The bathrooms would also be full guts, she explained. Hand-pressed subway tile, honed marble, frameless glass—she rattled off the finishes up the back stairs.
“This will be Hunter’s room,” she announced as the procession continued into the first bedroom. “We’ll close off the access to the bathroom here and put in a linen closet to make it a true hall bath.”
The contractor nodded and made a note.
Margot opened the closet door for the first time to take stock of the storage space and startled at what she found. Giant letters screamed in red crayon wax:
DeAD GiRL!
DeAD GiRL!
RuN!
A flurry of other pencil marks and crayon scarred the walls, slashing angrily over the spider-cracked plaster. Hundreds of words large and small scribbled in a childlike hand.
I KiLLeD iT! BAD BeNNy! BAD!
MusT TeLL MusT TeLL
HeLP HeR!
She drew in a ragged breath.
“What, no closet space?” Myron came up behind her with a knowing smile that dropped at the sight of the words. He opened his mouth to say something, but Margot slammed the closet door shut before he could speak. I hate this creepy house! her expression shrieked at him.
“What would you like for the closet, ma’am?” the contractor asked, pencil in hand.
Margot blinked away her horror and cleared her throat, visibly shaken. “Wallpaper. Old-fashioned prints. Like . . . hatboxes. We’ll, um . . . we’ll send you the patterns.”
He nodded. After the couple stepped out of the room, he cracked the closet door back open to take a few quick measurements. “Dead girl,” he muttered to himself. “That’s real nice. Jesus Christ.”
Out in the hallway, Margot stared blankly down the long, dark row of doors as though expecting to see the specter of a dead girl standing there. The lines of her forehead deepened, and she suddenly looked much older than her girlish hair and figure would admit. What have we done? her face seemed to ask. Every toned muscle in her body tensed to run out the door and never look back, but it was too late. They’d paid cash for the place.
Her husband placed what was meant to be a reassuring hand at the small of her back. She recoiled as though struck.
“Hey.” He tried again, holding both hands up as a peace offering. “It’s just some sick kids playing games, hon. Nothing to worry about. I promise.”
Her jaw tensed as she debated the wisdom of screaming, of crying, of slapping him across the face. You did this! Now we’re trapped here!
The fat man appeared just in time. “So what’s next?”
She shut her eyes and forced air in and out before rattling off the next series of instructions. Fresh paint in every room. Reconfigure the master suite. Repurpose that bedroom. Move the master bath. Build his-and-hers walk-in closets. Refinish the wood floors. All signs of vandalism would be eradicated. Everything would be brought up to date and rehabilitated. Every demon exorcised. Every ghost chased out.
Margot stopped their procession at the top of the narrow attic stairs. At the far end of the long, empty expanse that would have been the maid’s living room, a light bulb was still burning in the bathroom. It cast a sickly yellow glow onto the dusty wood floor.
I told them to turn the light off last week. Her eyes flashed with irritation. Her upper lip curled at the porcelain floor tiles of the grungy bathroom. Dozens of filthy footprints loitered there. Squatters, vagrants, drug addicts. The grout lines ran black with a hundred years of dirt. She shrank from the room as though she could sense something terrible had happened there.
“And what would you like to do up here, ma’am? Paint?” He motioned to faint pencil markings on the wall—and we shall plant four trees—but the lady of the house wasn’t looking.
She turned away from the filthy bathroom floor and straightened her back. “Not much . . . we’ll just use it as storage.”
The fat man clomped over to one of the half-size doors on the left and popped it open. Dust rained down from the rafters as the door slapped against the knee wall. He shined a flashlight into the unfinished crawl space under the eaves between the window dormers. “We could run our AC ducts through here,” the man said and pulled a tape measure from his belt. He poked the cold metal line up and down, side to side, tearing through the cobwebs.
Margot squinted into the cavern, braced for bats or rodents to come skittering out. The roof rafters sprang from the far edge of the floor, disappearing under the plaster over her head. Orange sap beaded up on the faces of the wood boards. The beam of the man’s flashlight hovered over a spot on the floor where a small leather shoe lay in the dust. From the cut of it, it was at least sixty years old. Margot frowned, debating whether to pick it up.
It had belonged to a boy.
“Can even fit the air handler, I’d bet.” The contractor clicked off the light and slapped the door closed again.
Margot shook the image of the little shoe from her head. The attic left its impressions all over her face. Unsettled. Sad. Lonely. Haunted. The sales agent’s warning rang true in that moment: The house is cursed. She rubbed her arms as though cold.
The contractor turned to the two small bedrooms facing the backyard. The door on the left was locked. He jiggled the handle and asked, “Anyone give you the master key?”
Margot glanced from the locked door to her husband.
Myron raised his eyebrows and said, “Nope. They sure didn’t.”
“We’ll have to call a locksmith.” Max made a note on his clipboard and moved to the next small bedroom, taking a quick inventory.
The locked pine door cast a sinister shadow in Margot’s mind. She studied it warily as though she could sense something or someone on the other side of it, listening. “What do you think is in there?”
“I don’t know.” Myron cocked a teasing eyebrow. “Indian Head pennies? Buried treasure? Jimmy Hoffa?”
Unamused, Margot pushed past her husband and away from the mysterious door. A blemish in the ceiling over the stairs caught her eye. She squinted at the pinpoint of daylight leaking in from outside. The plaster had blistered and yellowed around it. “Is that a roof leak? Myron, was this in the home inspector’s report?”
Her husband looked up from his cell phone with a defensive scowl. “No, I don’t think so, but I’m sure if it was a major concern, they would’ve said something. Max? Can you weigh in on this?”
The contractor straightened himself and walked over to the spot the woman was pointing to with an accusing finger. He squinted at the round hole in the ceiling, no bigger than a dime. Fine cracks radiated from it like a broken spiderweb. Bullet hole? his face asked, but what he said was, “That shouldn’t take much to patch. We’ll have our roofer go up and take a look.”
Myron nodded, relieved. “Good. So when do you think we’d be able to move in?”
Max flipped through his clipboard and began to talk numbers.
Ignoring them both, Margot wandered toward the first small bedroom on the right and peered into where a maid had once slept. Inside, a tiny window looked out onto the overgrown backyard. Pale flowered wallpaper still clung to the walls. She stepped into the room and ran a finger down a puckered seam. It was hand-printed paper, not machined vinyl. Clearly, the room hadn’t been touched in nearly one hundred years. The sloped ceiling was slightly yellow in the corner. The pine casements and baseboards had been left unpainted. She eyed the round buttons of the antique light switch next to the door and the shadow of a narrow bed on the floorboards.