The House on Harbor Hill
By Shelly Stratton
The House on Harbor Hill
Between Lost and Found
The House on Harbor Hill
Shelly Stratton
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part I - Camden Beach, Maryland September 2016
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
Part II - Chevy Chase, Maryland May 1968
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
Part III - Camden Beach, Maryland November 2016
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
Part IV - Chevy Chase, Maryland November 1968
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
Part V - Camden Beach, Maryland April 2017
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
The House on Harbor Hill
Discussion Questions
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
DAFINA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2018 by Shelly Stratton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Dafina and the Dafina logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1117-5
eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1118-2
eISBN-10: 1-4967-1118-1
First Kensington Electronic Edition: April 2018
To Chloe and Andrew, thank you for your love, support,
and distraction.
To Mom and Dad, thanks for being there from day one.
Part I
Camden Beach, Maryland
September 2016
CHAPTER 1
When Tracey first saw the envelope taped to her front door—a four-by-six-inch yellow square set against blue paint made gray by decades of unrelenting sun—she instantly thought it was an eviction notice.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered under her breath, shifting her sobbing thirteenth-month-old farther up her hip.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” her son, Caleb, asked as he swung his Batman backpack back and forth, making it look as if the caped crusader was about to take flight. He wiped his runny nose with the back of a chubby hand already smudged with some drying substance that could be chocolate or mud. Wide, blue eyes gazed up at her innocently. The vulnerability in those eyes almost broke her heart.
Sorry, sweetheart. Mommy’s failed you yet again.
The boy had been fed a steady diet of disappointment for the past eleven months.
Tracey painted on a smile and turned to him. “Nothing, honey! Nothing!”
She had to shout to be heard above her daughter’s ear-piercing screams. She bounced Maggie up and down, but the screams didn’t subside; they only increased in intensity.
“It’s all right, honey. It’s okay,” she whispered against the child’s wet, flushed cheek. She then reached for the envelope and yanked it from the front door. There was no address label, so she flipped it over and inspected the back.
“To Tracey Walters,” it said in a script so elegant she wondered if it had been written with a calligrapher’s pen, “from the woman you met at Chesapeake Cupcakery.”
Who?
Tracey’s brows furrowed as she stared, flummoxed, at those words.
When was the last time she had been at Chesapeake Cupcakery—the little shop on Leonardtown Avenue her friend Jessica owned? And what woman had she met there? Invisible fingers groped into her memory, but latched onto nothing.
“What is it, Mommy?” Caleb asked.
Tracey opened her mouth to answer, but Maggie screamed again, making her wince. Tracey hastily tucked the envelope into her purse along with the rest of the mail. She dug out her house key, inserted it into the lock, and shoved the front door open.
She was in no mood for cryptic messages, but at least it wasn’t an eviction notice—though she would probably get one of those any day now.
Her landlord, Mr. Stapleton, had been harping on her for the past few months about the piecemeal rent payments she would slip through his brass door slot late at night or in the wee hours of the morning. Not checks, because he no longer trusted in the validity of any checks she wrote, and frankly, she didn’t blame him. Any check with her signature had more bounce than the red inflatable castle her son liked to play in at Jasper Jumpers—whenever she could afford to take him to Jasper Jumpers, that is. So when Tracey paid her rent, it was either crumpled bills in denominations of twenty and ten that smelled of sweat and peanut oil from the hotel restaurant where she worked or money orders wrapped in a sheet of paper with an apologetic note attached.
I’m sorry I can’t pay more, the last note had read, scribbled in the purple ink of one of her son’s oversized magic markers. I SWEAR I’ll get the rest to you sometime next week!
His response had been that her rent was eight hundred and fifty dollars a month. “Not six hundred! Not five hundred! And certainly not four hundred and fifty dollars!” He said she should look elsewhere for somewhere to live because he had several potential tenants on a waiting list that wanted to live in the home she was renting.
Then times must be harder than I had imagined, she mused, because the two-bedroom, one bath, ramshackle rambler where they lived wasn’t exactly a mid-century modern luxury rental in Palm Springs.
The temperature of the water in their only bathroom was so unpredictable that if you turned on the shower faucet, it was a roll of the dice whether the water would come out icy cold or scorching hot. (She had the scalded shoulder to prove it.) The beige carpets were so threadbare she’d started to cover them with a patchwork of throw rugs to mask the holes. The paint along the ceilings had a maze of cracks like a web of veins and capillaries. The electric outlets sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t. The cockroaches were so numerous she was on the verge of asking them to chip in for the rent. And no matter how high she turned up the heat during cold months, there seemed to be a blustery draft that made its way from the front door to the back porch, causing goose bumps to sprout on her arms and legs whenever she ventured from her bedroom without wearing a robe.
But the house had a roof, a door, and four walls. It had running water and electricity. Her humble home had the essentials, even if it wasn’t perfect. And it was one of the few rentals in this middle-class neighborhood, with its low crime rate and grade-A school district, that she could affor
d on her meager salary.
Tracey wanted to make more money; she had no romantic illusions about the life of a pauper. She’d applied for other, better paying jobs—even jobs where the hours weren’t ideal or the location was so far away from her home she would have developed a stiff neck and a bad back from driving for so long every day. Cashier at Burger King, manning the check-in desk at a seedy motel off Route 4, receptionist at an office building downtown . . . she had applied for them all, but her applications either got lost in the shuffle or she didn’t make “the cut,” according to whomever was holding the scissors. No one seemed eager to hire a college dropout and former full-time, stay-at-home mom.
Desperate, Tracey had even swallowed her pride and tried to apply for financial assistance three months ago. The county caseworker had handed her a clipboard with a form attached, asking not only for her name, address, and the names of her children, but also for their father’s name and address.
“Why do you need this?” Tracey had asked, pointing at the blank space on the page with the tip of her ballpoint pen.
“We need it because the state isn’t going to pay to take care of your kids unless their father can’t to do it,” the woman had answered bluntly as she popped her gum.
Tracey had caught a whiff of spearmint as she spoke.
“Wait. You’re going to contact him? You’re going to make him pay child support?”
The woman had nodded. “Either he pays you or he pays us.” She’d inclined her head. “Look, if you don’t know for sure who the father is . . .” She had paused to glance at Maggie, who had been sitting on Tracey’s lap, sucking her pacifier, and Caleb, who had stood in the corner, making explosion noises as he banged his Incredible Hulk action figure into the wall plaster. “Or if you don’t know who the fathers are,” the caseworker had said, raising her eyebrows meaningfully, “you can always give the names and addresses of your best estimation.”
Tracey had lowered her pen, too stunned by the woman’s words to be insulted.
“It’s no big deal. You wouldn’t be the first. Flip it over and write as many names as you have to on the back of the form.”
The caseworker had then turned back to face her computer screen. As she clicked away at her QWERTY keys, Tracey had stared at the back of the woman’s blond head. She’d silently placed the clipboard back on the woman’s desk, risen from her leather chair, and grabbed her purse.
“Caleb, let’s go,” she’d whispered.
The trio had fled from the welfare office, much like she had fled from her home with the children in tow almost a year ago. They had been at a near run by the time they reached the parking lot.
Tracey still had no intention of returning.
She didn’t want child support from her husband—not one single dime. And she certainly didn’t want to reveal to him where she and the children now lived. If she did, he’d come for her; he’d come for all of them. He’d try to make her come back, and she was never, ever going back.
* * *
“Homework before television!” Tracey shouted half-heartedly over her shoulder as Caleb raced down the short hall to their living room. She veered toward the eat-in kitchen.
As Tracey walked through the kitchen entrance, out of the corner of her eye she saw Caleb beeline for the television, grabbing the remote from their second-hand IKEA coffee table and tossing aside his backpack onto their love seat. He turned on Nickelodeon, ignoring his mother’s command. The sound of lasers and explosions suddenly filled the house.
Tracey’s lips tightened in frustration. She should order him to turn off the television, but Maggie’s screams of agony took precedence over Caleb’s blatant disobedience.
“What he needs is a good smack on the rear end,” she could hear her mother say. “Spare the rod, spoil the child, Tracey!”
But her mother hadn’t done much spanking, let alone disciplining, during Tracey’s own childhood. And since leaving her husband, Tracey hadn’t had much of a stomach for corporal punishment. The idea of raising her hand to Caleb made her almost nauseated.
Tracey dropped both her purse and the diaper bag onto the kitchenette table before falling back into one of the wooden chairs and setting Maggie on her lap. She fished around in the bag’s inner pockets.
“Where is it? Where is it?” she muttered amid the soundtrack of wails and blaring cartoons before finally locating the plastic tube of Orajel. She’d had to buy a spare since Maggie’s babysitter kept losing them.
“Does the woman think I’m made out of money?” Tracey mumbled to herself before covering the tip of her index finger with the bubblegum pink gel and swabbing it on her daughter’s inflamed gums. Gradually, the screams and tears subsided. The baby thumped her head back against Tracey’s collarbone in relief, making her mother wince, then smile.
“All better?”
“Eat! Eat!” Maggie shouted.
Tracey kissed her crown and rose to her feet just as the doorbell rang. She glanced over her shoulder again.
“Eat! Eat!” Maggie chanted as the doorbell rang a second time, followed by a loud knock.
Tracey rushed out of the kitchen and down the hall, perching Maggie on her hip as she did so. She swung open the front door and took a step back in surprise.
Mr. Stapleton stood on the doormat with his fist raised and his hairy knuckles poised to knock again. When he saw Tracey standing in the doorway, he lowered his hand.
He was a short man who resembled a melting candle—his pale, bald head sank into his thick neck, which sagged into his bowed shoulders, which then turned into a doughy frame and finally ended in two stubby feet encased in unremarkable cheap, leather shoes.
“Ms. Walters,” he said, shoving his wire-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose, squinting his watery gray eyes at her.
“Mmm-Mr. Stapleton,” she stuttered, pushing the door farther open. “Umm, look, I know I told you I’d give you the rest of this month’s rent early this week, but I’m going to need a little more time.”
He quickly shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not here to collect your rent.”
“You aren’t?”
He shook his head again. “No. I was hoping you’d be here so I wouldn’t have to dig out my key.” He held up a key ring and jingled it, showing an assortment of more than a dozen keys of all shapes and sizes. “The damn thing isn’t here. I must have left it back at the house. It’d be a pain to have to go back there now. I’d hate to have to postpone the tour.”
She frowned. “Tour? What . . . what tour?”
Tracey watched as Mr. Stapleton suddenly turned and beckoned a couple she hadn’t realized had been standing there the whole time. They were waiting at the end of the driveway near a red hatchback missing one of its hubcaps. The woman had her arms wrapped around her and her head bowed. The man had his hands shoved into his pockets and looked anxious. When Mr. Stapleton waved at them, they immediately shuffled across the yard toward the wooden steps.
“What tour?” Tracey repeated, though she already knew the answer.
Mr. Stapleton turned to her and grinned. “I’m giving a tour to the new tenants.” He extended a folded sheet of paper toward her. “This is your one-month notice to vacate.”
* * *
That night, after the children had gone to bed, Tracey sat alone at the kitchen table, staring at the notice. A chipped glass sat beside her, half filled with a Lodi zinfandel the hotel manager had given to her for Christmas. He’d given a bottle to all the wait staff, a splurge meant to reward them for a stellar year filled with happy tourists who readily opened their wallets and plunked down more than twenty bucks for frozen scallops and overcooked lobster at the hotel’s restaurant.
She hadn’t opened the bottle when she’d received the gift, deciding to save it for some special occasion, keeping it in its feather-fringed gift bag and tucking both in the cabinet underneath the sink next to the bottles of 409 and Pine Sol. But tonight, she pulled the cork and finished a third of the
bottle. She figured losing your home was a rare enough occasion to warrant getting drunk on a decent wine.
Tracey twirled the gift bag around and around her index finger and raised the glass to her lips. As she sipped, she tossed the bag aside and began to write on the blank side of the eviction notice how much money she had left. As soon as she’d begun to dream of her great escape, she had squirreled money away like acorns to last her through the cold, hard winter. Now, less than a year after leaving Paul, Tracey was already at the last of it—a sum total of three hundred and twenty-seven dollars.
She then calculated how much money she would need to move to a new place: first month’s rent, deposit, hiring movers, etc.
There’s a big difference between those two numbers, she thought forlornly.
She reached for her purse. It was still sitting on the kitchenette table. She shoved her hand inside in search of her latest bank statement among the bills that had arrived in her mailbox that day, foolishly hopeful she had more money than she remembered. Instead, she pulled out a yellow envelope. She stared at it in bewilderment, wondering why this was in her purse, and then she remembered.
The elegant script on the back . . .
The woman from Chesapeake Cupcakery . . .
She examined the envelope, laughing softly to herself. The parchment was thick, and you could spot its woven pattern even with the naked eye. It looked like something you would send to invite someone to a wedding or an induction ceremony. How could she ever have mistaken this for an eviction notice?
She opened it and tugged out the letter inside. As she read it, her smile disappeared.
Dear Ms. Walters,
I saw you and your beautiful children at the Chesapeake Cupcakery. You seem like a warm woman, though—I hope you don’t mind me saying this—a bit worried and maybe even a little scared. I want to assure you that you are not alone in this world. Please accept my invitation for help of any kind. My door is always open.