The House on the Other Hill

A woman struggles to make sense of a random act of violence when her small town is visited by a serial killer.

Betty Towers was reading on the porch when she first heard that the railway murderer had entered the state. She could hear the evening news through the screen door where she sat with her Agatha Christie, a pack of cigarettes, and an iced tea. It was the middle of June, and though nearly ten at night, the sun still lit the hills with a soft red light, as though the trees were on fire. In the distance, storm clouds gathered—they neither broke nor dispersed but lingered there, menacing the hills. On the opposite ridge from her home was the Dale house, its windows blazing with light.

The news anchor said the railway murderer had been spotted earlier that day outside Brownside. Hearing that news, Betty set her book down, rose quickly from her chair and went inside to watch. The railroad came directly from Brownside and passed right next to her house, winding through the thickly-wooded ravine that separated her from the Dales. If the murderer was on the train… She went into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed the Dales.

There was no answer. She left a message: “Hey Ted and Jess, Betty here, just heard the news about the railway murderer. Not sure if you saw it, but he was last sighted at Brownside. Can you believe it? I wanted to give you the heads up, in case you didn’t watch the news. Lock your doors. Lock your windows! For God’s sake, keep safe! And give me a call when you get this message. Thanks.”

She returned to the living room to watch the rest of the segment, but they were done talking about the serial killer and had moved on to a story about the upcoming state fair.

Betty went back out to the porch and tried to focus on her novel, but her mind kept wandering to the railway murderer. For the past six months he had been traveling across the country, hitching rides on industrial rail lines, stopping in small towns where he would target a random house, murder its residents, and spend the night in their home. Unlike other serial killers, the railway murderer didn’t have a type—he killed anyone and everyone: old and young, man and woman.

The sun disappeared behind the hills, throwing the woods into shadow. She lit a cigarette and took a long drag, staring into the darkness. John would know what to do, she thought. He would tell her there was nothing to worry about, that there were many train lines that came out of Brownside and only one that went by their house. And even if the murderer was on that train, he would reassure her, there’s two-hundred miles between Brownside and Chicago, and what were the odds he would stop at their house, of all the houses on the line? 

But John was not there, and she heard only the keening wind and the crickets revving their nightly chorus.

Betty triple-checked all the locks. She considered bringing up one of John’s old guns, but she didn’t have the heart to go into the basement. All of his things were still down there, and she couldn’t face them, especially then, in the dark, her nerves buzzing.

She tried to read in bed, but her mind would not sit still. She kept looking out the window, at the copse of trees that shielded her view of the railroad. Trains didn’t come through often, she thought, and maybe they wouldn’t come tonight. She turned on the television and watched QVC until at last she fell asleep.

Betty awoke with a start and glanced at her clock. It was just after midnight. The television’s lights danced across the room. She fumbled through her sheets for the remote and turned the TV off, plunging the room in darkness. She looked out the window but could see nothing. No lights, no moon, not even the stars. While she had slept, the thick clouds had crept up the valley, blanketing the night sky. But still, the storm did not break. 

Betty turned back to bed, but then she heard it—the long, high-pitched whistle of a distant train.

She sat up in bed, her heart pounding. The train was approaching, the hum of its engine churning towards her. She thought about going downstairs to check the door, but she was too frightened to move. “Please, John, watch over me,” she whispered, pulling the covers to her chest. 

The train barreled through the valley, its whistle piercing the night with long, mourning shrieks. It sounded like it was coming through her house, its horn blaring through her living room, the screeching metal vibrating the floor beds.

Then, as suddenly as it came, she could hear the train receding, its whistle softening as it wound through the hills. At last silence returned to the night, and Betty could hear the blood pounding at her ears. She took slow, deep breaths to calm herself. As she lay in the dark, she wondered if she had imagined the train, conjured its roaring fury out of her nervous, overworked fear. 

John used to always say that she imagined things.

Betty was about to fall asleep again when she heard another sound, loud and heavy, and coming from downstairs. She pulled at her covers and held her breath. Had she imagined it? A loud banging sound, like someone trying to break down her door. But she was all alone in the dark and could hear nothing, not even the crickets. She stepped out of bed and listened at the door. Nothing. Betty stepped through the door and onto the second floor landing, peering through the bannister toward the entrance. Nothing.

There was nothing amiss downstairs either. Betty turned on all the lights and checked every room except the basement. She checked the windows and the doors but everything was secure. Perhaps I imagined it, she thought. 

Before she returned to bed, Betty went out onto the porch to look at the Dale house. All its rooms were lit up. Strange, she thought, that they should be up so late. Betty went back upstairs, and as she drifted to sleep for the last time that night, she thought she heard something—carried on the night wind, over the midnight trees, the piercing sound of a woman’s scream.

---

At Sadie’s the next morning all anyone could talk about was the railway murderer. The heavy clouds still hung over the town, darkening the cafe with a gloomy mood.

Betty grabbed a seat at the counter and ordered a coffee and danish. She could hear snatches of conversation around her, and from the words she caught—railway tracks, serial killer, fifteen people—she knew what everyone was thinking. Could he have really come to their town?

The woman next to her noticed that Betty was eavesdropping. It was Sharon Day, the high school principal. “You live close to the tracks,” she said. “Are you worried?”

“I did have a little scare last night,” Betty admitted. “But I’m worried about the Dales. The tracks pass right between our houses.”

“Speaking of the Dales,” Sharon said, and she turned back to her husband. “I heard Bobby was seen in town yesterday.”

Her husband snorted. “That derelict,” he said.

Bobby was Ted Dale’s older brother. He was a perennial trouble-maker and drove their father crazy. When he was caught smoking weed outside the bleachers at school, their father sent him away to live with an uncle. There were also rumors that he was the one who got the Chesterton girl pregnant. 

If Bobby was in town, it wasn’t good news for Ted and Jessica. Realizing that the Deans had never called her back, Betty finished her breakfast and hurried out of Sadie’s. 

As she pulled up the drive that lead to the Dales, her worst fears were confirmed: she saw the flashing lights of three cop cars next to their house.

Had she truly heard that terrible scream in the night? She could imagine it so clearly: the railway murderer dropping from the train into the dark woods, stalking up the hill to Betty’s house where he attempts to break in through the window. But Betty hears him and, seeing the light, he flees back down the hill and crosses through to the other side of the ravine, to the Dales. There he finds an unlocked door, sneaks in through the shadowed kitchen, as light and silent as a cat. He creeps up the stairs, finds the Dales asleep in their bedroom, and brings sudden horror to the young couple. 

Betty could hear the scream again and shivered. She ran into Officer Douglas who came from around the garage and stood in the middle of the drive. She rolled down her window. Douglas stood with his hands on his hips, his long face looking longer than usual, waves of stubble poking out of his chin.

“This is a crime scene, Betty. I can’t have you here.”

“What happened?”

“We’re still trying to determine that.” Officer Douglas was a large man, tall and slightly overweight. He moved his body in front of her car.

“Was it the railway murderer?”

Douglas gave her a long, hard look. “I’ll ask you not to spread rumors in town. Everyone’s on edge enough as it is.”

“Are the Dales ok?” The car engine was still on, muttering softly.

“Please go back home,” Douglas said.

Betty did not turn off the engine. Nor did she turn the car around. She sat there for a few minutes, looking at the house, waiting to catch a glimpse of—of what? A body coming out on a stretcher? “Look,” Douglas said. “I’ll come by later this evening and we can talk. How does that sound?”

“I—” Betty wanted to say that she’d rather he told her now but she could tell from his posture, from his hard gaze—not at all the way he had looked at her recently—that he was not going to budge. “That’s fine,” she said. “Yes, I’d like that.”

She turned the car around and drove down into the valley and up the hill to her home. When she got back to her house she went out onto the porch where she could see the cop cars still there. Another car arrived, however, and parked next to the front door. It was a long, black hearse.

---

Betty couldn’t sleep that night. She couldn’t get the grisly image out of her head: the railway murderer sneaking into the Dales at night, a knife glinting in the moonlight. 

Officer Douglas had failed to appear that evening. Betty tried calling but got only his voicemail. She tried to read her Agatha Christie but her mind kept turning to the Dales. It didn’t help that she could see their house from her bedroom window, a dark shadow on the opposite hill. No lights came on as twilight fell.

How dreadful, and how dreadfully random, that she, in an almost identical house equal distance from the tracks, had been spared, and they, a young couple, recent homeowners, on the path to starting a family, their whole lives ahead of them, could be so pointlessly and cruelly cut down, while she, while she—what did she have to live for?

It should have been me, Betty thought, and when that terrible idea forced its way into her brain, a stranger one snuck in on its heels. If that had happened, if there was order, justice in this world, then she would be dead right now. What would it feel like, to be dead? To be cold, senseless, lying somewhere on a sheet of metal, Officer Douglas and the coroner hovering over her. 

But she was not dead. She could feel the weight of the heavy quilt on her legs, smell the evening hair still thick with rain, listen to the low rumbling of thunder far in the distance. In another world, one where the coin flip had not fallen in her favor, she would be gone—her house a shadow marring the hillside, while the Dale house would shine with light and love.

And she? Oblivious to the gathering storm, to the quiet home, the stillness in the floorboards, her cup of water, her bowl of cereal, her cigarettes, her old lamp.

I would be with John, she thought.

Betty rose from her bed and dressed. She put on her work jeans and her tall rain boots. She tied her hair in a ribbon, went downstairs, and passed through the door and down into the dark ravine. The moonlight disappeared, for its silvery light could not penetrate the thick, overgrown trees. Betty pushed through the tangled underbrush, her boots sinking into the damp earth. She heard thunder in the distance and wondered if the rain would finally come. The darkness was complete, and Betty could hear nothing but the sound of her own breathing, her feet snapping on twigs. But she did not stop. 

At last she reached the other side of the ravine, the Dale house looming above her. She saw a light on the second story and her heart leapt with hope. Maybe they were alive after all. Maybe she had imagined everything. 

The front door was unlocked and Betty stepped inside. The house was exactly as she remembered it. The plush blue couch with the yellow pillows. Ted’s reading chair by the window. A cookbook lay half open on the kitchen counter and a peeled onion was on the cutting board, ready and waiting. The Dales’ shoes were neatly stacked by the front door and a pile of unopened mail was on the kitchen table. It was as if the Dales had been abducted in the middle of their evening.

What had she expected to find? Blood splashed across the living room? Body parts shoved in the kitchen sink? Police tape? White chalk outlines where the bodies had been? But nothing was amiss—everything exactly as it should be, except the Dales were missing.

“I had a feeling you’d come back.” The voice came from the stairs. Betty spun around, her heart racing. She saw a large shadow coming down the stairs. It flipped a switch and, in the sudden light, Betty saw Officer Douglas. 

She took a deep breath, steadying her nerves. “I needed to know. I couldn’t sleep. You never came!” 

“I needed to make sure before I told you.”

“I have a right to know. I’m their neighbor. I live right there. The railway murderer could have come for me instead.” Her voice sounded strange in that bizarre, empty house.

“It wasn’t the railway murderer.” Douglas gestured at the living room and took a seat on the couch. 

After a moment of hesitation, Betty sat on a wingback chair across from him. At any moment, she imagined that Jessica Dale would come in from the kitchen and ask them both if they would like something to drink. “What happened then? Are the Dales ok?”

Officer Douglas looked down at his hands. He folded and unfolded them three times. “It was Bobby,” he said. “Ted’s brother.”

“What do you mean?”

“We apprehended him earlier this evening. He confessed to everything.”

Betty looked at the onion on the kitchen counter. It seemed absurd, a peeled onion, just sitting there.

“Bobby came back to town the other day. He came to the house last night. Ted tried to send him away, but Bobby felt that he had a right to the place, being the older brother. There was an altercation in the kitchen. Bobby hit Ted with a cast-iron pan, stabbed him in the neck. When Jessica arrived later that night, he slashed her up. Hands, face, everywhere.”

Betty didn’t say anything. She wished that someone would clean up the onion, put the cookbook away. 

“Bobby stayed in the house that night. He put the bodies in the trash bin, cleaned up the blood, ate their leftovers. Then he took a shower. Slept in their bed. Read one of Jessica’s books.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I thought you wanted to know what happened?”

“I wanted to know about the railway murderer.”

“Haven’t you heard? They apprehended him outside St. Louis. Caught him trying to buy a case of beer. He never came close to town.”

Betty could feel her tongue heavy in her mouth. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for the Dales in their final moments, betrayed by a family member.

“Bobby’s in custody,” Douglas continued. “We’ll be pressing charges, but it’s out of our hands now.”

“I see,” Betty said, but she didn’t see it at all. She tried not to think about the two bodies crammed into a trash bin in the garage, discarded like refuse. “I—I need to go home.” Betty stood up from the chair. 

Douglas nodded and stood up as well. “I’ll drive you home.”

“No, I’ll walk. I need to think. To process.”

He looked at her for a long time. Betty thought he was going to say something. She thought there was something Douglas needed to say. But he only said, “I understand.”

Betty returned to the woods, heading for home, clawing her way through the darkness. The rain came at last, lightly at first—big thick drops hitting the leaves—but then the thunder sounded overhead and the heavens opened. Lightning flashed, and in its brief and sudden illumination, Betty could see her way through the woods.

She returned home.

That night, for the first time since his passing, Betty went into the garage to organize John’s things. She found his journals, his suits still pressed in their bags. She found his golf clubs, a stack of mail he had kept, including all the old birthday cards she had given him over the years. She read them and put them into a box. She read through his journals and put those in a box, too. She put his clothes in a bag for Salvation Army. It was harder than she expected, to see them all, the outfits he had worn when they used to sit together to read, when they went on long drives through the countryside—that purple shirt he loved to wear. She couldn’t go through his hats, not yet. It was enough just to be there with this things.

Betty took one of the journals upstairs to read. The storm was already over. It took the hot, thick air with it, and when Betty went out onto the porch, she felt a cool breeze coming over the hills. The clouds had cleared and she could see the stars in the sky, and there, across the ravine, a dark and empty home.