Home Before Dark: A Novel by Riley Sager

luck to this place.”
    Elsa Ditmer grudgingly agreed. Together, we tossed the plates onto the floor, where they shattered into pieces.
    “I feel lucky already,” I said as I fetched a brush and dustpan and began sweeping up the shards. “At least luckier than Curtis Carver.”
    The smile on Elsa’s face dimmed.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was cruel of me. You probably knew them.”
    “A little, yes,” Elsa said with a nod. “I did some cleaning here when they needed it.”
    “What were they like?”
    “They seemed happy, at first. Friendly.”
    “And Curtis Carver? Was he—”
    I paused, choosing my words carefully. Elsa Ditmer had known the man. She even might have liked him, and I didn’t want to offend her if she had. It was a surprise when she finished my sentence for me.
    “A monster?” she said with undisguised venom. “What else could he be? A man who could do such a thing to his own child—to any child—would have to be a monster. But he was very good at hiding it. At least in the beginning.”
    The dutiful husband I was trying to be wanted to ignore the remark. After all, I’d promised Jess not to drag the past into our present. But the journalist in me won out.
    “What happened?” I asked, keeping my voice low just in case Jess was approaching in a cloud of sage smoke.
    “He changed,” Elsa said. “Or maybe he was always like that and it just took me some time to notice it. But in the beginning, he was very nice. Charming. Then the last few times I saw him, he seemed nervous. Jittery. He looked different, too. Tired and very pale. Atthe time, I thought it had something to do with his daughter. She was ill.”
    “Was it serious?”
    “All I know is what Mr. Carver said. That she was sick and needed to stay in her room. My girls were crushed. They liked coming here to play.”
    “You have daughters?”
    “Yes. Two. Petra is sixteen, and Hannah is six.” Elsa’s eyes lit up when she said their names. “They’re good girls. I’m very proud.”
    I finished sweeping up the broken plates and dumped the shards into a nearby trash can. “It must have been hard for them, losing a friend in such an awful way.”
    “I don’t think Hannah quite understands what happened. She’s too young. She knows Katie is gone, but she doesn’t know why. Or how. But Petra, she knows all the details. She’s still shaken up by it. She’s very protective. Strong, like her father was. I think she thought of Katie as another little sister. And it pains her to know she couldn’t protect her.”
    I risked another question, knowing Jess would be angry if she ever found out. I decided that no matter what I learned, I wouldn’t tell her.
    “What exactly did Curtis Carver do? We weren’t told any of the details.”
    Elsa hesitated, choosing instead to focus on carefully stacking the remaining plates.
    “Please,” I said. “It’s our home now, and I’d like to know what happened here.”
    “It was bad,” Elsa said with great reluctance. “He smothered Katie with a pillow while she was sleeping. I pray that she stayedasleep through the whole thing. That she never woke up and realized what her father was doing to her.”
    She touched the crucifix hanging from her neck, almost as if she was reassuring herself that such an unlikely scenario had actually happened.
    “After that, Curtis—Mr. Carver—went up to the study, put a trash bag over his head, and sealed it shut with a belt around his neck. He died of asphyxiation.”
    I let that sink in a moment, unable to understand any of it. It was, quite frankly, incomprehensible to me how a man could be capable of both acts. Not the tightening of a belt around his neck until he couldn’t breathe, and certainly not the smothering of his daughter while she slept. To me, madness was the likely culprit. That something broke inside Curtis Carver’s brain, leading him to murder and suicide.
    Either that or Elsa Ditmer was right—he had been a