The doors lining the corridor were all closed. I opened the second door on the left.
It was a small room, tidy, with a single twin bed made up with a gray blanket. An ornate desk sat against the other wall, the kind of desk a young girl might use. Next to it were bookshelves, empty. There was a rug in the middle of the floor. A wooden clock ticked on the wall.
Beth Greer had been born in 1954. Which meant this room, her little-girl room, had sat here unchanged for some sixty years.
Some families didn’t change their children’s rooms. They kept their kids’ beds, their bookshelves, long after the child in question had grown up and moved out. My own mother had kept my and Esther’s room intact until my parents moved to Florida. But that was a pattern born of love, of nostalgia, and the thought that maybe grandchildren would want to use the room someday.
That wasn’t what this was. This little girl’s room had never been changed because the space wasn’t needed in a house with so many rooms and only three people. It was unchanged because Mariana Greer couldn’t be bothered. And then it stayed unchanged because both Julian and Mariana were dead, and Beth had let it sit for another forty years.
What the hell was wrong with this place?
I moved past the bedroom and farther down the hall. The air was still, even stuffier than it was downstairs. Like fresh air was alien to this place. The next door I tried opened to a bathroom, but the one after that was a room with a heavy wood desk with a blotter on it and a leather chair. Julian Greer’s study.
I stepped inside. I felt like an intruder in this room, as if the man who owned it would walk back in at any minute. He’s been dead for over forty years, I reminded myself as I approached the desk and put my hand on one of the drawer handles. After a brief pause to inhale a breath, I yanked the drawer open.
Inside was a pack of cigarettes. Winstons, in the distinctive red and white package. Next to it was a heavy metal lighter. There was an empty ashtray on the desk.
I pushed aside the cigarettes, left here by a man dead for decades, and picked up a piece of paper from the stack beneath it. It was a phone bill dated January 3, 1972, listing the calls in and out of the house.
My God. Had Beth thrown nothing away in all these years? This was some kind of mental illness, maybe even a psychosis. How was it possible that she looked so modern and fashionable when she lived in this museum? How could she be mentally stable when for forty years her life had been lived in a shrine to her parents?
Beneath the phone bill was another, and another. On the third bill, I thought I saw the ghost of dark handwriting on the back of the paper. I turned it over and saw three words scrawled in ink:
I’m still here
The breath left my throat. Those were the words I’d heard whispered into my phone. I turned over the other two phone bills and saw the same three words written on the back. Suddenly, I’d hazard a guess that I’d see those words written on every piece of paper in this desk.
I grabbed my phone out of my back pocket with numb fingers and snapped photos of the scrawled words. Thinking of the way the last interview had vanished from my phone, I immediately texted the pictures to Michael. I didn’t even bother with a message. He knew I was at the Greer mansion right now.
I hit send, and then I noticed that the air was cold. And there was the soft sound of someone breathing right outside the open door of the study.
“Beth?” I called out.
The air grew colder, and there was a soft shh. I looked down and saw that all of the desk drawers were open.
I took a clumsy step back, then rounded the desk to bolt for the door. It slammed closed, and I saw the shadow of something moving in the crack beneath the bottom of the door and the floor. Not feet—something sliding smoothly across the door, from one side to the other and back.
I lifted my hand to the doorknob, and something pounded on the other side of the door. Bang. Bang. I stumbled back in shock, and my phone fell from my hand, spinning across the floor and under the desk. I dropped to my knees as the banging continued, heavy and rhythmic, almost a human sound but not quite. Flinching with each bang, I groped under the desk until my fingers found my phone. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the smooth shadow still moving back and forth. It definitely wasn’t human feet.