A Stranger in Wynnedower (27 page)

“Which is where she
already is.” She touched his arm. “I promise I’ll be careful.”

“Rachel, you can invite
her out of her rooms, but don’t get her involved in plans for restoration. If I
decide to sell Wynnedower, I don’t want it to hurt her more than it would
already.”

His hand slid over
hers. She tried not to read anything into it. Dreaming had tripped her up in
life more than once. Not dreaming. Fantasizing. Pretending something was going
to be different instead of accepting it ‘as is.’

She’d spent years
taking care of herself and Jeremy and planning their future only to awaken one
day and discover that, no matter how well-intentioned and how valuable her
actions were, the motivation had grown up and wanted to be on his own. Even
Aunt Eunice…. She tried to help Eunice, too, in the later years, but no matter
how many times Eunice said she was thankful for Rachel’s help, Rachel knew her
aunt considered her bossy and high-handed.

Naturally a man like
Jack would be interesting to a bossy wallflower bookworm inventory specialist.
But she’d done a solid job of not imagining more in the relationship than there
actually was. In fact, and in reality, Jack was far, far away from what a
reasonable woman would consider good sweetheart material.

****

Tracing the broken
brick paths with her feet, visualizing the garden, resting on the concrete
bench and evaluating the view…while the path at her back, May’s path, promised
a mystery and tantalized as it vanished into the forest. Not just a mystery
about May. What about the dark figure she’d seen the evening of Helene’s
distress? Whoever had gotten in…. Kilmer, right?

No one had actually
seen him well enough to identify him except Helene, right? And she seemed vague
about it.

Jack was away. May was
in the kitchen. Rachel walked beneath the overgrown arbor and headed toward the
woods.

The path was wide
between the tall trees, more than sufficient for a car to pass. It didn’t look
look like that happened often.

Bird song. Fluttery
leaves. The noises were like little snatches of music. Clean air. She breathed
deeply, sending thank you thoughts to the trees for their gift of oxygen. She
felt like a nature girl despite what Jeremy said about her and the outdoors. A
nature girl, but a savvy one. She avoided branches and tall weeds, hoping also
to avoid tiny hitchhikers. Problem avoidance was mostly about proper
management.

As she walked, the
wheel tracks became more obvious. This must have been a wagon path long ago,
but it wasn’t rutted like the dirt road leading to Wynnedower. Unused. No
litter.

She came to a stop. A
fork in the path. Now what?

Take Robert Frost’s
advice? Follow the road less-travelled? But then that wouldn’t lead her to
May’s house, would it?

She was about to move
forward when a shoe print caught her eye. Captured like a stamped mold in a
slick patch of red mud, the treads had hardened as the print dried. A man-sized
print. Heading away from her.

When had it last
rained?

The evening before
Helene’s intruder and the open conservatory door?

Rachel stared at the
print, thinking it must surely belong to the figure she’d seen running away.
Kilmer? Something bothered her, but she couldn’t pin it down. She looked
around. The only print she could see was that one captured in clay. 

The path curved again,
and she saw May’s house.

A small, charming
house. Trim and neat. A tin roof and wood siding, but painted and solid
looking. Not a house for mysteries.

Rachel sat on the trunk
of a fallen tree. What had she expected? A haunted house with bats circling
above? Wynnedower was far more mysterious, even sinister, in appearance than
May’s cottage.

It was a civilized
clearing in the woods. Bushes and flower beds showed May’s activities when she
wasn’t at Wynnedower. The path, barely a road, continued beyond.

The setting hinted at a
May who was pretty basic. Lacking in imagination, certainly, else how could she
have spent her days ranging between this trim house and Wynnedower? The car, an
older model mid-size something or other, was parked discreetly next to a Crepe
Myrtle. Pink blossoms littered the car’s roof and hood.

If Wynnedower had a
future, it could include May.
Should
include May. Rachel made a mental
note to speak to Jack. He might not want Helene involved in renovation plans,
but what harm could it do to let May see that Wynnedower had a chance to
survive, and that its future could include her, its most devoted supporter?

Her curiosity had
seeped away. She stood and brushed the bits of bark from her shorts and started
walking back. The distance seemed much shorter returning.

Near where the woods
ended, the imposing wings of the dining room and Jack’s quarters loomed toward
her.

Wynnedower, from the
back, from this distance and despite being neglected, was impressive. The lawn
looked lush and green, again from a distance, because the distance disguised
the bare patches and weedy invaders.

From this angle, the
faint telltale marks of vehicle traffic turned left and followed the edge of
the tree line, curved around and passed by Jack’s car parked at the east end of
the building. Jack’s car, Jack’s wing, the neglected garden, then the dining
room wing.

Beyond the dining room,
near the wide wooden doors at the west end of the house, was a pickup truck. A
man was doing something to the doors. Must be Brendan because she was pretty
sure that was his truck.

She angled across the
yard. As she got closer, she could see Brendan was working on the doors. He
stood, moved over to the truck and put something in the truck bed. He looked
up, saw her and smiled.

“Hey, there.”

She stared at the
freshly cleared earth at the entrance to the doors. “They’ll open now?”

He kicked a tire to
dislodge the dirt clinging to his scuffed boot. “They always opened or would
have if the key hadn’t been lost to the padlock.” He lifted the long tool, the
bolt cutter, from the truck bed. “Fixed now.”

She nodded at the
freshly exposed earth. “The grass blocked it before. It looks neater now.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No, well, yes, just
thinking about security. Anyone trying to enter this way couldn’t be seen from
inside the house, except maybe from the dining room. These doors were blocked
before, but not now.”

Brendan turned to the
doors and rattled the shiny new chain looped through the iron door handles. “No
worries. I replaced the old rusty hardware with nice new shiny hardware.”

Which was a rather
pointless remark, she thought. Rust didn’t make it weaker and might actually
have made the lock harder to open. “I’m heading inside. Do you want me to take
the new key to Jack?”

“Nope. He already has
it.” Brendan leaned against the truck. “You seem preoccupied. I don’t think
it’s only about security.”

“Thinking about May.”

He nodded toward the
woods. “Did you walk back to her house?”

“Yes. Can she drive out
some back way?”

“Probably, unless it
gets blocked by downed trees or the road gets washed out by the creek—the site
of my infamous car jump. May can come and go by the dirt road out back or out
this way.” He waved at the perimeter of the open area. He flashed his
disingenuous smile, but his eyes looked away. “Unless you’re planning to chop
wood, I can’t think why anyone would bother trying the back way.”

She was nearly back to
the house and thinking about something else entirely when she thought of
Brendan’s boots and then the rubber toe of the shoe she’d seen in the attic.
The wearer supposedly was the same person who’d disappeared into the woods.
Kilmer, right? But Kilmer wore loafers, or had every time she’d seen him. His
loafers had a smooth sole like Brendan’s boots. But the print in the woods
showed sneaker treads.

Jack preferred to stay
in the dining room, painting. Absorbed in his painting, the rest of the world
ceased to exist. He didn’t think about Wynnedower, about his sister, about the
million nagging things that pulled at him, draining his time and energy. And he
didn’t get caught up in worrying over the coming trip and the showing. Anywhere
other than being firmly in place in front of his easel, was nothing more than a
landscape of duty and decisions.

Before Rachel.

She was aggravating,
but not a drain.

So here he was, instead
of painting, he was in the kitchen sharing a meal with her.

He watched as she sat
across the table from him, spooning beef stroganoff casserole onto her plate.
She looked up, saw him and smiled. He smiled back. He couldn’t help himself.

She pushed the
casserole dish across to him. “I found some interesting papers in that box.”

“What box?”

“The one with the
framed photographs?”

“Right. You found
what?”

“Papers. Receipts.
Amazing receipts. We should frame them.”

“What’s got you so
excited about receipts?” Typical of Rachel to get excited over some slips of
paper when the whole world was in turmoil and his own world was full of
distractions and he had this art show looming and who knew how that would
go...but he liked that she did. She had a way of focusing and shutting out the
raucous noise of life.

“They’re receipts for
paintings. Paintings your great-grandfather must’ve purchased. Guess what? They
name the paintings and the artists. Like Van Gogh.
Cottage Sunflowers
.”

“Old news. I told you
Griffin spent a small fortune dabbling in his art obsession. Whatever paintings
he bought, however valuable, are long gone, sold to pay off debts. Griffin was
a dreamer and an idealist whose head was turned by the fame of others.”

“It’s part of your heritage,
Jack. Don’t be so dismissive. Griffin wasn’t perfect. No one is. I went to the
Goochland Library this morning and looked up the paintings online. There is no
Cottage
Sunflowers
painting. Lots of Van Gogh sunflowers, but none with that name.
Same for the others listed on the receipts.”

“So the name was
changed. Or wrong. Or Griffin sold it to a private collector who didn’t share
his inventory.”

“But the receipts
themselves are like holding a piece of history in one’s hands.”

“The painting is the
only thing that matters. The artist, too, I guess. The rest is just–” Her
excitement enlivened him, but it also worried him. He didn’t want her to be
disappointed, or feel used, or….

“Oh, why do I bother?
You really are a humbug, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not, or I
would’ve dumped this place long ago.” He scraped the last bits of pasta onto
his fork. “But reveling in dusty receipts won’t pay the bills.”

“Someday, someone might
be holding a receipt for one of your paintings in his hands and feeling like
he’s touching history.”

Jack didn’t answer. His
brain had suddenly stopped and something electric started in his arms and went
through his chest. She’d done that. Made it feel real. The possibilities. The
future with the possibilities realized. He took a quick look at her face, almost
expecting that she was making fun, but no. Her face was flushed; her amber eyes
were flashing.

On the edge of a
precipice
. Where had that thought
come from? Change the subject. He said, “I never asked about your parents or
even your aunt. We always talk about Wynnedower.”

She stared at him
blankly.

“You and Jeremy. Did
you always live in Baltimore?”

“No. Yes.” She
shrugged. “We moved there when we went to live with Aunt Eunice, but that was
so long ago, and we were so young, that it might as well as been ‘always’.”

“You said your Aunt
wasn’t…what did you say? I forget how you phrased it. But she wasn’t up to
raising kids?”

“She was a gentle lady.
Never married or dealt with children. Left to her, we would’ve spent every
waking hour in front of the television. Anything that would keep us quiet and
still, might keep us safe.”

“Like couch potatoes?”

She laughed, but the
humor didn’t reflect in her eyes. “She wasn’t mean or anything, but it was as
if she had no frame of reference for living. Everything was either safe or it
wasn’t. She didn’t want us to play outside because we might get stolen. At the
end of each school day, everything we told her either alarmed her or worried
her.” Rachel clapped her hands to her cheeks in mock drama. “What? Jeremy only got
a C on his spelling test? Had I spoken out in class too much and offended the
teacher? Did Jeremy have another bruise? Had he hurt someone? Had someone hurt
him?” She shook her head. “We’d just lost our parents, yet each day, I felt
like Aunt Eunice was going to topple over from a heart attack over something
I’d done, or hadn’t done.”

He tried to keep his
face non-committal. “That was a difficult way to live, always having to watch
out for landmines.”