Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

“Oh, nothing much. Just that she’s getting settled, and she thinks she’ll like Florida. Every other word is about her granddaughter. I guess the real reason she wrote was to remind us to put in a new furnace filter this fall. A few other things like that.” Phyllis frowned. “There’s a part here at the end I couldn’t quite figure out.”

She handed Ben the letter.

He scanned the page and then handed it back. “What’s so mysterious about this? All old people take a proprietary air about everybody else’s kid. Personally, I don’t know why she’s so worried about the creek. It’s not more than a foot deep. There’s no danger of Kate’s getting drowned. And I haven’t seen any snakes down there — not up to now, I haven’t.”

“Well, it’s not only what she said in the letter. It’s the way she’s acted about Kate since she saw her. Almost as if she wouldn’t have sold the house to us if she’d known we had a child. But I’m sure I mentioned Kate to her the first time we came out with the agent.”

Ben lit a cigarette. “Maybe she thought Katie would tear up the place.”

“No, it wasn’t that. In fact, several times I told her how we’ve taken Kate to all kinds of museums and historic homes, and how she’s always been careful with valuable old things. But Mrs. Gastell hardly paid any attention at all to me. She kept saying Katie shouldn’t be allowed to wander all over the place by herself.”

Ben shrugged. “Mrs. Gastell’s seventy years old. People her age think we give our kids too much freedom. That’s all she meant.”

Their daughter had abandoned the lightning bugs and was now making hollyhock dolls, lining them chorus-fashion across the brick path to the grape arbor. Her shorts were grass-stained and the soles of her bare feet were already seasoned a greenish-rust. Ben reflected on her a moment and then he said, “I guess it will be hard on Katie, being alone so much now. It might be a good idea to get acquainted pretty soon with the people around here.”

Phyllis leaned her elbows on his shoulders. “That’s the trouble. Nobody on this road has children her age. But it’s only six weeks until school starts. And in the meantime, there’s plenty around here to keep her occupied. The two of us can start all kinds of projects. I can’t describe what a wonderful feeling it is, not to have people running in for coffee all day long or the phone ringing every ten minutes. Everybody knows this is a toll call, thank goodness. Maybe now I can start on the book.”

Ben stood up abruptly. “No, you don’t. Not after what you went through with that last story. Remember, you promised me you wouldn’t do a thing for the rest of the summer.”

She took his hand. “I didn’t mean anytime soon. I only meant now that we’ve moved. I promise not to write a word until we’re all settled and Kate’s in school.” She called to the child, “I’m going to start your bath now, so don’t be long.”

“In a minute,” Kate said automatically. “Daddy, come here. I made seven pink ones with white hats, and seven white ones with pink hats, and...”

Phyllis smiled and went into the kitchen. She turned on the brass lamp over the round pine table. The planked floor gleamed with a fresh coat of wax. It was a low ceilinged room, full of early morning sunshine and pine-shaded in the afternoon. Women years before her had stood at her window and cleaned berries, kneaded bread, stamped butter with a thistle-patterned mold. Perhaps the room had given them moments of completeness, as it gave her now when she poured milk into a brown earthenware pitcher and set it beside a bowl of tawny nasturtiums.

Then, as she was slightly bent over the table, one hand on the pitcher, Phyllis had the sensation that this room, the whole house, had an inexplicable fullness. That the very atmosphere had absorbed a century and a half of other lives. It reminded her of an incredible camera she had once read about — one that recorded, through heat radiations, images from the past, that were of course invisible to the naked eye. There was something about this house that seemed to retain, at times even emanate, certain... presences. And it was not a feeling that came from any conscious attempt to visualize previous occupants. Somehow this thought disturbed her.

She let go of the pitcher and went into the bathroom. The sound of water rushing from the faucet partially distracted her from whatever had bothered her and she dumped half a jar of bubble soap into the tub. Kate would love her extravagance.

The following day the Reverend Mr. White, rector of St. Steven’s Church, called. He had the same cheery roundness as a Toby jug, smoked good Havanas, and produced a box of licorice cough drops for Kate. Before he left, he told Kate to bring her parents to church Sunday. It’d be a good way for her to make new friends, too.