Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers (3 page)

The plantation's main driveway was a mixture of gravel and truly determined weeds. There were two brick gate pillars leaning at odd angles just inside the turnoff from the main road. One had a date inscribed, 1838, and the other the plantation's name, Glory's End. The numerals, antique characters partly obscured by ivy, were only faintly visible. The name's lettering, however, looked newer, which matched with the story of the name change at the end of the Civil War. As I turned into the drive I caught a glimpse of an even bigger house across the road behind its own aisle of oaks. David Oatley had told me that the neighboring plantation was called Laurel Grove and that the people who had built Glory's End had been related to the people across the road. I couldn't tell whether anyone was home, but the grounds did look maintained. Mr. Oatley had said the folks were eccentric, devoted to the past, and reclusive.

I drove almost a half mile to get to the house. The road was bumpy and needed crowning. The fields on either side were mostly overgrown with waist-high winter weeds. There were two tree-lined creeks running under the road and through the fields. It looked like someone had replaced the original wooden beam bridges with concrete culvert structures. As I got closer to the main house, a line of oaks began to flank the road, their overhanging branches creating a hazy green tunnel of spring foliage overhead. The road divided about a quarter mile from the front of the house, with the left branch headed down along the base of the homestead hill toward some barns and other farm structures behind the house. I took the right branch and drove up toward the house itself.

The building was well proportioned, with two stories built over another level that was half underground, half above. At the front there was a large white staircase leading up to the main level's columned front porch. Three tall windows bounded either side of double doors. There was a somewhat narrower sleeping porch above the columns. The semisubmerged ground level had smaller windows across its entire front, except where the twenty-foot-wide staircase obscured them. The bricks were obviously handmade, but some of the mortar had that floury look that indicated I'd need the services of a mason.

I let the two shepherds out and gave them a minute to desecrate the grounds. Then all three of us went up the staircase to the front doors, which were ten to twelve feet high and made of some heavily painted wood. The original nineteenth-century hardware was long gone. The doors were secured by a modern, brass-plated doorknob, to which I had a key. Except now the doors were partially ajar, and the shepherds were staring at the opening as if someone might be lurking in there. I tried to remember if we'd gone inside on the last visit, but we hadn't. So who was in there?

I stood on the porch and listened. It was a pleasant spring morning, with birds twittering in the nearby oak trees. The sound of insects rising in the unkempt grass provided a quiet hum in the
background. There were no other vehicles in sight, so if someone was inside, he'd walked in. Kitty's ears went up, and then one door opened all the way.

A woman stood in the doorway, and for a moment I thought I'd fallen into a time warp. She was dressed in one of those black southern gowns I'd only seen in museums and movies, full length to the floor, flaring skirts, and full sleeves ending in white lace. She was handsome rather than beautiful, with dark hair done up in one of those
Gone with the Wind
hairdos, pulled back from her forehead in a tight bun that ended in long, luxurious, shoulder length curls clamped by an ornate ivory comb. She had brown eyes, under imperiously arched eyebrows, and a small, thin-lipped mouth. I could not guess her age. The shepherds sat down on either side of me to await developments.

"Good morning to you, sir," she said, inclining her head in the tiniest of nods. "Are you perchance the new owner?"

"Not yet," I said, "but we're working on it. And you are?"

"Valeria Marion Lee," she announced. "My mother, Hester Lowndes Lee, owns Laurel Grove plantation, across the road." She looked at me expectantly as if all those names should mean something, and I supposed that they did in some southern pantheon.

"I'm Cameron Richter, and these are my helpers, Frick and Kitty."

She glanced at each dog in turn. "Kitty?" she asked.

"The folks who bred her did it as a joke. The guy's wife wanted to be able to call, 'Here, Kitty, Kitty,' if she thought she needed protection."

A very faint smile crossed her face. "How droll," she said. "I suppose you wonder what I'm doing here."

"Mostly how you got in. The Realtor told me the place was locked up."

She fished in a pocket and produced a brass key that looked identical to mine. She stepped out of the house, skirts swishing, and handed it to me. "We've had a key ever since Mrs. Tarrant became
incapacitated by her advancing age. No need of that now, I suppose."

Standing closer, she was nearly my own height, although some of that was the Scarlett O'Hara hairdo. Her clothes smelled of lilacs.

"Thank you," I said. "Since you're here, though, would you care to give me a tour of the house? I suspect you know it better than Mr. Oatley."

She cocked her head for a moment, considering it, and then agreed. I left the shepherds on the front porch. She led me back into the house. She described the house's stylistic elements--heart-pine floors, plaster and lath walls, fireplaces--and its basic history. The downstairs layout was similar to many large plantation houses of the prewar period: A central hall was flanked by withdrawing rooms on either side; a large, ornate staircase circled up both sides of the hall to the second floor, where there were four bedrooms giving onto a long hallway. What had become the master bedroom in more modern times now had a bathroom, which was a very obvious addition to the original layout.

The previous owner, Mrs. Tarrant, had set up a temporary bedroom on the main floor in the left-hand drawing room; there was a bed and some armoires, and over in one corner, a tiny bathroom had been plugged in. The ceiling was eighteen or maybe even twenty feet high. The paint scheme was strangely reversed: There appeared to be wallpaper on the ceiling and paint on the walls. The wallpaper design was filled with mythical animals, scrollwork, and numbers. Some of it was missing, leaving bare spots on the ceiling. I couldn't really make out the details, but it all looked to me like an astrologer's bad dream.

Behind the two large drawing rooms on the main floor was a long kitchen and pantry setup, with back stairs leading down to the in-ground floor. In the nineteenth century, this in-ground floor was where the food preparation area had been, as well as the main dining room, all situated half underground to provide a cool place during the summer. The original kitchen had been out behind the house,
and its foundations were still visible, next to what she told me had been the smokehouse. The original springhouse was also still there, nestled in a grove of ancient oaks from which a brook escaped down the broad hillside toward the river. There was no period furniture, but there was a clunky-looking central heating system and some air-conditioning machinery out behind the house, surrounded by unruly boxwood hedges. I peeked into the main electrical box and found round fuses instead of circuit breakers. I was probably lucky to find electricity.

"This is known as a Thomas Day house," she said as we went back upstairs to the main floor. "He was a notable woodworker who specialized in moldings, fireplace mantels, and staircases. He was also a black freedman who himself owned slaves."

"Mr. Oatley took me to see the site of the train robbery," I said, looking out the back windows at the outbuildings. "Did the family have a cemetery here as well?"

"No," she replied. "There were Lees here for most of the house's history, but they're all buried in town in the St. Stephen's cemetery. Our family actually built the church in the first place."

"The disclosure statement says there's another burial ground on the place but that it's been lost."

"That was probably a slave cemetery," she said dismissively, as if to say,
Who cares?

"Is your family related to the Virginia Lees?"

"So it is claimed, but I'm not entirely sure. My mother says we are, but only distantly."

We stepped back out onto the front porch. The floorboards were a little springy, and I noticed now that some of the railings had begun to sag. There were some little piles of sandy-looking mortar dust at the base of the front wall.

"There's a lot of land here," I said, looking out over the surrounding fields. "Can it be farmed?"

"Most of our land across the way is leased to local farmers. I'm
sure there'd be people interested in leasing this. It's been lying fallow all these years."

"I'm looking forward to exploring it all."

"Mind where you walk, sir," she said. "There are undoubtedly some abandoned wells out there, and they can be fatally treacherous."

I heard a noise down the driveway, and then a horse and buggy appeared out of the oak aisle. A smiling black man was driving it. He waved when he saw us on the front porch.

"Your chariot?" I said.

She smiled again. "Its proper name is a governess's cart, but, yes, this is how I will get home." She inclined her head formally and presented her right hand. "It's been a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Cameron Richter. I hope you can join us for tea sometime."

I took her hand, not quite sure if I was expected to kiss it or shake it. I gave it a slight squeeze and let go. "I'd like that very much," I said.

She went down the wide wooden steps, holding the hem of her skirt up with both hands as the little carriage pulled up.

They're taking this living in the past pretty seriously,
I thought. Then I saw the cell phone in the old man's shirt pocket. He saw me looking at it as he got down to help Valeria Marion Lee into the carriage and gave me a wink.
Okay,
I thought,
they're not all nuts.

I locked the front door, gathered up the shepherds, and drove into town for lunch. Afterward I stopped by the realty office, signed yet some more papers, and asked the ladies there if there was an established restoration company in town. Not exactly, they told me, but a Ms. Carol Lee Pollard ran a consulting business on restoring old houses. They said she volunteered over at the library, and gave me directions.

Carol Pollard was a shapely brunette, late thirties, maybe forty, five-seven with short flip-style hair, blue eyes, and a warm smile to go with a broad upland North Carolina accent. She recognized my name when I introduced myself.

"Oh, yes," she said. "Mr. Richter from Triboro. You bought Glory's End. That's wonderful. You're not a developer, are you? I mean, you will live there?"

"I hope to," I said, realizing not for the first time that there were no secrets in a small southern town. "Getting tired of city life. The folks at Oatley Realty told me you're the local restoration wizard. I think I'm going to need a lot of advice."

She asked one of the other librarians to take over the front desk, and we retired to the office, away from the library patrons. I noticed she walked with a slight limp.

"I basically offer a consulting service on restoration work," she told me. "I can recommend what should be done, what should be left as is, and who the local contractors are that I'd trust with a project like that. I can also act as the general contractor if my clients want me to."

"That's what I need," I said. "I'm not on some crusade to put it back to absolute authenticity. I'll want to address structural problems and then mostly make it livable."

"Great," she said. "Because if you try to take something like Glory's End all the way back to the 1830s, you'll never get there."

"So I've been told, repeatedly. I met one of my neighbors this morning. A Ms. Valeria Lee?"

"Oh, my," she said. "That's amazing. No one ever sees them except on important church days. You didn't just go knock on their door, did you?"

I told her the circumstances, and she shook her head. "Now that's really interesting," she said. "The Laurel Grove Lees and the Glory's End Lees haven't been on speaking terms apparently since the train robbery in 1865. Supposedly, if one mentions them in front of Ms. Hester--that's Valeria's mother--she will get up and leave the room in high dudgeon."

High dudgeon. I laughed. "I believe it. Ms. Valeria rode off in a horse and buggy after giving me a tour of the house. I thought she'd been putting me on with the antebellum getup."

"Not at all," Carol said. "They're both pretty eccentric. You should hear the stories. Candles instead of electric lights. The costumes, of course. Horse and carriage instead of a car. The obligatory crazy relative supposedly mewed up in the attic."

"Is there a Mr. Lee?" I asked. "Or would it be Colonel?"

"There is a Major Lee," she said, "but no one ever sees him. It's rumored that he's the one locked in the attic."

"Great local color, if nothing else," I said, "and my next-door neighbor. Are they going to be mad at me if I start messing with the house?"

"I don't know," Carol said. "They might, but they're such hermits I can't imagine they'd bother you, especially if you throw around the word 'preserve' liberally."

"Yet there she was this morning, wandering around in there like some kind of ghost."

"She probably heard about the place selling and wanted to see it one more time before the new owners knocked it down and put up a sacrilege."