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Augustine house and barn

The Augustine house and barn is the Radford family home, bordering the woods and a river clearing, where Phoebe Augustine vanishes from her bed, and whose locked backyard barn is her father Derek's writing office.
Type Location (suburban house and converted barn)
Aliases The barn; Augustine household and barn; Augustine house and river clearing
Region Suburban Radford, Virginia, at the edge of the woods
Residents Derek Augustine, Maybelline Augustine, Phoebe Augustine, and a son of about eleven
First appearance Radford Horror 03

Description

The house is a wide, upper-middle-class ranch house with a semicircular driveway and a large green backyard, with thin trees along a neighboring yard (Radford Horror 03). The barn at the back has been converted to an office. It has frosted aftermarket windows, a desk and typewriter, a record player (light jazz), a couch, a mini fridge and a lamp, but no air conditioning, phone or calendar. A hayloft with no ladder holds boxes of paper, an old vacuum and Christmas decorations (Radford Horror 03). Phoebe's bedroom is full of horse things, with no UFO items, and its window faces the woods at the end of the street (Radford Horror 05).

Notable places within

  • The barn: Derek's writing space, usually locked. The writer inside is drafting a romance novel Andre describes as "the shittiest romance novel that anyone has ever seen," about a thousand pages deep (Radford Horror 03). Derek writes under the pen name Marcus Heat (Radford Horror 05).
  • Phoebe's bedroom: with an unmade bed, one slipper by the window and the other across the room (Radford Horror 05).
  • The woods and river clearing behind the house: a roughly 40 by 30 foot clearing where Phoebe's blood trail ends about 20 feet short of the water, with white powder (Radford Horror 04).

History of events there

Radford Horror 03

Kurt tails Dr. Lori to the house. Lori storms out of the barn after a furious meeting, and an unrecognized man follows to the door, smokes, says "Fuck," and goes back in; a typewriter starts. The team learns the house belongs to Derek and Maybelline Augustine, the family of Amanda's friend Phoebe, and Deputy Molly Underhill says the family has never crossed law enforcement's radar (Radford Horror 03). Kurt picks the barn lock and spends over two hours in the hayloft. When the writer leaves for dinner, Kurt searches the barn, finding a notepad of plot notes with dates paired with acronyms (which he copies by graphite trace), unused condoms, aspirin and cigarettes, and no pill bottles. In the couch cushions he finds a small pink butterfly hair tie, and takes it with wadded drafts from the trash. Kurt suspects an affair, possibly with a minor (Radford Horror 03).

Radford Horror 04

At 4:30 a.m. the team's pagers go off: Phoebe is missing from her bed, gone about an hour. Police and neighbors comb the woods. The blood trail Kurt follows with luminol ends at the riverside clearing, and the search turns up the white powder. A witness says Phoebe was wearing only a long T-shirt and already had cuts on her feet from the brambles (Radford Horror 04).

Radford Horror 05

The team interviews the Augustines while a part-time deputy sits with them. Derek's eye flickers at Dr. Lori's name; he says the pink clip must have fallen off when Amanda visited a few weeks earlier, and that Lori gives him "a weird vibe" because "he likes jazz too much." Kurt searches Phoebe's room and learns Amanda was seeing someone besides Dean Lawson; Maybelline says one Whateley twin had a crush on Phoebe. Kurt notes that the clip in Amanda's hair matches the one from the barn (Radford Horror 05).

Inhabitants

Appearances