Читать книгу The Cherokee Rose - Tiya Miles - Страница 13

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As she stretched to wipe the window ledge, Sally Perdue hiked up the baby. Her dust mop, dulled by the grime of countless cleanings that never seemed to make this old house shine, flopped on the end of its stick. From his seat on her hip, the baby lunged for the mop, reaching sideways with a chubby fist. “No, no, baby.” Sally’s voice was gentle. “This is Mama’s, and this is Junior’s.” She handed him a rattle. He reached again for the mop, his blue eyes tracking dust set in motion by his mother’s hand. Dust motes rose like dandelion seeds where they stood on the staircase landing, a space one-third the size of the trailer Sally shared with Eddie Senior.

Sally blew a puff of air through her lips. Not much more now. Just the stairwell and the hallways, the butler’s pantry and foyer. Thank the Lord Eddie Junior takes good naps. Sally had finished the second floor while he slept in his seat. She had mopped and polished the main floor while he rode on her hip in a fancy made-in-Canada sling she had gotten as a hand-me-down from one of the former docent’s daughters.

Sally cooed at her son once, twice, looking into his eyes while he gurgled. She lifted him out of the sling and bent to strap him into the bouncy seat. “Almost finished, Junior. Gotta make it pretty. Somebody’s fixin’ to buy this place.” Sally plopped a kiss on her baby’s cheek and popped a pacifier into his mouth. She pressed the button that made the seat rock back and forth, then wiped a palm across her damp hairline.

Raising the sling over her head and stuffing it into her diaper bag, Sally grasped a fold of her T-shirt and flapped it in and out. She cranked the iron handle of a leaded-glass window, hoping for a breeze. The noise of a construction truck rumbled in. Maybe a digger, maybe a bulldozer. Mason Allen. Beyond the dip of the elegant hill on which the old plantation house stood, the land was being cleared for a condo development.

Sally touched a hand to the paneled oak wall beside her. Its planes and ridges felt like vertebrae beneath her thumb, fragile and hollow, thinning with age. She had begged for this job back in high school—talked her way into it when she heard the previous cleaning lady had quit in a huff, complaining of an odd smell in the attic that just couldn’t be gotten rid of. A dead bat, Sally had thought at the time. She had seen worse around her trailer, even before Eddie Senior moved in. The director of the house museum called an exterminator and hired Sally on the spot, desperate to see the place spruced up in time for the garden show that year. The pay was low, but better than what Sally made cleaning at the nursing home. And she had always wondered about this brooding house on the hill, visible for miles. She had been curious about its history even before her fifth-grade class took the standard tour for county kids. If she had made it to college, or even out of high school, before getting together with Eddie Senior, she would have taken some kind of class on Southern history. But working here had given her the next best thing, a chance to soak in all that drama of the past.

The story went that James Vann Hold, the man who built the plantation when this all counted as Indian land, was the handsome son of a full-blood Cherokee mother and European father. Hold got to be filthy rich investing family money in slaves, trading deerskins and crops, and making shady business deals. He was murdered in the prime of manhood, and nobody knew who did it. Sally recalled the script by heart from overhearing the docents. They never really changed it up unless a black person took the tour, in which case they said “servants” instead of “slaves.” She had cleaned the place only a year before the state closed it down. She had been hired back today to get the house ready for auction. Sally was glad for the work, such as it was. Lord knew, Eddie Senior took a paying job only when he had a mind to.

Junior dropped his passy. Sally tucked it into her bag and stuck a clean blue one in his mouth. She dusted ornate mirror frames, wiped down silvered glass, swept the formal stairway and long oak halls. When she finished the foyer, she was parched and thought that Junior must be, too. After climbing the stairs to where he sat rocking contentedly on the landing, she pulled out his bottle of formula. What a good baby.

The rude honk of a horn blared through the open window. Shit, Sally thought. Eddie. She flew into motion, lifting Junior and hooking him to her hip with one arm beneath his padded bottom, grabbing the diaper bag in one hand and the bouncy seat in the other. She jogged down the staircase, jostling the baby and his things while the horn bellowed.

“What the hell took you so long, Sally?” Eddie was mad, his face puffing out and in from his worked-up breathing.

“Sorry, Ed, sorry.” Sally reached inside the open rear window to unlock the door and throw the bouncy chair inside. She eased into the passenger seat and held Junior out to his daddy. “Could you take him for a spell? I need to lock up.”

“Jesus Christ. I thought I told you to be ready when I got here.”

“I won’t be but a minute.”

Sally ran back to the house and opened the double entry doors. She reached for the oval sign that hung on a hook beside the door chime’s soundbox. Exiting, she pulled the doors shut behind her, turned the oblong metal lock, and listened for the click. Hearing it, she twined the ribbon of the sign tightly around the neck of a brass doorknob. Closed, it read. With her back to Eddie Senior, Eddie Junior, and the winding driveway that led into town, she pressed her hand to the heavy wooden door panel. “Bye, now,” she whispered to the house.

“Get a move on, Sally!” Eddie shouted. “This kid of yours is gone and shit his pants.”

Sally turned her back to the red-brick mansion, its eaves and porches, porticoes and columns. As she hustled down the broad front steps, a stiff breeze followed her, carrying with it the meadowy scent of late-summer wildflowers. The wind caught and parted Sally’s short red hair, cooling the nape of her neck.

While Eddie careened the beat-up car around the circular driveway, the breeze kept on blowing, flipping the sign to read, Open.

c

The drive stretched into a frustrating trek, heightened by Cheyenne’s nervous anticipation.

After what felt like two hours, rather than the fifty minutes promised by her GPS, she found herself pulling in front of the Chief Hold House. She eased out of her car and planted her heels in the uneven gravel, taking in the view. Bold, brick, and becoming, the home seemed to greet her like a bridegroom. Cheyenne seized a breath. Magnificent. Even the high heat couldn’t distract her from this architectural belle.

The Department of Natural Resources had arranged for a local broker to show her the house that afternoon, and a middle-aged woman in a blue pencil skirt and white blouse with a Peter Pan collar was standing in the driveway. Light brown hair hung neatly to her shoulders from a center part. She wore silver earrings and sensible shoes. She leaned in the window of a parked black SUV and smiled flirtatiously at the driver, whose face was hidden from Cheyenne. Cheyenne willed the woman to speed it up. She was desperate to get a look inside. There was no chance the photos posted on the realtor’s website did this beauty justice.

Cheyenne undid the silk scarf on her head, shaking loose her dark sheeting of hair. She retied the slip of fabric in a soft knot around her neck and shifted her weight and one hand to her hip. She stood at a polite distance, impatiently biding her time.

“Of course, Mr. Allen,” Cheyenne overheard the woman say.

She caught snatches of conversation interspersed with laughter.

“Pro forma . . . required to show it to anyone who makes a request . . .

“. . . can’t be serious . . .

“. . . gorgeous property, good bones . . .

“. . . want that river view you promised me . . .

“You have a good holiday, now.”

Cheyenne watched as the SUV’s window rolled up to seal out the sunlight and the woman straightened her back and cleared the playful look from her face.

“Miss Cotterell?” The woman held out a hand as Cheyenne closed the distance between them. “I’m Lanie Brevard. We spoke on the telephone.”

“Yes. Nice to meet you, Lanie. If I may, who was that just leaving?” Cheyenne’s voice landed on a nervous high note. Her lips puckered with concern. Someone had scheduled a viewing. Competition.

“Oh, him.” Lanie Brevard’s tone was playful again, as if she were still speaking to the man himself. She cleared her throat. “That was Mr. Allen. Mason Allen. One of the pillars of our town.”

Cheyenne frowned. “He’s interested in the Hold House?”

“Everyone around here is interested in the Hold House, Miss Cotterell. Surely you’ve read about the controversy in the papers. The Hold estate has been an economic boon to this town for centuries. With any luck, we’ll see its fortunes rise again after the auction next week. Let me show you the house.”

She escorted Cheyenne up the wide front steps, dangling a key labeled Hold like a forbidden delicacy. The metal parts of the lock released. The broker turned a knob on one of the twin oak doors that held a sign on a ribbon. Cheyenne stepped into the foyer after her. The house had a stale, closed-in smell despite the scent of cleaning products that betrayed a recent mopping. The air felt cool and still, like a root cellar. Cheyenne crossed her arms, stroking her bare skin in the sudden chill.

The broker watched the motion of Cheyenne’s hands. “Handmade bond brick,” she said. “Keeps the house cooler than a cave. You’re from Atlanta? Did I remember that right?”

“You did.”

“Mr. Allen does business down in the city every once in a while, but most of us prefer to stay here in the mountains. Our town is just right for us, fits like a hammock. Have you been up this way before?”

“Back in elementary school, we toured the Hold House. It was something like a fifth-grade pilgrimage. And I used to go to summer camp on Fort Mountain. Camp Idlewood?”

“Yes,” the broker said. “I’ve heard of it. Idlewood was an African American camp that started as a school for former slaves, wasn’t it?”

“It was a school for fifty years. The camp’s founders bought the lot in the 1920s and repurposed the old Freedmen’s Bureau buildings. African American families from all over the South, and a few from the North, paid a fortune to send their children there every summer.”

“Hmm,” the broker said noncommittally. “I believe the buildings are used for crafts and whatnot now. The state purchased the land to expand Fort Mountain State Park—which, by the way, is just one of the gifts of the Allen family to our county.”

Lanie Brevard broke off her homage to the Allens and turned to the drawing room. Cheyenne followed, pushing back worry as her Giambattista Valli skirt swirled around her knees. This was it. She was here. Inside the arms of the Hold House. She took in the elaborate carvings on the fireplace mantel, the plaster moldings that framed the walls and ceilings, and the hand-blown windows languidly filtering light.

They exited the drawing room, entered the dining room. She scanned the nine-over-nine leaded-glass panes topped with gold-leaf fixtures in the form of phoenixes rising. Dried pine needles and okra pods rested on the window sills. An old-fashioned brick of tea sat on a saucer made of blue transferware china. The antique textiles and furnishings collected over the years remained in place in the house. Some of the pieces had belonged to the Hold family; others had been donated by wealthy patrons over the years. Cheyenne had read in Southern Living that the table settings in the Hold House were replicas of the fragmented dishware uncovered beneath the outdoor kitchen by a state archaeologist in the 1950s. The property would be auctioned with its contents intact, sold “as is.” Spacious by nineteenth-century standards, boasting three stories, eight rooms, broad hallways, back and front porches, and a cellar, the house brimmed with the contents of generations. And it could all be hers. It had to be.

Lanie Brevard led Cheyenne through the first floor with chatty narration about the upstanding families who had lived in the home before the museum opened. Cheyenne tried to tune her out. She wanted to focus on the house.

Back in the front hallway, where a half-opened cardboard box held forgotten copies of Chief Hold House brochures, Cheyenne turned with the broker toward the wooden staircase. They mounted the grand oak steps with carved balustrades, reached a large, superfluous landing crafted solely for show, and continued to the second story. At the front of the center hallway, a seating area flowed into a covered veranda that faced the road leading off the estate. Cheyenne turned on the crisp heels of her slender Bottega Veneta sling-backs to make her way to the master bedroom behind Lanie Brevard.

It was divided from the rest of the home by a lateral bridge that echoed the structure and form of the staircase. The oddly placed bridge connected the front and rear of the second story. It rose in an arch from the center hallway and crossed the open space of the downstairs hall. Cheyenne had read that architectural historians debated the reason the bridge had been built. Some said it represented the split sides of James Vann Hold’s racial identity; others argued it was Hold’s calculated attempt to keep his private life separate from the scrutiny of United States Indian agents and white missionaries.

Cheyenne crossed the elegant arch of the bridge, the sharp edges of her sling-backs digging into the floorboards. She faced the entry to a spacious bedroom and saw a closed doorway farther down the hall—leading up, she supposed, to an attic. She watched as Lanie Brevard unlatched the velvet rope that cordoned off the master bedroom, protecting its heirloom contents from long-gone tourists. Inside, Cheyenne’s gaze caught first on the full eastern view of the Blue Ridge, then on the hand-worked lace canopy atop the mahogany bedstead, and next on the folding antique game table splayed with period playing cards. The room had no proper master bath, but one could be added without even knocking down a wall. She moved to a chestnut wardrobe with an inlaid rose motif on the crest. Pulling it gently open, she marveled at the little drawers inside and stroked the silk of the chest’s inner lining. Cheyenne breathed in and out, gazing at blue-peaked mountaintops and feeling deep in her bones that this would be her bedroom. She turned to see Lanie Brevard watching, a sharp look in her eye.

“Miss Cotterell, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you just how much work goes into maintaining an old house like this. And you’re alone, as I understand it. This would be quite an undertaking. If you’re looking for a vacation property, we have a number of charming cabins and log homes on the market. I could show you a few right now.”

Cheyenne’s eyes narrowed. The woman was steering her. “I like a challenge, Ms. Brevard,” she said. “I like the Hold House.”

“I see. Then you have the right to know that members of the original Hold family . . . they tended to die under mysterious circumstances. There’s no evidence that this is a stigmatized property per se, but, well, who knows?”

“Mysterious circumstances? Is that right? Did you tell Mr. Allen that story, too?”

“Of course not.” The broker waved her hand in the air between them as if the suggestion were ridiculous. “Mason is local. We’re pretty close-knit here. I’m sure he knows all there is to know about this house.”

A high-pitched peal erupted from the hallway. The sound was not human.

“What was that?” Cheyenne jumped, hand flying to her chest.

“It’s bound to be a stray cat. This property is full of them.” Lanie Brevard smiled politely. “Like I said, a big undertaking.”

Cheyenne fingered the natural pearl in her left ear, dropped her fidgeting hand, and set her chin. “I like cats,” she said to the broker. “I’ve even been thinking about adopting a kitten.”