Raising Attabury: A Contemporary Christian Epic-Novel (The Grace Series Book 5)

by Stallings, Staci

  Dani heaved a sigh of relief that drilled gray fog into the air. “That sounds great by me. I’m going to be an icicle if we stand out here much longer.”

  With that they all headed across the front yard that no longer had cattle wire around it. Jaycee called to Derek to tell him where they would be, and he waved back. Ducking under the branches, they made their way inside, which truthfully couldn’t be called warm but at least it was out of the freezing-cold breeze.

  In a little trail, they followed Jaycee into the living room, and Eric let himself think that this would be the last time it would look like this. In a strange way that made him a little sad.

  “Will they take some shots of it before we start clearing it out?” he asked, suddenly seeing that this memory would soon be only that.

  “Oh,” Jaycee started. “Uh, I don’t know. Sometimes we do. We can… I guess, if you want.”

  His mind began spinning an idea. “You mind if I take some pictures?”

  That sent her backward in surprise. “Well, it’s your house.”

  Tiny spiders of dread began crawling up and down Dani’s skin around the time that Eric made it back inside with his camera. She breathed down the trepidation, whether it was due to the thought of being on camera soon or being in the creepy old house, she didn’t know. Whatever it was, her nerves felt every vibration of it.

  “I was looking at the plans last week,” Jaycee said. “They’re going to try to put a powder room somewhere over by the front entrance.”

  “Caleb was talking about it,” Rachel said as if this was all perfectly normal and not surreal at all. “They’re going to try to route some plumbing to the upstairs too to give Jaden a bathroom up there.”

  The two women started that way, and with the option of following them or staying and listening to the incessant click of Eric’s camera, Dani opted to go with them. Every step clutched her lungs just a little tighter, and she shook her head to get herself to calm down. Of course, she had been in the house before, but back then, this day was just a fantasy. Now that it was here, this all felt very different.

  “I wouldn’t have thought of this as a bedroom,” Jaycee said as they entered the little parlor.

  “I don’t think it was,” Rachel said, going over to the door that led to the right. “Caleb says he thinks Mrs. Attabury probably stayed down here when the stairs got to be too much for her.” She checked in the armoire and touched the little writing desk that sat there. “Do you remember her?”

  “Old Mrs. Attabury?” Jaycee asked, going past the armoire and over to the fireplace that dominated the far wall.

  “Yeah.”

  “Some. Barely. Mostly what Luke’s told me about her, but I’m not sure how much of that is real and how much I made up from his stories. Do you?”

  “Only a little. Mom used to come out here and check on her. I don’t think she was in real great health. She was a teeny-tiny little thing, and she walked with a walker when I knew her.”

  “Thus the not going up the stairs thing,” Jaycee said and took a step back. However, her heel seemed to catch on the floorboard, and she teetered off balance for a split second. “Oh. Wow. Good grief.”

  “Whoa, Jayc.” Rachel headed toward her, but she wouldn’t have been nearly fast enough to catch her had she fallen. “You okay?”

  Jaycee laughed and straightened herself back out. “Yeah. I’m fine. Clearly however I should take walking lessons.”

  The two of them laughed as Dani skirted the room and went through the side door to the kitchen. Standing there in that darkened space, she wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the chill that had nothing to do with the weather. Her gaze slid around the room. To the hearth along the side, then to the other that held the broken down cabinets. After today, they would be no more. Her gaze fell to the floor at her feet, and she closed her eyes, willing the tears that were threatening down inside her. “I’m so sorry, Grandma. I couldn’t do anything about how life was for you here, but from here on out, it’s going to be different. I promise you it will.”

  At that moment, Eric came in from the other direction, and he had taken the picture before either of them really knew it was happening. “Oh, hey,” he said, lowering the camera. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Dani fought to smile, but it never made it that far. “Yeah, well, I’m here.”

  “Okay,” Aaron, the cameraman, said as Eric and Dani stood out on what would be the front lawn if there was one. The snaking branches of the trees wound down around them, forcing them to stand closer together than they had been in months.

  Eric worked to find a way to stand with her that didn’t feel awkward and forced. It wasn’t easy. Finally he resorted to putting his hand up on the branch behind her both to balance and brace himself.

  “Oh, yeah.” Aaron’s excitement crescendoed with no warning. “That’s perfect. Perfect. Just like that. Leave your hand up there. Yes. That looks awesome.” He came back out from behind the camera as Eric’s gaze jerked over to the guys standing off to the side watching them. Greg had joined them, and now he felt hideously on display. “Great. Good. Now we just want a couple of sound bites. Something about what you think of the house, or your expectations for it, what you’re hoping it will be when it’s finished. That kind of thing.”

  In front of him, Dani ran her hand over her hair and then clutched that hand in front of her with her other. “Do you want me or Eric?”

  “Either one,” Aaron said, going back to the camera, and Eric really hoped they hurried because his arm was going to go to sleep like this. “I’ll count it off, backward from five and then you can start. And five, four, three, two…” Instead of saying one, he simply pointed at them.

  Eric swallowed the giant lump in his throat and tried with all of his being to act cool. It shouldn’t have been hard seeing how much practice he’d had at doing just that when he’d first gotten together with Dani. There was the first date when he’d locked the keys in his beat-up car, and they had to call a locksmith. Then there was the night he had proposed when the restaurant lost his reservation, and they ended up walking one of the old neighborhoods, dreaming about the life they were living now. At the time he had been disappointed his plans hadn’t worked out, but now, looking back that was one of his favorite memories of their early time together.

  He felt her look up at him, and he looked down at her and smiled a ghost of a smile. How his normally take-charge-and-run-them-over wife could look so very unsure of herself, he didn’t really know, but he saw it and felt it just the same. Turning, he breathed down his own trepidation. “I think pretty much everybody who lives around here knows about the Attabury place,” he said, letting his voice fall into sounding philosophical. “It’s got a lot of history in these parts. Some of it is good, and some of it…” He glanced down at her and had to duck to get the words out. “Well, I guess it’s like everything. We’ve all got things we’ve done we’d rather not be remembered for.” He glanced back at the old house. “I think that’s one of the reasons we decided to do this project. Sometimes it’s time to bury the past, and start over again with a brand new future.”

  Next to him Dani nodded, and two seconds later, Aaron yelled, “Cut! Awesome. Let’s get a couple more, and then we’ll move inside.”

  As it turned out the filming part took most of the morning. Because they were all feeling their way through just how the show would be put together and no one really had a blueprint for it, Aaron was intent on capturing anything and everything they might possibly need in Hollywood when it came time to put the actual show together. That meant most of the morning was spent standing around, waiting for the real project to get going.

  Then, about the time they might have gotten going, Luke and Sage showed up with sandwiches and drinks for everyone. That took another 45 minutes so it was nearly one o’clock before the first piece of furniture was even touched.

  “Here we go,” Caleb said to Eric on the opposite side of the dusty couch as Aaron framed
the shot just so. “On three. One, two, three.” Together they muscled the thing from the living room out through the front door and to the waste bin that had been moved as close as possible due to the trees. It was a trick to get it into the thing, and the crash on the other side was satisfying. Caleb dusted off his hands and turned to the camera. “One down.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Rachel said to Dani as the work commenced around them. “What do you think about preserving some of the pieces, reworking them or revitalizing them?”

  “Oh. Uh.” Dani hadn’t been prepared for the idea. “I don’t know. What did you have in mind?”

  “Well, there are a couple of pieces here in the parlor.” Rachel led, and Dani followed. Going over to the little writing desk, Rachel put her hand on it. “I think this would be a great piece for in your office or maybe in the living room, and this vanity…” She went over to another piece. “And the armoire. Both of these could be used upstairs in the bedrooms or in the office even. Maybe you could store supplies in the armoire, and I’m sure we could find a place for the vanity.”

  “Oh, uh, yeah.” Truth was, Dani had been tilted off-center from her very first footstep in the house earlier, and it hadn’t really gotten any better. She knew she should be taking charge and directing things, but no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t get into command mode.

  The guys came in, and Rachel stopped them halfway to the bed.

  “Hang on. Before you do that, we were thinking about using these three pieces and maybe the chairs and trying to refinish them,” Rachel said, and Dani tried to remember their conversation about the chairs. Did she mention the chairs before? It was difficult to keep up.

  “Oh, yeah, great,” Caleb said. “I hope they’re in better shape than most of this stuff has been.”

  About that time Eric and Luke tipped the mattress up from the bed frame as no one would even think about salvaging that thing.

  “Hey, hold up there a second,” Luke said, raking his hand across the top of the mattress.

  “What?” Eric asked just as he was about to heft the thing up off the floor.

  Luke’s face fell into grave thought and his voice took on a quiet, low surprised quality as he felt across the mattress. “What…? Oh…. Hold on.”

  By that time everyone within earshot had turned toward the bed, and all other conversation ceased. Holding the mattress upright, Luke carefully slipped his fingers into the seam, ripping it just enough to be able to dig inside. His face lit with surprise and excitement. “No way. This…. Oh, man. No way.”

  “What?” Eric asked as if he was about to explode.

  “Well, look what we have here.” And with that, Luke pulled out a rounded circle about the size of his fist.

  “What is it?” Caleb asked just as Luke turned it over and tossed it to him.

  “Looks like old Mrs. Attabury’s bank account if I don’t miss my guess.”

  Caleb’s eyes widened as he turned the bundle in his hand over to examine it. “Oh, wow. No way.”

  “Are you…?” Eric asked, his own eyes going wide with disbelief. “Is that all there…?” But before he got that question out, Luke tossed him one as well. “What? How much is in there?”

  “Don’t know.” Carefully Luke lay the mattress down so it was half on the frame and half on the floor. Without asking permission from anyone in the room, he took his knife out of his pocket, flipped it open and carefully split the seam wide and then wider still. When he’d finished, he replaced the knife and pulled the top part of the mattress back, revealing more money than Eric had ever seen in his lifetime in one place except on paper.

  “What in the wide world?” Derek gasped as they all stared down at it.

  “Are you serious?” Caleb asked as Luke put his hands on his hips and stared down at the sight.

  “How… How much do you think it is?” Jaycee asked as she stood to the side, her arms anchored at her chest.

  Luke didn’t so much as move to touch more of it as he stood there shaking his head. “Whoa. There’s no telling.”

  Not a single one of them moved, and it was only when someone sensed the camera crew in the room that they were jolted from the shock. Luke looked up at the rest of them, his gaze landing somewhere in the vicinity of Eric and Caleb. “So what do we do now?”

  Caleb looked at Eric, who had absolutely no idea. A second and he looked over at Dani. His first thought was he hadn’t seen her this ashen since he’d come home to her sick the week before. His second was that she didn’t look at all prepared to make a decision.

  “Uh, well,” he said, not really knowing where to go from there. “I think we clean it out of the mattress, and make sure we’ve got it all before we trash the thing. Then…” He shrugged. “We see if it’s even worth anything?”

  The rest of the afternoon was spent in a kind of hazy dense fog of shock for everyone. It was as if no one wanted to disturb what the others might be thinking. For Dani’s part, she simply tried to block it all out. What she had thought would feel like a victory really didn’t, and she couldn’t quite explain that even to herself.

  She watched with her arms wrapped over her as Caleb and Luke removed the little writing desk and took it outside to Luke’s pickup. In minutes Eric and Derek strode in with straps to get the armoire.

  Derek opened the thing, and Dani had a vision for a blink of him going in to Narnia. She wouldn’t have been at all surprised as the whole day had seemed about two degrees off of center to her.

  “It’s just a bunch of clothes,” Derek said to Eric who stood next to him, examining the piece’s interior. Reaching in, Derek pushed clothes this way and that before pulling a dusty, ratty, threadbare housedress out. “Rags would be closer. There isn’t much left of them.”

  “You’d better check the pockets before you trash them,” Luke said, coming in to stand behind them. He wound his arms in front of him and shifted his stance. He shook his head very slowly as he glanced around at all of them. “In fact, Rachel, when you go to redo these things, keep your eye out for hidden compartments and stuff.” His countenance became somewhat sheepish. “I don’t want to go spreading anything around about her, but as paranoid as she always was, not to mention what we found in that mattress, it wouldn’t surprise me none that that wasn’t the last of the surprises in this old place.”

  Somehow all of them had once again congregated to the front of the armoire. Looking in, Dani ran her hand across her arm once again. She had to breathe down the uneasiness because it was quickly overtaking her lungs.

  “Luke’s right,” Eric said, and her gaze snapped over to him. He looked up at the ceiling, the intricately pieced-together wood spoke of money and prestige in a long-bygone era. “I think it’s pretty clear from the stash in the bed that these folks were plenty rich, so there’s no telling where they might have hidden stuff, or what they might have stashed.”

  The nods went all around the room.

  “Okay then,” Caleb said. “Everybody grab something and make sure it’s just rags and dust before we take it out and trash it.”

  With that, the guys pulled the clothing out and the women set about searching it. Pockets, seams, every thread and shred of it. Thankfully they only found a couple of odd coins to add to the first stack, and Dani was glad of that. What other secrets did this old place hold? She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out.

  “Good enough,” Caleb finally pronounced, and he swiped up an armload and deposited it in Eric’s arms. “Let’s get rid of this before we all die of dust-poisoning.”

  He wasn’t kidding, Dani thought as they trooped out to throw the things away. The fine dust seemed to cling to practically everything. Now that the armoire was cleaned out, Rachel inspected it and came out nodding. “It’s in great shape. I wonder what its story is.”

  Before she had time to speculate, the guys came back in and proceeded to haul the thing out to the flatbed Greg had procured from someone in town.

  “Careful through this
door,” Caleb commanded, and they all complied though it was a strain.

  When that piece was gone, Dani bit her nail and moved over to where Rachel was inspecting the little vanity. It had at one time been an off-white or cream. The mirror on it was cracked, and Dani didn’t like that at all. “What do you think?”

  “Structurally it’s good,” Rachel said. “I think we take it to the farm and see what we can do with it.”

  Dani’s eyes went wide. “We?”

  With a laugh, Rachel stood, stepped over to her, and squeezed her in a side hug. “It’ll be fun. Trust me.”

  Sage invited them all over for supper, and although Dani really didn’t feel comfortable sponging off of everyone while they were in town, she also couldn’t find a good way out of it either. So after going out to the farm to try to wash all the years’ old dust off of themselves and change into nicer clothing, they loaded Jaden into the SUV and headed out to Luke’s.

  Truthfully even if she had wanted to talk with Eric about the day, Dani didn’t know where to start. She could hardly process it all much less put her thoughts into words. It was overwhelming in ways she hadn’t at all bargained for. When Eric exhaled, however, she knew she’d better get prepared because like it or not, he was about to broach the subject of just what they had gotten themselves into.

  “So, about tomorrow,” he said slowly as if he knew the firing squad was about to commence shooting. He glanced over at her but only that. “I asked a couple of them about the services.” He held up his hand. “Just to see, and it seems like they all go to that church. You know, the one where Caleb and Rachel tied the knot.” He held his hand up one more second before letting it drop. “Now I’m not saying we have to go, but I do think it would be a nice gesture seeing how nice they’ve all been to us.”

  She dragged a breath in, tired of fighting, tired of all the crazy conflict life kept throwing at them. “Okay. Whatever. That’s fine with me.”