“See?” Dhaval whispered to Delilah.
“The last time I saw her,” Vani continued, “she needed someone to help her open a safe-deposit box in town for her documents. She was wary of those places—banks, government offices, anything official, you see. When we were downstairs, she mentioned she thought she’d done the blessing ceremony wrong. I asked what she meant, but she only said the house felt fuller. She was thrilled by it, though. And that was that.”
“You didn’t see her after?”
“No, Delilah. She was always a bit of a hermit; I just assumed it had grown worse. You want to let people have their oddities.”
“We found Hilary’s key to the box,” Delilah explained. “After the fire, that was it. We were going to check the safe-deposit box to see what his mother had left there and try to get away from the house. From town. But then his mother called, and he went there looking for her and told me to go to the bank.”
Dhaval leaned forward, shock all over his face. “You were going to leave?”
Delilah stared at him with wide eyes. “Hell yes, we’re going to leave!”
“Dee, your grades are so go—”
“Dhaval! This thing set my house on fire! I don’t care about my grades right now! I can finish high school somewhere else!”
Vani’s eyes cleared in understanding. “You tried, but couldn’t get into the safe-deposit box.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“And you knew before you came here that I have access,” Vani said quietly.
“Please, I need your help.”
Vani stood, nodding. “Let me get my things.”
Delilah stopped her with a hand on her arm, eyes already apologetic. “Auntie, I can’t leave town without Gavin.”
“I know, jaanu.”
Delilah’s voice dropped to barely a whisper. “Can you help me get him out? I don’t know what I’m dealing with here.”
“I can try. The bank is on the way. It won’t take more than a few minutes, and then we’ll go to your Gavin. But, Delilah, it’s more than getting him and leaving town. If this is all true, we’ll also need to get rid of the haunting, and I can rely only on very rusty knowledge for that.”
? ? ?
With Vani at her side, getting access to the safe-deposit box was simple. A flash of identification, a signature on a form, and they all followed Kenneth down into the belly of the building.
“When you’re done,” he said in his quiet, warm voice, “put the box away and come on upstairs. Or, if you prefer, I can help you store it.”
The box itself was long and flat, and it felt too light to hold all of the answers Delilah needed.
And, in fact, the box held only seven pieces of paper: two photos, three handwritten pages that looked as if they’d been hastily torn from a notebook, Gavin’s birth certificate, and the deed to the land beneath the house. They took it all and headed back to the car.
“Do we wait here for him?” Vani asked. “It’s only ten, Delilah. He told you he would be here at eleven.”
“I can’t sit here and do nothing. There’s no way everything is going fine over there.”
With Dhaval driving and the calming hum of the engine all around them, Delilah went through the pages. Hilary was beautiful, in a wild sort of way. In one picture her brown hair was pulled from her face with leather ties and jeweled clips. She wore a flowing, layered blue dress. Her black eyes gleamed in happiness, and she held a baby Gavin in her arms as if she’d won the entire world when she had him.
In the second Gavin was older, clearly barely walking as he tilted—nearly toppling—and Hilary crouched on the sidewalk before him, arms open in welcome. Behind them, the house loomed, the window eyes staring down at them on the street.
Delilah could already feel the life there, and a violent shiver ran down her arms.