It was getting on to noontime and Mrs. Wenlow had told me to return by lunch. She needed me to watch some of the younger children so she could do some food shopping.
I stacked the pictures on the kitchen table and locked up the little house.
“Strange job, indeed,” Harriet Wenlow remarked as she cut a tuna fish sandwich in half. It had taken a few months, but she and I had come to sort of an arrangement. Oh, no doubt she didn’t approve of me — not my music, my hairstyle (straight-up, closed-cropped, with a touch of gel), my clothes (jeans and a T-shirt most days, shorts if it was hot), or my apparent lack of friends.
“Never approved of loners,” she’d told me shortly after my arrival. But she was sympathetic to what had put me in the foster-care system and didn’t pry into anything beyond what she needed to know.
But today she asked: “So what is it you’re really doing over there at Old Cedar? I hear it’s going to be tom down.”
“Just making sure nothing of any value is left behind.”
“My family is from that area, but I didn’t know Molly Windsor. We go way back, so I asked my mother if she knew anything.” Mrs. Wenlow shook her head. “She said the old woman just wasn’t a part of things.”
And neither am I, I wanted to add... well, most the time. Oh, I do have friends, I even had a girlfriend or two, but just then I was happy flying solo, in all areas of my social life.
“The only other thing my mother knew about her is that she painted pictures,” Mrs. Wenlow added as she started to fill her dishwasher.
“Painted pictures,” I echoed.
“Yes, they were said to be terrible,” she said, chuckling.
I didn’t have a chance to return to Old Cedar that day, and the next day I was recruited for a different job, cleaning the gutters at the Wenlow house. It was after noon before I could get away. It was July Fourth, kids were running up and down the beach setting off small firecrackers, and I was in the house again, staring up over the big fieldstone fireplace, staring at the painting of Old Cedar.
An early Old Cedar, I realized now. The cedars between the two houses were smaller, and the house was visible from the windows of the first floor up to the roof. It was also an Old Cedar that had been painted white.
“You painted this view all through the years,” I said, “But why?”
Not everything’s a mystery, not everything’s a secret, even when someone tells you it is. But I took the picture down, using a rickety old chair I found in the kitchen, and set it carefully by the kitchen door. Then I did yet another circuit of the house — my third.
This time I moved a bit slower, and did more standing and...
Looking at where windowsills met the wall or how a door fit into its frame. I was searching for something, anything that was a bit out of line, a bit off center. I studied paneling in the bedrooms, and if anything looked crooked, patched, or sealed over, I checked it out. I’d bought a measuring tape, a hammer, and a small crowbar because I figured if I did find something a bit off it would do no harm to break a wall, pry off a sill, knock out a bookshelf. But again there was nothing.
First floor, marking everything off in green chalk this time. Second floor, the same, and the third floor. Then even the hot, dusty attic, crawling around under the eaves on my hands and knees. Nothing but a bit of dry rot and spiders.
Shortly after four in the afternoon, I was back on the second floor, sitting on the floor in a southeast-facing bedroom, back against the door frame. Not much natural light in this room this time of day, only a light glow in through the windows. But it was cooler here, comfortable, full of shadows. And if I shut my eyes for two minutes...
I shook myself alert before I could doze off, and then I saw it. Something.
In the top corner of the room, near the ceiling, and on an interior wall, was a thin streak of something dark that trickled down through the green and blue pattern of the room’s wallpaper. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, and truthfully, I jumped up thinking it was a bloodstain. I went and got the floor polish crate, came back and stood on it, and reached up to touch the streak. A reddish-brown powder came off in my fingers. I looked at it, smelled it. Rust. Probably from a rusty old steam pipe.
Again, nothing.
“Why Herbert Sawyer, haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.” Martin Cross reached forward from his wheelchair. I took his hand, gave it a good shake. The man was a powerhouse from the waist up and he nearly took my arm off in his grip. “You don’t come to the library anymore, Herbert.”
“Don’t live in town anymore, Mr. Cross. I’m over in Falmouth with the—”
“He knows all about that!” Elmer Hornton cut me off, angry, impatient. “Forget the pleasantries, Martin, damn it! Tell the boy what you told me!”
For a moment both Martin Cross and I simply stared at Elmer, until he shook his head, mumbled some kind of apology, and shuffled with his walker across the kitchen. “I’m not staying,” he snarled. “I’ll be out on the porch, working on a damn fly. You tell me when you’re done.”
“Of course, Elmer,” Martin said in an amazingly patient manner. “Thank you for the coffee.”
Mr. Hornton went onto the porch.
“This is really bothering him.” I sat down at the table. Outside in the distance was the constant boom-boom of fireworks. They’d go on for hours.
“I know,” Martin said, “I also think he’s angry at me. I couldn’t find much of anything on this woman. She lived a very unremarkable life.”
“No secrets?” I said.
“Let me tell you what I told him.”
Martin removed some papers from a manila folder lying on the table and began:
“First about the house. It was built in 1888 by the Windsor family as a summer home, a retreat. Nothing very notable ever happened there, as far as I can find. Next, about the family. They owned Windsor Feed and Grain and up until around 1920, made a very respectable living from it. However, the company never diversified, never branched out into lumber or other areas, and as the small farms in the area disappeared, so did the customers. Edgar Windsor, the last owner, died of a heart attack working at his desk; he was forty-four. His wife, Elvira, died a week later in bed of what the death certificate calls a ‘wasting disease.’ It might have been cancer, tuberculosis, perhaps anorexia.” Martin shook his head. “She was only thirty-five. Mary, their daughter, also known as Molly, was ten when her parents died and she was immediately taken to Boston by her father’s sister, Sarah. Molly Windsor never attended public schools, either here in Manamesset or in Boston; she was ‘home-tutored,’ possibly by her mother and later by her aunt. There’s no record of their being a governess or other instructor.” Martin paused to look at me. “The records of the Windsor company are public, Herbert, and kept in the Barnstable Public Library. Windsor Feed and Grain folded shortly after Edgar Windsor’s death. Its assets were sold to pay off its debts and the remainder, which amounted mainly to that one big house, Old Cedar, went to Sarah Windsor. Edgar mixed family finances with his business, so I found accounts of what he paid for wood, for ice, for household expenses, and so on. But there’s no account for a tutor or private school, so I’m assuming—”
“Boring.”
“Quite so.” Martin shook his head. He shuffled through the folder a bit, removed some more papers.
“Now, from Stribner and Sons, the law firm where Molly was employed. Molly started there at age fifteen, and continued until her retirement at age seventy-seven. Remarkable. She was a legal assistant. I could find no indication that Molly ever joined any clubs, or was a church member.” A pause to take a sip of coffee, and then, “I have spoken by phone to the oldest Stribner, an Abner Stribner, grandson of the man who hired Molly. He remembers her, of course. But she retired twenty years ago and his memories of her are sparse. According to him, she was an efficient, older woman who kept to herself. Oh, one more thing: she did have two library cards. One for Boston Public, the other here in Manamesset.” He smiled.