“So what are you going to do about Mr. Pitney?” I asked Karol as she climbed into her car.
She shook her head as she pushed the ignition button. “I don’t know. I’m going to call Mark Michaels after I leave here. See what he wants me to do. Oh!” She turned her crystal eyes toward me. “Mark told me last night they think they’ve found a developer for this project.”
At first I thought she meant the house. “What do you mean?” I looked at the house, then back to her. “I thought I was handling this alone.”
Karol smiled. “Not the house . . . Cottonwood. Mark’s been searching through the proposals of several development companies and said he thinks he’s found one. Should have an answer on that pretty soon. At any rate, their representative and you and I should get together to talk.”
“Me?”
“Sure. Why not? This place is going to be a focal point when it’s finished, and whoever it is will want to know what you’re doing inside and out. We want to make sure our plans . . . jive.” She said the last word with a hint of jest.
“I haven’t heard that word in a while.”
“And I haven’t been in church since I was confirmed, but looks like I’ll be seeing you there.” She winked at me. “Do you think they’ll have fried chicken?”
“That’s like asking if the sun is going to rise in the East. No group of self-respecting Southern women would allow a church supper to happen without fried chicken . . . and potato salad and—in spite of this wicked cold—sweet iced tea.”
Valentine Bach arrived just before one o’clock, driven by his great-granddaughters, who parked the family car in our driveway, waved a friendly hello to me, and then headed over to the store. Mr. Valentine—who insisted I call him just that— and I walked in and through each room of the house. Every so often the old carpenter would stomp on an area of flooring with his worn work boot or pull his hammer from the loop of his overalls and tap on a wall. He spoke in a contractor’s language. “See this?” he said, having tapped his hammer on the wall of one of the first floor bedrooms. “These studs are twenty-four inch on center on top of one-inch-thick one-by-sixes. Right ’chere . . . tongue-and-groove boards. And the nails you’ll find under here are the old cut nails. Don’t see those anymore.”
Inside the dining room he gave me a lesson I didn’t need, but it seemed important for him to share, so I let him do all the talking. “All hand-cut lumber in those days. If a house caught fire they burned hot and long.” He nodded as his eyes clouded, as though he were remembering a house or two that had lost its life in a blaze. Then suddenly he continued, “And what they did was—they didn’t put up plaster walls, you know—they put up the lumber and then stretched canvas over it and then wallpaper on top of that.” He placed his weathered hand flat against a wall and rubbed it as though it were a woman’s back. “Wonder how many layers of wallpaper’s under here.”
“I don’t think Aunt Stella ever replaced this wallpaper. Not that I can remember, anyway.”
Valentine chuckled, shoved his hands in his pockets, and shook his head. “No, ma’am. Not Stella. But I’ve heard tell Miss Loretta liked to keep up with the times. So she may have added at least four or five layers here.” He looked toward the wall again. “Feels like five.”
Upstairs and in front of a bedroom fireplace he said, “Jim had the good sense back years ago to replace the fireplaces. But why he never added central heat and air is beyond me. But I ’spect Jim and Stella lived only in the rooms they needed and figured why go to the expense.”
“I don’t remember any rooms being opened except the living room and their bedroom,” I said. “And one led to the other. The doors between the living room and the hallway were kept closed. The dining room was never used, so it was kept closed. All the bedrooms were closed off. The kitchen was heated in the winter by cooking at the stove and cooled in the summer by a small window unit. Same with their bedroom and the living room.”
Valentine bent his neck backward and looked up. I didn’t follow his gaze at first; I was momentarily mesmerized by the way his hair traveled down his back. When I did look up, I frowned. The ceilings in this house were going to be a challenge. “Heat rises,” Valentine said, looking back at me.
I brought my eyes back to his.
“I understand you had some folks over here working for a few days.”
I cocked my head. “How did you hear that?”
He smiled. “Word gets around.” He shuffled out of the room, and I followed. “Think you can get them back? We could use a few hardworking men over the next few months.”
“What about the women?”
He stopped then and smiled again. The crow’s-feet around his eyes were deep and oddly appealing. “Whatever you think best, ma’am. It’s your money.”
“Sort of,” I said and smiled back.
As we walked around the outside of the house he asked about termite inspection, and I told him that calling someone was on my list of things to do. “Best do that today,” he said, to which I replied, “Yes, sir.” It was then I realized that, in an odd sort of way, he was no longer working for me, but I for him.
He headed for the opposite side of Main Street, and as we crossed over he said, “Around here, termites’ll bring your house down before the years even have time to blink.”
“Hopefully Uncle Jim took care of that.”
We reached the sidewalk across the street, and he turned back toward the house. I watched as he eyed it. “Only slight bowing in the walls. Jim always tried to stay on top of things where the house was concerned but not so much with the buildings out back once his farming days were over.”
At the barn I told him of an idea I had. “I’d like to have a cottage where the overseer of the museum can live, if need be. This will have to be torn down, but maybe we can salvage some of the original lumber.”
Valentine nodded. “Seen it done a-fore.”
When he’d finished his tour of the property and Annaleise and Arizona had joined us back at the car, I asked, “So, do you think I’ve completely lost my mind? I know it’s going to be a lot of work, but you do agree, don’t you, that it can be restored?”
Valentine looked from me to the house and back to me again. And then he smiled a quiet smile and said, “Foundation’s pretty stable, ma’am. If a foundation’s good, anything can be restored.”
In spite of the twinkle within, his blue eyes pierced my soul. For a moment I wondered what he knew about me . . . about my marriage . . . or better yet, about my life. As he’d said, “Word gets around.” Difficult as it was, I managed to look away from him and to the girls, who stood lovely and patient in their waiting. So young . . . so full of an inner exuberance that shone from their faces. Obviously nothing had happened in their young lives to chisel away at the hope and future one could easily see awaiting them. I took a deep breath, in and out of my nose. I looked back to the old man then. “I’ll take your word for it,” I said.