“Yeah? What kind of business?” asked Nellie.
“Mom. Push the button that says speaker. Put him on speaker.”
Nellie turned away from her and waved her hand. “Can’t read anything that small. No, not you. Yeah, we’re going there now. Then we’ve got some detective work to do. Yeah, we’ll be just fine.” Nellie turned back to Jane. “How do you hang this thing up?”
“Give it to me.”
“Never mind, I got it. End, right?”
Jane had a toolbox in the trunk of her car. Maybe she did have a crowbar with her, and if she did, maybe she could use it on Nellie. She wanted her out of the car. Now.
“Swanette called Tim last night,” said Nellie. “You gave her the card, so she decided she’d talk to him. He’s coming out, too, but a little later. Had a meeting this morning.”
So much for things falling into place in an uncomplicated fashion.
Jane drove for fifteen minutes, straight west out of Kankakee, toward Herscher. Jane didn’t speak, Nellie murmured a few consoling words to Rita, concerning, Jane surmised, her driving.
“Look, I got to tell you something,” said Nellie.
“Talking to me or the dog?” asked Jane.
Jane glanced down at the directions Swanette had given her and clicked on her turn signal.
“This is something you should know. I had to come with you today,” said Nellie.
“So you could save Rita when the airbags deployed?”
Jane looked straight ahead at the road, then to the odometer. She had to go 3.6 miles then prepare to turn in at Swanette’s farm. Country driving always made her nervous. All of these look-alike county roads, numbered or lettered, and no one around to answer any questions about directions. No landmarks, unless you consider the livestock, and one couldn’t very well turn at the two cows or go straight past the trotting horse. Jane much preferred the anonymity of a city street to the isolation of the country road. Having Nellie sitting next to her, clucking and chuckling every time she hit a rut, only made her more anxious.
“If you don’t want to know, then I guess I don’t have to tell you,” said Nellie, unfastening her seat belt as Jane turned off the county road into a long driveway.
Swanette’s farm, at least the farm house, was not that large. A compact two-story white frame structure with a glassed-in porch, or Florida room, as Jane had heard them called, attached. There was a pole barn around the back, and a few sheds, maybe an old chicken coop. Unlike so many farms, Jane saw no tractors or equipment parked under the trees. A beater station wagon, up on blocks, and a small hatchback were parked in front of the barn.
Swanette was out the door to greet them before they even got completely out of the car. She hugged Nellie, which caught her so much by surprise that Nellie hugged her back. Although Jane saw no reason to admit it, she knew it was probably for the best that her mother had come with her.
“I called your friend,” said Swanette. “I decided I’d be taking advantage by asking you to do all the work for free. I’m going to pay you and pay him, too.”
“No need to worry about—” Jane stopped talking as she stepped into Swanette’s living room.
“What in the world happened here?” said Nellie.
Jane tried to shush Nellie, but the woman would not be shushed.
“How long have you been living this way, Swanette? Are you crazy?”
“Mom!”
“Let’s see, Lee died almost fifteen years ago and my mother-in-law passed away last spring. My niece lived in the back bedroom for about six years back in the seventies–eighties, so I would say the house has been as you see it for . . . well . . . way too long.”
Swanette was dressed in a pair of navy blue slacks and a maroon turtleneck sweater. Jane noticed a stylish matching jacket was draped carefully over the back of a kitchen chair. Her short gray hair was professionally cut. Her hands, Jane noticed, were manicured, her nails polished with a tasteful deep pink. How did this well-groomed, sane-looking woman live in this—even to Jane’s stuff-loving eyes—insane asylum of a house?
Every surface—and there were plenty of surfaces—was covered. Tables, bookcases, end tables, and coffee tables were pushed up next to each other to display collections of porcelain, thimbles, salt and pepper shakers, plates, souvenir snow globes . . . everything Jane had ever seen on a flea market table of mixed smalls was represented here in multiples. The windows were streaked with heavy clinging dust, so that despite the sun shining, barely any light entered the room. There were several lamps, most of which Jane thought were from the forties and fifties, many with fraying cloth-covered cords, none switched on.
Built-in bookcases on either side of the fireplace were filled with magazines and newspapers. Jane could see that there were photo albums and postcard albums stacked on the shelves in between fifty-year-old issues of Life and Look.
“I would love to have a photograph of your faces,” said Swanette. “I told you there was a lot of stuff. Didn’t you believe me?”
“Of course I believed you, but—” Jane began to say. Nellie cut her off.
“But we didn’t think you were crazy! Swanette, you could have died in a fire from all this junk. Could have just exploded, all the dust and garbage—”
“Oh no,” said Swanette, beginning to laugh. “I don’t live here. I mean I haven’t been living here for the past several years.”
Swanette explained that her mother-in-law, who had never really cared for Swanette, grew more and more eccentric after her son died. Since she didn’t trust Swanette and she needed almost round-the-clock care, Swanette had hired full-time help and kept watch over her mother-in-law from the outside.
“Where the hell you been?” asked Nellie.
“I took an apartment near the high school. I was doing some substitute teaching, so it was convenient. I came here on weekends to work in the garden, and when I was allowed, I poked my head in. I knew it was a disaster, but she was just hanging on and all this junk made her as content as she could be. Tell you the truth, I kept putting off doing anything with the house, thinking she was going to be dying any minute, but spite and malice are powerful medicines. She was a woman who lived on hate. She had her nurse Carla hire a guy from town to come out here and move stuff around—from the basement to the coop to the shed and back to the living room. She had a truckload of stuff she moved here with—probably some good old antiques if we can find them. Never threw anything from her mother or her aunts away, had stuff packed up and stored all over the farm. I just didn’t have it in me to fight her on this stuff. She thought her name was on the deed with mine and Lee’s—his dad left him the place and insisted that her name be left on some of the papers that described the acreage. It wasn’t really a legal thing, but Lee always told her she was a part of the farm. She had no equity in the property, but she believed her name was on the deed and we never really tried to make her understand that she had no legal claim. She acted like she bought it with us or something, but I never took a thin dime from the old battle-ax.
“I’ve been trying to call the handyman who worked for her, but he didn’t answer his phone this morning. I think he had the keys to the sheds—Mother Flanders had him put padlocks on the doors. I’m just going to put an ax through them if I can’t find the keys.”
“She let a nurse and a handyman into the house, but not you?” asked Jane.
“Yup,” said Swanette. “She said as long as she paid them, she could make them do what she wanted, but since I had just married Lee, married my way into my connection, she didn’t trust me. She told me I thought I was better than them because I had a college degree and used big words, worked in an office. She was certifiably crazy, and it didn’t help that on top of crazy, she was mean as spit.”
“Yeah,” said Nellie, “but you can understand it, right? If you hire somebody, you pay them and they do the job, fine. And if you don’t like them or the job they do, you fire them. Family you’re just stuck with.”
�
��Sweet sentiments,” said Jane.
Nellie was already stacking up newspapers, shaking them and blowing the dust away. “Any law against burning trash out here?”
“No,” said Swanette and Jane at the same time, although with considerable differences in emphasis.
Swanette shook her head. “I burned trash all the time.”
“No,” repeated Jane. “We’ll sell those newspapers and magazines. Leave them, Mom.”
“They’re filthy dirty,” said Nellie.
“We’ll wipe them down a bit, shake them out, but they’re really in great shape. No rips, no yellowing. I don’t smell any mold or mildew in here. I think the books and paper stuff will be good. Mom, you can wash dishes and glassware, but don’t throw anything away unless it’s garbage. Not by your definition, but by mine.”
“You don’t have a definition of garbage! You don’t throw anything away.”
“Old food. You can throw away old food.”
Nellie headed for the kitchen, grabbing a large plastic bag from off the counter. She stood in front of the stove and began to sweep all the spices in their grease-filmed tins and bottles into the bag.
“No,” yelled Jane. “Those old tins are vintage. Just old food. Smelly moldy stuff, scraps—that’s garbage. Everything else can be cleaned—but just a little—and sold. Tim will think he’s died and gone to heaven when he sees the graphics on that bottle of celery seeds.”
Swanette tried a number on her cell phone, then shook her head. “I don’t know where that guy is. He always came out here to check the property on Saturday mornings.”
Jane had planned on taking the photo of Michael and heading into Edna’s Diner after a brief walk-through at Swanette’s house. The stacks of books, magazines, and file boxes with newspaper-wrapped china bulging out the cardboard sides made any kind of walk-through, brief or detailed, almost impossible. Although Nellie’s energy and scrubbing techniques would be helpful, she couldn’t be left unsupervised or half of the good junk would disappear.
“When did Tim say he would be here?” asked Jane.
Nellie looked at one of the six kitchen clocks hanging on the wall and shook her head—whether at the number of ticking clocks or the passage of time in general, Jane couldn’t be sure.
“In a half hour or so,” Nellie said. “Why did she need so many damn clocks?”
“She liked backup,” said Swanette. “She always said that no one could trust one of anything, including husbands. Lee’s father was her second husband and I’m not sure she ever put any faith in him. She liked setting people up against each other. She’d tell her nurse to watch the handyman, said she didn’t trust him, thought he was taking her stuff and selling it off. Then she’d tell the handyman that the nurse was stealing from her. Each one of them told me about the other. God knows what she told them about me.”
Jane wandered around, opening cupboards and closet doors, as Swanette described the old lady. Jane tried to tune out the parts of the description that sounded like her. After all, Jane had explained multiples in her own collections by saying how much she liked backup. None of this boded well for her golden years.
When Tim drove up twenty minutes later, he found Nellie at the sink up to her elbows in soapy water washing out crusty blue canning jars, with stacks of filthy pink and green Depression glass plates and cups waiting their turn. Jane and Swanette were in the back bedroom used for several years by Swanette’s niece. Jane was on the floor dragging out boxes of teen movie magazines and comic books from under the bed. Spotting a silver bit of jewelry in a box, Jane fished out a charm bracelet.
“Man, woman, birth, death,” said Tim in a low ponderous voice, then added, dragging out each syllable, “in-fin-i-ty.”
Jane shook her head.
“You don’t remember Ben Casey on TV?” asked Tim, holding the bracelet up to her face.
“Sounds familiar, but—”
“This is a good TV collectible—show was on in the sixties—and it opened with the old mentor doctor drawing these medical symbols on the board. The charm bracelet was a hot item.”
“You’re my age, Timmy, how do you know so much or remember so much?”
“Research, honey. You keep digging up the stuff, I’ll write the history on the price tags.”
Jane left Tim with a stack of Teen magazines to page through and told Swanette she would be back in an hour. She wanted to visit the “haunted house” and, if no one answered the door, still have enough time to ask questions at the diner before the lunch crowd left. Jane wanted to follow Miles’s advice and bring Rita along, but assumed she’d have to pry the dog away from her mother. Since Rita’s bacon breakfast, she hadn’t strayed two feet away from Nellie. Walking back through the house into the kitchen, Jane whistled but saw neither the dog nor her mother. There were, however, stacks of glistening green and sparkling pink glassware drying on the now wiped and cleaned kitchen counter.
After only an hour, Nellie had made a substantial dent in the filth and clutter.
“I wonder what would happen if I locked her in the chicken coop with all those boxes,” Jane said aloud, wondering if that were indeed where her mother had gone.
No such luck. Just as she had been earlier in the morning, Nellie sat in the front seat of Jane’s car, chattering away to Rita in the back.
“No,” said Jane. “Not this time.”
“Just drive,” said Nellie. “I’m going to tell you a secret.”
Jane tried to remember if Nellie had ever uttered these words to her before. No. She was sure that Nellie had never volunteered any information, personal or otherwise, let alone given up any secrets. Nellie’s relationships with both Jane and Michael . . . and probably with Don, as well . . . had at their core a firm belief that information was given on a need-to-know basis.
When Jane had asked the typical childhood questions of her mother—How did you meet Dad? What was it like when you went to school? Et cetera—Nellie had refused to participate. Her answers ranged from “I don’t remember” to “What’s the difference? Who cares?” Michael always said their mother missed her calling. She should have been with the CIA.
Now Double O Nellie was offering to tell her a secret?
Jane drove.
“Well, when I was—What the hell?” Nellie began rummaging through Jane’s purse to locate the loudly ringing cell phone.
“Forget it, don’t answer it,” said Jane. “Keep telling me—”
“Yeah?” said Nellie, pushing several buttons and assuming that one of them would allow her to answer the phone.
“Mom, I’ll get the message later. Please don’t answer my phone, I—”
“Yeah, it’s me. She’s here, but she’s driving. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Wait a minute.” Nellie turned to Jane. “What time do you think we’ll be home?”
“Why ask me? Seems to me like you’re running the show,” said Jane.
“Dinner. Yeah. Bye.”
Jane parked in front of Edna’s Diner. The haunted house across the street, in the October light of midday, looked just as dark and forbidding as it did yesterday in the late afternoon. The enormous oak trees that hung over the roof isolated the house from any sunlight, from any connection to neighboring structures. Set back on the lot, on a mostly commercial street, it stood teetering on its foundation, defiant. Just try to tear me down, it seemed to say, I was here before you and I’ll outlast you all.
“It was your dad,” said Nellie.
“What’s the secret?” asked Jane.
“I’ll tell you later,” said Nellie, opening her car door and getting out before Jane could slam down on the childproof locks and hold her mother captive until she talked.
“Rita, I swear, if you shift your allegiance to that woman . . .” Jane began, opening the car door for the dog. The house was forbidding enough that she thought it might be a good idea for Rita to come with them and sit at attention at the door.
Nellie was batting down the cobwebs on the front porch
by the time Jane caught up with her. Jane lifted the knocker.
“I already knocked,” said Nellie.
“Of course,” said Jane.
No one answered the door. Jane thought, just as she had the day before, that she saw the curtain flutter. Jane lifted the knocker again and let it fall.
“Oh hell,” said Nellie, “somebody’s got to be home. Where are people who live in a house like this going to go?”
Without waiting for Jane to answer, Nellie turned the giant doorknob and the door swung open. Jane put her arm across her mother to stop her from walking in.
“You can’t just walk in, Mom,” said Jane.
“I know that. You think I’m an idiot?”
Jane moved her arm and Nellie walked in past her.
“Hello! Anybody here?”
“Mom!” said Jane, “Stay.” Rita sat down and faced the street. “I was talking to your pal Nellie,” said Jane, following her mother, ready to hog-tie her and throw her back in the car.
“I’m calling out,” said Nellie. “The door was open.”
Jane watched openmouthed as her mother walked straight through the dark foyer into the front parlor. Nellie stomped her feet as she walked, making twice as much noise as she needed to—Jane figured it was one more way of announcing their presence. Still no one came or answered Nellie’s repeated hellos.
Jane, after scanning Swanette’s place, was in high scanning mode. This house, so haunted and forbidding from the outside, was much cleaner and cared for inside, although it was almost as full—top to bottom—of stuff. Shelves ran around the parlor molding and continued, Jane could see, into the dining room. Every inch of shelf space was filled with jack-o’-lanterns, witches, black cats, and devil heads. They were mostly papier-mâché candy containers, some, Jane guessed, nearly a hundred years old. It was the largest collection of Halloween objects that Jane had ever seen, and she was still only looking up at the shelves. When she allowed her eyes to roam, she saw that the giant mahogany dining room table was set with Halloween paper decorations, honeycomb crepe pumpkins and witches, all in fine-to-mint condition. Jane had to get a closer look.
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