Harmon Gothic by Joan Drescher-Cooper

Contrary to the County News, I am not crazy. It’s a starting point—a truism one must accept to hear my side of the story. If you are disposed to believing the tripe published to sell a few more copies or get picked up by a larger news service, then stop listening. 

Yes, I broke into the old Harmon Mansion last Wednesday after being ejected from the property that day. I admit it looks extreme at the outset. Everyone warned me about the place and my suspicions about the girl. Taken out of context, how many people sound like they're gibbering delusions from time to time? 

Believe me or not, all my misdeeds and hard-headed determination yielded the discovery of not one, but two lost children. I swear I did not have a thing to do with either. I simply watched and listened. That’s all. Contemplation opens many doors. My husband says idleness is the devil’s playground. Maybe. Maybe he sounds too much like a granny to me.

One week ago, I was simply a housewife living in a new community of houses that backed up to the old Harmon place. At first it was charming to live over the canal bridge and out in the country but close enough to jog to a neighbor’s house to say hello. It was sweet to work by remote and spend my breaks gardening or straightening a house that was admittedly far too big for the two of us. 

When work laid me off, I spent too much time surfing the net for a job that devolved into wandering the garden, staring at the minute hint of a path to the Harmon place, and dreaming up scenarios for a novel I always told myself I’d write.

Every night, my husband asked about my day and the job hunt. I would dutifully report on my efforts and catalog my work at the house. I started making up fibs about job hunting after a few days when I realized he wasn’t listening. 

The morning he mentioned children, the prospect of “taking advantage” of my free time to begin our clutch of expected progeny, I saw the girl for the first time.

Everything in me rejected the idea of getting pregnant to excuse my lack of income. Irritation with the idea sent me to the farest corner of our little property to widen the path to the Harmon Mansion. I had half a dream that I could work there, maybe curate 18th century documents, plan community festivals, or act as a docent for the scant visitors I’d noticed snaking down the shady, rutted gravel road to the house.

I had a bunch of milkweed and some tall stalks of white flowers that sprayed stinging burrs all over my clothes when I looked up and found a child looking back at me through the brush. I wiped a hand over my sweaty face and tried to smile. Her gray eyes were wide as they met mine–curious but not frightened. I thought she was wearing a white dress–odd for late October’s chilly breeze. “Hi.” My throat was croaky as I asked, “Are you here with a school trip?”

She shook her head but raised a hand and crooked her finger in the universal beckoning we adults do to children. I shook my head and said, “Are you lost? The mansion staff will help you find your group.” Her hand was thin and white, the skin transparent in the dappled light of the thick brush. 

She looked back at the mansion which rose above everything in our community due to its natural elevation. She shook her head and then crooked her index finger again. While I dropped my bundle of debris and peeled off my gloves, she turned and left. At least I assumed she did. When I looked through the brush, she was no longer there. 

My husband laughed when he heard about my visit to the Harmon Mansion with my hair wild, gardening shears in one hand, and my gloves jammed in one pocket of baggy sweats. No–I was not fit for visiting. When I asked the one groundsman I could find about a lost child, he rolled his eyes and told me there hadn’t been school trips to the place in years. He scoffed at the report that a little girl in a white dress had been seen on the grounds. “All the kids are in school, Miss. Maybe get your eyes checked?”

I returned to gardening after another morning of applying for jobs and keeping an eye on the mansion rising from the thick brush. Uneasy is the best way to define my mood. Curiosity led me back to the mansion during visiting hours described on a dated website. The geography of the place is interesting–the house faces ours, to the side of a sweeping, circular drive but away from a gorgeous view of the river from the peninsula it sits atop. Obviously a hill from the distance of my backyard, the three-story main house and its pair of two-story wing additions required a climb–as if a dry moat was once an option. The bricked formal gardens are terraced around a low-lying center fountain that trickled water from the hand of a Grecian maiden whose alabaster surface raced with veiny cracks. In fact, the garden was overgrown, with mortar crumbling due to exploring vines and extended roots. The steps to the top were overrun with crabgrass and random creepers. I resisted pulling out the worst offenders.

There was no sign of the older man I’d met during my first visit. A woman in a faded blue dress with a white apron met me at the back door. I supposed the guide was dressed in period gear, but her cell phone buzzed a few times from an apron pocket as she conducted the hurried tour. Renovations had been made as late as the 1960s when a distant relative of one of the richest families in America bought it after a messy divorce. That explained the inclusion of a bright violet-blue kitchen on the first floor of the east wing.

The rest of the house, save the bedrooms of the divorcee and her teenage child at the time, restored the house to its heyday in the 1780s. A tobacco and sheep farm, the original owners escaped crowded Wilmington, and later Philadelphia, during good weather spells to oversee the farm management and have some respite from being the ruling class in our surprisingly feudal new democracy. The entire house was decorated in the Chippendale style imported and copied from the Orient but tamed by sophisticated Europeans. The fretwork on the intricate stairway mirrored the delicate plants and flowers in the hand-painted silk wallpaper–said to be based on the original. Some of the furniture had been stripped from the place by financially strained generations but returned by the 1960s owner. In total, it was a grand reminder of another time with all the slightly frayed edges of decay just below the surface. 

In the front room of the first floor, a small gallery of paintings and photographs partially traced the families that had lived there. I stared at the faces of the people in the portraits, looking at their clothing and expressions. The docent pointed out relatives of the rich family that restored the mansion to its glory. In a few, the threadbare clothes of the servants' children who worked the fields were an obvious contrast to the fancy clothes of the visiting landowners.

Climbing all the way up the last set of stairs above the third floor, I stood in the open widow’s walk and took an inventory of the rest of the grounds and tallied the incursion of our new community of houses, including mine. At the corner of my property, a true shortcut was visible from that height. I wondered what might have been built where our house now stood. A barn? An overseer's house? The missing slave cabins the guide mentioned as we surveyed the family history on the first floor? 

When I made the mistake of asking about the children who might visit the estate, the docent frowned. “Why?”

I pointed toward my house and said, “I live over there. I’ve seen a little girl.”

The woman blinked, took a half-breath, and began to say, “Does she …” but something caught in her throat. 

“She was wearing a white dress.”

“This house isn’t haunted. Don’t start rumors over there,” she gestured in the general direction of the new houses. “We have enough trouble as it is.”

“How?” I couldn’t imagine anyone protesting a state park in their backyard. 

“You ask too many questions. You’re making a mess,” she said, gesturing at dusty footprints on the shining floor.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean . . .” I looked down at my sneakers, wondering where those tracks might have come from because they were smaller and so many. 

She interrupted, “All you new people want is more property. Or a view of the river. Or some two hundred-year-old tree removed.” She pressed her lips together and turned away from me. 

Out of the corner of my eye when I glanced toward my house, I swear I saw a flash of white like the girl’s dress. I held my tongue. 

The woman rushed me back down the stairs and escorted me to the door. I walked around the rest of the grounds and read the signs for the tobacco rolling shed, the cistern, and various rare trees and shrubs. The wizened arch of trees that lined the two mile drive were orange osage–a tree that produced odd balls that reminded me of raw walnuts. I poked my head into the displays for a summer kitchen and glanced down at the dark void of the underground ice house. As I left the grounds, I noticed the docent watching me from the doorway. 

Of course the next morning as I sipped my first coffee of the day, I saw the girl again. I was standing on the back porch staring at the sky piled with clouds as if a storm was building. A constant breeze shook a few leaves off the surrounding oaks which were slowly turning gold, orange, and red. 

Though the distance between us was greater, the child’s face was more defined with pronounced cheekbones and those flashing gray eyes. She beckoned again, but this time, I did not hesitate. I left the porch, rushed across the yard, and broke through the bracken without taking my eyes off of her. We crossed an overgrown meadow and advanced on the east wing of the mansion. In fact, I carried my coffee cup gripped in both hands all the way up to the kitchen door. Of course, the girl had disappeared. I assumed she went inside the mansion, so I opened the door and nearly bumped into the docent in the same blue dress from the previous day.

“You’re back,” she said. There was no friendly welcome. She gave me a once over glance that made me aware of my pajama bottoms and hole-strewn sweatshirt. 

“The girl–where did she go?”

“What?” she shouted, looking behind her toward the stairway. I stopped so fast that coffee sloshed in front of me, splashing a spot that looked like mud on the floor between us. Looking back up at her, I found that she was glaring down at it. “Look what you’ve done!”

I shook my head. I insisted, “I saw a girl. She came in here.” I tried to move past her, but the woman sidestepped me. I stepped back to avoid running into her, this time spilling the coffee on my sweats. 

When I looked up from wiping away the spill, her eyes had narrowed, and her mouth curled like a dog bares his teeth. “Get out of here.” She pointed out the door. “Stop making messes.”

“But the girl. I followed that little girl in here.” I tried to make my voice convincing, but I heard hesitance choking me. My heart started to thump. Then a chill raced through me. 

She snarled, “There is no girl here. You are seeing things.”

“But I saw her,” again I tried to look past her.

The woman muttered something about everyone making messes. Then, “Crazy.” She glanced at her cell phone on the gift shop table. She said, “Leave now.”

Suddenly my foolishness dawned on me. She could call the police, we had just bought the house right at the corner of the property, and I was seeing things. I said “Sorry,” and backed out the kitchen door to see the groundman I’d met the other day squinting at us from the formal garden. He might have been laughing, but as I looked back up at the house, I swear someone was standing in the second floor bedroom looking out. 

I marched myself back to our house, stomped through the opening in the overgrown path that snagged at my clothes, and hurried to the backdoor. I wouldn’t let myself even glance into the backyard all day. Could my worry over a job be making me crazy? Did I see a child because my husband suggested we start a family? How twisted was that? Either way, there was no way I was going to go near the garden or look at the mansion that day. 

When my husband came home in the late afternoon, I had a full list of job applications I’d completed, a meatloaf in the oven, and a number of reasons children were not in the immediate future if he brought it up again. He placed the daily newspaper on the counter and began a reiteration of his tough day teaching twelve-year-olds. I couldn’t hear a word he said. The lead headline under the fold declared that a local boy was missing. The child in the photograph under that headline looked just like the girl I’d seen twice with those light eyes and sharp cheekbones. I broke right into his diatribe on discipline and the foibles of his administrative team by asking, “There’s a child missing?”

He rolled his eyes just like the middle school kids he taught. “Don’t you watch the news or listen to the radio anymore?” He shook his head. “He’s been missing for a few days. His sister was in my class last year. Really nice family. They live right around the corner.”

“He looks like that girl I saw.” I turned the paper toward me and started to read the article that outlined efforts to search the woods and river. There hadn’t been a sign of the child since he disappeared during a party. “This is so weird,” I whispered. “I saw that girl again today.” I looked up to find my husband peeking in at the meatloaf. 

“Man! Did you make your mother’s recipe? That’s the best.” He was grinning. Again, he wasn’t listening. He said, “How about we make real mashed potatoes tonight?” It was my turn to roll my eyes. While he peeled the potatoes, I searched the internet for everything I could find about the boy, his family, and the area where he was last seen. Our neighborhood–again, I had chills. There were very few leads, and one deputy speculated that he had been taken out of the area. 

While my husband ate, I pushed the food around on the plate and watched the mansion until a car drove away. I turned back to my husband who was giving the meatloaf rapturous praise as he ate three helpings of potatoes. When I went back to the kitchen to put on coffee, I slipped into the garage for a hammer and a pair of screwdrivers then served him a coffee as he settled down to grade a stack of essays. 

I said, “I’m taking a walk around the mansion.”

He glanced up with a half-smile before I left the house. “Don’t stay outside too late, honey.”

I made some kind of agreeing hum back that he didn’t hear. I had about forty-five minutes of daylight, so I slipped a flashlight we kept on the porch into one deep pocket of my jacket and checked for my cell phone. The mansion loomed larger in the darkening landscape. Other than the few lights on the outside of the property, the place was dark. Halfway across the field, I looked up at the facade of the house and saw some kind of light twinkling or flashing in the same upstairs window I thought I saw someone that day. 

When I reached the door to the east wing entrance, I was surprised to see a padlock on the door. It gleamed in the fleeing light as something too new for the house and too grotesque for the grandeur of its history. So, I struck it with the hammer until I knocked it off by the hinges. The door swung open, and a thick silence crept into the noise I had made and swallowed it. There were no cries, creaks, or groans to guide me. I stepped into the house and closed the door.

Heart beating rapidly, I stepped through the rooms without the flashlight. I could see the outlines of each piece of furniture, each doorway in the lowlight of sunset. In fact, the stairway seemed encased in a rosy-orange glow from the tall windows behind it. When I glanced at the birds in the wallpaper, they seemed to settle or cock their heads in the waving light. This time, I took the stairs two at a time, trying to avoid the give of each carpeted step. 

Then I heard a voice. 

There was nothing intelligible in the words. A chant? A song? Perhaps a prayer? I stood on the second floor landing as I listened and felt my enthusiasm for this adventure wane. Did I want to know? No. I took a half step back, but lights from an approaching car flashed across the front of the mansion which pushed me across the room to the bedroom I thought might be the right one. 

The door was locked. “Staff Only,” was emblazoned on faded paper glued to corrugated cardboard like a child might fashion. I tried the door handle and was greeted with a sob from behind the door. I said, “Hello?”

Another sob. I said, “Can you unlock the door?”

Something moved in my periphery. The white dress was filmy like the froth of the ocean fading away against the darker shore. Her hand reached for the handle and tried to twist it like I had. Something behind the door scuffled across the floor. “Help!” I didn’t know if the girl in the white dress or the thing behind the door spoke. I jammed the screwdriver into the keyhole and twisted it. I tried the doorknob again as I felt a breeze rush through the house. Someone had opened a door or a window below. Raising the hammer, I smashed it into the screwdriver, of course, hitting my hand. I smashed at it again and again until the doorknob turned. 

All through the house, an anguished voice screamed, “No!” As the door opened, something pushed me into the room and onto the floor. Looking up as I rolled to the side, the groundsman stood over me, but he was looking at a figure sitting in a chair near the window. The seated figure was writhing and crying, jabbering nonsense. He yelled, “What the hell?”

Seems we both called the police by thumbing our cell phones at the same time. It took a while–maybe a nail-biting, twenty minutes–but they came with lights and sirens and roused the whole neighborhood. They hauled both of us into the county jail to be held until questioned. The child was rushed off to a hospital for examination and interview before being released to his relieved parents. 

My husband rode behind the police car. The one time I saw his face, he looked angry. Whoops. Evidently, I tripped a security sensor somewhere between the door and the stairway which alerted the groundsman–his name is Lou, and he’s lived on an adjoining farm all his life. He had no idea I had nothing to do with the child tied to a chair on the second floor, so he took my hammer and screwdrivers, as well as my phone until the police arrived. He removed the gag, and untied the child then held the boy in his lap until he was taken away by a deputy. In the meantime, Lou berated me for ruining two doors before he stopped speaking. He stared at the floor for a moment and then asked, “How’d all this mud get into the room.”

The child looked up. “I didn’t mean to track it in. She got so mad.”

“Ah,” Lou said, “Never liked that woman. Too bossy.”

“Where’s that girl? The one who stayed with me all night?” he asked. 

Lou and I just looked at each other. 

Later when the officer in charge asked me how I knew where the child was being held, I told him a garbled story about the girl in the white dress, the light in the bedroom window, the docent obsessed with the mud and trouble from the new neighbors. He rolled his eyes. He left me after I concluded, “I know–sounds crazy–but I found your lost child.”

After I was released, Lou rode with us back to the mansion to pick up his truck. As we crossed the canal bridge, I thought about the little boy’s parents and felt all the tension begin to leave. I couldn’t stop thinking about the little girl in the white dress. 

On the dark, twisting drive through the orange Osage to the house, Lou whispered, “I saw her, too.”

My husband asked, “Who? The woman they think found the boy in the mansion and kept him prisoner?”

Lou turned around to look at me. “The girl in the dress. The one you asked about.”

I sat forward. I laid a hand on his shoulder. “Good to know I’m not completely crazy.”

He nodded. “Me, too.” 

When he got out of our car, I stood with him a moment and asked, “Where do you usually see the girl?”

He gestured toward our property. “Mostly over there. Sometimes in the field.”

“Never in the house?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I just cut the lawn for the place. Started when I was a kid.” He rubbed his whiskers. “I don’t think I’ve been in the house since that new woman came on to the staff.” He looked down at me in the dark, lit only by our headlights. “She was so strict about dirtying up the place, I just kept clear.”

The next morning, I watched as a passel of police vehicles bumped down the rutted gravel road and flocked around the mansion like crows. I assumed the woman who kept the child hidden all those days had been arrested. I went back to the computer until the dew burned off the grass and checked for replies to my job queries and spied on any local news–which was scant. I took a turn at examining everything about the Harmon Mansion I could find on their website and then into county records. Then I looked into our own neighborhood development with a slowly evolving feeling of excitement. 

By noon, I was armed with garden shears, a rake, a shovel, and a hand-drawn map of our property over an outline of the original Harmon property. I was so busy hacking and pulling at offending brambles that obscured the old path to the mansion that I wasn’t aware of Lou or the deputy with him until their shadows touched my periphery. I had half-expected the little girl in the white gown, so real men in the flesh made me yipe for a second. My back zinged with the effort to stand up straight after crouching and pulling so long. 

“Whatcha looking for now?” The deputy was not laughing this morning. His eyes took in my efforts to unearth the brick path that I expected to find due to my research. I’d uncovered a five-foot wide path that semi-circled in the direction of the formal garden a half-acre away. 

I wiped my hair off my brow with a dirty glove. I replied, “A grave.”

The deputy blew his derision ineloquently through his lips. “Ann Thurston said you were a troublemaker. She says you set her up.”

I stared up at the young man and then checked an impulsive response when Lou said, “Thurston is the nasty docent you met. This fool was thinking of questioning you today.” He raised an eyebrow that I took as a warning not to blurt out anything about ghosts.

I laughed. Really laughed for the first time in a long while. “Why don’t you both help me a sec? I’m looking for a white stone–maybe marble. A very small headmarker.”

Lou nodded and picked up my rake. He said, “It wouldn’t be white marble. All the markers they removed were dark–maybe granite, one was a rosy color, and many were gone to pieces because they were wood.” He began to sweep with big yanks that unearthed stray vines and grasses. 

“What are you two talking about?” The deputy took a step back, but he was also looking around the area with squinted eyes. 

Lou gestured toward me. “She figured it out.”

“What?” barked the deputy.

I gestured at my house. “The whole place was a graveyard. I assume they missed a grave or two when they moved the rest.”

Lou grunted agreement. When we found the remnants of a cracked stone a half hour later, I wasn’t surprised. The deputy had left us, and all the police cars had slowly pulled away. I promised to call the historical association who oversaw the mansion first thing in the morning. Call me crazy, but that was a good day of work.

I invited Lou for dinner. We had leftover meatloaf after all.

Joan Drescher Cooper is a Baltimore native who writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She has published one collection of poetry, Birds Like Me, with Finishing Line Press, two short story collections and two novels with Salt Water Media of Berlin. She is a retired public school teacher who loves old houses and gardening.