The House on Harbor Hill

by Shelly Stratton

  “Where did I put it?” Delilah said, turning away from the pile, raising her hand to her head. She tried to recall the last time she had seen it, sifting through her cluttered mind much like she had the contents of her purse. Then she remembered.

  She had left it sitting on one of the footstools in the living room last night after she had gone out to say good-bye to Aidan. How could she retrieve it without being seen by Tracey’s husband?

  She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “I thought you were calling the police,” Caleb said, making her eyes flash open. She turned to find him gazing at her expectantly.

  “We will, sweetheart. I just have to go downstairs to get my phone. This one isn’t working.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  She shook her head. “No, honey, you stay right here.”

  Despite her words, he hopped off the bed. “I want to come with you!”

  “Caleb, I said no!” she shouted, making him shrink back.

  She hadn’t meant for it to come out so harsh, but she didn’t have the patience or the best nerves at that moment. She took a deep breath and rubbed his shoulders. “I need you to . . . to stay up here and watch over your sister. What if she wakes up and no one is up here? She’ll get scared in her room all alone. I need you to watch over her, honey.”

  She could tell from the look on his face that she had finally gotten through to him. She knew the kind of boy Caleb was—eager for responsibility, yearning for approval. He would not turn down the weighty duty of protecting his little sister.

  Ever so slowly, Caleb nodded.

  * * *

  A minute later, Delilah began to creep toward the staircase. As she rounded the newel post and saw the foyer below, she almost froze in place, shocked by what was in front of her. She had heard the chaos upstairs but was not prepared for it visually. The front door sat ajar, and Delilah could spot the house phone sitting abandoned on the front porch. The foyer console table was overturned. Two of the flower vases that had been sitting on top of it now lay shattered on the hardwood floor. The roses and freesias they had once contained were strewn everywhere in the pooling water, like someone had tossed them there as an offering to a bride or a fertility goddess. One of the curtain panels of the bay windows had been ripped down, and the torn cotton fabric and its tassels blew gently in the breeze coming from the outdoors.

  Delilah remembered the last time the house had looked like this, how the light had streamed through the window and the door had been left open. The only exception now was that a body wasn’t crumpled at the bottom of the stairs.

  Tracey’s scream shook Delilah out of her stupor. She jumped and started walking again, finally descending the stairs. The creak of each step sounded like a thunderclap in her ears, but it was nothing compared to the shouting in the kitchen, the clanging and the banging. A real struggle was happening in there, and Delilah’s sense of urgency fought with the need for stealth.

  “Get up! Get up, goddammit! Now where are they? Are they upstairs?”

  “Th-they’re . . . they’re sleeping if they haven’t woken up already,” Tracey stuttered between sobs. “Please, Paul, just—”

  Her words were abruptly cut off by a sharp slapping sound, then a thump. Tracey cried out.

  “I haven’t seen my kids in more than a fucking year! I’m not waiting any longer. You hear me? Take me to them. I want to see my kids! I said get up!”

  As Delilah rushed across the foyer, carefully dodging the debris, she caught a glimpse of Tracey and her husband. Tracey lay on the floor, her face bloodied and streaked with tears. Her legs were twisted underneath her as her hands pried at Paul’s fingers, which were currently entangled in her long dark curls. The hulking man was dragging her across the kitchen tile like heavy luggage.

  Though Tracey had once described her husband as handsome, he didn’t look it at that moment. His face was red and distorted with so much fury and malevolence that he barely seemed human anymore.

  Delilah ran the remaining distance to the living room, hoping that he hadn’t seen her as she did it. She spotted her cell phone instantly. It still sat on the footstool next to one of her opened books, just as she remembered.

  She reached for the phone and stared down at the glass screen. She almost dropped it because her palms were so sweaty and her hands trembled so much. The screen showed that only eight percent of the battery’s charge was left—just enough to make one phone call. She began to dial.

  “Hello, this is the Camden Beach Police Department,” the voice answered on the other end of the line. “Please state your emergency?”

  Delilah hesitated. Again, she felt like she was being transported back in time.

  “Camden Beach Police Department, please state your emergency.”

  Delilah took a shaky breath. She could feel herself being transported back forty-plus years. She could remember standing at the console table in the foyer long ago with a phone headset against her ear. She’d fought the urge to hang up the phone back then.

  I could run, she’d thought at the time. I could pack my bags and disappear before they even found his body. I could be far, far away!

  And now, she wanted to run all over again. But then she could hear Tracey in the kitchen, beaten and screaming. She remembered Caleb sitting on her bed upstairs, ready to protect his little sister and diligently fighting the urge to come to his mother’s rescue. He was willing to be brave.

  “Camden Beach Police Department. I can hear breathing. Is someone there?”

  Delilah closed her eyes, blotting out the vision of her terrified eighteen-year-old self. “H-hello?” she finally answered.

  “Yes, ma’am? What’s your emergency?”

  “Yes, a man has broken into my house,” she whispered, cupping her hand over the receiver. “He’s . . . he’s . . . uh . . . violent and beating up his wife. I think he might kill her. You . . . you have to send someone right way!”

  “I understand, ma’am. I’ll send officers there. What’s your address?”

  “It’s—”

  She stopped when the phone was yanked out of her hand.

  Delilah whipped around to find Paul standing behind her, holding the tip of one of her Wüsthof knives only inches away from her button nose, catching a glint of the morning sun on the cool steel. Tracey stood at his side, hunched over with her head bowed, looking almost ashamed. Delilah watched as Paul pressed the button to hang up her phone, stopping the dispatcher mid-question.

  “So this is your house?” he asked. His lips were so tight they were almost white. His blue eyes were dilated and rimmed in red.

  Delilah gradually nodded. “Y-yes.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” He grinned then dropped the knife down to her neck, letting the tip hover a mere centimeter away from her jugular. “Now take me to my fucking kids.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Aidan raised his head from the sofa cushion, squinting at the bright light coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. He pushed himself up to his elbows, almost feeling a sense of vertigo as he did it. He closed his eyes and waited for the world around him to settle, then opened his eyes again.

  For a few seconds, he couldn’t recall where he was. He wondered why he wasn’t lying in his bed back at Harbor Hill and was, instead, sprawled on a rickety futon, surrounded by a sea of cardboard boxes with no other furniture. Then he remembered he had moved out last night. He’d arrived at his new condo and drunk himself into a stupor. He must have blacked out because he didn’t remember lying down, let alone falling asleep here.

  With a tired groan, Aidan sat up. He rubbed his eyes, then shoved his hand into his hair, cupping his throbbing forehead. He made several failed attempts to rise to his feet before finally staggering into his eat-in kitchen. The cabinets were still bare, but he had managed to pick up a few items during his stop at the gas station last night and load them into the fridge.

  “Breakfast of champions,” he said, bypassing the shrink-wrapped club sandw
ich and the carton of OJ and going straight to the six-pack on the bottom shelf. He tugged out a beer and twisted off the lid. He took several gulps, enjoying the sensation of the cold liquid sliding down his parched throat and sloshing around his empty stomach. He then slammed the refrigerator door shut and headed back down the hall to the bathroom to take a shower.

  Aidan was well aware that drinking a beer didn’t qualify as breakfast. It certainly hadn’t a month ago. But today, he didn’t care. He hadn’t drunk this much in years—in almost five years, to be exact. But he didn’t care about that either. Time had taken him full circle; he was back where he started—inebriated, unencumbered, and nestled in a cushion of apathy.

  Aidan had once believed that life was a straight line from start to finish, but now he knew it was cyclical. You experienced the same cycles of love and hope, heartbreak and disappointment again and again. New losses reminded you of old ones. Old wounds could be reopened.

  “You still haven’t healed yet,” Delilah had told him. But the truth was he never would, and he wouldn’t keep deluding himself otherwise.

  He took a quick shower, then stumbled into his bedroom naked, in full view of the open window. He didn’t reach for a towel but instead, let himself air dry, admiring the view.

  Luckily, the only ones in danger of seeing the naked man on the eleventh floor of Bayside Condominiums were the seagulls hovering over the bay, darting their heads beneath the waves to retrieve flounder and striped sea bass. Aidan’s windows faced the open water, giving him the illusion of a man alone on an island. It’s certainly how he felt.

  After he finished his beer, he threw on some underwear and one of the clean T-shirts and a pair of jeans that he’d packed in a spare duffel bag. He walked barefoot into his new living room to begin unpacking.

  The first thing Aidan had done last night when he’d arrived at his new place was to plug in his stereo system and assemble his stack of CDs in an alphabetized row next to it on the bamboo floors. Now, as he arrived in the living room, he beelined toward it, loading a few of the CDs and turning up the volume. The soothing soul music surged from the speakers, and Aidan nodded in appreciation before walking into the kitchen and grabbing another beer. He then sauntered to the tower of boxes in one of the living room corners. He hadn’t bothered to label anything, so it would be a grab bag of random findings: books buried under gym socks, picture frames crammed in with his electric iron and a desktop lamp.

  For about a half hour, he set about his task, listening to one song, then the next. He opened a fourth box, then paused when he saw what was sitting on top of his old basketball jerseys. He squinted as he reached inside and pulled out the object. It was the Incredible Hulk action figure.

  Aidan stared at it in amazement, wondering how Caleb’s toy had made it into one of his boxes. He hadn’t accidentally taken it, had he? And then he realized that the little boy must have put it in there himself, left it there for Aidan to find. The toy that Caleb had carried around like a talisman, he had given away to Aidan.

  “I want to be strong like the Hulk,” he could remember Caleb saying that day on the back porch.

  “Don’t we all, kid,” Aidan had replied.

  Aidan gripped the plastic tighter, blinking as his vision began to blur. He felt one hot tear slide onto his cheek and then another after another. He heard a loud groan and realized that it had come from his own lips. He slowly sank to his knees, still holding the action figure, and began to sob openly.

  He hadn’t cried like this in years, not since he had gotten the phone call from the police about the car crash. He could remember sitting at Trish’s bedside, listening as the heart monitor went flat and the nurses quietly turned off all the machines and left the room. Even her parents hadn’t stayed for that part. Instead, they had walked into the hallway to hold each other and weep softly. But he had stayed until the last moment, until all went silent. He had sobbed and sobbed, more than he thought any human being could. And Aidan hadn’t just cried because his wife was dead, but because his daughter was dead too, and the one person in the world who could understand that pain had been taken from him.

  When he’d left the hospital room, his mother-in-law had tried to embrace him, but he had shaken his head and walked away. The tears hadn’t come again; it was like he’d used them all up. He’d felt alone—utterly alone. He was on his own little island.

  But he realized now that he had been wrong, in more ways than one.

  Aidan continued to cry until his stomach ached, until his eyes were puffy and he could barely see. When he was done, he felt better, strangely enough, like some toxin had been washed out of his system. He staggered to his feet, still clutching the toy. Through blurry eyes, he glanced at the digital clock on the stereo. It was a little after eight A.M. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He would drive back to Harbor Hill and return this wonderful gift, explaining to Caleb that he didn’t need it anymore.

  CHAPTER 39

  Tracey opened the bedroom closet, shaking as her husband loomed behind her.

  “Just grab a suitcase—only one suitcase . . . that’s all you’ll need,” his voice boomed, making her quivering worse. “You can leave the rest of this shit here.”

  Tracey blinked through her tears as she reached inside her closet and pulled out one of her suitcases—a tweed, rolling duffel bag with a leather handle—as he had ordered. She carried it to the bed, unzipped the lid, and flipped it open, realizing almost with a bemused remoteness that it was the same suitcase she had packed when she’d left Paul more than a year ago. It seemed almost ironic to be packing it again to go back to him, though she wasn’t doing so willingly this time around. But it wasn’t like she had much of a choice. If she wanted for her, the children, and Delilah to survive this, she had to do it.

  At least Paul hadn’t hurt Delilah too badly. Tracey had begged him not to. He hadn’t hit or punched her like he had Tracey but had dragged the old woman by the arm up the stairs, making her cry out in pain and Tracey scream for him to stop. That, along with the punch to the arm she had given him after tossing Delilah into the upstairs closet and locking her in there, had earned Tracey a slap to the face. But she’d do it again. Aidan had told her Delilah hated confined spaces, that she was terrified of them, and Tracey could sense from the older woman’s tortured sobs from behind the wooden door that he’d been telling the truth.

  At the thought of Aidan, Tracey paused midway in loading her suitcase, her hand hovering near the top drawer.

  Had Aidan mentioned that he was coming back to the house today to get the last of his things? Would he stumble into the horrific scene downstairs that looked like a mini hurricane had burst through the front door and made its way around the first floor? Would he make the right choice and immediately call the police, or would he come charging inside and run into Paul?

  Tracey shuddered at the thought. Aidan was the same build as Paul and under normal circumstances could probably hold his own in a fight, but her husband seemed to take on an almost superhuman strength when he got angry. He could pick her up as if she was lighter than air and toss her like she was one of the T-shirts that now tumbled from her drawer to the floor as she packed her bag.

  “Speed it up!” Paul barked, making her wince. “I want us out of here in less than an hour. That includes you packing the kids’ things too.” He paused to glance down at Caleb, who anxiously stood at his side, wringing his T-shirt. A smile suddenly came to Paul’s lips, looking as out of place at that moment as the butcher knife he still clutched in his hand, and pointed at Tracey. He nudged Caleb’s shoulder almost playfully. “Anything in particular you want to take with you, kiddo?”

  Caleb blinked like he was holding back tears. He quickly shook his head. “No,” he whispered.

  Tracey had tried several times to catch Caleb’s eye, to touch him and reassure him that everything would be okay, that she would protect him. But he kept evading her gaze. His big blue eyes cagily shifted around him like a cornered
animal.

  Tracey hesitated, then turned around to face Paul. “Are you going to let her out when we leave?”

  Paul’s smile abruptly disappeared. The demented gleam was back in his eyes as he squinted at her. “Let who out?”

  “Delilah. We can’t leave her in the closet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she could be in there for hours . . . or days! Who knows when someone could stop by here. She can’t stay in there. She could die!”

  He raised his brows and took several steps toward her. Instinctively, she took a step back, bumping into Maggie’s playpen. The little girl began to whimper, then cry.

  “If that old hag lives or dies, whose fault is that? You were the one who chose to come here, Tracey. I gave you a nice life, a nice home. I took care of you, of our children, and you deserted me!” He lifted the knife, jabbing it toward her, and she flinched as if it had touched her. “You stole them from me! You stole my life! I had to chase you down, to bribe your mother. I still wouldn’t have found you if it hadn’t been for your landlord suing you for back rent and sending that summons to the house.” He chuckled, and Tracey blanched. She had wondered how he’d found her. “You changed your name, but you didn’t change your Social Security number, Trace. I mean . . . come on! How stupid can you be?”

  She closed her eyes as he continued to laugh, refusing to let him see her hot, angry tears.

  “Your life was so much better without me, huh? It was so much better that you couldn’t even afford to keep a goddamn roof over your head! Now you’re living with strangers?”

  She had asked him about letting Delilah out of the closet, and instead he had chosen to berate her, to humiliate her. And she’d play meek and change the subject. It was an old routine they knew well. Paul loved to be in control, and she’d give him the illusion that he was, even if she wasn’t ready to hand over the reins quite yet.