The House on Harbor Hill

by Shelly Stratton

  Had it already been a full week?

  She should have called by now, Delilah thought.

  Tracey and the children seemed to have enjoyed their dinner at Harbor Hill, to love the food and her home, and yet she obviously hadn’t won them over. If she had, the young woman would have told her she wanted to move in by now. She would be standing on Delilah’s welcome mat, juggling suitcases and boxes. Caleb would come tearing through the doorway and go charging toward the stairs, eager to pick out his room on the second floor.

  What had Delilah done wrong?

  “When will you get it, Dee?” the voice chided. “She doesn’t want to live with you! Honestly, you’re like a girl waiting by the phone, hoping that boy you met at the dance is going to call. For the last time—she’s not coming!”

  “Shut up,” she whispered fiercely, slamming the cabinet door shut. “Just shut up.”

  The voice let out a low chuckle. “You know I’m right.”

  Perhaps he was.

  She would have to let it go, let Tracey and the children go. The recipes she had earmarked in her cookbooks for the large meals she would make for all of them would sit unused. Her fantasies of the sound of little feet clomping along the hardwood floors would have to fade. She had done it before, tucked away her dreams under a blanket of disappointment.

  Dee blinked as she looked around her. The kitchen, which had seemed bright and full of warmth only seconds ago, now felt much darker and colder. She peered through one of the windows near the farm sink and saw a shadow drifting across the backyard, turning the vibrant kelly-green lawn to almost a dowdy blue. She shivered and rubbed her shoulders before turning away from the window and the cabinets. She walked to the kitchen’s entrance.

  I’ll just find someone else, she resolved as she shuffled down the short hall leading to the staircase. Bruce trailed her, walking near her ankle. His tail flicked back and forth, rubbing her pants leg and grazing the wainscoting.

  There was never a shortage of women who needed help and a place to stay. Delilah would find another candidate, one who would appreciate her kindness and banish her loneliness.

  “And what will happen when she leaves?” the voice asked. “And the one after that and the one after that?”

  She slowed her steps down the hall, coming to a halt at those words.

  “How will you feel then? Those women are just covering up what’s always been there. What will always be there. It isn’t loneliness that you want to get rid of.”

  “That’s . . . that’s e-enough of that,” she whispered, fear rather than anger now making her stutter. The truth terrified her.

  Oh, how she hated being alone like this. She hoped Aidan would return home soon. Delilah reached for the glass doorknob leading to the small storage pantry underneath the staircase. It was where she kept all her extra goods that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen cabinets. If the blackberry jam she couldn’t find in the kitchen was anywhere in this house, it would be here.

  She turned the knob and tugged twice before the door popped open with a painful squeak. She made a mental note to remind Aidan to squirt some WD-40 on the old hinges, maybe replace them entirely. A small shaft of light from the hall entered the dark, damp space. The pantry smelled vaguely of wet newspapers. Delilah rubbed her shoulders again. She felt even colder now, to the point where she thought a mist might appear in front of her lips.

  Delilah blindly reached inside the room, flailing her hand in the air, grasping for the string dangling overhead. The tips of her fingers finally brushed it, and she pulled, filling the pantry with light, revealing shelves on all sides. She stepped inside, stooping slightly to clear the doorway. She squinted as she stared at the jars all lined neatly on the shelf to her right. Within seconds, she noticed a solitary jar of blackberry jam. So Aidan hadn’t eaten it all. She smiled a little, almost with relief. As she grabbed the jar, the door to the pantry slammed shut behind her, making her jump in alarm and almost drop the jar to the floor.

  Delilah turned and stared in amazement at the closed door. She rushed across the pantry, nearly whacking her head on the low ceiling. She grabbed the doorknob and pushed. The door wouldn’t budge. She pushed again and again. It stayed firmly shut.

  “Hello?” she called out. “Hello?” She pushed a third time and began to frantically knock against the wooden slab. “Aidan! Aidan, you out there?”

  Only Bruce’s muffled purr answered her.

  Delilah stared at her hand clasped around the door handle, at the two screws in the gold knob.

  “You’re stuck, huh?” The voice laughed and her stomach dropped. “Too bad I can’t let you out this time.”

  This time . . .

  He had done it before—locked her in the pantry. Was he doing it again?

  That’s not possible, she thought. But she could not tamp down the panic. It wrapped its tight hold around her now as it had more than forty years ago.

  She pushed against the door again with all her might, shoving with her shoulder. It wouldn’t budge.

  How had he done it?

  Maybe hatred and revenge had empowered him from the grave, allowing him to cross the ether and subject her to the same torture he had when he was alive. That’s what he had been promising her for years, a slow agony that would make her regret he had died first.

  But she wasn’t strong enough to last three days locked in the pantry, like she had been at the age of eighteen. She wouldn’t survive this time around. She was old and worn. She would crumble within hours. She wanted to get out. She had to get out of here.

  Delilah pushed against the door, pounding her fists against the wooden slab until her hands were sore. She sobbed and yelled. She kicked the door until her toes were sore and damp with her own blood.

  “Cee, let me out! Let me out, dammit! You can’t do this!” she screamed. “You have to let me out! I can’t stay in here! Let me out, Cee, please! Let me—”

  She slammed herself into the door again, and it suddenly swung open. She bolted toward freedom, only to find her jailer waiting on the other side.

  CHAPTER 9

  Aidan heard the screams as soon as he opened the front door, stopping him in his tracks on the wicker welcome mat.

  For a second, he had wondered if it was a mistake. Perhaps he had misheard, or maybe it was the television. Delilah was always doing that, leaving on her soaps or the Hallmark Channel on the flat screen in the living room. She’d turn it up to its full volume, like she was hard of hearing, then go wandering off to some other part of the house.

  Aidan would come into the living room, annoyed, and turn the volume down or turn the TV off. Delilah would come back to the living room a few hours later, turn on the television, and go wandering off again. He’d sigh and trek back downstairs in search of the remote to lower the volume.

  It was a dance they both knew well—a waltz they executed with perfect synchronicity.

  But when he listened to the screams more closely, he knew it wasn’t the television. It was Delilah.

  He dropped the plastic bag he’d brought back from the local hardware store and rushed inside the house, not bothering to close the front door behind him. He ran through the foyer and down the hall, searching for the source of her screams. He paused when he neared the pantry closet.

  Bruce paced back and forth in front of the pantry door, twitching his tail nervously. The plump tabby’s ears were flat against his head. He stood on his hind legs and pawed at the door frame like he was trying to reach the glass handle two feet above him.

  “Dee?” Aidan called, nudging Bruce aside with his foot. “Dee, I’m here! I’ll get you out. Don’t worry.”

  But she didn’t seem to hear him. She continued to scream and wail. Her voice sounded so supplicatory, she could be on bended knee with hands clasped on the other side of the door for all he knew. She yelled for someone named Cee to let her out. She yelled for God to help her.

  Aidan tugged on the door once to no avail. On the second try, he gave a ha
rd yank, and the door popped open with a loud burp, like he was removing a Tupperware lid. He then felt a cool rush of air against his face.

  Delilah tumbled out, wild-eyed. She fell into his arms. They both went crashing into the adjacent wall. Aidan hit his shoulder hard and winced. He caught Delilah just before she fell to the floor.

  “Let go of me! Let go of me!” she yelled, pounding her fists against his arms and his chest, exhibiting a strength he didn’t know she had.

  “Oww, dammit, Delilah!” He shoved her away. “Calm down! I was only trying to help!”

  “You weren’t helping me!” Her brown, wrinkled cheeks glistened with tears. Her gray hair stood at all angles. Some was pasted to her sweaty temples. “You locked me in that place!” She pointed toward the pantry, then turned her bright eyes back toward his. “You locked me in there!”

  He shook his head and rubbed his sore shoulder. “No, I didn’t! Why the hell would I lock you—”

  “Because you’re mean. Because you’re a hateful, evil son of a bitch!”

  Aidan stopped rubbing his shoulder, now taken aback. He’d never heard her curse before.

  “You said you would never do it again! You said you wouldn’t! You promised me!”

  “Dee, what are you talking about? I’ve never locked you in there. I wasn’t even here! I just came home a minute ago.”

  Delilah fell silent, staring at him as if he was speaking a foreign language. She blinked rapidly and gazed around her. She had the glazed look of someone who was waking up from a dream, like the hallway of her home had morphed into alien terrain and was now fading back to its normal state. She reached up to her hair and looked down in bewilderment at her disheveled clothes.

  “Dee, are you all right?”

  She nodded and slowly turned to him. “I just . . . I just need to lie down,” she said as she walked toward the staircase, dragging her slippered feet as she went.

  He guided her up the stairs, holding her elbow and wrapping his arm around her shoulder as she took one shaky step, then the next. They walked down the hall, and he eased her bedroom door open. She shuffled across her room with Aidan at her side and Bruce at her feet. He lowered her to the four-poster bed, and she leaned back against her dozen or so decorative pillows, a mountain of velvet and tassels. Delilah lay with her arms at her sides. She stared at the wall in front of her.

  She looked like a corpse in a satin-lined casket.

  “I should call a doctor.”

  That’s what he would do when his mother got like this.

  When Aidan was fourteen, doctors had finally diagnosed Rosario with clinical depression, explaining that it was of the cause of her black moods that kept her locked in her room for days on end, refusing to eat or wash until the room reeked of her body odor and she could barely hold up her head. She had bounced from doctors to mental health wards for years before her last suicide attempt. Aidan had finally placed her in a facility where she was monitored in a private room by friendly nurses, where she did arts and crafts on Wednesdays and had music therapy on Fridays.

  When Rosario was at her worst, she would get the same glassy-eyed, slack-jawed expression Delilah had now. It made him uneasy. It made him scared.

  “To hell with this,” he muttered, reaching for the cordless phone on her night table.

  “Don’t call the doctor.”

  Her voice startled him, almost making him drop the phone. It didn’t sound like it came from her mouth; instead, it felt like a ventriloquist with an odd voice had said the words for her.

  Aidan looked at her again. She faced him now. Delilah no longer had that faraway look in her eyes. She seemed more alert but weary.

  “Can you . . . can you get me a glass of water, honey?”

  “Water?”

  She dipped her chin into her neck in a stiff nod. “That’s all I need.”

  “That’s all you need? That’s all you need?” He lowered the phone back onto its charger. “Dee, I just found you screaming and crying in a pantry closet! You didn’t know who the hell I was! You thought I’d locked you in there!”

  “And now I know you didn’t. I’m better. I just need some water,” she whispered hoarsely, shifting slightly so that she sat up higher on her pillows. Bruce leapt onto the bed and took his perch beside her, curling into a ball near her hip. She began to rub his back gently.

  The two looked like nothing had happened, like they had always been there. Like the scene Aidan had stumbled upon only minutes ago had been a figment of his imagination.

  “Can you hand me my remote?” she asked casually, gesturing to the remote control. It sat on the night table next to her phone and box of Kleenex. “I want to see if I can catch All My Children.”

  Aidan’s eyes widened. All My Children?

  He stared at her, then at the remote. He took a deep breath and shoved his fingers through his hair. “Look, we don’t have to call 9-1-1 or anything like that. But I really, really think we should at least have you—”

  “Hello!” someone shouted from the floor below, stopping Aidan. “Hello? Is anyone home?”

  He let out a sharp breath and pointed at her. “You stay right here. You hear me? I’m going to see who the hell that is. But please, whatever you do . . . don’t move. Okay?”

  She nodded, and he headed toward her bedroom door.

  “Remote!” she called to him, making him roll his eyes. He snatched the remote off the mahogany tabletop and tossed it onto the bed. It landed on Bruce, and the cat narrowed his yellow eyes at him.

  “Hello?” someone shouted again just as Aidan ran out of the bedroom and down the hall. He could hear the opening soundtrack to All My Children coming from over his shoulder as he rounded the corner. When he reached the top of the staircase, he could see through the white spindles a man in a pale blue dress shirt and gray slacks standing in the foyer. His hands were on his hips as he peered around him. He leaned in closer to stare at one of the paintings on the wall. He turned, ran his hand over the ornate wood trim along the front bay window, nodding appreciatively.

  Watching him, Aidan felt like he was witnessing someone at a car dealership inspecting an Audi he was about to purchase.

  “Can I help you?” Aidan asked, now frowning as he walked down the stairs.

  The man gazed up at him. “Ha! Someone is home after all!”

  Aidan inspected him more closely.

  The man couldn’t have been more than fifty, judging from the first signs of wrinkles around his mouth, the slight puff to his eyelids, and his receding hairline. But he looked like someone who also went to great lengths to hide his age. That was obvious from his shoe-leather tan, the absence of a single strand of gray hair on his head, and his bleached-white grin.

  “I’m sorry!” the man began. “I didn’t mean to just barge in here, but the door was open.” He gestured to the open front door as evidence, then held out his hand for a shake. “My name is Teddy! Pleased to meet you, Mr. . . . uh . . .”

  “Dominguez. Aidan Dominguez, and how can I help you?” Aidan repeated as he shook his hand, but this time there was a firmer edge to his voice.

  He did not like this man, though he couldn’t say why. The vibe Aidan got from him now wasn’t that he was here to buy something, but to sell something—and Aidan was in no mood for a salesman song and dance because of the crisis he was dealing with upstairs. He didn’t know when he went back to Delilah’s bedroom if he would find the old woman lying on her queen-sized bed watching television or dangling her feet from the second-floor window, ready to jump into the rosebushes below.

  “Is Ms. Grey home?” Teddy asked, looking hopeful.

  Aidan glanced over his shoulder toward the staircase. Breathy soap-opera dialogue funneled its way to the foyer from the floor above.

  “Yes, she’s home but she’s . . . uh . . . a little occupied right now.”

  “Occupied?”

  “Yes, she’s a . . . a little under the weather. She’s tired and lying down.”

&nb
sp; Teddy took a step toward him. His blue eyes squinted with keen interest. “She isn’t feeling well? Is it something serious?”

  Aidan quickly shook his head. “No! No, nothing like that. Like I said . . . She’s just feeling under the weather, that’s all.”

  “Oh.”

  The two men gazed at one another awkwardly. Aidan cleared his throat.

  “Look, I’ll tell her that you came to visit when she’s feeling better. I’ll have her—”

  “May I ask . . . Are you Ms. Grey’s groundskeeper, Mr. Dominguez?” Teddy drew even closer. “She’d mentioned that she had one.”

  “Yes, I am, but I haven’t always been!”

  Aidan was quick to correct the assumption. People often saw a guy with the last name Dominguez who did yard work. They’d then assume yard work was all someone like him could do. He wouldn’t put it past a guy like Teddy to imagine Salvadoran men sprung from the womb with garden shears in one hand and a spade in the other, ready to tend someone’s lawn.

  “I used to work for a big law firm in Chicago in the banking and financial services division,” he clarified, starting the prepared speech he had reiterated those rare times when someone asked him just how he had come to live and work at Harbor Hill. “But I lived here before . . . when I was a kid. Delilah and my mom stayed in touch. Dee kept inviting me back to visit. I finally did it. I decided to stay and help her take care of Harbor Hill.”

  “Wait . . . you just decided to pull up stakes like that? You gave up your job at a big city law firm to mow grass and trim hedges?”

  “Well, I needed a change of pace after . . .” Aidan’s voice drifted off.

  “After what?”

  Aidan swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat. Four years had passed, and he still couldn’t say it aloud. He lowered his eyes, then raised them to look at Teddy again. “After . . . after my wife and I separated and I . . . I got tired of Chicago,” he lied.

  “Oh. Well, I guess anyone would get tired of all that cold!” Teddy’s grin abruptly widened, and he lowered a hand onto Aidan’s shoulder, catching him off guard. “It’s awful nice of you to come here to help Ms. Grey. I told her a place like this has to get overwhelming for a woman her age. In fact, I even offered to take the house and all the property off her hands so she wouldn’t have to deal with the burden anymore. But that old gal keeps turning me down!”