by Cameron Judd
A high and ragged chorus of “Hi, Mr. Stokes!” erupted among the smiling, floor-sitting group of mostly underprivileged kids, and Curtis lifted his face, smiled back at them, pushed past his shyness, and said, “Hi, everybody!” And then, “Hi, Miss Kendra!”
A moment later, he was on the floor, swarmed by the children, and glad he’d taken a shower that morning and put on a clean shirt and deodorant. It was easy to keep clean, living in Coleman Caldwell’s house, where there was a washing machine and dryer and Curtis’s very own shower on the far side of the basement.
He didn’t care what Amber said about it: life was good. Usually, anyway.
ELI’S HEART WAS POUNDING hard in his chest as the edifice that was Harvestman Lodge appeared before him. It was a bigger and taller building than he’d expected, made of gray stone and as sturdy as a courthouse.
He’d expected it to stand on an overgrown lot. Not so. The grounds were regularly mowed, and though a new mowing was needed, the growth was no more than two weeks’ worth at most. Despite the seeming tendency of all of Kincheloe County to treat Harvestman Lodge as That-Which-Must-Never-Be-Mentioned, someone was bothering to provide at least basic care for the property.
Melinda pulled the Bronco to a halt in front of the big building and leaned into the steering wheel to take a good look. “Who is the owner of this place now?” she asked.
“I assume that the board, or trustees, or governors, or whatever word you would use in the case of a fraternal group, would be the owners. Or maybe the overall national or international society the group is part of … ”
“No such thing,” Melinda said. “The Fraternal Order of Tennessee Harvestmen was conceived and created right here in Kincheloe County and was affiliated with no previously existing organization. The original purpose had something to do with … ” – she paused and frowned, pulling something from her memory banks – “‘empowering men of farm and field, husbandry and harvest’ to perform deeds of ‘charity and community good’ in accordance with ‘the best civic and Christian principles,’ or some similar phrase. Anyway, it also noted in what I read that Sadler money built the building, and several Sadlers were among the membership and leadership of the original Harvestmen.”
Eli was astonished. “You’ve been holding out on me, young lady – and not just in the way I’m always griping about. Clearly you’ve found some source of Harvestmen history, and from the archaic and stilted ring of the wording, I’d guess you’re quoting old published material. Am I right?”
“You are right … but don’t scold me for holding out. I found it just yesterday, and by accident. There’s an old so-called antique store a few buildings down from our shop, really more of a junk shop or thrift store, and I went in on impulse just to see what old books they might have. My dad’s birthday is coming up next month and he loves old first editions, mostly of the works of famous preachers and prohibitionists. Well, I didn’t find any worthy books for Dad, but I did find an old pamphlet about the Harvestmen. A manual, really. Procedures and rules of order and definitions of the various offices and how to properly wear the official sash and plowman’s hat (their answer to the fez, I think – the picture showed what resembled an Amish man’s flat-brimmed broad straw hat, though with the brim narrowed). I read through some of the material with the basic information and scanned through the rest, but when I went to buy it – I wanted to buy it for you – the old bag running the store told me it wasn’t for sale, that ‘Delroy would throw a fit’ if she sold it. I took it that Delroy is the one who owns the place.”
“So you don’t have the manual now, then.”
“I don’t. Sorry. I tried. And when she wouldn’t sell it to me, I went back further in the store again and did my best to memorize as much as I could of the ‘History and purpose’ section. I wanted to be able to repeat it to you as exactly as possible, but I may have a few words wrong. By tomorrow I probably won’t remember a word of it.”
“Well, I’m impressed with what you do remember now, and really appreciate that you tried to get it for me. I’ll be paying a visit to that antique store myself, and seeing if I can’t persuade Delroy to let me buy that manual, or at least borrow it long enough to photocopy it. I’m intrigued by this Harvestmen group, especially now that I can see their building, and I want to learn all I can about them. I’m going to go back through the microfilmed papers again over the next few days. I’ll tell David it’s for magazine research, and that’ll be true in part, but mostly I want to take a new look for anything published about the Harvestmen that I may have missed the first time through. There’s some story worth novelizing in that old lodge group. I can feel it in my bones, Melinda.”
“I think I can too. There’s that edge of mystery and even eeriness, you know.”
“You really memorized those archaic old sentences?”
“As best I could.”
“You are a remarkable lady, Melinda Buckingham!”
“Aren’t I, though!” She paused. “Well, here we are. Are you ready to do a little breaking and entering, Mr. Scudder?”
“Let’s go.”
THEY APPROACHED HARVESTMAN LODGE with no clear idea of how they would get inside. The building surely was locked and the windows latched. And if there was power still turned on, there might be an alarm system as well.
They went to the front entrance … locked. No loose hinges or rusted-out escutcheon plates, no misaligned latchholes or or poorly secured strikeplates, to handily provide them a burglar’s advantage. And a quick check revealed the windows were all latched closed. No broken panes, surprisingly, though a couple were cracked. If they wanted to raise a window for entry, it would require outright vandalism, the breaking of glass.
“Maybe around the side, or in back,” Eli said.
Melinda put her face close to a windowpane and Eli followed suit. Through the front windows they could see almost nothing in the shadowed interior.
They went around the east side to the rear, and discovered something that would make entrance into the building easy.
The front yard of the lodge, and most of the east side yard, were almost devoid of trees, but the rear of the building sat back into a big grove of oaks and maples. There was a gap in the trees in the part of the grove nearest the rear, with three large stumps remaining. A storm had at some point blown down trees that fell against the rear of the building and knocked down a big section of wall. The trees had been cleaned up since, but the hole in the building remained.
“Let’s go inside,” Melinda said, and took Eli’s hand.
THEY STEPPED OVER THE lowest part of the broken wall and found themselves in a long hallway that ran the full width of the building’s long rear portion.
“Did that manual include a map of this place?” Eli asked.
“No. It was all procedure and rules and the like … but there was a bird’s-eye-view drawing of one big room. Chairs, a stage on one end. I remember that.”
“Probably the meeting room of the lodge,” Eli suggested. “Let’s see if maybe some of these interior doors aren’t locked.”
But they were. Eli and Melinda rattled nearly a score of doorknobs up and down the dark hallway, which would have been darker yet if not for the broken-down exterior wall admitting shaded light. Trial of several wall switches had turned on no lights; the power was off. Only one doorknob turned, and it allowed entrance merely to a large janitorial closet, empty except for rolling metal wringer-bucket on wheels with a long-unused bone-dry rag mop stuck in the bucket. There was no evidence on either the mop or the floor that any mopping had been done for several years past.
At a big, boxy utility sink in one corner of the large closet Melinda tried the faucet. The water, like the power, was not on.
“Well, we still haven’t found access to the deeper interior of the building,” Eli said.
“Uh, Eli, you’re detective skills must have fallen asleep. There’s more than one door in this room.”
She was right. Eli had failed to
observe a second door on the far wall from the hallway side, this one positioned to probably lead deeper into the building. Eli started for the door but Melinda got there first.
Locked. But loose on its hinges, and hollow-core, lightweight. Melinda twisted and yanked on the door and found it had a lot of play and flexibility. The door bent just enough to let it pop open with ease.
The room beyond was musty, big, and because the heavy front curtains were drawn, darker than the hallway had been. Melinda stepped in first and knew right away they had found the main gathering room of the Fraternal Order of Tennessee Harvestmen, the room she’d seen diagrammed in the manual. It was drafty and cavernous, dust dancing in the sunbeams coming around the edges of the curtains covering the front windows. Those beams revealed several old wooden chairs and a few plain rectangular tables. The stage was on the west end of the big room. All the way down on the east end was a massive stone fireplace and mantlepiece. Melinda was drawn toward it, and stood staring.
Eli joined her. “What are you seeing?”
“See the lighter-colored place on the mantlepiece? The oddly shaped spot?”
“I do.”
“That’s exactly the shape and size of the plaque that hung on the door of the Rising Angel room at the House of History display. So Erlene was telling me the truth about that, anyway. And knowing that makes her other stories seem more credible.”
“UFOs and all?”
“I don’t know about that part, and the UFO had nothing to do with Harvestman Lodge, anyway.”
“Right.” Eli looked around. “Now that we’re here, I’m wondering what I had expected to find. It’s just an empty building … not much we can tell about whatever history is here just from empty rooms.”
“Maybe we should look around a little more closely. And with some light.”
They began to explore, moving back to the west end of the big room. Eli went to the nearest window there and tugged back the heavy curtain. Light flooded in. The two explorers wondered how long it had been since any significant illumination had infiltrated this cobweb-and-spider-infested place.
“Interesting,” he said to Melinda. “When I pulled back the curtain, all kinds of Daddy Longlegs spiders scurried up it. And some parts of the country refer to those as Harvestman Spiders.”
“Oh, what an amazing thing to find spiders in an abandoned building with a hole in the wall!”
“Okay, smart-mouth, we can do without your sarcasm. Let’s open some more curtains and look around.”
MORE OPENED CURTAINS MEANT more visible details. On the fireplace end of the lodge hall, which was sufficiently large and ruggedly made to generate phantom old-movie visions of Vikings sloshing cauldrons of mead and flinging gnawed legs of mutton to hungry dogs, they found three more doors. One was unlocked and the other two had been forced open by some earlier lodge infiltrator, so access was no problem.
In the area behind the huge fireplace they found what once had been an office suite. The office rooms were substantially empty, though one big oak desk remained in the largest room, covered with dust, grit, dead insects, and the droppings of birds and bats. A big desktop blotter remained in place.
The drawers were empty except for a few pencil stubs, one cheap inkpen, and a creased wallet-sized school photograph portrait featuring a girl, probably high school age, with straight-hanging, part-in-the-middle ‘70s hair, and on the back, the name Kelly and the date 1975.
“Anybody you know?” Eli asked as he showed Melinda the picture.
“I don’t think so. Then again, girls all looked pretty much the same back in the ‘70s.” She frowned and looked more closely. “On the other hand, she does remind me of somebody … who, though, I just don’t know.” She continued to study the image, but in the end shook her head and handed the photograph over to Eli. “Just a girl of the ‘70s looking like any other girl of the ‘70s.”
Eli nodded. “Isn’t it that way in any era? Girls dress and style themselves for each other, you know, then they copy one another until they all look the same. It’s a behaviorally confirmed fact. If a boy happens to notice a girl looks good, fine. If not, it doesn’t matter as long as the girls around them want to look like they do.”
“You’re an expert on feminine psychology now, are you?”
“You got it, babe. Can you dispute me?”
“No comment. Except that if you ever call me ‘babe’ again, you’re going to go through the rest of your days with a life-changing deficit of dangling body parts. You understand what I’m saying to you, big boy?”
“I understand, and I’m chilled to the bone hear it – uh, no pun intended. Regarding this picture, I bet if we knew who sat at this desk, we’d find he had a daughter named Kelly. That looks like a school portrait to me.”
“Hey, what’s in that cabinet there?”
It stood in a corner, a simply designed wardrobe about six feet tall. Melinda opened it, having to tug hard. Inside hung a few dusty, cobwebbed and insect-damaged robes similar to church choir robes or college graduation gowns. A few had intricately woven golden cords draping the shoulders … the ceremonial gowns of the lodge leaders, probably. On the sides of the right sleeve of each gown was a fabric patch bearing the emblem of a farmer behind a plow, with the words Honor est praemium virtutis below. Melinda recognized the same image she’d seen on the wooden plaque in the Hall of History display.
“What does the Latin mean?” Melinda asked.
Eli mouthed the motto out silently, sent his mind back to his hated university etymology class, and said, “Something about honor being virtue’s reward, or something along that line.”
“Hmm,” Melinda said. “Ironic slogan for a group whose legacy is apparently so bad nobody wants to talk about it.”
“It’s just a good generic expression that sounded sophisticated to a bunch of East Tennessee agriculture types, I guess,” said Eli. “They probably had no clue what it meant. Could have meant ‘My Auntie breaks wind in church,’ for all they would have known.”
“Don’t be crass, Eli.”
“Sorry, Miss Manners.”
On garment hooks on the interior side walls of the wardrobe hung several well-made plowman’s hats. Two bore gold cords similar to those on some of the gowns.
“The grand poo-bahs wore those two, I guess,” Eli said.
“I’m amazed any of these things are still here,” Melinda said. “You’d think vandals would have cleaned out anything even slightly interesting a long time ago.”
“Maybe the place is guarded,” Eli said, his own words spooking him. He looked around as if expecting a phantom watchman to appear from a shadowy corner.
“I doubt it,” Melinda replied. “If anyone cared enough about this place to pay a guard, they’d have repaired that damaged wall, too. Gosh, I hope we don’t get caught here. It could be my job and yours both if we were picked up for trespassing.”
“Yeah. So let’s not get caught. Or at least not identified. Maybe a disguise …” With that, Eli reached into the wardrobe, took down one of the hats, and playfully plopped it onto Melinda’s head before she could block him.
“Gross!” she barked. “There could be spiders or slugs or anything inside this thing!” She yanked it off and checked, and was relieved her fears did not prove out. The hat exuded a light tang of mildew, but no crawling critters were there.
“Sorry,” Eli said. “Just kidding around.”
She hung the hat back in the wardrobe. “It’s okay,” she said. “I just never have liked having hats stuck on my head, unless I do it myself. One of my weird little things.”
“I’m sorry … I didn’t – ” Eli cut off at once, and Melinda sucked in her breath in a sharp gasp.
They’d both heard it. Someone had just turned a key in the lock of the front door of Harvestman Lodge.
Chapter Twenty-Six
BY ALL RIGHTS, KYLE FEELY knew he shouldn’t still possess the key to the old lodge hall. It had been loaned to him by the building’s ow
ner as a gesture of trust and a seeming indication of support for Feely’s then-new idea of finding a replacement use for the building. “Keep the key as long as you need, Rev,” the owner had said. “Poke around in there all you want and see if it really could be useful for what you’re thinking of. It would be a fine thing to rehabilitate that old place, and its image in the public eye.”
That had happened in the early days of Feely’s ministerial work in Kincheloe County, and had been his introduction to the whole matter of Harvestman Lodge and its notorious but largely undefined dark reputation. Never one to leave curiosity unsatisfied when he smelled a good mystery, Feely had explored the building several times and early on had begun a long-term, unhurried investigation of just what the insular Fraternal Order of Tennessee Harvestmen had been, and what wickedness had happened among its ranks, if any actually had.
The lock turned easily under Feely’s key. Feely had several times sprayed a metals lubricant into the works to deter rust. He’d mostly ignored the hinges, though, and they squeaked loudly as he opened the heavy door. As the door moved Feely remembered that part of the rear wall was down and he could have entered the building without using the door at all.
He looked in and saw no sign of human presence, or indication that anything about the place had changed since his last visit the previous winter. He did not, however, recall having left the front curtains open. He couldn’t explain to himself why they were open now, or why that familiar-looking blue Bronco was parked outside.
He didn’t come to this place often, having no real need to do so. The idea for the building’s use that he’d put forward with its owner had faltered, at least for the foreseeable future, so any further exploration of the abandoned structure had no purpose other than satisfying Feely’s constant urge to explore and discover. He’d been that way since boyhood, when he’d often ignored the common boyish recreations of sports – something he was not good at, anyway – in favor of private exploring of woods and fields and abandoned barns in his native Pennsylvania. His parents had worried about his love of solitary roaming, thinking it might indicate some defect in his social nature. Young Feely himself knew they needn’t have worried. He was a normal, sociable person, fond of his friends and schoolmates and enjoying group activities such as Saturday afternoon movies, fishing with friends, and swimming. He liked the company of others, but often as not equally enjoyed his privacy.
