Chapter Fifteen

FIFTEEN

Shortly after that business with the man on the stairs, I decided it was high time I learned a little more about the house. Father Cyrus had already come and gone, as had September in all its chaotic glory, but there were still pranksters around and the basement still brought about that dreaded feeling, even more so now that I knew the man was down there.

It wasn’t that Hal didn’t believe me about the man by the basement stairs, but he believed me only in a vague sense, like someone might loosely believe in UFOs without ever seeing any evidence. Still, Hal didn’t share my desire to learn any more about the house; he had never been the type to delve deeper into a situation, to really grasp its underpinnings. So I was alone in the library, stacks of old newspaper clippings surrounding me. I had a good laugh at myself for being the type of person to squint over a microfiche reader, jotting down notes about murders past and getting sideways looks from the librarians. I might as well have been a character in a movie.

There wasn’t enough information to form a linear story, but there were enough bits and pieces that I was able to fill in at least some of the blanks.

“A lot of things make more sense,” I said to Edie later as we rocked on the front porch and sorted through my stacks of photocopies and microfilm printouts. Edie shared Hal’s disinclination to learn more about the history of the house, but she was at least willing to listen.

“Here’s what I can piece together.” I held up a photocopy of a newspaper article, its grainy images nearly obliterated by time. “This house was built in 1882 by this family—the Vales. They seemed well-known in town. Once I started searching for the name, there were little blurbs about them everywhere. George Vale was a doctor, and his wife, Penelope, was on all these planning committees for dances and the like. The townsfolk seemed to love them—there are all sorts of glowing things written about them in the paper. Even their children seemed to be town celebrities. Their son—Vernon—was active in the church, and their daughter—Violet—had a piece written about her debutante ball.” I passed the piece of paper to Edie, who turned it over in her hands and pretended to be interested.

“Do you think the man you saw on the stairs is George?” Edie asked.

I showed Edie a picture of George in the paper. Even in the blurry, faded black-and-white photo, you could tell that George was somewhat short and fairly girthy. “I don’t think so,” I said.

Edie chuckled.

“There were some discrepancies about the family in these articles,” I continued. “Some articles said that George and Penelope had two children and others said three. But I never saw any children’s names mentioned aside from Vernon and Violet. I chalked it up to errors on the newspaper’s part at first. But when I looked up their obituaries, that’s when things got strange.”

“Strange how?” Edie asked. “Did they die under suspicious circumstances?”

“Sort of,” I said. “The whole family seemed to die around the same time. Like, within a month or so they were all dead, even the children. George died first—a heart attack.”

“Not that suspicious,” Edie said, pointing at his picture.

“Right,” I said. “But then Penelope died a few days later. Because the family was such a big deal and George had just died, there was a longer article about it. The newspaper said that she had been outside gardening and had a seizure, but some family friend was quoted as saying that she had had no history of seizures and had been in tip-top shape.”

“Grief?” Edie asked.

I rolled my eyes. “Everything is survivable.”

“Not seizures, apparently.”

“Fair point,” I said. “But get this—a week later, Vernon died.” I handed Edie the article. “Their nanny said he was playing ball in the yard with some friends and collapsed. Just like that. She said he hadn’t been feeling well but was trying to soldier on, being the new man of the house and all. They never figured out what happened. And then”—I handed Edie yet another article—“Violet disappeared, just walked off into the woods. She was found a week later, propped up against a tree. She’d been nibbled at by some wild animals, but the article says that wasn’t what killed her. It says she died from dehydration or exposure to the elements or something. Like she just sat down and died.”

“That’s odd,” Edie said.

I pointed at the articles. “And look at the dates.”

Edie peered at the blurred text. “September.” Her eyes widened. “Do you think that’s what all the hullabaloo was about last month?”

“Maybe,” I said.

Edie made a sad noise. “A whole family. Dead in under a month.”

“Interesting you should say that.” I shuffled through the papers. “Because it turns out, that wasn’t the whole family.” I placed an article in Edie’s lap.

Edie read it over, then looked up at me. “They had another son?”

“Well,” I said, “Penelope did. Theodore Vale.” It had been nearly impossible to find out anything about him, but I had been able to piece a few things together. “She had him before she and George got married. Their marriage announcement said her last husband died. I guess George adopted him.”

“That’s nice,” Edie said.

“Not quite,” I said. “Theodore Vale’s place in his family seems uncertain. He wasn’t in any family photos. He wasn’t mentioned whenever the family was written about. Hell—I couldn’t find a record of him having attended school. Both Vernon and Violet had little articles written about them when they were born, and Theodore wasn’t mentioned in either. But he had been there all along.”

“That’s strange.” Edie’s brow furrowed. “Why do you think he was left out?”

I shuffled through my papers. “I have a theory about that,” I said. “A few months after everyone died, someone wrote an article about the Vale family. They talked about the tragedy of their deaths, the summer of youth stolen away, blah blah blah. The house and everything went to Theodore Vale, and the article had a thing or two to say about him.” I handed Edie the article. “First of all, Penelope wasn’t telling the truth when she said her last husband had died. Apparently, there was no last husband. Theodore was born out of wedlock.”

“So?” Edie asked. “Who cares?”

“George Vale, apparently,” I said. “A close friend of the family said that he was enraged when he found out that Penelope had lied, that she had been with another man outside of the bonds of marriage. That he had given his family name to a bastard.”

Edie rolled her eyes. “Men.”

“Right?” I said. “Also, even though the Vales had this reputation in town as being the perfect family, there are excerpts from a few of Violet’s letters that told a slightly different story. Apparently, George was a bit of a dick. Violet talked about him not allowing her to eat the week before her debutante ball, so she could fit into her dress. She said that Vernon got low marks in school once, and George beat him so bad he couldn’t walk for days.”

“Oh my.” Edie’s eyes widened.

“But in another letter,” I said, skimming through the article, “Violet says, Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. At least it isn’t as bad as Teddy gets it.”

“Theodore?” Edie asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “Not that Violet had any sympathy for him. Here, she says, He draws it out of father with his wicked little ways. It is in his nature, after all, being a bastard.”

“Jesus,”Edie said.

“I know,” I said. “Different times, I suppose. It seems that Theodore Vale had a rough life. But?.?.?.” I shuffled through more articles until I found the one I was looking for—it had a grainy photograph of the house, taken just after the Vale family died. It was faint, but in the living room window, I could just make out a figure—a tall, skinny man with arms that were too long for his body; he was staring out at the world with an expression that time had erased. I pointed to the figure. “That is definitely who I saw.”

Edie blew out a breath. She didn’t seem to care for the man in the photograph.

“The article says a lot more about him,” I said, “and most of it isn’t good. Some of the former staff were interviewed—Theodore Vale fired most of the help after his family died, apparently. They said he was vicious and ill-tempered, would lash out at them for the simplest mistakes, insisted everyone call him Master Vale. They said that he didn’t seem to grieve his family’s death at all, that he said it was time he got what was rightfully his.”

“Well”—Edie shrugged—“they didn’t seem to treat him very nicely, now, did they?”

“The article got a little weird after that,” I said. “Apparently, a few townsfolk thought that Theodore Vale had had something to do with his family’s deaths, that he was involved in some sort of witchcraft or devilry. There doesn’t seem to be any actual evidence of that, though. I think they were just saying it because, it says here, they never saw him at church.”

“Old-timey folks and their superstitions,” said Edie.

“And then it gets really bad.”

“Oh?”

“A while later, children started to go missing.” I grabbed an article and pointed at a large photograph of a doe-eyed girl sitting by her infant brother. “That girl. That’s the one I’ve been seeing. The one who points at the basement.”

Edie peered at the photograph. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. I saw her every day for a month straight. I practically saw her in my sleep, if I’d been sleeping at all. That’s her.” I looked at the article. “Her name was Angelica.”

“Did they ever find her?” Edie asked.

“No,” I said. “They never found any of them. There were three?.?.?. four?.?.?. five?.?.?.” I flipped through the articles, counting. “Six children missing in total. None of them found. The advertisements would show up in the paper from time to time—Have you seen this child? But as far as I can tell, nothing came of them.”

“That’s terrible,” Edie said. “To lose a child and never know what happened.”

“I know what happened,” I said. “Every single one of these children, I’ve seen them. They were here, in this house. Last September. They look just like they did when they died. This one”—I shuffled through the papers until I found the picture, then held it up for Edie to see—“named?.?.?. Julian. He was disemboweled. These two”—again holding up a picture—“Charles and Constance, they were stabbed. This kid”—another picture—“his arm was cut off.”

Edie waved her hand at me. “I get the point,” she said, gone a touch pale. “Was Vale ever found out?”

“No,” I said. “The children were spaced out across the years. A few children gone one year, a few more the next.”

“How can you be so sure it was him?” Edie asked.

I gestured toward the house. “Who else could it’ve been? All these kids disappearing, one after another, starting right after Theodore Vale takes over the house? And then reappearing in this same house, all together? Speaking of—” I shuffled through the papers. “Guess when the children went missing each year.”

“September?”

“Exactly. There is something about Theodore Vale—Master Vale, I guess—and Septembers,” I said. “Anyway, I have his obituary here. Apparently, he wasn’t paying off his debts, and when someone from the bank came around to check on him, they found him dead inside the house. They think he had some sort of disease. It says he had wasted away to basically nothing and had sores all over his body. He had long since fired all the house staff at that point, so he was all alone, with no one to care for him.”

“Don’t tell me you feel bad for that man.” Edie chuckled.

“Not really,” I said. “But he had a hard life. Think about it—neglected and abused, despised by your parents, who refused to acknowledge you while your siblings got all the adoration? That must really have an impact on a person.”

“He killed children,” Edie reminded me.

“I know that.” I waved my hand at her. “I’m just saying that when you consider the kind of life he had?.?.?.”

Edie rolled her eyes but let it rest. Edie knew how I was, given my own family background.

“So, what else did you find out?” Edie asked.

“Nothing near as exciting,” I said. “There was an article written in the 1910s, when that man in the upstairs closet went insane and killed Fredricka and his wife and then supposedly himself, but I already knew about all that. Otherwise, the house has mostly just been empty. I keep finding real estate listings for it, as the property of the bank. People buy it and then disappear.”

“Are there any pictures? Do you recognize any of the former owners?”

“No pictures.” I frowned. “And not a lot of names either. Here’s something—in the 1940s, the place was owned by a widow and her son. I can’t make out the woman’s name, but it looks like the child was named Elias. They went missing after a few years, and the sheriff was quoted saying they couldn’t afford the payments anymore and split town.”

“Do you think that’s the boy you keep seeing?” Edie asked. “The one that bites?”

“It must be,” I said. “I haven’t seen his mother, though. Not sure what that’s about.”

“She must be around here somewhere,” Edie said.

“The last article written about the house was in the mid-nineties,” I said. “At the time, the house had been recently purchased by someone, but the article didn’t say who. But then, a few years later, I found a real estate posting about the house again, back as the property of the bank.”

“Oh dear,” Edie said.

I told all this to Hal later, but he wasn’t particularly interested in any of it. He didn’t find my deductions about the children revelatory (Haven’t you been saying they look all cut up? he asked. Of course they were murdered.), nor was he especially interested in the backstory of Master Vale (What does his father being a dick have to do with us? he asked). He was not at all sympathetic about Elias, saying only that the boy gave him the heebie-jeebies when he stood at the end of the hallway and stared like that, eyes full of nothing, and Hal definitely did not care for all the biting. I would have left him too if he had bitten me like that, Hal said when I told him about Elias’ mother, and he was not receptive to my reminders that the problem could be prevented by staying out of Elias’ space (That’s not the point, Hal said).

“Will any of this get these things out of our house?” Hal asked me. “These things you say you’re seeing.”

“I don’t think they’re going anywhere,” I replied. And that had been the end of that.

“Do you want to hear something funny?” I asked Edie.

“Sure,” Edie said.

“Guess when Master Vale died,” I said.

Edie smiled, already knowing. “When?”

“September thirtieth.”

Edie laughed. “Of course.”