Chapter 10 - The Woman of the House

The bristles of my hairbrush scratch against the softness of my scalp as they make their way from the front of my head to the back. It’s been almost two weeks since I accused Brian of hiding information about the previous owner from me. He says he’s forgiven me, but I’m not so sure.

“I choose to let go of the past and embrace the future,” I say to my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

It’s been even longer since I saw my face covered in blood. “I choose to let go of the past and embrace the future.”

I couldn’t keep avoiding the bathroom without Brian noticing, so I forced myself to brush my thick hair in front of the mirror one hundred times every morning. Exposure therapy. It must be working because I haven’t run out of the bathroom screaming. Not yet anyway.

“I choose to let go of the past and embrace the future.”

The more time that goes by, the more I realize Brian was right: I let my stress get to me. Now, the only thing left to do is to continue with my daily affirmations, hoping that one day I’ll believe the words the woman in the mirror is saying.

“I choose to let go of the past and embrace the future.”

I throw the hairbrush back in the drawer and go into the guest bedroom.

From the window I watch as Vick and his crew of shabby-looking men work on the landscaping. The overgrown lawn has been tamed by Vick and his seated lawn mower, but the shrubbery along the side of the house is still wild and unmanaged, which I know Brian will want handled soon.

The run-down studio apartment I lived in before I met Brian didn’t have so much as a patch of grass outside it. I don’t know anything about gardening or landscaping or managing contractors, but the woman who grew up in the upper-middle-class suburb of Oak Park and went to a prestigious liberal arts college in Bloomington, Illinois, would know how to do all of those things. She’s the woman Brian married, the woman I told him I was. So at night I do my research about the differences between the various types of plantain lilies, and in the morning I keep tabs on Vick’s progress, like I know Brian expects me to. Vick still won’t come inside the house, despite my numerous invitations. Not even an ice-cold lemonade or peanut butter sandwich can convince him to cross the threshold, so I watch him and his men work from the window, and if we need to talk, we do it outside.

On the other side of the yard, one of Vick’s men is leveling out dirt with a shovel. The thicket of weeds growing along the edge of the lawn is gone. Now, a small wall of rocks separates the grass from the edge of the cliff that looks out over the temperamental water. The man with the shovel must feel my gaze on his back because he turns around and looks up toward the window. Dirt smears the side of his cheek just above a thick beard that covers the bottom half of his face. A baseball cap hides his forehead, but when he looks up at me, I can see his hard and unfriendly expression underneath it. I hold up my hand and wave. He doesn’t acknowledge me, he just turns back to his shovel and continues to move dirt.

I step away from the window and disappear into the guest bedroom. Ten paint swatches sit on the dresser. I told Brian I would pick out a color weeks ago. I sigh, knowing I’ve put off the menial task long enough.

I hold each of them up to the wall to see how the color will look in the morning light. Most of them are different shades of beige, but one stands out. Yellow. It was Brian’s suggestion, which means it was Deborah’s suggestion. “Gender neutral,” he had said with a wink as he put it on the top of the pile.

Looking at the yellow against the wall, it seems like it’s trying too hard to be happy. I hold up a couple other beige swatches before remembering there are more on Brian’s desk.

Downstairs, I move aside several large pages of building blueprints before finding the small pile of misplaced paint colors. As I flip through more iterations of beige, a business card falls out. I push the chair back and reach underneath the desk to grab the rectangular piece of paper. When I sit up, I see who it belongs to:

Sonja Peckett

Real Estate Agent at Atlas Realty

Lake Moss, Wisconsin

I want to put the business card down, but something stops me. I remember what Frances said about the previous owner. Here one day and gone the next. I don’t know anything about her, but somehow I feel connected to her. Maybe if I learn what happened to her, this place will start to feel like my home instead of hers.

My hand hovers over Brian’s desk drawer. The impulse to go through his things is like an itch that needs to be scratched. I’ve felt compelled to poke around other people’s belongings more times than I can count. After Brian and I started dating, he’d take me to dinner parties hosted by his colleagues. We’d drive up north to suburbs I’d never heard of, like Wilmette, Winnetka, or Kenilworth, where the houses looked nearly as big as the buildings Brian engineered. I’d never seen homes so luxurious. And the people inside all had shiny skin and the same bright white smiles. The truth was, I was fascinated by them. I thought people like that existed only in the reality shows I watched. I needed to know more. So, during each meal, I’d quietly excuse myself from the dining table. But instead of going to the bathroom and opening medicine cabinets, I’d find our host’s main bedroom. I’d peer into jewelry boxes, dresser drawers, and walk-in closets. You can tell a lot about a person by what’s inside their bedside table: the books they’re reading, the cards they’ve kept, and even the kind of sex life they have. Danielle Weaver didn’t strike me as the type who’d own a pair of handcuffs, but her top dresser drawer told me otherwise.

Once, when we were still living in Chicago, Brian left early for work one morning and I was alone in his apartment. I went in his closet to get a sweatshirt and saw an old shoebox peeking out from behind a thick wool sweater on the top shelf. I couldn’t help myself. I pulled it down onto the floor. The tips of my fingers tingled with anticipation, and I found myself hoping that I would find something—anything—that showed he was lying about who he was just as much as I was. My mind raced with possibilities. Maybe he wasn’t from a well-off family in the northern suburbs after all. Or he went to a community college instead of Northwestern. What if his name wasn’t really Brian? Most people would consider these sorts of lies relationship-ending, but instead of scaring me off, I was excited. If Brian had lied, then he and I were more alike than I ever could have imagined.

I held my breath as I lifted the lid off the weathered cardboard box. First, I pulled out a pair of movie tickets from over a decade ago. Underneath the tickets was a set of Polaroids of him and another girl, their mouths smiling wide and full of metal from their teenage years. I tossed the pictures to the side, only to find about half a dozen anniversary cards and love letters from other old girlfriends. I dumped the entire box onto the floor, but the whole thing was full of unremarkable mementos from his past relationships. Brian had no skeletons in his closet, no deep-rooted secrets. He was exactly who he said he was.

I was crushed.

Inside the office, my fingers graze the metal handle of Brian’s desk. I know I won’t be satisfied until my arm is elbow-deep inside this drawer. Going through his personal documents is an invasion of privacy. But things are different now, I tell myself. I’m his wife. It’s not an intrusion if I’m looking for documents related to our house.

I open the drawer on the right-hand side of the desk in search of any information about the previous owners. After ten minutes of rummaging through neatly arranged contents, I come up empty-handed.

Keep looking. You aren’t just going to give up, are you?

I know I should stop, but I can’t. Inside the office closet, I push past our winter coats and snow gear until I see a plastic bin full of important documents Brian has organized with color-coded tabs. My finger flips through the folders labeled “401(k),” “Rose Work,” and “Finances,” until I reach “House.” I pull out the folder and empty it out onto my lap. I thumb through the paperwork, but it’s just information about Brian’s old apartment in the city. I look around the room, unsure of where the contract for the house could be.

I pull my phone out from my back pocket and type out a text to Brian, but I stop before I hit send. I promised to let all this go. If I ask him where the paperwork is, he’ll know it’s still bothering me. I delete the message and open up the browser. I type in our address and scroll past the pictures of the house. My eyes devour the information on my screen. It was bought in 2026—that’s us—and also back in 2019. Before that, it exchanged hands half a dozen times, but no names are listed. I clear the search bar and type in “missing woman Lake Moss.” My thumb hovers over the crime section of the Daily Moss.

Angela Walsh, 39, of Lake Moss went missing Thursday morning after dropping her kids off at school. She was last seen going into her home on Edgerton Drive by two witnesses who were walking by on foot. If you have any information about the disappearance of Angela, please contact the Lake Moss Police Department.

There’s a picture next to the article. The woman has natural blonde hair that falls just below her shoulders. Her smile makes her blue eyes look small and big at the same time. She’s hugging the person next to her, but the picture is cut off, so all that’s left is a thin slice of pale skin. She looks happy. Not the fake kind of happy that most people move through life trying to portray, but the real kind of happy. It’s in her eyes. There’s a brightness to them that makes me want to smile back. This is how her friends and family will remember her: a smiling woman who loved her husband and her kids. But there’s always more to it than that, isn’t there? They wouldn’t put it in the article, of course, but there are shades of darkness to everyone’s life. When someone disappears, it’s easier, simpler, to look past the shadowed parts and only see the light.

I tap the arrow back to the search engine and try to find more information about her disappearance, but all I find is a follow-up article saying the police are investigating multiple leads.

I toss my phone onto the desk. There was more to Angela Walsh’s life than being a loving wife and a caring mother. And there was definitely more to her disappearance. People don’t just vanish for no reason.

Different parts of the house flip through my mind like a Rolodex as I wonder what happened to her. I picture the narrow front hallway at the base of the staircase. Angela runs up the stairs, two at a time. A gloved hand reaches for the back of her head and grabs a fistful of blonde hair. She falls backward, tumbling down the staircase until her body is a twisted pile at the bottom. A pair of black boots stands over her before dragging her out of the house. Then, I see her at the island in the kitchen. Raised voices echo throughout the house. Her husband takes a step toward her, fists balled. She dares him to go ahead, do it. He uses the back of his hand to slap her across the face. Her head hits the side of the countertop, and soon the milky marble turns a deep crimson red. Finally, I see her at the windows in the living room, looking out on the lake. Her mind wanders to a place and time before the house, the kids, and the husband. A car honks in the driveway. She takes a deep breath before picking up the bags at her feet and stepping out the door.

I’m organizing the stray pieces of paper I pulled out from our files when I see a copy of the Lake Moss Gazette underneath a stack of Brian’s building layouts. I’m not surprised at the lack of information online about Angela’s disappearance since it’s an open case, but if there were other incidents at the house over the years, the Lake Moss Gazette would have written about them.

—

The walk from the house to the library takes a little over ten minutes. I follow the path along the water, into town and up a hill to the small brick building that’s situated just past the town’s police and fire station, but before city hall.

I push open the wooden doors. Once I’m inside, I’m welcomed by the smell of worn pages tucked inside old books. An older woman with spiked gray hair is sitting in the corner, surrounded by a small group of children. A pair of glasses is perched on her beaked nose as she reads from an oversized book. The children are all wide-eyed with their mouths agape, as if they’re drinking up the words spilling out of her mouth. I shuffle past them to the circular wooden desk that has waves etched into the side of it. When I look closer, I notice the scene is complete with a mermaid peeking out from behind a wiry piece of seaweed. Her wooden fin is covered in scales, and she has an expression carved into her face that can only be described as suspicious.

“Can I help you?” a man asks from behind the desk.

He looks like he’s about Vick’s age, but his skin is soft and pale, unlike Vick’s tan, leathered skin. He picks up a small stack of books and moves them from one area of the desk to the other. His fingers are long, lean, and delicate, perfect for turning the fragile page of a book without wrinkling it.

“Um, yes,” I say. “I’m looking for some records, articles probably, about a house on the lake. I looked online, but couldn’t seem to find anything from the Lake Moss Gazette before the ’80s.”

“That’s because they didn’t digitize anything from before then. Guess they figured no one would ever be interested in gardening tips or boat rentals from back then, so they didn’t bother. We kept a record of all of that, though. I made sure of it,” he says with a smile, like it was his idea in the first place.

“Would it be possible for me to take a look at them?” I ask.

“Follow me,” he says, waving one of his delicate hands.

He disappears behind a stack of books, and I glance down at the wooden mermaid to make sure her eyes don’t flicker in his direction. After a moment, I follow like an obedient dog as the willowy librarian maneuvers between fiction, nonfiction, and autobiographies. Even inside the library, there’s a dampness in the air from the lake that makes everything smell a little like mold. The natural light from the front windows disappears as we walk farther into the stacks. Back here, everything is cast in gray.

The librarian turns on his heel and reaches down to the bottom shelf of one of the large bookcases. When he stands up, five large leather-bound books fill his arms. He puts them down on a nearby desk and an explosion of dust erupts in front of us.

“Copies of the Lake Moss Gazette dating all the way back to the ’20s,” he says, taking a step back and admiring the stack.

I open one of the large books and see the articles have been laminated. There must be over two hundred pages per book.

“Are they organized by topic?” I ask, hopeful.

He shakes his head. “Date.”

“So if I’m looking for something specific—”

“I suggest you get started,” he says, pulling back the desk chair in front of the books. “We’re open until nine p.m.”

—

The first half of the 1920s in Lake Moss were uneventful. The town was founded a decade prior, so the population was relatively small, and with a small population comes a slow news cycle. It wasn’t until 1925 that scandal struck the sandy shores of Lake Moss. The mayor was caught cheating on his wife with his secretary and resigned. I imagine the scandal wasn’t as hard on the disgraced mayor as it was on his wife. It’s the women who bear the brunt of it, harboring the hurt and pain in their bones, wearing it like a shroud, while men seem to come out from a crisis more or less unscathed.

I turn laminated page after laminated page, looking for any news of the house or its residents, but find none. Minutes tick by on the large clock hanging on the wall opposite me. I text Brian to tell him that I met up with Frances and we decided to get dinner. He responds with a simple thumbs-up.

With my chin nestled in the palm of my hand, I turn the page, expecting to find more gardening tips. That’s when I see it. The picture is in black-and-white. There aren’t any shutters on the windows, the shingles look worn, and the lawn is overgrown, but there it is. My house. I look at the date under the article: October 24, 1938.

My eyes scan the article, trying to keep up with my brain as it leapfrogs ahead. Certain phrases stick out to me: “a young family shattered”; “father worked in the pharmacy in town”; “wife says he wasn’t the same after moving into the house”; “died under mysterious circumstances.” The cause of death wasn’t revealed, and no charges were filed. Farther down on the page, beneath the picture of the house, there’s another photograph. A young woman holds a baby in her arms. Her husband has his arm around her. He’s smiling. Their names are underneath: “From left to right: Carly, Jackson, and Charles Schwartz.”

I thumb farther into the ’30s to see if there are any follow-up articles about the young father’s death, but I find none.

Before I know it, it’s eight p.m. My eyes are glazed over, tired from scanning the small print. I pick up the pace. I cast one large leather book aside. Then another. I go through the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s with no sign of the house. With every turn of the page, I will the house to appear. A couple times I think I see it, standing tall on the top of the hill, overlooking the lake, full of dark shadows. But then I realize it’s just an article on a new construction company or a profile on a wealthy, well-known family moving to the area.

8:38 p.m. My stomach rumbles. The only sounds in the library are the turning of laminated pages and the echo of a squeaky wheel as the librarian pushes a rusty cart full of books somewhere inside the stacks.

Near the end of the fifth and final book, right before the start of the ’70s, the house appears again. At first I think my eyes are betraying me. My finger trails along the headline: “House of Horrors.” My breath gets stuck in my throat. I can feel my heart get heavy in my chest. “High school honor roll…planned on going to the University of Wisconsin in the fall…no signs of a struggle…parents said she was a happy teenager…fell from the cliff at the edge of the house…found on the beach below by her brother.” The bright shining face of the high school student, Margo Williams, stares back at me. This must be her senior-year picture. Her dark hair cascades over her right shoulder. Her smiling face is full of bright, untarnished optimism.

I sit back in my seat. One death at the house is a tragedy. The second, a coincidence. But the disappearance of Angela Walsh makes a pattern. After Margo Williams died, the house was abandoned for years, decades even, until the Walshes bought it and fixed it up, but I bet the house’s history wasn’t lost on the town.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” a quiet voice asks behind me.

I jump in my seat. My palms hit the top of the desk, sending more dust into the air. When I turn around, I see the librarian standing over me. I was so deep in thought, I didn’t even hear the squeaking wheel of his cart as he approached.

He cocks his head to one side. A small smile starts at the corners of his mouth, as if he already knows the answer.

“No,” I say, lying out of instinct. “No, I didn’t.” I push the large leather book away from me and stand.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, tightening his grip on the cart. “If you want to stay, you’re more than welcome.”

One of the overhead lights flickers, and I notice another wooden mermaid hanging on the wall opposite me. Her arms are outstretched and inviting, but her eyes are wide and maniacal.

“Thanks, but I better get going,” I say, grabbing my purse from the seat next to me. I head toward the row of bookcases that lead back to the entrance.

“Don’t be a stranger now,” the librarian yells from behind me.

My walk turns into a run. I sprint down one row of bookcases, then another. Everything looks the same. Then, I realize I’m headed for a dead end: I’m running straight into a white wall. I double back and make a turn. The sound of the squeaking wheel seems to be coming from every direction. I turn right at books about fishing and biology, then left at the romance section. Nothing looks familiar, but soon I see the edge of the circular desk near the entrance. I run past the desk, past the empty corner where the children listen to their afternoon stories, and push the large wooden doors open into the cold, dark night.