The Tilting House

by Tom Llewellyn

  “It looks like we’ll have to, Josh.”

  “Maybe we could just dim it,” Aaron said. “We could use the dimmer switch to make the house disappear and then no one would know we were still here. We could stay forever.”

  Dad smiled grimly. “I wish it were that easy, pal. But it won’t work. If I don’t find a job soon, we’re sunk.”

  DESPAIR. I knew from a recent vocabulary test that despair meant “to lose all hope.” I’d just lost all of mine, so the definition fit.

  My parents sat in our living room, talking about moving as if it were no big deal. All the kids in my class lived in houses, but my parents couldn’t keep our house—not even an old house like Tilton House with tilting floors. I bet no one else in my class would even be willing to live in this weird, old house. I’d been worried we’d lose it because it hid the body of a murdered man, but now we were going to lose it because of Dad’s stupid job.

  “What is wrong with you people?” I shouted at Mom and Dad. “Why can’t you even give us a decent place to live?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer. I jumped up and ran outside into the night. It was late November. Fog sat low and cold on the ground, and I was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans. My feet were bare, and the cold ground hurt with every step. I shivered and instantly wished I could go back in, but my pride and my despair kept my bare feet moving forward. I walked into the fog, which was growing so thick, it made all the familiar neighborhood landmarks look blurry and spooky.

  I walked down an uncounted number of streets, making no attempt to keep my tears and anger in check. The fog made the streetlights useless. Instead of illuminating the ground, the light hovered high above. The sidewalk was shrouded in the mist and dark.

  I made a few turns and assumed I was walking back in the general direction of my house, but I recognized nothing. I might have even passed Tilton House and not known it. Then I heard a voice in the mist and knew I’d wandered back to my own block. It was the voice of the Talker, and he was chattering about war again. His mumbles guided me like a crazy foghorn.

  “Three combat units made up the 187th Division,” said the Talker. “Each unit included a regiment of artillery and a regiment of infantry.”

  “Hi,” I called dejectedly as he came into view.

  “The 187th fought against established German positions, against much larger numbers,” the Talker replied. “It was the heart of winter, December and January, and we never received our heavy boots.”

  “My dad lost his job,” I said, sitting down on the steps next to him, “and it looks like we’re going to have to sell our house.”

  “The Germans were holed up in each town, while we had to attack from snow-covered open ground, without our heavy boots,” he responded.

  “I don’t want to move,” I said. “I love our house. I love its secrets. I love this neighborhood, even though the Purple Door Man is a complete jerk. I even like you, and you’re nutty as a fruitcake.”

  “Each day, we suffered heavy losses,” he went on. “My feet and the feet of my men were so cold, they were numb. Men lost toes to frostbite. Some lost so many they were unable to walk. We searched the German bodies for decent boots, but found theirs were worse than ours. I was the oldest field officer of the 187th. My soldiers were more boys than men. Even though the odds were against us, even though these boys were the youngest division of World War II, the 187th refused to yield.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?” I said.

  “I can recall sitting for hours, waiting for commands and watching as truckloads of cold, dead bodies were hauled from the battlefield.”

  “Gross. Can’t you talk about something else?”

  The Talker paused for a few seconds, then said, “It was the movie The Shopgirl, in 1927, which was to define her career.” I wondered if his change of topic was coincidence or if he was responding to my request.

  “I wish I could do something,” I said, mostly to myself. “To save our house, I mean.”

  “At the height of her popularity she received more than forty-five thousand fan letters a month,” the Talker said. “Her last film was in 1933. It was called The Primrose Path.”

  “That sounds familiar,” I said, trying to remember where I’d heard that movie title before.

  “On the last night I saw her, she gave Francis and me a beautiful treasure.”

  “Treasure? That’s what I need right now.”

  “I ended up with only a small part of it. The rest is likely buried. Under fourteen eighteen.”

  “Under what?” I said. “Did you say fourteen eighteen? That’s my address! That’s the address of Tilton House! What kind of treasure?”

  But the Talker’s ramblings had returned to the war and the struggles of the 187th again. It didn’t matter. I’d heard enough.

  I RAN ACROSS THE STREET and back into the living room, where Mom, Dad, Aaron, and Grandpa were still sitting around the coffee table. I began telling them, as fast as I could, what the Talker had said about treasure being buried under 1418 and how 1418 was our house number and how all we had to do was dig under our house and we’d be rich and we wouldn’t have to move.

  “Who told you this, Josh?” asked Dad, tiredly.

  “The Talker, Dad! He said some actress gave him and Francis a beautiful treasure and he’d only gotten part of it and the rest was buried under fourteen eighteen.”

  “Francis? Who’s Francis? What are you saying, Josh? You think we should dig around under our house for buried treasure?”

  “Yes!”

  “It’s a lovely thought,” he said as he got to his feet. “A lovely dream from a crazy man. Maybe I’ll dream about it tonight. I’m going to bed.” He walked out of the kitchen. Mom smiled at me sadly and joined him.

  I sat in silence with Grandpa and Aaron for a few minutes. Finally, Grandpa said, “So the crazy old guy really said all that?”

  “He did!” I replied, exasperated.

  “And who exactly is Francis?”

  “Francis Tilton. As in Tilton House.”

  “Well then,” said Grandpa, “we may as well start. Lead the way, Josh.”

  We managed to scrounge up a few flashlights that actually worked, and grabbed a couple of shovels from the garage. Grandpa grunted and creaked through the little door into the crawl space under the house. The low ceiling forced him to hunch down. He found the light switch and clicked it on. The lone lightbulb gave off a dim glow—just enough to illuminate the hundreds of cobwebs.

  “It’s a mighty big space,” said Grandpa. “If we have to dig up the whole underside of the house, we’ll be here till I die.”

  Then it hit me. In my excitement to find buried treasure, I was standing in the dark, ready to dig under the house, and I’d completely forgotten about what F. T. Tilton had said in his journal. I’d forgotten about the body that was possibly, at this very moment, beneath my feet.

  My voice shook as I told Grandpa about the journal and the body. “We should get out of here,” I said.

  Grandpa squinted into the darkness and then turned to face us. “If you boys don’t mind, I think I’m going to light my pipe and have me a smoke. I always think better when I smoke.” Aaron and I watched as Grandpa struck a match on an overhead beam and lit his bowl of tobacco. It glowed red like hot coal. Grandpa put away his matches and stared at us through the smoke.

  “Now, if I was to bury a treasure down here,” he said, “where would I do it? Or where wouldn’t I do it? I wouldn’t put it by any pipes that went underground, ’cause if one of them busted and somebody had to dig it up, I wouldn’t want ’em finding my treasure. So we don’t have to dig where any of the pipes are buried. That should take out a good chunk of the space.”

  “But what if we find the body, Grandpa?” I asked.

  “Josh,” Grandpa said, as he stared at his pipe, “good things don’t come easy. Look at your parents, for instance. Look how hard it’s been for them to get this home for you boys. Taken ’em years. Y
ou can’t expect to just look beneath your house and find a pile of gold laid out for you. You got to take a risk, one way or another. You find either something good, or something bad. But at least you find something. Now then, we can dig, or we can run away like babies. What’s it gonna be?”

  “What about Mom? If we find a dead body, do you think she’d keep living here?”

  “Your mother? She’s one of the strongest, wisest women I’ve ever known. A pile of old bones isn’t going to bother her. Don’t you worry about your mom. Now, what’s it gonna be?”

  Aaron and I looked at each other.

  “What’s it gonna be?” Grandpa repeated.

  “Dig,” Aaron said.

  Who was I to wimp out on my eight-year-old brother? “Dig,” I repeated.

  “Fine, boys. Where do we start?”

  “Maybe he buried it by the chimney,” said Aaron.

  “Maybe,” said Grandpa. “Maybe so.” He hobbled toward the furnace chimney, where a column of brick stood in the dirt. Before he’d reached the spot, his wooden leg slipped out from under him and he landed on the ground with a thud. Grandpa let loose with a long string of beautiful curse words, so big and bold, I could swear they almost lit up the darkness.

  “Sorry about that, boys,” he finally said, lying flat on his back, “but by the time you reach my age, you learn to save the four-letter words for special occasions. Now come on over here and help me to my feet.”

  We scrambled over and pulled him up. Aaron found Grandpa’s pipe and handed it to him. Grandpa wiped it on his sleeve and set about repacking it with fresh tobacco. He fished another match from his pouch and struck it on the beam above his head. The flare of the match lit up the dark, casting weird shadows on Grandpa’s upturned face.

  Grandpa kept looking up and when the match went out, he lit another. “Look here, boys,” he said. The flame illuminated the words “six o’clock” in white chalk.

  “Six o’clock!” I shouted. “I know what that means! Six o’clock points straight down!” I explained to Grandpa about the words I’d found in the attic.

  Grandpa grunted. “Straight down is right where I’m standing. We may as well give ’er a shot.”

  Aaron and I started digging directly under the white words. Aaron’s shovel kept clanging against mine, and I couldn’t seem to get much dirt into each scoop. After fifteen sweaty minutes, we’d barely scratched the surface and Grandpa’s patience had run dry.

  “No offense, boys, but you stink at this. Kindly step aside and let a one-legged old man show you how it’s done.” Grandpa grabbed a shovel and stabbed it deep into the dry ground. In less than a minute, he’d dug more than Aaron and I had in fifteen.

  Half an hour later Grandpa’s hole was four feet deep. Then his shovel hit something hard. We shone our flashlights into the hole and saw white peeking from beneath the dirt. Grandpa climbed out and had me go down into the hole. I began to brush away the dirt from around the object.

  Aaron screamed. It was a hand. A white hand. We hadn’t found the treasure. We’d found the body instead.

  I scrambled out of the hole and Aaron clutched Grandpa’s shirt so hard, he almost pulled them both to the ground.

  “Settle down now, boys. It ain’t alive. Aaron, quit tugging on me. Hold the light still and shine it down there so I can see it.” Aaron managed to obey, and Grandpa squinted into the hole. “I can’t see from here. Josh, get back down there and clean off more of the dirt.”

  I thought I was going to throw up. “You want me to go down there?”

  “You heard me. Don’t take all night.”

  I took a breath and carefully lowered myself into the hole. With the toe of my shoe, I kicked away at the dirt, ready for the hand to reach out and grab me at any moment. The hand didn’t move. I knelt down and scooped away some dirt. The hand was attached to a smooth white arm.

  It took us another hour of slow and careful digging to uncover the whole secret. The arm was attached to a body, and the whole body appeared to be made of hard white marble. We’d found the statue of a woman in wonderful condition—except that it was missing its head. It was Pandora.

  When we uncovered Pandora’s other hand, it was holding a partly opened box, just as the newspaper articles described. A single tiny figure, like a fairy, was flying out of the box. That would have been hope, I guessed.

  Tucked inside the box lay something else—a rolled-up leather pouch. Grandpa opened the pouch and carefully pulled out a moldy sheet of paper. It was a letter addressed to Francis Theodore Tilton.

  “Who’s it from?” I asked.

  “I’ll be,” said Grandpa, staring at the fragile paper intently.

  “What?” Aaron and I cried.

  “It’s from Mary Preston.”

  “Who’s Mary Preston?”

  “Mary Preston was a movie star. Way back in the early days of the talkies—the first talking pictures. She was a real beauty. ‘The beautiful shopgirl,’ they called her.”

  “Mary!” I said. “That must be the Mary that Tilton wrote about in his journal. What’s the letter say?”

  In the dirt and the dark, next to the white, headless body, Grandpa read the letter aloud:

  Dearest Francis,

  I traveled to your beautiful Tacoma looking for happiness. It appears I’ve somehow managed to bring misery with me.

  You were so kind to me. I loved you in my own untidy way. But I loved Hanson, too, and that could never work.

  If I found I was the cause of the end of your friendship with Hanson, I would never be able to forgive myself. Please don’t let things end this way. I am leaving, but I am giving both of you a single gift. This statue is my most prized possession, and I want you and Hanson to have it. Let it keep you together. May you share fond memories of me.

  With love,

  Mary Preston

  We pieced together what must have happened. After Mary had left the statue and said goodbye to Tilton, Hanson had come over to Tilton House. The two had fought over the statue and it had somehow broken. Tilton had buried the body in the crawl space so Hanson wouldn’t find it, and Hanson, assuming he had survived his fight with Tilton, must have taken the head. No one had been murdered. The body and the treasure were one and the same.

  But who was Hanson? How and why did Hanson or someone else leave the head in front of our house? And how did the Talker know the body of the statue was buried under 1418?

  “Grandpa, do you know the Talker’s real name?”

  “I don’t. That’s all we’ve ever called him.”

  “Come on,” I said. “We’re going to dig through his garbage.”

  THE LIGHTS WERE OFF in our parents’ bedroom. I led Grandpa and Josh across the street and into the alley behind the Talker’s house. We found the green garbage can against his back fence and opened it. It stunk like rotten vegetables. I started pawing through it without hesitation.

  “We just need to find a piece of mail—an envelope or a bill or anything. Here’s one!” I pulled out a crumpled envelope from the gas company and unfolded it under the glare of my flashlight. The name on the envelope was Karl Hanson. The Talker was Hanson.

  Josh and I ran home as Grandpa clunked quickly behind us. The front door was locked for the night. We pounded on it with our fists until Mom and Dad woke up and flung it open. We spilled the whole story there on the porch. Then we led Mom and Dad down to the crawl space to take a look at the statue. Dad whistled low when he saw it. “Well, Josh,” he said, “you may not have found buried treasure, but I think you got my job back.”

  It turned out we got much more than that.

  We skipped school the next morning. After breakfast, I looked outside. The Talker—Karl Hanson—had already taken his regular place on his front steps. He was babbling away again about the 187th when Dad and I lined our wheelbarrow with blankets and rolled Pandora over to his house. For the first time since we moved in, the Talker stopped talking. He looked at the headless statue, smiled softly, and said, “D
ora.” We set Dora on his porch, and Hanson stared up at it in silence.

  Dad called Cal Landgren, his lawyer friend, and told him about the letter and how it proved Karl Hanson’s ownership of the statue. It took another couple of days, but Cal brought a court order down to the museum and returned to our house with Pandora’s head packed in a wooden crate.

  “It’s nice to have the head back,” said Mom, “but what about Hal’s job? We’ve got bills to pay, you know.”

  “All in good time, my dear lady,” said Cal with a smile.

  “First, we need to bring Dora’s head back to her body,” said Dad.

  Dad and I walked over to Karl Hanson’s house. It was raining, so Karl was sitting inside on a comfortable chair. He stopped talking and smiled when he saw us through his front window. We took that for an invitation and stepped inside.

  “We have something for you, Karl,” said Dad. He pulled the head carefully from the wooden crate and handed it to him. Karl smiled at the head as he took it from Dad. He carried it out onto the porch and set it carefully on Dora’s body. It fit perfectly. The crack circled Dora’s neck like a silver chain.

  Karl turned back to Dad and said, “Mary gave her to me. I loved Mary.”

  “I know you did,” said Dad. “She loved you, too, Karl.”

  Karl took Dad’s hand and set it on Dora’s arm. “You have her,” he said to Dad. “You’re young enough to love her. I’m too old.”

  Dad found out it was impossible to argue with the Talker, so the next day Cal Landgren drew up papers giving Dad complete and legal ownership of the head and body of Pandora. Dad and Cal went back to the museum for what Dad called “an important meeting.” This turned into another meeting and then a whole series of meetings that lasted weeks. The first of December came and went, but I heard nothing more about us moving.

  During that time, the newspaper found out what had happened and Van Leopold, the reporter, wrote a series of stories, which got picked up again by papers all over the country. This time, all of us—Dad and Grandpa and Aaron and I—came out looking like heroes.