David stayed at the sink for a time, then turned to me, as if he had decided something.
“Dad,” he said. “Mr. Harris says that something bad happened in this house. Is that true?”
“I don’t know, David,” I replied, and it was the truth. I had seen David talking to Frank Harris as he went about his work in the house. Sometimes he allowed David to help him with little tasks. He seemed like a nice man, and it was good for David to work with his hands, but now I began to have second thoughts about leaving my son alone with him.
“Mr. Harris says that you have to be careful with some places.” David continued. “He says they have long memories, that the stones hold those memories and sometimes, without meaning to, people can make them come alive again.”
I tried to keep the anger from my voice as I responded.
“Mr. Harris is employed as a handyman, David, not as a professional frightener. I’m going to have a talk with him.”
With that, David nodded unhappily, picked up his jacket and sports bag from the hallway, and walked down the garden path to wait for the bus. The local school, where David would begin studying in the autumn, was running summer events for children three days each week, and David had enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to play cricket and tennis in the sun.
I was about to join David when I saw another figure kneeling beside him, obviously talking to him, his face serious and concerned. He was an elderly man with silver hair, and there were paint stains on his blue overalls. It was Frank Harris, the handyman. He stood and patted David’s head gently, then waited with him until the bus pulled up and whisked David away.
I intercepted Harris as he opened the front door with the spare key. He looked a little confused as I began to speak.
“I’m afraid that I have to talk to you about a serious matter, Mr. Harris,” I said. “It’s these stories you’ve been telling David about the house. You know, he’s been having nightmares, and you may be the cause of them.”
Mr. Harris laid down his paint tin. He regarded me evenly.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Markham. I never meant to give your son bad dreams.”
“He says you told him that something bad had happened here in the past.”
“All I told your son was that he should be careful.”
“Careful of what?”
“Just that, well, older houses have histories, some good, some bad. And as new people enter them, and bring new life into them, the history of the house is altered and modified. That way, bad histories can slowly, over time, become good histories. It’s the way of things. But the house where you now live hasn’t experienced that kind of change. It hasn’t had time.”
Now it was my turn to look confused. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“The people who found this property for you didn’t check on its history,” said Harris. “It was just in the right area at the right price, and the local agent was so happy to rent it he didn’t see any point in spoiling a good deal by opening his mouth. Nobody from around these parts would ever have considered renting or buying this house, or even recommending it to a nonlocal. In fact, I was the only person who would agree to work on it. It’s not a good house in which to be raising a child, Mr. Markham. It’s not good to allow a child to live its life in a house where another child had its life ended.”
I leaned back against the wall. I welcomed its support.
“A child died in the house?”
“A child was killed in the house,” he corrected me. “Thirty years ago this November. A man named Victor Parks lived here, and he murdered a child in his bedroom. The police caught him trying to bury the remains down by the river.”
“Lord,” I said. “I didn’t know. I’ve never even heard of Victor Parks.”
“Nobody told you, Mr. Markham, so you couldn’t have known,” continued Harris. “By the time you’d rented the house, it was already too late. As for Parks, he’s dead. He had a heart attack in his cell on the very night he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Maybe the thought of an existence spent trapped in a small cell, far away from what was familiar to him, was too much for him to bear.”
Something changed in his voice. It tightened, as if fighting off some unwanted emotion.
“He was an unusual man, Victor Parks,” he said. “He worked as a verger in the church, and helped train the local football teams. In many ways, he was a model citizen. People respected him. They trusted him with their children.”
He paused, and those old eyes were filled with a remembered grief. What he said next caused my hands to tense involuntarily.
“He also gave lessons, Mr. Markham. He taught piano to the children.”
I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to hear this. It was foolishness. Harris had told David this story, and David had picked up on some details of it to create a fantasy that mixed up his dead brother and the victim of this Victor Parks.
I tried to salvage some semblance of sense from all of this, to return us to reality.
“All of this may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that these stories are obviously troubling David. Last night I found him in the sitting room. He thought there was a little boy at the piano, and that the boy spoke to him.”
Harris bent down to pick up his paint tin once again. I was about to tell him not to bother, that his services were no longer needed, when he spoke again.
“Mr. Markham,” he said, as he straightened. “I didn’t tell David what happened in this house. He doesn’t know anything about Victor Parks or what was done here. If he’s heard something about it, then it was told to him by someone else. David says he sees a little boy, and you think that he believes that it’s the child who was killed, but Parks didn’t kill a boy. He killed a little girl. Whatever your son is seeing, Mr. Markham, figment of his imagination or not, it isn’t the girl Parks murdered.”
I stood aside to let him pass, and the next question came so unexpectedly that I thought for a moment that an unseen third person had asked it.
“What was her name, Mr. Harris? What was the name of the girl who died here?”
But even as the words left my lips, I already seemed to know part of the answer, and I understood at last why it was that he had agreed to do the work on this house.
“Lucy,” he replied. “Her name was Lucy Harris.”
I did not ask Frank Harris to leave. I could not, not after what he had told me. I could not even imagine what it must be like for him to work in the place in which his daughter had lost her life. What brought him back here, day after day? Why would he torment himself in this way?
I wanted to ask him, but I did not. In a way, I think that I understood. It was the same instinct that made me find excuses to drive past the spot where Audrey and Jason had died. It was a means of maintaining some kind of contact with what they once were, as if some part of them remained there and would find a way to reach out to me.
Or perhaps I hoped that someday I would drive by and see them, however briefly, caught between living and dying, before they faded away forever.
For a time, David had no more bad dreams, and there were no more nocturnal wanderings. Frank Harris finished most of his work on the house and departed temporarily, but not before he tried to speak to me once again of his concerns for David. I brushed them away. It was over. The trouble had passed, and David was himself once more, helped by warm days spent playing with other children in green fields, far from the house in which a little girl had died. I taught my classes, and my own writing progressed. Soon David would commence school, and the normal rhythms of our new life would be established at last.
But the night before school began, David came to me and woke me to listen to the sound of the piano.