“Which is?”
“They were doing what ghosts always do. Trying to make contact. With added drama to get your attention. They’ve piqued your interest. Now, when they come with their message, you’ll be so curious that you’ll listen.”
I stood in the Amityville front yard looking up at the house. It really was a ringer for the famous one. I wondered how much of that was original and how much had been cosmetically altered. That may seem like a lot of wasted money for a single TV special, but it would still be a damned sight cheaper than the expenses incurred by a scripted show. Afterward, they could likely sell it for a profit. All the creeptastic allure of living in the Amityville Horror home, without that icky tragedy.
As I met the cast—the “real” folks who’d be joining us—Mike waved to tell me to detail that tragedy from the second-story balcony.
Inside, it looked like a typical family home. That was, I suppose, the point. Look at this house. So nice, so normal. Just like yours. But this house holds a secret. A dark, bloody secret—Oh, wait. Not this house. The one three miles away that looks just like it. Close enough.
They set me up on the balcony as the cast and crew gathered below. An even bigger crowd—curious onlookers—waited beyond the security tape. I felt like I was about to deliver the Gettysburg Address. Or start quoting Juliet. My Romeo was indeed below, off to the side, watching me, a faint smile on his lips. I returned it, before fixing on a proper look of gravitas.
“Many of us have heard the story of the house in Amityville,” I began, addressing the crowd as the camera rolled. “How the horror truly began, on an autumn night in 1974, when Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family, urged on by voices no one else could hear. A year later, the Lutz family moved into what they thought would be their dream home. Instead, it turned out to be a nightmare few of us could imagine …”
Actually, “dream home” was a better description, if your dream included exploiting tragedy for profit. Amityville was a hoax. Oh, sure, the Lutzs still claimed it was “mostly true,” but when they sued and were countersued, scrabbling for the profits, a judge decided—based on the evidence—that their book was a work of fiction. Maybe something did happen in that house, but there were no demon pigs and secret satanic rooms.
Of course, I was forbidden to mention that. Forbidden by contract. Also by contract, I had refused to say anything to suggest I believed it. So the script was worded like a campfire tale. They say that deep within that house there is a room, painted red, not found on any blueprint …
I recited my spiel. Then I joined the crew on the lawn, and it was Gregor’s turn. He’d been assigned the far less exciting task of telling other tales from Amityville’s past. Because we weren’t, you know, actually at the house, so we weren’t going to see that haunting. But who knew what other deep, dark secrets this sleepy New England town might hold …
No one. Because there weren’t any. Put haunting and Amityville together, and you got a certain Dutch Colonial home by the water. That was it. So Gregor’s script had to stretch. A lot. He mentioned a massacre of Native Americans in 1644 and a suicide cult in 1931. There were even Hollywood connections. Maurice Barrymore died in the Amityville Asylum and Jim Morrison’s Wiccan high priestess wife, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, grew up in the township. The researchers had found another so-called satanic connection—a teen named Ricky Kasso, who’d held some kind of ceremony on the Amityville Horror house front lawn and later convinced friends to help him kill another teen as part of a ritual. Not surprisingly, Kasso was also an alumnus of the Amityville Asylum.
It should have sounded like a desperate attempt to find scandal in a quiet town. Yet Gregor managed to make it sound as if the Amityville region was a hotbed of horror. Part of it was just him—his bookish looks, his Russian accent, his slightly stilted diction, all giving the ludicrous script an air of academia.
I was making a mental note to congratulate Mike on finding Gregor—give credit where it’s due—when Gregor said, “Yet there is one more tale, perhaps the most tragic, an untold story of Amityville: the disappearance of three young women, from three different eras, connected only by the mystery of their vanishing. Or, perhaps, by their killer.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Jeremy, staying off camera. He caught my eye, and I caught his message.
Don’t jump to conclusions. Listen to the story. Everything is all right.
Except it wasn’t all right, because Gregor went on to tell the story of those three young women, one from 1924, one from 1952, and one from 1988. Clara Davis, the first girl, left a wedding reception and was never seen again. Polly Watson, the second girl, had been last spotted leaving a church dance with a young man. And Dawn Alvarez had disappeared while walking home from her job as a chambermaid.
And what had I seen in that basement room? A young woman from the twenties in a formal dress, a girl from the fifties in a party outfit, and a more recent one in a maid’s uniform.
I glanced back at Jeremy. He stood poised, watching me. I waved for him to stay put. I didn’t need to; he knew better than to rush to my side on camera, not unless I was convulsing on the ground. He nodded and texted me with, I’ll have Elena look into it.
Gregor continued. “These three young women all disappeared, never to be seen again. It would appear they are unconnected cases. How could they not be, spanning nearly seventy years? Yet it would seem there is indeed a connection, for after each, the local newspaper received a letter from a man claiming responsibility. Claiming to have killed these pretty girls. Claiming to have stabbed each one to death.”
I swallowed and struggled not to look at Jeremy again.
“Three murders. Decades apart. It could not possibly be the same killer. Yet all signs pointed exactly to this conclusion. Each letter provided details only the killer could know. How is this possible?” Gregor paused and glanced surreptitiously to the side, where his script was displayed on a hidden screen. “That is what we hope to discover tomorrow. When we enter this house—the home of Polly Watson—the second young woman to vanish. We will enter this house, haunted by the spirits of these girls. We will speak to them. We will help them find peace. We will help them find their killer.”
EIGHT
When the cameras turned off, I tracked down Mike. He saw me coming and tried to evade, but I cornered him outside the makeup trailer. Well, actually, Jeremy cornered him, coming out the other side.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
Mike lifted his hands. “I know, I know. You’re not happy with our cast of regular folks.”
“It’s a reality show that doesn’t even have a prize attached. You risk public humiliation for sub-SAG rates. Of course they’re stupid and self-centered. Who else would apply?”
“Well, actually, we did have some—”
“Strike that. Others may apply, but you’re sure as hell not going to cast them. For a haunted house show, you don’t want anyone who’ll stop worrying about their close-up long enough to notice the effects are all faked.”
“We are not going to fake …” He shook his head and waved us into the trailer.
“Can’t even finish that sentence, can you?”
He muttered under his breath. When we were inside, he shooed the one remaining makeup artist out, then collapsed on a chair and motioned for us to do the same. I took the one beside him; Jeremy opted for the one nearest the door.