I had always written Mrs. Delaney off as the neighbor who complained about everything. But when my children came home from her house in tears, I finally learned why she had been watching our family so closely.
My six-year-old twins came home from trick-or-treating with two empty buckets, crying so hard they couldn’t speak.
Mia and Owen. They’re six.
Their big brother Cole took them out.
He’s 15, and the deal every Halloween is that he walks them around the neighborhood.
When they get down to the last few houses on our own street, he texts me and goes off with his friends, because from there I can see them out the window.
Every Halloween I send them with two buckets.
They were gone for two hours.
They came back with nothing in either bucket.
Not “a little.”
Nothing.
Like they’d never left the house.
And they were crying so hard neither of them could speak.
I dropped to the floor in front of them.
“What happened? Did someone say something to you? Are you hurt?”
Mia shook her head.
Owen covered his face.
I checked their arms, their faces, their costumes. Nothing was torn. Neither looked injured.
“Where’s your candy?”
That made them cry harder.
Ten solid minutes passed like that.
Finally, I grabbed my phone and called Cole.
He answered on the fourth ring, music and teenagers shouting somewhere behind him.
“Mom?”
“Who did you leave them with?”
“What?”
“Which house were they going to when you left?”
There was a pause.
“Mrs. Delaney’s.”
And I just sat there, because I had no idea what to do with that.
Mrs. Delaney lived four houses down.
She was a grump. The car was too close to her driveway, the kids were too loud, the bins went out too early. If a basketball rolled onto her grass, she’d be standing at the window before anyone could retrieve it.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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