road for skinny-dipping or splashing.
The kitchen will be my base camp, Vera decided. I’ll keep it neat and organized and not worry about the chaos everywhere else. Once breakfast was over she started upon an inspection tour of the rest of downstairs. And it was really very simple, at least as regards the basic layout.
The hall, the central hallway along which she had groped her way the night before, ran all the way from the kitchen to the front entrance. The stairs climbed one wall—they looked even steeper and narrower than they had in the dark, and most of the banister was missing. Three rooms opened off one side of the hall, two off the other side, each reached by its own door. On the west, front to back, was the main parlor, then a sewing room or den, then a smaller back parlor with boarded-up windows. On the east was a foyer with brass pegs, then a narrow closet, then a dining room that was the largest, most pleasant room in the house, with windows that ran all the way up from the floor and an old-fashioned ceiling fan that, upon her entrance, began stiffly spinning, as if showing off what it could do.
This was the geography, it was easy enough to understand, and on her second inspection she turned her attention to the details. The floors were as beautiful as Jeannie claimed—birds-eye maple that gleamed satin in the morning light. Transom windows were cut in the tops of the doors, and the one in the dining room was stained glass. The windows, old as they were, looked sturdy and formidable, with filigree trim around the sashes that matched the gingerbread outside.
These were the highlights, the little touches that had convinced Jeannie to buy. “Everything’s horrid after that,” she said on the phone, and she hadn’t been exaggerating. Water stains on the ceilings expanded outwards in urine-colored rings. Plastic sheeting had been tacked to the doors to make up for gaps caused by the house’s settling. A mirror framed by a toilet seat dominated the back parlor, along with a Mickey Mouse clock with the eyes gouged out. The curtains, what were left of them, hung like shrouds. Cobwebs lay thick in the corners, mice droppings littered the floor, and everything seemed possessed by the kind of cold that, having nothing to do with temperature, remained impervious to the sun.
Fireplaces would have helped, working fireplaces, but the one she found in the front parlor had collapsed into a shapeless mound. Lichen covered the stone—stalked cups, yellow nodules, rosettes of greenish-gray. The grate was still there, but in place of logs was a damp, cradle-shaped slurry where squirrels or chipmunks had once made their nests.
That left the wallpaper—the wallpaper she had been trying her best not to worry about before examining all the rest. Even with Jeannie’s warning, it was hard to look at without shuddering. The rooms on the left of the hall were covered with a thick brown paper that was meant to imitate pine, complete with knots and grain, while the rooms on the right had a paper that was even thicker, a faded white velvet with red-pink squiggles that suggested frosting. It was hung badly—seams split apart from each other and hardened pimples of glue bubbled up in the cracks. Horizontal strips had been pasted on as patches above the radiators and baseboards, but the bottoms hadn’t been trimmed, so in places the velvet dangled against the floor like a trollop’s dirty skirt.
Jeannie had no information whatsoever about the former owners. The house had been empty for years before the town stepped in, squatters had apparently lived there before that, and like every abandoned home along the border it was said to have been a hiding place for drugs.
“So we’re back in the Sixties, whoever papered it,” Jeannie had said. “I picture her in—what were those awful slippers called? Mules? I picture her in purple mules, her hair up in curlers, reading women’s magazines about the suburbs and how knotty pine was all the rage. That’s half of her. The other half is someone who never had a fancy wedding and hung the velvet in revenge.”
Vera wasn’t sure Jeannie’s profile was right. It wasn’t a frustrated housewife she sensed, but someone brassier, bolder, a woman trying to break out. Maybe the walls had been falling apart, and the paper had been meant as a desperate cover-up or glue. Maybe she had known how ugly the paper