Chapter 1: The Warning She Left Behind
The Woman Who Sold Us Our House Left One Warning Scratched Inside a Closet: "Don't Ever Give the Harrises a Key." Six Months Later, I Found Out Why.
Three days after we moved into our new house, I found something scratched into the back wall of the upstairs hall closet.
It was faint enough that I almost missed it, hidden behind an old wooden shelf the previous owner had left behind.
"Don't ever give the Harrises a key."
I called my husband, Jason, upstairs and showed him.
He read it twice, then laughed.
"Well, that's not ominous at all." At the time, we assumed it was some bizarre private joke or the remains of an old neighborhood feud.
The problem was that the Harrises lived next door.
Tom and Linda Harris were both in their early sixties and had lived in the neighborhood for almost thirty years.
They were also incredibly nice.
Linda brought us lasagna the first night we moved in.
Tom loaned Jason a ladder before we even knew where ours was.
They knew the garbage schedule, which plumber not to call, and exactly how much Halloween candy we would need because, according to Linda, "this street gets overrun with kids."
When I casually mentioned the writing in the closet a few weeks later, Jason told me not to bring it up.
"Why make things weird?" he said.
He was right.
There was no reason to accuse two perfectly friendly neighbors of something based on a sentence scratched into a wall.
So we forgot about it.
Or at least I did.
About two months later, Jason and I went out to dinner and came home to find our garage door open.
Nothing was missing.
We assumed one of us had accidentally pressed the remote while leaving.
Tom noticed us standing in the driveway and came over with a flashlight to help us check the garage.
"Probably just the opener," he said.
"These old Craftsman units are temperamental."
I remember thinking it was odd that he knew what kind of opener we had because the motor was mounted inside the garage and couldn't be seen from outside.
But Tom had helped Jason carry some boxes in when we moved, so I figured he must have noticed it then.
A few weeks after that, Linda asked whether we were planning to keep the small office in the basement.
I stared at her.
"What office?"
She looked surprised.
"The room behind the laundry area."
There was a small finished room in the basement, but you couldn't see it from the stairs.
You had to walk past the furnace and turn a corner to even know it existed.
Linda seemed to realize what she had said because she quickly added, "Oh, I was in there years ago.
Margaret used it as a sewing room."
Margaret was the woman who had sold us the house.
That explanation made sense.
Linda and Margaret had been neighbors for decades.
Of course, she had probably been inside the house hundreds of times.
Still, I remembered the warning.
"Don't ever give the Harrises a key."
Six months after we moved in, Jason and I planned a long weekend at my sister's house.
It was the first time we were both going to be away overnight since buying the place.
The night before we left, Tom saw Jason loading a suitcase into the trunk.
"You guys heading somewhere?" he asked.
Jason told him we'd be gone until Monday.
Tom immediately said, "Want me to keep an eye on the place?"
Jason thanked him but said we had a camera by the front door and would be fine.
Then Tom asked something that made me look up from the bag I was carrying.
"You have a spare key hidden somewhere, just in case?"
Jason laughed.
"Nope."
Tom smiled.
"Smart."
That should have been the end of it.
We left the next morning.
On Sunday afternoon, while we were seated in my sister's backyard, my phone buzzed with a notification from our doorbell camera.
It said motion had been detected at the front door.
I opened the app.
Tom and Linda were standing on our porch.
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What were they doing at our door while we were away?
Comment "NEXT" if you want Part 2 — it's in the comments.
