The Response

Creekside Hills was the kind of community that Maddie’s old friends would’ve called “McMansions." The shiny new luxury homes coming up like daisies on the outskirts of a nondescript suburb meticulously avoided any distinctive architectural styles or characteristic features. But with five bedrooms and a basement rec room, Floor Plan Three was perfect for a young family like hers: two children and a third on the way, a hardworking husband with a bright and well-paid future ahead, and Maddie herself not yet 25.

It wasn’t that Maddie didn’t understand the appeal of the colonial, the mid-century modern, or the ranch home. She’d grown up in a cozy California craftsman herself, and with a degree in interior design, she knew how to appreciate an architectural tradition in its proper context. But as she walked through the model home for Floor Plan Three, she found herself feeling subtly soothed by each smooth finish, gray-toned backsplash, and unassuming fixture. A blank slate, she thought, with few constraints on her creative imagination. Nothing like the dingy third-floor walkup she’d endured while Travis was in law school, with its strangely shaped rooms and rickety built-ins, or the cramped one-bedroom where they’d spent their first year of marriage. She turned to a north-facing window and drank in the late afternoon light. Yes, this was the perfect place for a fresh start.

Six weeks later, Maddie pulled her minivan into the driveway of 7 Creek View Court, right in the center of the newest cul-de-sac in Creekside. Travis was about half an hour behind her with the moving truck, after telling her to go on ahead from the last rest stop for the sake of the tempers and sleep schedules of their two exhausted toddlers. They’d finally worn themselves out and fallen asleep less than ten minutes from their new home. Maddie sighed as she glanced at them in the rearview mirror, then shifted her gaze through the windshield to the dusky horizon behind the house, letting her eyes lose focus and then shut briefly.

A sudden pounding had Maddie gasping awake, heart racing, until she looked up to see Travis’s gentle smile out the driver’s window and remembered where she was. A notification from her phone sent her jumping again, unused to the noise since she’d only turned sound on to ensure she didn’t miss Travis’s calls on the road. The stress of the move had her on edge, and as she shook her head and smiled through the window, reaching for the door, she felt grateful to finally be here.

Travis wrapped her in a hug and kissed her on top of the head before nodding to the trunk of the minivan, where they’d packed the air mattress and two pack-and-plays that would let them rest after the long drive, and save the hard work of unpacking for tomorrow. They giggled and whispered as they carefully extricated both children from their car seats, miraculously avoiding waking either one. Once the children were settled, Travis pulled her into the kitchen and theatrically covered her eyes with her hands, then began tapping a near-silent drumroll on the counter before opening the freezer and presenting her with a pint of her favorite cake batter ice cream. He hugged and kissed her again before putting a finger to his lips and holding up the hand pump for the queen mattress, signaling his plan to set it up the slow and quiet way to avoid waking the kids, while she enjoyed the ice cream and welcome rest after their long day.

As Travis left the kitchen, Maddie grabbed a plastic spoon from the cooler and dropped to a cross-legged seat against the wall. She pulled out her phone to scroll for home décor ideas on Pinterest, then froze at the number she’d missed several messages from. She’d never saved this number, but she’d never been able to bring herself to block it, either. The messages came sporadically enough that she could put them out of her mind for months, sometimes years, at a time, alternating between explaining them as spam, pranks, or a wrong number. But something in her gut nagged at her each time she articulated one of these explanations to herself, bothering her enough to prevent her from talking to anyone else about the messages, fearing that any scrutiny on the situation would reveal a reason for serious concern.

Save yourself NOW, said the first text, time stamped to correspond with their arrival at the house around 8:30 p.m. The rest of the messages had come in after she silenced her phone again. Previous texts from the number had been much less specific than what she saw now:

8:42 p.m.: You’re in more danger than ever before.

8:43 p.m.: There aren’t any witnesses here.

8:57 p.m.: You’ve been lucky so far, but it won’t last much longer.

9:13 p.m.: Please, there’s so little I can do, but we can help each other, if you’ll listen.

Maddie opened the messaging menu and let her thumb hover over the “delete” button. A prank, she thought. This must be a prank. She took long, slow, deep breaths, willing her heart to stop racing. She jumped and nearly screamed as she felt a hand on her shoulder.

Travis stepped back quickly, pulling his hand away. “Sorry, honey, I thought you saw me come in! You okay? You're so wrapped up in your phone!” he teased.

Maddie smiled with just a little weakness that dissipated quickly as the familiarity of Travis’s presence, and the grounding influence of a real-life conversation, brought her back to herself. “Just some weird texts from an unknown number,” she said, caught off guard enough to share more than she usually did about the mysterious messenger. “Do you know anyone with a 408 area code?”

Was it her imagination, that dark expression that flashed across her husband’s face? It must have been; it was gone so quickly. He only looked charmingly puzzled as he answered.

“I knew a few people from Arizona in undergrad, but no one I still talk to,” he said easily. “Can I see the number?”

Maddie nodded and handed him her phone, and though she didn’t look away from his face, she noticed nothing strange about his expression as he took in the number and read through the texts. Of course he looked worried, she thought, given the content. And then he was holding her, and validating her fears, and asking, had she gotten any texts from this number before? And did she want to make a police report? And she wondered why she’d never shared this burden before, when she had such a loving and supportive husband to help her through it, and she told him everything about the texts, and her thoughts on the most likely explanations for them, and her certitude that they were nothing to worry about, how common pranks and scams and wrong numbers must be. They decided that the best thing to do was to block the number, and then he said their bed was ready and there was a chilled bottle of sparkling cider in the fridge, and did she want to christen the new house with a toast and maybe some romance, if she wasn’t too tired? And she smiled and nodded and they marveled at their luck that both children were still sleeping soundly, and Travis produced two plastic champagne flutes he’d secreted away somewhere, and they headed toward bed.

 * *

Maddie had never been a good sleeper, at and 34 weeks pregnant, the problem was exacerbated by her endless muscle aches, heartburn, night sweats, and the strangest dreams she’d ever had. As she groggily checked her phone–4:32 a.m.–she tried to grasp at the threads of the latest unsettling dream, its details just out of reach despite the persistent knot of horrible emotions so out of place in her idyllic new life.

It had been three months since the move to Creekside Hills, and Maddie was thriving. She had started cultivating a rose garden with some of the same varieties her mother grew. She was teaching Sunday School to a group of older teens who were bright and curious, asking thoughtful questions and trusting her enough to bring their personal experiences to their weekly discussions. Her older daughter, Kenzie, had started at a Montessori preschool three days a week, and she was enjoying the resulting one-on-one time with her 18-month old. Travis’s work schedule was astonishing—some days he was gone for upwards of twelve hours—but with his generous paternity leave and a sizable bonus that would fund a lavish family vacation next year, they had plenty of quality time on the horizon.

So why did her stomach tie itself in knots every time she let her guard down? It was always worst as she woke up, whether in the middle of the night, as planned with her alarm, or from an afternoon cat nap. She shuddered and glanced around the room. A shadow flickered in the corner behind the wardrobe. She blinked and shook her head, then turned back to her phone. Was that—?

“No, no, that can’t be ri—”

Travis stirred next to her, his voice slurred with sleep. “What is it, honey?” But as she opened her mouth to answer him, a second text came in from the familiar number.

If you want to live, you will not tell him.

Maddie shut her eyes tightly and took a deep breath. When she was sure she had control of her voice, she carefully controlled her tone. “Just another one of these weird nightmares,” she said lightly, with the slightest of laughs. “I thought that by my third pregnancy I would know what to expect! But these are something else.”

Travis patted her shoulder and murmured something unintelligible, turning over and beginning to snore as the next texts came in. Maddie’s blood ran cold as she recognized photographs of their previous two apartments. In each one, she made out a familiar silhouette, one she’d taken great pains to convince herself she couldn’t possibly have seen. There may be strange shadows in the corners and crevices of old buildings, and people—Maddie herself—may sometimes mistake them for—for what? For a girl, with distinctive red curls and eyes bright with tears. The same girl, in a new place, made of something from Maddie’s subconscious, her always-active imagination. She’d heard all kinds of ghost stories in her life, and all kinds of reasonable explanations for them. This was nothing more than a trick of her mind.

Tearing her eyes away from her phone, Maddie brought a hand to her mouth to keep from waking Travis with the scream she barely held in. There was no mistaking the familiar face in front of her, the person sitting on the edge of her bed, far from the shadows in the corners as the room began to fill with morning light. The girl shook her head, looking meaningfully at Travis before turning to Maddie again, indicating her phone. You’re the only one who can help me, read the text. And I can help you, too. Please let me show you what I know.

Maddie jolted awake, breathing hard. A dream, she thought. It was only a dream. But there had been something familiar in that face—like someone she had seen in distortion, as through a dark window. A car window, she thought, and why had that come to mind? Unbidden, a memory arose of her husband, driving away, a very young women looking desperately back at her through the passenger side window.

Had he seen her that day? She so often avoided this memory that reaching for the details felt like hiking through a snowstorm. It had been snowing that night. Travis hadn’t come home yet, had told her he’d be at the library late. She had stepped out the back staircase to take out the trash, had stopped short when she saw their car pulling out of its designated parking space. The driver’s side hadn’t been facing the door. There was no way, she thought, no way he could have known that she’d seen—that she knew—

Maddie tried to cut off the spiraling thought, such a familiar exercise by now, but something was different this time. She remembered the headlines, the pictures, that she’d seen as she’d scrolled through her socials. It couldn’t be the same face, she thought, as she had at the time. Missing; then found, dead. Maddie’s heart racing every time her husband entered the room until finally, thankfully, an arrest was made. She’d been wrong, of course, to even begin to imagine that he could—

The sun was up and Travis’s alarm was sounding. She shook herself back to the present as he kissed her cheek and said something light, innocuous. It was automatic enough, these days, for her to engage in the banter, not even really sure what she said. As he moved toward the shower, she reached for her phone, telling herself again, it was just a dream. You blocked the number months ago. You never saw anything that couldn’t be explained—maybe you don’t know the explanation, but their could be one. It could not have been anything but a dream.

But as she picked the phone up, Maddie knew what she would see. The number on the screen, though never saved and eventually blocked, was not a surprise. The first two photos in the thread were dark, blurry; and though she knew deep down what she had seen in those spaces in the photographs, there was nothing clear enough that she couldn’t explain it away.

The third photograph was chillingly clear. The deep, mournful eyes staring at her from almost the exact scene in front of her: the picture showed a girl sitting on the end of her bed. She’d been here in this room, in this new, perfect house in Creekside Hills, in daylight, unmistakably the girl from the pictures, the girl from the car.

“Does he know?” she whispered. “Does he know I saw you?”

Three dots appeared in her messaging app, and she waited for the response.