Chapter Twenty-Three #2
The backyard was strictly utilitarian: an apparent staging area for the ongoing renovations of the house, a padlocked storage shed, and a two-car garage.
Gardening tools were scattered here and there, and an inexpensive set of white plastic garden chairs and a table sat in one corner, one of the chairs lying forlornly on its side.
“Delilah…” Asher cleared his throat as he stepped up to the back door and opened the lock. “My sister added on this mudroom when she was doing the renovation. She didn’t want people tramping dirt into her beautiful home.”
He paused upon entering, as if listening for something.
“Everything okay, Asher?” Harper asked after a moment.
“Of course,” he said, letting out a breath and rolling his shoulders. “Ghosts in the walls, that’s all.”
“Ghosts where, now?” said Highbaugh from the garden.
Asher flashed a smile. “Memories. Regrets, hopes dashed. That’s what ghosts are, right? Come on in.”
The small room was more solarium than mudroom, its walls made of numerous small-paned windows. A series of brass hooks along the inner wall held an apron, a couple of jackets, a straw hat. Resting on the floor below was a shelf on which sat a pair of old sneakers and muddy boots.
Harper was struck in that moment, in a way she hadn’t been before, by a sense of Delilah as a person and not just as a victim of a shocking crime.
She was someone who used to put on a straw hat before walking out into the sunshine or pulled on her jacket and boots to ward off a chill from the damp fog rolling in off Monterey Bay.
Delilah had been a living, breathing person, a soul walking this earth.
And now she was a glimmer of a memory.
The mudroom door opened onto a spacious kitchen decorated in rustic but beautifully finished wood cabinets, with bunches of herbs and braids of onions and garlic hanging from roughhewn beams overhead. A large window above the sink looked out onto a side garden.
Beyond this was another small room lined with books.
Next to the window was a big, comfy-looking armchair with a fuzzy blue blanket draped over the back and a matching footrest. It was easy to imagine Delilah snuggling up here with a novel and a cup of tea, or a glass of whiskey, a purring cat in her lap.
As their trio advanced farther into the house, Harper began to feel the strange sensation that had overcome her the last time she was here: Her feet seemed to be moving without moving, the walls were closing in on her, and she felt dizzy, detached, as if she were in a fugue state.
Everything seemed to blend together, the past and the present, the living and the dead.
She tried to regulate her breathing, hoping to calm herself.
In the hallway, she glanced toward the basement door. It rattled slightly. She could not look away as the knob began to turn…
“Harper?”
Harper let out an undignified yelp.
“What’s up?” continued Asher.
The knob on the basement door was still.
“Nothing,” she said. “There’s no one except us in the house, is there?”
Asher frowned. “I certainly hope not.”
Me, too.
Harper joined the men in the main living room, which was chock-full of paintings and collectibles.
As before, she noticed that many surfaces were covered in fingerprint dust, the dark powder casting strange, ethereal shadows here and there: on a wineglass, around the doorknobs, and on the stair’s newel-post.
She glanced at the mirror over the fireplace, still cloaked by a dark gray cloth. It repulsed and frightened her, and yet at the same time her fingers itched to remove the shroud and gaze into the shiny surface of that looking glass.
“Did Delilah always drape the mirror like that?” Harper asked.
“I don’t think so,” Asher said. “At least, I never noticed it. And there’s usually a tarp down—she painted in here.”
“It’s really quite common to place a shroud over a mirror,” Highbaugh said. “Part of many mourning rituals. It’s done in a house of the dead, so the spirits aren’t attracted to it.” He seemed suddenly embarrassed, and shrugged. “Or so my mother used to tell me.”
“But why would Delilah have draped the mirror? As far as she knew, nobody had died here, right?” Harper asked.
“Are you suggesting the murderer did it?” asked Asher.
“More likely somebody since then,” Highbaugh said sensibly.
“Somebody, like whom?” Asher demanded, agitated. “Is it a common thing for police officers to do something like that?”
Highbaugh looked taken aback. He held up his hands in surrender. “My apologies. I should not have said anything.”
“No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” Asher said with an endearing duck of his head. “I’ve been on edge lately. It was probably Mario. He seems like a superstitious sort.”
Asher reached up and whipped the shroud off the mirror. Harper gazed at the looking glass, and her breath caught in her throat.
The woman in white stood behind her, her rebozo covering her head and shoulders and obscuring her face. Harper could make out only her glowing eyes. The figure reached out long, pale, ethereal arms, as if appealing to Harper for something.
Harper opened her mouth to speak, then realized the men were discussing Delilah’s paintings. They hadn’t seen a thing.
Heart pounding, she turned her back on the mirror. Was she really seeing something, or was it her imagination?
“Most of her canvases are in here,” Asher was saying to Highbaugh. “There are more in the closet, I believe. Feel free to look through them.”
“Thank you,” Highbaugh said. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and walked over to a stack of canvases leaning up against the wall and began emitting soft oohs and aahs as he browsed. “Mr. Mason—”
“Call me Asher, please.”
“Asher, then. May I suggest you have these professionally photographed and cataloged? I’ll be happy to arrange it. My man Emerson is taking photographs of all Ms. Mason’s paintings in Benjamin Philips’s current collection, but those are mostly from her California impressionist period.”
“ ‘Your man’ Emerson?” Harper interrupted.
Highbaugh nodded. “He does some photography for me.”
“Is that Sergeant Emerson? I think I met him on base,” said Harper. “I thought he was military police.”
“He is. He is also a freelance photographer.”
“Are military personnel allowed to moonlight?” Harper asked.
“I am not familiar with the military’s policy on outside employment,” said Highbaugh with a sniff. “Does it matter?”
Asher was watching this exchange with a bemused look on his face.
He stepped in with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“I honestly don’t care about the details.
You offered to catalog these paintings, Alastair, and I appreciate your help.
If that includes having them photographed, then have them photographed.
We’ll…I suppose we’ll have to decide which to sell and which to keep at a later date.
This has all happened so quickly, I’m not even sure whether there’s an updated will to be executed, or if I’m the sole heir, as her only living relative. ”
“Yes, yes, of course. Do you mind if I take snapshots with my phone, just to jog my memory?”
“Be my guest,” Asher said. “So, Harper? You said you wanted to see the basement?”
“Um, not exactly. Detective Serrano wanted me to take a look the other day, but we sort of got interrupted,” Harper said. “Still, I would like to get that journal I mentioned yesterday, if you’re still willing to part with it.”
“Delilah loved the basement,” Asher said, half to himself. “First thing she did when we bought the place: located the basement door. It had been nailed shut and covered over with paneling.”
“Why was it covered up?”
“I have no idea. After what happened with the original owners, maybe no one had the stomach for an underground laboratory.”
“How did Delilah even know it was there?”
“When we were kids, we found a little basement window just big enough to allow us to slip through. Delilah was fascinated by it. That’s where she found the journal I mentioned to you, though I’m not sure if it’s the same one you saw.
She has so many things, everywhere.” Asher looked over at a bookshelf crammed with tomes and crowded with tchotchkes, sighed, and shook his head. “It’s a lot to deal with.”
“Asher, I don’t mean to tell you what to do,” said Harper in a gentle voice. “But you lost your sister not long ago, and it was a terrible shock. You might want to take a while before you make decisions about her estate.”
He nodded, but she wasn’t sure if he was listening. Grief brain. She remembered it well.
“I understand that in addition to being an artist, your sister was also something of a scientist, experimenting with natural tonics.”
He murmured: “Delilah’s Gift.”
“I’m sorry?”
“She used to joke about it,” Asher laughed. “ ‘Gift’ means ‘poison’ in German.”
“Poison?” Harper repeated. She noticed that Highbaugh was staring at Asher, a shocked look on his face. “Why would she joke about something like that?”
“It was her sense of humor,” Asher said with a slight inclination of his head. “I thought it was funny, too. We shared a weird sense of humor, I guess. She was convinced that the so-called medications on the shelves were the real poison, while she had the secrets to the real cures.”