Epilogue - The Woman of the House

Rachel sat cross-legged inside the boathouse with a cardboard box full of abandoned beach toys and forgotten life preservers.

When they toured the house just a few months ago, Rachel hadn’t been discouraged by the fact that it had been on the market for over a year. In fact, it helped them negotiate a better price. Apparently, the previous owner was eager to sell, and once Rachel saw the boathouse, she was eager to buy. She’d heard about the death of the woman who lived here before—she died after a month in a coma following some terrible drowning accident—but Rachel didn’t care. She could see beyond the drama of the previous owners and the piles of junk that lined the windowsills of the boathouse. She knew it had potential.

When she closed her eyes she saw beige walls, an oversized armchair with an ottoman in the corner, and a built-in bookshelf. She pictured herself with a glass of red wine in her hand and a book on her lap as the lake pawed at the shore below. She knew this vision wouldn’t happen overnight, so she got to work dragging cardboard box after cardboard box out of the boathouse and onto the street in front of the house, where garbage trucks would carry them away in a few short days.

Soon, sweat lined the back of her shirt and her armpits, but the boathouse was almost cleared out. She looked around the small room, pleased with her work, before her eyes landed on the antique dresser in the corner. She ran her hands along the side of the dresser and thought about refinishing it, but after seeing that the wood was chipped in the corners and the drawers were outfitted with a series of dents, she didn’t think it was worth it. Feeling the muscles in her arms and legs burn, Rachel put all her weight behind the dresser and pushed. It only budged about an inch or two, but something fell from the back of the dresser onto the floor. Rachel bent down and pulled a small black notebook out from underneath it. She turned it over in her hands before she opened the first page and saw Angela Walsh scribbled inside the front cover. Tired from cleaning out the boathouse, Rachel sat down against the wall and started reading.

“What’s that?”

Rachel looked up from the notebook to see her husband Will standing in the doorway of the boathouse. It was only then that she realized how far the afternoon sun had slipped in the sky.

“I think it belonged to a woman who used to live here. Angela,” she said, flipping through the pages full of rambling thoughts she had spent most of the afternoon trying to decipher. “She wrote about how some lady was, like, low-key stalking her. Apparently, this woman was obsessed with Angela and the house. She would show up at her work and stand outside the house pretending to bird-watch, but really she was looking inside the windows.”

“Weird,” Will said as he sat down on the floor next to his wife. “Can I see?” Rachel handed him the diary.

“Listen to this,” Will said after a moment of thumbing through the back half of the diary. “ ‘Charles and Margo’s deaths weren’t accidents…’ Who are Charles and Margo?”

“No clue. What else does it say?”

Will cleared his throat. “ ‘I tracked down Margo’s brother, Tyler, in Green Bay. He said he and his sister both experienced things they couldn’t explain while they lived in the house. Whispers in the walls. Things moving on their own. Doors slamming for no reason. Margo tried to tell her parents about it, but they didn’t believe her. A few months later, she was dead. I’m going to tell Jonathan tonight that we have to leave. There’s too many similarities. It can’t all be a coincidence. I don’t know what’s going on inside that house, but I do know one thing: It attracts evil.’ ” Will lowered the diary in his lap.

For a moment, Will and Rachel were both silent.

“Hey, is everything all right?” Will asked after a moment.

“Yeah, yeah,” Rachel said, wiping the sweat from her brow.

“You sure? You look a little pale.” Will touched the tip of his wife’s chin with his thumb.

“Just gives me the creeps. That’s all.”

“Spooky,” Will said, raising his eyebrows as his body mimicked a shudder.

“Stop it,” Rachel said as she playfully swatted at him.

“Forget about this,” Will said, tossing the diary in the trash pile. “Some kid probably wrote it to freak out their sibling.”

“You’re right,” Rachel said as she wiped a stray hair off her face.

“Come on, let’s go inside.” Will stood up and gave Rachel his hand.

Together, Rachel and Will left the boathouse and walked through the yard, the shadow of the house looming over them.