And there, behind it, hanging on a small nail, was the door key.
Granny’s voice might easily have been mistaken for a wisp of wind under the veranda eaves, but I swear I heard her whisper. See? You never forgot this house, and this house never forgot you.
Team Pioneer Cathy unpacked the U-Haul, did a quick reconnaissance tour of the yard and barn, then went over the house from the tip of its small, unfinished attic to the bowels of its stone-walled cellar, their heavy footsteps echoing on the empty hardwood floors. I stayed in the living room with all my supplies, opening boxes and unfurling a sleeping bag on a cot in the corner by the fireplace. I set battery-powered lanterns along the hearth and on the broad mantel. I was too nervous to notice many details, just an overwhelming impression of dark wood, stone, and windows with no curtains. Elliptical pools of high-tech lamp light made weird patterns on the wood-paneled walls and ceiling. Wind moaned in the chimney. An aging piece of plywood had been bolted across the front of the fireplace.
I kept eyeing that prohibitive screen. A fire would have been so warm, so cheerful.
So terrifying.
No fires. This house would be a flame-free zone. I patted my ski mask. I’d rather shiver.
I pulled a hammer and nails from the boxes, along with several wool blankets. I nailed them over the windows. I remembered the house filled with sunlight during the daytime, cozy furniture, paintings, whimsical pottery, and lit at night by flickering yellow light from beautiful old kerosene lamps. Without my grandmother’s furnishings in it, the house felt like a wooden mausoleum. I’d save a thorough exploration for morning.
Team Pioneer Cathy returned from securing the perimeter. “Where are the light switches, Ms. Deen?” the leader asked.
“There aren’t any. My grandmother never installed electricity.”
“Bathroom?”
“Chamber pots and a wash stand. For serious business, she used an outhouse.”
“Ms. Deen, we did a quick survey of the yard. There’s no outhouse. Not even a pile of debris where one used to stand.”
I shook my head. “It’s out there somewhere. My father rented this house to tenant farmers after my grandmother died. They lived here up until a few years ago. There has to be a relatively new, intact outhouse.”
“No, ma’am.”
Another unfriendly surprise, like the plywood-barricaded fireplace. Ohhh-kay. I’d improvise. “Well, I’ve got my handy-dandy portable chemical toilet in a box here, somewhere. I’ll set it up and find the outhouse later.”
“Ms. Deen, do you have any idea where to find clean, running water? There’s only a small hole in the wall over the kitchen sink. Someone covered it with a piece of wood.”
I frowned. “There should be a pump-handled spigot.” I made pumping gestures. “You know. Old-fashioned. Pump the handle, water eventually comes out. There’s a rain cistern outside with a pipe that runs straight to the kitchen wall. You can see it from the kitchen window. I used to climb the cistern and sit in the water. Just like the girls on Petticoat Junction. Remember that show? I watched all the re-runs.”
“Maybe there used to be a cistern, but it’s not there now. And from the looks of the patch on the kitchen wall, there hasn’t been a faucet of any kind over the sink for a lot more than a few years.”
My heart sank. Thomas had been right. My father lied to me about taking care of the farm. Daddy wanted to make certain no one, including me, preserved the homeplace of Mother’s embarrassingly backward mountain family. “Well, I’ve got plenty of bottled water to drink,” I said cheerfully. “And plenty of snow to melt for washwater. There’s also a well out in the yard, with a pretty well house . . .”
Their shaking heads told me that was gone, too. I took a deep breath. “I’ll have someone drill a new well. In the meantime, please tell me there’s still a small pond on the far side of the barn. It was spring-fed, and my grandmother raised catfish there.” Nods. “See? I have a pond. Plenty of water.”
The men looked doubtful, but they helped me unpack a few boxes of food and water, and set up my toilet in one corner of the living room. They screwed a heavy-duty latch bolt on the back door to replace its flimsy hook-and-eyelet, and, finally, made sure all the windows were firmly latched. “We could nail these shut,” one said.
The thought made me see woozy stars for a second. How would I escape in a fire? “No nailed windows,” I said. The men looked disappointed. “Please change your mind and come back to Asheville, Ms. Deen,” the leader urged. “When I worked for Halliburton in Iraq I saw bunkers in the desert that were more modern than this place.”
“My grandmother lived here happily all her life. My grandfather died young, and after my mother left home to marry my father Granny stayed here all alone. When I visited she left the windows open and never locked the doors. She felt perfectly safe.” And so did I.
“Did she die of natural causes?”
“She died of a stroke while leading an anti-Reagan rally in Asheville. Look, I appreciate your concerns, but I’ll be fine. Now, get going. You’ve got a thirty-minute drive on a snowy trail just to reach the paved road in the Cove. And then an hour on the mountain road. Get out of here before dark. Save yourselves! Just kidding. Remember, I’ve got friends in the Cove, if I need help.”
Not that I’ll ever ask for it, I added silently.
Team Pioneer Cathy sighed, gave up, rummaged in the boxes, and presented me with a surprise gift: a shotgun and two boxes of shells.
“How sweet,” I said. “Thank you, guys. Whatever I kill first, I’ll have it stuffed and send it to you.”
At least they didn’t have to teach me how to use the gun. One of my aunts had been a champion skeet shooter, and she’d taught me the basics of gun etiquette. Of course, I didn’t have her accoutrements, but does a gal really need a diamond bracelet with an NRA charm, a shaker of martinis, and a custom shotgun with a monogrammed mahogany stock?
I shooed Team Pioneer Cathy onto the veranda and then waved them goodbye. But as the spare Hummer’s taillights disappeared into the snow and the darkness, my chirpy assurance faded and reality set in. Talk about living off the grid. The cold mountain night crept close around me, leaned over my shoulder, sniffed me like a meal, and whispered, Fire didn’t do you in, but ice just might. The wind whipped wet flakes through the holes of my mask, planting cold, wet kisses on my eyes and mouth.
I looked around fearfully. Was this adventure a call to self-sufficiency or an idiot’s guide to self-destruction?
My hands shook as I turned off my flashlight to test the full effect of aloneness atop Wild Woman Ridge. Oh, yes, this was the darkness I remembered from my visits as a child. Not just dark, but dark-dark. Dark-of-the-womb dark. No streetlights, no road sounds, no sirens, no distant glow of city lights, no nothing. Just me and my scars and my phobias and my proud notion that I would show Thomas Mitternich a thing or two about strength of character.
A little door opened in my brain. The hinges creaked. Diaphanous spider webs stretched tight on the door knob. A sign over the door said, Primitive Superstitions, aka Creepy Shit You Don’t Want To Think About.
These ancient Appalachians brimmed with ghost stories, witch stories, hauntings and risings, spirit panthers screaming in the forest, spirit lights dancing in the hollows, encounters with Beelzebub. The kind of stories suburban kids tell each other over flashlights at a pajama party, only these were worse, because here in the mountains they were based on real history.
And their sources were buried nearby.
Oh, God. I’d forgotten about the Nettie cemetery in the woods behind the house. Dozens of Netties, going back to the eighteen-hundreds, were all buried in a pretty clearing where my grandmother had planted so many jonquils the graves became a sea of fragrant yellow blooms every spring. There were pioneer-settler Netties under pitted, fading tombstones, modern Netties under fancy granite pediments, baby Netties under cherubs, even favorite Nettie dogs and cats and one very special goat under flat rocks w
ith their names chiseled on them.
The only two Netties who weren’t buried there were the two whose spiritual surveillance I needed most: Mother and Granny. Mother was buried in the Deen section of an Episcopal church in Atlanta, and Granny was buried in the graveyard of the Methodist church in Turtleville. Daddy and I were in Europe on vacation when she died, so Daddy said there was no way we could get home in time for the funeral and no way he could plan an old-fashioned burial in the isolated Nettie cemetery. Or perhaps he didn’t want to honor a custom that he saw as archaic and even primitive, like the Nettie heritage in general.
“Granny? Mother?” I whispered in the darkness. “I realize spirits don’t have geographic concerns, but I really wish you were within walking distance right now, because at the moment I’m recalling some fairly lurid details about our dead-Nettie heritage.”
Hadn’t the ghost of Granny Nettie’s brother wandered the hollow of Ruby Creek with a grisly head wound, searching for the rival who had murdered him over a woman? Hadn’t Granny turned from her kerosene kitchen stove one sad morning in 1946 to see a small, playful handprint in the biscuit dough on her kitchen table, the kind of handprint my mother’s elder brother, Lucas Nettie, liked to press into the pristine dough to tease her, only little Lucas had died the week before, of meningitis? Hadn’t she seen Grandpa Nettie standing in the pasture hours after he was shot dead? Hadn’t she seen the Cherokee spirit of her mixed-race great-grandmother floating along the deer paths of these woods, moaning for the full-blooded relatives the army had sent on the Trail of Tears?
Granny had related those stories to me with matter-of-fact sincerity and no trace of morbid concern. “There’s a difference between ghosts and spirits,” she explained. “Ghosts are just lost souls, but spirits let you know they’re around for a reason. To teach you something and to comfort you.”
At the moment I didn’t feel comforted by any possible ectoplasmic sightings, no matter how Granny categorized them. I stared into the black portal of the front yard, hearing the skeletal fingers of the big oaks click and rustle in the wind, sensing generations of my mountain kin in the shadows, waiting for me to cut and run.
I don’t want to see dead Netties.
Above my head, something growled.
I leapt inside the doorway, switched the flashlight on quickly, grabbed the unloaded shotgun, then wobbled the flashlight toward the veranda’s rafters. Two beady black eyes stared down at me. A small raccoon was overnighting the storm in a nook of the rafters. He growled again. No, not a growl; okay, it was more like a frightened chuckle.
I sagged a little. “At least you’re not dead and not a relative.”
I backed slowly into my new home, shut the door, locked it, loaded the shotgun, set it on the hearth next to my cot, stuffed several pillows behind my sleeping bag so I could prop up, then crawled into the bag still fully clothed, including a fur-lined parka. I pulled the bag all the way up to my nose. Peering out, I waited sleeplessly for dawn.
Pioneer Cathy had arrived.
Thomas
As the snowy post-Thanksgiving night settled in, I lay on my bed in the firelight of my cabin, wondering where Cathy was and still kicking myself for provoking her to leave Los Angeles. My cabin, or, as I called it, Chateau de Vodka, felt claustrophobic that night. If I calculated the physics of my own saliva just right, I could spit all the way from one end to the other. That small. When the cell phone buzzed on the kitchen table, I finished poking a log in the fireplace, tossed back a double shot of vodka in a coffee mug, rolled across the bed and picked up the phone without ever taking a full step.
Pike drawled in my ear. “Thomas, did you see anybody turn up Ruby Creek Trail as you were heading home?”
“No. Nobody and nothing. Why?”
“Aw, Falter Perkins was out ‘taking some fresh air’—meaning he was turkey-hunting out of season, in the snow, so the game warden couldn’t see his tracks—and he swears he heard heavy trucks—or something that sounded like heavy trucks—pass by on the creek road. This would have been right before dusk.”
“I left the café before then. Didn’t see anybody headed that way.”
“Oh, well. Ever once in a while some ignorant yahoo tries to use the creek road as a short cut to Turtleville. They get to the fork and realize they’re in the middle of the mountains with not even a road left, much less a town. Only an idjit would head out that way in the snow and the cold, with it getting dark.”
I stood up. Vehicles on the creek trail worried me. “I’ll go over and check,” I told Pike.
“Are you nuts? Your piece-of-shit vintage truck doesn’t have four-wheel drive. You’ll get stuck and then it’ll be my butt out in the snow giving you a ride home. Delta and I are just about to get in bed with a pumpkin pie, a bottle of Apple Jack and a copy of Playboy. Snowy weather and holiday leftovers brings out the beast in that woman.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll break out my vintage snow chains.” I said goodbye and tossed the phone back on the table. I started pacing. Three strides one way, three strides back. Hamsters on tread mills had more options. Outside, snow filled the gloom with cold crystals of isolation. I pictured Cathy on a private beach somewhere, hiding from prying eyes in a cabana, distrustful and alone, watching a distant ocean on a white-sand shore.
Her grandmother’s house was my best hope of keeping her alive and in touch. So what if I was overprotective? No one but me would know I’d made a crazy trip out in the snowstorm to check on the place.
No one but me.
Damn. Tire tracks on the road up to the Nettie house. The falling snow hadn’t quite filled them in. They made broad parallels in the beam of my truck’s headlights. What the hell was this invader driving—a tank?
I downshifted for traction as the truck followed the tracks up a slushy path to the broad knoll of the farm. Firs and cedars, heavy with snow on their evergreen boughs, leaned over the trail. They whacked the truck’s windshield and grabbed at its heavy-duty wipers. The aged wipers fought back and won.
Good craftsmanship was built to survive. I pulled a vintage World War II pistol from a cloth sack on the seat. Good craftsmanship would also give trespassers a need for clean underwear.
I switched off the headlights as the truck crested the knoll. I rolled down my window, hung an arm out, and used a flashlight to creep along the final yards until the trail left the woods. On my left appeared the leaning chestnut posts of the front pasture. I guided the truck along that fence line until it reached a corner. I was now at the edge of the barn yard. Fifty yards further and I’d come to the shrubs and walkway of the house. I parked the truck, tucked the gun inside a deep pocket of my sheepskin coat, snugged the brim of an old fedora low over my eyes, and moved through the falling snow with just a pinpoint of flashlight in front of my boots. I followed the mysterious tire tracks to a hulking black Hummer under the front oaks.
Whoever owned this gas-sucking suburban Panzer meant business. North Carolina tags. Buncombe County. That meant Asheville. A rental, maybe? The photographers I’d chased off months ago? Maybe they thought they could sneak past us hicks in a snowstorm and prowl around Cathryn’s property to their hearts’ content. Maybe photographers had sniffed out her departure from Los Angeles and were stationing themselves anywhere they might ambush her, no matter how remote the chance.
I’d do a little ambushing of my own.
I circled the house, noting the faint glow behind the covers someone had placed on the living room windows up front. The windows of the dining room, kitchen, and two bedrooms were dark and curtain-free, as always. I halted by each, glancing inside quickly. Dark, empty rooms looked back. All right.
For the past four years I’d treated the Nettie house as my own private stomping ground. I wasn’t a thief, I wasn’t a vandal, I was a volunteer caretaker. I’d jimmied every window open, picked the front door lock, wandered the house at will. I knew what was stored in the attic, and in the cellar. I knew which windows creaked when I opened the
m, and which floorboards squeaked under my feet.
I knew how to slip inside silently.
There was no lock on the screen door of a tiny, covered porch sandwiched between the back bedroom and the kitchen. The blueprint for this Sears bungalow called it a sleeping porch; it was just six by eight feet, and Delta said Mary Eve had only bunked there on the hottest summer nights. Both the bedroom and kitchen looked into the porch via small windows. I’d recently repaired the sash weight on the window of the bedroom side, so I knew it would open without a sound. I popped the latch with the blade of my pocket knife, then eased the window up. Sticking my head into the dark room, I held my breath and listened.
No sounds came from the front of the house. Good. I might catch the trespassers asleep. Latching my hands atop the window frame, I levered myself inside, settling lightly on the bedroom floor. The house was solid; the joists strong. The wide maple floorboards had been fitted as seamlessly as jigsaw pieces.
Solid craftsmanship doesn’t squeak when you walk on it.
Moving one slow step at a time, I entered the house’s central hallway. It gave me a clear view straight to the living room up front. Through the doorway I saw an odd assortment of stacked boxes near the front door, with a single small lantern giving off a white glow. The rest of the living room was steeped in darkness.
I walked up the hall, listening hard. No snoring, no conversation, no rustle of book pages turning, no low melody of a CD player or radio. Briefly I touched the gun in my coat pocket, but left it there. The old man had taught John and me the hard rules about handguns and rifles, the first one being, Only fucking morons pull a piece on somebody if they don’t intend to shoot, with the second rule being, Don’t be a fucking moron.
I passed the kitchen and dining room doors on the left, and the front bedroom door on the right. Two more soft steps and I’d stand in the living room doorway. Just stand there and confront whoever had had the balls to set up housekeeping in this very private, very special place.