With a frown, she caught her lower lip in her teeth and made her way around to the front of the house. A beautiful little barn caught her eye as she gazed over the front grounds. The lower level was built solidly with saffron sandstone, and the upper level was constructed of long planks, once painted red, but now a weathered burgundy.
The little farm sported at least ten acres of pastured land, with some of the fencing made of dilapidated wood planks, and some merely strung with sagging wire. Alex couldn’t see any animals, so she lifted her head and sniffed, seeking the delightful smell of warm furry horses or cows. Or at the very least, the wafting odor of manure. Yet there was nothing but the scent of pine.
Alex stepped off of the porch and glanced back at the house. It was not as large as she had first imagined, and was more likely built before the turn of the century, with a Victorian style trim, a rounded bump out, and a slate roof.
The roof was the only attribute that truly seemed to be in good repair, but the house had a certain charm that even years of neglect could not brush away. It was easy to imagine such a home cheerfully painted, with shutters hung, and smoke rising from a great brick chimney.
Turning back to the barn, Alex couldn’t help the feeling of excited yearning that hummed through her limbs. Although she felt guilty about trespassing, it was not enough to stop her from swinging open the double barn doors and investigating. It was obvious that the place had been deserted for some time, so why not?
It took her several moments to adjust to the gloom, and she managed to resist the urge to fling all of the Dutch split doors open to air the place out. There appeared to be about ten stalls, and several storage areas, which were currently filled with junk. Old hoppers, an ancient-looking horse drawn plow, and piles of baskets littered every open space. Bales of straw had been broken into by an army of mice, and their fading yellow contents were strewn haphazardly about the aisle.
The stalls were complete with feeding bins, and there was a large concrete-floored area which had once housed steers, from the looks of it. A pre-50’s John Deere model tractor was parked in the open area, looking pitifully unstartable.
But Alex’s excitement simply continued to grow. The barn was built for housing animals, and was still functional. Her young heart had dreamed of growing up in a place like this as a child. And as a teen, she mused; for the dream had survived... she had even started college enrolled in an Animal Science major. Her straight A’s in high school and her mom’s low income bracket had bought her a scholarship.
Horses were her first love, for she had begun riding at the age of nine, and was competing successfully by the age of twelve. Alex had gone through several horses during her teen years, always looking for a new challenge, the kind of animal who was a diamond in the rough, waiting for her to polish the edges.
Unable to afford a fancy animal, she had figured out how to turn a problem horse into a blue ribbon contender, and she was good at it, really good at it... but eventually, a second love soon intervened, in the form of her future husband.
Richard Winters was dark and handsome, and for a mere college student, he had projected a worldly image, which was coupled with the allure of money and class. It was something Alexandra had never before experienced.
He spoke several languages, and had traveled extensively with his parents, who were wealthy bankers out of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Alex had been completely, overwhelmingly enchanted, from first sight forward.
With a rueful smile, Alex remembered their third date. It had been their very first conversation about Alex’s own career ‘goals’. Richard had laughed at her hopes, actually laughed out loud, and stunned her into horrified silence. Since that night she had looked at her big ideas in a whole new light.
“What do you want, Alex, to raise mules out in the hills of West Virginia? Ha! I can just see you slopping around in muck boots, shoveling horse patties for a living. Perhaps with ten kids trailing behind.” He chuckled again. “You’ll end up on food stamps for sure. I just don’t see it, Alex, sorry but I don’t.”
“My grandmother lived on a farm, and it was-”
“The city is where it’s at, Lex! I’m sorry but you can’t make money living on a farm with animals. Horses are merely an indulgence for the wealthy. Your best bet is to switch your major. Like, immediately. Tomorrow.”
“To what?” she had asked miserably, her face heating to a vigorous red glow. She was so damned embarrassed! Richard was two years older than she, and at the tip-top of his class. He was most definitely going somewhere. And Alex wanted desperately to be along for that ride.
She had changed her major to Business Accounting the following week. The classes were horribly boring to her, although she had always been fairly good at figures. But in the end, her grades hadn’t mattered, for she had ended up dropping out of school soon after Richard’s graduation ceremony.
She’d then followed him from Maryland to Delaware, where he had enrolled in Widener School of Law, desperately frightened that he’d find another woman if she stayed behind to finish without him, someone smarter, more chic, with all the money and class that she didn’t have.
Anger buzzed around her ears like a nettled hornet, and she wheeled and stomped out of the dusky barn, slamming the double doors behind her with enough force to rattle the hinges and raise a cloud of dust. The irony of her story was that everything she had done and worked for thus far had been for nothing... absolutely nothing.
She didn’t have a husband who loved her - or a career. Stinging tears of pity welled in her eyes, but before she could indulge herself, a fit of sneezing from the dusty straw overcame her. Half-blind, Alex stumbled away from the barn doors and along the decrepit, sagging fence.
After wiping her bleary eyes with a crumpled tissue, a blur of color in the distance caught her attention. Judas trees, she thought, squinting at the stunning series of shrubs and small trees that were blanketed in a hail of rose hued blossoms. She recognized them, for her Nana had once grown several of the pert redbuds in her little backyard in western Pennsylvania.
“They’re holy trees, Alexandra, for they symbolize the rebirth of the Christ. To me, they’re a reminder of his promise.”
“They’re so pretty!” Alexandra had responded with enthusiasm. “They look... happy.”
Nana smiled and patted her head. “You’re right. They are happy. Judas trees in flower mean that spring is here to stay.”
Her Nana’s words clear in her head as if uttered only yesterday, Alex moved toward the grove, with an aching sense of loneliness invading her core. Who was left for her to even love?
As she neared the flock of Judas trees, she realized that they were part of an old garden, bordered with walls of crumbling sandstone. Within its bounds, a riot of tulips and daffodils crowded merrily in every corner, with pockets of lavender and yellow-gold forsythia spattered throughout, with no rhyme or reason to their order. In its neglect, the garden had achieved an undisciplined loveliness that no careful human hand could ever have created.
But the garden’s crowning glory was its redbud trees, healthy and alight with delicate pink blooms. Although the redbuds were obviously planted some time ago, they remained dense and shrub-like, as if loathe to rise above the carpeting of floral melee into the responsibility of tree-hood.
Alex knelt to pick up a worn sign that had toppled at the foot of a vibrantly-scented purple lilac bush. The board was worn smooth by years of wind and rain, but for the lightest imprint of a hand-carved word: EDEN.
Alex smiled tremulously, envisioning the gentle country woman who had once cultivated her own little piece of heaven with loving care, naming it in honor of the sacred grounds from the tale of Genesis.
As her fingers moved over the shallowly etched letters, she remembered when she had long ago asked Nana how she could get to the lush and wonderful Garden of Eden, where man and animals played together peacefully. “I don’t want to wait either,” Alex voiced plaintively.
Nana’s voic
e again rang clearly in Alex’s mind. “Alexandra; Eden is not something that a woman easily stumbles upon with careless feet. You must wait. But remember this: a woman grown must help to build her Eden, to cultivate it, to coax it to grow... and that’s something that takes a heap of sweat and toil.”
And the child-Alexandra had merely smiled and nodded at her Nana’s words, hearing but not absorbing, just happy to be walking hand-in-hand with her Nana, and included in such grown up conversation.
When in Nana’s company, they did not often speak of childish things, of letters and numbers or of games, but more of the process of growing up, of the joys and sorrows of life, and of the importance of friends and loved ones. Almost as if Nana had known, somehow, that their time together would be short, as if making up for the years she would later lose.
As the breeze picked up and dusted the tendrils of wearied hair from her neck, she brought to mind her Nana’s face, the sharp features and piercing brown eyes softened by long waves of silver-gray hair that no comb could ever tame.
Alex gazed around the farm, seeing through her Nana’s wise eyes, the little house, the tall and verdant pines, the fields whose grasses now moved in tune with the wind’s song, the gay garden whose scent had filled her nostrils with the blush of spring.
“I understand now, Nana,” she whispered, rocking unsteadily to her feet. “I’m done waiting. Sweat and toil.” Alex adjusted her pack, and without looking back, set off down the long driveway toward the road.
~~~~~~~~
The cell phone blared sharply, jerking her out of a fitful sleep, where she dreamed of barrels filled with flames in filthy back alleys, and men with rotten teeth. Andrea reached for it in the dark, trying not to whimper as her aching body stretched with the effort. Marcus shifted beside her, and she knew he was awake.
“Hello?” She listened a few moments, and then handed the phone to Marcus.
He palmed the phone. “Who?”
“It’s Ridgeway,” she whispered.
Andrea flicked on a lamp and observed the frown etched across his face, even through the blurry dimness in the bedroom. “Certainly,” he said in a tight, clipped voice, “And rest assured, there will be no fuck ups with this one. It will be a priority,” he added resolutely before placing the phone in its cradle.
Waiting for Eden
~*~*~*~*~*~
Chapter 4
The IV bag was making noise again. Two feet from his left ear, the nagging little blip every five seconds was enough to drive a body over the edge and right into the damn morgue downstairs. He squinted and concentrated on wiggling his big toes beneath the sheets, and was pleased when the starched white linen vibrated in response. He had only been able to accomplish that as of yesterday.
“Ezra, quit your fussing. You’re long overdue for a nap.”
A nurse, well over two hundred pounds in her not-so-starched uniform, waddled past, flashing him the evil eye as she went.
“It smells like week-old applesauce in here! I cain’t take it anymore.”
“Fiddlesticks.”
“Fiddlesticks your big arse, woman. I want to be shipped down to Florida. Lookit, I can even lift my leg today.” Ezra grunted, and the sheet rose an inch or two in the air, quavered, and then sank again with a soft pooofff.
The nurse paused at the door, her more than generous lips puckered in disdain. “Well I’ll be a rooster’s egg. I’ve surely just witnessed a miracle. Lord be praised.” As she passed out of the doorway, Ezra waited for the resulting draft across the nape of his neck, as the air in the room sought to replace the vacuum that had once been filled with her massive bulk.
“Fish lips,” he muttered, after she was out of ear-shot. Nurse Liddy only took so much sass before turnin’ mean and that was a sight he had witnessed once. Once had been quite enough.
Liddy’s doughy face poked back into the doorway, giving him a momentary start of fear. “I heard that ole man. You’re just lucky you got a visitor now.”
When the nurse’s sour visage receded the second time around, there was a skinny young thing standing in his doorway, skirted and stockinged, powdered and puffed. And lookin’ exactly as if she had just stepped out of the corporate headquarters of Ridgeway Lumber. The thought curled his stomach in with vicious intent.
“Don’t want no visitors!” he snarled in his best rotten old man voice.
“Mr. Wilkens, I’d just like a few minutes of your time, that’s all.” She stepped into the room and smiled. “My name is Alexandra Winters.”
“Guess you’re deaf too.” Ezra continued to glower at the little priss, and yet found himself lifting his nose for a sniff. Ezra’s frown softened when he drew in a shaky breath and caught a lovely whiff of rose. No, maybe it was lavender...
He inhaled deeply, for one moment free of the stale bouquet of moldering applesauce. It never, ever smelled liked lavender in this hospital.
“You got perfume on, missy?”
She was taken aback for a moment, and her grin went a little bit crooked. “Oh... are you allergic? I could wash up in the restroom if you like-”
“No, no.” Ezra waved a bony hand. “If you’re one of Ridgeway’s, just get on out, less you’re meaning to kill me. Then, I say, just get on with it.”
“Ridgeway? No, I’m not ‘one of Ridgeway’s.” She moved cautiously to a chair near his bedside and perched in it, the corners of her mouth still turned up, trying to disarm him, he supposed. “And I’m not here to... kill you?”
She was lookin’ at him as if he were plum insane. If Ridgeway thought he was gonna get anywhere with this new strategy, sending him a pretty young thing faking confusion to soften him up, he had another thing coming. He was an old man, and Miss Priss was a pip-squeak. A pretty piece of fluff, but a pip-squeak nonetheless.
Nobody had believed him about Marta. They said there was no sign on her chest, no evidence of an intruder. No locks broken, nothing stolen. Just a sad old lady who had had enough pain and suffering. He knew they thought he was senile. And they knew she had cancer.
“Mr. Wilkens?”
He scowled, for she simply couldn’t be about any good news. None of that left. “So what do you want then, girl?”
“You can call me Alexandra, if you like,” she returned tartly. “Actually, I’m here because I wanted to talk to you about your property off of Stony Run Road.”
“I knew it! Not for sale. Not ever, tell Ridgeway. Get on out.”
“But the realtor, Mr. Lockland said-”
“Damn that busybody. That man’s gonna get a swift kick in the arse the next time I see him. I can just about do it too.” Ezra struggled again to lift his right leg in proof, and then fell back against the pillows, cheeks flushed and bushy eyebrows nearly meeting in his effort to look intimidating. “Tell Ridgeway-”
“I don’t know any Ridgeway,” Alex repeated, and her voice now held more than a little edge to it. She took a deep breath, and started again softly, “Mr. Lockland explained your situation to me, Mr. Wilkens. And by the way, I’m very sorry to hear about your wife. I lost my husband in an accident three months ago myself. I know what you must be going through.”
Ezra pursed his lips, but held his tongue, starting to believe that it might be possible that she hadn’t been sent by Ridgeway. Well then, it was likely that she was from another company, sneaking in on the heels of its competitor. Lookin’ for an easy kill, a soft old man, and a senile one at that.
“Well I ain’t senile yet,” he muttered. The girl was lookin’ at him as if he were daft now. He only raised his voice. “I ain’t crazy neither.”
“He sure ain’t crazy, just a royal pain in my butt.” Nurse Liddy’s expansive junk passed through the doorway in a slow-motion trundle.
“Mr. Wilkens, if you don’t want to sell your property, why did a realtor tell me that it might be available?”
Ezra looked away from the girl’s intense, hazel-eyed gaze, trying hard to figure out a way to get her out. “Liddy! Bring me a bedpa
n! It’s comin’!”
“Ya just went!” Liddy’s voice returned from somewhere out in the hallway.
~~~~~~~~
This was pure insanity. Thoroughly defeated, Alex slumped back in her orange vinyl chair, and it squeaked out a debasingly rude sound in protest. Coudersport Memorial was a cross between an under-funded rest home and the Twilight Zone. What the hell had she been thinking?
After hitching a ride back to Ole Bull State Park, where she was happily reunited with her gold-tone Mercedes sedan, she had driven until she finally located a few bars of cell phone service. A few searches and a swift change in the restroom, and she was heading up Route 44 toward Northern Realty, the proprietor one Norman G. Lochland III.
One glance at Norman G. should have convinced her to retreat and point the nose of the sedan in the direction of D.C. without a second thought, but she had managed to convince herself that bizarre characters were merely part of the local flavor. Quaint, Alex, that’s the word you want... quaint.
When Alex had entered the office, proprietor Norman G. Lochland III was perched behind a small, neat desk in a greatly oversized chair which further emphasized his frail physique. He was a tiny man, squirrel-like in body and movement, with pale, watery eyes that bugged myopically from behind horn-rimmed glasses. Slim Whitman was crooning somewhere in the background.
Norman G. had appeared more than a little frightened by her entrance, she being a young and attractive out-of-towner in expensive clothes. He had managed to clear his throat, but his voice had pitifully failed him when it came to introductions, cracking and rasping until he had coughed up a hunk of phlegm into a dainty, lace trimmed hanky.
Waiting For Eden (Eden Series) Page 4