The screen of my old flip phone read 2:04 in the red glow of the bedside clock when the floorboards outside my guest room gave that familiar, dry little groan. Down here in Cairo, houses settle into the bottomland mud slow and quiet, but you learn the exact rhythm of the wood beneath your feet. I sat up before I even thought about it, pushing the floral quilt back from my knees.
The latch on my door clicked with that soft brass sound I’ve listened to for twenty years, and then Leo was standing there in his dinosaur pajamas, clutching his pillow like it was a shield.
He didn’t make a sound, just crawled up onto the edge of the mattress and pulled his knees right up to his chin. He smelled like that cheap berry shampoo Chloe always buys down at the Piggly Wiggly, and his breathing was hitched way up in his chest. Back at home, six miles away down on River Road, his parents had been keeping his bedroom dead-bolted from the outside for three weeks. Chloe told me he was just acting out because of the new school schedule, making up stories for attention because he hated going to bed early. I wanted to believe her because she’s my only daughter, but sitting there in the dark with my grandson shaking against my shoulder, I knew my daughter was lying to my face.
“Grandma,” he whispered, his voice trembling so hard the syllables blurred together. “They’re packing up my room.”
I stroked his hair, feeling the damp curls at the back of his neck. “Nobody’s packing anything, honey. Your mom just keeps the guest room locked for storage right now.”
Leo reached under his pillow with cold, small fingers and pulled out Mark’s old cracked smartphone that they let him play games on. He tapped the screen twice and held it out to me. The video was dark and shaky, filmed from the low angle of someone sitting flat on the floor inside a closet. Two men in dirty work boots and blue jeans were tossing plastic storage bins into the back of a large cardboard box. I watched my grandson’s blue dinosaur sheet get rolled into a tight ball and stuffed down beside a stack of old comic books. A strange man with a shaved head and a tattoo on his forearm swore softly at something stuck in the doorframe, and then the screen went black.
I didn’t sleep another wink after that. I just sat propped up against the headboard with Leo curled into my side until the gray light of Saturday morning started creeping through the lace curtains. The kitchen smelled faintly of old coffee grounds from the night before, but I didn’t bother putting a pot on. I got dressed in my good gray slacks and a cotton blouse, moving around the quiet house like I was walking on broken eggshells. Leo stayed right behind me, his little fingers hooked into the belt loop of my trousers as if he thought I might vanish if he let go.
The drive down River Road took less than ten minutes, but every mile felt like dragging an anchor through wet gravel. The weeping willows along the ditch lines were heavy with morning fog, and the air smelled like damp earth and rotting cornstalks from the fields behind the county road.
When I pulled my old Buick into Chloe’s driveway, the place looked completely normal from the outside. The white paint was peeling a little around the front porch railing just like it always had, and Mark’s silver pickup truck was parked right beside the garage with the tailgate down.
We walked up the front steps together, Leo dragging his feet so slow I could hear the rubber soles of his sneakers scraping against the concrete. I didn’t bother knocking because the front door was unlocked, which was the first wrong sign in a house with a toddler and a suspicious mind. The inside hit me with a strange, hollow silence that didn’t feel right for a Saturday morning when cartoons ought to be blaring from the television. The living room furniture was all still there, but the framed family portraits on the mantelpiece were gone, leaving pale squares of clean paint on the dark wallpaper.
Chloe came around the corner from the kitchen holding a roll of packing tape, her hair pulled back in a messy clip with strands hanging all over her forehead. She stopped dead on the braided rug when she saw us standing in the foyer, her eyes darting straight down to Leo’s white knuckles gripping my hand.
“Mom,” she said, and her voice had that sharp, thin edge she only used when she was caught dead-to-rights in a lie. “What are you doing here this early? I told you on the phone yesterday we were busy getting ready for the appraisers.”
“You told me you were cleaning the guest room,” I said, keeping my voice lower and flatter than I actually felt. “You didn’t say anything about emptying out Leo’s entire bedroom while he was staying under my roof.”
Mark appeared right behind her out of the hallway, wiping his hands on a greasy rag like he’d been down in the crawlspace messing with the water heater. He looked at me, then down at Leo, and his jaw worked once before he let out a short, ugly breath.
“You brought her too early,” Mark said to Chloe, and the words dropped onto the hardwood floor like lead weights.
Chloe spun around and glared at her husband, her face going hot and blotchy. “I didn’t invite them, Mark! She just showed up on the porch!”
I didn’t wait for them to start arguing back and forth the way they always did when things got tight. I let go of Leo’s hand, told him to stay right by the front door, and walked past them down the narrow hallway toward the back bedroom. The door that had been locked tight for a whole month was now standing wide open, the brass knob resting flat against the wall with a small dent in the drywall behind it. I stopped on the threshold and looked inside.
The room was completely, starkly empty. The blue walls looked faded where his posters used to hang, and the floorboards showed clean squares where the bed and dresser had stood for three years. There wasn’t a single toy left behind, not a book, not a scrap of paper. Right in the middle of the bare floor sat a heavy, dark blue vintage suitcase with my own initials, M.J., engraved in brass plates near the leather handle. It was the old bag my late husband had given me for our thirtieth anniversary, the one I kept up in my attic under three layers of mothballs.
Before I could even reach out to touch the leather, a muffled, hollow sound came up from right beneath my feet. It wasn’t just the house settling. It was a sharp, rhythmic tapping against the subfloor, followed by a human voice shouting something hoarse and broken through the heating grate by the closet.
“Hey!” the voice yelled, muffled by layers of plywood and dust. “Get me out of here! They locked the bulkhead!”
Chloe let out a sharp cry and ran down the hall, grabbing my arm with fingers that felt like ice. “Mom, don’t listen to him. It’s just an old squatter, some vagrant Mark found wandering on the back property. We’re calling the sheriff right now.”
“Don’t you lie to me,” I told her, shaking her hand off my arm with more force than I meant to use. “That’s Tom Miller’s voice. Tom Miller hasn’t been seen since he came over to help Mark with the title paperwork back in November.”
Mark lunged forward from the doorway, his face twisting into something ugly and desperate as he reached for my shoulder. “You need to leave right now, Martha. You have no idea what you’re messing with. We signed the papers fair and square.”
Leo started crying behind us, a small, high-pitched sound of pure terror that cut right through the noise in my head. I didn’t back down an inch. I turned around, grabbed the heavy iron fireplace poker leaning against the hall table, and brought the flat end down hard against the wooden heating grate over the crawlspace access until the rusted screws snapped loose with a loud, ringing pop.
The cold, damp smell of cellar dirt rushed up into the hallway, carrying the sound of coughing and desperate breathing from the dark below. I dropped the iron poker, knelt down on the dusty floorboards, and reached my hand down into the black opening where a pair of terrified eyes were staring up at me from the shadows.
