Carroll and I passed an uneventful evening at the B&B, scavenging a light dinner of sliced cucumbers bathed in the last dregs of several different flavors of salad dressing, along with cheese and crackers. High living, indeed. I fell into bed before 10:00 p.m., drifting off while thinking about that tiny bedroom in the Barton attic and the life of its inhabitant. I startled awake when my phone rang just after seven the next morning.
“Kate, it’s Morgan. Hope I didn’t catch you too early. Got to rise ahead of the heat around here, as I’m sure you know.” I scratched my head, rose creakily from the bed. How did servants manage going up and down those stairs all day?
“Oh, hi, Morgan. No, it’s fine. What’s up?”
“I’ve got some workers for you. I think it’ll be a good team.” He paused briefly. Did he want me to whoop in congratulations, or was he a bit uncertain about his statement? I couldn’t tell. Also, I needed some coffee if I was going to have civilized conversations with anyone today.
“That’s great, Morgan. Can we meet up with them tomorrow, tentatively? I need to get word from Detective Reynolds that it’s okay to proceed with work on the house.”
“Sure. I’ll let them know. I got the estimate typed up last night, and I’ll email it to you. There’re a couple of good sites for salvaged antique parts and fixtures too—I’ll send you the links. And I know a guy—no online presence, God bless him—but we can go check out his warehouse sometime.”
“That sounds amazing, Morgan. My, you work fast, don’t you?” I thought about what I’d done last night—mostly a haze of snacking and dozing off in an armchair, before actually hauling myself upstairs to go to bed.
“They say idle hands are the devil’s workshop, Miz Hamilton.”
“I guess that’s true. You’re an example for us all, Mr. Wheeler. Steadfast American industry!” I was perhaps feeling a bit loopy in my pre-coffee mentality.
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But I’m glad to be on the job. Let’s say tomorrow if I don’t hear otherwise from you. Have a good day, Kate.”
“Thanks, Morgan.” I hung up and stared into the space above my head. There was a slightly gaudy ceiling medallion at the center of the room, a decorative oval with interlocking floral motifs. I wondered if it was original to this house or if Cordelia had added it as a way to class up the joint. I lay down and drifted off again, thinking of decorative finishes.
I awoke what felt like minutes later to another phone call. The clock said it was 8:30, so I must have really fallen back asleep. It was Morgan again. He sounded oddly strained.
“Kate? Sorry to call you again so soon. Listen…” He paused. Was something wrong? He was usually quick with words. “Can we meet up today to look at the job, rather than tomorrow?”
“Sure, Morgan. I have some time. Is everything all right?”
“Yes … mostly. It will be fine. One of my contractors is just balking at the wait. I guess he wants to get going, or he has some commitment tomorrow that he didn’t see fit to mention when we first spoke.” There was a slight edge in his voice, which I wasn’t expecting—although I had to remind myself that we had met just a few days ago. I thought I had a read on who Morgan was—but did I? I certainly felt like I could trust him, so far.
“Okay, no problem. What time do you want to meet?”
“Say around three today? I do apologize for the short notice. It doesn’t have to be long. We can just give them a general impression of the job.”
“That works for me.”
“Much obliged, Kate.” He hung up quickly. Well, that was odd. Is this too good to be true? I thought the body in the wall was our main problem, but … I stood and began to dress and think of coffee downstairs, hoping to escape those troubling thoughts. Get out of your head, Kate. I needed to keep moving.
Arriving back at the mansion that afternoon, I stepped into the cool front parlor, shaded by its thick drapes. I opened an east-facing window to let in the faint breeze. I still had more than an hour to kill before the meeting with Morgan and his crew, so I sat down and looked around me. I wondered if Henry and Mary had done this very thing—passing the idle afternoon hours together, sitting on the plush sofas and wingback chairs. I looked around the room, and as my gaze passed by the door that led out to the main hall and the library on the other side, the tall bookshelves caught my eye. I had never really stopped to look at Henry’s collection. Not being terribly literary myself, I figured his choices of books wouldn’t mean all that much to me. Should I have hired a literary consultant, to get some insight on the house’s intellectual life? I made a mental note. But now my interest was piqued, and I stood and walked into the library, pulled out the first book my hand landed on, and sat to read. It was a novel by Anthony Trollope, a Victorian author about whom I knew exactly nothing. I read the first few pages. The story concerned the lives of several civil servants, their loves and professional pursuits, and …
I must have drifted off, because a loud rapping on the front door was the next thing I heard. I stood and replaced the book on the shelf, wondering if this 1850-something edition was perhaps worth real money, and smoothed my clothes as I walked to the door. Out on the porch, I found a woman, about my age or a little younger, dressed in a black T-shirt, work pants, and boots, a dense ring of keys dangling from a carabiner on her belt loop. She was staring up at the underside of the porch roof, which was painted pale blue—a Victorian custom, to mimic the sky above. As I opened the front door, she looked down to meet my gaze and smiled.
“Hi. Are you Kate?” She stuck out a hand. “Bethany Wallace. I handle the wiring. Morgan said to be here at three, but I guess I’m early. Nice to meet you.”
“You too,” I said, shaking her hand. My gaze followed where hers had been, and we both looked up at the porch roof in silence for a moment.
“It’s cool, right?” I said. “Looks like the sky. That’s some kind of Victorian tradition.”
“Well, it is and it isn’t,” she said, still looking up, her mouth wrinkling into a smile.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t say as to your original builder’s specific history and intentions in choosing this color, but the tradition of blue porch ceilings actually comes from Gullah culture. They called it ‘haint blue.’ My grandmother’s people were Gullah, from West Africa way back when, and she told me about this when I was a kid. You can see the influence more as you go farther south—she grew up in Georgia—but the traditions pop up all over. Like right here. Gullah people believe that evil spirits can’t cross bodies of water, so they paint porches blue, sometimes front windows and doors, and the spirits are supposed to get confused and pass on by. My sister lives over on the other side of town, by the grocery store—she and I painted her front door blue a few years ago when our grandma passed, as a tribute to her.” She fell silent, both of us staring up at the peeling blue paint. “I wonder if there were some bad things in this house that needed keeping away.”
I looked at her. She didn’t seem to mean anything serious by the remark, and it remained to be seen how much of this house’s history she was aware of. I thought of Mary’s three lost babies, resting quietly in the family plot out in the back field—to say nothing of the dead man in the staircase. But I’d explain that part when the rest of the crew got here.
Soon two more trucks appeared at the far end of the long driveway, the one behind driving slightly too close to the one in front, as if anxious to get where it was going, though they were both perfectly on time for our appointment. They parked, and Morgan stepped out of the first truck; two men emerged from the second, the larger one slapping the smaller on the shoulder as they walked—whether in a gesture of comradeship or impatience, I couldn’t quite tell.
When they reached the porch, I beckoned all of them into the house, where Morgan introduced the new faces. The larger of the two men looked mildly peeved, although maybe that was just the resting appearance of his face.
“Kate, this is Steve, our plumbing lead, and Lars, his assistant. It looks like you’ve met Bethany—she’ll be our head electrician. We’ll have more of a crew when we get going, but I thought these folks should come through first, since they’re leading the charge.” The peeved-looking man stuck his hand out first, stepping forward and angling his body past the others to face me.
“Steve Abernathy,” he said, staring hard at the space between my eyes. “This is Lars, my little brother. I’m teaching him everything I know. Nice place you’ve got here.” He looked around the room appraisingly, then past my head toward the kitchen at the end of the hall. He was a stocky man, a little older than I was—probably early forties—with sandy hair and a pink complexion. The other man, thin and reedy, sheepishly put out a hand, and I shook it without saying a word. He had a curious look and was less pink in the face than his brother; he nodded and smiled as we shook hands.
“Hi, Steve. Hi, Lars. Nice to meet you. Yes, I just met Bethany a few minutes ago. She was just telling me something I never knew about the porch ceiling—”
“Well, well,” Steve broke in, “the electric lady’s an expert on that stuff, isn’t she?”
Bethany smiled at him, but the smile had a bite to it. “Steve here had never worked with a woman electrician before we met. Isn’t that right, Steve? But I can hardly blame him—not too many of us around here. I’m always telling the guys I work with that small hands are better for feeding wires through small spaces.” She shot a jesting glance toward Steve, who didn’t seem to get the joke. “Anyway, I’m glad to be on the job. Thanks for meeting us on such short notice.”
Steve snorted, and then spoke again. “Yep, we had to get in right away and see what’s what. The kitchen’s this way?” He gestured with his chin toward the back of the house and started walking that way before anyone could answer. Bethany raised her eyebrows at him, but followed him toward the kitchen, looking around her with interest at the details of the rooms. Lars drifted after them like a boat in tow. Morgan stayed behind.
“You said you’d worked with these three before?” I asked when they were out of earshot. “Can you trust them to respect the building as it is? I mean, even I know it’s tricky to feed wires through walls without tearing the walls open, much less make sure that pipes won’t leak, but I don’t want them to look for shortcuts. Or at least, can I trust they’ll make the holes invisible before they leave?”
“Don’t worry—I’ll keep an eye on them.” He looked like he wanted to believe what he was saying, but wasn’t sure.
“Did we ever settle on a schedule? I seem to remember that the plan you sketched out for me involved totally rewiring the house first, and then getting to the kitchen.”
“Yes, that will be necessary, just to bring the place up to code. Let’s put it this way: it would be possible to get it all done in, say, three weeks, if you were willing to hire a lot of extra people and pay them overtime for long hours. But the rest of the house wouldn’t be ready for the public by then, would it?”
I shook my head. “When I started all this, I was hoping for a splashy fall opening. Now maybe I should start thinking about Christmas.”
“Everybody loves a holiday!” Morgan said, which I interpreted as It’s definitely going to take at least six months. I sighed.
“It is what it is, I guess,” I said ruefully. I tried to turn my thoughts around, to face what was possible in the moment. “Well, let’s show them the place, eh?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Morgan said, smiling as he removed his cap.
Once we were all gathered in the kitchen, I quickly outlined my original plan and the changes that had occurred over the past couple of days—acknowledging the large hole in one wall, and why it was there. Steve, Bethany, and Lars all stared at it, and Bethany laughed quietly at the strangeness of it. I wrapped up my introduction, cautiously watching their faces for reactions.
“So, I want to preserve the style and ambiance of the house, but I also want to be able to use it in the modern world. I know it’ll be a juggling act for you, trying to maintain the best of the old while still making it functional, but I hope you’ll do your best. If you run into any problems, talk to me. Now, you know better than I do what you need to look for, so I’ll leave you to walk through for a while and make any notes you need. You might want to start with the basement, where pretty much everything is exposed. By the time you get to the attic, there’s only one hanging bulb, so I hope you have some flashlights. Sound okay?”
Everybody nodded, so I directed the workers to the cellar stairs. As they descended, a thought seemed to occur to Morgan, and he turned to me.
“You planning to leave the staircase in the kitchen there?”
“I don’t know.” I had been mulling it over privately and honestly didn’t know the right answer yet. “It’s interesting and it’s creepy at the same time. I’m not sure I’d want to live with it in my own home, knowing what had happened, but this is going to be a public building, and the story might appeal to people. You think you’d want that extra three feet of space for the kitchen?”
“Not necessarily. Kitchens were for servants in those days, so they weren’t always large. There had to be room for a big table in the middle, because that was the main working surface. Of course, you could pull a stunt with it—install a retractable panel over the staircase, push a button, and give the crowd a before-and-after view of the room. But that’s a little silly. Anyway, you’ve got some options to think over here. Do you want to keep the layout?”
“I think so, unless you tell me there’s a good reason not to. What about lighting? Nowadays, we’re accustomed to recessed spotlights everywhere you might be working in the space, but I assume things weren’t like that in 1880?”
“No, they weren’t. Even for the rich, there were limitations. Your Henry worked with light bulbs, didn’t he?”
“Among other things. He was an industrious kind of guy.” But enough chitchat—we were supposed to be doing business. “Morgan, give it to me straight: Do you think your people can handle this renovation?”
“I wouldn’t have brought them here if I didn’t. I’ve worked with these two before—Steve and Bethany, I mean. I can’t say I know Lars well, but he seems to have a good head on his shoulders. Anyway, they know my standards. They’ll bring in a few other apprentices, but I’ll keep an eye on them too.”
A personal recommendation was always encouraging, and I didn’t think Morgan would lie to me. “Do you think they’ll start with the basement?”
“Most likely. They need to map out where the main circuits will go first. Would you happen to have the original plans for the house, at the time of its rebuilding?”
“I’ll see if I can find any—I don’t know how much Henry did himself, or if it was all done in one continuous operation. Or who he hired to work on it. I’ll ask Carroll to check.”
Morgan smiled. “Don’t worry—we’ll figure it out. When do you want us to start?”
“As soon as you can, I guess. Do you have a contract?”
“I’ll put something together. Don’t worry.”
So unlike Baltimore! I thought. I was used to looking out for sharks, budget inflators, and corner-cutters, so this exhibition of small-town trustworthiness was almost confusing.
“Thank you, Morgan. Should we shake on it?” The idea seemed both old-fashioned and appropriate—Asheboro really was a little world unto itself. We shook hands.
So, one small step accomplished. Having said that to myself, of course I realized there were a lot of other issues, things I hadn’t even contemplated tackling yet. What did our insurance cover, with these new people coming through the house? Should I have Ryan look at any contract before signing it—or even write up the contracts himself? Would Morgan know where to find vintage fabrics and such, or did he have a counterpart who handled interiors? Did I need to approve each design choice as it came up—or did I need a new research consultant for this?
Calm down, Kate, a voice said, and I realized it was my own. Out loud. Luckily, Morgan had wandered off down the basement steps after our handshake, so he didn’t have to hear me giving myself a pep talk. I continued, just for the heck of it. One thing, and then the next. Make a list. Ask someone. And remember—you can’t move the mountain in a day.
It was oddly comforting. I shifted my weight forward and proceeded straight ahead to the next task at hand.