“Meggie, you don’t owe Aunt Amelia all this effort, especially if your life is in danger.”
Meg twined the kitchen phone cord around her finger. “It’s not as dramatic as all that, Jerry. Besides, I really do owe her. Aunt Amelia gave me this house, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. A lot of good it’s doing you now.”
“And that’s another reason I have to stay. I have to fight for my right to Ashford House and I can’t do that if I run back to Orlando because of one little incident.”
Even as Meg said the words, she realized she was growing tired of the constant struggle with Wade over Ashford House. For very different reasons, the house meant as much to him as it did to her, but if she left now, he would conclude that she was giving up her claim to the property. And she wasn’t willing to do that.
“I’d be leaving the door wide open for Wade to press the legality of his lease-option contract,” she explained to Jerry.
“I’m not so sure that you shouldn’t just let the deputy have the place,” Jerry said. “Take our twenty percent for doing the auction and call it quits.”
“Call it quits?” Jerry definitely didn’t understand her connection to Ashford House, and she couldn’t blame him. While he’d enjoyed his summers at the house, he’d never truly experienced the place like Meg had. He’d never felt the comfort of its walls around him, protective, caring. He’d lived at Ashford House for weeks at a time, but he’d never really belonged here. Meg had. She always would. Even Wade Murdock, with the tragic circumstances that led him here, couldn’t appreciate the house the way she did. He cared about the property, but he saw Ashford House through the eyes of a grown man. He saw potential. She saw it through the eyes of a woman growing up within its walls. She’d lived its past.
Jerry’s voice brought her back to their conversation. “Well, one thing’s for sure. You can’t stay there alone. What if these burglars come back? You’re definitely not taking Spencer back there this weekend.”
Since when had Jerry become so paternal? Oh, yes. Since Mary Beth had become attached to Spence and Jerry had become attached to Mary Beth. “You don’t have to worry,” she said. “We won’t exactly be alone.”
“What do you mean? Who’s with you?”
“The sheriff of Mount Esther came up with a solution to protect the house…and me, I guess.”
“Oh yeah? What solution?”
“He suggested that Wade move in.”
Normally Jerry would have made a snide comment about such a living condition being cozy or convenient, or some other such euphemism with a sexual connotation. But not this time. “The deputy’s living there? Good grief, Meg, you claim the house is important to you. But why don’t you just hand Wade the key?”
“He already has a key.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“It’s not like you think. He’s here just as a precaution against further break-ins. He knows this arrangement doesn’t give him any more claim to Ashford House than he already believes he has.”
“So, it’s just the two of you sitting in front of the fireplace every night popping corn…”
“No. It’s not just the two of us. Wade’s father and daughter are also moving in.”
Jerry whistled through his teeth. “I hope you know what you’re doing. What’s that old saying, ‘Possession is nine-tenths…’”
“I look at it this way, Jerry. No one’s going to possess Ashford House if vandals destroy it. I’m just trying to keep that from happening. Now tell me about the auction. How is merchandise coming in for this week’s sale?”
“Mary Beth is an angel.”
“So you’ve told me. And, by the way, does your angel know the true facts about Spence—that he has a mother who’s coming to get him on Sunday?”
“You’re sort of forcing my hand on this, Meg.”
“Good. Tell her the truth. Now, what about the auction?”
Despite being told to set the record straight with Mary Beth, Jerry’s voice brimmed with excitement. “You should see the stuff she brought in this morning. Name-brand power and garden tools. Top-of-the-line exercise equipment. Bicycles, women’s jewelry, you know, the good stuff that doesn’t turn your skin green.”
Meg’s suspicions were aroused once more. “Jerry, this just doesn’t make sense. Where is she getting these things?”
“I told you. She runs this charity organization and people donate—”
“What people?”
“Lots of different people. Right now it’s a couple of men who buy factory close-outs, returns, overruns, you know, the usual channels merchandise takes when it ends up at a place like an auction.”
That was true enough. Over the years they’d gotten a lot of saleable goods through those exact avenues, and it was all perfectly legal. Still, she hoped Jerry wasn’t being taken in by con artists or a pretty face. “But what do you know about these men?” she pressed.
“I haven’t met them yet, but I will. They’re dropping off the stuff at Mary Beth’s place and taking fifty percent of whatever sells here. It’s a win-win situation. We make twenty-five percent, which is decent. Mary Beth and her charity get twenty-five. I’m not having to work my butt off getting things to sell. The customers love the stuff and are getting great buys. What’s not to like?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Jail?”
He brushed off her comment with a throaty chuckle. “Don’t be ridiculous, Meg. Nobody’s going to jail. This is all clean merchandise. Good grief, the guys are giving it to a charity. What could be more honest?”
She supposed he was right if that were true. And besides, what could she do about the situation anyway? She was a five-hour drive away. She’d never met Mary Beth or her contacts, so she really couldn’t judge. Like it or not, she’d just have to trust her brother. “Okay, Jerry, keep up the good work. I’ll see you Sunday when I come to pick up Spence.”
When she hung up the phone and walked into the parlor, Meg heard the rumble of a large vehicle. She strode to the front window and looked out. A moving truck was backing up to the house. “What’s going on now?”
On the side panel of the van were the words, A Couple Of Guys And A Truck. No Job Too Small Or Too Large. The movers stopped at the base of the porch and the two advertised men got out. And the Mount Esther patrol car pulled up beside it.
Wade stepped out of the car and met the men at the steps. “It’s all on the third floor,” he said. “Go up the main staircase just inside the front door. At the end of the hall, you’ll see another set of stairs to the attic.”
They went inside and Wade remained behind with Meg.
“What have you done?” she asked.
“I arranged to have all evidence of the casino cleared out. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Well, yes, but do we have the right to do that? After all, everything up there really belongs to Aunt Amelia.”
“I’m just moving it to a storage facility. If Amelia wants it back, she can have it.”
Meg truly doubted that Amelia even remembered the casino existed, and she knew her aunt would have no use for the crumbling old tables and stools left behind by Stewie decades ago.
“Besides,” Wade added, “I saw the way Jenny kept glancing up those stairs the other day. I figure she’d have been in the attic by suppertime tonight and would be thinking of a way to introduce middle school kids to blackjack.”
Meg nodded. “Yeah, and all we’d need is for Mount Esther parents to be calling us about their kids losing their allowance at Ashford House.”
“Exactly.” Wade headed for the front door. “Let’s give the guys a hand. With four of us working, they’ll be gone before Jen gets home from school.”
They met the movers as the men were coming down the main staircase. Each one carried a pair of bar stools. In the bright daylight, the furniture looked even shabbier than it had in the attic. The chrome legs were pitted and scarred. The leather fabric on the seats was cracked and worn. And a sheen of du
st coated everything.
When one of the movers saw Wade, he chuckled. “I can’t believe what’s up there.” He looked at his buddy. “We’ve decided that we were born in Mount Esther about five decades too late. There must have been some wild parties in that room back in the day.”
“And that picture!” the other one said.
Meg flinched.
“Looks like more than gambling might have been going on up there,” the fellow added.
“Never mind about that,” Wade said. “We’d like to keep the artwork in that room from becoming a headline in the local newspaper. Your job is to move the things, not to make any assumptions or spread any rumors about what you found. Remember, Mrs. Ashford still lives in Mount Esther and is respected by everyone here.”
“Hey, no problem,” the other man said. “It’s not the strangest thing we’ve ever come across.”
For the next hour, the three men emptied the attic of all visible traces of Stewart Ashford’s bygone days. Meg used a broom to pull down the remaining cobwebs Wade had missed on his first cleaning, and sucked over half a century of dust into a vacuum cleaner. Before long, all that remained of the casino was the mural and Meg’s very active visualization of what the room might have looked like in its heyday.
When the movers had gone downstairs with the last gaming table, Meg leaned against the door frame and released a sigh that seemed despondent even to her own ears. “Can’t you just picture the way it must have been?” she said to Wade. She looked up at the crystal chandeliers that hadn’t been lit in years. “When the ceiling lights sparkled on silver tokens and taffeta dresses? When the clatter of dice and spinning wheels and the slap of cards meant the difference between good luck and bad?”
Wade stood beside her, silent, thoughtful perhaps, drawing his own conclusions about glittering summer nights in Stewart Ashford’s hideaway. “Yeah, I can picture it.”
His lips curved upward in a little smile. “Your uncle must have been well connected,” he said. “What he was doing here was illegal as hell. But it wouldn’t surprise me if his best customers were the mayor of Mount Esther and the governor of the state, not to mention a number of Florida congressmen.”
Meg knew it was true. Even when she was a little girl, before Stewart died, she remembered seeing dignitaries at Amelia’s dining table. She walked into the now empty casino and paced slowly around the room, examining small cracks in the wood paneling, dents in the planked floor. “So, do you think there’s money hidden up here?” she asked Wade. “Uncle Stewie must have made a tidy sum.”
Wade scrubbed his hand down his face. “If there is, then I don’t know why your aunt didn’t uncover it and spend it. When I met her, she was in bad straits. She owed money to almost all the merchants in town.”
Meg stopped pacing and stared at Wade. She didn’t know her aunt’s finances had been this disastrous. “She did?”
“Yep. She’d been buying on credit for a long time, and the store owners apparently didn’t have the heart to turn her down. That’s one of the reasons I agreed to the large down payment on the lease-option contract. She needed the money right then. She did pay some bills I guess, along with spending the majority of the money on the purchases you’ve seen.”
This was a revelation. “So Amelia actually talked you into giving her the twenty thousand?”
Wade grinned a little sheepishly. “We sort of agreed on that amount. And you were right when you said I got a good buy on the house. Even though it needs a lot of work, I know I got a bargain. Still, twenty thousand was a big chunk of change to put down.”
When you’re only buying a house, Meg thought. But maybe it isn’t too much when you’re investing in the future and trying to erase bitter memories.
She resisted the urge to tell him that she knew about his past, that for a while this morning when Roone told her, she’d been shocked, angry, even felt some of his pain. But now wasn’t the time. Maybe there never would be the perfect opportunity to tell him she knew. Maybe he didn’t want her to know. Maybe he’d established enough of his new life that his tragic one was finally fading into some dark part of his mind. So instead she said, “I’m beginning to believe that my relatives were not the people I’d thought they were.”
“Hey, everybody has a few skeletons in the closet….”
Laughter from the outer room interrupted him. The movers had returned. When Meg and Wade went out to meet them, they found the men staring at the mural.
“What do you want us to do with this?” one of them asked.
“Take it?” Wade said, looking at Meg for confirmation.
“We’ll have to chop it up to get it out the door,” the mover said. “Whoever painted it must have done it in parts elsewhere and then carried them up here and put them together.” He illustrated his point by showing where four distinct panels of wood had been connected to make one whole painting.
“Just so you know, we’ll never get it out of this room without wrecking it,” he added.
“Do what you have to do,” Wade said. He took Meg’s arm and gestured toward the door. “I guess we don’t have to stay and watch.”
The older of the men instructed his helper to take his hammer from his tool belt. “Start whacking,” he said.
With an expression of near glee on his face, the mover gripped the hammer tightly, raised his arm and prepared to swing. And all at once Meg sucked in her breath in something very like the terror she’d felt the night before. It was as if the hammer were aimed at her skull instead of the mural. “Stop!” she cried. “Don’t do it.”
The two workers stared at her. Wade tightened his hold on her arm. “What’s wrong?”
Her voice shook. “I can’t let them destroy it.”
Wade moved aside, leaving the entrance to the attic free. “Thanks anyway,” he said to the movers. “You guys can go. I’ll come outside in a few minutes and pay you.”
Exchanging confused looks, the men left and went down the stairs. When they were alone, Wade turned to Meg. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice cracked. “We’ve definitely done the right thing by clearing the attic. But now it’s all gone, the mystery of this room, the games, the excitement that was here once, the past. It still existed in this house an hour ago and now it’s gone.” She walked over to the painting and studied it as if seeing it for the first time. In the past few moments it seemed to have lost its garish lewdness and become a testament to an unknown artist’s imagination as well as a part of Ashford House history.
She released a long, trembling breath. “This painting is all that’s left.”
Wade came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Why, Miss Hamilton, I believe you’re showing your romantic side.”
She smiled even as she fought to hold back tears. “I guess I am.” She pressed her fingers under her eyes and blinked hard at the painting. “It is romantic,” she said. “Even sweetly so in a way.”
His low laughter rumbled in her ear. “The mural is sweet now?”
“Yes. Those people caught in time, in a sublime setting, with nothing on their minds but the meadow, the sun…”
“And the anticipation of a certain obvious gratification,” Wade added.
“Yes, that, too.” She turned to look at him and found his gaze understanding and comforting. “It seemed a shame to destroy it.”
“Then we won’t. But since I have a teenaged daughter moving into the house, I suggest we turn it around and fasten it to the wall.”
She smiled and looked at her watch. “Oh, definitely. It’s almost three o’clock. We’d better nail it quickly.”
“You got it,” Wade said. “And only you and I, two movers, and one old guy who raises peacocks will know of its existence.”
“An old guy who raises peacocks?”
“Yeah, and cuts out on his gasoline bill. He’s a relic from your Uncle Stewie’s past, and the one who told me about the mural. I’ll take you out to m
eet him some day, but right now I’ve got some hammering to do.”
WADE HAD REVERSED the painting and secured it to a wall in time to meet Jenny’s bus and take her to pack her belongings for the stay at Amelia’s. Roone had started a pot roast cooking in the oven and the smell of garlic and onion permeated the first floor and made Meg’s mouth water. She had her doubts about this living arrangement, but she knew one of them wasn’t about meals. Roone Murdock loved to cook, and, unlike Meg, he seemed blessed with considerable skill in that area.
Now that the house was back in order, at least as much order as could be expected with auction preparations underway, Meg concentrated on gathering family photos to take to her aunt. It wasn’t easy to narrow the choices to just a few. Through the years, Amelia had collected many portraits, both formal and casual. In the end, Meg chose a picture of the three children, Gloria, Jerry and herself, in a rowboat on the Suwannee River. Jerry was just a boy, while Meg and Gloria were in their adolescent years, their smiles proof of the pure, innocent joy of a summer afternoon.
She also chose a photo of Amelia and Stewart on their wedding day and one taken of Amelia ten years ago when she was given an award from the Mount Esther Historical Society. This picture had always been a favorite of Meg’s since her aunt, then eighty-two, was an elegant, graceful woman in an aqua suit adorned with a pink-and-white orchid corsage.
And last, she picked a portrait taken of Stewart on Smoky, his Arabian mare. Meg had been nine years old the day the picture had been shot, but she remembered when her uncle sat astride the beautiful gray horse in front of a photographer. She’d admired the photo many times over the years, and when she looked at it today, she found that her admiration had not faded even after learning the secrets of Stewart Ashford. In his black jodhpurs and charcoal-gray jacket, her uncle had been frozen in time through the camera lens as a dashing country gentleman both to the young girl who had idolized him and to the woman who was mystified by him now.
Meg tucked the photos into a canvas bag for the trip to Shady Grove and left the house. She stopped in the driveway before getting into her car and looked back at the old Victorian structure that was both the embodiment of her past and the fulfillment of her future. Not nearly as grand as it once had been, Ashford House still spoke to her heart.
Your House or Mine? Page 13