“It’s weird that she held on to this place for all those years, isn’t it?” Ted asked. He’d insisted on taking the McLaren, and he drove too fast for the country roads. Every turn was executed too suddenly for the loose surface. “God knows there were times when she could have used the cash.”
“We’ve had the place on the market for months without a nibble. Grams didn’t want us to do anything with the farm but sell it, but she probably knew it wasn’t worth anything. Turn left up here.”
Ted took the curve and Ben winced at the cloud of dust and gravel he saw billowing in his passenger-side mirror.
“Remember the funny way she would talk?” Ted said. “All those old expressions? ‘Keep up the light, Benjamin. Keep up the light, Teddy.’ I kind of remember her telling us stories about a farm. The way the crops needed to rotate, how the hens clustered together in their coops, how cows would need to be marched back to the barn on a frosty night. How hard the winters were. Despite everything, I always assumed that she’d give everything to Mom, you know?”
“Whatever Mom got was a lot more than she deserved,” Ben said. By long-established habit, Ben had sheltered his brother from the details of his most recent conversation with their mother. All Ben had told Ted was that she’d finally signed the lawyer’s documents and that Grams’s estate was officially settled. “Here we are, on the right.”
“Where?” Ted slid his Ray-Bans onto his forehead.
“Slow down. See the post?”
Ted pulled off the road just short of a crumbling stone gatepost. The ghost of a gravel path extended beyond it, barely discernible under the cover of wild grass. The low-slung remnants of a house sat a few hundred yards from the road. “So that’s it, huh?” Ted asked. He turned the McLaren up the drive and pressed it forward in a crawl. The grass came up to the windows, and Ted arched in his seat, trying to see what he was driving over.
“I didn’t know this car could move so slowly.”
“I don’t think the owner expected me to take it on safari. Can we walk from here? I don’t even know if I’m still on the gravel.”
Hudson was the first one out of the car. He dove headlong into the grass, sending a trio of chickadees chattering into the sky.
Ben waited while Ted checked his hair in the mirror, as if they’d arrived at a gallery opening instead of a derelict ruin. When he was ready, they lifted themselves from the car and looked at their grandmother’s house. It was a small two-story stone saltbox with a single chimney and only a gesture of a roof. Its windows were narrow maws, their glass long gone. Its door lay on its side by the front steps.
The interior was cool and smelled vaguely of rot. The timbers supporting the second floor had collapsed it into the first. Patches of shingles from the roof were spread across the floor between thatches of ferns and other plants. Beams skewered what must have been the house’s little sitting room, some of them embedded in what remained of the wood-plank floor.
“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” Ted said, picking his way through the debris. He climbed over a pile of fallen masonry to the kitchen area. “Looks like they left a lot behind.” He pointed to a brown wedge that was crushed under a timber beam. A bed of rusted springs was visible through the gauze of rotted fabric.
A couch, Ben thought.
The last time he’d been here, Ben had spent only a minute inside. Now that he took the time to look, he saw corroded pots and pans in the space where the kitchen had been. Fragments of shattered dishes covered one end of the floor. Pieces of broken chairs lay on the ground, alongside the empty husks of ruined oil lamps.
“Why would they leave all this here?” Ted asked.
“I don’t know,” Ben said. It seemed odd, now that he thought about it, that a family with so little would leave behind so much. For a moment the ruined farmhouse felt eerily like the Crofts: a place where possessions were left abandoned by suddenly absent owners.
“Why’d they move away from here, anyway?”
But Ben hardly knew anything about his grandmother’s young life. His mom had said something over the phone about “demons in the wood and devils at the door,” but she’d only been trying to ensnare him in conversation.
“Did you get down to the cellar the last time you were here?” Ted asked.
“I didn’t see a way down other than jumping through the hole in the floor.”
“Here’s something, I think,” Ted said. He pointed to a small alcove in the wall that was obstructed by tree branches and fallen timbers from the ceiling or roof.
Ted tried to maneuver a beam out of the way, and Ben grabbed its other side to help him.
“It’s light,” Ted said.
“It’s rotted,” Ben said. “Don’t look down.”
Ted looked down and dropped the beam onto the ground, where it landed in a cloud of powdered wood. He’d disturbed a nest of termites, and they welled out of the hollowed-out timber. Ted brushed his hands off on his pressed pants. “You enjoyed that, didn’t you, Benj? I’m not exactly dressed for manual labor.”
“Are you ever?”
Ted peered into the cavity in the wall. “The steps look like they’re stone, so they should be safe. Might be something interesting down here.” He squeezed between a broken beam and a sapling that had taken root in the floor.
The steps were dark and slippery, and Ben kept a hand against the wall for balance. The cellar was smaller than he’d thought it would be. The ceiling had caved in on the far side of the room. Decades’ worth of rotting leaves and other vegetation along with this season’s fresh additions made the floor feel soft underfoot.