Chapter 4 — The Hargrove Woman

"He was up there for four minutes. I was at the bottom of the stairs. He didn't call out, didn't respond when I called to him. When he came down he was — different. Not immediately. It wasn't like a film. He was fine for three days. And then he started not sleeping. Then the nightmares. Then he stopped speaking. Then—"Eleanor stopped. She picked up her tea, set it down."We left on the sixth day. I never went back in. I had someone else collect what I needed.""Your husband—""He recovered. Eventually. Eighteen months, two therapists, and a medication that I won't name. He's in Portland now. He doesn't like to discuss it." A pause. "He also doesn't like attics. Any attic, anywhere. He'll leave a building if he has to pass one.""What's up there?" Nora asked.Eleanor looked at her steadily. "I don't know. I know that it's been there a very long time. I know that the house was built on land that the original owner — a man named Aldous Marsh, no relation — purchased from nobody and built on without permits. I know that the Vances had their own experience, and the family before them — the Beaumonts — had one that ended rather worse.""How much worse?""The father." Eleanor said nothing more.Nora sat with that."Mrs. Hargrove. Why did you leave the note? Why not just — let us find out for ourselves?"For the first time, something cracked in Eleanor's controlled expression. Not much. A millimeter."Because I have daughters," she said. "And you sounded like you might have children too, from the estate agent's description. And I couldn't—" She stopped. Picked up her tea. Set it down again. "I couldn't just not say anything. I know what it feels like to hear your child's name spoken by something in a wall." Her voice, at last, dropped its careful flatness. "I know what that sounds like."Nora drove home in the dark, forty miles west, and thought about vents and eight-year-olds and a man who couldn't walk past an attic.She thought about Lily, who slept in the room nearest the end of the hall.She drove faster.