Райли Сейгер - Home Before Dark - A Novel

As for the noise, I had no idea what it was. I suspected the house was responsible. Most likely something to do with the heating system resetting itself at a designated time. Granted, just before five in the morning was an odd time for that, but I saw no other possibilities for what the noise could be.

Rather than go back to bed, I went downstairs before dawn for the second time since we moved in. Once again, the chandelier was lit. I would have continued to think it was the wiring if I hadn’t heard the record player the night before. Clearly, both were the work of my unusually sleepless wife.

When Jess joined me in the kitchen after six, I greeted her by saying, “I never knew you were a Sound of Music fan.”

“I’m not,” she said, the second word stretching into a yawn.

“Well, you were last night. I don’t mind you going into the study. Just remember to turn off the record player when you leave.”

My wife gave me a sleepy-eyed look of confusion. “What record player?”

“The one on my desk,” I said. “It was playing last night. I figured you’d had trouble sleeping, went up there, and listened to music.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jess said as she made her way to the coffeepot. “I was asleep all night.”

It was my turn to look confused. “You weren’t in my office at all?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t turn the record player on?”

Jess poured herself a cup of coffee. “If I had, I certainly wouldn’t have picked The Sound of Music . Did you ask Maggie? She likes that movie. Maybe she was exploring?”

“At midnight?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Ewan,” Jess said as she sat down at the kitchen table. “Did you have it on at some point?”

“I did,” I said. “But that was two days ago. Right before Maggie hurt herself.”

“Did you turn it off?”

I didn’t know. All I could remember was hearing screams in the woods and bumping into the record player before running out of the study. Between taking Maggie to the emergency room and exploring the cemetery in the woods, I’d never had time to return there until the night before.

“Now that you mention it, I don’t think I did.”

“There you go.” Jess drank heartily from her mug, proud of herself. “You left the player on, and something bumped the needle back onto the record. Then the house was alive with the sound of music.”

“But what could have bumped it?”

“A mouse?” Jess suggested. “Maybe a bat? It’s an old house. I’m sure there’s something scurrying around inside these walls.”

I winced. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

But think about it I did. It was possible that an animal could be living in the study. After all, there had been a snake in the Indigo Room. Although I found it highly unlikely any animal could accidentally play a record.

After breakfast, I returned to the third floor and examined the record player. Everything looked normal. Turned off, record on the turntable, no sign a rodent had been anywhere near it. I bumped the arm, just to see if it could easily be moved by man or mouse.

It couldn’t.

So much for Jess’s theory. That meant the culprit had to be Maggie.

Before leaving, I unplugged the record player. Just in case. Then I made my way to Maggie’s wing, prepared to tell her she needed to ask permission before entering my study. It struck me as the only way to prevent it from happening again.

I found Maggie alone in the playroom next to her room. Only she didn’t act like she was alone. Sitting on the floor with an array of toys in front of her, she appeared to be talking to an imaginary person across from her.

“You can look, but you can’t touch,” she said, echoing something Jess told her nearly every time we went shopping. “If you want to play, you’ll need to find your own toys.”

“Who are you talking to?” I asked from the doorway. In Burlington, Maggie hadn’t shown any signs of having an imaginary friend. The fact she had one now made me wonder if it wasn’t a by-product of having Elsa Ditmer’s daughters here three days before. Now that she had finally experienced some companionship, maybe Maggie longed for more.

“Just a girl,” she said.

“Is she a new friend of yours?”

Maggie shrugged. “Not really.”

I stepped into the room, focused on the patch of floor where her imaginary not-friend would have been sitting. Even though no one was really there, Maggie had cleared a space for her.

“Does she have a name?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “She can’t talk.”

I joined her on the floor, making sure I didn’t invade the space of her imaginary friend. I still felt guilty about when I’d accused Maggie of lying about the girl in the armoire. She hadn’t been lying. She was pretending.

“I see,” I say. “So which one of you was in my study last night?”

Maggie gave me the same confused look I’d received from Jess in the kitchen. A slight tilt of the head. Right eyebrow raised. A scrunching of the face. The two were so alike, it was uncanny. The only difference was the bandage on Maggie’s cheek, which crinkled as she scrunched.

“What study?” she said.

“The room on the third floor. You haven’t been up there, have you?”

“No,” Maggie said, in a way that made me think she was telling the truth. Her voice usually contained a note of hollowness when she was lying. It remained convincing when she turned to the empty space across from her and said, “You weren’t up there, were you?”

She paused, absorbing a silent response only she could hear.

“She wasn’t,” Maggie informed me. “She spent last night in the wooden box.”

Those two words, innocuous by themselves, took on a sinister new meaning when used together. It made me think of a coffin and a little girl lying inside it. I smiled at Maggie, trying to hide my sudden unease.

“What wooden box, sweetie?”

“The one in my room. Where Mommy hangs things.”

The armoire. Again. I thought it strange how fixated she seemed to be on a simple piece of furniture. I told myself that Maggie was five and only doing things all kids her age did. Playing. Pretending. Not lying.

But then I remembered the sounds I kept hearing in my dreams. And the thud that most definitely wasn’t a dream. That got me thinking about what Hibbs had said about the house remembering. And the way Maggie’s door had closed the other night, almost as if pulled by an unseen force. A sense of dread crept over me, and I suddenly no longer had the desire to indulge my daughter’s imagination. In fact, all I wanted was to leave the room.

“I have an idea. Let’s go outside and play.” I paused, opting to make one small concession to Maggie’s imagination. “Your new friend can come, too.”

“She’s not allowed to leave,” Maggie said as she took my hand. Before we left the playroom, she turned back to the spot where her imaginary friend presumably still sat. “You can stay. But tell the others I don’t want them here.”

I paused then, struck by one word my daughter had used.

Others .

The unseen girl Maggie had been talking to and playing with—she wasn’t her only imaginary friend.

• • •

“I’m worried about Maggie,” I told Jess that night as we got ready for bed. “I think she’s too isolated. Did you know that she has imaginary friends?”

Jess poked her head out of the master bathroom, toothbrush in hand and mouth foaming like Cujo. “I had an imaginary friend when I was her age.”

“More than one?”

“Nope.” Jess disappeared back into the bathroom. “Just Minnie.”

I waited until she was done brushing her teeth and out of the bathroom before asking my follow-up question. “When you say you had an imaginary friend named Minnie, are you talking about Minnie Mouse?”