“So what you doing up here? Come to collect the pictures? Nothing left of any value in the whole place. I saw some trucks here a few weeks ago, took away all the furniture.”
“Pictures,” I murmured.
“Well, they’d be worth something only to anyone who cares. She was not a painter. Elmer can tell you that. Contrast all out of kilter and her take on perspective? Crooked lines everywhere like she never heard of vanishing point or anything, not that I’m a painter, mind you. Can’t paint a damn straight line, but Elmer, he showed me a thing or two. I had a mind to be a portrait painter back in — when did my first book come out? Hmm, late sixties?” He leaned forward, slapped me on the knee, jolting me nearly out of the chair. “That’s all ancient history to a kid like you now, ain’t it?”
“I guess,” I said, sinking back into the chair as he moved away, finally, and standing at the edge of the porch, looked out over the bay and said:
“Hey, got a new little sloop, Herbie, and she’s a beauty. A forty-footer, not that big, needs a crew of four to handle, but you and me and Elmer, we ought to take her out for some deep-sea fishing.” He paused to pick at his teeth with some metal thing. “What do you say?”
“You inherit the little house?” My first words on entering his house without so much as a knock.
And his response: “So what? Worthless shack. Going to tear it down, is what I’m going to do.”
“Mr. Hornton—” I walked toward him, determined and just a bit angry. “—you want me to find Molly’s secret? Well, it’s probably in that little worthless shack!”
“Ain’t nothing in there but a few personal things. No, Herbie, the secret’s up in Old Cedar and if you can’t find it, well, I got half a mind to burn the whole place down.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Silence, almost a stunned emptiness between us as old Mr. Hornton turned way from me, shuddering, shoulders sagging. For a moment there was nothing there, no feeling, no sensations, just a deep void as empty as the rooms in Old Cedar. He had truly loved this woman.
“Hey, I’ll be back later. Sorry...” I started toward the door.
“Stay,” he said between half-muffled sobs, and then angrily: “Stay!”
“All right.”
“What’s a few tears between friends, hey?” he said, making hot coffee on this hottest day yet in July, but I took it, added three packets of sugar, and sitting in the little hot box that was his kitchen, he said to me. “Maybe I did love her, in a fashion, I don’t know. Only twelve years between us...” He shook his head, put a fist down on the tabletop, but not hard, just in emphasis. “Maybe she could have been my wife. All those years, Mrs. Elmer Hornton.” He ran a sweating hand over his forehead. “You ever been in love with an older woman?” He looked at me and quickly answered his own question. “Course not. You’re just sixteen, a boy still, but I tell you this, it’s a pain that won’t go away, and it gets worse as the years pass by.” He turned aside a bit, pulling in his bottom lip, but he wasn’t about to cry this time.
“Yeah, I have,” I admitted. He turned his head sharply. “She was fifty-four.”
“Fifty-four? Holy mackerel, that’s a young ’un for me!” He tried to laugh, but his eyes were reddening up again.
“I thought she was thirty-five.” I shrugged. “I suppose it was more of a crush.”
“Yes, that’s a good name for it because you feel like your whole insides are being crushed to pieces. I can talk a blue streak, you know that, but I could never talk enough to get inside who Molly really was. She was quiet, but she was also sad. There was something missing.” He sat back, sighing, almost gasping, and I moved to help. It was a new problem Mr. Hornton had been experiencing. He put a fist to his chest.
I found his inhaler in a kitchen drawer. He used it, took a minute to compose himself, then said, “I know the answer’s in the big house, but if you want, well, go ahead, look in the little house; the keys are on the ring. I gave Martin all her papers, well, what she had of them, and what the lawyers didn’t need.”
“I’ll look tomorrow,” I said, watching him carefully. His breathing was still ragged and he wanted more coffee. I got up to make it for him.
He reached for the white handkerchief in his back pocket. “Life is full of might-have-beens, Herbie. Don’t let your life get filled with too many of them.”
“There is the painting,” I said as I brought him his coffee. I was hoping to get his mind on something solid, away from all this emotional stuff. “It’s still over the mantel.”
He waved his hand at me: “I told you! Couldn’t paint to save her life! I tried to show her a few things, but she pushed me away, said, ‘Elmer, I paint for my own enjoyment.’ ”
“Where are the other paintings?”
He paused to think. “Well, a few hang around town, post office, library, but that’s because I put them there. Most are just collecting dust.”
“Where?”
“In the little house, of course.”
I spread the paintings across the kitchen floor in the little house. There were twenty of them, all total, all neatly framed, and all, indeed, amateurish. There was no sense of space; everything was flat. One showed seagulls flying over a marsh, but the painting had no life, no color, no sense of anything real to it.
There were ten paintings of the big house. I set those aside and opened the window which looked north and toward the cedar grove. Old Cedar wasn’t visible from here, but Molly had painted these pictures from somewhere nearby, maybe just outside the little house. I knew this because every picture of Old Cedar showed only the top of the house, the part which included the second and third floors, along with the diamond-shaped, stained-glass window, the attic area, and the high, peaked roof.
I lined up these ten paintings, not by date — Molly hadn’t dated any of her work — but by the fact that the cedars had grown taller through the years in which she had obviously painted them. Less and less of Old Cedar was visible, until in the final picture only the peaked roof and the very top corner of the stained-glass window could be seen.
I went outside, slamming the door. It was gusting wind today and would soon get worse. Possible thunderstorms, coming in after the heat. I walked around the little house, looking up toward the big house, through the cedars.
Red cedars are an evergreen; they grow fairly straight up with a peeling, reddish brown bark, and can branch out thickly from a very low height if not trimmed back, and none of these trees had been trimmed; they’d been allowed to grow up thick and close. The branches, for the most part were short, covered with a bristly, blue green needle, and at this time of year, were starting to break out in small blue berries.
The house wasn’t visible at all anymore, unless I was almost at the road and facing toward the bay, to the northwest. From there I could see the roof of Old Cedar, and just make out the very top of the stained-glass window on the third floor. But if I could imagine going back in time, the cedar trees shrinking as the years moved backwards... My conclusion was that Molly had painted all ten pictures of Old Cedar right here, from her side yard, looking north toward the cedar grove. There was also one more picture which I knew of, over the mantel at the big house. I didn’t know what pictures were in the post office or the library, but possibly there were two more of Old Cedar.