Chapter Two

Franny was examining a framed photograph on a table. It was a tintype of a little girl in ruffles standing beside a seated woman who was holding a baby.

“That’s Aunt Hannah,” said Jack, “and that’s her mother, my great-­grandmother. The baby is my granddad, John Caine.”

“And those kids were the son and daughter of the General?” Franny asked.

“That’s right.”

“Do you have a picture of the General?” asked Duff.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of General Caine, but there must be one around here somewhere,” Jack said. “By the way, there are electric lights.” He flipped the wall switch and grinned.

“Thanks,” I said. “I wondered.”

We toured the rest of the house and I must admit my antipathy lessened a bit. There was a fairly large dining room, as well as two small bedrooms and a bathroom downstairs, and the kitchen was a complete surprise. It was dominated by a huge wood-­burning stove, but near it stood a modern electric range, and next to that a seemingly almost new refrigerator and freezer.

Upstairs were two more bedrooms and another bathroom. The rest of the second floor area was an enormous storeroom. It would have been an antique dealer’s heaven. Piled on top of one another were pieces of eighteenth and nineteenth century American furniture, as well as a number of items that must have been imported. There were certainly some Louis XV chairs and a Queen Anne chest and a long oak table that looked positively Elizabethan. Taking up a lot of space between the articles of furniture were a great many old trunks, as well as piles of newspapers and books, including scrapbooks.

Duff opened one of these and started to read some yellowed clippings.

“What’s all that stuff?” Franny asked him.

“Newspaper stories about the Civil War mostly. May I take some of these books downstairs and read them, Dad?”

“Later,” Jack said. “There will be plenty of time later.”

I didn’t agree with that, but I held my peace. Then we went out to the back yard, where we found a sizeable barn with cow and horse stalls and lots of rusted farm equipment. From the appearance of the overgrown fields, no farming had been attempted here in many years.

Next to the barn was a wagon shed, containing a collapsed wagon and an even more decrepit two-­seater buggy. Beyond, a weed-­grown path led toward a woods maybe three hundred yards away. Halfway to the woods was the family burial plot. It was perhaps fifty feet square and surrounded by a rusted iron fence.

“I wonder if Aunt Hannah is buried here,” Jack said. “You remember there was a dispute about where she was going to be buried?”

“Something about a local priest.”

“Right. He’d been visiting Aunt Hannah occasionally and he evidently thought she wanted to become a Catholic. I think he wanted to bury her in the Catholic cemetery near Cainesville. Mrs. Reddy insisted that Aunt Hannah had told her that she wanted to be be buried here with the family. Anyway, I left it for Aunt Hannah’s lawyer to decide. When I flew home, the body was still at the funeral home.”

Franny opened the gate and went into the graveyard. “Aunt Hannah’s here now,” she reported, “or somebody new is.” There was an apparently new grave near the fence on the far side.

“I suppose I should arrange for a stone to be put up,” Jack said. “I probably should’ve done it before this.”

The engravings on some of the stones had worn away, but most were still legible. The oldest stone was on the grave of Thankful Caine, who had been born in 1775 and died in 1825. Near Thankful were the graves of her husband, Hosiah, and her infant children, Charity and Bountiful.

“They must have come here from the East,” I said. “Those are New England given names.”

“They did,” Jack said. “The Caines along with some other families moved west from Cape Cod around the turn of the nineteenth century.”

“There must have been Indians here then, Dad,” said Franny.

“There were. In fact, I remember a stone here for one of Hosiah’s sons who was killed by Indians.”

We looked for it among the graves of Thomas, William, Patience and Rebecca. There were many graves of children, piti­ful evidence that only the most hardy could survive the diseases and perils of early America.

In a corner was the stone of Brigadier General Duffin Hadley Caine who had been born in 1825 and died in 1890. The inscription also revealed that he had been commander of the Second Ohio Cavalry Brigade from June 5, 1863 to October 26, 1863.

“That date in 1863 must have been when he was captured,” Jack observed. “It’s strange, but I don’t remember the placement of some of these stones. That’s Ada, the General’s wife, next to Aunt Hannah. Now where’s my grandfather’s grave?”

We finally found it, almost hidden by weeds, beside the grave of his wife, Martha. They had both died in the 1930s and theirs were the most recent stones in the plot.

“My father never lived here and my mother didn’t want him buried here,” Jack said. “My grandfather left here as a boy and didn’t return until he was shipped back in a coffin.”

“Why did Aunt Hannah live here then, if nobody else wanted to?” Franny asked.

“Maybe she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Or maybe she found a secret charm in the place, as we will too.”

“I doubt that I’ll ever find it,” I said. I was ready to head for the nearest telephone to make reservations on the next flight back to New York.

“Let’s stay here tonight anyway,” Jack said.

“Here?”

“Sure. Where else?”

“If anywhere, I suppose a motel. There must be something around Cainesville or Ashland.”

“But why? We have a perfectly good place here with plenty of room.”

“What about food?”

“We can go to a restaurant—or, better yet, get some steaks in Cainesville and bring them back here.”

“What about towels, soap, bed linen?”

“The beds are all made—you saw them—and there must be towels in the cupboards. Soap we can buy, if we have to. Let’s go see Mrs. Reddy.”

We found the Emil Weber place without difficulty. The house and small barn were newly painted and the fields were freshly mowed. In the drive was a station wagon with tools and ladders in it, seemingly indicating that Emil Weber was some sort of handyman rather than a farmer. A small boy on a dappled pony came up to greet us, then dismounted and ran to tell of our arrival.

Mrs. Reddy and her daughter came out and invited us into the house. We sat in a pleasant, sunny living room, furnished in Early American style, and Mrs. Weber served lemonade and cookies.

Mrs. Reddy was plump and jolly, like a little old Mrs. Santa Claus in a starched housedress. I took her to be in her mid seventies, while Rose Weber, blonde and equally plump, was perhaps a little more than half that age.

“So you’ve come to live in the family home,” said Mrs. Reddy.

“To visit it,” I said.

“That house needs to be lived in. It needs children in it. It was an old folks’ home too long.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Weber agreed. “It’s a good farm and it’s a shame to see it deserted.”

“We’re not farmers,” I said.

“You could get help to work it. There’s plenty of young fellows looking for work around here.” Mrs. Reddy poured more lemonade and passed the cookies again.

“But no one willing to rent the place?” Jack said.

“That’s something different. That takes cash and there’s a shortage of that nowadays.”

“The kitchen seems to have been modernized,” Jack said—to change the subject, I hoped.

“Your aunt spent a packet of money on that. And my son-­in-­law, Emil, installed the dishwasher and the rest of it. He put in that new shower upstairs too. If you need any other work done, just let us know. Emil is very familiar with that house.”

“We’re planning on going back to New York tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh, that’s not fair—not to the house or your aunt,” Mrs. Reddy protested. “I don’t mean to interfere in your affairs, but your aunt always hoped you folks would come and stay in the house after she was gone. Of course, if you’ve got pressing business elsewhere . . .”

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s just that our home is in the East.”

“On the other hand we’ve been considering selling that,” Duff said. While eating cookies he had been staring as though fascinated by Mrs. Reddy. She in turn was watching him and smiling and nodding in grandmotherly fashion.

“Please, Duff,” I said sharply, irritated as much by his manner as his words. Then to Mrs. Reddy: “Aunt Hannah must have realized it would be impossible for us to stay here, considering my husband’s work.”

“Oh, yes, but she thought Mr. Caine would be retiring from that one day. He has retired now, hasn’t he?” The old lady paused after what seemed to be a warning glance from her daughter. “Though I suppose it’s hard to cut ties you’ve had a long time. Maybe you could do it gradually. Just stay a month or so this time and get used to the place.”

“We can’t stay a month,” I said flatly.

“Well maybe a couple of weeks then to start.”

She was beginning to irritate me, although I felt that she meant well. I managed to turn her to the subject of towels and linen and the location of the best supermarket in Cainesville (tell the butcher you’re a friend of Mrs. Reddy’s) and we got up to leave.

While we were standing at the door, Mrs. Weber’s daughter, Stephanie, came into the room. She seemed to be in her early twenties, tall and rather sleepy looking. She could have been rather attractive, I thought, but like her mother and grandmother she was overweight. It seemed that she had completed two years of nursing training at Ashland Hospital, but had to drop out of the program because of an allergic condition. After greeting us without really looking at us, Stephanie began nibbling cookies.

Mrs. Reddy’s last words to us were a reminder that her son-in-­law could do any sort of work that needed to be done at the Caine place. As we drove away, I wondered aloud if that was why she wanted us to stay so badly—to provide work for Emil.

Jack pooh-­poohed it. He thought maybe Mrs. Reddy just missed Aunt Hannah and hoped to be consoled by having some of Aunt Hannah’s relatives near her. Also, he thought it only natural for any property owner to want responsible people as neighbors.

It was a ten-­minute drive to Cainesville, a one-­commercial-­ street town. The recommended supermarket turned out to be the only supermarket. It was well stocked, however, and the prices seemed lower than those we had been used to paying in Scarsdale.

I had intended to buy only enough food for dinner and perhaps breakfast, but Jack and Franny loaded up the cart, and Duff got into the spirit of the thing too, contributing crackers and other snacks that, he explained, we could take back with us if we didn’t use them at the farm.

Instead of four steaks Jack bought a dozen and three pounds of ground sirloin as well. I didn’t try to stop him. If he wants to stay three or four days, just keep your mouth shut and put up with it, I thought. It’s not going to kill you. Of course, it never occurred to me that it might eventually kill him.

“Everything looked so good,” he said lamely as we put the bags in the car trunk.

I kissed him lightly on the cheek. “You’ve been mesmerized by Mrs. Reddy.”

Duff had wandered off as we were loading the car. Franny and I went looking for him and found him on the other side of the parking lot talking to three burly motorcyclists.

It was impossible to tell whether they were much older than Duff or not, considering their sunglasses and beards. They were wearing the customary sleeveless denim jackets and no shirts and their arms were tattooed from their wrists to their shoulders.

Duff was conferring earnestly with them. When I called to him, they all turned to stare at me, and then one after another they roared out of the parking lot.

“Who were they?” I asked, trying to keep it casual.

“Some local guys.”

“What were you talking about?”

“Oh, I was just checking on the local scene—where the action is around here.”

I thought he was kidding, although his expression was serious. I would have been willing to bet plenty that he had never before in his life had words with such people. Not that he would have been afraid of them. He would just have considered them to be of subhuman intelligence and wouldn’t have wasted his time.

But then I thought, maybe the boy is just making an effort to come out of his shell, and I said no more about it. I didn’t even ask what advice the bikers had given him. I think now he might have told me. He might not have reached the point of lying to us yet. And what the bikers said to him very likely led to much of what happened later.

Anyway we went back to the farm. Jack drove up to the barn and we carried our bags of groceries into the house. While I prepared dinner, the others did some more exploring and chose their bedrooms.

Duff and Franny decided to take the upstairs bedrooms and Jack and I would sleep in the rooms downstairs. Jack and I had been sleeping separately since his last heart attack. Dr. Raphael had suggested that he go easy on the sex for a while—not that he had been much interested in it for the past year or so anyway—and we decided that he could rest better in a room by himself.

We had a very nice dinner of broiled T-­bone steaks, fresh peas, and corn on the cob, with ice cream for dessert—even a smidgen of the latter for cholesterol-­watching Jack. Then, to fill out the evening, Franny found a pack of playing cards in a cupboard and we played bridge, hearts, poker, using a collection of Aunt Hannah’s buttons for chips, and several other games that Franny introduced to us, some of which I think she invented.

Around ten we all went to bed. About two hours later, Duff had a nightmare. His screaming awakened all of us, including Jack, who, after scrambling out of bed and trying to run through a dark and unfamiliar house, fell and broke his hip.