but I would have preferred the truth.

I leave the playroom and head down the hallway, peeking into the other rooms on the second floor. Most of them had been guest rooms during Baneberry Hall’s stint as a bed-and-breakfast. They’re small and, for the most part, empty. One, presumably a remnant from the B&B days, contains a twin bed stripped of sheets and a tilted nightstand, the shadeless lamp on top of it leaning like a drunk man. In the room next to it are an old sewing machine and spools of thread stacked in tidy pyramids. On the floor sits a cardboard box filled with Life magazines from the fifties.