no doubt once belonged to William Garson. Like Baneberry Hall itself, it had a grandeur that could be conjured only by a man of wealth and status. The whole room did. Instead of Curtis Carver, it was Mr. Garson’s presence that loomed large inside the study.
But I couldn’t ignore the brutal fact that a man had taken his own life within these walls. In order to make this space truly my own, I needed to rid it of any traces of Curtis Carver.
I started in the first of two closets, both of which had slanted doors like the one in Maggie’s bedroom. Inside were shelves stacked with vintage board games, some dating back to the thirties. Monopoly and Clue and Snakes and Ladders. There was even a Ouija board, its box worn white at the corners. I remembered what Janie June had said about Gable and Lombard staying here and smiled at the thought of them using the Ouija board in the candlelit parlor.
Below the games, sitting on the floor, were two square suitcases, their surfaces feathery with dust. I slid both out of the closet, finding them not without some heft.
Something was inside each of them.
The first suitcase, I discovered upon opening it, wasn’t a suitcase at all. It was an old record player inside a leather carrying case. Fittingly, the other case contained LPs kept in their original cardboard sleeves. I sorted through them, disappointed by the collection of Big Band music and movie musical soundtracks.
Oklahoma. South Pacific. The King and I.
Someone had been a Rodgers and Hammerstein fan, and I was fairly confident it wasn’t Curtis Carver.
I carried the record player to the desk and plugged it in, curious to see if it still worked. I grabbed the first record in the case—The Sound of Music—and let it spin. Music filled the room.
As Julie Andrews sang about the hills being alive, I made my way to the second closet, passing a pair of eyelike windows similar to the ones facing the front of the house. These two looked onto the backyard, beyond which sat woods that sloped sharply down the hillside. Peering outside, I saw Maggie and Jess round the corner of the house, hand in hand. Knowing I was up here, Jess shot a glance toward the window and waved.
I waved back, grinning. It had been a rough few days. I was sore from all that moving and unpacking, tired from restless nights, and concerned about Maggie’s problems adjusting. That morning at breakfast, when I asked why she’d opened the doors to the armoire in the middle of the night, she swore she hadn’t done it. But my stress melted away as I watched my wife and daughter enjoying our new backyard. Both looked happy as they explored the edge of the woods, and I realized that buying this place was the best decision we could have made.
I continued to the second closet, which was almost empty. The only things inside were a shoebox on the top shelf and, next to it, almost a dozen green-and-white packages of Polaroid film. The shoebox was blue with a telltale Nike swoosh across its sides. Inside was the reason for all that film—a Polaroid camera and a stack of snapshots.
First, I examined the camera, boxy and heavy. Pressing a button on the side raised the camera’s lens and flash. A button on the top clicked the shutter. On the back was a counter telling me there was still enough film inside for two more pictures.
Just like with the record player, I decided to test the camera. I went to the back window, seeing that Maggie and Jess were still outside, heading toward the woods. Maggie was running. Jess trailed after her, calling for her to slow down.
I clicked the shutter as both entered the forest. A second later, amid much whirring, a square photograph slowly emerged from a slot in the camera’s front. The image itself had just started to form. Hazy shapes emerging from milky whiteness. I set the picture aside to develop and returned to the snapshots stored in the shoebox.
Picking up the top one, I saw it was a picture of Curtis Carver. He stared straight at the camera with a blank look on his face, the light from the flash turning his skin a sickly white. Judging from the stretch of his arms at the bottom of the image, he had taken the picture himself. But the framing was off, capturing only two-thirds of his