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WE JOINED THE other women upstairs. Everybody seemed to be just milling around, unsure what to do now that there weren’t any more diaries or Myra Sue letters to read. The light from the overhead light bulb seemed garish. I wondered who had flipped the switch.
I also wondered who had wired the attic to begin with. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing Elizabeth Hoskins would have worried about. "When did electricity get started?"
Glaze grimaced at the garish light bulb over her head. "I don’t know, but candles and lanterns sure give a nicer glow."
"We used candles up until the late thirties," Sadie said, "all through the depression and for quite a while after." She had to think about it a bit. "Do you remember, Rebecca Jo?"
"I couldn’t give you a year, but I do know that we had power before Bob was born."
I perked up my ears.
"I remember worrying about how bright the light was next to the bed." She looked over at Carol. "He was born at home."
"In the four-poster bed with the lion heads?" Dee asked.
"Of course."
All this time I’d been married to Bob, and he never told me he was a home birth. "So," I said, "Elizabeth and Perry must be the ones who had the attic wired—the whole house, in fact."
"I hope she was as good at wiring as she was at ..."
Glaze let her words dribble off. I was fairly sure that after what we’d learned about how Tricia killed Charlie Ellis, my sister was thinking twice about introducing more murder into this space.
"I’m sure she was," I said. "Or, more likely, she hired a good electrician. Bob and I had the wiring inspected when we bought the place, and everything checked out."
Carol peered upwards. "I wonder if these are the original bulbs?"
"Since the thirties or forties," Dee squawked. "They couldn’t be."
"Oh yes they could," Carol said. "The early light bulbs used to last for twelve-hundred hours or more."
"I guess nobody back then had heard about planned obsolescence," Ida intoned.
I went back to leafing through the rather boring letters in our trunk, but couldn’t help thinking about Tricia Moody. The elephant in the middle of the room.
What is a nelafant?
She kept me from concentrating. I was about to broach the subject when Pat beat me to it.
"Did any of you know about this? About her, I mean? Not being Charlotte. Charlie."
Her words were as chaotic as my thoughts. I looked over at Sadie. She’d be the logical one to say something, but she just tightened her already tight lips. I could tell she was close to losing it.
Losing what?
"This may not be the time to talk about this," I said. "We don’t have any details, and it’ll be like one of these attic artifacts."
"What do you mean?" Dee asked.
"Nothing but suppositions on our part."
"I remember Charlie," Rebecca Jo said. "The real Charlie. She was one of the dearest children I’ve ever known. Oh, she could get into all sorts of scrapes. She wasn’t a goody two-shoes or anything like that. But she was always enthusiastic about everything, whether it was a heap of leaves in the autumn or a homemade fishing pole in the spring."
"Most kids are like that," I said, thinking about my three when they were little.
"She was happy," Sadie said.
That, I thought, wouldn’t be such a bad epitaph. I wondered where her bones would be buried, once the investigation was completed.
Sadie settled against the back of her chair.
"You’re right," Maddy said. "I’m sure we’ll learn more details soon enough. For right now, I’m going to concentrate on the trunks with all the letters in them. We might find something else as good as the journals."
I doubted that, but it wouldn’t hurt to look. I lifted another tied-up bundle from Sadie’s and my trunk, but stopped when Sadie laid a hand on my arm. "I just remembered something else." Her voice was low.
I sat next to her and waited.
"Remember when she"—there was a fair amount of venom in the pronoun, enough to make me sure she was talking about Tricia Moody—"and Pat both had their heads down in that trunk over there?" She pointed toward the far end of the attic. "You wanted everybody over here in the circle to see ... something. I can’t remember what."
I had no idea where she was headed with this.
"You called out Pat’s name, and they both jerked upright. They bumped their heads together, remember?"
I combed my mental landscape. "Vaguely," I said.
"She must have gone by Tricia when she was in college, but I’d be willing to bet her family called her Pat." She sat back in her chair, grim satisfaction on her face. "Another nail in her coffin."
"Sadie? Do you want me to get you a candle to light?"
She pursed her lips, and looked so much like a dried-up apple, I almost laughed. Until the tears began to leak down her cheeks.
"Not yet. I need to feel a great deal of sadness and a great deal of rage first."
I wondered if she would be mourning her little Charlie Ellis for a year and a day.
"Why do so many young people think we old ones are blind?" Dear, sweet Sadie Masters seemed to hold her anger in front of her like a shield, around which she spit her words. "Didn’t it ever occur to her that she might be recognized as a fraud?"
"Apparently not. Or she was arrogant enough to think she could get away with it."
"I could kick myself for not saying something that first day she came to town. I knew. I just knew something was wrong."
Without saying anything, I placed a gentle hand on her forearm.
"I know." She gripped my hand. "It wouldn’t have made any difference. Charlie was already ... already gone."
There wasn’t anything I could say, so I just sat there.
"Do you think they’d let me have her ... her remains?"
I looked a question at her.
"We could bury her in the green cemetery, next to Wallace."
"That’s a lovely thought, Sadie. I’m sure Bob could help you figure out who to talk to about it."
"Oh, yuck!" Pat’s voice came from the far side of the attic. "This is disgusting."
"Sounds like just what I need," Sadie muttered. She patted my hand.
Pat walked toward the throw-away pile, holding something at arm’s length. I wasn’t sure I wanted to look too closely, not after what she’d said, but Sadie hauled herself to her feet. "What is it?"
It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. Just a congealed lump of candles, all melted into one another.
"I would have thrown this out immediately," Pat said. "Why put these up here?"
"They probably didn’t start out like this," Carol said reasonably, "although I will admit it’s not too smart to store candles anywhere it’s going to get hot." She looked a question at me.
I nodded. "Heat rises. This place gets pretty stuffy in the summertime."
"Understatement of the year," Glaze said.
"All right," I said. "Hotter than the blazes. Maybe I ought to come up here and open the eyebrow windows once in a while." Maybe we could put screens on them so they could just stay open all summer long. I thought for a few seconds about the mess in Pat’s hands. "Are they salvageable?"
"Are you kidding?"
Sadie put out a quelling hand toward Pat. "Everything’s salvageable in one way or another. You could remelt the wax and use it to make more candles, although"—she peered at the mess—"you’ll want new wicks."
"It might be fun," I said. "My granddaughters and I could do it as a special project." I took the lump from Pat and put it on the step stool, the one I still hadn’t taken downstairs. "I never saw such yellow wax," I said. "Actually I’ve seen some fairly garish colors in candles, but they’ve all been modern candles, and the colors look artificial."
"Yeah," Melissa said. "I thought old candles were always white."
"Not necessarily," Maddy chimed in. "It depends on the wax."
"But this is beeswax," I said. "At least it smells like beeswax." Down below, I heard the front door slam. Bob’s home, I thought. And Doc and Dave.
Maddy grinned her I-know-something-you-don’t-know grin. "The yellow wax happens sometimes when the tulip poplar trees are in bloom."
"They used to be called yellow poplars," Carol said.
If I stayed up here in the attic much longer I was going to deserve another college diploma.
I will get one for you if you will tell me what it is.
~ ~ ~
1852
LEONORA MARTIN HOSKINS scanned the table one more time. Gideon, her husband, had been kinder for the last few months, but she had read the signs of impending upset when he had left the house after his noon meal. He had been no less settled when he walked in from the stable just a few moments before. She had hoped to appease him with this special meal, but one look at his face had been enough to let her know this would not be a pleasant night. Roasted chicken could not make up for her perceived limitations as a wife, as a mother, as a living being, but she could not stop herself from hoping the food might put him in a slightly more mellow mood. She had even used three of the candles she had made from the batch of yellow beeswax Young Gideon found for her each year when the yellow poplars were in bloom.
She ran a hand through Young Gideon’s already-tousled hair and smiled when he looked up at her with such trust.
A look he quickly shuttered when his father strode back in, his face wet from a quick splash at the rain barrel. Gideon wiped his damp hands on his breeches and surveyed the table.
One of the candles spluttered, as if it could single-handedly push back the night. Push back Gideon's anger.
He gave more of his attention to the dinner than to her, but that suited Leonora just fine. The older boys were as surly as their father. Ellen and Rachael were, as usual, almost invisible in their quietness. Leonora made sure her sighs were inaudible.
After the meal, once Gideon had withdrawn to his seat in front of the fire, Young Gideon approached his mother and whispered in her ear. "May I have several of the yellow candles, Mother?"
"Of course." If it had been one of her other sons, she would have refused, for she did not trust either of them to take the care necessary with an open flame, but even though he was but six years of age, Young Gideon was ever cautious where caution was needed, and he was already undeniably canny with a flint.
She wondered what he would do with the candles, but she had long known he retreated to the spacious but often dark attic to draw the animal pictures he dared not leave about the house and to think the thoughts he could not share with his father.
~ ~ ~
"WHY DO YOU SUPPOSE there are so many card tables up here?" Even though I was thinking out loud, I garnered a number of answers, ranging from they-knew-we’d-need-them to where-else-would-they-store-them to bridge-club-obviously. I figured the last answer was the most likely.
"Bridge clubs used to be popular," Amanda said, "didn’t they? I wonder why you don’t hear about them so much anymore."
"I think they were just a way to combat boredom," Sadie said. "After the war was over, all those women who’d worked got kicked out of their jobs once the men were back to fill them."
"So they started bridge clubs?" Amanda sounded dubious. I didn’t blame her, but I didn’t have a better answer.
"It doesn’t matter where these tables came from," Maddy said. "I’m just glad they were here."
Rebecca Jo surveyed the spread of letters, cards, fabric, hats, and various other whatnots we’d accumulated. "Otherwise we’d be tripping over everything on the floor."
Sadie ran her hand along the edge of one of them. "My card tables always had nicks and scratches on the edges, but these look ... pristine, I guess you’d say."
"You’re right." Dee inspected the table she was at. "This one’s in great shape, too."
"No food stains, no torn—What is this? Vinyl?—on the top."
Pat nodded at Melissa. "No markers or crayons." She nodded, almost nostalgically. "Norm used to draw all over the place, whether there was paper underneath or not."
There was a piece of me that felt bad about continuing with all this attic work when one of the women who had explored up here with us had been arrested—not that she’d done that much exploring—and when Sadie must still be almost in shock from knowing for sure that Charlie had been killed. But thinking about card tables seemed like the perfect antidote to thoughts of murder.
~ ~ ~
1953
ELIZABETH ENDICOTT HOSKINS could find anything she wanted in the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Now that the Great Depression was over and done with and the war was out of the way, she took great pleasure in buying whatever she wanted. Perry never objected to anything she purchased. All he was interested in was keeping his hunting knife sharpened. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if he honed it so much the blade disappeared. Order another one from Sears Roebuck and Company, she supposed, although it wouldn’t be the same as this knife that Perry inherited when his father, the town veterinarian, had died.
Elizabeth had grown up with tales of how her mother used to look through every catalog page by page, circling the things she wanted, no matter how fancy or how expensive they were. Mother had been reading the Sears & Roebuck catalog from cover to cover ever since the first one came to Enders in 1897. Somehow, Mother always said, circling the things she dreamed about—in ink, no less—was almost as good as buying them.
Elizabeth wasn’t sure she could agree to that. She liked the buying part. Shipping by mail was always an option, or by freight if the item was bulky. As these card tables were. They had legs that folded! A bridge club was what this town needed. She would get her card tables—five or perhaps six should be enough—and she could set them around the living room, as long as she got Perry to move some of the couches out of the way.
Elizabeth had never played bridge, but it couldn’t be that hard. She wondered idly if Sears & Roebuck carried instruction books on how to play bridge.
As soon as her order arrived, she had printed invitations made up.
Contract Bridge
a Weekly Ladies’ Club
hosted by Elizabeth Hoskins
Every Wednesday at 2 p.m.
13 Beechnut Lane
Martinsville
RSVP
The responses were far less than she had expected. Or rather, everyone responded, but everyone said no. Perry took the card tables up to the attic, and Elizabeth never mentioned them again.
Perry knew better than to say anything about it.