Page 18 of Night Falls on Predicament Avenue
He didn’t answer. Instead, he brushed past Effie and moved back into the entryway and the hall beyond. “The upstairs. Will you come with me?” He waited, a patient expression on his face.
Gus exchanged looks with her and motioned for her to follow.
Mr. Anderson’s footsteps were heavy on the stairs. The wooden stairwell was narrow, the floral wallpaper on either side faded and peeling. Effie tried not to touch anything as she climbed behind him. Everything was coated in a layer of grime and dust. Spiderwebs hung from the ceiling, and the sunlight that met them through the window at the top of the stairs only illuminated more webs that had trapped flies and an assortment of other insects, all of them dead. The spiders were also long dead, their food stores having dried up.
Reaching the landing, Mr. Anderson surveyed the upper level of 322 Predicament Avenue: two rooms on the east side, two on the west. A short hallway split the upper level, along with the stairwell.
Effie chose to remain at the window, in the sunlight. Mr. Anderson ducked his tall frame and entered the first room. From where she stood, Effie could see it was empty. No furniture, nothing to hint at life or family or past residents. The same was true with bedroom number two. Both rooms looked out over the front of the house and the street beyond.
Mr. Anderson, after investigating the two front rooms, moved on to the third and fourth.
The third room was, to her surprise, an altogether different story from the first two. This one was furnished. The wood floor creaked loudly under Mr. Anderson’s weight. A small dresser stood along the far wall. Next to it were a bed frame, void of any mattress, and a full-length mirror—a luxury for a farmhouse—tilted on its stand and reflecting their images back to them.
Mr. Anderson reached out and touched the mirror. His brow furrowed as he stepped closer to study a seam in the mirror’s walnut frame. He thumbed the edge of it, then moved to look around at its back. There was the briefest intake of breath, quick and sudden-like. Then he lifted his face to Effie with no evidence to convey that anything was out of the ordinary. “Please come,” he said.
Effie walked toward Mr. Anderson and the mirror, her footsteps across the floor sounding hollow to her ears. For the first time since coming upstairs, Effie heard nothing. No clock ticking. No birds singing. No noise from the street or voices of passersby.
A spirit could whisper, and she would hear it. The skin on her arms and legs grew cold beneath her dress. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling her hands start to tremble.
“Look at this,” Mr. Anderson said, pointing.
Effie came closer, aware of his tall frame near hers. He didn’t move aside for her, so she was forced to press into his arm and shoulder to see what he was showing her.
On the back of the framed mirror was brown paper backing, put there to protect it from getting scratched or marred. The paper was stained with a spatter of dark brown spots.
“What is it?” Effie breathed.
“You can’t tell?” Mr. Anderson moved toward the dresser positioned against the wall, off-center from where most would have placed it. There was a loud scraping sound, and Effie jumped,twisting where she stood by the mirror to see Mr. Anderson shoving the dresser away from the wall into the center of the room.
It was now obvious to Effie, and so awful in its reality, that she wanted nothing to do with it. Behind where the dresser had stood, the wall was stained with the same dark spatter as the back of the mirror. It appeared that whatever had stained the wall had run like trails of water down it. A dried, sticky mess covered the wood floor where the dresser had been. A trail of it ran across the floor where Mr. Anderson had pushed the dresser away.
Mr. Anderson towered over the ugly stain, hands at his waist. His jaw clenched and unclenched before he spoke again. “You see, Miss James? I believe youdidhear a woman screaming the other night.”
“No. No, it’s not...” Effie couldn’t disregard the awful sight of the blood that cursed this room with it stains. Stains that someone had taken the time to hide by rearranging the furniture. “Polly and I wouldn’t have seen inside this room. It’s upstairs. Polly looked only in the window on the back porch, the one with the view into the kitchen.”
Mr. Anderson seemed to weigh Effie’s words. With his shoulders set, he strode from the room and took the stairs down two at a time. Effie hurried after him, hiking up her dress so she didn’t trip. The pounding of their feet echoed in the empty house. The walls were like a coffin that hid the secrets of the body it entombed. And yet there wasn’t a body. Only blood. Only the remnants of something awful and terrible.
Effie rounded the corner into the kitchen, grasping at her throat as she watched Mr. Anderson push the table from its position. The floor beneath it was clean with the exception of the scraps of old food, crumbs, mouse droppings, and dust. He kicked over a chair and growled.
Gus hobbled into the kitchen behind Effie, worry etched into every wrinkle on his face. “Mr. Anderson?”
Effie hugged the wall as Mr. Anderson ignored them both and grabbed hold of the cast-iron cookstove, yanking it back and forth. Its metal chimney groaned and protested, as did the stove itself. Too heavy to move aside completely, Mr. Anderson managed only to haul it a few inches from where it had sat, enough to bend the stovepipe. Effie startled as it popped free from the stove with a clamor.
“Mr. Anderson!” Gus attempted to hurry to his employer’s side, but Mr. Anderson had already ducked behind the stove, and in a swift motion he grunted and then stood. A butcher knife was clutched in his hand, blood clotted along its wooden handle and the blade.
He held up the knife, his face an array of expressions that made Effie take a step backward. Not that she fearedhim, but the blade in his hand was further proof of Polly’s claims. It was the reason why her sister was curled into a state in her bed, traumatized, her life wasting away in silence.
“This knife.” Mr. Anderson flung the weapon onto the stovetop with a clang. “That’s what your sister saw! Whoever killed Isabelle finished her off here in the kitchen. She must have escaped and attempted to flee. That was the scream you heard.”
Effie sucked in a sob. If that were true, then—
“But where is she?” Gus’s question sliced through the kitchen. A kitchen that pretended to know nothing but had witnessed everything. A room and floor and walls that had been saturated with murderous truth and were now silent.
Mr. Anderson stilled as he noted a cupboard against the wall beneath the window beside the back door. He hauled it aside and stared at the floor beneath.
The stains beneath where the cupboard had stood told the story. A testament to the violence Polly and Effie had innocently stumbled upon, a violence Polly had witnessed the last throes of.
“But...” Gus choked, his voice weakened by age and shock. “Where is Isabelle?”
