The next year I bought a much smaller, six-bedroom gingerbread Victorian around the corner. I furnished it with antiques and frilly lace curtains and rented it out to “women in transition,” as a haven for ladies going through a divorce or new in town who weren’t yet ready to commit to a long-term lease. Between the two places, I met some really interesting people.
My next project was a dilapidated, seventeen-bedroom Victorian dive that had deteriorated and was now condemned. The moment I stepped into the foyer and saw the original black and white checkered tiles, and the intricately carved Eastlake staircase, I fell in love. It was by far my biggest undertaking. By that time, Jim had moved in with me, and we were living in a house we had purchased together in the rose garden area of San Jose. Jim wanted nothing to do with these “fixer-uppers,” and if he didn’t have to, he wouldn’t even come over to see what I had accomplished. Jim had grown up, along with his six brothers and sisters, in an old Victorian house in need of repair, so he never seemed to see the appeal of buying one.
I adored everything about the Victorian era, from the bold colors and patterns used on walls and furniture, to the genteel customs, like “visiting,” and “calling cards.” I was especially intrigued by the architecture, with its gingerbread, turrets, and secret passageways.
My cousins all say I got this passion from my grandfather. He came to the United States on a ship from Stockholm, Sweden, after he had gotten his architectural degree. He was just twenty-one when he arrived in Los Angeles and went to work for an architectural firm where he designed several famous theaters and other buildings, including the Wiltern Theater, now a historical site, and the old Firestone Tire factory, now the famous monument visible from the interstate, done in Egyptian motif, known as The Citadel.
When the Depression hit, the only work my grandfather could find was at a movie studio in Hollywood. He apprenticed with an art director on Shirley Temple movies and went on to design sets for many other films, becoming a production designer and art director himself. He became an authority on Victorian architecture, and he received an Academy Award nomination for the production design of Life With Father, with Elizabeth Taylor, but that year, Gone With the Wind swept the Oscars. Another of his projects was the design of Main Street at the original Disneyland in California; a Victorian wonderland built to five-eighths scale. He personally acquired many of the antiques for the original shops.
My two sisters and I loved to visit my grandparents at their two-story white clapboard house, perched high atop the Pasadena hills above the Rose Bowl. There were so many nooks and crannies to crouch into when we played “hide and seek” with our cousins. When my grandparents had a party we would sneak into the second-story transept that ran along the far wall of the two-story-high living room, with windows on both sides, and peek out into the living room, or the other way over the garden patio, and watch the adults. “When I grow up, I want a house just like theirs,” I used to think, and I dreamed of throwing parties of my own.
Grandpa was the only one who truly appreciated and understood why I would want to buy a house that looked as if it was falling down. If the Victorian features were intact, the more dilapidated the house looked, the more I could visualize the breathtaking beauty it would possess after it had been restored. When I bought the condemned house in San Jose, my parents and Jim told me I was crazy, but the moment Grandpa stepped into its antique black and white checkerboard foyer and saw the Eastlake banister, he loved it, too.
Restoration was my passion, and that house needed a lot of work. I quit my job to work on it full-time. Several of the guys renting in my big Victorian were in the construction business. The timing was perfect, because they were between jobs, and they worked for me for far below their normal pay. I worked right along with them, and they taught me how to paint, sheetrock, float, and tape. I’m not that coordinated with a hammer, but I can slop mud with the best of them. We turned that dump into a showplace and had it fully restored and rented in just two months. The profit I made on that house, and the others, enabled me to buy the Myrtles.
One of my deepest regrets in life is that my grandfather did not live to see the Myrtles.
CHAPTER 15
My thoughts were interrupted by footsteps on the back gallery. They continued into the kitchen, which was right next to my room. I glanced at the clock: 7:45. Lillie May was early. The door opened, then slammed shut, and I could hear Lillie May working in the kitchen, opening cupboards, banging pots and pans, and dropping heavy objects onto the floor. My mouth started watering just thinking about her biscuits.
“Lillie May,” I called out.
No answer. Maybe she didn’t hear me.
“Lillie May?” I hollered even louder.
The racket in the kitchen suddenly ceased and the house became dead quiet.
My body froze.
“Oh, my God, there’s someone in the house, and it’s not Lillie May,” I thought. “They won’t answer me, but now they know I’m here . . .” I imagined it must be a burglar, looking for silver or whatever valuables he thought he might find. In a split second, I was off the couch and crouched in the closet, barely daring to breathe. From the loud beating of my heart, I felt for sure the intruder would find me.
When I didn’t hear anything for a long time, I tried to talk myself down. “Okay, he knows I’m here, but he hasn’t come to get me, so he must have been startled when he realized someone was home. Maybe he left!” My legs were aching from squatting for so long.
Finally I spotted Lillie May through the window, making her way to the back of the house. I felt a tremendous relief, quickly followed by a deeper fear. What if he was still in the house, and now Lillie May was in danger, too? I had to warn her. Bravely I bolted outside and met her, breathless, on the gallery.
“Miss Frances, what’s wrong? You looks like you have seens a ghost,” she asked.
“Worse. We had a burglar,” I replied.
“A burglar!” she exclaimed. “Is everything okay? Did he take anything?”
“I don’t know. It just happened. He must have seen John L.’s car leave, so he thought no one was here. I heard him walking up the back gallery and into the kitchen. He started opening cupboards and banging things around. At first I thought it was you, so I called out. That must have scared him away.”
“Sit down, child. Let me makes you some coffee.”
Lillie May put her arm around my shoulder, took my hand, and directed me to one of the sturdy white wooden rockers on the verandah, then turned to walk to the back door that led to the kitchen.
“Don’t go in there,” I screeched as she reached for the doorknob. “He might still be in there. I think he left, but I’m not sure.”
“Miss Frances . . .” Lillie May started, with her hands on her hips.
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” I asked, still unwilling to entertain the idea that the intruder might not have been a real person.
Surprisingly, Lillie May didn’t seem fazed one bit by my account. She opened the door wide and stood back to reveal an empty kitchen, with every cupboard closed, every utensil in place.
“See, Miss Frances, I tolds you, that’s the kind of thing that happens here all the time. It’s nothing to worry yourself about.”
Nothing to worry about! There had been someone, okay, maybe something, in the house! Although I had been tormented at night, up until then, by daylight I had felt safe. That illusion of safety was no longer there.
Lillie May walked over and cupped my hand in hers. She was gentle and caring.
“Things will get better,” she promised. “You’ll see.”
“Lillie May, what would I do without you,” I gushed, grateful for her mothering.
“You wait right here while I go make us somes coffee,” she cooed.
A short time later she came back with two cups of steaming-hot dark roast Community coffee and sat down in the rocker next to mine.
We chatted for a few minutes, until I asked, “Lillie May,
just what have you seen here?”
She paused, shaking her head. “I haven’t seens much, but I heards a lot,” she admitted.
“Like what? Please, tell me?”
“You runs along now, child,” she said, quickly standing up. “I gots plenty of work to do.”
I couldn’t get any more information from Lillie May. I wondered if, as Malcolm had confided, John L. had asked her not to tell me about the ghosts. But John L. would be moving soon, and maybe she would open up to me after he left. I was dying to learn what Lillie May was obviously keeping from me.
Several days later, I was plumping the draperies. Throughout the house, the long, silk draperies, tied back with big balls of shiny mercury holders, were “puddled” onto the floor in front of each of the floor-to ceiling windows that could be raised up into the walls. This “puddling” used to be a status symbol, showing the world that the family could afford to “waste” the expensive imported silks. In the summer, the windows could all be raised up into the walls, allowing a cross-breeze to blow through the house, cooling it off. When balls were held at the plantation the guests could waltz from the parlors through the window openings out onto the verandah. So romantic!
I was fluffing the draperies in the double parlors when I found a plastic baggie behind one of the drapes. In the baggie was some kind of white powder. I immediately wondered if it contained some kind of illegal substance, left by a previous owner. I took the bag to Lillie May for her to inspect.
“Thats is salt,” she explained. “There’s bags of it in fronts of every window in the house.”
I was amazed that I had never noticed them before. I asked her why they were there.
“Oh, Mr. Celestine, the old manager, he puts it there years ago,” claimed Lillie May. “He saids it would ward off them evil spirits.”
How silly, I thought, as I started to pick them up to throw away, pausing after I had gathered a few.
“On second thought, let’s just leave them there, just in case,” I said, carefully replacing the ones I had removed. “After all, there’s no sense in tempting fate.”
CHAPTER 16
With Charles’s trip to Louisiana running behind schedule, and John L. moving out that afternoon, I decided to spend my nights at Betty Jo’s until Charles arrived. In the mornings, Betty Jo would drop me off at the Myrtles so I could give the tours. I wanted to establish the Myrtles as a well-run business, and as such, I thought it would be unprofessional to close the house to tours for even one hour.
I loved giving the tours. Every group was different, and I got to meet people from all over the world. It also gave me a break from the concerns that plagued me. I was relaxing on my lumpy couch in the sitting room after the last tour of the day, my throat parched from speaking so much. I decided a Coke from the machine outside would help. I walked over to the door leading to the hall, but it was locked. I figured it must be some kind of mechanical malfunction, so I tried the door leading to the French bedroom, but it was locked, too. I ran to the door leading to the outside, the only other door in the room, and it was locked! How could that be? There weren’t even any locks on any of the interior doors!
Frantically, I raced around to all the windows, which ordinarily slid up easily. One by one I shoved them, rattling them hard, but they would not budge. I felt a wave of nausea rising from the pit of my stomach as I realized that there was no way out. I was trapped! I bolted around the room, shaking each door again furiously, until the sickening realization swept over me—I was a prisoner inside the Myrtles!
It wouldn’t help to scream, as everyone was gone. I picked up the phone and held my breath, praying it would work. Thank God, there was a dial tone. By the time Betty Jo answered, all I could do was scream into the phone, “Help me! Please help me. I’m locked in!”
“Hold on, I’m on my way,” I heard Betty Jo’s breathless reply. She sounded as if she were a million miles away. How long would it take for her to get here? What would I do until then?
My knees gave out, and I crumpled to the floor, feeling very small and helpless in the center of this big imposing prison.
What was going on? Was I in some kind of Stephen King nightmare? My logic was shouting this can’t be happening, but my senses were telling me THIS WAS HAPPENING!
“Let me out. Let me out,” I pleaded over and over, as my body shuddered with silent sobs.
After an eternity, I heard Betty Jo’s car speeding up the drive. I crawled to the window to watch as she rushed up to the house and tugged furiously at the doorknob. I waited hopefully as the doorknob jiggled and the door shook, but it wouldn’t open.
“I’m going to try another door,” she shouted. I could hear her running around to the side door. The entire door frame rattled as she tried to get the door open. She ran to another door, and then another, but they were all locked. Finally, in frustration, she pounded on the door with both fists.
“Frances, Frances, are you in there?” she cried. “Are you okay? I’m trying to get to you.”
I started screaming back for her to hurry. I didn’t know how much longer I could take this.
“Hold on. I’m going to get a crowbar,” she cried as she darted for her car. My eyes followed her every move, scared to death she might flee. She was my only hope of being rescued. But she came back armed with a crowbar and a hammer. I waited for the door to come crashing in from the force of the crowbar, but instead it simply opened before she even inserted the tool. Betty Jo practically fell into the house.
“Frances, are you okay? Frances!” she hollered as she ran for the sitting room.
“Oh, my God!” she said as she found me crumpled on the floor by the window. Grabbing my arm, she hoisted me up.
“Hurry, we have to get out of this place while we still can,” she urged. Holding hands, we ran outside and made a dash for her car. The gravel flew as we spun out of the parking lot. Neither of us said a word on the way to her house. How could we begin to explain what had just happened?
CHAPTER 17
The latest event with the doors and windows defied any rational explanation, and yet there had to be one, didn’t there? I felt angry that I couldn’t risk being alone in my own home in the middle of the day. I didn’t know if I was more upset at the situation, in which I felt helpless, or at myself, for being such a wimp. For now, whenever I was inside the house, I left the doors and windows ajar.
I was glad that Charles would be arriving that very day. Naturally, I was excited to see him, but I would also be relieved to have another living soul in the house with me. Right at five o’clock, as I was saying goodbye to the last tourists, Charles called to let me know he was in Houston, and it would be another five or six hours before he arrived.
There was no way I was going to stay here alone after dark! I called Lillie May with the pretense of asking her to come over and make up Charles’s room. As the hours dragged on, I kept inventing more things for her to do, wondering if she suspected the truth. I trailed close beside her as she moved about the house.
To ease my tension at being in the house after dark, I made small talk, asking Lillie May about her life. She told me an astounding story! Born in the 1920s, Lillie May spent her childhood toiling in the fields from sunup to sundown, meticulously sowing and planting in the spring, stooped over all day gathering crops in the summer and fall. Her erect posture belied the years of drudgery behind the plow, or bent over for hours at a time in the fields. The long-awaited payday came just twice a year for Lillie May and the other children of crop-sharing families—winter and summer. She made $0.25 a season!
“Miss Frances, I woulds be so sick.” she grimaced, holding her belly. “I woulds takes that little money, and spends every penny of it on candy. My stomach would hurts so bads, I would swears that I woulds never eat so much candies again, but then by the times the next payday cames, I woulds do it all over again.”
Twenty-five cents for six months’ pay? I could hardly believe what she was telling me. It sounded too
much like slavery. I was outraged at a system that would take advantage of and use people, especially children.
“How could they get away with paying you so little?” I asked.
“Oh, we was sharecroppers. They would give us the land, and we woulds do all the work on our own little piece. At harvest time, we split the profit.”
“Didn’t you go to school?” I inquired.
“I wents until I was around eleven, when I was big enough to work the fields. But you haves to know that schools were different back then. Black peoples, we hads our own little schools. We didn’t go to the school in town. It wasn’t until 1978 that they closed down all them old schools, and built the new one.”
“But the schools are integrated now?” I asked.
“Oh, no, ma’am. Everyone goes to the same school now, but theys ain’t really integrated. The black kids have their own classes with black teachers, and the white kids have classes with white teachers. They haves a black lunch, and a white lunch. They haves a black prom and a white prom.”
I couldn’t believe this was still going on in America. It was not the history I had been taught in school.
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