Ha! My eyes darted to the guilty party outside. Mom went to the window and leaned down with her hands on the sill. “Bossy! What did you do with my big knife?”

It happened faster than a blink. The window slammed shut. My mother turned white. She couldn’t even yell. Her hands were inside the window frame; her fingers were outside. The part where the window landed looked flat as a pancake. I struggled to open it; maybe it was so difficult because I was a kid, and Mom was in the way of my getting a good hold on it.

Luckily, it looked worse than it was. Easy for her to say, Mom wants you to know. God rest her soul. Tell them where the knife was. The knife turned up in the middle of the table, in plain sight.

The door leading to the basement was right next to that window. There were two steps down to a landing where another door led outside, then a turn at the flight that descended into those dank rooms underground. The door separating the kitchen from that hole to hell stayed open because we were always running in and out of the backyard. We’d duck past the stairs, not looking; pretending the dark gaping maw and whatever secrets it held weren’t there.

Almost two, Bugs was steady on her feet. One second she stood at the window, her bright eyes peeking over the sill like sunrise; the next, she was crying at the bottom of the basement stairs, her little bunny teeth stuck through her bottom lip.

Crying in her daddy’s arms as he carried her up, she turned and pointed at the scarecrow, fear in her eyes, and screamed. Mom took the little doll to the barrel out back and burned it immediately. But the strange happenings didn’t stop.

It was Christmas week. Nanna arrived on a train from Chicago. It was my favorite time of year, being a kid and all. We waited with anticipation for her to make the traditional fudge because no one else did it as well. Mom made and decorated a thousand cookies. There was snow on the ground, and all kinds of festive holiday specials on TV. Best of all, Nanna and I stayed up after everyone else went to bed and watched the late movie, the late late movie, and sometimes the very early movie. Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, and The Bells of St. Mary’s had kept us up one night, and on this one, we’d watched back-to-back Bing in White Christmas and Holiday Inn, followed by Cary Grant in The Bishop’s Wife.

I was curled up beside Nanna, and she patted my leg as the credits began to roll. We got up, and I turned off the TV, which required walking over to it in those days. Nanna turned out the light. In the tiny rotunda at the top of the stairs, Nanna went right, to Bossy’s room. I went left, to mine. Already in my pajamas (they might have had little feet in them, I’m not sure), I was immediately snug and warm under the covers in the quiet house. Until I heard a strange noise and raised my head to listen. It came from just outside my door. It sounded as if someone was sawing through wood, and it wasn’t Dad snoring. For some reason, I thought of the wooden chair that sat outside the bathroom door, next to my room.

“Dee Dee,” Nanna called, because that was her pet name for me, “what are you doing?”

“It’s not me,” I called back. “I thought it was you.”

We met in the tiny rotunda. The noise persisted. I examined the wooden chair. “It sounds like someone sawing wood,” I said.

Nanna raised her head and tilted it. “It’s not wood. It’s water.” I turned around and we flipped on the light and went into the bathroom. We had an original pedestal sink with real antique faucets – hot water came from one and cold water came from the other, and both were slowly turning as we watched, squeaking like rusty hand pumps. The water spraying hard from them had almost filled the bowl. I wish I could remember which of us found the courage to turn them off.

The last incident I recall wasn’t one I witnessed. I overheard Mom on the phone telling someone about it.

“We were in bed,” she said, and I pictured her and Dad in the big king-size bed in the room across the little rotunda from the stairs. “They came up the stairs … these little green lights. Faint green spots of light. I shook Bill and made him look. They came in and floated at the end of the bed … and then they went through the wall.”

I don’t remember hearing Mom and Dad discuss moving away. I don’t recall the words realtor or for sale or mortgage or equity ever being mentioned. We left late one night with some clothes stuffed in the trunk and some more piled nearly window high on the back seat. Bugs’ new baby sister slept in a wicker laundry basket wedged down in the pile, and Bugs laid on top of it like the Princess and the Pea. We drove far away, and we never drove back.