The House on Harbor Hill

by Shelly Stratton

  Paul found me, she thought dazedly, feeling an equal mix of shock and horror. He found me!

  She turned, prepared to bolt. Instead, she ran smack-dab into a display of glazed and frosted donuts. Several boxes tumbled to the tiled floor, spilling in all directions. Tracey would have fallen with them if Aidan hadn’t grabbed her hand and tugged her back.

  “Whoa!” He pulled her back upright. “Slow down! Okay?”

  She began to shove out of his grasp but halted when she looked over his shoulder again and saw the man she was trying to escape was a mere five feet behind them. She could see him more closely now.

  “Th-that’s not P-Paul,” she stuttered.

  “What?”

  “That’s not Paul!”

  The man who stood in front of her could pass for a leaner version of her husband, but it wasn’t him.

  Tracey closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, dropping her trembling hand to her stomach. She wanted to break into tears. All the worry from seconds ago rushed out of her like air from a deflating balloon.

  “Who’s Paul?”

  Her eyes stayed focused on the man as he passed them. She studied his every feature, even the glint of his blond hair under the track lighting. He stared back at her uneasily, like she was a skittish dog who could nip him.

  “Who is Paul, Tracey?” Aidan repeated, finally releasing her shoulders.

  She hesitated before she answered him. She couldn’t believe she had said her husband’s name aloud. She had told Delilah about Paul, about why she was running from him, because after she moved in she’d felt she had to. She felt she owed Delilah that. But for everyone else she had schooled herself to never mention his name—and if she did talk about him, to give only superficial details. And here she was, raving about him in the middle of a grocery store, creating a scene.

  Aidan continued to stare at her, waiting for an answer. Finally, she caved.

  “Paul is my . . . my husband. I thought that guy was . . . that he was Paul.”

  Aidan’s face changed. His furrowed brows disappeared.

  She threaded her fingers through her damp hair, lifting it from her shoulders. “Look, Aidan, I’m sorry I—”

  “There’s no need to apologize. I get it.” He dropped to a knee and began to pick up the doughnut boxes, adding them back to the stack she had partly knocked down. Tracey quickly dropped to her knees to help him.

  “You get what?”

  “Every woman who comes to Harbor Hill comes for a reason, Tracey,” he said gently, gathering the last of the boxes. She watched as he rose to his feet and placed the ones he held on the stack. She stood up too. “I guess he’s your reason then?”

  She didn’t nod right away. The admission felt like it was being physically pried out of her. “We . . . we haven’t seen him in about a year,” she finally said. “We had a close call ten months ago, not too long after I’d left him. I’d moved out of the house but hadn’t moved far enough, I guess. I hadn’t covered my tracks. I tripped up, and he almost caught us.”

  It had been her neighbor in the apartment building where she once lived who had given her the heads up. The old woman had told her a man whose description sounded eerily like Paul’s had shown up in the lobby and had been asking if they knew of a woman named Tracey who lived in the building. He’d even shown a few of the tenants her picture.

  Tracey had moved out of her apartment that very night. She’d meandered her way from hotel to hotel and then finally to Camden Beach.

  “But he doesn’t know we live at Harbor Hill now—and I want it to stay that way.”

  “Yeah, Caleb mentioned that he’s not allowed to talk about his dad. I figured there was a good reason why.”

  She did a double take. She squinted up at him. “Cabe said that to you?”

  He nodded.

  “Wow!” She let out a low, mirthless laugh. “You guys really bonded, didn’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t call it ‘bonding,’ though I got a sense that’s kind of what the kid may have wanted, even if he couldn’t put it into words. If it’s just you and his sis, he probably longs for some male bonding. I know I did at his age when it was just me, Mom, and Dee.”

  “Your mother left your father too?” she asked tentatively, wondering if it was intrusive to ask. She slowly placed the boxes she held on the stack.

  “It’s hard to leave a man who’s still married and living with someone else.”

  “Oh,” she whispered, unsure of how else to respond.

  “But I still secretly would’ve liked having my dad around,” he confessed. “Or if not him . . . a guy who could’ve taken his place.”

  She grimaced. “I wonder sometimes if Cabe misses his father, but he never talks about it.”

  “Are you really surprised, though? I bet he knows how you feel about his father. Why would he talk about him?”

  Tracey felt prickles of irritation at his statement, but she quickly patted them down. It was obvious Aidan wasn’t needling her anymore or being passive-aggressive. He seemed earnest. He also was offering an insight she hadn’t considered.

  “Look, I know that the way I’ve . . . I’ve handled this may not be the best, but it’s not like they give you an instruction manual for this type of thing!” she said.

  She looked again at Paul’s doppelgänger, who was closing the glass door to the freezer after taking out two canisters of gelato—peppermint bark and chocolate hazelnut. He didn’t seem wary of Tracey anymore; he was back to ignoring her. He strolled to the end of the aisle, then disappeared behind a line of shelves. She returned her gaze to Aidan.

  “I’m just winging it,” she said.

  “Hey, I get it! And I’m sure you’re doing fine. They seem like good kids, and considering everything, they seem well-adjusted too.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. And . . . uh . . . if you want me to hang out with Caleb a little . . . give him some of that male bonding he may be yearning for, I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Really?” For the first time since she had been around Aidan, she smiled at him. It was a real smile, not a forced one. “You would . . . you would do that?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Well, you didn’t seem to want to be around them . . . around us when we moved in. I thought maybe you just didn’t like kids.”

  He stared at her. A change washed over his face, an expression she couldn’t quite pin down because it flashed so quickly. But within seconds, he was smiling again, and the smile looked genuine. “I like kids, Tracey. I just hate the bratty ones. I wasn’t sure what brand you were bringing with you to Harbor Hill, but like I said, now I know for sure they aren’t brats. If you need me to help with Caleb, I’m willing.”

  She stared at him in shock, momentarily struck speechless. Suddenly, Aidan had transformed from a man she loathed to one she could see herself considering as a friend.

  “Thank you, Aidan,” she whispered, feeling a thaw set in. “Thank you so much!”

  “No problem.” He held the grocery list aloft. “Now let’s get back to shopping.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “All right,” Delilah said as she placed two tin pans filled with sweet potato and pumpkin pie on one of the oven’s metal shelves, sending a blast of hot air into her face, filling her nose with a whiff of cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar.

  The children sat at the kitchen island as she did it—Caleb on one of the wooden stools and Maggie in her high chair.

  “Now we let them bake for a little more than an hour,” she said, closing the oven, setting the digital timer, and turning to them.

  “Then what do we do?” Caleb asked.

  He and Maggie were licking the remaining bits of pie filling from their fingers and spatulas. It was their reward for helping Delilah make the desserts.

  “We reheat them after dinner, and we eat them.”

  “But what else do we do?”

  “What do you mean, honey?”

  “I mean what do we do no
w . . . so we don’t get bored?”

  “Well . . . I don’t know!” Delilah chuckled. “I guess Miss Dee didn’t plan that far ahead. I thought your mama would be back by now and she’d keep you occupied,” she said as she glanced at the digital clock on the microwave.

  It was almost two-thirty. Aidan and Tracey had been gone for more than an hour. Why hadn’t they returned from the store yet? She hoped they were finally getting along.

  Delilah had sent the two on an errand under the guise of buying groceries she had forgotten, but that wasn’t the real reason. She’d done it so they would finally interact with one another, since the two seemed to go out of their way to pretend the other didn’t exist. She refused to sit with them at the table tonight with either Aidan conspicuously absent or having to endure a stilted, unsatisfying meal while Aidan and Tracey looked through each other like they were windowpanes. She’d had enough of that childish nonsense.

  Delilah guessed that, in some small way, she should be relieved Tracey was the first woman who’d lived at Harbor Hill whom Aidan hadn’t tried to bed in quite a while. Oh, he’d thought Delilah hadn’t heard him tiptoeing down the hall to the women’s rooms late at night, only to creep back to his room in the wee hours of the morning, but she had. The walls in the bedrooms weren’t that thick. At least, he’d had good enough sense and the decency to keep his distance from the more tenderhearted girls. She would’ve snatched him by the ear and given him a verbal blistering if he’d hadn’t, but thankfully, such lectures hadn’t been necessary.

  Delilah suspected Aidan was sticking his ding-a-ling in just about everything and anything because he wanted to bury his heartache and forget the pain he had left behind in Chicago—but he was a grown man, as he often told her. It wasn’t her place to question what he did with his life. Fortunately, Aidan wasn’t her concern right now. The children were, and they were staring at her expectantly, waiting for her to give them something to do.

  She went over the list in her head of the things she had left to cook, clean, and prepare. All of it was too complicated for the children to assist her.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t really have anything for you.”

  “Maybe we can play a game!” Caleb piped, still sucking his fingers. “Do you have a game we can play, Miss Dee? Toys we could play with?”

  “Toys,” Maggie echoed before shoving the plastic spatula back into her mouth.

  Delilah’s brow wrinkled. “You don’t want to play with your own toys?”

  “We play with those all the time!”

  “Well, Miss Dee doesn’t really keep toys around the house.” She walked toward the island. “But maybe I could—”

  “Come on now, Dee! That’s not true,” Cee whispered, halting her in her steps. “You shouldn’t lie to the kiddies. It’s not nice to lie, beautiful!”

  That’s when she remembered it: the chest. The chest with the broken lock in the corner of one of the upstairs bedroom closets. It had been there for more than forty years.

  Soon after she’d arrived home to Harbor Hill from prison, Delilah had gone to great lengths to exorcise the house of all symbols of her tortured past. She had given away furniture that had been in the Buford family for decades. She had repainted all the walls herself. She had tossed out everything Cee had owned, with the exception of his old silver flask; she had never found it and therefore couldn’t throw it away. The chest was the one thing she hadn’t taken to the county dump or given to the local Salvation Army.

  “Did you forget what you were about to say, Miss Dee?” Caleb asked.

  Delilah blinked at him, abruptly yanked back to the present. “I’m sorry, honey. What did you say?”

  “I asked you if you were about to say something and forgot it.” He dropped his spatula into a glass bowl, then rested his elbows on the butcher block. “Mommy does that all the time! She said sometimes there’s so much going on in her head that she can’t think straight.”

  Delilah laughed again. “No, I didn’t forget what I was going to say. I just remembered something I’d forgotten.”

  Caleb stared at her quizzically. “Huh?”

  “Come on,” she said, reaching around the island to rub his shoulder. “I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  Delilah flicked on the light switch on the wall, revealing a plain white, ten-by-ten-foot room with two small, shuttered windows. The room was filled with three-foot-tall towers of cardboard boxes and one solitary wooden desk covered with stacks of yellowing paper and an old Smith Corona typewriter.

  While they stood in the doorway, surveying their new surroundings, Bruce strolled inside the room, sniffing his way through the maze of boxes.

  “Eww! It stinks in here!” Caleb exclaimed, pinching his nose.

  Caleb was right. The guest room did have a distinct smell—a stale stench born of dust and cobwebs, of confined spaces that hadn’t been aired out in years.

  “Don’t let the smell scare you off!” Delilah gave a conspiratorial smile as she carried Maggie inside and beckoned for Caleb to follow her. “We’re here to find hidden treasure.”

  Caleb squinted up at her, releasing his fingers from his nose. “Hidden treasure? You mean like pirates?”

  “Yep, and the treasure is in a real pirate chest.”

  His face lit up.

  Delilah hoped the chest wouldn’t be too hard to find, though she knew it was buried under decades’ worth of junk. She hoped its contents were still in reasonably good condition too and weren’t just measly remains left behind by moths and dust mites.

  “Stand over there and hold your sister’s hand,” Delilah said as she walked toward the bedroom closet’s door. “Miss Dee hasn’t opened this closet in who knows how long! There’s no telling what might tumble out.”

  “Okay.” Caleb drew Maggie to his side.

  Delilah twisted the gold knob and gave the door a hard tug. When it popped open, she jumped back, barely missing getting hit in the head by an old tennis racket and an album cover. The racket caught Bruce on the tail, however, sending him scampering from the room.

  “I guess scaredy cat’s out,” she murmured, before glancing over her shoulder at the remaining duo behind her. “Should we keep going?”

  “Yeah,” Caleb said, nodding.

  She dropped to her knees, listening to her joints crack. Delilah began to dig, fighting her way through the dark closet, through piles of clothes, boxes, and old shopping bags, sneezing and blinking her watery eyes from all the accumulated dust.

  “Do you need any help?” Caleb called to her.

  She glanced over her shoulder at him, noticing his look of concern.

  “No, honey, I’m doing just fine!” she lied as she gulped for air, then winced at the taste of mothballs on her tongue. “I’m almost done anyway.”

  She finally spotted the chest under a pile of old coats. After several grunts and tugs, she managed to get it out of the closet.

  “It is a real pirate chest!” Caleb shouted, rushing across the room toward her.

  Maggie toddled after him.

  Delilah knelt in front of chest, reverently running her hand over the brown leather, gold studs, and latch.

  “Let’s open it, Miss Dee!” Caleb said, rubbing his hands together eagerly.

  Despite his keenness to dig in, Delilah hesitated. Would opening the lid be like opening a time capsule or, worse, Pandora’s box? Would a rush of memories and emotions, both good and bad, overwhelm her? Would they be recollections she would cling to forever or ones she would be more than happy to forget? But she had promised the children they could have what was inside the chest. She took a deep breath, bracing herself for the onslaught of whatever she might encounter. She slowly raised the lid.

  Delilah noticed the plush yellow bunny first—the one with the button eyes she had purchased from Macy’s in New York City during her and Cee’s brief honeymoon. Then she saw a stack of lace-trimmed bibs, a mobile that would have hung over her baby’s crib, and a Fisher-Price Barky the
Dog.

  Delilah sniffed. Her eyes began to water again, and this time not because of the dust.

  Aidan thought he was the only one who had endured a loss that seemed almost impossible to bounce back from. But she had experienced one too when she lost her baby. To her relief, she felt sadness now, but not the awful pain she had experienced the day the doctor had broken the news to her.

  “Wow, look at all the toys!” Caleb yelled.

  Delilah eased back, blinking through her tears as Caleb and Maggie dove almost headfirst into the chest.

  She watched their pure joy at discovering the new toys, how they marveled at them like they were objects from some alien planet. Soon her sadness shifted to laughter as she watched Maggie wrap a baby blanket around her waist and pretend to do the hula.

  “Thank you, Miss Dee!” Caleb said, kissing her cheek, catching her off guard and making her grin. He then grabbed Barky the Dog and began to tug him around the room by the string, making yips and barks. “This is cool!”

  That’s when something in her broke. She couldn’t hold back the tears anymore, but at least they were happy ones.

  * * *

  By the time Tracey and Aidan finally arrived home from the grocery store, the children were in the living room, and the toys were strewn everywhere. The kids were lost in play, having erected a multicolor dream coat of a tent from all of Delilah’s old knitted blankets and quilts. Caleb had proclaimed that the stuffed bunny and a few of the other toys were now at war, and the tent was their fort.

  “Where’d you guys get all this stuff?” Tracey called out, snatching Delilah’s attention. She stood in the doorway, watching the chaos with amused interest.

  Delilah pushed herself up from her wing chair. “I found it upstairs. They were a few old things that I had. I handed them over to the children, and well”—she gestured to the cluttered room—“they ran with it.”

  “I can see!” Tracey said, stepping into the living room. “Well, thank you for watching them. I’m sorry we were gone for so long, but we wanted to make sure we got everything on your list.”