Just Like Home(57)

The next time she woke in the night to the animal noises that came from beneath her bed, Vera had looked through the lens again. She wanted to see the animals. She wanted to see the babies. She wanted to see them before her father got them out of the basement, before he set them free. She believed him that they could be dangerous, so she wasn’t going to go into the basement to see them. But looking, she thought—just looking—just peeking—that couldn’t be so dangerous.

That night, the light had been on, and for the first time, she’d seen her father’s work.

Now, in the almost-empty basement, with her bare foot planted on a light-blue glove, Vera looked up at that square of ceiling. She thought of the other side of the argument she’d been having with herself for so many years, the side she usually pushed away because it felt so silly and childish. Because it didn’t make any sense.

There was never a good answer to the sounds she’d heard, and why she’d been able to hear them. The house was so well insulated, each room nearly soundproof, and this room was the most carefully built of them all. But she’d always been able to hear her father’s noises in the night, when he was in the basement. And she’d always been able to hear her parents fighting, and her father’s heavy footfalls.

Unless, a long-smothered corner of her memory reminded her, she snapped four times.

She shook that whisper off, unwilling to engage with it. It must have been intentional. Francis built his office to sit above his work. He must have wanted to see and hear what happened in the basement in his absence. She could picture him so easily, sitting at his desk, listening to the wet thumps of a man struggling to escape.

If that had been intentional, he would have known that Vera could hear, wouldn’t he? He would have known that she’d know about his projects.

Now, standing in the basement among the detritus of the investigation, Vera tried hard to spot the peephole the way Francis would have seen it, from below. She couldn’t find it, not even standing right under the pipes with her neck tilted back at a dizzying angle.

The floor beneath her tilted on an ever-so-slight grade, the cement under the plexiglass tipping down toward the six-inch-wide drain in the floor. That drain was perfectly framed by a neat circular hole in the plexiglass. It was covered in a silver metal strainer, but Vera could still feel the faintest breath of warm air from inside the pipe. A loose hair lifted away from her face. Heat from wherever the pipe led off to, she supposed, rising up into the cool of the house. She wondered if Francis had ever felt that warmth.

Scanning the plaster at the center of those pipes was starting to make her eyes ache, but she still couldn’t see the peephole. Maybe, she thought, if she got the stepladder from the kitchen and climbed up there. Not that there was any point, but she wanted to see what Francis saw.

She wanted to see what they saw, too—the men her father brought to this basement. And they weren’t standing on the ground when they were in this part of the room. They were always suspended, hanging by an elaborate system of knots that kept them too still to struggle, kept them steady and still, kept them right where they needed to be for her father to do his work—

Vera’s eyes landed on something wrong.

There was a scratch in the ceiling. Just like the deep scratch in the wall next to the stairs. It was up behind the pipes, a scar in the plaster, as stark as if someone had dug the tip of a butter knife into the surface of a full pint of ice cream. Vera would wonder how she hadn’t noticed it sooner, except that it was perfectly aligned with one of the lengths of pipe, and it was only in walking toward the pipes that she’d shifted her perspective enough to spot it.

Vera stared at the scratch. She couldn’t imagine how it had gotten there. Daphne hadn’t done this—the chances that she’d spent any time in the basement at all were nonexistent. Francis wouldn’t have done it either; he loved the Crowder House too much to scar it, loved it almost as much as he’d loved Vera herself.

Vera was standing right under it now, her head tipped all the way back, the smooth skin of her throat stretched as taut as a fitted sheet straining across a mattress. Her eyes ached as she tried to trace the contours of the scratch in the ceiling, tried to understand what had injured the house like that. The edges of her vision seemed to darken. She held her breath and she knew, she knew that if she looked long enough, she’d understand what had happened.

Something inside the ceiling moved.

The first thing Vera’s brain shouted was rat, but that wasn’t right. The noise wasn’t a rat-noise. It wasn’t a scrabbling skittering rush of movement, wasn’t the thumping tumble that she knew so well from the many shitty apartments she’d lived in. The noise that came from inside the plaster was a long dragging scrape, like the sound of furniture ruining wood.

Everything inside Vera froze. Her eyes watered, but she did not blink. She waited to hear the sound again. Her hands snapped into fists as she waited, waited, waited. She swallowed hard.

She hadn’t imagined the noise. That wasn’t even a question. It had been loud and grinding, almost tangible. There was no writing it off.

Waiting for it to happen again was silly. Vera knew that. Whatever had made the noise would still be there even if it didn’t make another sound. But she was stuck, her mouth dry, her heart beating in slow hard steady punches. She couldn’t tell if she was trapped or hungry, frightened or eager, predator or prey.