Chapter 4 — The Hargrove Woman

She found Eleanor Hargrove on a Thursday afternoon.It hadn't been difficult — Eleanor Hargrove (née Marsh) was listed in a 2019 alumni newsletter from a local community college, teaching pottery classes in a town called Dellwood, forty miles east. Nora had not examined too closely why she was searching for the woman who'd left her the warning. She only knew that questions were better than the alternative, which was the growing silence she was keeping from David.Eleanor Hargrove answered the door of her small house in Dellwood as if she'd been expecting someone. She was sixty, maybe, with white-streaked hair and the kind of stillness that comes from something having moved through you and left its mark.She looked at Nora. Something moved across her face — not fear. Recognition."You bought the house," she said."Yes. I found your note."Eleanor stepped back from the door.They sat in a kitchen that smelled of clay and tea, and Eleanor Hargrove talked with the careful precision of someone who had rehearsed this in their head many times, knowing someone would eventually come."We lived there for eleven years. Raised our daughters there. It was a good house for a long time." A pause. "The previous owners before us — a couple named Vance — told us about the attic when we moved in. Exactly what I told you. Don't open it. Don't go up there.""Did they say why?""They said they'd had an experience they couldn't explain and they'd chosen not to repeat it. They were practical people. They'd made peace with not knowing." Eleanor turned her tea cup in her hands. "We were practical people too. For nine years, we kept the rule. We heard things — everyone hears things. Pacing. Scratching. Sometimes voices, though that's—" She stopped. "I know how that sounds.""What kind of voices?"Eleanor looked at the table. "Not words, at first. More like... tone. Cadence. The way a conversation sounds through a wall when you can't make out the words. And then — in the last year — one of our daughters started saying she could hear it more clearly. At night. Coming through the vent in her bedroom."Nora went still."She was eight years old," Eleanor said. "She started telling us what she heard. She said it knew her name. She said it asked her questions. She said—" A pause that was doing a great deal of work. "She said it told her to let it out.""What did you do?""We moved her room. We sealed the vent. We told ourselves it was a child's imagination and a creaky old house and the power of suggestion." Eleanor's voice was flat, recitative. "We were wrong.""What happened?""My husband opened the attic door." She said it simply, the way you state a fact you've long since accepted. "He said he could hear someone in trouble up there. He said he couldn't just — leave it. He was a good man. He couldn't stand by."Nora waited.