Seven

I send Dane home for the day after our talk in the cemetery. It feels like the right thing to do, despite the fact that we accomplished next to nothing. After revisiting our possibly haunted pasts, both of us deserve an afternoon off.

For me, that involves heading into town for much-needed groceries.

My drive to the store brings me onto Bartleby’s main thoroughfare. Maple Street, of course. I pass clapboard houses as sturdy and unbending as the people who surely live inside them, storefronts with large windows and signs hawking authentic maple syrup, the obligatory church with its ivory steeple stretching toward the sky. There’s even a town square—a small patch of green with a gazebo and flagpole.

Although quaint, there’s a slight dinginess to Bartleby not present in similar towns. A sense that time has passed it by. Still, I notice small attempts at modernization. A sushi restaurant. A vegetarian bistro. A consignment shop specializing in designer brands with a diaphanous Gucci dress prominently displayed in the window.

And I see a bakery, which makes me slam on the brakes in the middle of Maple Street. In my experience, where there are baked goods, there’s also coffee. Usually good coffee. Considering my undercaffeinated state, that’s worth slamming the brakes.

I park on the street and step into a space decorated in a manner that’s both trendy and timeless. Copper fixtures. Tile-top tables with mismatched chairs. Midnight-blue walls filled with vintage illustrations of birds inside ornate frames. At the rear of the shop, an old-fashioned display case stretches from wall to wall, filled with gorgeously decorated cakes, delicate pastries, and pies with elaborate crusts worthy of Instagram. As far as visuals go, the owner certainly knows what she’s doing.

I walk to the display case, ready to tell the woman adjusting pastries inside it how much I like the design. The compliment dies on my lips when the woman rises from behind the counter and I see who she is.

Marta Carver.

I recognize her from the pictures I saw when I was a House of Horrors–obsessed tween who hoped Google would help fill the gaps in my knowledge. She’s older and softer now. Fiftyish, brown hair graying at the roots, slightly matronly in her yellow blouse and white apron. Her glasses don’t help—the same unflattering spectacles she wore in all those photos.

I’m apparently not the only one who’s done some Googling, because it’s clear she knows who I am. Her eyes widen just enough to register her surprise, and her jaw tightens. She clears her throat, and I brace myself for an angry tirade about my father. It would be justified. Of the many people in Bartleby who hate the Book, Marta Carver has the biggest reason for doing so.

Instead, she forces her lips into a polite smile and says, “What can I get for you, Miss Holt?”

“I—”

I’m sorry. That’s what I want to say. I’m sorry my father exploited your tragedy in his book. I’m sorry that because of him the whole world knows what your husband did.

“Coffee, please,” is what I end up saying, the words tight in my throat. “To go.”

Marta says nothing else as she pours my coffee and hands it to me. I muster a weak “Thank you” and pay with a ten-dollar bill. The change goes into a tip jar atop the counter, as if that seven dollars can make up for twenty-five years of pain.

I tell myself there’s no need to apologize. That it was my father, not me, who wronged her. That I’m just as much a victim as she is.

But as I leave that bakery, I know two things.

One, that I’m a coward.

And, two, that I hope to never see Marta Carver again as long as I live.

---

—

I return from the grocery store with a dozen paper bags in the back of my pickup. Because Baneberry Hall’s kitchen leaves a lot to be desired, I stocked up on food that’s easy to prepare. Canned soups, cold cereal, frozen dinners that can be zapped in the ancient microwave.

When I pull up to the house, I find a Toyota Camry also parked in the circular drive. Soon a man appears from the side of the house, as if he’s just been roaming the grounds. He’s in his early fifties, trim, with a tidy beard, a checked sport coat, and a matching bow tie. The outfit makes him look like an old-timey salesman. All that’s missing is a straw hat and a bottle of snake oil. As he approaches with one hand extended and another gripping a reporter’s notebook, I realize exactly who he is.

Brian Prince.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

“Good to see you, Maggie,” he says, as if we’re old friends.

I hop out of the truck, scowling. “You’re trespassing, Mr. Prince.”

“My apologies,” he says, doing a half bow of attrition. “I heard you were back in town, so I decided to drive out here and see for myself. When I saw the front gate open, I realized the rumors were true. Hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”

I grab a grocery bag from the truck and carry it to the porch. “Will you leave if I say yes?”

“Grudgingly,” he says. “But I do intend to come back, so you might as well get it over with now.”

“Get what over with?”

“Our interview, of course,” he says.

I return to the truck and grab two more bags. “I’m afraid I’m not very newsworthy, Mr. Prince.”

“Oh, I beg to differ. I think the community would be very interested to know that a member of the Holt family has moved back to Baneberry Hall.”

“I’m not moving in,” I say. “In fact, I’m moving out. There’s your article in two sentences.”

“What are your plans for the house?”

“Fix it up, sell it, hopefully walk away with a profit,” I say, nodding toward the equipment on the lawn as I make my way to the porch. First the table saw. Then the electric sander. Then the sledgehammer.

“The fact that Baneberry Hall will soon be back on the market is newsworthy in itself,” Brian says.

Deep down, I know Brian Prince is blameless. He heard a juicy story about a haunted house, interviewed my father, and wrote down what he said. He had simply done his job, just like Tess Alcott had done hers. The only two people responsible are my parents, and even they had no idea the story of Baneberry Hall would grow into the unruly phenomenon it became. That still doesn’t keep me from wanting to grab the sledgehammer and chase Brian Prince off my property.

“Newsworthy or not, I don’t want to talk to you,” I say.

“Your father did,” he says. “Sadly, he never got the chance.”

I lower the bags on the porch, my legs wobbly with surprise. “You communicated with my father?”

“Not often,” Brian says. “But we continued to correspond on and off over the years. And one of the things we discussed shortly before his illness took a turn for the worse was him coming back here to do an interview with me.”

“Your idea, I suppose.”

“Actually, it was your father who suggested it. He pitched it as an exclusive interview. Him and me talking inside this house, twenty-five years later.”

It’s yet another thing my father never mentioned, probably because he knew I would have tried to talk him out of it.

“Did he tell you what the gist of this conversation would have been?” I say, toying with the possibility it might have been an attempt to finally come clean after all these years. A confession, of sorts, taking place at the scene of the crime.

That idea is immediately shot down by Brian Prince.

“Your father said he wanted to reaffirm what he had written in his book.”

“And you were just going to go along with it?” I say, my opinion of Brian Prince swiftly changing. Maybe he’s not as blameless as I first thought. “Listen to my father tell a bunch of lies and write it down as fact?”

“I wasn’t planning on going easy on him,” Brian says as he fussily adjusts his bow tie. “I was going to ask some tough questions. Try to get at the truth of the matter.”

“The truth is that he made it all up,” I say. “Everyone knows that.”

“I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” he says.

Because Brian Prince shows no sign of leaving anytime soon, I take a seat on the porch steps. When Brian sits next to me, I’m too tired to shoo him away. Not to mention a tad curious about what he thinks is the real reason we abandoned Baneberry Hall.

“Did you investigate his claims?” I ask.

“Not back then,” Brian admits. “I didn’t have access to this house, for one thing. Plus there was other news to deal with.”

I roll my eyes. “It must not have been too important. The Gazette put my father’s bullshit story on the front page.”

Which, I wanted to add, was the reason other news outlets paid so much attention to it. If Brian’s article had been buried inside the paper, no one would have even noticed it. But by splashing it across the front page, along with a particularly sinister photo of Baneberry Hall, the Gazette had provided validation for my father’s lies.

“If our deadline had been a day later, your family’s story probably wouldn’t have even made the paper. But I didn’t hear about the Ditmer girl’s disappearance until the morning after that issue had gone to press.”

My body goes rigid at the mention of Petra. “I thought she ran away.”

“I see you’ve already talked to Chief Alcott,” Brian says, flashing me an unctuous smile. “That’s the police’s official line, by the way. That Petra Ditmer ran away. I guess it sounds better than saying a sixteen-year-old girl vanished under mysterious circumstances and they were too inept to find out what really happened to her.”

“What do you think happened?”

“That’s one of the things I wanted to ask your father.”

An uneasy feeling floods my gut. Although I’m unsure where Brian is going with this, his tone of voice already suggests I’m not going to like it.

“Why ask him?” I say. “My father didn’t make Petra run away—”

“Vanish,” Brian interjects.

“Vanish. Disappear. Whatever.” I rise, heading back to the truck, no longer wanting to hear what else Brian has to say. “My father wasn’t involved in any of that.”

“I thought that, too,” Brian says, still on the porch steps, still smiling, still acting like this is just a friendly visit when it’s clearly not. “It wasn’t until later—long after your father’s book came out—that I began to suspect they could be related.”

“How?”

“For starters, Petra Ditmer was last seen on July 15—the same night you and your family left this place. That’s a bit too strange to be a coincidence, don’t you think?”

The news hits me hard. There’s a dizzying moment in which I think I’m going to faint. It comes out of nowhere, forcing me to lean against the truck to keep from falling.

Petra Ditmer vanished the same night we fled Baneberry Hall.

Brian is right—that does feel like more than just a coincidence. But I don’t know what else it could be. Petra certainly didn’t run away with my family. That’s something I would have remembered. Besides, Chief Alcott was inside our hotel room at the Two Pines that night. Surely she would have noticed if a sixteen-year-old girl had also been there.

“I think you’re overreaching,” I say.

“Am I? I’ve read your father’s book many times. In it, he had lots to say about Petra Ditmer. Considering their age difference, they seemed quite close.”

He puts a lascivious spin on the word that makes my blood boil. Yes, Petra was mentioned frequently in the Book, often at key moments. That can’t be denied, especially when I now have the photos to prove it. But that doesn’t mean she and my father were, to use Brian’s euphemism, close.

I knew my father better than he did. Ewan Holt was a lot of things. A liar. A charmer. But he wasn’t a creep or a womanizer. I know that as sure as I know that my mother, had she been cheated on, would have taken my father for every cent he was worth. Since she didn’t, I have to believe we left Baneberry Hall for other reasons.

“Most of what’s in my father’s book is verifiably false. You can’t trust a single thing he wrote. Including how much time he spent with Petra Ditmer. My father wasn’t a stupid man, Mr. Prince. He certainly wouldn’t have written so much about Petra—in a book that hundreds of thousands of people have read—if he was the one who caused her disappearance.”

“Now you’re the one who’s overreaching. I never said he caused her disappearance. What I’m suggesting is that they’re related. Your family fled Baneberry Hall at almost the exact same time Petra Ditmer vanished without a trace. That’s not normal, Maggie. Not here in Bartleby.” Brian stands and makes a show of wiping his pants, as if merely sitting on Baneberry Hall’s porch steps has somehow dirtied him. “Something strange happened the night your family left, and I fully intend to find out what it was. Now, you can help me or hinder me—”

“I’m sure as hell not going to help you,” I say.

Even though Brian Prince and I share the same goal, it’s clear we’re each looking for different results.

“Although that’s not the answer I wanted to hear, I respect it nonetheless,” Brian says. “But just so you know, I will uncover the truth about that night.”

“You’re going to have to do it off my property,” I say. “Which means you need to leave. Now.”

Brian makes one last adjustment to his bow tie before getting into his car and driving away. I follow behind him, walking the long, curving road down the hillside to the front gate. Once I’ve made sure he’s gone, I close the gate and lock it.

Then it’s back to the house, where I’m finally able to carry my groceries inside. Burdened with bags heavy in both arms, I get just past the vestibule before noticing something wrong.

It’s bright in here.

Way too bright.

I look to the ceiling and see the chandelier burning at full glow.

But here’s the weird thing: when I left the house, it was dark.

While I was gone, it had somehow been turned on.