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I bit back my words, even though I wanted to point out that all these fancy new electronics weren’t back at his precious mother’s house. He’d seemed to do just fine without them before.
I sighed, struggling to keep my patience. “Beck, we talked about this when we decided to get our own place. I know it was my decision, but you promised me you would eventually contribute. I know your music is important to you—”
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t make me feel bad about my art. You wanted this place so bad, Marnie. You said it would be our little haven. So, the bills are your responsibility right now. You know my process takes a while. I have a couple of gigs coming up, and—”
“Our haven!” I said, hating the screech that was creeping into my voice. “Ours! Which means I can’t do it alone forever and ever, Beck. Our place, our responsibility. But it feels like I’m the only one trying to make it work. I can’t handle the financial strain on my own. I’m… I’m sick of your excuses. I thought you would maybe find some responsibility or see how much I love you… God, something.”
“Psh,” he said dramatically, then set his controller on the table. “So now I don’t love you? Whoa, Marn, maybe you need to take a step back. You know it’s going to be worth it all in the end. You’re going to be glad to be with me. You need to take a deep breath and realize this is not a big deal. You are making it a big deal. You’re making me sound like a shitty boyfriend, Marnie.” He shook his head like I’d hurt his feelings, not the other way around. “You need to take some time to think about that.”
Jessica would have smacked him in the back of the head and used terms like deflection and narcissist, but Jessica wasn’t here. Just me and my anger and the refusal to admit that everything I was trying to turn my life into wasn’t working.
“Sure,” I said quietly. “I can… take some time. Just know that I love you, and if we want to survive this, we need to work on each other. I need support, Beck. It’s not just about money. It’s about commitment, too.”
He picked up his controller and resumed Red Dead. “Yeah, commitment.”
Leaving the takeout on the counter to grow cold and congeal into a greasy sludge, I went upstairs for a hot shower and some deep personal reflection. There was no way Beck would listen to me now. He’d shut down, I could tell.
I ran the water hot enough to burn Satan, then scrubbed the day’s grease and makeup off my face a little too harshly. I still didn’t feel better, feel clean, so I said screw it and took one of those showers where you waste all the hot water and do everything. I’m talking about shaving, exfoliating, and conditioning. I was smoother than a baby seal but still pretty pissed. At least I smelled nice.
I had a feeling Beck and I weren’t entirely done with our evening, so I put on a slouchy tee and some leggings instead of proper pajamas. Truthfully, I wanted to cool off for a moment and then go back downstairs to discuss things some more like reasonable adults. And no one wanted to be a reasonable adult in printed Halloween jammies from Target, no matter how cute they made my butt look.
I sank onto my bed and tried to flip through some TV, but nothing seemed interesting. My Kindle was dusty on the nightstand, hardly touched in weeks. Everything was just work and Beck and sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. I couldn’t remember the last time I took a whole evening for self-care. I picked up my Kindle and restarted an ebook I’d begun weeks ago, but it didn’t grab me either. My brain was a storm of thoughts, most of them about Beck and this damned house. Everything Celia, Jessica, and even Carl Brimley had said kept repeating in my head.
“Just get it over with,” I muttered to myself, honestly not sure whether I meant Beck, the house, or some combination of the two.
I grabbed my laptop from the box of random bedroom stuff that was still at the foot of the bed, checked the charge, and then plugged it in next to the nightstand. With a crack of my knuckles and a deep breath, I waited for it to boot up. It was finally time to get to the bottom of the rumors. It was finally time to Google some shit. Growing up in Delaney, you took the rumors and children’s nursery rhymes as urban legends. You absorbed everything anyone ever said about the house and let it wrap itself up in a delicious, macabre mystery. Well, now, I was actually living inside the mystery. And I needed some damned answers.
Once the screen flared to life, I typed in Randall, Crime, and Delaney, Ohio. A massive amount of search results popped up, though a quick glance showed me that most of them were more speculation, more rumors. A lot of it was haunted house stories in Ohio. Apparently, so-called urban explorers and other lookie-loos liked to drive around and try to break into creepy old abandoned homes, and there were a few pictures of what it had looked like prior to the renovations. While that was sort of interesting, it wasn’t what I was looking for.
I scrolled past the Amazon page for a book that had been written about the home and the case. It had been written in the eighties and had one of those terribly cheesy tabloid-style true crime covers. Still, I made a mental note to read it sometime. There was also a podcast that had the Randall House set as a possible topic for an upcoming episode, but nothing I could listen to yet. Once I had several reputable-looking articles and a Wikipedia page opened, I bounced back and forth between the tabs, doing my best to parse together as much of the story as I could. I even found an old newspaper article from the time. The headline made me gasp, the black block letters staring back at me almost accusatory:
REMAINS OF TEN WOMEN FOUND IN OHIO BASEMENT.
I reeled back a little like I’d been slapped, but it was also just a strange feeling to see the evidence I wanted written so plainly. Ten seemed both too low and too high. Growing up, you always heard it was one hundred bodies or something bananas like that, and as a kid, I ate those stories up. I never really thought it was one hundred, and the fact it was a local legend made it seem all that more deliciously spooky. It distanced me from the real tragedy. Now, ten dead women seemed too awful to comprehend. Ten women who never got to grow up or have lives… Jesus, no wonder the older folks in town used to get so mad at us kids for making light of it.
Upon further reading, it seemed that the Randall family had lived in this house for generations and that the nineteen-fifties found them to be incredibly poor, though that wasn’t too different from a lot of folks in the rural area. The patriarch of the family worked at one of the several steel plants in Northeast Ohio, and the wife was a typical fifties housewife. They were sorta odd and apparently religious fanatics, which was saying something considering the time period. There was one son, and he was kept away from the world, though he had a habit of sneaking out and causing some hell with the local police. Girls went missing in the area, but it wasn’t chalked up to the Randalls until one finally escaped and sounded the alarm. What the police found then would go down in infamy.
Bodies were found inside the home, and under, I suppose. Evidence of captivity… I skimmed over a lot of the gory details. Worse, Mrs. Randall herself had been among the victims. Both of the Randall men—the son was then in his twenties—were taken into custody and fast-tracked to the electric chair. Neither of them spoke a word or admitted to a thing.
Great, and now I lived where those two psychos had lived. I mean, I knew that going in… but now I knew-knew it, you know?
I clicked on another article, this one with accompanying photos. I chewed the inside of my lip as I stared at the screen on my lagging, crappy Chromebook. The picture of elder Randall seemed pretty typical—a big man with a harsh, craggy face and crazy eyes. But the second photo… was a different story. The face that stared back at me was classically handsome, with the kind of brooding eyes and cleft chin that made James Dean famous. His hair was dark and slicked back from his high forehead, and one ebony lock had fallen over his right eye. If I asked one of those damned AI generators all over TikTok to make me a “hot rebel, greaser-type,” this dude would have been it. Maybe that was why all those women went with him willingly. Even the girls from town, the ones who’d heard the rumors. He was just too damned handsome.
Weird, I mean… okay, I myself liked some weird stuff like Jessica had said. I wasn’t above finding a guy in a horror movie hot… but this was something else entirely. It was gross and true, and he’d probably used those looks as a weapon. God, maybe I really did have terrible taste in men.
“Dammit,” I said with a sigh, leaning back onto the headboard with a thud.
I checked the time on my phone and saw that it was close to ten. Maybe Beck would be up for a very late dinner, or maybe we could have a beer or two on the porch or something. Getting out of my head would be nice, and I still wanted to talk to him about some things.
I crept down the stairs, relieved to see that Beck was done playing his game. Instead, he had some old sitcom on and was watching it with sleepy eyes. The stairs creaked as I came down, alerting him to my presence.
“Marnie?” he asked sleepily. “You ready to chill?”
“Um, yeah,” I said as I walked into the living room, tucking my hair behind my ears as I did. Beck’s eyes snapped to me, scanning down my body a bit as he woke up a little more and straightened up on the couch. He opened up one arm as an invitation, and I sat next to him and snuggled into his side.
“You good?” he said, then sipped on the beer he had.
I nodded. “Um, I… I was wondering if you might want to have another beer with me. It’s nice. We could sit on the porch and talk or something. Or… maybe find a movie to watch after?”
