Every summer while growing up, my parents rented a cottage on the Connecticut shore for a week. But the summer of my thirteenth year was different. We were going to the shore for an entire month!

Our house was right on the beach and because it was large (seven bedrooms) my parents invited my father’s cousin, Antoinette and her three children to join us and split the expenses. And even cousin Marilyn came along.

We had never met our Brooklyn cousins but we got along splendidly. My sister, Martha, was drawn to Cousin Paulie, a good looking teenager with the voice of an angel. He went around the house, singing Connie Francis’s hits - Lipstick on Your Collar and Among My Souvenirs.

Our days were full of swimming in the ocean with rubber tubes, building sand castles and pranking one another. Dinner was at a picnic table. Antoinette cooked her delicious Italian recipes, lasagna, chicken cacciatore, and homemade pizza. And for dessert my mother baked, chiffon pie, butterscotch brownies and coconut cake. At night we had one black and white television, where we all watched Andy Griffith, The Honeymooners, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. We popped popcorn and drank root beer. We played board games. Clue, Sorry and Careers and the game of Life could last for days.

I would sit on the porch overlooking the ocean, writing my Nancy Drew inspired mysteries, and then read them to Marilyn.

Our dads came only on weekends and the nine children had the run of the house. Except for the attic, which was locked.

Marilyn and I shared a bedroom and it didn’t take long for us to hear noises coming from above. It sounded as if someone was moving furniture. When we first heard it, Marilyn let out a scream. Martha flung open the door and her reaction to what we heard was simply, “That was me. I was in the bathroom, rolling down the squeaky toilet paper.”

Except it happened again and again. When no one was in the bathroom. Reporting this to my mother met with, not only disbelief, but irritation. “You should be sleeping,” she said, “not staying up, listening for noises.”

One sweltering afternoon, we were all on the beach sunning ourselves (with baby oil and iodine – what was the sense of spending a month at the beach, if we didn’t return looking golden) when Marilyn shrieked. “I saw him! I saw him! The boy in the attic! I saw him in the window! He was wearing glasses and staring down at us!”

We all looked up, but the sun was blinding. It was difficult to see anything. The younger children (all four of them started to wail) and were quickly snatched up by Antoinette, who frowned at us and scolded us in Italian.

And then there was the missing food. My mother opened the ice box one morning and noticed that some of her deviled eggs were missing, as was a chuck in the jello mold.  The chocolate layer cake was gnawed at.

“I don’t mind you snacking,” my mother said. “I just need to know who is eating what, so can make more.”

My brother, Joey, admitted to the jello and the cake. As to the deviled eggs? “I didn’t like them the first time around,” he said. “Who would steal eggs?”

Marilyn and I knew. The boy in the window.

Marilyn and I talked of nothing else, and, if Martha heard us, she went running to my mother. “She’s telling stories again,” the tattletaler yelled.

My mother and Antoinette had had enough. “You’re scaring my children,” Antoinette said, (although that wasn’t true of Paulie, who was blissfully unaware of what was lurking in the attic). “They’re afraid to be alone in any of the rooms. This vacation was supposed to be restful but with your storytelling -”

Then my mother gave us an ultimatum. If we didn’t stop talking about the boy in the window, Marilyn would have to go home. Marilyn? Home? Who would I hang around with? Martha and Paulie? And poor Marilyn! She would be shipped to a day camp, which was a field, and, in the hot sun, she would play softball and weave baskets with an occasional swim in the Community Pool, or a trip to the neighborhood bowling alley to break the monotony.

We vowed to never speak of him again.

But that didn’t mean we couldn’t whisper at night, when we heard the footsteps above us. We decided if the boy in the window was going to murder us, he would have done so by now. He was probably a teenager, who ran away from an abusive home. Or maybe he had committed a small crime and he was hiding out from the law.

Years later I wondered if my son came to me with a story like that – would I believe him? Probably not. But, at the least, I would have called the landlord and said that we heard activity in the attic and we wondered if there was a rodent nesting in the space. But than again, I have never been responsible for six children (the youngest four) and the parent of an imaginative daughter, who entertained herself by writing mysteries.

Finally it was time to go home. In spite of the glorious ocean outside and Antoinette’s delicious cooking, Marilyn and I weren’t too sorry to depart.

Antoinette had always been fastidious and she and my mother (with our help) scrubbed the house from top to bottom with bleach and Bon Ami. They dusted and vacuumed and used glass cleaner on the windows until the panes gleamed.  They were determined to leave the house better than they had found it.

We had only been home a few days when the telephone rang. My mother scowled when she lifted the receiver, probably because she knew someone from the party line was listening in.

I could only hear one part of the conversation. It was enough.

“I don’t understand… My cousin and I cleaned that house thoroughly until it sparkled… There no way we would ever do such thing…We need that money… Hello, hello…”

She hung up the phone thoughtfully and then announced, “We are not getting our security back. The landlord said we trashed the house. Windows were broken, the sofa was slashed, the walls were full of graffiti. I don’t understand. Who could do such a thing?”

I looked at mother, long and hard. I didn’t need to say what I was thinking.  Because I knew the answer to her question, and maybe now she did too.

The boy in the window.