On Wednesday evening, Connor sat on Marie’s lap in the nursery of Marlow House while she read him a book, and Eva watched over the infants, who slept in their cribs. Downstairs, the mediums of Beach Drive, along with Lily, Ian, and Brian, sat in the living room, discussing what they now referred to as a poltergeist. One thing they all agreed on was that they couldn’t come to an agreement on how to define poltergeist, which made sense to them, since they had no definitive answer to what was going on at Marlow House.
Brian and Heather had picked up food at Beach Taco, and the group now sat around the living room, plates of food in hand, discussing what Danielle and Lily had learned about the quilt.
“It’s sounding more and more like negative energy,” Heather said. “Not a haunting in the sense of a shy ghost, but some bad mojo wrapped up in the quilt.”
Brian, about to take a bite of his taco, paused a moment and looked at Heather. “How do you figure that?”
Heather shrugged. “Think about it. This Betsy person put all this love in the quilt, and then hormones flip an evil switch, and she ditches her family. She had to have been conflicted. The energy from all her negative feelings got sewn into that quilt.”
“I’m not so sure about the negative energy getting sewn into the quilt. From what Gemma told us, Betsy made the quilt when she was pregnant. It was after her babies were born, and after the quilt was made, that she seemed to change. But I agree in that the quilt was probably a likely target for the negative energy. If that’s really what’s going on,” Danielle said.
“You think it’s something else?” Chris asked.
“I don’t know.” Danielle leaned back in the sofa, a half-eaten burrito in her hand and, under it, a paper plate on her lap. “I guess it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact she never came back after the roller coaster of the postpartum depression subsided. Although, it can last for years, especially if left untreated.”
“She obviously got in touch with her husband sometime,” Chris said.
“Why do you say that?” Danielle asked.
“If he remarried two years later, they must have gotten a divorce. I would have to assume that meant they had some contact.”
“Who do you think the guy she left with was?” Heather asked. “Some boyfriend?”
Danielle shook her head. “I doubt that. When did she have time to meet someone? She probably arranged a driver.”
“I don’t think they had Uber back then,” Ian teased.
“What do we do now?” Lily asked. “Bury the quilt?”
“Yeah, and have it reappear, like it showed up in the nursery last night after we left it downstairs?” Danielle asked.
Chris glanced around the living room. “Where is the quilt now?”
“I put it in the basement in a trunk. Hopefully, it will stay put,” Walt said.
“Are the walls still knocking?” Chris asked.
“Only when Addison and Jack are hungry,” Danielle said.
“What’s the plan now?” Brian asked.
“A plan would be nice,” Danielle groaned.
“I’m sorry, Danielle. I wish I had never gone to that estate sale,” Lily said.
By the time Danielle went to bed that night, they had resolved nothing regarding the annoying poltergeist. Ian told them he would see if he could find out what happened to Betsy. Danielle was also curious about what happened to their twins.
* * *
“We’ve got to figure this out,” Danielle told Walt after she snuggled up to him later that night under the blankets in their bed. “We can’t expect Marie and Eva to spend all of their time here.”
“They have an eternity,” Walt teased.
Danielle giggled. “You know what I mean.”
Walt wrapped his arms around Danielle tighter and pulled her close. “I do.” He let out a sigh. “This is not how I imagined we would spend our early weeks of parenthood.”
“Me either. I really thought Eva would figure this thing out by now.”
Walt dropped a kiss on Danielle’s lips. “We’re going to work this out. But for now, I want you to get some sleep.”
“I’ll try not to yell in my sleep tonight.”
Walt chuckled. “Yes, that would be nice. I love you.”
“I love you too, Walt.”
They both closed their eyes and drifted off to sleep.
Danielle opened her eyes and found herself back in the bedroom with the two cribs and the rose-patterned wallpaper. She remembered being in this room before, but she couldn’t remember when that had been, or who lived in the house.
Confused, Danielle glanced around the room before moving closer to the cribs. She leaned over one crib and looked inside and saw a sleeping baby, and then peeked into the second crib, finding another sleeping infant. She wasn’t surprised to find them, yet she didn’t know whom they belonged to.
“I shouldn’t be here,” Danielle whispered to herself, overcome with a sense of dread. Turning from the cribs, she rushed from the room into the hallway and then abruptly stopped. She almost called out to see who was there to take care of the babies, but she instinctively understood that would be dangerous. Instead, she needed to get out of the house and find help.
Danielle rushed to the staircase, clutched the handrail, and started down the steps, careful not to make any noise. She had only taken three steps when something hit her in the back, and she tumbled down the stairs, head over feet, until she landed, facedown, on the floor.
She screamed, but no sound came out of her mouth. Danielle tried to speak, but she could not form words. She tried to move, but she felt paralyzed. She had landed on what looked like a large throw rug covering the wood floor.
Something, someone, grabbed hold of her ankles and lifted her legs up several feet from the floor. They dragged her backwards, shifting her body and then dropping her. The next moment she felt herself being rolled up into the carpet and then dragged backwards along the floor.
From one end of the carpet rolled around her body, she could see the staircase, which she had just been pushed down. Someone was pulling her away from the staircase, dragging her across the floor. The carpet rolled around her made her think of a straitjacket, holding her arms immobile along the sides of her body. She had been in this house before. They were taking her to the kitchen.
The monster dragging her across the kitchen floor stopped a moment, and she heard a door open. Her carpet prison no longer slid easily across the wood floor, but now bumped and slapped her body along what felt like dirt and rocks. She watched as she was pulled backwards from the kitchen door leading to the backyard.
Once again, she tried to scream, but she remained mute, locked inside herself and the rolled-up carpet. She watched as the house seemed to disappear, and her captor dragged her by a red barn with a large white J painted above its closed barn doors.
Finally, the monster stopped dragging her and twirled the rolled-up carpet—with her in it—around, giving her a view of where she had been taken. It looked like the entrance of a root cellar, or at least like pictures she had seen of root cellars.
She watched as its doors opened. Someone shoved her toward the opening, and then the carpet unfurled, spitting her out, landing her in a dark, earthy cavern. Whoever had been moving her stepped into the root cellar with her and rolled her body farther into the space until finally she hit a cool dirt wall. She opened her mouth to scream, but dirt filled her mouth as someone covered her with loose soil.
* * *
As Danielle was just waking up from her nightmare, two young boys across town hadn’t yet fallen asleep. Instead, they had helped a man sneak into their garage apartment without their mother, aunt or uncle seeing. Their mother was in the shower and assumed her sons had already fallen asleep. What she didn’t know, her sons were hiding someone in her bedroom.
Wearing her robe and a towel wrapped around her freshly washed hair, Debbie stepped out of the bathroom and looked into the living room. The hide-a-bed had been pulled out, and she could see both of her sons tucked under the covers. She turned and headed for the bedroom. As she opened the door to her bedroom, she could swear she heard her sons giggling.
She paused for a moment, looked back into the living room, and said, “You boys need to go to sleep. No playing around.”
“Yes, Mom,” they chorused before suppressing more giggles.
She turned her back to her sons, opened her bedroom door, stepped inside the room, and shut the door behind her. The next moment, someone grabbed her from behind, held a hand over her mouth, and whispered, “Deb, don’t scream. It’s me. Clay.”
Clay released hold of his wife, and the next moment Debbie twirled around, threw her arms around her husband, and sobbed.
* * *
Debbie and Clay snuggled under the blankets in the dark bedroom. They had been talking for hours. Clay told her where he had been, how he had run into their sons after they had broken into the Crawford house.
Debbie told him how she had been spending her time; she told him of Fred’s change of attitude and how he seemed resentful having her and the boys stay with them. She recounted conversations she had had with her sister, including a recent one about the gold coins and the Missing Thorndike, and how both she and her sister felt it unfair, how some people seemed to have everything handed to them. Debbie only recounted that conversation after Clay told her about the tunnel and opening the locked door leading into the Marlows’ basement.
Their conversation shifted to his current troubles with the law, and Debbie said, “I never doubted your innocence.”
Clay kissed his wife’s forehead. “The boys told me you knew I was innocent. Until then, I wasn’t sure.”
“Of course I believe you. I knew about your affair with Camilla. But I also knew you wanted to end it. You made a mistake, and you chose me and the boys. That’s all that mattered. There was no reason for you to kill that woman. Heather Donovan killed her.”
“Unfortunately, no one will believe me now. Not after I ran off.”
Debbie held Clay tighter. “You didn’t have a choice. Not the way the police department is in this town. It’s ridiculous the control Edward MacDonald has on the city council. Since your arrest, I see it more clearly. But you shouldn’t have come back, Clay. It’s too dangerous.”
“Everyone assumes I’m in Canada by now. I can’t leave you and the boys.”
“I should be furious at the boys for stealing those keys and breaking into the house, but I’m glad they did, because it brought you back to me.”
“Our boys are smart, Deb.”
“Like their daddy.”
Clay chuckled.
“I love you, Clay! But what are we going to do?”
“You need to trust me, Deb. But that means you need to promise not to say anything to your sister about me being here.”
“I won’t tell her. I promise. While Robyn has been great, super supportive, she would say something to Fred if I told her you were here. And Fred would call the police. He’s pretty pissed you took his coins.”
“Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have done that. But I panicked.”
“I understand.”
“But I have a plan. You’ve given me some ideas tonight on how to get us some money. Enough that you and the boys can leave this place, and I’ll meet up with you. You need to trust me, Deb. Can you trust me?”