“What is that?” Diane wanted to know, but neither Claire nor Julian had an answer.
“Let’s just find your dad and get out of here,” Julian said grimly, and the three of them hurried out of the bedroom and up the stairs.
“Roger!” Julian called.
“Dad!”
“Dad!”
He was not in Julian’s office, James’s room, Megan’s room or the bathroom. They saw nothing unusual upstairs, and though Claire thought she heard a weird tapping in Julian’s office, it might have been her imagination, since neither Julian nor Diane heard a thing.
As agreed, they went out to the garage together, but by now what little hope remained in Claire of finding her father had vanished. She didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him, but something had certainly occurred, because he seemed to have disappeared.
He was not on the ground floor of the garage, they saw instantly. Julian went up to the loft by himself, and though he stayed up there several minutes longer than she thought he should have and returned looking pale and shaken, he claimed that he’d seen nothing out of the ordinary.
“So he’s not here,” Claire said.
“Maybe he went home,” Julian suggested.
“His car’s still in the driveway.”
“Maybe he walked away. Or got scared and ran.”
“We need to go to the police,” Diane announced.
“The police aren’t going to believe—” Julian began.
“I don’t give a shit what they believe. My dad is missing, and it’s their job to find him, and if they happen to discover the existence of ghosts on the way, well, good for them. But Dad’s gone. And we need to get him back, no matter what it takes.”
Claire agreed, and instead of arguing the point, she grabbed her sister’s arm with one hand, Julian’s with the other, and pulled them both out of the garage. Just in case. Once in the driveway, she took out her cell phone and dialed 911. She looked up at the sky, wondering why the sun and clouds were visible from here but the moon and the stars were not. Did it mean something?
A police dispatcher came on the line. “What is your emergency?”
“My father’s missing. He disappeared about an hour ago—”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” the dispatcher said, and there seemed to be a tone of smirking condescension in her voice, “but an adult male is not considered missing until he has been gone for forty-eight hours. Your father has been out of contact for one. I suggest you wait. I’m sure he will turn up later this morning.”
“You don’t understand,” Claire said. She saw the anxious expression on her sister’s face. “He disappeared inside our house.” She hadn’t intended to bring any of this up, hadn’t wanted the police to think her crazy and not take her seriously. But there wasn’t going to be any action taken to find her father for two full days, and she knew she needed to spell everything out. Still, she had to be careful what she said. “We’ve had some incidents at our home recently,” she began.
“Vandalism,” Julian whispered.
“Incidents of vandalism,” she said more confidently. “Someone shut off our lights and attacked my husband in our living room. This is the same house,” she added with sudden inspiration, “where an intruder named John Lynch committed suicide several days ago.”
Julian gave her a thumbs-up.
Now it was her turn to be condescending. “I’m sure that crime is in your records,” Claire told the dispatcher.
“You may report the assault and file a claim regarding the vandalism. Although, since they occurred previously, neither incident is considered an emergency. I can transfer you to an officer who will take your statement and arrange a meeting. As for your father, a person has to be missing for forty-eight hours before the police can open an investigation.”
“Transfer me,” Claire ordered.
She spent the next five minutes trying in vain to convince a Lieutenant Weiss that he needed to come out to their house to investigate, finally giving up and handing the phone over to Julian, who alienated the officer in record time and ended up turning off the phone in anger and disgust.
Diane was crying. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Julian said helplessly. “Does Rob know anyone who has contacts at the police department? Maybe we can get some help through a back channel—”
“I don’t think so,” Diane said, taking out her own phone, “but I’ll ask.”
Rob didn’t, and, from Diane’s side of the conversation, it didn’t sound as though he believed a word of what she was telling him, but he promised to ask around and see whether maybe someone he knew knew someone who could help them get some traction with the cops.
Diane hung up. “What do we do now?” she asked.
Claire looked over at the house. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
As they passed by her dad’s car, she felt a pang, wondering whether she would ever see her father again. He was rough, and he was mean sometimes, and he hated Julian, but she loved him, and she didn’t know what she would do without him. Her parents were both getting on in years, but she had never really considered, seriously considered, what she’d do if one of them died. Now she realized that if her dad died, it would not just affect her emotionally, but would require her and Diane to take care of their mom. Her dad was the one who ran the household, did all the shopping, paid all the bills and made most of the decisions. If something happened to her dad, she and her sister would have to take up the slack.
Claire immediately felt guilty for even contemplating such mundane, practical considerations, and she pushed all such thoughts from her mind before telling Julian and Diane to meet her at her parents’ house, and climbing into the van. She wanted to cry, wanted to dwell on her unhappiness and wallow in it, but luckily driving required concentration, and her emotions were once again under control as she pulled into her parents’ driveway.
All that hard-won discipline threatened to crumble, however, as soon as she walked into the house, saw her mom and knew she would have to explain that her dad was missing. A more enlightened parent might let her kids in on the conversation, too, but Claire’s instinct was to keep them away from this as much as possible, and she told Megan and James to go into their rooms while she talked to Grandma.
She didn’t know where to start. Diane was already crying, but Julian stepped into the breach and informed her mom that they’d just come back from their house. “We were looking for Roger. He went over there this morning to prove me wrong, I guess, and show me that our house isn’t really haunted. He called Diane first to ask whether Rob wanted to go with him, but Rob was at work. After he hung up, she got another call, a weird call, and we went out there to make sure he was all right. His car was parked in the driveway, but he wasn’t in the house or in the yard or in the garage. We couldn’t find him.”
“He disappeared,” Claire said, touching her mom’s arm. “He was just … gone.”
Her mother seemed confused. “He can’t have just disappeared.”
“He did, Mom. I don’t know how, but he did.”
Diane was nodding. “That house is haunted. I’ve never experienced anything like it. The bathroom was all fogged up, and there was a … a face in the mirror.”
Their mom started to cry.
“We called the police,” Claire said, “but they can’t do anything until he’s been missing for forty-eight hours.”
“What do we do?” her mom asked.
That was the question. Claire had been going over possibilities in her head, but the truth was that there weren’t a whole lot of options. This wasn’t a situation where the choices were self-evident. She’d never encountered anything even remotely similar, and doubted that anyone else had, either. Even if the police were to get involved, she doubted that they would be able to find her dad. He had been taken by the same creature that had attacked Julian, and whether her father was alive or dead, they would never discover what had happened to him unless they figured out how to stop whatever lived in that house.