Oak Avenue (Dark Corners collection)

by Brandi Reeds

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Brandi Reeds

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542090636

  Cover design by Belief Agency

  For the girls who grew up in their very own Victorian house on Oak Avenue, and the guy who puts up with all of us.

  PDD

  1

  THE FIND

  “So how much?” I shift fifteen-month-old Sabrina on my hip to shield her from the blazing afternoon sun. Her cheeks are pink with the July heat, and while she must be uncomfortably hot, she contentedly slurps on her cup of organic apple juice and rests her beautiful head on my shoulder.

  “Well.” Bill the Tree Man—I assume not his given name—wipes the back of his neck with a red handkerchief. “Nearly every tree in your boundary needs something.”

  “That’s what I gathered.”

  “If you want to have the work done, tell Eddie to give me a call.”

  Eddie. I’ve never referred to my husband by this particular diminutive, but in the week since we moved back to his hometown, I’ve learned that’s how most people know him.

  The tree surgeon shoves a worn business card at me. It looks as if it’s been in the back pocket of his jeans through at least one wash cycle. I take it, although I know how to get ahold of him. My in-laws gave me his name and number, and anyone in town would’ve done the same. You want a tree taken down? You call Bill. He’s been here, in Parker’s Landing, nearly as long as some of the trees he fells.

  “Good to have the kid back in the neighborhood,” Bill says. “When did you marry him?”

  “It’ll be three years this September.”

  “Well, congratulations. Nice to meet you, Eddie’s wife.”

  “Anastasia,” I tell him for the third time.

  “Yeah.” He turns toward his truck, which is rusting at the right rear fender. A hand-painted BILL’S TREE SERVICE spans the side of the bed. “I look forward to getting started.”

  “Mister . . .” I check the card, but there’s no last name listed. “Bill. Wait.”

  He glances at me over his shoulder.

  “My husband’s career has him in New York every Monday morning through Thursday evening, and if you’re waiting for Eddie to come home to make a decision, you could be waiting a long time. With all due respect, if you want the job, you’re going to have to deal with me.”

  “All right.” His shoulders drop with his drawn-out sigh. “Take me through the property again. I’ll pay attention this time.”

  I bite my tongue before a you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me slips out. If I were anywhere else, in any other town, I might have told the guy to get lost. But it took the entire week to schedule an appointment, and no other services come out this far. Believe me, I tried.

  So I keep my thoughts to myself, walk the property again, and at the end of the second round, Bill the Tree Man says, “Have Eddie call. We’ll talk numbers.”

  “Really?” But I don’t have any more time to waste arguing. Sabrina’s hungry, the oven has been preheating for nearly half an hour, and it’s so damn hot.

  “Brave woman,” Bill says as he climbs into his truck. “Moving into this house.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He thumbs toward the house a couple of acres away, where my husband’s parents reside. “Mother-in-law factor.”

  “Oh. Yes, there’s that.”

  “You gonna take down that carriage house?”

  “I’m a restoration specialist. At least I used to be.” I peek at the structure behind me, which boasts a hayloft and cedar-lined room on the second level, and on the first, a pony stall and carriage stops beneath inches of mud accumulated over the years. The roof sags, the foundation is sinking, and the siding is rotting from the ground up. “I’d like to restore it.”

  He chuckles and shakes his head, as if he can’t believe I’d be so stupid as to entertain such a thought. “Good luck.” Clouds of dust rise beneath his tires as he drives away.

  “Mama?” Sabrina hands over her empty juice cup.

  “Yes, baby girl. I’ll get you something to eat.” I climb three splintered wooden steps to the door of the late 1800s Victorian, which Edison and I had purchased—without my ever seeing more than a photograph of the outside—a few weeks ago. He’d dreamed of living in this place since he was a little boy, but the Churchill estate still owned it and had refused to sell it for years, despite its vacancy. Needless to say, when the house finally came on the market, my husband placed a call and offered more than the asking price.

  We packed up and moved from Chicago to this eerily quiet little town on the southern tip of Illinois, where he’d grown up, where his family had rooted generations ago. Close to my folks, he’d said. They’ll help with the baby while I’m on the project in New York.

  He’d promised I’d love the town and its people, and while I’m certain his parents still aren’t crazy about me, the stranger who’d hijacked their son and eloped with him to Saint Croix a month into our relationship, he insists living here is a good way to hit the “Restart” button.

  Even without the prospect of help with Sabrina, and thus time to myself, the thought of living in an enormous historical home enchanted me. I envisioned polishing old woodwork to its former glory, and finding ancient trunks in attics and secret rooms or passageways behind old wainscot. Even approaching the house, I was giddy with excitement to see the wraparound porch, steep gables, and turret. Imagine my surprise when we opened the doors to shag carpeting and dark laminate paneling—neither of which has been en vogue since the disco age—and bicentennial wallpaper, complete with Stars and Stripes and bald eagles on shields. The only wainscot came in the form of the shag carpeting stapled to the walls in the upstairs hallway, and the only hidden anything I’d found was a store of dusty wine bottles and beer cans in one of the crawl spaces.

  Ugly doesn’t begin to describe the interior of the house. Not a square inch of Victorian charm had survived the 1976 renovation.

  I hate it.

  But it’s fixable. In a few years, when we have some money saved, we’ll tear into it and give this house the justice it deserves. It’ll be beautiful then. We’ll raise our family on this rare three-acre plot of land just outside this quaint town where everyone knows my name—Eddie’s wife, or to the more traditional neighbor, Mrs. Clementine.

  Across the room, Sabrina laughs in her high chair.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask.

  She eats a Cheerio—I gave her a cup of cereal to tide her over until the oven timer buzzes—and says, “Zo.”

  This is a new one. Every day she explores new sounds. I suspect it’ll be a few days before I know what zo means.

  I turn on a kid show to occupy her, and get to work. I try to unpack three boxes a day, but the task seems never ending. Being a mom of a baby under the age of two means my days are broken into fifteen-minute increments. Besides, there’s no storage in the kitchen, which makes settling in nearly impossible. I’ve stacked pots and pans in a corner on the countertop because
I refuse to hang them on the pegboard wall.

  That’s right. Pegboard. In the kitchen.

  My daughter lets out a belly laugh. “Zozozozozo.”

  The next morning, I stir with the rumblings of heavy machinery out on the lawn. Sabrina, who hasn’t slept in her crib since the day we moved in, yawns next to me. “Mama.”

  “Morning, pumpkin.” I gather her into my arms, rise from the mattress, and walk over to the window to see what the ruckus is.

  “What the . . .”

  Bill’s Tree Service trucks line my drive. Bill himself is in the middle of the side lot, barking orders, pointing this way and that.

  “G’morning, ma’am.”

  I gasp when I see a man tethered in ropes, sitting in the tree just outside my window. He grins and offers a wave. I throw closed the ugly green-and-blue brocade draperies.

  “Let’s call Daddy.”

  Edison answers on the fourth ring: “Good morning, my love.”

  I warm with the sound of his voice. “Hi . . . Eddie.”

  “Eddie?” He chuckles. “Since when do you call me Eddie?”

  “Just trying to be one of the crowd here.”

  “Well, from the sound of it, you’re doing just fine. How’s the baby?”

  “Wonderful, as always. She misses her daddy.”

  “Her daddy misses her.”

  “She’s got a new word. Zo. She’s been saying it since yesterday afternoon.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” he says, laughing, “but I hate missing all these things. In a few weeks, I’ll be able to take some time off, and we can do something fun together. Just the three of us.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “And, Ana? I miss the hell out of you too, babe.”

  “Miss you more.”

  “Listen, I have to call you back. I’m heading into a meeting.”

  “Just a second. Did you speak with the tree man, by any chance?”

  “I thought you were handling that.”

  “I tried. Twice. But remember? He wanted to talk to you?” I’d detailed the annoying meeting during last night’s conversation. “Well, he’s here. Overtaking the lawn.”

  “What’s it going to cost?”

  “I don’t know! That’s why I’m calling. I just woke up—”

  “Just now? It’s nearly eight there.”

  I ignore the dig and the implication it carries—that I’m eating bonbons while he’s earning a living. Or maybe I’m just stressed and making a big deal out of nothing. “They’re already working. They’re already digging at the roots of that old catalpa.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Go find out what he’s going to charge before we end up with a bill we can’t pay. I don’t have to remind you that things will be tight for a few months.”

  Because we paid too much for this money pit.

  “I’ve already tried twice to get a number out of him,” I say. “He won’t give me an estimate.”

  “Why not?”

  “Who knows? Because I’m a woman? Because I didn’t grow up in this town?”

  “Anastasia.” He sighs. “We knew moving from the city was going to be an adjustment. Give it time. You’ll meet people—other moms. You’ll have friends. People will like you.”

  “That’s not what I’m getting at.”

  “Can you handle this? Please?”

  “I’ll give it another shot.” No sooner had I hung up, managed to get Sabrina changed and my teeth brushed, than the doorbell is ringing.

  Quickly, after tossing on a sundress, I hike the baby higher on my hip and begin down the hallway. Just near the stairs is a door that leads to steps up to the attic. Being a six-panel oak door, stained an orangish yellow in true testament to the 1970s, it obviously isn’t original to the structure. It’s always slightly ajar, as it appears a hair too wide for its frame, but this morning it’s wide open.

  My breath catches in my throat with the sight of it. How could a door that needs coercion to move even an inch have swung open on its own? Perhaps the vibration of all the machinery outside had something to do with it. After giving it another shove—it begrudgingly scrapes its way into position—I head down the stairs to answer the doorbell, which is ringing again.

  There stands Bill, already sweating, already dirty. When I open the door, he offers a handwritten contract. I glance at the bottom line. Seventy-three hundred and change.

  Wow.

  “We may have to do the work in installments.”

  “Trees gotta come down before they fall. This one here’s rotten at the core.” He thumbs over his shoulder at a nearby pear tree. “Get it? It’s a fruit tree. Rotten at the core.”

  “Yes. Funny. And I understand, but Edison and I—”

  “I do the work. Eddie pays me when he pays me. It’s gotta be done.”

  “Okay, I’ll just give Ed a call, and—”

  “You got a minute? We found something I think you oughta see.”

  I follow him out to the yard, to the roots of the catalpa. There, embedded in the soil, a couple of feet beneath the surface, is a door.

  “We’re digging it out by hand,” Bill says. “A shock we didn’t split it when we drove the backhoe over it.”

  “What’s it doing there?”

  “Who knows? Far as I can tell, it’s intact.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I manage to say. But beautiful can’t begin to describe it. Mesmerizing is more like it, especially because you don’t expect to see this sort of thing buried in the ground. It has exactly the type of Victorian detailing I’d hoped to find inside this place.

  Three men scrape their shovels against the door, which boasts four horizontal recessed panels, each trimmed with applied molding. And at the top, in the space where a fifth panel might be, is an ornate iron grate. Its pattern matches the one original heat register in the house, in the nursery.

  “What do you want us to do with it?” Bill asks.

  “Strange that it’s not rotted,” one of the men says. “Being in the dirt so long.”

  “How long’s it been here?” I ask.

  “Probably tossed out with the last rehauling of the house,” Bill says. “Maybe missed the dumpster, and with all the dirt moving around for the back addition in ’76, got covered up.”

  “If it’s salvageable—” I begin.

  “It’s preserved,” Bill says. “Strangest thing.”

  “Could you bring it to the back patio so I can clean it up? I’d love to use it in the renovation.”

  He chuckles. “It’ll be a lot of work. You’ll have to treat it like reclaimed wood. Spray it with pesticide, scrape off all the paint, which probably has lead in it, and you have a child to think about . . .”

  “I don’t mind hard work.” I straighten. “I’ll be right back. I’d like to measure it.”

  “I got it.” One of the laborers stretches a tape measure over it. “Thirty-four and seven-eighths by . . .” He adjusts the tape measure. “Eighty-one and a quarter. Odd size. Most doors are about three-quarters of an inch shorter. Wonder if it’ll fit anywhere.”

  “I’ll trim it if I have to.” I want this door in my house. I want the place to look as grand as it once did. I want this move to no-man’s-land to be worth it.

  “Okay, then,” Bill says. “If that’s what you want. Maybe you want to call your husband to be sure.”

  “I’m sure my husband would agree.”

  Before he can do his damnedest to make me feel like a fool, I go back inside, where the old air conditioner—the one element of the bicentennial renovation I don’t mind, even if it is on its last legs—sputters to life.

  I clip up my hair, feed my baby, begin unpacking another box.

  But I can’t stop thinking about the door. Why would anyone have tossed out such a gorgeous architectural piece, only to replace it with something ordinary? And if Bill’s theory is correct and it really was meant to land in a dumpster, who would’ve left it on the ground to be covered by over forty
years of earth?

  The hum of the machinery outside rattles this old place; I feel the grind of the gears in my teeth, in my bones.

  And when Sabrina and I go upstairs to dress for a walk to the park, the attic door stands open, as if I’d never negotiated it closed. Wood swells with summer heat—I know this—and perhaps the cooling system has caused the door to shrink back and glide open. It’s a better explanation than those skipping through my mind: that I’m losing it and never closed the door to begin with, or that there’s something living in the attic that doesn’t pay rent—a squirrel or raccoon or, heaven forbid, a rat pushing against it from the other side.

  I shove the door closed again, and with great effort, it finally pops back into place. The latch doesn’t catch because it doesn’t line up; all the years of settling haven’t been kind. But I lean into the door and, once it’s closed, give it a tug to test it. It won’t budge. “That ought to do it,” I say aloud.

  This time, however, I notice something as I’m walking away. The ugly attic access door is shorter than its frame—by about three-quarters of an inch.

  2

  THE WHISPER

  It’s nearly midnight, but I can’t sleep, so I’m reading in the hallway, so as not to wake Sabrina by keeping a light on. They say the key to getting enough rest when your kids are young is to sleep when they do, but I can’t rein in my thoughts tonight. Even the book in my hands can’t pull my attention from the state of this house. I imagine what this place will look like when I’m finished with it—once the door is in place at the foot of the attic stairs, once these cheap metal registers are replaced with replicas of the original iron grates, once the walls are painted and the carpeting is hauled off the property in a dumpster.

  There’s nothing I can do about the probably asbestos-ridden dropped ceiling in the dining room, or the god-awful, dysfunctional kitchen until we manage to build our savings back up, but that doesn’t mean I have to live with this gaudy décor forever. Elbow grease, and my time, won’t cost anything. I can get this place looking nicer than it does, and the sooner, the better.

  I peek into the master bedroom, find Sabrina still fast asleep, and decide, Why not get started? I’ll feel better about being here if the place feels more like home.