The House on Dead Boy Lane

By Carter Johnson and STEPHEN ADAMS

When Derek Hall moved to the small town of Tanner's Ridge, he never expected to meet the beautiful blond named Alex living next door. He didn't expect to get beaten up by her boyfriend, either. But as the two grow closer, she will introduce him to the town's most disturbing legend: The House on Dead Boy Lane. As Alex begins to dream about the house nightly, she will lead Derek down a path he may not survive...

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491834190

Carter Johnson

Carter Johnson was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. He studied screenwriting and film production for several years and saw little success, until he began writing novels. He lives in Charlotte with his wife and their cat. Spider's Web is his third novel.

Book preview

Prologue: The House Sleeps

It had been abandoned since the summer of 1980, sixteen years ago, and it would have remained just a house if it hadn’t been for the murder of the Hoffmann boy.

There was nothing remarkable about the house at 325 Hanson Circle. Nothing physical anyway, other than its general state of deterioration. It sat at the bottom of a cul-de-sac where Hanson Circle, which wasn’t really a circle at all but more of a horseshoe shape, dead-ended after intersecting Turner Lane. There were no other houses in this particular cul-de-sac, neither had there ever been. This peculiarity was only one of the house’s many faults.

The lots that surrounded 325 Hanson Circle (or Duck Pond Road as it had been called long before the house had ever been built… when the road was still dirt and the cars that drove it still had to be crank-started by hand) had all been cleared of trees in preparation for construction on more houses that never materialized. But even without the clearing, nothing could—or would—have grown there now.

If the things that happen in a place can tarnish it, then this house, moldered and broken down, was beyond any sort of help. Not that anyone would want to help it—not with the sort of reputation the place had. And it wasn’t just physical… the unnamable blemish on the house. The soul of the place had become stained somehow. Any kid who had ever laid eyes on it could tell you that. The place was just wrong.

Grimy windows stared reproachfully at the dirt-crusted lawn where the grass was a lifeless, spoiled brown and no trees grew. Several of the front windows had been shattered by those same young children from the neighborhood—kids who had gotten that close to the house only on dares from their just-as-scared friends. An ancient, long-dead oak simply refused to topple over onto the front porch. The decayed and crumbling masonry of the chimney was coated with what looked like black moss or some kind of fungus. Paint peeled off the sides of the house in long, thin strips.

The house had malice in its heart, if it had a heart. Do houses, whether they are alive or not, have hearts? Do they remember the things that have happened within their walls, the good and the bad? Is a house, which is nothing more than a collection of timber and nails and masonry and insulation, capable of thinking for itself? And if it’s capable of thought, then is it capable of emotion? Fear? Anger? Such things may not be possible in other houses, other towns. But here, in Tanner’s Ridge, it wasn’t just possible. It had already happened.

The house, had it been awake, would have done everything in its power to entice the children of the town inside its walls where unfathomable pains and undeniable pleasures would await them. And they would disappear into its depths as had others before them… others who had dared to awaken it over the years… others who had tempted fate by venturing too far into its depths… others whose tales had become the sort of legends that only children and old folks still believe in… the sort of legends that are told around campfires by night.

And the house would enjoy it, as far as houses could enjoy such things.

Had it been awake. But it was not.

Sleep had not come easily to the house. Why would it? After the violence that had been perpetrated within it, how could it not rage and hate, seething at the world as it fantasized about rending flesh from bone? How could it not rave and jabber in the dreams of the insane, or in the dreams of children? It did all these things and more while it was awake; it tortured the children of the town in their dreams and sent vivid visions to the insane patients in the mental ward of Bennington Philpott Memorial Hospital.

It raged and it hated and it seethed.

But after its initial rampage, it had remained in a dormant state for many years, save for a few incidents during which it was angrily awakened. It did not dream, for what does a house dream of? Families to fill its rooms? Fathers to mow its lawns? Dogs to pee on its bushes? Those thoughts, if such raving lunacy can be called thoughts, were the territory of madmen and were best left unconceived. And yet…

A house can hold secrets too. Oh yes, it can hold the secrets of the people who dwell inside it… secrets that might be too unsavory for the general public… secrets that could cause a person to be shunned by the community or, God forbid, arrested. If houses had a currency, it would be secrets. The secrets would be traded back and forth between the houses the same way that Mrs. Arbogast and Mrs. Van Leuwen trade gossip between each other over the telephone on weekday afternoons during the commercial breaks for their soap operas.

The house had seen many things happen in its time and had taken them all into itself as it would any other type of nourishment: The death of Violet Andrews, the poor thing. The murder of the Hoffmann boy, who had only been ten years old when he died within the walls of the house. The disappearance sometime in 1978 of the Clausen woman who had tried to sell the house after the murder. After that one, any real estate agency interested in the house, which had seen two renovations in its long and despicable existence, shunned the property.

But there had been a time, as distant as it may have seemed, when the house had been beautiful. A family had lived in it once, and it was then, most would say, that the house, in good repair at the time, was at its most appealing. When the social studies teacher bought it in 1969, it remained beautiful, at least on the outside. Its chimney had stood proud then, far from the disintegrating mess it was now. The front porch, now saggy with age and weather and rot, had stood high and upright; the back deck, which the social studies teacher had built by hand, was now missing nearly all of its wooden planks, only its taller support posts left. The front and back yards had once been a lush and bright green.

But it became ugly—ugly on the inside—soon after that.

If you sat down on the long-dead grass, crossed your legs, and settled in for a long wait, you just might, if you concentrated hard enough and allowed the house, even while asleep, to guide you through the twists and turns of its madness, see what the house has in store for you on the inside. And if you stared long and hard at the grimy windows, the crumbling chimney, and the mindless, idiotic lunacy behind those windows, you might see exactly what the house was doing while it slept.

It was waiting. Waiting for the children who would awaken it from its slumber. It was waiting for the time when it would be allowed to once again share its secret with the world.

Part One

In the Beginning

The town knew about darkness.

It knew about the darkness that comes on the land

when rotation hides the land from the sun,

and about the darkness of the human soul.

—Stephen King

Salem’s Lot

*1*

Tanner’s Ridge, North Carolina, the town that surrounded the house, had its own sordid history, just like the house. And in many ways, the two histories intertwined like mating snakes, preying on each other.

The house remained as it had been after the murder. Tanner’s Ridge, however, had continually prospered since morphing from a small mining outpost consisting of shacks to a booming gold rush town.

Most small towns come from nothing, and the story of Tanner’s Ridge was no different. If the gold had never been found, the town likely never would have become much of anything and would likely have faded away to nothing. There would have been no need for a market, or a hotel, or a general store, or even more than one saloon. Tanner’s Ridge, a town in which there were no ridges or folks named Tanner, would have become simply another part of early American history. But the gold was found.

In 1799, twelve-year-old Conrad Reed, the son of former Hessian soldier John Reed, discovered a seventeen-pound gold nugget while playing in a creek on the family farm in Cabarras County. For three years, the nugget, unrecognized for what it was, served as a doorstop in the family’s farmhouse. In 1802, a jeweler from Fayetteville identified the nugget as gold and told John Reed to name his price. Reed, being a simple farmer and having no understanding of the true value of gold, named the hefty (or so he thought) sum of $3.50, which amounted to a week’s worth of wages on the farm. The nugget’s true value was estimated at $3,600.

Thus began the United States’ first gold rush.

Tanner’s Ridge, which at the time of the rush was a simple mining town, soon became a hub for gold mining and gold trading with placer mining beginning in 1824. This was soon followed by underground mining in 1831. John Reed would die a rich man in 1845.

In 1861, the Civil War broke out.

The state seceded from the Union that same year, but the folks in Tanner’s Ridge, who were by and large non-slave-owning farmers, mostly supported the Union during the war. But this information was, at the time, best kept to themselves. One never knew what one’s neighbors held dear in their secret hearts. By the grace of God, Tanner’s Ridge was largely untouched by a war that had pitted brother against brother, father against son. When the war ended in 1865, Tanner’s Ridge was edging slowly away from gold mining.

Textiles were, by this time, becoming the next big thing, and the town managed to weather the slow collapse of its mining industry without too much pain. Jobs disappeared, and men were out of work, but not for long. The local economy turned more and more toward textiles, which by that time were in the hands of four families. These same families controlled nearly everything else in the town as well.

Philpott Textile Mills opened its doors in 1901, focusing mainly on cotton production. Upon seeing how well Philpott’s little venture was doing, the other three families decided to try their hand at textiles and see what they could make of it. Warwick Textiles opened in 1903 followed by Andrews Mill and the Warner Textile Plant in 1904. All of these mills, and several others, operated in large buildings, now also abandoned, on Overlook Boulevard (or Mill Town Road as it was nicknamed by the workers during its heyday).

Once again, the town boomed; but this time the four families had more to do with it than ever before.

In a few short years, the booming textile industry would be the town’s lifeblood. And it wouldn’t become a company town either. The textile industry attracted other businesses into the town as well. Several family-owned farms (most of which would disappear in the next forty to fifty years of the town’s history) sprouted up both inside the town and along its peripheral limits. Many of these farms grew cotton for use in the textile mills in town, something the mills proudly touted in their individual slogans.

The mills, which found themselves contending with growing competition from the New England states, would continue to carry the town into the era of Prohibition, and it was during this time period, this age of Al Capone–style gangsters and bootleggers, that a young architect would design the house at 325 Hanson Circle.

*2*

The house was a typical American Foursquare designed in 1922 by an up-and-coming young architect named Edgar Thomas Friedkin. Its design shared many features with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School of architecture, a style that was a reaction to the Victorian and other revival styles that were being mass produced around the turn of the century due to their popularity. Typically these houses were square and boxy. They were two to two and a half stories tall, each floor divided into four large, square rooms. A center dormer and a large front porch with wide stairs gave the houses character.

As designed by Friedkin, however, this house was enlarged to give the interior rooms more space. A basement and attic were also added to the two-story design. These things were specified by the man paying the bills—Randolph Andrews, a miserly, dubious man who was very powerful in the town of Tanner’s Ridge.

To Friedkin, Tanner’s Ridge was magnificent, even with people like Andrews and his friends in charge. The views of the Appalachian Mountains from Whitlock Park to Downtown (which would become Old Downtown in 1971) left little, if anything, to be desired. The town itself sat in a valley between these mountains, which contributed to the fantastic vistas. And it was this that led Friedkin to design several other houses that he planned to build in that cul-de-sac where Hanson Circle dead ends.

But when Friedkin completed these designs and presented them to his boss, he was told that all the surrounding lots had been purchased by Randolph Andrews for pennies on the dollar, a favor that Friedkin later discovered was due to his friendships with nearly everyone who held a seat of power in the town.

When construction began on the house in 1923, Friedkin observed something very odd; two different firms had been hired for the job. One firm, he was told, had been tasked with building his design. The other had been hired to design and build a large sub-basement for the house, a fact that Friedkin found baffling. Then he reminded himself that this was the era of Prohibition and put the thought out of his mind. Better not to know. Knowing was troublesome, and trouble was unnecessary this early in his career.

The house was completed in May of 1924; Randolph Andrews, his wife, Katherine (whom everyone referred to as Kitty), and their first-born son, Howard, moved into the home immediately. Kitty, raised dirt-poor on a farm in Wichita, considered the newly built home to be a dream come true. It was just so big! There was more room inside than she had ever seen before in a house, except maybe the mansions she had read about in the papers. It was just perfect! The huge family she had always wanted to have would fit more than comfortably in the house with room to spare.

Randolph Andrews, who had been raised with money and privilege his entire life, thought nothing of what he considered to be a modest home. It was slightly smaller than the house he had grown up in, but it would do for his purposes.

Randolph Andrews was a bootlegger, and he was good at his work.

The Volstead Act, or the National Prohibition Act, had been ratified by the United States Congress on January 16, 1919. The act, while effectively banning the sale and production of alcohol, also set down rules for enforcing the ban. It prohibited the sale of intoxicating liquor, which the act defined as any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. It also regulated the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcohol, as well as ensuring that an ample supply existed for the purposes of research, as well as the development of fuels, dyes, or other lawful industries.

Randolph Andrews was not a man who blindly followed the laws of his government; he was openly defiant of Prohibition, and everyone in Tanner’s Ridge knew it. But Andrews’ many powerful positions in the town prevented any action from local authorities. And the town, being what it was, kept his secrets, just as it kept the secrets of everyone else who lived in it.

Andrews had been in bed with rumrunners since the act was ratified, enlightened pirates who ran liquor across the Gulf of Mexico into Florida. While Andrews did not like these men, and had met several of them personally in order to do business with them and confirm to himself that they were dishonest and intolerable, he had a certain respect for the work that they did, as well as for the money the enterprise provided him with.

From Florida, the liquor was run up the coast by bootleggers, who made several stops a month in Tanner’s Ridge. Randolph Andrews supplied this liquor to three of the town’s speakeasies as well as several blind pigs (a much less-classy version of a speakeasy) within the town’s limits.

Not all of the liquor he brought in made it to the speakeasies and the blind pigs, of course. And it was for this reason that Randolph Andrews hired two construction firms instead of one to build his house.

The sub-basement, which had actually been designed by Andrews himself, was built expressly for the purpose of hiding his liquor. Andrews had prepared for the worst in case the US government decided to make Prohibition a long-lasting policy. He had designed the sub-basement to be a warren of underground cubbies in which he could hide his prized collection. The liquor was hidden in only one room, a large concrete-walled space filled with shelves upon shelves of illegal firewater.

In one corner of this room was a walnut desk surrounded by four chairs.

This desk was where Randolph Andrews would sit to enjoy his ill-gotten gains and make plans with the three other men who were his partners in the boot-legging operation; Augustus Warner, Jeremiah Philpott, and David Warwick. These four men, the current representatives of their families on everything from the town council to the school board to the sheriff’s department, met once a week in the otherwise dank and dark sub-basement to discuss their business plans, upcoming opportunities, and any other affairs that might interest them or be considered for future discussion.

Behind this desk, and behind the leather chair that Randolph Andrews sat in while conducting the group’s meetings, was a tall shelf lined with glasses and tumblers of all kinds. These glasses were just one of the things that Andrews used to show others he was a successful businessman. Other things included his wife, his mistress (who came to town when his wife was away), his many business ventures, and his children. (A second son, Jacob, had been born two years after the family moved into the house; a daughter, Violet, had been born three years later.) But the glasses… those were one of his personal favorite expressions of his success. Real crystal, most of them. Acid-etched designs on many of them. A few bore his family’s crest, and even one or two were simply emblazoned with his initials.

The other three families had their own business interests outside of the so-called liquor alliance, which was their drunken nickname for their joint venture into illegal alcohol. The textile mills were still operating at near-peak capacity, and the other three families had branched out—Warner into town politics, Warwick into railroads, and Philpott into steel manufacturing. And while those other business interests were undeniably lucrative in their own right, nothing could touch the profits these men saw from their joint venture.

And so they would have their meetings, plotting the course of the town and the people living in it.

*3*

Prohibition ended with the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment on December 5, 1933.

Randolph Andrews died peacefully in his sleep, with his wife beside him and his children snoring gently down the hall in their beds, on April 24, 1934. He took the secret of his clandestine liquor storage with him to his grave.

Kitty Andrews inherited her husband’s vast fortune, but due to the constraints of his family, she was not able to keep the textile business. This was no problem, however; Randolph Andrews, through legally and illegally gotten gains, had made sure that his family would be well taken care of should anything happen to him. Kitty was able to keep the family in the house, and with money no longer a concern, she lived a good life and made sure that her children lived a good life as well.

However, Randolph’s ne’er-do-well brother, Everett, became president of Andrews Mill shortly after that. Everett was nowhere near the businessman that his brother had been, and the mill began to suffer as a result. It wasn’t pretty. Everett Andrews simply did not have the business sense his brother had possessed, and without that one simple component to keep the family business afloat, Andrews Mill began a slow spiral into bankruptcy.

In addition to his horrible business sense, Everett Andrews was a compulsive gambler and a drunk. He lost a staggering amount of money on horses that year, and it would surprise no one to know that most of that money came out of his sinking company. In other words, the company was already on the edge, and Everett Andrews merely provided that final push.

Andrews Mill finally closed its doors in August of 1937. Everett Andrews was forced to liquidate everything inside in order to pay his debts, both public and private. He wasn’t just paying off his suppliers; he had back taxes to pay (ole Ev had been cheating Uncle Sam out of his due since he took over the company). He owed thousands of dollars to his employees (some of whom had been working without pay for more than a year), and there was the matter of certain private debts that were best not spoken of in polite company.

But once again, the town kept his secrets, because that was what the town had always done.

World War II, while devastating in so many ways, was a time of great economic prosperity for the town. The state’s farms benefitted from New Deal programs such as tobacco growing, which created a steady flow of income to farmers, and the cotton-growing program, which raised the prices that farmers could charge for their crops. The textile industry continued attracting cotton mills that were relocating because of the high wages demanded in the northern states. The state also supplied the military with more textiles than any other during the war.

Kitty Andrews died of a stroke in 1953. According to her will, the house would go to Violet, the only child who had not married. By this time, Howard and Jacob had both married and had children of their own.

Violet Andrews, through no fault of either her mother or her father, had grown into a shrew. She had never married, and perhaps as a result of that unfortunate fact, she regarded the institution of marriage as a sham. Her brothers, both handsome young men, were busy living their lives, and she was there, living in that house. The emptiness of it would sometimes get to her, but she managed to stave it off with the help of alcohol. While Violet knew her brother Jacob would not demand the house when he returned from the war (she knew he had a house of his own), she almost wished he would. The house didn’t… well, just didn’t sit right with her, she supposed. She could never quite put her finger on what made her feel this way. It wasn’t something she wanted to share with her brothers (they would think she was crazy… even crazier than they already thought she was), so she kept it to herself.

Not that anyone would listen to her besides her brothers.

Violet Andrews was not a woman who attracted attention; neither did she want to be. The attentions of men were best kept at a distance lest one get it on one’s leg. She had always believed it to be so. Men were not something she concerned herself with. Neither did she concern herself with money; this was something that she had in abundance. Violet Andrews had inherited enough money from her mother that she had nothing to worry about. Her children, if she had had any, would never have needed to worry either. But of course, she didn’t have any.

When she inherited the house (and her share of the money) from her mother, she had immediately begun a full renovation of the interior. She had walls pulled down, doors moved, and rooms enlarged. Violet relocated the master bedroom from the left rear of the house to the right rear. She put in large closets as well as an extremely self-indulgent bathroom with marble countertops, silver taps with ivory inlays, a porcelain tub, and the crown jewel—a marble toilet with an ebony seat and lid. The kitchen was a place of warm and happy solitude for Violet, as she loved to cook, and would often prepare elaborate meals merely for her own enjoyment. She gutted this room and rebuilt it with Corian countertops, porcelain sinks, and top-of-the-line appliances.

Violet treated herself like the royalty she felt she was.

It was during the renovation that she discovered her father’s liquor stash. Violet Andrews increased her fortune by selling the priceless bottles of Prohibition-era whiskey and rum to auction houses across the country. As for the sub-basement, she ordered that it be sealed up with plywood and painted over… forgotten.

Violet enjoyed the privileged life her money afforded her, even if she did not enjoy the company of other people. Money was her companion, and shopping was the intricate mating dance she performed with her money. Nothing else got her blood pumping like money, except maybe for the sci-fi and pulp books that she read at home. Money was what she loved, besides her books, and money was the only thing that she felt loved her back.

Violet Andrews died during tumultuous times.

The year 1968 was nothing short of a game changer for the United States of America. On February 8, a civil rights protest at a whites-only bowling alley was broken up by highway patrolmen; three college students were killed in the resulting skirmish. Later that month, on February 24, the Tet offensive was halted in Vietnam. On March 14, nerve gas leaked from the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground near Skull Valley, Utah. Wind direction—and luck—kept it away from Salt Lake City. Two days later, the My Lai Massacre took place, but was not reported by the press until November of the following year; this incident eventually helped to undermine public support for the war. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, by James Earl Ray; riots erupt in many US cities and lasted for days afterward. The Catonsville 9 entered the selective service offices in Catonsville, Maryland, on May 17 and proceed to burn dozens of stolen draft service records with napalm in protest against the war in Vietnam. On June 5, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; Kennedy died the next day as a result of his injuries. Saddam Hussein, a man who was to become a great problem for the United States in the future, became the vice chairman of the Revolutionary Council in Iraq on July 17 after a coup d’état. The next day, the company Intel was formed; it was, at the time, a small semiconductor company. And in Miami Beach, Florida, Richard Nixon was nominated for president of the United States at the Republican National Convention; Spiro Agnew was nominated as his running mate. This would be the last major international event before the death of Violet Andrews.

On a cool September evening, the night before it happened, Violet sat outside, her legs dangling off a wicker chair. She was in the backyard reading the latest Robert Heinlein novel and listening to the night sounds around her. She had treated herself to a lovely steak dinner at Cooper’s Steakhouse downtown, even though there had been no one to share it with, and afterward she had come home and opened a bottle of red wine. Intending on getting good and drunk, Violet had retrieved the book from her nightstand upstairs and carried it along with her wine outside and into the backyard.

Sitting outside under the stars was one of the few pleasures that she had, or so she thought. The benefit of having no neighbors around was that there was no one, ever, to disturb her. Peace and quiet were all around her; the noises of the neighborhood were far away. The Heinlein book, The Past Through Tomorrow, was good enough to hold her attention, at least for the time being. Then she heard a noise from out front.

Violet set the book down on the table next to her and pulled herself out of her chair. She opened the back door and went through the house to the front door where she peaked outside through the peephole.

There were children on her lawn. Loathsome things.

Violet flung the door open. It bounced off the wall with a thud. She stepped over the threshold of the door and raised a fist, shaking it as she spoke. You kids get offa my grass! she screamed and followed that with a wordless growl. Three children stood on the lawn, each one holding a roll of toilet paper in each hand. At the sight of Violet, the children dropped their toilet paper to the ground and ran for the street.

Violet did not know it, but she was the subject of much speculation amongst the children of the neighborhood and the town.

Some thought she was a witch (this was mostly the younger children), while others thought she was simply a crazy woman who had been confined to the house by her family. This theory, of course, never panned out due to the fact that there was no other family in Tanner’s Ridge at that point who could confine Violet Andrews to a house that was lawfully hers anyway.

Violet stepped back into her house, slamming the door behind her. Damn kids. They were always playing tricks on her. And she knew who it was too—that damn Warwick kid and his shitty little friends. But one day she would get them. Oh yes, she would get them all.

The next morning—the morning that would see her fall to her death—Violet woke up to the sounds of birds singing outside her window. It was a beautiful song. She certainly thought so, and if she wasn’t such a shrew, she would have someone to share that beautiful sound with.

The thought filled her with a sudden loneliness… a longing that she had never felt before. But the feeling of loneliness was quickly followed by one of revulsion; where had those thoughts come from? They were alien thoughts, as alien as the little green men in the pulp magazines she sometimes read, and they made her feel as though she were not in control of her own mind. Alien thoughts that crept in like that were a sure sign of going mad, weren’t they? She laughed and shook this new idea away. It was the ridiculous notion that she might be losing her mind that made her laugh. She was the only sane person she knew.

Violet fell down the stairs a few minutes later.

Her neck snapped on the way down. A painless death. Much more painless than the deaths that would follow her own in this god-forsaken house. Violet Andrews left this world with surprising quickness, and on her way out, she didn’t have time to examine the details of her life and determine just where she had gone wrong. Her thoughts were on her own clumsiness as she slipped on that first stair, the one that creaked when she put her weight on it. As she tumbled backward, she thought about how much her head was going to hurt after she cracked it against the wooden step. When her neck hit the step instead of her head, snapping it in two instantly, she had time for only one thought—that it wasn’t her head she had hit at all—before her thoughts turned to nothing, and the world went black. Her lifeless body tumbled to the bottom of the stairs, her vacant eyes staring out at the world.

She would lie there for four days before being discovered by neighbors drawn to the smell.

*4*

Violet Andrews was buried in the family plot in Hallsfield Cemetery, which was (and still is) on Garrett Road at the northeast edge of town. The town would mourn her loss for several days, but only because it seemed like the polite thing to do; no one had much liked Violet, but everyone agreed that her brothers were fine, upstanding young gentlemen who deserved better than this. But while no one had much cared for her, the town cared very much for the family, and it was for this reason that the wishing pool in Whitlock Park was built and the reason that the plaque in front of it reads Violet Andrews Memorial Pool – She Loved the Park, even though most people knew that she, in fact, hated Whitlock Park and would have liked nothing more in her lifetime than to have seen it bulldozed. These things were the sort of details that would be left out of the neighborhood children’s tales, which would grow and expand as they were handed down through the passage of years. Violet Andrews’ death would become legend in the town, and the children would be the ones to carry it.

After the death of Violet, the Andrews family no longer resided in Tanner’s Ridge. So the four families became three.

A hotshot developer from Texas by the name of Otis Daniger somehow found out about Violet’s death—and the enormous piece of property she had been sitting on. He began a quest to purchase the house and the land on which it stood. He had a plan.

Daniger had done similar things in Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Tennessee. His plan of action, in all cases, had been to inquire (discreetly, of course) through the many real estate agents and other developers he knew about anything they could tell him concerning large plots of land in their areas. Through these back channels, Daniger would discover properties that piqued his interest, then would quietly keep an eye on them. When an opportunity developed, as it surely would (opportunities were what drove his business after all) he would swoop in as fast as he could and deal as hard as he could.

He figured he could lowball this property, since the bank would be dying to sell it. He would then bulldoze the house and begin construction almost immediately. The entire property was big enough for at least four to six homes, depending on their size. Daniger wasn’t yet sure how many he wanted to put on the lot, but he felt confident that six would be the maximum number. Yes, six would be it.

The deal was done quickly, and Otis Daniger walked out of it the lawful owner of 325 Hanson Circle.

First, he hired a crew to clear the lots around the house; he wanted to work from the outside in. The crew, which included a thirty-something man named Redmond Red Carver who would become a school bus driver in twenty years, spent three weeks clearing trees, then stumps, from the surrounding lots. It was tough work, but they were tough men… men who had seen action in the Big One and Korea after that… men who had blisters on their hands and sunburns on their faces and ripped muscles on their bodies. When this was done, Daniger had the same crew grade the lots to match the house. When the foreman asked why, Daniger said, That little pisser of a house is starting to grow on me.

So the foreman and his crew, including Red Carver, carried out the grading job with no more questions asked. When it was finished, Otis Daniger paid the men and then flew up to New York to meet with his investors and have lunch with his architect. All of the investors were well pleased with how the project was proceeding, and his architect’s designs were exactly what he had been looking for when he hired the guy; everything was going according to plan. Otis Daniger hopped on a plane to fly home to Texas for an evening with his wife before heading back to Tanner’s Ridge.

He never made it.

Daniger’s plane exploded over Kentucky, raining metal over three counties. Many of the bodies were never recovered, including Otis Daniger’s. Families were at first inconsolable; then personal-injury lawyers convinced them to sue the airline. The airline responded with a cash settlement for all the families, and the incident was soon forgotten by the public and those involved.

But no one would touch the property after that.

Something about the entire thing spooked every developer that got near it. It seemed they had all heard the story of Otis Daniger and the crash of Flight 98. The property—lots and house included—was soon bought back by the bank. It was turned over to Reeves Home Sales in March of 1969, one month before the social studies teacher would buy it for a quarter of its value.

By this time, the textile industry in Tanner’s Ridge was beginning to fade; the jobs were being shipped overseas. Warwick Textiles had closed in 1965, followed by Warner Textile Plant in ’66. Some of those left unemployed were able to find work at Philpott Textile Mills, which despite the downturn in business, seemed to be flourishing; however, it went under in ’68.

But the men who had built the town were still in the fight.

Warwick Steel Mill opened in 1969, the same year the social studies teacher bought the house. Douglas Warwick, the grandson of David Warwick, devised a plan to open a mini-mill in Tanner’s Ridge using his own family fortune as well as the help of some of his friends. Mini-mills, secondary steel producers that operated cheaply by utilizing scrap steel recycled from cars and equipment or byproducts from the steel-making process, had become popular in the last few years, and Warwick thought he could make a killing in the business. He was right.

The mini-mill quickly became a savior of sorts for the town. Because of the needs of a mini-mill, jobs were suddenly in abundance. Men were needed to run the electric arc furnace that was used to melt the scrap steel; to operate the ladle furnace, a process used for precision control of the steel chemistry; to run the continuous caster, which converted the molten steel into solid form; and to run the reheat furnace and rolling mill. Suddenly the town didn’t appear to be slipping downhill any longer.

It was also during this time that several other businesses, many of which are still there today, opened in Tanner’s Ridge. Farber-Dixon Concrete Pipe Company, which specialized in the manufacture of concrete pipe for large city sewer lines and gravity-flow drainage, first opened its doors for business in 1971 and is still in operation today. Victor Wilson opened his hardware store, Wilson’s Hardware and Farm Supplies, in 1970; the name was shortened to simply Wilson’s Hardware in 1989, after Victor Wilson, by then sixty-eight years old, left the company to his son, Oscar. The store is still open today, even though Oscar is slowly losing business to the Home Depot out on the highway. Reeves Home Sales would close in 1973, muscled out of its own turf by its biggest competitor, Warner Real Estate Sales, which would go on to become the biggest real estate firm in the town.

Progress prevailed: the white knight (or savage dragon) of any town in America.

Progress kept the town from becoming another statistic, another haven for the jobless masses that would have surely filled its streets and dwellings had the town not pulled itself up by its own bootstraps.

When Aiden Rand bought the house at 325 Hanson Circle, no one thought much of it. He was a not-unattractive man of thirty-three, a social studies teacher who came highly recommended from his last job, which he had left because, as he put it, The city was choking me, and I needed some room to breathe. He was unmarried and had moved to town to begin an exciting new career as a teacher at James Warner Elementary School.

Rand mostly kept to himself; in later interviews, he cited his privacy as the main concern for his motivations behind buying the Andrews house. He immediately began a complete renovation of the house, ripping apart all of Violet’s hard work. Rand had Violet’s treasured bathroom fixtures removed—all of them—and replaced with simple composite countertops and inexpensive tile work. No walls came down this time; no doors were moved. Rand kept the layout as it had been. But he removed anything that he felt did not fit with his concept of the house; the bathroom was merely the first to go. Next was the kitchen; after that, the basement. Rand wanted the basement to be, as he put it, the last word in rumpus rooms. Sometime during the remodeling of the basement, Rand discovered the hidden entryway to Randolph Andrews’ secret tunnels.

This is the part of the story where things begin to get a bit fuzzy.

Small towns have long memories; yes, anyone can tell you that. Small towns don’t forget things quickly, and neither do the people who live in them. Much like the house, which would rage and hate and seethe in under a decade, small towns keep long records of the slights they have incurred through the years. Sometimes these things are deserved; other times they are not. The people in the town harbor their secret grudges against each other; even now, Mike Mullaly, the owner of Mike’s Mechanix on Myrtle Street, the man whose father opened the shop in ’62 (under the name Mullaly Repair Shop), will swear up and down that if you go to Ted Carson’s shop over off Hildebrand Road in Old Downtown, not only will that bastard not fix your car correctly, but the son of a bitch will cheat you out of more money for repairs than the devil himself could do.

Yes, what anyone can tell you is this: small towns never forget.

But the murder of that poor boy… that particular unsavory incident faded quickly from the town’s memory. There were no scholarship funds or toy donations or memorial pools in the park for Daniel Hoffmann.

There was an investigation, of course. The town wouldn’t have had it any other way. And of course, there was justice. Aidan Rand was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection, which would be carried out at 7:03 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on August 29, 1986, after his lawyer had exhausted all of his appeals, and when the governor said he wouldn’t even think of ordering a stay of execution for that guy.

*5*

Barbara and Ethan Hoffmann were married on March 23, 1964, in Baltimore, Maryland. Ethan was a business lawyer with a firm in town and had a most promising career ahead of him. Barbara was a registered nurse who mostly worked the day shift in the emergency room at Saint Agnes Hospital. The two had met when Ethan had sprained his ankle while playing tennis with a friend after work one day and had brought himself into the ER to have it looked at. Ethan claimed it was love at first sight. After a few years of marriage, Barbara wasn’t so sure.

Their son Daniel was born on November 4, 1967, at the same hospital where Barbara was a nurse.

The Hoffmanns appeared to have everything. What they actually had was an abusive husband, a terrified wife, and a helpless baby.

Ethan liked to drink, and not just an occasional nip here and there. He liked to drink a lot, wherever he was. His colleagues had noticed his habit during the annual Christmas parties when ole Ethan would throw back a few too many and have it out with the misses in front of everybody. His favorite drink, by far, was bourbon—and not just any bourbon, mind you, but the old, reliable Mr. Jim Beam, if you please. Yes sir, ole Ethan would put away a few, maybe at home or maybe down at the bar after work, but when he did, you’d better watch out. Ethan was a mean drunk, and when he would come home drunk after spending hours out at the bars, well, sometimes he liked to show his wife who was really in charge around the house.

It started slowly, the drinking and the beatings. If dinner was late, or if she forgot to wash his socks… if the trash wasn’t taken out, or if she hadn’t remembered to get more bourbon at the liquor store, Ethan would start out by slapping her across the face, just hard enough to leave the redness of his hand behind.

Ethan started drinking more often and in higher quantities. The beatings progressed from simple slapping to more intricate forms of punishment… things that made Barbara’s skin crawl when she gave them the slightest thought. Sometimes she wouldn’t be able to go outside for days at a time. Her face, puffy and swollen from his fists, would ache from sunup to sundown, and she would go to bed on those nights wondering how she had ever let herself get into this mess in the first place.

It was after he put her in the hospital the first time that she began to worry about Daniel.

She had been standing