Rachel was at her office the next day, so I was alone with my coffee. Susan emailed me contact information for the house’s previous two owners. Before that a bank had owned the house for eight years, and I’d already figured out why.
As much as I didn’t want to talk to Susan, I didn’t want to email this to her. “I think we just found who the ghosts are,” I told her when I got her on the phone.
“Who?”
“About 10 years ago, the owner of the house, Oswald Franken, shot his wife, two daughters, and then himself. I can send you some articles if you want.”
“Oh God.” Susan was silent a moment. “W-why?”
“There was no motive the police could figure out.” I was looking at some of the media reports. “There was no note, no reports from the wife about abuse, no complaints from the neighbors, no social media clues—he just snapped, apparently. Or maybe he was possessed by a homicidal demon.”
“Oh, come on, you can’t—” Then she remembered she ass talking to me. “A demon? Is that for real?”
“I’ve seen them. Too often.”
A long silence. “You have a strange life.”
“And you could have shared it with me all these years, but you bailed.” Yeah, it was a cheap shot. I just couldn’t resist.
“We both bailed. I just got to my lawyer first. “
“You’re right, you’re right. Sorry.” I took a breath. I might need to see my therapist when this was over. “Doesn’t your company include stuff like this for agents?”
“It’s supposed to. I’ll talk to the district office.” I heard her swallow some coffee. Or maybe some morning vodka? No, I had to stop thinking like that. “And I’m sorry too, Tom. It was—I’m not exactly proud of who I was back then.”
That was unexpected. “I’ve accepted that it was mostly my fault. Rachel’s fond of pointing out when I’m being a jerk.”
“Then there’s at least one thing we have in common.” She went on quickly: “Can you talk to the two other owners?”
“That’s next on my list. I’ll let you know.” I hung up before our delicate truce collapsed again.
I called Philip Chavez, the house’s most recent owner. He was friendly and willing to talk, as if he needed somebody to take him seriously. “Yeah, we couldn’t take it anymore. At first it was just stuff falling over. We thought there was mice in the walls, but the exterminator couldn’t find anything. A bookcase fell over one night for no reason, and then there was a fire out of nowhere. My wife was pregnant! I don’t believe in ghosts, but there’s something wrong with that house.”
“Is your wife all right now?”
“Yeah, we had our boy last month. He’s fine, she’s fine. But we’ve got to do something! We’re renting and it’s okay, but I don’t want that place hanging over our heads. You’re working for the agent?”
“That’s right. Was there anything else? Did you hear anything specific?”
“No, it was just whispers. A few screams. That scared the shit out of us. There was one—” He stopped.
“One what?”
Chavez hesitated. “I saw a guy looking at the house a couple of times. Not enough that I wanted to call the cops, maybe just two or three times around the last couple of months. He was a young guy, about 25? I don’t know. White, not too tall. Blond hair. Casual clothes, I guess. I jacket. That’s all. He might have been nobody.”
I thanked him, and wished his son and his wife well. “Thanks,” he said. “Tell that agent—I don’t know. We’ve just got to sell that house.”
We hung up, and I called the next name on my list—the prior owner, David Towers. I had to go through a secretary, but he was willing to talk. Just not over the phone. I arranged to meet him in his office downtown in an hour.
So sixty minutes later I was waiting in the office of a small financial firm near the Board of Trade. The secretary, a young black woman. offered me a cup of coffee and explained that Mr. Towers would be with me as soon as he got off the phone with New York. I suspected an effort to impress and/or intimidate me by making me wait, but he opened his door five minutes later with a smile on his face. “Mr. Jurgen? Tom? Come on in.”
Towers was heavyset, in his 50s, hairline receding, waistline fighting expansion. His handshake was firm. The office was small, no windows, and his desk was strewn with paperwork surrounding a computer monitor.
“Uh, that house, right?” He shook his head. “Christ, that was crazy.”
“What happened while you were living there?”
He smiled. “Well, at first, it wasn’t much. Noises around the house. I thought it was raccoons or squirrels, you know? One night I heard a scream and I called the cops, but they couldn’t find anything.” He shrugged. “We kind of got used to it. Made jokes about ghosts. It only got really bad in the last year. Things started falling over more. Bigger things, like a bookcase in one of the bedrooms, and our dresser one day when no one was home. The dining room table one time. Then the screaming—”
He shook his head. “We had to move out, but by then I lost my job and we were already looking to sell the place and move.” He lifted an arm and pointed toward the corner of the office. “This is me, starting over.”
“Was there anything that changed? When things started getting worse?”
His eyes flickered as he thought. “The only thing I can think of is my wife said some kid came to the door one day. He said he used to live there. She didn’t let him in, she got a weird feeling from him, but they talked for a few minutes. Then he said he used to live in the neighborhood, not the house, and he was sorry to bother her, and he left. She was a little creeped out.”
I thought about Chavez. “What did he look like?”
“I didn’t see him. She just said young, 20-something. Blond hair”
Same guy? “And the weirdness got worse after that?”
Towers looked up at the ceiling. “I guess. I don’t really know, I can’t put a date on it or anything. But I think so.”
That was interesting. I didn’t know if it meant anything, but I thanked Towers for his time and wished him good luck. He sighed. “It’s tough these days. But I’ll get there.”
I envied him his optimism.
Back home I doublechecked the media reports of the murders. Oswald Franken, 42; wife Nicole, 39; two daughters, eight and 12—Melissa and Carmen. No son, no male child living with them. So who was this visitor?
I tried calling the police detective quoted in one of the articles. It turned out he’d retired. The police don’t usually like talking to me very much, but I persisted until I got someone willing to share a key piece of information: The murders had been discovered by a 14-year-old boy from the neighborhood. They’d left that out for his privacy and safety. She wouldn’t give me his name, even after I pointed out that he’d be an adult now. I was trying to think of another argument when she hung up.
It wasn’t much, but maybe it was something to work with. I spent most of the afternoon searching public real estate information on the internet for anything I could find about families in the neighborhood, and then I tried connecting the names I found to the Franken family.
By 4:30 I had two candidates: Eric Gracen, 23, who’d lived three blocks away from the Franken house until eight years ago, but as far as I could tell he was in college in California. Still, he fit the general description of the young man Chavez and Towers had described.
Then there was David Stillman, 20 or 21, who’d lived down the street. He’d apparently gone to the local high school, because I found his name in a few pieces about the track team, along with a picture of him with the team. Again, he sort of fit the description, such as it was.
Now what? I thought that over as I started making enchiladas for dinner, since it was my night to cook. I didn’t exactly want to track the kids down and ask, “By the way, did you happen to walk into a family murder scene 10 years ago?” I always hated stuff like that as a reporter, calling families to get their reactions to tragic news. Susan would call me a vulture when I did, and my boss would call me a coward if I didn’t.
Thinking about Susan sparked a thought. Not a sour, spiteful thought either. Something constructive. I checked my texts from yesterday. There it was: Wave for the Ring camera.
Nuts. Now I had to call her.
“There’s a camera in front of the house?” I asked.
“Yeah, we put them up whenever we list a house. Keeping an eye out for burglars, vandals. Sometimes there’s a delivery even if the place is vacant. But it doesn’t track anything inside—”
I told her about the young man Chavez and Towers had seen. “Can you send me everything you have?”
She hesitated. “I’m not supposed to. Company policy.”
“It could help us figure out what’s going on. And help you get that house sold.”
Suddenly she was angry. “Is this the best you’ve got? Some kid lurking around the house from years ago? Do you really think this kid has something to do with the ghosts?”
For a moment I was back in that small apartment, with Susan yelling at me to stop seeing things that weren’t there and me yelling that she never believed me, that I saw what I saw, and if she couldn’t believe what I was telling her then why was I talking to her?
That wasn’t the moment that had blown us apart. That came later. But it was part of the tick-tick-tick that had eventually shattered our marriage.
I took a deep breath. “Maybe nothing. I won’t know until I can check it out. But if you can’t do it, I’ll think of something else.”
The irritation faded from her voice. “Well—it’ll only be a problem if they find out at corporate. Keep it to yourself, all right?”
“I will.”
We hung up. I checked my phone a few minutes later and found the file.
With the enchiladas ready for the oven, I chopped some vegetables, set the table, and went back to my office. Rachel would be home soon, but I had time to watch some video.
The camera was motion-activated, so at least I didn’t have to fast-forward through the past week, which was all the device was set to record. Lots of squirrels turned the camera on. The mail carrier at least once every few days, delivering junk mail. Susan came twice. One Amazon driver dropped off a package.
I found my target first in the background, as the mail carrier came up the porch steps. Across the street, standing still. I tried expanding the picture until it got too blurry to view, but he did have sandy blond hair and looked to be in his 20s. I saw him again the next day when the Amazon delivery came, but he stayed on the far side of the street.
Then two days later—just three days before Susan called me—he came up onto the porch and I got a decent look at him. Not a kid, probably 25, he wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans. He walked to one side of the camera—looking in the windows?—and then I watched him walk away.
I went back for a screenshot of his face. Then I compared it to my two candidates. The visitor was David Stillman.
Rachel came home then, so I didn’t have to think of my next step right away. She went to change clothes and I started the oven. Then we had a beer in the kitchen while I filled her in and showed her the video.
She frowned. “You really think this kid has something to do with the ghosts?”
I had to remind myself that Rachel wasn’t Susan. “I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s all I’ve got to go on right now.”
Rachel patted my arm as the oven timer dinged from the kitchen. “Your instincts are usually pretty good.”
“Tell that to my ex-wife.”
Then she slugged me, but lightly. “Let’s go eat dinner.”
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