6. Thursday, September 7, 2023
Beverley
She’s just gotten comfortable when a horrible shriek sounds outside.
She can’t tell if it’s a human or an animal, but it’s very unsettling.
Predator or prey? Could it be the thing that killed and dismembered all those animals?
Shoving off the covers, she gets out of bed and goes to the front window, the cats following close behind.
She doesn’t see anything directly in front of her cabin, so she opens the door and steps out onto the platform of the front porch.
Hissing sounds come from behind her. When she turns, she sees all three cats sitting only a few feet away in the living room, their ears flat to their heads.
Soot wails an awful, discordant, deep-throated note.
Turning her attention back to the yard, she scans it for anything moving.
Though the shriek hasn’t come again, she has the sense that something is still out there.
Stepping even farther from the door, she cranes to look toward the woods at the back and freezes.
A tall, hooded figure is standing at the edge of the trees.
She draws back and closes her eyes for a few seconds, sure she’s seeing things.
But when she opens them again, the figure hasn’t moved.
“I see you,” she calls out in a faltering voice. “You’re trespassing and I’m going to call the police.” All three cats behind her start growling. “Shush, now,” she commands, waving a hand at them to stop.
They persist.
When she turns back to the woods, the figure is gone.
She looks along the tree line but there’s no movement, no sound, no figure.
She hopes it was just some kid nosing around and she scared him off with her threat of the police.
Annoyance at Alice rises. She’s sure Alice didn’t even consider the voyeurs that would come with the place.
Those people desperate to get a glimpse of awful things, obsessed with serial killers.
Stepping back inside the cabin, she locks the door for the first time since moving there.
Then goes to each window to make sure they’re locked as well.
The cats scatter as she moves, hiding under the couch and dining table as though she’s brought something back inside with her.
Flipping on a table lamp, she sits down on the couch, and only then does she realize that her hands are trembling.
She’s not sure what to do. She stays sitting, staring at the front door.
Convinced that at any moment the doorknob will turn or there will be a loud pounding.
Would they even hear her in the main house if she screamed?
How long would it take someone to find her?
She stays like that, frozen in place, staring at the door, imagining an intruder doing to her what was done to those animals yesterday morning.
Death. At her age it’s impossible not to see it everywhere.
Every time she looks down at her skeletal hands.
Every time she looks at her own daughter and sees the wrinkles on her face, the gray in her hair.
The older Alice looks, the closer to death Beverley feels.
In her dreams, the ghosts of her three husbands beckon to her, whispering of reunion—each one knowing the ways she betrayed them, the secrets she kept from them.
Hell seems more likely to her than heaven.
She’s done a lot of things in her life that she’s not proud of.
The one that eats away at her most is that the night the twins were in the accident, she’d ignored Alice’s phone call.
Beverley had been awake reading with a glass of wine when she saw Alice’s name and number pop up.
She hadn’t been in the mood to listen to Alice whine and didn’t even listen to the voicemail she left until late the next morning.
“Mom? Mom, something terrible has happened. There was a car accident. Lucy…” Alice had sobbed into the phone. “L-Lucy’s gone. Polly’s in a coma. Mom, I need you. Please call me back.” In the background, Beverley heard a doctor being paged and the beep of medical equipment.
She hadn’t been there to comfort her daughter through the greatest tragedy of her life, or anyone else’s.
She’s never admitted it to anyone. When Alice asked why she didn’t answer her call, Beverley had been too afraid to admit the truth so said she’d been asleep and had left her phone in the living room. She’ll take that secret to the grave.
The longer she sits there without anyone pounding on her door, the less threatened she feels.
The shaking in her hands and legs finally subsides.
She gets up from the couch and looks out the window.
She’s flooded with relief when she sees nothing out there.
Going into the kitchen she pours herself a small glass of whiskey to settle her nerves, then takes it back to the couch.
She focuses on the burn of it as it moves through her and soon she’s feeling almost silly for letting her imagination run wild like that.
She takes two more quick sips before putting the glass on the side table, sliding down on the couch and pulling a throw over herself.
Only then do the cats come out of hiding, jumping up to settle in the spaces around her body.
By the time her eyes drift closed she’s convinced herself that whatever she saw in those woods was just her mind playing tricks. That the cats were only reacting to her fear and that she’s perfectly safe there in her little cabin with her kitties, surrounded by the woods.
Alice
Alice is sitting at the island, dressed for work, a coffee in front of her, staring at her phone, talking to herself, when Geoff comes into the kitchen.
He mumbles a good-morning. She ignores him, still mad about the fight they had the night before, still mad that he chose to sleep in the TV room on the couch rather than come to bed, that he left his dirty underwear outside their bedroom door for her to trip on.
She’s checking the trail-cam footage. He activated it when he went out there at 10:15 p.m. and then again when he left at 11 to come inside to the TV room.
That’s the weird thing, the reason she’s staring at her phone. At 3:05 a.m. something activated it. It recorded a horrible shrieking sound and then the screen turned to fuzz, seven minutes of it. Then the recording ended and nothing else was recorded for the rest of the night.
“I think the trail cam is broken,” she says to Geoff.
He turns away from the coffee he’s just made for himself, looking somewhat relieved that she’s talking to him. “Why, what’s wrong?”
She holds her phone out to him. “Watch this video. Not the ones before.” She doesn’t want him to know that she can monitor his writing-studio coming and goings. “The screen goes fuzzy and then nothing else is recorded for the rest of the night.”
He watches it, his brow furrowing when he gets to the fuzzy part.
For some reason it sparks a feeling of attraction in Alice.
She wants to reach out and smooth the wrinkles from his forehead, stroke his beard, maybe even kiss him.
Then as quickly as the sensation arrives it passes, and his loud morning breathing annoys her.
He hands her phone back. “I’ll download the app and go see if I can get it working again. I’ll also check for more dead animals.”
Alice gets off her stool. “I already did a quick walk around the property this morning. None that I could see.” She carries her coffee cup to the dishwasher. With her back to him she says, “Can we just forget about last night?”
When he says he’d like that, she turns back to face him.
Apologies and concessions are hard for her, and she can only make them without eye contact.
“Quinn is up and will be ready to get the bus,” she says.
“Polly is still in bed, but she starts training for her new job this afternoon so will need to borrow your car.”
He salutes her, which she hates, but he thinks it’s endearing.
Sometimes he calls her Captain too. It seems futile to explain to him that she doesn’t want to be the one in charge, that she wishes she were a subordinate with someone else making the decisions and keeping things running smoothly.
He doesn’t understand that being good at something doesn’t mean you want to do it all the time.
She’d love to walk into a room like he does, unencumbered by the weight of other people’s expectations. She has not enjoyed the luxury of waking up in the morning and thinking only of herself since they started dating, before she unconsciously slid into this role of lead caregiver.
“Polly’s been complaining that the carpet in her room smells weird,” she says while gathering up her phone and work bag.
“Do you think you could pull it back and see what’s under there?
We’ll probably just get rid of it entirely.
” She sees a glimmer of annoyance in his eyes.
He hates when she gives him tasks. When he’s expected to sacrifice some of his precious writing time.
That’s why she did it. Polly said in passing that the carpet smells weird, but if Geoff wants her to be the captain handing out jobs, then she will.
“Okay,” he says with a sigh. “Trail cam and carpet. Got it.” There’s a hint of hard-done-by in his voice.
She fights the urge to list all the things she has to get done that day—work for eight hours; pick up groceries; plan, make, and possibly clean up after dinner; emotionally support both children, her mother, and him; make sure the dog is fed; and any number of other tasks that arise in the course of the day.
“Oh, and I sent out invites for the party on September thirtieth, so we’re locked in,” she adds as she’s heading toward the door.
“Murder House Reputation Revamp launched,” he says, chuckling.
She turns back. “Please don’t call it that.”