“Yeah, well, don’t go turning on the water anymore either.” Chewing my lip, I glanced at the tangle of rickrack and ribbon near the box on the writing desk. “In fact, I think I’ll take care of that issue right now. There’s a bowl in the kitchen, you know. You can go down there for a drink if you’re thirsty.” Since I couldn’t figure out how the cat was getting in and out, I’d set up food and water dishes yesterday before I left the house. I couldn’t find any cat chow, but Iola’s kitchen was loaded with Beanee Weenee cans with varying expiration dates. As long as the cat liked Beanee Weenees, he’d be in good shape. If he knew how to use a can opener, he could survive here forever.
“You have turned on your last faucet, buddy.” I pointed a finger at him, a declaration of war, of sorts. I knew just how to make sure there was no more danger of unexpected flooding inside the house.
Twenty minutes and some of Iola’s ribbon and rickrack was all it took to tie every available faucet firmly into place, making them kitty-proof. I almost wished the cat would follow me so I could see the look on his face when he encountered my handiwork. The urge to find him and officially lay down the gauntlet before I left became overwhelming, so I trotted up the stairs with the last of the rickrack dangling between my fingers.
He was still lounging in the blue room.
“Okay, if you can get those faucets to turn on now, you’re more than just a normal cat, and I’m not coming back in this house,” I joked. “But since I’m the one with opposable thumbs and control of the can opener, you might want to think twice about running me off.”
I twizzled a piece of rickrack along the edge of the bed, and the cat looked at me like Do you really think I’m going to fall for that old kitty-kitty-kitty trick? Go find some fluffy little thing named Fifi if you need a patsy to chase your ribbon around.
His disinterested look made me laugh as I balled the rickrack into my palm. A slice of colored sunlight fell across it, giving the gold threads a glow, and I turned slowly toward the suncatcher in the window beside the bed. In the corner beyond, the closet door was open, a crack revealing the fathomless darkness of the space behind the library nook.
“That door wasn’t open yesterday,” I whispered to myself or the cat or the house. Perhaps all three. I’d come to the point where it almost seemed natural to talk to the walls here.
A strange warmth slid over me as I walked toward the closet. I thought of the dream that had haunted me after I found Iola’s body —the blue room, the light, someone standing within it, the comfort I’d felt and the way it drew me in, made me want to know more, to come closer.
The reflection of hummingbird and passion vine caressed my skin, melted across it as I walked to the closet, slowly opened the door, let in a spill of light, caught a breath of dust and stillness and wonder.
In the area near the door, clothes hung on wooden hangers —a fur coat, a man’s suit, something that looked like a long black cape with a red satin lining, a pink dress and a matching pillbox hat, both encased in plastic.
My gaze skimmed past, drawn instead to a patchwork of color and shape against the back wall. Cloaked in shadow, clothed in fabric and wood, adorned with ribbon, rickrack, buttons, multicolored bits of beach glass, and tiny shells with glitter sprinkled on like sand, they waited.
A diorama of boxes, upon boxes, upon boxes, neatly stacked from floor to ceiling. Judging by the layer of dust, they’d been hidden there, keeping their secrets, for a very long time.
CHAPTER 7
I HEARD THE CAR HORN only dimly at first. I was crouched in Iola’s closet, looking at the boxes. I’d slid another one off a shelf, a wooden box this time, the varnish old and yellowed, a faint image still visible on the lid. I touched the crackled paint, traced the sails of a galleon on a storm-filled sea.
I’d figured out the organizational system of the boxes, peeked inside a few long enough to look at the dates, deduced that they ran left to right in rows, bottom to top like the imitation hieroglyphics outside the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas. Floor to ceiling, next to what must have once been a built-in ladder that provided access to an attic hatch high in the eaves —fourteen feet, at least. Far out of reach now, since the ladder steps had been pried off the wall at some time in the past.
Every box seemed to be filled with Iola’s letters to her father, written on stationery and scrap paper of all types, the edges yellowed, the ink faded, the corners dissolved by time or eaten through by the tiny creatures that find their way into sealed boxes.
Had her father stored them here, building a collection as the numbers grew? The shelving was as random as the boxes it held —created out of boards that ranged from oak table leaves to bits of plywood to the flattened remnants of a La Motte oyster crate. The oyster-crate shelf was held together by more bent nails than straight ones. On the sidewalls, brackets had been made out of everything from metal cracker box lids to what looked like two broken bits of broom handle nailed on horizontally.
My grandfather would’ve been appalled at the carpentry, and actually so would my father. Daddy had only taken on construction work when he couldn’t make enough money buying and selling horses, but he was surprisingly good at building things. He kept me home from school and made me come along if he needed an extra pair of hands or a sober driver. I’d shuttled him to jobs since I was old enough to reach the pedals, so it never really occurred to me that it wasn’t normal for a ten-year-old to drive across town. The upside was that I’d learned things that had come in handy later at some of the fixer-upper places I’d lived in before Trammel. I could have built better closet fixtures than these with a blindfold on and six fingers tied behind my back.
It was a lucky thing Iola’s shelves were holding no more than paper-filled boxes, some decorated with fabric and trims, some the salvaged packaging of days gone by —a wine carton, a bamboo tea container with Chinese characters printed in red, the shellac blackened and crazed. The wooden box in my hands looked ancient, like it might have traveled around the world in some sailor’s chest before it came into Iola’s collection. On the top shelf —the one far out of reach and supported precariously by broom-handle brackets —a stained-glass container sat last in line, looking far too heavy to be where it was.
The car horn blared long and loud outside, and I fell off-balance into the wall, realizing with a quick note of panic that I’d been so mesmerized by the boxes, I’d forgotten all about Ross. High on its shelf, the stained-glass container trembled, then settled into place again as I returned the sailing-ship box to its correct position and hurried from the closet. Downstairs, I rushed through checking locks, then left via the back door by the kitchen, crossed behind an overgrown bayberry hedge, and came out from behind the cottage. Ross had exited the truck and was on the cottage porch, trying to find me.
“Where’ve you been?” He looked me over, taking in the disheveled hair and the same clothes I’d had on when he left. Then he peered around the corner of the cottage like he expected to find someone there.
“Finishing up some stuff for the church. I lost track of time, sorry. Let me grab a couple things, and I’m good to go.”
Ross licked his lips, holding the bottom one between his teeth and looking from me to the backyard again before he turned and walked back to his truck. I let myself into the cottage, grabbed what I needed, locked the door, and was in the passenger seat in under two minutes, which wasn’t fast enough. Ross gunned the engine on the way out, his chin stiff, his eyes focused straight ahead.
“So who’s the guy?” he demanded as we pulled onto the narrow, tree-lined street that led from Iola’s house to Highway 12.
“What guy?”
“The guy at the store.” A hard look came my way. “The loser in the flamingo shirt.”
I was afraid to ask why Ross was bringing Paul up again. “He mowed the lawn the other day. . . . well, and he’s J.T.’s teacher. I just bumped into him at the store when I went for trash bags.”
Ross leaned back in his seat, one arm resting atop the steering wheel, his thumb sliding across the pads of his fingers. “He come back by just now while you were at the house?”
“No.” The word puffed out in a little cough. “Nobody was over there but me, Ross. He’s J.T.’s teacher, and he introduced himself when he saw me at Bink’s. That’s all.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you shouldn’t hang around the store letting your kid’s teacher hit on you.” Considering that he was headed out to surf, Ross was in an intensely foul mood. I’d never seen him quite like this. No doubt he was irked that his daddy had him out fixing faucets while the waves were good. He hated working for his daddy.