Miss Julia to the Rescue

by Ann B. Ross

  “Well, count me out of that, too.”

  “Okay, but I’d like to count you in for the Israel trip. Give me one good reason why you don’t want to go.”

  I looked at him. “I’ll give you more than that. I have no desire to get in an airplane and let somebody else drive it. I don’t like flying, and I wouldn’t like traipsing all over the Holy Land with my knees aching and my feet hurting. And Pastor Ledbetter would drive me crazy, being with him every day, and I have to supervise a room remodel here. There’s no way I’d turn a bunch of carpenters loose in this house with nobody watching them. And, finally, Hazel Marie might need me. She’s still not in full control of those babies, and with Mr. Pickens gone so much she’ll need help. And, well, I guess this is the final reason, but Lloyd might want to stay on awhile, so I need to be here in case he does.” Then I said, “But I know how much you like to travel and see new places. Your plans are all made, bags ready to be packed and everything, so you go on and don’t worry about me. Besides, I don’t have a passport. That’s really the final reason.”

  “I expect,” Sam said mildly, “we could get you one, have the process expedited, so that’s not a good reason.”

  “Well, I’ll strike that one and let the others stand.” I smiled at him, ready to let the conversation lapse.

  “You don’t mind my going?”

  “Sam, I miss you every time you step out of this house, even to walk downtown. So, yes, I’ll mind your being away for—what? Two weeks, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, two and a couple of days for travel.”

  “I wouldn’t keep you from doing something I know you’ll enjoy. You just have a good time, and I’ll try to have your office all set up and ready for you by the time you get back. Then we’ll see if you can finish that book you’ve been working on for a hundred years.”

  “Setting me a challenge, huh?”

  “That’s right,” I said, giving him a warm smile. “Actually, it would’ve been better if you’d had that book done by now. Then while everybody’s reading it, you could be out of town.”

  Sam laughed. “I doubt everybody’ll be reading it. There won’t be many who’ll be interested in the legal history of Abbot County. Although,” he said, patting his fingers against his mouth, “it’s not turning out to be quite as dry as I thought it would be. Might not be a bad idea to plan another trip when it does come out.”

  “Ooh,” I said, teasing him. “You mean you’ve been writing a racy book all this time?”

  “Well, you know what they say,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “A writer should write what he knows.”

  I laughed, warmed by my husband’s teasing. “You’re too much, Sam.” I held up the painted needlepoint canvas—Japanese or maybe Chinese chrysanthemums, only partially stitched. “Look at this thing. There’s so much shading, I’ll never figure out what color goes where.”

  “Pretty,” he said and picked up the paper again.

  I slipped the needle into the canvas and folded the piece, ready to leave it for the night. “Sam,” I said, “I’ve just had a thought. Emma Sue’s not going on the Holy Land tour, is she?”

  “I don’t think so. She planned to go on that first tour—the one that was a disaster—six or seven years ago, got a passport and was all ready. But at the last minute she backed out and ended up staying home, remember? And now I guess she’s too busy with all her commitments.” He turned a page of the newspaper, then looked at me. “Why?”

  “Well, it seems to me that the pastor could make arrangements for his own wife to go at least once. And, yes, I know. She says she has too much to do to leave, but I’m wondering if the real reason has to do with thinking they can’t afford it.”

  Sam lowered the paper. “That would be a big part of it, I expect.”

  “Then she can go in my place. I’ll pay for it.”

  “You mean,” Sam said, his eyebrows lifted high, “as my seatmate, roommate, whatever?”

  “No,” I said, laughing at the look on his face. “I want you to enjoy the trip.”

  “Well, seriously though, it would be a nice gesture on your part, Julia. I think Emma Sue uses her commitments as an excuse because it’d be too expensive for both of them to go.”

  “Yes, but you and I know what the pastor makes, and they could afford it if he’d just do it. Tell him tomorrow that I have too many commitments and that I want Emma Sue to go in my place.”

  “Okay, but what if the real reason is because he wants a break from her,” Sam said, “or she wants one from him?”

  “Too bad, because she’s going.” I laid aside the needlepoint and went over to his chair. “That’s not the case with us, though, is it?” I sat on the arm of his chair and took his hand. “I expect you’ve noticed that we’re all by ourselves. And, furthermore, it’ll be a couple of hours before Lloyd gets home.”

  Chapter 3

  With the question of my going to the Holy Land firmly settled—I was not going—I turned my mind the next morning to the other matter that needed settling. I was still going back and forth, trying to decide which room I wanted Sam to work in and which room I wanted him to sleep in. And the more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea of remodeling the downstairs bedroom into an office. Well, not an office, exactly, but more of a library with deep leather chairs and a sofa trimmed with brass nailheads, cherry or mahogany panels with bookshelves lining the walls, a few good oil paintings and, of course, a large mahogany desk for his work. And, I suddenly thought, a fireplace. Yes, we had to have a fireplace. I could already picture the room—a lush, quiet refuge for him during the day and for the two of us in the evenings.

  To tell the truth, I was tired of the Victorian furnishings in our living room—tired especially of that stiff-backed, hard-stuffed neoclassical Duncan Phyfe sofa, which I’d never liked anyway. Even though I’d recovered every upholstered piece in the room in bright florals—as far from Victorian velvets and tapestries as I could get—as soon after Wesley Lloyd’s demise as had seemed appropriate, the room was still a little too prim and stodgy for my taste.

  So there was no way I’d carry the Victorian theme over into the rest of the house, now that I was in a redecorating state of mind. I’d just live with the living room the way it was, putting it on hold for the time being while I concentrated on Sam’s new library. I wanted deep, soft leather—real leather, not Naugahyde, vinyl or plastic—and maybe carpet instead of an Oriental on the floor, and a colonial mantel with large brass candlesticks on each end or perhaps wall sconces on each side of an oil painting of a horse in the English countryside.

  I would have a butler’s tray with those brass hinges as a coffee table and lamps converted from porcelain vases, draperies with valances and fringed trim and a great leather executive’s chair for Sam. It would be beautiful but, I realized with another one of my sinking feelings, not exactly suitable for a working office. The computer, a printer, cables and surge protectors strewn around would just ruin the decor.

  Still, I wasn’t ready to give up my vision because, to tell the truth, I’d just realized that the best place for Sam’s office would be the sunroom upstairs at the back of the house. That was the room that then-Deputy Coleman Bates had rented soon after Wesley Lloyd passed and had more recently served as a guest room for Etta Mae Wiggins. It would be the quietest room in the house, and he could leave his books, notes and papers spread out all over the place without anyone seeing or disturbing them.

  If I did that, I mused, it would mean that Sam and I would keep Hazel Marie’s room as our bedroom, which in turn meant that it would need a complete overhaul, using a more suitable color scheme. Get rid of all that pink, first of all, because Sam kept telling me that pink wasn’t his color. The room needed a color scheme that he would be comfortable with, something a little more masculine without ignoring the fact that a wife shared it as well.

  It wouldn’t take much, I thought as I tried to count the cost in my head, to remove wallpaper, then paint the room, replace
the carpet and give Hazel Marie any pieces of furniture from the room that she wanted.

  Wonder how pink would look on Mr. Pickens?

  All of a sudden, I seemed to be planning some major remodeling, which would be a good thing, given my need to have something to occupy my mind. It would keep me busy throughout the summer and maybe ease some of the sadness of no longer having Lloyd around.

  One other little niggling worry if I carried out these plans was how many more years Sam and I could manage to get up and down the stairs. I think that aging people, which we certainly were, should think ahead on such matters. Even now, I was sometimes so stiff I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings, and I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to trot up and down stairs a half dozen times a day.

  Even so, I wasn’t ready to give up my dream of an English library downstairs. If it got too difficult to climb the stairs, I’d put one of those little elevator chairs on the bannister. That would do the trick, although Sam and I would have to draw straws each night to see which one got the first ride up.

  All of my dreaming and planning and musing came to a halt when the telephone rang halfway through the morning.

  “Julia?” my neighbor Mildred Allen asked, although she knew my voice as well as I knew hers. “Did you hear that Emma Sue Ledbetter is going on that tour to Israel?”

  “Why, yes, I did hear that, and I’m glad she’s finally getting to go. In fact, it was becoming a scandal that the pastor kept leaving her at home, don’t you think?”

  “I certainly do. And I was thinking that I might slip her a few dollars to spend as she wants to.”

  “That’d be very thoughtful,” I said, and restrained myself from mentioning the more-than-a-few dollars I’d slipped to enable Emma Sue to go. You lose the spiritual benefit of giving if you tell it, so I didn’t.

  “Anyway,” Mildred went on, “I heard that Sam is going, and I wondered if you’d changed your mind.”

  “Not a chance, Mildred. I have no desire to go anywhere. I want to be here in case Hazel Marie needs me, and, of course, I still have Lloyd for a little while longer, and I’m planning to have some work done on the house.”

  “Oh, good. That means you’ll have a big party when it’s all done. I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to do. Why don’t you bring your plans over and let me see them?”

  “Shoo, Mildred, I’m just in the thinking stage. I don’t have any plans yet, but now that you mention it, I probably should. Except the only real construction I’m thinking of is a fireplace. Oh, and bookshelves.”

  “You’d better have all that drawn out on a blueprint then. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. You try to explain your ideas to even a master carpenter and if he doesn’t have specific measurements and an exact picture of what you want, you won’t get it. Take my advice, Julia, and use an architect. Tucker Caldwell is awfully good—he did my pool house, you know. You do have to be firm with him, though, and make sure his ideas don’t take the place of yours. And when you’re ready, I know a really good carpenter—Adam Waites. He is just excellent and easy to have around, except for one thing.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s a Christian.”

  “Well,” I laughed, “so are you and I. What’s wrong with that?”

  “He lets you know it all the time, that’s what’s wrong with it.”

  “You mean he’s one of the witnessing kind?”

  “Not exactly. Well, let me tell you what he did the first time I had him do some work in my kitchen. He drove up in his pickup, crawled out and turned his face up to the sky and started singing.”

  “Singing? Singing what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Some kind of hymn, like having joy down in his heart or something. Anyway, I was standing on the back porch waiting for him. Trying to be nice and friendly, I said, ‘You sound mighty happy this morning.’ You know, thinking that maybe his wife had just had a baby or something. And he said, ‘I have Jesus in my heart and that makes me happy.’ Well,” Mildred said, taking a deep breath, “what can you say to that, ‘I do, too’? Except I wasn’t singing and didn’t feel like singing, which would’ve made it sound as if Jesus had made him happy enough to sing but had left me out.”

  “So what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Oh, well, good. You ready to work?’ I mean, what else could I say? But he really is an excellent carpenter if you can overlook all that piety. But listen, Julia, that wasn’t what I called about. Did you ever know the Whitmans?”

  “Candy people?”

  “No, banking.”

  “I guess not, then. Who are they?”

  “They were a well-to-do, and I mean very well-to-do, family in Asheville, and they had one daughter late in life who was a trial to them the entire time they had left. I lost track of her after they passed. Well, I really never knew her—she’s younger than we are by twenty or so years, I think. Maybe more. Actually, I knew the father more than I knew her because Daddy had done some business with him. Anyway, to get to the point of it all, that girl, woman, whatever she is, Agnes Whitman, traipsed all over creation from California to India, going from one crazy thing to another. You know, seeing gurus and wearing beads and caftans and things like that. And she was brought up in the church, Julia, can you believe that? Anyway, I’ve just heard that she’s moved to Abbot County. She bought a good bit of acreage over in Fairfields and built what I heard is a mansion and is really making a showplace of it, with horses and everything.”

  “Well, she sounds interesting.”

  “Oh, you haven’t heard anything yet. Actually, it’s strange that you’re looking for a carpenter because I heard that Adam Waites has done some work for her: built some stables, a pool house, and I don’t know what all. What I’m getting around to telling you, even though it sounds like I’ve been rambling, is that it all ties together.” Mildred stopped, and I realized it was time for me to say something.

  “How?”

  “Well, I’m not exactly sure. It’s just that I’ve also heard that Agnes is mixed up with some sort of strange cult of some kind. Her parents would simply die if they knew, but they’ve passed on, so I guess it doesn’t matter. And I was just wondering how she and Adam got along. You know, with one dabbling in weird Wiccan stuff and the other singing Gospel songs. I would think that’d make for a volatile situation.”

  “You mean she’s a witch?”

  “No, I don’t think she dances around trees, although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she’s tried it at one time or another. Now listen, don’t think that Adam has been telling me all this. He’s not a gossip, even though I admit I let him know I was interested when I learned he’d worked for her. No, I’ve heard from various people that she’s involved in some kind of strange body-and-spirit religion, but nobody seems to know any details. I’m just surprised that she and Adam could work together.”

  I laughed. “Well, maybe one will convert the other. But seriously, Mildred, I doubt they’d have much to do with each other. I know I don’t hang around any workmen I hire. I tell them what I want done and leave them to it. Anyway, if he’s already done all that work for her, then he’s through.”

  “No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. If you want him, you need to call him right away. She’s redoing her entire landscape, and I mean to the extent of tearing down the pool house Adam has already built for her. He said she now wants a guesthouse that’s either a miniature replica of the main house or a Palladian folly—you know, one of those eighteenth-century fun houses. She’s just waiting for the blueprints to make up her mind, so you need to get him between jobs, which is to say, right away.”

  So Mildred gave me Adam Waites’s business name, which was The Carpenter’s Sons, and his phone number. With her assurance that he was the absolute best, I decided to take the plunge and secure Mr. Waites for my remodeling project. He could start removing pink wallpaper while I engaged an architect to draw the plan for the new library. No more dreaming and planning—
I was now embarked on turning my house upside down.

  Chapter 4

  After discussing my plans with Sam and asking for his ideas on the remodeling project, I realized that I had a free hand to do whatever I wanted. He was so easy to please and easy to get along with that I congratulated myself again for having had the sense to marry him. Some men, you know, can’t let anything happen without putting in their two cents, then they get mad if you don’t agree with them. But Sam only wanted a place to work on his book, and as long as I arranged a room where he could spread out his notes and papers, he’d be happy. Actually, he was pleased that my summer would be full and busy, and he declared that the sunroom would be perfect for his office.

  “It’ll be out of the way,” he said. “And it gets a lot of light with all the windows. I like the idea, and I’m glad you thought of it.”

  With that, I kept the appointment I’d immediately made with Mr. Tucker Caldwell, intending to set him to work transferring the visions in my head onto blueprint paper. Mr. Caldwell was a short, slender man who wore pleated slacks and a bow tie—most likely purchased in a boys’ department. His straight brown hair flopped down over his brow, occasionally obscuring the black-framed glasses he wore. Something about him—maybe his precise, meticulous mannerisms or maybe his bow tie—reminded me of Wesley Lloyd Springer, my late, unlamented first husband, so I was momentarily put off when I first met him.

  But he seemed to quickly grasp what I wanted for the new library. At Mildred’s suggestion, I had brought a few books and some pages torn from magazines that illustrated the look I wanted to achieve.

  “I’ll need to come out and take some measurements,” he said as he looked through the pages. “But I see what you want, and I like it.” He glanced up from across his desk, giving me a quick smile, to see if his approval met with mine. “Now, how many windows are in the room?”