These Sheltering Walls: A Cane River Romance

by Hathaway, Mary Jane

  Memories of Lisette washed over Henry, memories of her tight expression when Henry was sick, of her sharp tongue when Henry had trouble in third grade math, of her undisguised anger when another relationship failed because the man wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility of someone else’s child.

  Henry looked at her watch. “I have to go. I’ll be back in―” The rest of her sentence faltered as she saw Gideon walk around the corner. He raised a hand in greeting, his expression sliding from friendly to guarded to curious.

  “What have we here?” Kimberly asked, smoothing her dress over her hips. Henry could hear the appreciation in her voice. She could never resist a handsome man, and what Kimberly wanted, Kimberly got.

  Gideon stopped in front of them, looking from Kimberly to Henry and back.

  “Is this your friend?” Kimberly asked.

  “I― no,” Henry blurted.

  Gideon raised an eyebrow at her.

  She sighed. “Kimberly, this is Gideon Becket.” She assumed she didn’t need to finish the introduction. Everyone in the country knew the woman by sight.

  Kimberly held out a hand and beamed. “So nice to meet you,” she gushed. “I think I’ve only met one of Henry’s friends before. That girl from your high school class, the one with the curly red hair. What was her name? Penny? Patty?”

  “Patsy,” Henry said.

  “Such an interesting woman. Always going on about which insects are native to the area and which are invaders.” Kimberly brushed back her hair, letting it fall along her back like a glistening waterfall. “Well, I’m glad to see you with a man. I was starting to think you were against them on principle.” She let out a little laugh, as if to prove she really meant no offense.

  Leaning close to Gideon, Kimberly looked up at him from under her lashes. “Maybe you can convince my niece to spend a little less time on dead people and a little more time on making some live friends. History is real nice but all we have is the here and now. That’s what my yoga instructor says.”

  Gideon let out a sound that was a combination of cough and laugh. Henry shot him a look. It was probably very funny to him to see Kimberly Gray, standing there like a red stop light, displaying the figure that made her famous and spouting nonsense. Henry knew she was ridiculous, but she didn’t want anyone mocking her, either.

  “We need to go. I’ll call you when I get back,” Henry said and turned to head back down the sidewalk. She hoped Gideon would take the cue and follow her because although she knew where the Finnamore house was, she didn’t have a key.

  “It was nice to meet you,” Gideon said.

  Truth.

  “I’m sure we’ll see each other again,” Kimberly said, giving a tiny wave, fingers wiggling. “My niece can cook us some of her famous jambalaya.”

  He caught up with her in just a few steps and Henry didn’t look back to make sure Kimberly was gone.

  “Famous jambalaya?” he asked.

  “I can’t cook. I don’t know where she got that idea.” For some reason, that small fact made her more angry than Kimberly’s other comments.

  He laughed out loud and she turned in surprise. She was so used to his usual expression that she almost stopped walking just to look at him.

  “Well, I can cook, so if you get roped into hosting a dinner, we’ll just do a switcheroo and no one will know the difference,” he said with a wink and Henry decided there was no way she was putting Gideon in Kimberly’s man-eating path.

  They reached the wide porch stairs and looked up at the dilapidated older home. It would have been a beautiful building, if it wasn’t on the verge of being bulldozed.

  “Since there isn’t any electricity, we have to use oil lamps for light. I also have a few head lamps, if you’d rather use those, but I find them distracting as I move around,” he said.

  Henry let out a slow breath. She was so thankful he wasn’t going to say anything more about Kimberly. Maybe they could both pretend she didn’t exist. “Do you think anyone will buy it?” she asked.

  “No. The amount of work to be done is more than the house is worth. Only someone with a real love of the area’s history would buy this place, and they’d also have to be prepared for a long course of repairs. It’s not livable.”

  Henry noted the three stories, gabled windows and wrap around porch. But as beautiful as the bones were, the roof was rotting and the front steps sagged suspiciously at one end. “And it’s too out of the way for a bed and breakfast, probably.”

  He nodded. “Maybe so. It seems the businesses do best along the waterfront, like By the Book. I admire how Alice has kept all the original fixtures.”

  “Have you ever been upstairs?” As soon as she asked the question she almost cringed. It sounded as if she was hoping for a chance to invite him into her apartment.

  “No, but if it’s anything like the store, I bet it’s a wonderful example of preservation.”

  He didn’t seem to think anything of her comment. Henry felt herself start to relax. There was something about Gideon’s conversation that was almost soothing. He spoke with an utter lack of subtext while Henry felt her entire life was an exercise in decoding the meaning beneath someone’s words.

  “The apartment is a dream. My fireplace mantel is two hundred and twenty years old French cherrywood. Alice said it survived a hurricane on the trip over. She knows the names of the Creole freemen who laid the brickwork. The floor is hand hewn quarter oak from a grove north of the city.” She couldn’t help smiling as she remembered the first time she walked into the apartment. “Living there is like touching history.”

  He looked down at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “You touch history every day.”

  “Yes, but it’s a whole different experience when I make my coffee in the percolator on the fifties stove and brush my teeth in the tiny water closet and do the dishes in the old porcelain sink.” She pushed up her glasses. “It’s not all luxurious accommodations, of course. I can’t tell you how many cold showers I’ve endured since I moved in.”

  “I can’t say I’m a fan of cold showers,” he said, starting around the back of the house. “The basement entrance is over here.”

  She followed him down a narrow flight of cement steps and watched him unlock a narrow door which had green paint flaking off in long strips. He turned the brass handle and the door didn’t budge.

  “Watch out,” he said, putting a hand out behind him. She dutifully moved to the side and watched him take a step back and ram his shoulder against the thick panel a few feet above the knob. It unstuck with a crack. “Sometimes the door is a bit stubborn, so you may have to give it a little help.”

  Henry cleared her throat. “Does it ever stick when you’re inside?”

  “Yep,” he said, letting it swing all the way open. He turned, as if realizing what she must be thinking. “But it doesn’t take much, just a tug.”

  She glanced from Gideon’s shoulder to the door frame. She was no frail twig but that had been more than a tug. “I’m feeling a real Cask of Amontillado vibe here.”

  He tensed. “I’ll let you go in alone if that would make you feel better.”

  “Oh, I’m not afraid you’re going to seal me up behind a fake wall. I’m worried about being trapped in here and no one noticing that I’m gone for months and months, and when they find me I’ll just be a skeleton holding some old letters.”

  “I’m sure you’d be missed much sooner than that,” he said, his lips turning up at the corners. “Come on in and I’ll show you around.”

  She stepped inside, inhaling the smell of damp stone and cool, stale air. The light from the door illuminated a long table, a chair, a scanner and boxes. Many, many boxes.

  “Wow,” she breathed, walking toward them. Her mind couldn’t grasp how much Cane River history was contained in the dank, musty basement. She turned in a circle, trying to take it all in. Gideon set a hurricane lamp on the desk and lit the wick, carefully setting the glass back in place. “But how do y
ou run your scanner if there isn’t any electricity down here?”

  “Extension cord,” he said, pointing toward a bright orange cable that snaked along one wall and out a casement window. “It’s plugged into the neighbor’s external outlet. Mr. Ferraux has been very happy to lend a hand when needed.”

  “Couldn’t you bring a few electric lanterns down here if you’ve got that cord?”

  “Hm, you’re right. But it wouldn’t be nearly as authentic, toiling away by candlelight, knowing my eyesight was slowly failing from the strain.” After lighting a second lamp on the desk, he looked around. “If you’re really worried about being stuck in here, just remember the door swings inward.”

  “Will that help me?”

  He took out his keys, walked back to the old oak door and pointed toward the hinges. “These are ancient and it would take some muscle, but here, watch.” He held up a key, gently jimmied it under the pin that held the hinge together, and started to wiggle it around. After a few moments, a larger space appeared, and he grasped the top of the pin and pulled. “You remove the pins, and the door would open from the other side.”

  “Hm,” she said. The top hinge was about a foot over her head, and she didn’t think she had the strength to yank a dirty pin out of the place it had sat for so many years.

  “Try it. Work on the bottom hinge.”

  Henry wanted to laugh and wave it away, but then she thought of being stuck in the basement took his key. Crouching down, she worked the key into the space between the pin and the hinge, just as he’d shown her. Grabbing the top, she tugged and at first, it didn’t move at all. Then she imagined herself trapped down there, without anything to eat, no bed, and no bathroom.

  “Nice,” he said, admiration in his voice. She’d yanked the pin almost clear of the hinge. “And I think you’d want to do the top on next, in case the door shifted and made it harder to get out.”

  She stood back, grinning. “You learn something new every day.”

  “Something useful, no less. Making sure I can get in and out is the first thing that crosses my mind when I enter a place.” He turned, as if regretting his words. “More about getting out, than getting in. I’m no burglar.”

  She smiled at him. “I know.”

  He pounded the pins back into place and dropped his keys in his pocket. “So, probably the worst set up you’ve ever seen, right?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Well, now I’m curious,” he said.

  “As a graduate student, I was asked to organize a large collection of porcelain dolls. After his death, his family wanted them catalogued and moved as quickly as possible, which I don’t blame them for in the slightest. Anyway, my advisor thought we should take photos and catalogue them before moving in case there was any accidental damage.”

  “Dolls. Definitely not a favorite subject of mine,” he said.

  “Oh, it gets better. The owner was many paper plates short of a picnic. He hadn’t collected whole dolls, just the heads. The collection was in his attic, arranged on shelves, with little labels holding the names he’d chosen for them. Names like Sweet Dreams, Baby’s Breath, Genevieve’s Tears.”

  She stepped closer to him and dropped her voice to a dramatic whisper. “Imagine, if you will, the moment the sky starts to turn dark. You have long hours of work yet ahead. The house creaks and pops as it settles in for the night. The multitude of little glass doll eyes glimmer in the dim light. You refuse to think about how the owner of this collection died at home, just a few feet below the room you’re in. Working faster, you tell yourself it doesn’t matter that the owner of this ghastly collection wanted it to go to his children, but that none of them wanted it. They’d told you more than once that he would be so angry if he knew, if he ever found out his beloved doll heads were being touched by a stranger.” She held up a finger. “Shhh. That sounded like…. Footsteps on the attic stairs?”

  He clapped a hand to his chest. “I see why you read Poe stories. You seemed to enjoy telling that tale a little too much.”

  She grinned and pushed up her glasses. “Oh, come on. You wouldn’t have been rattled. I bet you’re not afraid of anything.”

  His smile faded away and he said, “I am. A very few things.”

  Truth.

  If there were an instrument that measured levity, it would have shown a massive drop, a shift in the conversation that stripped away the silly stories and the jokes.

  “What are they?”

  He looked at her for a long second or two before he responded. “Acting on emotion, rather than logic, is one.”

  She considered that. “Funny. I think I have the exact opposite fear. I’m afraid I’ll be one of those people who act on what I’m told to believe, rather than what I know is true.”

  “Aren’t they usually the same thing?”

  “Almost never,” she said.

  “You’re not talking about religion,” he said.

  “No.” She pushed up her glasses, suddenly wishing she’d never asked him about his fears. There was no way to explain, and it was too late to gracefully back out of the conversation. More than that, she realized she wanted to tell Gideon about her curse. There, in the middle of the dark basement, she would explain how she could spot a lie like a neon sign, how it sounded like an alarm in her head. She would tell him how she’d known since she was very small that her mother wasn’t really her mother, and how much she’d hated the lie about the father who’d run away with the waitress. She wanted to empty herself of all the ugliness she held inside, all the lies that weren’t hers but that she tended and kept safe for other people. Then after she was hollow and clean again, she’d admit how much she wanted to be normal. She hated Kimberly for her endless string of boyfriends and yet, and yet, she wished for some small taste of it. Just a dinner or two or ten, all dressed up, sitting across a fancy dinner from a handsome man and not hearing a single lie he told.

  She wanted to say these things but she didn’t. Henry was a good daughter, the keeper of secrets and protector of lies.

  “We should get started,” she said, looking toward the walls of boxes.

  She felt him standing there, a few feet behind the shoulder she’d just turned, and the silence was so deep she wondered for just a moment if he would ask her to explain.

  “Of course,” he said.

  ***

  Gideon carefully set out piles of sorted letters, explaining the complicated system he’d constructed and illustrating the step-by-step process of his cataloguing project. Henry listened attentively and asked several questions, but seemed to understand it all intuitively. Of course, she’d spent years doing this kind of work.

  “I think I’ve got the idea,” she said. “You’ve done a really thorough job. This will change the way we access Cane River history.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “If you have any questions, you can call my cell phone.”

  She glanced at the table full of documents and uncertainty crossed her face. “Since you’re here, we could always work together. Unless you have other plans.”

  He thought of her anxiety over the stubborn door and nodded. “Sure. You take the desk.”

  She started to protest but he’d already dragged over a few boxes and sat down.

  They started to work, and for the first few minutes he could only hear her small movements, the breaths she took, and the sense of someone else so near. But after a while, he fell into a rhythm of carefully unfurling the fragile papers and deciphering the spidery, faded writing.

  He picked up a small photo of two men, one had a bushy beard and held a flintlock rifle, the other was considerably younger and held a revolver. The back identified them as uncle and nephew. They didn’t look at all related. He thought of the moment he’d walked around the corner and seen Kimberly Gray standing next to Henry. Before that moment, he would have said the two were nearly polar opposites and not just in appearance. He only had a vague impression of the actress, mostly from pictures he’d seen of her on
the red carpet or on the front of the gossip magazines at the grocery store. Henry was serious, thoughtful, quiet. Kimberly seemed to seek out as much ugly drama as possible.

  Once they were side by side, it was clear they had the same high cheekbones, full mouth and perfect complexion. He watched her read over a letter, a tiny frown line between her brows. His first impressions were almost never wrong, but now everything shifted, like a picture coming into focus. Henry wasn’t concerned with looking academic enough. The glasses and severe ponytail were simply an effort at disguising her connection to Kimberly Gray.

  She looked up “Is something wrong?”

  “No, sorry, just thinking,” he said.

  Setting another letter in the pile to the right, he tried to focus. He carefully sorted and stacked most of a box before his mind swung back to Henry. She clearly disliked her aunt enough to avoid any connection, but she must have wanted the Cane River Creole Park position enough to deal with her feelings. Or at least try to keep the two areas separate. Maybe that accounted for her reluctance to go out in public.

  He rubbed a hand over his beard. It might explain her expression of utter sadness a few minutes ago when she mentioned her fears. He didn’t know what had possessed him to answer her question, but she’d answered him just as honestly.

  Chapter Six

  “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

  ― Thoreau

  Henry rummaged through her purse one last time. She couldn’t believe she’d managed to lose her keys the day after Alice left for New York. They couldn’t be in her office since she’d driven home yesterday. Most likely they were somewhere between By the Book and the Finnamore place. She heaved a sigh and pulled the door of her apartment closed behind her. It was a good thing she had a spare key to her car and that the rest of the staff would be at Oakland to open the doors. She wasn’t usually so scattered but she clearly was still adjusting to the move. Everything seemed out of place.

  A few minutes later she reached the sidewalk and headed for the little lot where she parked her car. The usually clear morning sky showed large clouds gathering at the horizon. She wondered if she should turn back for an umbrella. Her flowered skirt and bright red sleeveless shirt felt perfect for the moment, but she didn’t look forward to dashing down the block through the rain on her way back to the apartment.