Wild Orchids Page 10

  There were windows that had stained glass and some with beveled. There were at least four little pitched roofs that held up tiny porches with big French doors leading out to them.

  The whole house had once been painted bright colors, but had faded to pale gray and lavender-blue, with dusty peach brackets here and there.

  It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful house I’d ever seen in my whole, entire life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ford

  It was the most hideous house I’d ever seen in my life. It looked like a giant wooden wedding cake made of balconies, porches, and turrets. Everywhere you looked was another little roof and another tiny, useless porch. Skinny, carved posts ran across every edge and surrounded every window. Windows seemed to have the sole purpose of adding more ornamentation to the whole ghastly edifice. The late afternoon sunlight glinted off the edges of beveled glass, highlighting stained-glass windows which depicted various animals and birds.

  Even in good repair, the house would have been a monstrosity, but this one was falling apart. Three gutters hung by pieces of twisted wire. A couple of panes of glass were covered by Masonite. I saw cracked balustrades, broken window frames, and porch floorboards that were split and probably rotten.

  Then there was the paint—or the lack of it. Whatever color the house was originally had been lost to a hundred-plus years of sun and rain. Everything had faded to dull gray-blue, and the paint was peeling everywhere.

  I turned the car into the weed-infested driveway and stared in disbelief. The lawns around the house had been cut, but the old flower beds were knee-high in weeds. There was a broken birdbath and an old arbor that had vines growing through the paved floor. Back against the trees I could see two benches that sat at angles because half their legs were missing.

  I really don’t care about any story enough to stay in this house, I thought. I turned to Jackie to offer an apology and tell her we’d find a hotel somewhere, but she was already getting out of the car, an unreadable expression on her face. Probably shock, I thought. Or horror. I knew how she felt. One look at this place and I wanted to run away, too.

  But Jackie wasn’t running away. Instead, she was already up the porch stairs and at the front door. I practically leaped out of the car to run after her. I had to warn her that the place didn’t look safe.

  She was standing on the porch and looking around, her eyes wide. There had to be fifty pieces of old furniture on that porch. There were beat-up wicker chairs with dirty, faded cushions, and half a dozen dinky little wire tables that weren’t big enough to hold more than a teacup—or a glass of sarsaparilla, I thought.

  Jackie seemed to be as speechless as I was. She put her hand on top of an old oak cabinet. “It’s an icebox,” she said and the odd tone of her voice made me look at her more closely.

  “What do you think of this place?” I asked.

  “It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen,” she said softly, and there was so much raw passion in her voice that I groaned.

  I’d had some experience with women and houses and knew that a woman could love a house the way a man loved a car. Personally, I couldn’t see it. Houses took too much work.

  I followed Jackie inside. I’d asked the realtor how I could get the key to my “new” house and she’d just laughed. Now I saw why. No respectable burglar was going to waste his time on this place.

  When Jackie opened the unlocked front door, I saw that it was even worse inside. The door opened to a large hallway, with a winding staircase directly in front of us. The staircase might have been impressive if both sides of each step weren’t covered with foot-high stacks of old magazines. The trail up the stairs was no more than eighteen inches wide.

  In the entrance hall was an oak hall tree: big, ugly, with six moth-eaten hats hanging from hooks. On both sides of the hall were three-foot-tall stacks of yellowing and brittle newspapers. On the floor was a rug so threadbare there was no pile left.

  “There’s an Oriental rug under that, and it’s made out of tile,” Jackie said as she disappeared between double doors of a room on the left.

  Kneeling, I lifted up the corner of the dusty rug and saw that beneath it was, indeed, an Oriental “rug” made of mosaic tiles. It was the work of a master craftsman and if it weren’t so dirty, it would have been beautiful.

  I followed Jackie into the next room. “How did you know about…” I began, but couldn’t finish the sentence. She was standing in the middle of the parlor, better known as the living room. I’d been told that the house had been continuously occupied for over a hundred years, and when I looked about that room, I was willing to bet that every occupant had bought at least six pieces of furniture—and each one was still there. To walk between the furniture, even skinny Jackie had to turn sideways. In a far corner were three frighteningly ugly walnut-trimmed Victorian chairs covered in worn-out red velvet. Next to them was a 1960s flourescent green sofa that had pillows on it printed with big lips. In the opposite corner was a square couch that looked Art Deco. Along the walls were old oak bookcases, new white bookcases, and a cheap pine cabinet with doors hanging by one hinge. Every souvenir anyone had bought over the course of a hundred years was in that room. Above the bookcases were framed prints, dirty oil paintings, and what looked to be a hundred or more old photographs in frames of varying degrees of dilapidation.

  “They’ve moved all the furniture into here. Wonder why?” Jackie said as she left the parlor and went into the room across the hall.

  I started to follow her but I tripped over a stuffed duck. Not like a kid’s stuffed toy duck, but a real bird, something that had once flown through the air and was now sitting on my living room floor, feathers and all.

  As I untangled myself from the duck, three more fell off a shelf and pelted me. It was a mother duck and her ducklings, preserved forever in lifelessness. After I’d conquered my urge to scream, I ran out the door and into the room across the hall.

  Jackie was standing in what I assumed was the library. Three walls were covered with grand old bookcases and the ceiling was magnificently coffered. The bookcases were filled with old leather-bound volumes that made me itch with wanting to look at them. But it would take a forklift to make a path to those books because in front of them were cardboard shelves—the kind with wood-grained wallpaper on them (as though that would fool anyone)—filled with thirty years of best-sellers. Everything Harold Robbins and Louis L’Amour had written was in those shelves.

  “It’s the same,” Jackie said, her eyes still glazed over, as though she were in a trance.

  As she turned to leave the room, I made a lunge to grab her arm, but I missed because my foot caught on an old coal bucket that was filled with paperbacks. Four copies of Frank Yerby fell on my foot. I stepped out of the books and started forward, but when I saw a copy of Fanny Hill, I picked it up, put it in my back pocket, and went after Jackie.

  I found her in the room behind the library, the dining room. Tall windows ate up one wall and would have let in light if two-thirds of them hadn’t been swathed in dark purple velvet draperies. I started to speak but was distracted by what I was sure was a bird’s nest at the top of the curtains.

  “It’s fake,” Jackie said, seeing where I was looking. “It has tiny porcelain eggs in it.” With that she left the room.

  I started to run after her but three of the eighteen or so mismatched chairs in the room stuck out their legs and tried to trip me.

  It was too much! I knocked the chairs over—after all, they were mine now—and ran into the hallway. No Jackie. I stood there for a moment, then I let out a bellow that sounded as though it were coming from the moose head I’d seen somewhere.

  Jackie appeared instantly. “What in the world is wrong with you?” she asked.

  Where do I begin? I wondered, then got hold of myself. “How do you know so much about this place?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “My father said we lived in Cole Creek for only a few months when I
was very young, but for all I know we lived in this house. Maybe my parents were housekeeper and handyman, that sort of thing.”

  “If you remember so much, you must have been older than ‘very young.’”

  “I think you may be right,” she said as she entered the big room across from the dining room. I followed her, but stopped short. It was a smaller room than the others and it was clean and neat. Even the windows had been washed. The ceiling was exquisitely painted with vines and flowers, and the floor was blond oak inlaid with a border of walnut. What was really good was that there wasn’t one piece of furniture in the room.

  Jackie stood in the doorway looking around, but I walked in to sit down on a cushionless window seat.

  “I think Mr. Belcher moved everything out of here and into the other rooms,” she said as she walked to a corner of the room and picked up a small brown prescription bottle. “I think this was his sick room, and he probably lived in here.”

  “Hey!” I said. “Is that an outlet for cable TV?”

  Looking at me, she shook her head in disgust. “You’re not much of an intellectual, are you?” she said over her shoulder as she left the room.

  The thing I liked most about Jackie Maxwell was that she treated me as a man, not a best-seller, but a man. The thing I liked least about Jackie Maxwell was that she treated me like an ordinary human being and not with the deference that my success deserved.

  I found her in the kitchen. It was a big room with white metal cabinets over worn and dented stainless steel countertops. The height of 1930s elegance. Truthfully, I was surprised to see that the house had been touched since it had been built in 1896. In the middle of the room was an oak table that had thousands upon thousands of knife cuts in it.

  Jackie looked inside the cabinets while I opened the doors to the left. First was a big walk-in pantry, every inch of shelf space crammed full of boxes and cans of food. Reaching to the back of the highest shelf, I pulled down a box of cereal with a photo of a man in a football uniform from about 1915. I was tempted to look inside the box, but thought better of it and put it back.

  Two other doors revealed a powder room with a pull chain toilet and a maid’s room with a narrow, hard-looking brass bed.

  When I walked back into the kitchen I was hit by a smell so awful I put my hand over my nose. Jackie had opened the round-cornered refrigerator.

  She sneezed a couple of times and I coughed. “I got the contents of the ’frig in the deal?” I asked.

  “Seems so. You ready to go look at the upstairs?”

  “Only if I have to,” I muttered as I followed her out of the kitchen back to the front staircase. I’d been looking at the endless spiral of old magazines and hadn’t noticed the little brass dragon on the top of the newel post.

  “Wonder if it still works?” Jackie said under her breath, then gave a sharp twist to the pointed tip of the dragon’s tail.

  I jumped back as a four-inch-long blue flame shot out of the dragon’s mouth.

  She twisted the tail tip again and the flame stopped.

  “Cool,” I said. It was the first thing I’d seen in the house that I really liked.

  Jackie ran up the stairs, having no trouble stepping between the piles, while I stayed downstairs to investigate the dragon. It was amazing that the thing was still hooked up to a gas line after all these years, and even more amazing that it still worked. The tail tip could use a little oil, I thought as I turned it again.

  “Can I have the mistress’s bedroom?” Jackie called from above.

  I was looking down the dragon’s mouth, trying to see the gas pipe inside. “Yeah,” I said, “but who gets the wife’s bedroom?”

  “Very funny,” she said. “Could you stop playing with that and look up at where I am?”

  She was at the very top of the stair spiral, third floor. A huge, round, stained-glass window was in the ceiling above her head.

  “Stairs like these were air-conditioning,” she said. “Hot air rises.”

  “Straight up to the servants’ bedrooms?” I was kneeling to see where the gas line entered the newel post.

  “The heat up here would keep them downstairs so they could work,” Jackie called down, then her voice lowered. “My goodness, the old nursery has been converted to an office. I bet they stored that big old train set in the attic.”

  Train set? I quit looking at the dragon and decided to mosey on upstairs.

  Jackie met me on the landing of the second floor, and dutifully, I looked at four bedrooms, three bathrooms straight out of a BBC set of Edwardian England, and a storage room so full of boxes we couldn’t open the door all the way.

  At the front of the house was a master and “mistress” suite. Two big bedrooms, each with a private bath, had a sitting room between them that opened onto the spiral staircase. The bedroom Jackie wanted so much that I could see her heart beating in her throat, had doors opening onto a deep, round porch that was filled with delicate white furniture. It was no hardship on my part to say she could have the room.

  As with the downstairs, the second floor rooms were full of furniture and semi-antique junk. The wallpaper was enough to give a person nightmares. The flowers on it could swallow a person whole. Jackie’s bedroom had roses on the wallpaper—complete with needle-pointed serrated leaves and stems with thorns a quarter inch long. It was creepy.

  The only room I truly liked was my bathroom. It had wallpaper of dark green leaves interspersed now and then with small oranges. (“William Morris,” Jackie said.) All the original mahogany bathroom fixtures were in the room and they all worked. There was no shower but there was a bathtub—

  “William Taft could get in that tub,” Jackie said.

  “With the first lady,” I said, looking at her to see if she was going to accuse me of making a sex joke. When she laughed, I was glad. None of my other assistants had laughed at my jokes.

  I was getting hungry so I suggested we find a grocery before it got too late. Jackie gave a longing look upward and I knew she wanted to rummage around in the rooms on the top floor. Part of me said I should tell her to stay in the house and I’d go to the grocery alone, but I didn’t want to do that.

  The truth was, the long drive down together had been pleasant. I was glad to see that she wasn’t one of those women who talks nonstop. And she seemed to already know something about me because at the first gas station she had instinctively chosen my favorite snacks.

  I felt only relief after we got outside the house again. It would be dark in another hour, so I thought we should go. But Jackie got within three feet of the car door, then floated off toward the broken birdbath. I went to her, put my hands on both her elbows, ushered her into the car, and backed out of the driveway. Since we’d entered the little town from the east, I drove west, this time staying on a numbered highway.

  Once we were out of the town, Jackie seemed to come to herself. “I know you bought a furnished house, but—”

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “The truth is, there are some things missing.”

  “Besides parts of the roof, the railings, and the windows?”

  Jackie waved her hand in dismissal. “You didn’t happen to see the pots and pans in the kitchen, did you? Or lift up the quilts on the beds? Or touch the pillows?”

  The answer was no to all her questions so she filled me in. It seemed that in terms of livability, the house might as well have been vacant. There were probably sixty-one Statue of Liberty souvenirs in the living room, but no bed linens, and I could just imagine the pillows: hard, damp, and moldy.

  About twenty miles out of town, around twisty mountain roads, was a Wal-Mart. I didn’t say a word to Jackie, just turned into the parking lot. I must say that she was an efficient little thing. She grabbed a cart, I got another one, and thirty minutes later they were packed so full she couldn’t see over the top of hers. I had to grab the front of her cart and lead it to the register.

  “It’s a good thing you’re rich,” she said, looking at
our hoard of kitchen paraphernalia—clean, new kitchen equipment—plus sheets, towels, and paper products.

  The first few times she’d made these offhand remarks I’d wanted to tell her where to get off, but now I was beginning to get used to them. This time I smiled. “Yeah. It is good I’m rich. With a house like that one, I might as well paper the walls with twenties. How in the world will I be able to sell it?”

  “Sell?” Jackie asked, her face falling, and looking like a kid who’d just been told her pet rabbit was going to be eaten. “How could you sell a house like that?”

  “I doubt if I’ll be able to. I’ll probably die owning the place.”

  She started to say something, but it was our turn at the register so she started unloading.

  After Wal-Mart, we went to a grocery store and again filled two carts. At the checkout counter I was selecting candy bars when she said, “Are you planning to eat those things before or after dinner?” The way she said it made me put half the candy back.

  When we got back Jackie said that she’d cook dinner “this once” if I’d bring in the groceries. I agreed quickly. Cooking was not something I was good at. By the time the groceries were in and put away (one shelf of the pantry cleaned off, refrigerated food in the iced-down cooler we’d bought) she’d set the table with candles and plates that even to my untrained eye looked expensive.

  She saw me looking at them. “Limoges,” she said. “The cabinet in the dining room has three sets for twelve.”

  “Wonder why Belcher didn’t take them with him?”

  “And do what with them?” Jackie asked, stirring something on the old gas stove. There was a single bare bulb over the cooking surface and it was so low wattage it made a little spotlight around Jackie, highlighting her and the cooktop in the dark room. “You told me the realtor said he’s over ninety, heirless, and an invalid. He probably eats off those suction plates made for babies. And if he sells the dishes, who does he leave the money to? However…”