Your House or Mine?. Cynthia ThomasonЧитать онлайн книгу.
the back way,” he said. “I left the door unlocked.”
“You have a key?” An alarming thought occurred to her. “You’re not living here, are you?”
He smiled. “No, not yet. But I have access to the property. With your aunt’s permission, of course.” He swatted his ball cap against his thigh, settled it back on his head, and took a few steps toward the wheelbarrow as if he were dismissing her. “Oh, by the way, don’t be alarmed by what you see in there. The place may not look exactly as you remember it. Your aunt’s been a busy lady the last few weeks.”
She matched his smug expression with her most skeptical one. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll see when you get inside.” He grasped the handles of the wheelbarrow, but before he turned the corner of the barn, he called back over his shoulder. “Make yourself at home, Meg.” And then he smiled. “While you’re here I promise to knock before coming in.”
BEFORE MEG COULD utter an appropriate comeback, Wade had turned the corner with his Suwannee riverbank fertilizer. Consequently he probably didn’t hear when she slammed her car door after retrieving her suitcase and stomped along the old cement patio stones that led to the back door. Maybe Deputy Murdock didn’t appreciate the full effect of her frustration, but it made Meg feel better to release it.
His attitude was unnerving. He almost acted as if this dilemma were a laughing matter and that his claim to Ashford House was real. Of course she supposed he believed it was. Meg lugged her bag up three porch steps and twisted the doorknob which was, indeed, unlocked. She’d set Deputy Murdock straight soon enough. Meg knew Ashford House had been deeded to her. She’d seen a copy of the Quit Claim document before it was filed with the attorney. Her name was on it.
“This house guards our souls, Margaret,” Aunt Amelia had told her one warm, fragrant night many years ago. “We two are the only ones who feel its pulse and hear it breathe. Not even your Uncle Stewie understands these old walls like you and I do. We are the destiny of Ashford House.”
Through the years Meg had explored every nook and cranny of the mansion. She’d daydreamed at the windows of all six bedrooms. She knew about the secret panels in the library, the removable top to the newel post at the base of the front stairway where Uncle Stewie always hid a bag of silver dollars which he passed out to Meg and Jerry when they visited.
She stepped across the threshold into the kitchen and let out a breath. A sense of overwhelming relief washed over her. This was Hattie May’s kitchen, just as Meg remembered it with its six-burner stove, mammoth refrigerator, and ten-foot pine scrub table. She could almost picture Hattie May washing vegetables at one of the giant sinks as she spun tales about her ancestors who had been brought to America as slaves.
Don’t be alarmed, the deputy had said. The place may not look as you remember it. What nonsense, Meg thought. As far as she could tell nothing had changed.
Then she noticed that the pantry door was ajar. Several boxes protruded from the opening, making it impossible to close. Certainly the shelves were not stocked with food as they once used to be. Hattie May passed away a few years after Uncle Stewie’s death, and Aunt Amelia, with hired help only a few hours a day, prepared most of her own simple meals herself.
Meg crossed to the door, pulled it open the rest of the way and stood face-to-face with a solid wall of cardboard cartons. “What is all this?” she said to the empty room. The boxes she could see had been opened and resealed. She read a few of the shipping labels and discovered with a feeling of relief that each carton had been shipped to Amelia Ashford. At least the deputy hadn’t moved his personal possessions into her house! The postmarks were from the past two months. The return addresses were various companies located throughout the United States.
If this collection of cartons was what the deputy meant by alarming, then perhaps he had a point. Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, Meg went out the back door and stood on the service porch. “Deputy,” she shouted. “Deputy Murdock!”
He came around the barn, pushing the wheelbarrow with ease since it had delivered its cargo. “What is it?” he called to her.
“These boxes. What do you know about them?”
Leaving the cart by the barn door, he came halfway to the house. “They’re all Mrs. Ashford’s,” he said.
“I can see that, but what’s inside them?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Amelia’s been ordering things. I bring her mail up every day, and she gets stacks of catalogues. Since she’s been at Shady Grove I’ve left an accumulation on the wicker table on the front porch. If you look through the mail, I think you might get some answers.”
Meg shook her head. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “She’s filled up the pantry.”
Deputy Murdock laughed. “The pantry? Haven’t you been in the dining room?”
“No.”
He let out a long whistle. “I hope you aren’t planning any dinner parties while you’re here.”
She frowned at him. “Of course not. You’re just full of riddles and surprises, aren’t you, Deputy?”
“No, ma’am. I deal in facts, and you’re about to face some of them right now.”
Meg returned to the kitchen and walked cautiously to the dining room. When she pressed on the hinged door that normally provided easy access between the rooms, she discovered that it allowed only enough room for one person to walk through. And when she did, she couldn’t believe what she saw. Piled on the floor, the table, all ten Chippendale chairs were more boxes. Dozens and dozens of them. All sizes and shapes.
She sidestepped down a narrow path that wound between two columns of cartons until she was in the middle of the room where her aunt had once hosted friends and family and which now resembled a warehouse. She scanned a wall of corrugated cardboard while she ran her hands along the dusty exteriors of the boxes. Then, she absently noted Wade Murdock’s voice coming from the doorway to the kitchen. “It’s a little overwhelming, I guess. I suppose eventually we’ll have to figure out what to do with all this stuff.”
WADE FOLLOWED HER through the dining room to the formal parlor in the front of the house. She hadn’t asked him to. In fact, she probably wasn’t even aware that he was so close. But it was the least he could do, stand guard over her while she faced the evidence of her aunt’s eccentricity. She peered warily around the door frame into the parlor as if she expected to see additional boxes and was steeling herself to deal with even more chaos. She released a long sigh when she saw a mere half-dozen cartons sitting on the desk and an end table. They were the ones he’d carried in today. As long as Meg didn’t look too closely at the details of the parlor that had fallen into disrepair, she would be comforted to find this room at least familiar.
“As far as I know,” he said, “all the boxes are confined to these downstairs rooms. Although I haven’t been on the upper floors since I first saw the house and made an offer on it.”
Startled at the sound of his voice, she spun around and laid her hand across her chest as if she were sending a message to her heart to keep beating. Then she stared at him with wide, vivid blue eyes and shook her head. “How long has it been like this?”
“Roughly since Mrs. Ashford came into some money.”
Her eyes rounded. “What do you mean?”
He had to smile, since he knew the source of the unexpected income. He knew, too, as most everyone in Mount Esther did, that Amelia Ashford had suffered financial difficulties recently. Like many elderly folks, she’d watched her savings dwindle. “It was my money,” he said. “I gave her a deposit on the property when we signed the contract.”
Meg’s eyebrows arched with the unspoken question.
“Twenty thousand dollars,” he told her.
Her gaze darted to the entrance to the dining room and she groaned.