“Mr. Stewart?” said the woman. “Dale?”
For a second, he was totally at a loss. Then the slow tumblers clicked into place. “Ms. Whittaker?”
The heavy woman began walking carefully over the snow-covered ruts. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she cried, coming too close to him, “call me Sandy.”
Dale had found the McBride house for rent on the Internet. When he had contacted the local real estate company handling the house rental—a place out of Oak Hill—he had spoken to the woman for ten minutes about the details of renting the vacant house before the two realized that they knew each other. She had said her name was Mrs. Sandra Blair, but only after he told her on the phone that he had lived in Elm Haven for a few years as a child did she say that actually she was divorced—she still kept the Blair name for business purposes because her ex-husband had been an important personage in Oak Hill and Peoria—but that her friends called her by her maiden name, Sandy Whittaker.
Dale dimly remembered Sandy Whittaker as a thin, blond, quiet girl who hung out with Donna Lou Perry, the best pitcher in their informal but daily summer baseball league. Now, as he stood looking at this heavy, hippy, jowled, top-heavy woman, all the time hoping that she had not seen him taking a leak as she drove up, he could make no connection at all with the eleven-year-old girl from his past. Perhaps she had the same problem: he hadn’t put on as much weight as she had, but his salt-and-pepper beard and glasses certainly hadn’t been part of his image as a kid.
“Good heavens, Dale, we didn’t expect you until tonight or tomorrow. The place has been cleaned up a bit and the electricity was to be turned on today, but when you called from Montana we thought you said November first or second.”
“I did, actually,” said Dale. “I just kept on driving. Shall we get out of the snow?”
“Yes, of course.” She was wearing high-heeled shoes. Dale could not remember the last time he had seen a pair of stiletto heels like these, especially on a woman so formidable. He held out his hand to help her across the frozen ruts and through the snowy patches. “Very strange weather for so early in autumn,” said Sandy Whittaker.
“That’s what I thought,” said Dale as they came up onto the tiny side porch. “But then I thought maybe I’d forgotten what November was like here in Illinois.”
“Oh, no, no. Usually very nice. It must be that terrible el niño thing. Have you been in the house?”
“Only briefly last night,” said Dale. “The power was out and. . . I should warn you. . . something died in there. A mouse or rat, perhaps. It smelled pretty bad.”
She paused at the doorway and arched one painted eyebrow. She was wearing so much makeup that it seemed to Dale that she was wearing a flesh-colored Kabuki mask. “Smell?” she said. “I was here yesterday with a cleaning lady and the propane people. There was no smell then. Do you think it’s a gas leak?”
“No,” said Dale, brushing the snow from his hair. “You’ll see.” He opened the door for her.
Sandy Whittaker batted at the kitchen light switch, and the bare bulb came on. The dishes on the table and counter, Dale could now see, had been freshly washed and stacked. There was no smell whatsoever.
“That’s strange,” he said. He stepped into the dining room where the cold daylight illuminated the gray boxes of the learning machines. There was no smell there, either. “I was sure that something large had died in here.”
Sandy Whittaker giggled nervously. “Oh, no, Mrs. Brubaker—that was Mr. McBride’s sister—died in the hospital over at Oak Hill, where I live. Oak Hill, I mean, not in the hospital. That was almost a year ago. And Mr. McBride died in Chicago. . . oh, when was it?”
“1961,” said Dale.
“Yes, of course, the winter after. . . well, after that terrible accident to little Duane out here.”
Dale had to smile despite himself. His childhood friend had weighed over 200 pounds at age eleven. No one had ever called him “little Duane.”
“And he died in a farm machinery accident some distance from here, didn’t he?” continued the Realtor.
Dale realized that she was worried that he would think the house was haunted. “I just meant that last night it smelled as if a mouse or something died here,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s gone.”
“Yes,” said Sandy Whittaker, all business now. “Would you like to look at the house? I know that the snapshots I sent you via e-mail weren’t all that clear. I don’t have one of those newfangled digital cameras. . . I just scan in the snaps from my little Instamatic.”
“No, they were very helpful,” said Dale. He glanced at his watch. “Aren’t you working a little early. . . oh, wait, I forgot that I lost an hour driving to the Central Time Zone. My watch says seven forty-five.” He started to reset it.
“No,” said Sandy Whittaker, with a small frown, consulting her own watch, “your watch is right. It’s just seven forty-five.”
Dale paused. He was sure that he hadn’t reset it during his drive. Then he realized the obvious: Daylight Standard Time had begun while he was traveling. Fall back, thought Dale. Indeed, he seemed to have fallen all the way back into his childhood hometown, his childhood friend’s house, and this conversation with his elementary-school classmate without gaining or losing a minute of his life.
Just forty-one years,thought Dale with a slight tinge of vertigo bordering on nausea.
Sandy led the tour, starting with the ample kitchen. “I’m afraid only one burner works on the old stove. It’s gas, of course. Everything runs off the propane tank out by the tool shed. I’m sure you can get some place in Oak Hill or Peoria to come fix it. The stove, I mean.”
“I probably won’t need more than one burner,” said Dale. “Actually, it’s a microwave I’ll miss. I’ve been subsisting on Hungry-Man frozen dinners. I guess now I’ll just have to suck on them frozen.”
Sandy Whittaker actually stopped and stared at him in something like shock. He could see that she was revising her estimate of him down several notches. “I’m sure that there’s an inexpensive microwave available in. . .”
Dale held up his palms. “I was just kidding. An old Woody Allen line, I think.”
The Realtor frowned and nodded. “The refrigerator is small, but it still works. Plates and glasses and everything you’ll need are in the cupboards here. Mrs. Brubaker was a very tidy person, but I had Alma—that’s our cleaning person—wash everything again anyway. And the dining room here. . .” The floorboards creaked under Ms. Whittaker’s weight. She paused to fiddle with a wall thermostat, and Dale heard an old furnace kick on seconds before the house filled with that not-unpleasant dusty smell of the first-time heat of autumn.
“Well,” she said, stepping further into the dining room, “we just didn’t know what to do with these. . . machines. They were too heavy for Alma and me to carry all the way out to the old chicken coop or the barn, and of course the propane men were too busy to be bothered. I have no idea what these contraptions were, but obviously Mr. McBride had been working on them years and years ago—you may have noticed that Mrs. Brubaker kept everything as she found it, although cleaner, of course.”
“Why did she do that?” said Dale.
“Do what?”
“Keep everything as she found it?”
Sandy Whittaker shrugged. “You remember how. . . eccentric. . . little Duane and his father were. Well, Mr. McBride’s sister was the same way, I guess. She kept to herself. I don’t think anyone ever visited except the Meals on Wheels people during her last year here. And Sarah from Meals on Wheels said that the house never changed. Mrs. Brubaker had kept it up like a museum.”