Райли Сейгер - Home Before Dark - A Novel

Marta pauses, as if waiting for me to agree.

I say nothing.

“I spent the past twenty-odd years secure in the knowledge that I was safe,” she says. “That God had decided I’d suffered enough for one life. Then you came back. And Petra was found. And I knew it was only a matter of time before the truth finally came out.”

Marta’s hand stops at the small of my back and stays there. I tense beneath it, fearing what’s to come.

“I can’t let that happen, Maggie,” she says. “I’ve suffered. Far more than most. I lost my daughter and my husband on the same day. Few people in this world will ever know that kind of pain. But I do. I know it all too well. Forgive me, but I’m not about to suffer more.”

She flips me onto my back in one rough, startling motion. I’m too weak to fight it. Just a rag doll in her arms. The room stops tilting enough for me to notice the pillow hugged against her chest.

Marta pushes the pillow over my face. A sudden darkening. My breathing, already labored, becomes almost nonexistent. I gasp for air, sucking in pillowcase instead, almost choking on the fabric.

She scrambles on top of me, increasing the pillow’s pressure. I try to buck beneath her, to thrash my legs. But I have no energy left. The baneberries have stolen it from me. The most I can do is roll again onto my side.

It works.

Marta is thrown off-balance and falls away from me.

I fall, too.

Off the bed.

Onto the floor.

I take a deep breath of blessed air, and adrenaline kicks in, giving me the strength to start dragging myself along the floor. I’m at the doorway when Marta grabs an ankle and pulls me back toward the bed.

I scream and thrust out my free leg in a crazed, desperate kick. My foot slams against Marta’s face, which makes her start screaming, too. The sound of it rings off the walls as I resume my frenzied scramble down the hallway.

Marta doesn’t catch up to me until I’m at the top of the stairs. When she snags my leg again, I expect another pull back to the bedroom. Instead, she lifts it, flipping me over.

For a moment, the whole house goes upside down.

Then I’m on the stairs.

Still flipping.

Now rolling.

Now bouncing.

The edges of steps pound at my back. My head knocks against wall. My eyes pop open to see banister rails blurring past my face.

When it ends, I’m on my back at the foot of the stairs. Far above me, Marta stands at the top of the staircase, bent forward a bit, looking to see if I’m dead.

I’m not.

But I do think I’m dying.

A bright light forms atop the staircase, blinding in its intensity. So bright I grimace and squint. With that narrowing of my eyes, I’m able to see someone inside the brightness—a young woman just behind Marta, hovering at her shoulder.

She looks like Petra Ditmer.

Still sixteen and beautiful, flashing a smile of deep satisfaction.

The light lasts no longer than a blink. Definitely not long enough to confirm if the glow was indeed Petra or just a trick of my poisoned mind.

All I know is that right before the brightness dims, Marta Carver jolts forward, as if she’s been pushed. She tumbles down the steps, bones snapping like twigs. There’s one final snap when she lands—a loud crack of her neck I feel in my bones.

Her body rests a foot from mine, her head twisted like an elastic toy.

That’s when I know she’s dead.

And that I’m not.

And that all of this is finally over.

I roll my head, looking upward, my gaze sweeping up the staircase the two of us have just tumbled down.

That’s when I see someone standing at the top of the steps.

The person who had shoved Marta to her death.

It’s not Petra, as I had thought.

It’s her mother.

Elsa Ditmer stares at me, her eyes wild and alert. It’s clear she knows exactly where she is, what she’s done, and, after twenty-five long years, what happened to her daughter.

Epilogue

Vermont is gorgeous in October. Nothing but cerulean skies and fiery leaves and the smell of woodsmoke in the air. In the mornings, I like to sip my coffee on the front porch of Baneberry Hall and take it all in.

It’s my first Vermont autumn. It will likely also be my last.

There’s not much left to do on the house. With occasional help from Allie, I spent the rest of the summer and most of the fall renovating the place. My original plan in everything but execution. Instead of the Victorian glamour I’d envisioned, I settled for modern blandness. Open rooms and laminate floors and white everything. It seemed like the best option. Some houses don’t deserve to have their stories preserved.

It’s unclear how much Baneberry Hall will sell for when it’s listed. The house is once more all over the news—not always a good thing in the world of real estate.

Despite it being reported everywhere that the Book was all a lie to cover up what my parents thought I’d done, rumors persist that Baneberry Hall is haunted. People also continue to believe that my father was right and that Curtis Carver never murdered his daughter before killing himself. In fact, there’s a growing suspicion that Marta herself might have done it, even though all the evidence suggests otherwise.

All of this has brought out the ghouls, who’ve returned with renewed vigor. It got so bad that Chief Alcott had to resume stationing a police cruiser outside the front gate. I bring the cops coffee each night.

But I no longer feel unsafe here. It helps that I had the crumbled section of wall rebuilt, even though it was only the Ditmers and Marta Carver who got onto the property that way. I also had the secret passage bricked over and a state-of-the-art home security system installed. No more slips of paper stuck in the door for me.

As for the armoire, I happily took a sledgehammer to it, relishing the crack of the wood that came with each blow. Even so, I no longer sleep in that room, having moved instead to my parents’ old bedroom.

It turns out that Marta Carver wasn’t the only person who snuck through that armoire to visit me during the night. Elsa Ditmer had, too. While only partially lucid when interviewed by Chief Alcott, she confirmed in a foggy, roundabout way that she had entered my bedroom at least twice when I was a child.

Only I knew her as someone else.

Mister Shadow.

Not a ghost but a superstitious woman who knew of Baneberry Hall’s history and came at night to whisper a warning that almost came true.

You’re going to die here.

But now Elsa and her daughter are gone. Mrs. Ditmer’s Alzheimer’s got to be too much for Hannah alone, and she was admitted to a care facility near Manchester. Hannah went with her, moving into a studio apartment so she could be near her.

Before they left, my mother apologized to Hannah, who chain-smoked while she listened. When my mother finished, Hannah simply said, “You caused my family twenty-five years of pain. No apology is going to make up for that.”

It was the last time I saw her, although in the days leading to her departure, I noticed more and more items missing from Baneberry Hall, including Petra’s teddy bear, Buster. Other than that, everything that’s vanished from the house has ended up on her online auction site. Thanks to renewed interest in Baneberry Hall and the Book, a lot of the things sold for five times what they’re worth.

Dane is also gone.

I stopped by his cottage shortly after we both got out of the hospital. To his credit, he listened to what I had to say, letting me spend a good ten minutes standing on his doorstep and rambling my apology.

He said nothing when I finished. He simply turned away and closed the door.

A week later, he moved out.