Stillwell: A Haunting on Long Island

by Michael Phillip Cash

  “Mom and Dad will stop by tomorrow. I told them you have to get into some kind of normalcy.”

  Veronica served him a hot cup of coffee. It had too much cream in it. He missed the way his wife always put in the right amount. His daughter was watching him expectantly as he took the first sip, scalding his tongue. “Ahhh,” he said and smiled at her. “You made it just the way I like it.” She returned a sunny smile, took Stella’s hand, and went into the den. Then Lisa sat down next to him, her beefy hands closing up the open packages. Jesse retreated to the den as Paul heard the TV on and the muffled beginnings of a fight over the remote. Rolling his eyes, he started to rise, but Lisa put her hand over his, stopping him.

  “You have to have a little patience. It’s going to be hard. I know. You’ve got Mom and me. Dad will help too and then Allison’s parents are going to want to come...”

  She stopped when he gave her a martyred look. “Well, they are grieving too. At least once they go home to the Carolinas, you’ll only have to deal with one set of parents. Look, I told everybody to lay off you guys. You have to find a rhythm. A new rhythm, you know.”

  Paul hung his head, the eggs tasteless in his mouth. He shoved the plate away.

  “She’s gone and you don’t have the luxury to keep wallowing. Man up, Paulie...” She gestured to the den. “You don’t have time to be the grieving widower. The kids need you.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Phil,” Paul replied. “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Well, you don’t have a choice.” She started cleaning up the mess. “When do you have to go back to work?”

  “Soon. They give three days. I’ve been out so many. They’ve really been amazing, but I can’t afford to take much more.”

  “Set up a routine. The kids need it. Jesse’s been a horror. Stella’s barely talking and Roni’s like a shadow. If you don’t start acting more normal, the kids are going to lose it.”

  “I don’t want to be normal,” Paul insisted. “I want to go to sleep and wake up and find everything back like it was.”

  “Well,” Lisa told him from the sink where she was washing the dishes, “we don’t always get what we want.”

  ====

  He managed to get the kids ready for bed. Jesse closed the door in his face asking for privacy. Veronica kissed him good night. As he helped braid her blonde locks, his heart twisted. They were the same color as Allison’s. She was using her mother’s brush, and when she asked him to help her get out the tangles, he saw his wife’s hair entwined with his daughter’s, trapped in the tines of the steel brush.

  His throat closed up, clogged with emotion, and although he said good night, he found he couldn’t say anything else.

  Stella’s room felt ice cold. It was mid-September and unseasonably cool. He checked the window and found it closed, but a draft blew from a vent. He flipped the switch shut, watching her curtains stop fluttering to settle against the windowsill.

  “Oh, I thought that was Mommy’s ghost.”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Stella Luna.” He sat on the bed.

  “How do you know? Maybe Mommy’s a ghost.”

  Paul lay down next to her on the bed and wrapped his arms around her. Stella reached in and took out the chain around his neck. She put Allison’s ring on her pointer finger, her eyes downcast. He loved the way her lashes feathered against her plump cheeks.

  “Mommy is safe in Heaven.” He breathed in her sweet baby smell. Lisa must have given her a bath.

  “No, she’s not. She’s here,” Stella insisted. “Well, she was at Aunt Lisa’s and now she’s here.”

  “If it makes you feel better to think she’s…”

  “No, Daddy,” Stella said even more seriously. She looked at him without blinking. “She’s here. I heard her.”

  He gently disengaged her hands from the chain and started to rise. “OK baby doll, lay down,” he said then kissed her head. “She’s here.”

  Stella smiled, satisfied, and watched her father leave the room, the door slightly ajar. He heard her whisper, “You can come out now, Mommy. He left.”

  Lisa left hours before. The house felt empty. Shutting all the lights, he walked from room to room, picking up discarded clothes and leaving them in the laundry room. They had hired a cleaning woman toward the end—someone to keep up on the housework as Allison’s body failed. He’d have to see if he could strike a deal to get her a few times a week. It was going to be hard, with all the bills; he’d missed so much work and hadn’t sold a house in a while. He shuddered thinking he’d have to start showing houses again. He worked a few miles from his home. He loved this neighborhood. Settled by the English in the 1600s, it was rich in history. Both Paul and Allison had grown up here, next door to each other. They had played as babies together; their mothers had a great friendship that went back to when they had each bought the first new tract homes and developed them into a model neighborhood in the seventies. Paul was a year and a half older, but they had a lifetime of block parties, carnivals, and barbeques that they had shared. There was no question that they were meant for each other, and when they married, they purchased a home in the newer section of the town. A colonial built in the 1980s. It was a bit cramped. They never expected to have three children when they bought the house. They were planning a move to the next village of Jericho, but then Allison got sick. He was a broker in one of the more prestigious Long Island realty companies. A boy wonder, he surfed the housing boom and made tons of money. He had a stellar reputation for finding the right match, and young couples loved working with him. He was best known for nailing great deals that worked within a budget which made him extremely sought after. The added bonus was that Allison could quit her job as a buyer in the city and stay home to raise their growing family. He’d had the perfect life, the perfect wife. Now, to say the least, not so much. He needed a big sale to catch up on all the income he had lost. She had gotten sick in early April. The year before the illness invaded his home, the housing market had tanked, so they had been living off their savings for some time. He lost the whole end of the spring season, making a fraction of what he should have. Luckily, his partner Molly had been able to score some small sales, but he was the strongest of his team. The whole summer he barely left his ailing wife’s side. She entered hospice in late August and was gone the second week of September. The funeral was two days ago, and he hadn’t done any work in almost four weeks. He didn’t even know what was out there.

  He meandered to the makeshift office he created for himself in a corner of the finished basement. It allowed him to search for listings and even check out Facebook once in a while to see what his college buddies were up to. The kids generally played in their rooms, so it was nice to get some private time. But he hadn’t really sat at his home office desk in just over six months. Everything concerning Allison and her treatments filled his days, so for a few minutes, he felt rootless. It was strange to turn on his computer to read things that didn’t revolve around sickness. He opened his laptop, and a bright picture of Allison displayed on the screen. A smile tugged at his lips. It felt rusty, like an unused thing. They took that picture when the kids were playing at a friend’s house. Horsing around in the bedroom, he took revealing pictures of her chest that she had made him erase. He was playing with a new phone he had bought and wanted to test it out. Allison dared him to upload one of the less risqué pictures to his computer to save it as a background. She got sick about three weeks after the picture was taken. A thick cloud of sun-kissed locks framed her face, her lips swollen from the wild make-out session they’d shared. She had the contented look of a well-loved woman, and that she was. He had made long, slow love, knowing they had very little time before the kids returned. He didn’t care, and when she balked that the children would be arriving soon, he teased her by doing the things she loved, all the while telling her they had all the time in the world. He had no idea how time was running out for them. He didn’t realize that lazy afternoons with perfect loving would one
day be a memory. He stared at her beautiful face and couldn’t help but wonder if the cancer was brewing in this picture. She looked healthy; she had even gained a little bit of weight. Her effervescent smile lit up the whole screen. The beacon of her warmth reached out from the picture. She had the capacity to light up a room with her laughter. Everyone liked her; she was the type of person that never spoke negatively about others. If she didn’t have something nice to say, it went unsaid. He touched the tiny mole on her upper lip on the screen, sighing, missing her company. “Shit,” he said. “We didn’t have enough time after all.”

  He didn’t remember how long he sat staring at the desktop picture. Snapping out of his stare, he scrolled through the new listings his office had taken on. There were quite a few exclusives, houses that should have been his. Calls he had made to older couples looking to downsize, that he never followed up on. He had no inventory himself, since the market had crashed. He stopped soliciting new listings. He’d have to get back out there, that was for sure.

  There were thousands of emails, most of them advertisements for products he had purchased for Allison’s treatment. Goji juice, blueberry the natural antioxidant, invitations to test studies, just in case the one she was participating in had halted. His hand hovered over the delete button. Pausing, he decided to go through them. He had a few leads, people looking to rent, which was always good. Referrals from other happy clients, two or three emails each, that had moved on to someone else when he failed to return an answer. A few estates, people he knew trying to sell houses belonging to relatives that had passed away. One caught his eye. It was a returning client. An old friend, sort of. He had gone to school with both Melissa and her husband, Craig Andrews. They all ran in the same crowd when they were younger. He never really liked Melissa, but Craig had been a good friend. Allison never said anything, but he knew she didn’t like her. They did go to dinner a couple times a year, and he always had to coerce his wife into attending. He knew that Melissa made Allison uncomfortable, and he didn’t blame her; she was a phony and he knew it. Melissa had asked him to sell her parents’ home after they both died. Now it seemed her husband’s parents had passed away. He had known them pretty well and was surprised that both were gone. He didn’t remember hearing that either was sick, but he had been out of the loop for some time. They had one of the biggest and more famous mansions in the area. She wanted to unload their house. The email was two weeks old. He picked up the phone and cursed. She probably went with someone else.

  He punched in her number. “Hi, Melissa.”

  “Paul? How are you doing?” she asked hesitantly. “I heard about Allison. Is she doing better?”

  “Well…” Paul sighed, his throat was thick. He hated to have to keep repeating it. It never got easy. “She passed away last Friday.”

  “Oh Paul, I am so sorry. How are you…and those kids? Oh my, how are the kids doing?”

  He cleared his throat, swallowing the lump lodged there. “It’s been hard, but you know...”

  “Yes. I know. I’ve been waiting for you to call. We would have gone to the funeral. What happened?”

  “It was fast; just over six months ago, she was diagnosed. She wanted to keep everything normal.” He laughed sadly. “As if anything can be normal with brain cancer. She didn’t want a fuss and asked for immediate family only at the service. I had to honor her wishes. The kids stayed with my sister ‘til today. I’m trying to get back on track.”

  “She was a great person. I didn’t really know her well, but she was always so sweet and helpful.” It sounded like she took a long drag on a cigarette. “We waited for you, Paul. I wouldn’t dream of going with anyone else. You’re the best in the area.”

  With this Paul felt a lead weight come off his chest.

  “You did such a good job on my parents’ house. Even in this economy, you got us more than we expected. This house is not going to be an easy sell.”

  “Nothing is an easy sell in this market,” he added.

  “It’s not that. You may not want to take it. You didn’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “The house. It was a murder-suicide. Craig’s father killed his mom and then shot himself.”

  “Jeez. Melissa, I am so sorry. I didn’t know. How horrible.”

  “It was devastating. No motive. Well, not that we know of, and the mess. I hired two teams to clean it up.”

  A chill danced along his spine, and he fought the images of Craig’s parents. They were polite people, very proper. A bit on the cold side, but they had always treated him nicely. As a teenager, it was the place to be. He had swum in their pool many times during the hot summers as well as attended quite a few parties in the pool house. The amenities were unbelievable, and he had crashed regularly there throughout high school with the rest of the crowd. For a very short time, he and Craig had a garage band that practiced a couple of times a week. Surrounded by acres of undeveloped land, they could be as loud as they liked. With no small amount of pride, they won second place at the High School Battle of the Bands. This got them a few gigs in local bars, but to the relief of all parents concerned, it fizzled out when they all left for college. The Andrews family was very rich, since it had been here for eons, part of the original colonists to settle in the States. The family members were a permanent part of the landscape; he remembered reading one of them was an important senator in the past.

  “How are Craig and his brothers handling it?” Craig had two brothers and a sister. It was a large family and he knew the siblings had all moved out of New York when they completed their education.

  “Warped, as usual. I don’t know about men and the way they don’t acknowledge grief—” she stopped suddenly realizing to whom she was speaking. “They had a private funeral. There’s not much to say after murder involving your mother and father. Scott and Roy went back to Palm Springs and left us with the mess. Ellen—you remember her, Craig’s sister—is busy saving whales in Alaska and never bothered coming in.” She sighed again. “Craig left for Asia the next day. One of the factories had a fire. Lucky me,” she said and laughed without humor.

  Paul shrugged and realized she couldn’t see his movements. Wanting to get off the phone, he said, “I’ll call him tomorrow. What was the name of the house again, Stillwater?”

  “Stillwell,” she said coldly.

  “Oh right, Stillwell. Hey, is that wishing well still on the property? We used to throw coins down there as kids.”

  “Yes, nothing’s changed.” Melissa was getting bored.

  “Do you have the keys?”

  “I have the rotary luncheon tomorrow, so let’s say we’ll meet there Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Are you up to it? Craig gets home from China tomorrow. He’s been away for almost two weeks. I’ve had to handle everything myself. The fucking bodies were being lowered into the ground and he was already on his way to the airport, along with the rest of his useless family. The father’s brothers stayed. You remember, his uncles. I wish they’d leave.”

  “He has two, right? One of them built the senior housing on Cobble Hill.”

  “Yeah, he’s a contractor and is bothering me to give him the house. He’s coveting the forty acres Stillwell sits on. He wants to put up another one of those fifty-five and older communities. I’m not letting that happen. He screwed us over with Craig’s grandparents’ inheritance. He took a piece of land we were supposed to get. I’ll give the house away before I see him get anything out of it.”

  “Doesn’t the house belong to the whole family?”

  “No, Craig’s father inherited it from the grandparents. Each of the brothers got a piece of land. They are only entitled to some of the contents. We’ll see about that, though.”

  “What about the other brother?”

  “He’s a lawyer. Selfish prick. He just wants his share of the pie. They are like a pack of hyenas...his uncles.”

  It was quiet for a minute. “I just want to dump the house,” she continued. “It has bad vibes.”
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  “Do you have a number in mind?” Paul asked.

  “Craig mentioned the land alone is worth twenty-three million. I know the market is soft.”

  He paused. “It depends on how fast you want it to go. Most people are going to rip down the house either way. I have to look at my comps, but I’m thinking if you want a quick sale, nineteen million will get a lot of notice.”

  “It’s low, and I have to ask Craig. I’ll let you know Tuesday, after I speak to him.”

  There was an awkward silence on the phone. Selling Stillwell for nineteen million would repair Paul’s losses for all of this year. He needed this listing.

  “I’m sorry about your in-laws, Melissa,” he said, breaking the silence. “They were lovely people. I remember going to the house on prom night…They threw us a party. It was the biggest house in Locust Valley.”

  “And the oldest. It’s been there for over a hundred years.”

  “Do you have any of the history on it? Anything I could use to get rid of the taint of their deaths.”

  “No, I hate the place. Always have.”

  “I’ll go to the library and see what I can dig up about the house. Thanks, Melissa. I really mean it. I have been wallowing for the last week. I couldn’t get out of bed. I have to thank you. You probably saved my life.”

  “No problem, Paul. What are friends for? You need anything?”

  “I’m good.”

  “See you the day after tomorrow,” she replied.

  Paul hung up the phone. He closed his computer files to see Allison’s picture again. He stared at it.

  “Good night, Ally.”

  He shut the laptop and walked back upstairs. He wandered into the den then reached for the remote while falling onto the couch. It was the first time he turned on the TV in over a month. He looked over at where Allison used to sit and knew he would be watching television alone.

  Flipping the channels, he settled on a travel show and actually got involved in the commentary of the third-world country the host was visiting. A chill swept through the room rattling the blinds on the window. Goose bumps danced up his arm, so he took a blue, knitted afghan his aunt had made and wrapped it around his torso. As he rested his head on a pillow, he observed the man on television eat the innards of rodents. His mind shut down, his eyes did all the work, and he drifted as he watched. Strategies of selling a house of historical significance flitted through his mind. Photographers, brochures, a massive open house, he mentally checked off the coming responsibilities. The realtor in him perked up. For the first time in a very long time, Paul found something to be interested in. He wondered if he should call his sister and let her know.