The Murder House

  “You…shot…shot me…last night.” His eyes red and heavy and unfocused, his face unshaven but handsome. Thick auburn hair. Tall and lean.

  And then the boy sees the handgun, nestled in the leaves, three feet from him, and three feet from Mr. Dahlquist.

  The boy reaches down and picks it up.

  It is tiny, and light. Gold and silver. A short barrel. A big looping circle in the middle of the brass grip. Nothing like the guns that cops have, or that you see on TV.

  “My great…grandfather’s revolver,” says Mr. Dahlquist. “Over a…a hundred…years old. A knuckle…knuckle duster.”

  The boy wraps his fingers in the circle. Can’t even find the trigger.

  “I’m a good shot,” the boy says.

  The man’s eyes grow wide for a moment, his lips parting. His eyes shift from the gun to the boy. “That gun’s…loaded,” he says. “It has…bullets—”

  “I know what loaded means.”

  Mr. Dahlquist stares at the gun, as if lost in a deep dream, his body swaying slightly, his chest heaving. “Give it…to me, kid.”

  The boy doesn’t move. He cocks the gun, which produces the trigger, protruding against his index finger.

  “What…are you…doing?” Mr. Dahlquist reaches out with his hand, palm open. “Gimme it.” He lets out a noise, air whooshing out of him, and pushes himself to his feet, unsteady.

  The boy doesn’t move. Holding the gun, aiming it at the man. The sensation it brings, the feeling of power, control, over another person.

  The boy isn’t scared anymore. For the first time he can remember, he isn’t scared or confused. He feels…in control. For the first time in his life, he’s composed, in command.

  He relishes that feeling. He doesn’t ever want to lose that feeling. He wants to remember that feeling forever.

  He doesn’t ever want to go back to those other feelings he has.

  He puts the barrel of the gun against his temple.

  Mr. Dahlquist raises his hands, palms out. “No…”

  The boy pulls the trigger.

  Nothing but a loud click against his temple.

  He cocks the gun again, pulls the trigger again.

  Nothing again. The boy hurls the gun like a tomahawk across the yard. Adrenaline swirling inside him, his heartbeat rattling against his chest.

  Mr. Dahlquist, chest heaving, eyes bugged out, looks at the boy, then at the gun in the grass, then back at the boy.

  “You…think about…about doing that…a lot? Kill…killing yourself?”

  The boy doesn’t answer.

  Every day, he thinks. I think about it every day, every hour, every minute.

  “Me too,” says Mr. Dahlquist.

  Like the man can read his thoughts. Like he’s the first person who understands him.

  “Good thing…that gun’s a…hundred years old.” And then Mr. Dahlquist starts laughing. He laughs for a long time, wiping at his eyes.

  The boy doesn’t know what’s so funny.

  “We’re quite a…pair. Can’t even…kill ourselves…right.”

  Holden Dahlquist VI brushes himself off. “I’m cold. Are you…cold, kid?”

  He picks up his bottle, drinks the remaining liquid, and staggers toward the house.

  The boy follows him inside.

  89

  A SECRET. That’s part of what has made these last six months so fun. It’s a secret, the two of them. Nobody knows he comes over every day after school. Not his mother, not his friends—nobody knows about his new and special friend, Holden.

  Well, six days a week, not seven. His mom comes here once a week. The boy doesn’t come on that day.

  But all the other days, the boy slips through the gate and comes around the back.

  “Did you kill yourself today?” he asks Mr. Dahlquist.

  “Nope. Did you?”

  “Nope.”

  Their running joke.

  “I won’t…if you won’t,” Holden always says at the end. “Prom…promise?”

  Sometimes Holden looks happy to see him. Most days, he doesn’t look happy about anything else. Always unsteady on his feet, always reeking of alcohol—“my medicine,” he calls it—always slurring his words, forcing them out in small spurts.

  Every day there is a chore, and the reward of ten dollars. Usually the task is really small, like raking a meager pile of leaves or shoveling snow off the front walk or washing a few dishes. The boy can tell that most of this work has already been done by someone else, and only a small portion of the project has been reserved for him.

  Most days they talk. The boy, mostly. He tells Holden stories about his life, or his day at school, or the things that bother him. Holden doesn’t like to talk about himself, or even his family, for some reason. He likes to listen more than talk.

  The boy watches Holden sometimes, even when he doesn’t come in for a visit, standing outside the gate and just watching. Holden doesn’t leave the house very much. He lives alone, save for the servant who comes in every other day to clean and cook and run errands.

  He doesn’t have any other visitors, except the pretty women who come by once in a while and stay for a few hours, looking disheveled and sometimes bruised, sometimes limping, when they leave. Holden doesn’t like to talk about them, either.

  Sometimes Holden paints. Sometimes he reads. Always, he drinks.

  Canvases fill his upstairs, nearly all of the artwork dark, macabre. Storms ravaging houses, angry oceans, portraits of people dying, sometimes in bloody, grisly fashion, spears protruding through their midsections, gaping wounds in their chests. Anguished, tortured faces, death and destruction.

  “You don’t…have to come here…every day,” Holden tells him one day.

  “I want to.”

  “You have…friends…friends your…age? Kids in…school?”

  “Not really,” he says, when the true answer is a hard no. “I’m not really—” The boy isn’t sure how to finish the sentence. “They’re not…like me.”

  Holden turns away from his artwork and looks at him, appraises him.

  “I’m not like them,” the boy says.

  Holden nods.

  I’m like you, the boy does not say.

  His other secret—the one he hasn’t even told Holden: the journal.

  Or diary, whatever you call it. The thick book, bound in red leather, more than two hundred years old, which the boy found around Christmastime in Holden’s parlor. Wrapped in plastic for preservation.

  He doesn’t understand every word of what’s written in that journal. Some of the words he has to look up in a dictionary. But he gets the gist of it. Some passages he reads and rereads. He doesn’t dare dog-ear the pages, but he slips makeshift bookmarks into those pages.

  From Winston, the patriarch:

  I’ve come to surrender my inhibitions and any pretense of civility. I may be able to fool the authorities, but I’m far too advanced in age to fool myself. There is a monster inside me. It can sleep for days, for months. But it will never go away. It will feast on me, prey on me, until the day I die.

  From Holden III, Winston’s great-grandson:

  The lust has taken up permanent residence within me. I can no longer resist it, any more than I can resist my very existence. Blessing or curse, it is now my identity. I will use an axe, and I will watch Anna bleed, and then I will pray for death.

  Holden VI:

  Like Winston before me, I have surrendered. I can say that I’m filled with remorse over the four dead tourists, but in fact what swims inside me is neither dread nor sadness, but relief.

  They can’t help it. That’s what they’re saying. It’s not their fault. They can’t stop it. It’s a part of them. It’s outside their control.

  They don’t want to do it. They have to do it.

  He reads it every day. It makes him feel different. It makes him feel better. As if something inside him is blossoming, something changing, like a drug releasing its contents into his bloodstream.


  He’s not the only one.

  He’s not the only one who feels like there’s a monster inside him.

  And he knows that Holden’s just like him, too. No matter how hard he tries to resist it, Holden’s no different from him, no different from his ancestors.

  So he will wait. It may take months. It may take years.

  He will wait for the moment when Holden is ready to show everyone what lies inside him.

  Book VII

  Bridgehampton, 2012

  90

  IT’S LATE, so late that now it’s technically called early. Predawn, nearly five in the morning.

  The man who sometimes thinks of himself as Holden positions the note card carefully on the desk, his fingers covered in rubber gloves. He considers cutting the words out of a magazine or newspaper, like an old-fashioned ransom note, but there is no time for that. So he will write with his nondominant hand, to avoid detection by any handwriting expert.

  Again, this is him being smart.

  The words come out wobbly—especially the words bodies and Aiden, for some reason—but they’re legible, which is all that matters.

  He closes up the envelope but, of course, does not lick the adhesive. That would be something, wouldn’t it? After all this time, to make a mistake like that, leaving his DNA on the envelope?

  On his way, he makes a detour and turns down Ocean Drive. It’s still dark, and nobody will see him. He likes to visit this time of the day.

  When he reaches 7 Ocean Drive, he steps out of his car and crosses the street to the magnificent wrought-iron gates, leans against them, pokes his nose between the bars.

  He can’t fit between the bars anymore.

  “Bet you never expected this, did you, Holden?” he whispers.

  Who could have expected this turn of events? But it’s happening.

  He pushes himself off the gate and returns to his car. It’s not far from dawn, and he wants to deliver the note under the cover of darkness. He throws the car into drive and heads back toward town.

  It isn’t difficult to find the car, parked on the street, and nobody is out at this hour. He tucks the note on the windshield, safely and securely beneath the wiper blade, like a flyer advertising a liquidation sale at a sporting goods store or a buy-one, get-one-free at some fast-food restaurant.

  This note, of course, has a bit more gravity to it than a coupon.

  This note’s going to turn everything on its head.

  91

  I LEAVE Aiden’s house and get home before dawn. My apartment is a slum, papers strewn about, the bed unmade, unwashed glasses in the kitchen sink, a musty smell.

  I’m exhausted but propped up by the hum of adrenaline. I look again at the newspaper photo I pilfered from Aiden’s scrapbook, with the caption NEWBORN ABANDONED AT POLICE STATION.

  I must be right. It makes everything fit. Aiden’s mother, a prostitute, had a second child, one fathered by Holden VI. She gave the boy up for some reason—because she didn’t want a child fathered by Holden, or because she didn’t want Holden to have any influence over him. But in some way I can’t possibly know, father and son were reunited.

  But then—why is Aiden a part of this? How does he figure in?

  And more importantly—who is that second child, Aiden’s half brother?

  Is it Isaac Marks? He seems to be working with Aiden against me.

  Is it Noah? He’s the one who must have tipped off Aiden that I’d be with Justin last night, when Aiden came through the window and tried to kill me.

  Isaac and Noah. Each of them a grade younger than Aiden.

  Three kids who grew up together, who went to school together. Did they learn more than reading, writing, and ’rithmetic while they were in school together?

  I’m buzzed but exhausted at first light. Everyone else is just beginning to waken, to start a new day, and I’m about to collapse. My brain is fuzzy from sleep deprivation. I have a lot to do, but I can’t function without sleep.…

  Bam bam bam

  Let me out

  Buzz buzz buzz

  Please let me out

  Buzz buzz buzz

  My eyes pop open, mid-dream, adrenaline swirling. My cell phone vibrating. I pat the bed until I find it, pick it up, stare at it through foggy eyes.

  The caller ID says NOAH WALKER.

  A flutter through my chest. I’m not ready to answer it. I wait until the buzzing ends. A NEW VOICE MAIL message pops up.

  I look at the clock. It’s one in the afternoon. Wow. I slept for almost six hours. It felt like six minutes.

  Then I play the voice mail.

  Murphy, it’s Noah. Just want to make sure you’re okay. I have an idea I wanna run by you. Give me a call.

  I punch out the phone and drop it on the bed. He has an idea he wants to run by me? Yeah, I have something to run by you, too, Noah—why don’t you explain to me who told Aiden Willis that I’d be at Justin’s house last night?

  And by chance, were you adopted? Were you left abandoned at the police station as a child? Did you later discover that your biological father was part of a family line of deranged killers going back centuries?

  Did you decide to pick up the mantle where they left off?

  And was I, Detective Jenna Murphy, the dumb shit who sprang you from prison?

  I move slowly, as if I’d been drugged last night, as if I’m recovering from a hangover. I eat some toast and drink some coffee and sit under a cascade of scalding shower water until the hot water runs out—which, in my apartment, doesn’t take very long.

  My cell phone rings again. I find it in the bathroom through the steam. Noah, again. I ignore it, again.

  Somehow, it’s four in the afternoon now.

  I have to find Holden Dahlquist’s son. If that baby was abandoned at the police station, he would have been turned over to Child Protective Services, like the news clipping said. He would have entered the system—he would have been adopted, or placed in a foster home. Something that would have generated a paper trail.

  Did the child trace that paper trail back to Holden? Or did Holden trace that paper trail back to the boy?

  I don’t know. And I don’t care.

  Because however it happened—a paternity suit, an adoption, whatever—Holden would have involved his attorney. And I have his lawyer’s name, thanks to Noah.

  So how do I get this information from Holden’s lawyer, who will assert his attorney-client privilege?

  No clue. All I know is that I’m getting closer, shaking some trees, and people are getting nervous.

  Maybe all I can do is wait for their next move.

  My phone rings again. It’s Lauren Ricketts.

  “Hey there,” I say.

  “Murphy!” Her voice excited, breathless.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You’re not going to believe this.”

  I push my laptop computer aside. “Try me.”

  “Annie Church and Dede Paris,” she says. “We just found their bodies.”

  I close my eyes. Somebody—Aiden, Isaac, Noah—just made their next move.

  92

  MY THIRD time in two days driving in this neighborhood. But this time, it’s not directly to Aiden Willis’s house. And this time, traffic is at a standstill, logjammed as far as the eye can see, traffic down to a single, narrow lane on the turnpike.

  I inch forward until I reach the barricades blocking access to the very road on which Aiden Willis lives. TV crews have lined up their vans and satellite feeds, well-coiffed reporters taking their turns before the cameras with their microphones. Once past the barricade, the turnpike opens up again, so I head north another quarter mile to Tasty’s, where I park in the lot and head back to the scene on foot.

  Two bodies discovered in the woods, almost directly behind Aiden Willis’s property line in the backyard, buried ten feet belowground.

  That was all I got from Lauren Ricketts, one of the officers on the scene. She didn’t have much time to talk to me; I
was lucky to get as much as she gave me.

  I walk down to the barricaded street. A reporter from one of the local stations, a guy with hair so brittle from hair spray that he could weaponize it, recognizes me. He probably doesn’t know I’ve lost my badge. Either way, he allows me inside the van and shows me the feed his station’s helicopter is getting, an overhead shot.

  The overhead view: A lot of the work has already been completed. A bulldozer has already excavated the dirt, and a crane has somehow lifted the bodies out of the crater. The team is on the ground, officers and forensic investigators and medical examiners.

  Two gurneys are loaded into a hearse and driven off the property. I step out of the news van. Five minutes later, I see the hearse approaching the turnpike barricade, officers removing the barriers to allow it to leave.

  Annie and Dede. Why now? And how did it happen?

  I send a text message to Ricketts: I’m here on the scene when you have a minute. It will be a while, I expect, before her work is done.

  But thirty seconds later, I get a reply: Where?

  I text back, then wait. Ricketts, looking the worse for wear—dusty and dirty, like a soldier emerging from battle—but excited, too, approaches the barricade.

  “It’s Annie and Dede?” I ask.

  She nods. “I think so. One of the fingers was missing.”

  Right. He cut off one of Dede’s fingers and left it for the cops to find, a few years ago.

  “The knife was there, too,” she says. “The murder weapon.”

  Wow. He left the murder weapon with the girls? Our killer was probably too careful to leave fingerprints on the knife, but you never know.

  “I found the bodies,” Ricketts says. “It was me.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “How the heck did that happen?”

  “Well, that’s the thing—someone put a note on my windshield this morning.”

  I draw back. “What?”

  Ricketts looks around at the bedlam, the reporters and onlookers, practically shutting down the turnpike. “A note said I could find their bodies back here. By the large elm tree with the X in red spray paint.” She shrugs. “Why would someone do that? Why would someone write me a note?”