Chapter Eight
Eight
The next morning Harper awoke to her phone buzzing on the bedside table. She grabbed it and groggily read a text from Tariq:
Good morning! Just checking in. You doing okay?
It was nice, having someone follow up with her.
Someone who cared. Harper remembered that when she and Grant first got together, he would always check in on her when she went on a trip, and insist she let him know she had arrived safely.
Over time the check-ins tapered off, then eventually stopped altogether.
Had Grant’s feelings already begun to wane?
Had they grown too accustomed to each other, as a couple?
Had he lost patience with her sister Scout’s never-ending pleas for money and Harper’s feelings of guilt toward her?
Had he tired of Harper’s lack of professional success and her insistence on waiting to have children?
One of the hardest things about looking back on a marriage through the prism of infidelity was wondering if the relationship—the laughter, the closeness, the shared jokes—had ever been real or if it had all been false from the start.
She texted Tariq: Finally got a little sleep, which helped. How about you?
Hanging in there. See you tonight?
Harper hesitated, reaching for an excuse to duck the weekly get-together at a local pub called the Pearl.
She wouldn’t mind so much if it were just the two of them, but Tariq seemed bound and determined to develop Harper’s friend circle and always invited coworkers from the aquarium, others from Monterey College, the Defense Language Institute, and old childhood friends who still lived in the area.
Harper was not exactly a party person. During the pandemic shutdown she secretly enjoyed being relieved of the pressure to socialize; she could research and write all day without interacting with people.
Grant said this was due to her lamentable “hermit tendencies,” and over the years what had begun as a loving tease turned increasingly critical.
Harper was loath to admit that Grant was right about anything. Still, she knew it was good for her to take an occasional break from her work, extricate herself from the past, and engage with life in the real world. Especially since she was new in town.
She texted: Wild horses and all that.
When Harper and Tariq met in graduate school, their lives were eighty percent studying, researching, and writing, and twenty percent socializing and sleeping around.
They were young and healthy and driven, content to get together to share cheap takeout, which they ate sitting on the floor or on furniture salvaged from the ritzy neighborhoods on Big Trash Pickup Day.
None of them had much money, but they were poor by choice and were wealthy in the life of the mind.
Even then, when she was eating yet another scoop of bland lentils or packet of ramen or walking for miles because she didn’t have the fare for a ticket on BART, Harper had been aware of how lucky she was.
Tariq had been just another one of their friend group, and although they spent a lot of their free time together, they were not especially close.
She knew him as a quiet, steady guy, smart and hardworking, the first to borrow a pickup truck and show up early on a Saturday morning to help a friend move from one sketchy apartment to the next.
In some ways Harper barely knew Tariq, while in other ways he felt like family. A distant cousin, maybe, someone she didn’t know well yet to whom she felt a distinct and long-term connection.
Harper shrugged into her robe and slippers and shuffled into the kitchen to make coffee.
The studio apartment had been built in the 1930s, and Ellen had remodeled it twenty years ago with an eye toward updating the plumbing and wiring while keeping the original charm: the wooden wainscoting was painted a creamy white, the eight-pane sash windows were framed by handmade gingham curtains, and an old-fashioned, oval braided rug with a comfy upholstered reading chair sat next to a small woodstove.
Her queen-size bed was at the far end of the room and symbolically sectioned off by a rice-paper folding screen, while the small kitchen was up front, near the door.
The dining table doubled as her desk, which was not ideal, but it sufficed.
There simply wasn’t room for yet another piece of furniture.
The studio apartment was a major step down from the four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath, colonial-style house she had owned with her ex-husband, but it had everything Harper needed, it was easy to keep tidy, and its simple, sunny charm suited her.
From the first moment she walked in, it had felt like home. Safe and warm. Sheltering. Healing.
While her coffee was brewing, she switched on the old-fashioned radio that had come with the apartment to listen to Good Morning, Monterey on the local public radio station.
“At the top of our news this morning, famed Monterey artist Delilah Mason passed away early yesterday after being found in distress in the garden of her downtown home. Police have released few details, but unnamed sources describe a shocking scene. Mason was transported to Natividad trauma center in Salinas, where efforts to resuscitate her failed and she was pronounced dead. Police are asking anyone who may have any information to contact the Monterey Police Department.”
One of the first things Harper had done when she moved to Monterey was to subscribe to the print edition of the local paper, The Monterey Herald.
She knew it was old-fashioned of her to read hard copies, but as a historian she understood the importance of physical documents—not to mention, she believed in supporting local journalism.
She ran quickly down the stairs to the driveway to scoop up this morning’s paper and brought it back to her apartment.
The day was sunny and already warming up, so she propped the door open with the heavy antique iron she used as a doorstop and let the fresh air in.
She took a seat at the table to savor her morning coffee and peruse the paper. Delilah Mason’s death was big news in this small and generally murder-free town, and the story was splashed on the paper’s front page.
Accompanying the article was an artsy black-and-white Annie Leibovitz photograph of Delilah that had been taken several years ago.
Delilah was beautiful, strong-looking, her gaze steady and challenging, and her full lips were shaped into a barely-there Mona Lisa smile.
Her eyes were light and piercing, a striking contrast to her dark hair and eyebrows.
According to the article, she was forty-six when she died, divorced with no children, and survived by her brother, Asher Mason of Pacific Grove.
She had studied at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and London’s Royal College of Art, had won numerous awards, and her art was still represented by Bentley and Highbaugh’s Fine Art Gallery in Carmel.
That was it. The encapsulation of a life.
Harper sat back and gazed out the window, pondering how a laundry list of facts about a person failed to convey what they were really like, what truly mattered to them, and about them.
She remembered sweating bullets over her mother’s obituary, trying to express how special she had been. How much she had mattered.
What could Delilah Mason possibly have done to inspire someone to murder her, and in such a grisly fashion?
The article only hinted at the grisly circumstances of her death but revealed that she had been found in the Séance Garden, under the huge “Witch Tree.” The journalist had apparently done their homework and drew parallels to the long-ago demise of Isabel Perles.
Referring to the ghost tour, the article quoted Joel Aristide: “I warned the tour group of the danger of seeking out the spirits of the dead. That is always a risk, but one I believe is well worth it.” The article concluded by stating that anyone interested in learning more about the ghost tours, or spirits in general, could contact Joel Aristide and included his email address and website.
Huh.
Sigrid had called it: Joel had not hesitated to take advantage of the ghastly death of his alleged friend, Delilah Mason.
That took a pretty cold heart, didn’t it?
Harper recalled how Joel had sobbed as he spoke to the detective, seemingly as horrified by Delilah’s demise as the rest of them, if not more so.
Apparently he’d gotten over it. What a guy.
She tossed the newspaper aside and went to take a shower.
People were so disappointing.
Harper stood in the faculty mail room sifting through the various items that filled her mailbox to overflowing: publishers’ book catalogs, newsletters from professional associations, flyers from student groups, reminders from the IT department of a campus-wide computer update next Sunday.
The vast majority of these went straight into the recycling bin.
She opened a large manila envelope and found a copy of the front page of The Monterey Herald with the article about Delilah Mason circled in red ink.
Harper had not been named in the article; who on campus would have made the connection?
“Oh, Harper! I heard you were at the Perles Mansion the other night. On a ghost tour, of all things, wasn’t it?” came a voice from the hallway.
Harper steeled herself. It was her colleague Naomi, whom—in response to Harper’s confidential complaints—Tariq had nicknamed “Naomi the Nemesis.”