Page 49 of Home Before Dark

“A mouse?” Jess suggested. “Maybe a bat? It’s an old house. I’m sure there’s something scurrying around inside these walls.”

I winced. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

But think about it I did. It was possible that an animal could be living in the study. After all, there had been a snake in the Indigo Room. Although I found it highly unlikely any animal could accidentally play a record.

After breakfast, I returned to the third floor and examined the record player. Everything looked normal. Turned off, record on the turntable, no sign a rodent had been anywhere near it. I bumped the arm, just to see if it could easily be moved by man or mouse.

It couldn’t.

So much for Jess’s theory. That meant the culprit had to be Maggie.

Before leaving, I unplugged the record player. Just in case. Then I made my way to Maggie’s wing, prepared to tell her she needed to ask permission before entering my study. It struck me as the only way to prevent it from happening again.

I found Maggie alone in the playroom next to her room. Only she didn’t act like she was alone. Sitting on the floor with an array of toys in front of her, she appeared to be talking to an imaginary person across from her.

“You can look, but you can’t touch,” she said, echoingsomething Jess told her nearly every time we went shopping. “If you want to play, you’ll need to find your own toys.”

“Who are you talking to?” I asked from the doorway. In Burlington, Maggie hadn’t shown any signs of having an imaginary friend. The fact she had one now made me wonder if it wasn’t a by-product of having Elsa Ditmer’s daughters here three days before. Now that she had finally experienced some companionship, maybe Maggie longed for more.

“Just a girl,” she said.

“Is she a new friend of yours?”

Maggie shrugged. “Not really.”

I stepped into the room, focused on the patch of floor where her imaginary not-friend would have been sitting. Even though no one was really there, Maggie had cleared a space for her.

“Does she have a name?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “She can’t talk.”

I joined her on the floor, making sure I didn’t invade the space of her imaginary friend. I still felt guilty about when I’d accused Maggie of lying about the girl in the armoire. She hadn’t been lying. She was pretending.

“I see,” I say. “So which one of you was in my study last night?”

Maggie gave me the same confused look I’d received from Jess in the kitchen. A slight tilt of the head. Right eyebrow raised. A scrunching of the face. The two were so alike, it was uncanny. The only difference was the bandage on Maggie’s cheek, which crinkled as she scrunched.

“What study?” she said.

“The room on the third floor. You haven’t been up there, have you?”

“No,” Maggie said, in a way that made me think she was tellingthe truth. Her voice usually contained a note of hollowness when she was lying. It remained convincing when she turned to the empty space across from her and said, “You weren’t up there, were you?”

She paused, absorbing a silent response only she could hear.

“She wasn’t,” Maggie informed me. “She spent last night in the wooden box.”

Those two words, innocuous by themselves, took on a sinister new meaning when used together. It made me think of a coffin and a little girl lying inside it. I smiled at Maggie, trying to hide my sudden unease.

“What wooden box, sweetie?”

“The one in my room. Where Mommy hangs things.”

The armoire. Again. I thought it strange how fixated she seemed to be on a simple piece of furniture. I told myself that Maggie was five and only doing things all kids her age did. Playing. Pretending. Not lying.

But then I remembered the sounds I kept hearing in my dreams. And the thud that most definitely wasn’t a dream. That got me thinking about what Hibbs had said about the house remembering. And the way Maggie’s door had closed the other night, almost as if pulled by an unseen force. A sense of dread crept over me, and I suddenly no longer had the desire to indulge my daughter’s imagination. In fact, all I wanted was to leave the room.

“I have an idea. Let’s go outside and play.” I paused, opting to make one small concession to Maggie’s imagination. “Your new friend can come, too.”

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