The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,47
didn’t want to bug you.”
“Well, you can bug me all you want to now,” Calvin said. “Simon’s off saving the world again. There was a mudslide in some remote little village in Central America.” He sighed. “It’s not easy being married to a saint. In fact, sometimes it’s kind of annoying. That’s my hostage for the day; I am a terrible person who sometimes resents the fact that he has to share his husband the saint with the poor and downtrodden. What’s yours?” he asked. “I was really hoping it’d be something about the dead cat.”
“Calvin. For the fiftieth time, there was no dead cat.”
“Fine,” he grumped. “If it wasn’t a dead cat, what was it?” Calvin gasped as another possibility occurred to him. “Wait. Was it a dead body?” He gasped again. “Don’t tell me! A pile of newspapers fell on somebody and suffocated them. And when you dug them out, there was nothing left but a skeleton!”
“No!” I snapped, shuddering at the image, which would now haunt my dreams. As if dead cats weren’t enough, now he had to do this to me? “Ick. Seriously, Calvin, where do you get this stuff?”
“Simon says I watch too much trash, so I switched from Bravo to PBS. Now I’m binge-watching Midsomer Murders,” he said casually, as if this explained everything. “So tell me: what was the big discovery?”
“Yarn!”
“Yarn.”
Hmm. Clearly, he didn’t find this as exciting as I had.
“Well, not just yarn, Calvin. A whole room of it!” I said excitedly, still getting chills as I remembered trudging up the stairs and then walking through the door. Heath was right: if I hadn’t seen it myself, I would never have believed it. “Every wall is lined floor to ceiling with white cubbyhole shelving and every cubby is stuffed with skeins of beautiful yarn. It must have been Beebee’s, but I had no idea she had so much!
“And it’s all organized by color,” I continued. “The bottom cubbies on the left side of the door are filled with white yarn, then it goes to cream farther up, then yellow at the top of that stack. The next row starts with gold, then peach, then orange. It goes on like that all the way around the room, like a continuous rainbow, to the shelves on the right side of the door, which are filled with browns and blacks.”
“Okay,” he said grudgingly. “That actually does sound kind of cool. Not as cool as finding a missing murder victim, but still.”
“But here’s the really interesting part,” I said, feeling those chills again. “Apart from the yarn, a floor lamp, and a single wingback chair and side table with a basket of knitting needles and notions, the room was completely empty. The whole house is a wreck, so stuffed with boxes filled with old clothes and shoes and junk jewelry that it took four people all day just to get to the door, but the room behind that door was pristine, not so much as a piece of newsprint on the floor. Isn’t that crazy?”
“Huh. You think Calpurnia just closed it up after your grandmother died?”
“Could be,” I said. “But I don’t remember that room ever being used to store yarn. I remember the chair; Beebee always sat there when she was knitting. It was exactly the same—pink velveteen with channel-back upholstery.”
“Very nineteen fifties,” Calvin replied. “Everybody’s grandma had a chair like that.”
“But Beebee’s chair used to be downstairs,” I said. “So weird. The entire house is a disaster zone except for this one perfectly arranged and organized room, hidden away for who knows how long?”
“That is weird. But lucky for you, right? It’s a little island of order in the sea of chaos.”
“More like a cocoon,” I said, sitting down in Beebee’s chair and pulling my knees up to my chest as I gazed at the fluffy, colorful rainbow walls that surrounded me on all sides. “I decided to make it my bedroom, at least for now. But who knows? Maybe I’ll stay in here for the duration. It’s cozy.”
Cozy and comforting and safe. Outside this room, the task before me was overwhelming. But when I closed the door, it was possible to remember this house as it once had been—peaceful, pretty, and orderly, a place of refuge and welcome.
“What are you going to sleep on?” Calvin asked.
“I borrowed a sleeping bag from Heath and Caroline. I’ll buy a new mattress tomorrow.”
“Good. I was worried that you just dragged in a mattress from some other