“You see things,” he had said to me. “You sense things—”
It had been my turn to interrupt him, and a bit angrily at that: “No, I’m not... psychic or super-sensitive or anything crazy like that. Look, I have—” I took a short breath, but I understood, even as I protested it, to what he was referring. “—maybe a few times I’ve helped figure out some situation. But this is different.”
And to that Elmer Hornton had one response: “Exactly.”
I got up, went back into the house, sized it all up. The first floor rooms: kitchen, pantry, front room to the west, front room to the east, living room, dining room, morning room. There was also a storage room off the kitchen on the south side, which had probably been the housekeeper’s room. In addition, there were two bathrooms on the first floor: a small one off the kitchen and a larger one just off the dining room — it was around and under the staircase. Both bathrooms were completely modernized, the bigger one having a custom-built shower stall in which you could have had a party, and a hot tub large enough for me and six of my friends.
Now that was an inviting thought, if only I’d had six friends.
Then I walked through all the rooms again, this time opening and closing doors and drawers, running my hands across shelves. I sat on the hearth and tried to move the flagstones and the massive granite stones of the fireplace. I reached into the fireplace, stuck my head up into the chimney, and played with the damper, barely moving in time before a shower of soot came down upon my head. I walked the length of every room, inspecting floors, walls, ceilings, and I marked every space, every wall, every closet I checked with a white X chalk mark.
I was taking Mr. Hornton’s money for not doing an awful lot. I should have felt guilty. He was paying me to walk around a big, old empty house — a simply wonderful house with the ocean air moving through it.
“I’m turning over the keys to the town administrator on September tenth,” he’d said. “Then it’s to be torn down.” He hadn’t given me a chance to ask why before he said, “She willed the land to the town, just the land.”
“So did you have a secret, Molly?” I asked while standing in the middle of the great living room, and as I did a rush of cold air swept in from the northwest. The windows still had a slight frill of faded blue curtains and they swept up and down as I shut my eyes...
I reopened them and, returning to the dining room, took the stairs to the second floor.
Four bedrooms on the second floor, all running off a central hall. Pale wood in the walls and floors, probably maple, and paler walls in the bedrooms. Floral print in the bathroom shared by the front two bedrooms, a more robust red and orange pattern in the bathroom shared by the back two. But all of it was thoroughly modem: the lighting, the windows, the fixtures in the bathrooms. It seemed that perhaps there had been even more rooms up here, but to update the bathrooms, a smaller room had been sacrificed both front and back. But like downstairs, the rooms were empty, not even a rug or broken chair, odd picture on the wall. These rooms had been stripped.
The stairs which came up from the dining room continued upwards by way of a small alcove to the third floor. Up here three more bedrooms, two on the southwest side, with a shared bathroom between, and one bedroom in the back. That third bedroom, which didn’t overlook the bay, but south to the cedar grove, and the little house out by the causeway road, was bigger than any of the other bedrooms and had a colossal walk-in closet that smelled of cedar. It also had its own bathroom with another huge shower and an antique tub sitting on four brass-clawed feet.
In the hall on this floor was a small sitting area, a nook containing a window seat that overlooked the bay. Nice place to sit and read or just contemplate the view: beach, water, sky, boats. I threw up the windows, then turned and saw a closet in that nook. I opened it and found more stairs, these went to the attic.
I didn’t go all the way up, just stuck my head into the attic, and looked around. Okay, if I were looking for secrets, I would do this space last. But there seemed nothing here, just eaves and dust and the ceiling and roof above me. No old storage chests or bureaus, not even an ancient dress form, which most attics seemed to have.
I did another walk around of the second floor, inspecting walls, backs of closets, tops of closets. In one room I found an empty box for Imperial Floor Polish, which I used to stand on as I felt around inside the closets, pushing at the walls, running my hands along the smooth maple and oak floorboards. Every area and wall I checked got a new white chalk mark.
I turned the faucet in one of the second floor bathrooms. It ran brown for a few seconds, then was clear and cold. The hot tap worked too. I flicked a light switch and the light over the sink blinked on.
“So what am I looking for, Molly?” I said aloud.
No box of letters tucked up high on a shelf in a musty closet, no skeletons walled up, no unexplained stains on the floor.
The sun was moving into the west; late afternoon shadows were shifting through the open windows, with here and there a forgotten curtain lifting in the ocean breeze. It was indeed a strange sensation to walk through the huge, empty spaces looking for a “secret” that might not even exist.
I returned to the living room and stood in front of the fireplace. Above it was the painting.
A bit simplistic, almost childlike, but it was of Old Cedar, and it was signed MW.
“Kind of a nice place,” I said, sitting out on Mr. Hornton’s front porch, watching the guy across the road. He had dragged an outboard motor over to his side yard, had it set up in a large galvanized trash barrel full of water.
More than just a nice place, Old Cedar was an exceptionally nice place. I liked the deep, hollow feel of the rooms, the sound the hardwood floors made under my sneakers, the sweep of the salty air in my face when I pushed up the windows. It was a house which could draw you in — comforting, solid, and large. I would have liked to have sat in one of those rooms for hours, as the sun turned westward then dropped into the dark pool of the bay, and watch the shadows move across the floor and fade off as the sky turned purple, orange, and red.
But as far as this secret was concerned, I’d come up with nothing, nada, zilch, and I’d made that pretty plain to a grim-faced Elmer Hornton who sat next to me attempting to tie a fishing fly.
“Damn, it could be staring you right in the face, and you’d never know,” he snapped.
Was that intended to be personal? Especially after praising my ability to “sense things” earlier.
“Maybe the secret is that there is no secret,” I said, thinking I was pretty clever. He glared at me. “Okay, then it’s something else, isn’t it? What I mean is, it’s not the secret.”
“What are you going on about?” he snarled.
“You don’t want Old Cedar tom down.” The wheels were turning in my head, “So if someone important had lived there or...” It had occurred to me that what he really wanted was to find out something startling about the house, something which would make it more than just a local landmark, a reason to save Old Cedar.
“I’m already having that checked out,” he said, swearing under his breath at me, at the fly, the line, and even at the guy across the road who was now setting up an awful racket with his outboard motor. The rich scent of gasoline and diesel floated across the road. “Martin Cross is doing some research.” He muttered, swore, nicking himself with the jackknife he was so ineffectively wielding. Out came the handkerchief — along with a sour look directed my way.
Martin Cross was a local historian and a friend of Mr. Hornton’s. I’d met the man, had liked and respected him; compared to Elmer Hornton’s brusque gruffhess, Martin was gentility itself.