Page 131 of Home Before Dark

“You don’t want to know the truth. You think you do, Maggie. But you don’t.”

My mother’s birdlike gaze comes to a stop at the hole in the kitchen ceiling. That’s when I realize I was wrong about Dane. I might be wrong about everything.

“Is this about Dad?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did he kill Petra Ditmer?”

“Your father would never—”

“It certainly feels like he did,” I say. “All this secrecy. All these lies. It makes me think he really did kill a sixteen-year-old girl and that you helped him cover it up.”

My mother slumps in her chair. Her hand, placed palm-down on the table, falls away in a long, exhausted slide.

“Oh, baby,” she says in a voice made jagged by a hundred different emotions. “My sweet baby.”

“So it’s true?” I say.

My mother shakes her head. “Your father didn’t kill that girl.”

“Then who did?”

She reaches into her purse and pulls out a large envelope, which she slides across the table toward me. I open it and take a peek. Inside is a stack of pages. The top one bears an unexpected heading.

To Maggie

“Your father and I prayed this day would never come,” she says.

“Why?”

“Neither of us wanted to tell you the truth.”

“Why?”

“Because it wasn’t your father who killed Petra.”

My eyes remain locked on the page in front of me. “Then who did?”

“You did, Maggie,” my mother says. “You killed her.”

To Maggie

I’m writing this for you, Maggie, although I hope to God you never see it. If you do, it means your mother and I have failed.

For that, we are profoundly sorry.

By now, you already know some of the truth about what happened the night we left Baneberry Hall. This is the rest of it. And while it is my greatest hope that you don’t read beyond this paragraph, I already know you will. You are, after all, my daughter.

We never planned to leave Baneberry Hall the way we did. We never planned to leave at all. Maintenance issues and prior tragedies notwithstanding, it was a lovely home. And it could have been a happy one if I hadn’t become fascinated with the history of the house.

I admit I had an ulterior motive when I convinced your mother to buy it. I wanted a house with a past that I could research and write about and, hopefully, end up with a nonfiction account about being a beleaguered freelance writer who restored the fixer-upper he unwisely purchased.

But once I learned the circumstances surrounding the death of Indigo Garson, I realized I had stumbled upon an even better idea for a book. I wasgoing to be the beleaguered freelancer who solved a murder at the fixer-upper he unwisely purchased.

I ended up writing a far different book.

A word about House of Horrors: Much of it is true. A lot of it is not. We did discover letters written to Indigo Garson by the man who wished to elope with her. Petra Ditmer and I did research those letters, discovering other tragedies that had occurred in the house over the years.

---