Page 6 of The House on Forgotten Hill

The first night, I slept on a mattress in my old bedroom, surrounded by boxes and unfamiliar silence. I expected the house to feel strange given the changes that had been made over the years, but it didn’t.

It felt as though it had been waiting for me.

A few days later, I drove to the storage unit where I had placed everything from my mother’s house. Most of the boxes were labeled in her handwriting. I had avoided going through them after her death because at the time, it felt too painful.

Now they seemed like the only place to begin. If my father had been murdered, there had to be a reason my mother believed it. Somewhere amongst my mother’s belongings, I was certain the truth had been waiting for me all along.

4

Over the next month, I spent my days doing two things: Searching for answers and trying to make the house feel like home again.

I had far more success with the second.

Every evening, after unpacking a few more boxes I’d brought home from the storage unit, I hoped I’d stumble across something my mother had left behind.

A journal.

A newspaper clipping.

A letter.

Anything that might explain why she’d waited so long to tell me my father had been murdered.

Instead, I found old tax returns, family photo albums, and enough kitchen gadgets to stock a small restaurant.

Some nights I found myself wondering if I’d imagined the conviction in her voice, returning to my theory that maybe she was confused, or that the medication she was taking had clouded her mind.

I reached a point where I decided I wouldn’t give up looking, but I accepted that the answers weren’t going to reveal themselves overnight.

Instead, I turned my attention to the house. The previous owners had taken excellent care of it, but over the years they’d transformed it into their home, and I wanted to make it feel like mine again.

The first room I tackled was the guest bedroom, which had been my father’s office. After the tour with the real estate agent, I’d stood in the doorway imagining his desk sitting beneath the window once more, and the thought had refused to leave me.

I also hired a contractor to remove the carpeting, hoping the original hardwood floors might still be underneath.

To my delight, they were.

The wood was scratched and dull after years of neglect, but once the floors had been sanded and polished, they looked just as I remembered.

Seeing them again brought a smile to my face.

I painted most of the walls in the house a soft shade of green, which had always been my father’s favorite color.

Over the following weeks, I filled the office with pieces of my father's life I’d discovered inside my mother’s boxes. His brass desk lamp, a framed photograph of my parents taken the year they were married, and several leather-bound books with his name written inside.

The room came together one piece at a time, and by the end of the month, it felt less like a guest bedroom and more like the office I remembered as a little girl. I felt closer to my father there than anywhere else in the house.

Most days, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done in a long time.

Smiling.

The house had given me that.

For the first time since my mother’s death, I no longer felt as though I were drifting through life. I was beginning to put down roots again.

Just after lunch on a Thursday afternoon, there was a knock on the front door, which surprised me. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Setting my paintbrush on a drop cloth, I walked downstairs and opened the door.

A woman stood on the porch holding a covered glass pie dish. She appeared to be somewhere in her late sixties, perhaps early seventies, with silver hair pulled into a loose bun. She wore a pale-blue cardigan despite the warm weather and smiled as though she’d known me for years.