Old Eunice

Our new home was pretty far from the dream house I’d always pictured. It was on the small side for a single mother and her two kids. There were no flashy granite counters, and certainly no kitchen islands or walk-in closets.

My sole splurge was on a top-of-the-line surveillance system. People told me that my new neighborhood was very safe, but it wasn’t the possibility of random burglars that scared me.

Old Eunice first appeared on the Saturday after we moved in.

“Mom, did you drop these?” Kevin approached me as I was hanging new drapes that afternoon. He held out a handful of brown bobby pins.

“I can’t even remember the last time I used bobby pins.” And yet we found them scattered all over the living room. I picked them out of the carpet and grumbled about the previous owners leaving such a mess behind.

That night I was jolted out of a dead sleep at two-thirty in the morning by the frantic strains of “Viva Las Vegas.” Elvis Presley was in the building and cranked up to a volume that shook the walls.

And someone was banging around in the kitchen. The motion detector shrilled a warning.

How the hell could he have found us this soon? I jumped out of bed and flew down the hall to where Kevin and Katie were standing in the hallway, blinking.

“Is that Daddy?” Katie asked, rubbing her eyes.

“You two get back in your room and lock the door,” I hissed. “Now.”

I pulled out my phone, dialed 911, and reported an intruder in the house. And then I edged down the stairs. The “On” button glowed on Kevin’s stereo and the racket in the kitchen continued.

I took a deep breath and switched on the light, and then I screamed.

Kitchen drawers and cabinets swung open and slammed shut by themselves. Faint smells of body lotion and cigarette smoke, neither of which I had in the house, hung in the air. And when I happened to look down, the beige linoleum kitchen floor was covered in bobby pins.

“Mom?” I heard Kevin call from upstairs. “What’s happening?”

Before I could call to him to stay upstairs, someone knocked on the front door. “Viva Las Vegas” cut off and the kitchen and the motion sensor went silent. My head throbbed, and my legs shook so hard I wasn’t sure I trusted them to carry me to the door.

Two heavyset police officers stood outside. “We had a report of an intruder here, ma’am?”

My past experiences with trying to convince police that my family was in danger hadn’t been terribly productive, and I didn’t even want to try to explain what I’d just seen.

“Ma’am?” the younger officer asked. “Are you all right?”

I ran a shaky hand over my hair.

“Officers, I’m so sorry. I thought I heard something downstairs, but when I checked, I didn’t see anyone. I apologize for wasting your time.”

After I’d bid them goodnight (or good morning), I headed back to the kitchen, knowing I’d never get back to sleep. I gathered up the bobby pins scattered all over the floor, though my shaking hands made that hard.

A few days later I came home from my librarian job at the local college. Kevin met me at the door, rolling his eyes.

“Katie’s lost it, Mom.” He headed upstairs before I could ask if this was normal teenage annoyance with his little sister. I could hear Katie in the kitchen, laughing and talking to someone.

“Katie?” I called. She was alone at the table, her homework spread out in front of her.

“Who were you talking to, hon?” I asked.

“Old Eunice.”

Katie had never had imaginary friends. I wondered if our move to a strange new town — and the reasons for it — had made her feel like she needed one. The idea pierced me through with guilt.

“Who’s Old Eunice?”

“This was her house, Mommy.”

That was when I noticed the odd mug on the kitchen table. My mugs were all used Fiestaware in bright primary colors. This one was old and yellowed and had a line drawing of Elvis with the caption “BEEN THERE, SEEN THAT: GRACELAND.”

The mail fell from my hand.

“Sweetie? Where did you get that?”

“In there. Old Eunice wanted it back.” Katie pointed to the cabinet under the sink, which didn’t make me happy at all. She wasn’t supposed to mess around in there, and she knew it.

As I picked up the mail, I saw them: Bobby pins, scattered all over the floor. Again.

“Old Eunice doesn’t like it when she can’t find her things. That’s why she keeps banging stuff around.”

I shook my head as I gathered up the bobby pins.

“She doesn’t have things, Katie. She isn’t real.” And I dumped them in the trash.

That night, I messaged my realtor: Did the people who lived here before us mention anything strange about this house?

It didn’t take Shelby long to write back: So you met Eunice?

That pissed me off.

What the hell, Shelby? Why didn’t you tell me something like that was going on here?

She wrote back quickly: You never asked.

I was typing all the expletives I knew when Shelby wrote again: She won’t hurt you. She just gets noisy once in a while. The last family moved because they wanted a bigger place.

I rolled my eyes. Oh, that’s a relief. And *who* is she?

In response, Shelby sent me a link to an article. The headline mentioned the mysterious death of one Fred Graham, but the accompanying photo caught my eye: An old woman stood in the doorway of a house — my house — pointing at someone and yelling, a cigarette in her other hand. She wore a bathrobe, and her hair was rolled in small spirals I was pretty sure were secured with bobby pins. I used to try pin curls on my own stick-straight hair.

Eunice Graham’s husband had been found frozen to death in the snow after leaving a local bar. There’d been allegations that he beat Eunice, and that she’d somehow caused his death.

They never proved she did anything, Shelby added. But people suspected her until the day she died.

That made me feel a touch of pity for Eunice. The pity evaporated when Kevin’s stereo began blasting “Jailhouse Rock” and the cabinet doors started banging again.

I put my head down on my desk as I heard Katie and Kevin running downstairs. I couldn’t afford to pull up stakes and move again this soon, but I wasn’t sure how long I could last with a poltergeist who worshipped Elvis.

When I got home from work a few days later, I heard Kevin shouting at Katie before I even unlocked the door.

“You’re an idiot!” His voice came from the kitchen.

“Hey!” I rushed through the house to them. “Don’t call your sister names, Kevin.”

Kevin looked around at me, his face pale. “Dad emailed Katie, and she wrote him back!”

My stomach froze, and I could hear my heart in my ears.

“Oh, Katie. We talked about this.” I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her to face me.

“I didn’t tell him where we were, Mommy. I swear.” Her brown eyes welled up.

“He can figure out where we are from the email!” Kevin snapped.

Wham! A cabinet door behind him banged open, and he let out a shriek.

I tried not to yell. “Katie, you can’t write him. Not at all. Promise me that the next time you hear from him, you’ll come right to me and let me handle it. It’s too dangerous for him to know where we are.”

Another cabinet door slammed open, making us all jump. Katie stopped crying and her eyes grew wide. The kitchen began to stink of stale cigarette smoke and I was about to haul us all out of the house when Katie spoke.

“Old Eunice is upset.”

Old Eunice wasn’t the only one. I pushed up my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose. “What’s she upset about?”

“She doesn’t like bad men,” Katie said.

I spent the next two nights studying the surveillance cameras, but I saw no sign of anyone lurking around. I remembered Gordon banging at the windows of our old house, shaking the doorknob, screaming threats to burn the house down if I didn’t come out. Would I ever live anywhere peaceful and safe again?

We were all asleep the next night when I heard a tremendous crash downstairs, and the motion detector beeped a warning. At first I thought Old Eunice was getting fired up again. But then I heard his voice.

“Sarah! Get down here now!”

I was out of bed and halfway down the hall before he finished the sentence. Kevin and Katie were dark shapes outside their room. I grabbed Katie, pushed Kevin back into the kids’ room, and locked us all in there.

“Sarah! Don’t make me come up there.”

Katie sobbed. Kevin already had our surveillance camera feed up on his computer screen, which provided the only light in the room. On the monitor, Gordon’s bulky shape swayed at the bottom of the steps.

“Mommy!” Katie cried.

Out the window. I’d have to get the kids to go out the window. How far of a drop was it? Why the hell hadn’t I planned this out before?

And then Gordon’s footsteps pounded up the stairs. I started pushing Kevin’s dresser in front of the door.

But as the thundering footsteps reached the upstairs landing, Gordon let out an awful scream. We heard crashing and banging and then … silence.

Kevin’s computer monitor showed a still gray shape sprawled at the bottom of the steps. The motion detector stopped beeping.

“Mom?” Kevin breathed. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “He could be trying to trick us.”

We stared at the motionless mound for a minute before a loud blast of music started downstairs. Elvis sang “Hound Dog” with what sounded like extra gusto, but maybe that was just my imagination.

“Kevin, call 911,” I whispered. I edged to the door, pushed the dresser away, and crept down the hallway, exhaling only when I heard my son on the phone with the dispatchers.

When I switched on the stairwell light, Gordon was at the bottom of the steps. His head was at an angle that no human neck should be at, and his eyes were glassed over as they stared at the ceiling.

As I moved towards Gordon’s body and Elvis sang on about how I wasn’t any friend of his, something hard and cold jabbed the sole of my bare foot. Bobby pins were scattered all over the stairs.

The footage from my surveillance cameras backed up what I told the police: Gordon had slipped on the stairs when he was coming after us.

I watched the camera playback as soon as I could stomach it and showed it to the police. They must have found it strange that Gordon appeared to fly backwards as soon as he reached the upstairs landing, but nobody had been there to push him.

Maybe the police saw the bobby pins on the steps. Maybe they knew who’d gotten him. Maybe they just didn’t care once they found the large knife and coils of rope in Gordon’s rental car.

We haven’t moved out, and I’ve no intention of doing so. Katie’s still the only one who Old Eunice talks to, but the old girl’s not that hard to figure out. I leave her bobby pins out where she can see them, and I play some Elvis on the stereo once in a while even though the kids bitch about it. She doesn’t scare us awake in the middle of the night anymore.

Her Graceland mug sits on the kitchen table as if she might show up for a cup of coffee some day. I wish she would. I bet we’d have a lot to talk about.