Delia in the Dark

Delia Hartley lived in a narrow brick house two streets from the water in Salt Harbor, with six good rooms and a mortgage she referred to as a tenant that never left.

Ruth had known her since the two of them were eleven and the two of them were terrible — Delia because she was beautiful in the way that made adults stop speaking, Ruth because she was the kind of girl who alphabetized her own books and was therefore never invited anywhere twice. They had stayed friends the way things stay when they are built early and with no plan: by being the only two people each of them had ever had to explain nothing to.

That winter Delia pulled the house out of the city and made it her whole life. She staged properties for a living. She took empty rooms nobody wanted and made them say something, and she was good at it, and the work gave her the one thing she needed more than love, which was a reason to be in six rooms at once in a house with nobody in it.

It began in March, and it began small.

"It's the salt air," her mother said. Beverly Hartley had come up from Florida for the season, which she did every spring and complained about every day. "It gets into the wiring. I told you when you bought it. A house on the water is a house with a tenant underneath."

It was not the wiring. Ruth would sit on the dark porch with a glass of wine and hear the boards go overhead while Delia walked, and when she went up she would find her at the window of the front room with her forehead against the cold glass, looking out at the marsh, talking to someone in the tone of a woman being reassured.

"She does this," Ruth said to Beverly. "Since the break-up?"

"She did it when she was little." Beverly lit a cigarette on a gas stove, which was a thing she still did in Florida and was, Ruth suspected, most of the reason she came up. "Once a week, maybe. She'd get up and go to the door and I'd turn her around and she'd be asleep the whole time. It's nothing. Her grandmother had it. It runs in the family the way the teeth run in the family."

In April, three men began to come to Salt Harbor on weekends, and the town took an interest in all three of them, because the town had been watching Delia Hartley for twenty years without ever once arriving at a verdict.

The first was Adrian Vance, who was thirty-nine and ran a small residential psychiatric hospital on a hill outside Rhinebeck, forty beds, gold lettering on a plaque he had bought himself, and who arrived in a car so anonymous that it was a kind of statement. He was careful with his hands. He liked to stand beside a person rather than in front of them. He had a gift, which was the worst kind of gift, for making you feel that your interesting misery had a shape and that he could hold it in both hands without spilling any.

The second was Grant Halloway, whose family had gone from coal to freight to money that did not need to work, and who had a foundation, a beard he kept at one-eighth of an inch, and the manner of a man who had been raised to be a good husband to somebody and had not yet been told by anyone which somebody. He was kind in an unexamined way, which is the most reliable kind of kindness that exists.

The third was Rico Barrera, who came up from Texas to Salt Harbor to buy three buildings and stayed for a fourth one and, eventually, for a woman. He had been a combat engineer. He now bought things that were falling down and sold them standing up. He talked like a man who had been laughed at at a certain point in his life and had decided to be funny first.

"You've got three," Ruth said to her on the porch in April, watching the third of them drive away.

"I have three."

"You're going to have to choose."

"I know." Delia pulled her knees up onto the chair. "That's why I keep not doing it. Because when I choose, two people go away, and I'm already the last person in the room in the winter, and being the last person in the room is a fact about me, Ruth, I'm not pretending it isn't." She looked out at the marsh, which was going grey and pink at the edges the way flat water does at six. "Also I like having three. Is that so awful? I like that the phone rings four times a day. I like that there's somebody who can fix the porch, and somebody who can put me in a room with the governor, and somebody who actually listens when I tell him about my mother."

In the letter Ruth would later write to Delia's brother, the one she would begin and not send, she put it this way: she had three doors and she stood in front of them for a spring, and that was the whole of the crime, and it was not a crime at all, and it killed her.

The first event was on the ninth of May, and it was small enough to be nothing.

Delia went out at two in the morning and was found by a woman walking a dog, sitting on the seawall with her feet over the drop and her nightdress covered in salt, saying nothing, and the dog refused to come near her, and stood at the far end of the wall and howled until the woman took it home. Ruth drove up when they called her. She walked the length of the seawall. She got Delia by the shoulders and turned her around and walked her up the hill in her coat over her nightdress, and Delia did not wake the whole way, and in the morning she laughed about it and blamed the wine, and then she found the mark on her throat and blamed the brooch, which was a long brass pin shaped like a feather that she had bought in the city and had worn exactly once.

She had worn the brooch in that photograph on her mother's mantelpiece, the one from the gallery opening, with her head tilted. The pin was on her left, at her collar. The mark was on her right, under the hinge of her jaw, in the soft place where the pulse is, and it was not the shape of a pin, and Ruth looked at it for a long time in the hall light while Delia went on talking about the brooch, and then Ruth went home and wrote it down, and drew it, and started a folder, because she kept the record, and because someone had to.