Massonville 2006
It was about an hour before sunset by the time Katie finished reading the story of the Venable family. When she left the hotel, the sky was still light, but it was starting to get a little cooler. The bugs weren't out yet.
She made good time walking to the front door of the opera house— she'd already gotten to know where all the potholes were in the driveway— and she opened the lockbox quickly. The key for the opera house was there, right where she and Randa had left it, but the fancy iron one R.B. had described was missing. It seemed she wasn't going to be visiting his mythical garden after all.
She wasn't disappointed—not really. She started to walk up the path to the riverfront. But then she turned back. The white façade of the theater was bathed in the deep golden light of the sun that would soon be setting. It gave off a glow that Mike Killian's egg crate convention center could never match.
The stories are the reason you don't want to sell the opera house, R.B. had said. You look at a big old elevator and you see women in their hoop skirts.
She let her eyes run over the front of the theater, and imagined it as it would have been in the 1870s. She saw the black canopy over the front door with the words “The Venable Opera House” proudly displayed. There were carriages parked under it, and a servant helping the ladies up the steps to the door. She saw formal gardens, a velvet lawn, and flowers planted in window boxes under the restaurant windows. Her gaze continued roaming to the far end of the theater. That was when she saw that the side gate was open. And it was not her imagination. She hurried over to it.
The path went down the side of the theater to the garden behind it, just the way R.B. had said it would. There was a high hedge surrounding the garden, and Katie could hear voices on the other side. She followed the sound and found the remains of a trellis and a gate that had been the entrance to the garden. She went through it.
Three gray-white statues rose up over the garden at three corners. In the fourth corner was an empty pedestal. Randa and Susie were standing in front of a statue of a man wearing a cape and holding a sword up to the sky.
“Juliet Venable is over there, Mom,” Susie was saying. “She's wearing her costume for Romeo and Juliet. And that's Olivia Venable in the corner opposite her. She's wearing everyday clothes because she wasn't an actress.” Susie turned to the statue in front of them. “And this is the guy who kept the opera house going, even during the Depression.”
As she moved closer to them, Katie stepped on something, or maybe they just sensed that she was there, because they both turned. Randa laughed.
“You too?” Randa said. “Well, come meet Edward Rain. Our ancestor. Or not.”
All three of them turned to study the statue of Edward Rain, which, according to the date carved under his feet, had been put in the garden in 1935.