The Lump Under the Rug

On a small island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, in a community called Dark Harbor, there is a house where the furniture kept moving in the night. The first time it happened, the owner came downstairs to find every piece in the parlor pushed against the walls, leaving the center of the room bare except for the rug. Nothing was stolen. The sheriff's deputy suggested teenagers playing a prank, though how they could have crept up a gravel drive, broken in, and moved heavy furniture without waking anyone seemed impossible. Then the bloodstain appeared—large, unmistakable, human. DNA testing confirmed it belonged to no one in any database, and no one had been reported missing in Dark Harbor for years. The state police forgot about it. The woman who lived there, a writer, could not.

She began digging into the house's history at the town hall and library, cross-checking owners' names against obituaries and microfiche records from the town's sole newspaper. What she found was a story that had been nailed to the floorboards and left there.

A Courtship and a Cold House