“I’ve been trying not to think about it,” answered Holliday. He suddenly had a frighteningly strong urge for a cigarette. He hadn’t smoked since Amy died. “Sometimes I think I spent the best days of my childhood there.”
“Me, too,” said Peggy. Holliday could see tears welling in the corners of her eyes and could hear them beginning to clog in her throat. “He gave me my first camera, you know,” she continued. She blinked the tears away at least for the moment. “It was a Kodak Baby Brownie from the forties. I think he picked it up when he was in England. I used to take pictures of bugs and things down by the creek. I got so frustrated that what I saw in the viewfinder was never what showed up in the pictures; then Grandpa Henry explained it to me. I was the only kid in grade three who knew what parallax was.”
“He taught me the same lesson, except it was about trout fishing and the Cattaraugus Indians,” Holliday said with a laugh. “The fish wasn’t quite where you thought it was even when you could see it in the water.” He shook his head sadly. “There was a time in my life when I thought Uncle Henry knew everything worth knowing. I still think that way sometimes.”
“I’m going to miss him so much,” whispered Peggy.
“Me, too,” said Holliday. “But that’s not answering your question about the house, is it?”
“No,” the young woman agreed.
“Maybe it’s time we confronted the inevitable,” sighed Holliday.
“Maybe you’re right,” answered Peggy.
Twenty-six Hart Street was like a Walt Disney version of a haunted house, complete with a spooky turret and a widow’s walk with a wrought iron railing on the flat peak of the steeply sloping mansard roof. The house was set back on the property, enclosed by a low brick wall and surrounded by plantings of ancient elms, birch and gnarled black walnut trees, their limbs goitered and twisted like the arthritic crones found in fairy tales. Nobody had cut the grass in a while.
A sloping gravel path led down between the trees to the bank of Canadaway Creek, the burbling shallow stream hidden behind the long drooping branches of a dozen weeping willows, the far bank much higher than the near one and dense with undergrowth. Approaching the tottering Shingle Style Queen Anne monstrosity at the end of the street was like the opening pages of one of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia tales; there was a sense that entering the house might take you anywhere and not necessarily to places you’d like to go, a vaguely sinister call to adventure.
John Holliday and Peggy Blackstock went up five worn wooden steps to the covered piazza-style front porch. Holliday brought out the fat bunch of keys the lawyer had grudgingly handed over and tried them one at a time. Finally he found one that fit into the old Yale lock and turned it. He grasped the faceted crystal doorknob and opened the door. Holliday stepped inside, Peggy close behind him.
Instantly they were assailed by a cloying, familiar scent. “He’s riding high,” said Holliday.
Peggy smiled. “He has P.A.”
“Pipe Appeal and Prince Albert,” they said together, finishing the old advertisement that Uncle Henry would quote every time he took his ancient briar out of his jacket pocket, polishing the bowl against the satin fabric of the waistcoat he always wore before clamping the smelly pipe between his teeth, smoke fuming up and staining his white mustache a permanent nicotine yellow.
In the center of the wide hall a stairway spiraled up to the second floor. To their left was the library; to the right was the old-fashioned parlor. Behind the stairway was the dining room with its imposing fireplace, and at the end of the hall were the pantry and the kitchen. A glass-enclosed conservatory had been added at the rear of the house, and for many years Henry had bred roses there.
The floors throughout were heavily varnished pine, covered with a collection of worn Persian carpets and runners of every age and description. The walls were wainscoted in black walnut, with plain plaster above, painted white once but faded to a neutral beige after so much time. The furniture was all dark late-Victorian with heavy, deep brown velvet drapes to match. Small landscapes in plain gold frames lined the walls in the hallway, each with its own brass-sconced light. Against the wall opposite an old elephant’s foot coatrack and umbrella stand was a giant longcase grandfather clock, the brass face enclosed in an oak case inlaid with mahogany and satinwood. It ticked heavily, the steady sound echoing a little, making the empty silence in the rest of the house even more oppressive.
“It sure feels empty,” whispered Peggy sadly.
“Yeah,” agreed Holliday. “It sure does.”
They did a quick tour of the house. Every horizontal surface was covered with knickknacks and collectibles: shelves full of antique bottles, tables covered with stacks of old magazines, collections of minerals and fossils in glass-fronted display cases. A mantelpiece filled with ships in bottles, some of the bottles so old the glass was clouding.
There were four bedrooms on the second floor, a bathroom with a separate water closet, stairs leading up to the widow’s walk and the turret room. Everything was equally cluttered. Located conveniently beside the toilet was a stack of Life magazines dating back to the 1930s. Once upon a time the turret room had been a children’s play area, but now it was only a repository for broken furniture awaiting repairs that would never come and old luggage and boxes that would have been stored in the attic or garage of most houses.
Only one of the bedrooms had been occupied, the smallest, which had its own fireplace. Like everywhere else in the house it didn’t look as though anyone had dusted in decades, and soot from the fireplace and smoke from Henry’s inevitable pipe had made the window that looked out over the rear yard and the creek almost opaque.
“Never the greatest housekeeper, was he?” Peggy commented. She fluffed up the down-filled pillow and smoothed out the pale blue chenille comforter on the big four-poster bed that took up most of the room, her fingers running sadly across the old fabric.
“No,” murmured Holliday. They made their way downstairs again, going through to the kitchen. The furniture here was Early American-a pine table in the middle of the room with four plain matching chairs, ladder-backed with woven rush seats. The cupboards were painted wood inset with pale blue Delft tiles. The floor was gray-green linoleum.
The old Kelvinator refrigerator was filled with bits and pieces of past meals-a dried-out piece of steak badly wrapped in wax paper, a chunk of orange-colored cheese, an open half-used can of Campbell’s Chunky Chicken soup, some limp celery; an enormous jar of Cheez Whiz squatted on one of the racks.
“Uncle Henry’s secret vice,” said Holliday. “Cheez Whiz on toasted Wonder Bread.”
“Grandpa Henry once wrote an article for Smithsonian magazine about Edwin Traisman,” said Peggy. “I did the photo research and layout for him.”
“Who?”
“Edwin Traisman. A Latvian from Wisconsin. The guy who invented Cheez Whiz.”
“Figures he’d be from Wisconsin,” said Holliday.
“Turns out he also invented the McDonald’s French fry,” continued Peggy. “He was ninety-one when he died.”
“Guess he kept away from his own creations,” grunted Holliday. They went through the pantry and into the dining room. The darkly paneled room was dominated by an enormous display cabinet that took up one entire wall from floor to ceiling. The glass-fronted cabinet was filled with tier upon tier of stuffed birds and animals, from a tiny sparrow to an enormous horned owl, from a glass-eyed chipmunk forever climbing an amputated length of tree limb to a snarling bobcat riding a papier-mвchй and chicken wire boulder. The rest of the room was filled with a long, highly polished dining room table flanked by eight high-backed chairs upholstered in blue morocco leather. There was an ornate morini bowl of wax fruit as a centerpiece that was as dusty as everything else in the house.