The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,1
was six years younger—she’d never had to beg her before. Quickly, almost too quickly, she reversed course and said yes. Why of course she could help, that would be wonderful. They could leave scrapers for her and putty knives and stripping solution and a stepladder and a big garbage can to put scraps in and rubber gloves and bandages in case she nicked herself and plenty of food and wine, and it would all be ready for her when she arrived, she could go right to work.
“You won’t have to worry about a thing while you’re there.
Really—not a thing. It’s grunt work though, really messy. How strong are your wrists?”
“Once I finish I can hang the new wallpaper. Have you picked any out?”
“After stripping? That’s double the work.”
“Downstairs then. You can hire your Frenchman to do upstairs.”
“There’s a website with old Victorian wallpaper and we found a soft peach color that complements the floor. Tom’s doing the math on how much we need. But we’ll order it and have it waiting with everything else.”
“Thank you, Jeannie. Jeannie? Really, thank you.”
“You know how much aggravation you’ll be saving us? I’ll send you directions. Basically, you drive north on the interstate, then fall off the map. Don’t argue with me, but we insist on paying for your flight ... That merger I told you about? It’s back on again, so I have to be going.”
She said goodbye abruptly, without asking about Cassie, and the absence of that kept Vera holding the phone for a long minute after she hung up. “She’s well, thanks,” she said to the mouthpiece. As well as can be expected. If she can stand thirty days then so can I.
Maybe that’s what the chocolate on the pillow was for—an apology, a gesture of support. Certainly Jeannie had kept her promise about supplies. In the darkness, boxes and cartons made a maze she had to thread her way through before going upstairs. She glanced at the walls on the way up, traced her hand along the paper, but it was too dark to really see. Beside the candy was a penlight she used to find the bathroom; after undressing, she fell against the mattress as if she’d been pushed. Two layers of exhaustion worked on her, and the upper one, the one that came from the flight and long drive, was wonderfully smothering, the way it kept the bottom layer from having its way. She fell asleep quickly, dreamed of silly things, then, well before dawn, woke up to moonlight touching her face.
It burned, that was the odd thing, white as it was. She lay there until it touched her throat, then, restless, wrapped the cotton blanket around her shoulders and ventured carefully out into the hall. The walls weren’t square and reliable, but slanted at unexpected angles, like baffles, keeping her from walking straight more than a few steps at a time. One turn brought her to a door with frosted glass in the upper panels. A closet, she decided, but when she opened it she came to a pool of moonlight so dense and liquid she stepped back in alarm.
There she found a little balcony, a platform big enough for a single chair, set above the porch just below. Someone must have built it to have a quiet spot where they could be alone over the hubbub of visitors, and this pleased her, to have discovered one of the house’s secrets so quickly. The railing was wobbly and rotted, but it gave her enough confidence to take the three steps needed to peer down.
The ground mist rose into the moonlight, and toward the top were milky tongues that licked in toward the house. Back home the mist hardly ever rose above the sage, but here it seemed brewed from an enormous kettle, smelling of greenness and the lightest spice of fir. An enormous pine tree fronted the porch, but the fog hid its trunk and only the needles were visible, like pins holding the mist up. Jeannie had told her about the wild pea vines, and it was true, they climbed the porch and coiled around the railings, not eating the house so much as holding it ready to eat, shifting and turning it to just the right angle.
She could hear Tom’s trout stream across the road, a purposeful rushing, and an owl, very distant, calling to a hoarser one that roosted much closer. She shivered as she listened, her new kind of shivering that had nothing