THE HOUSE ON SEVENTH STREET
KAREN VORBECK WILLIAMS
“Nancy, every place you go, it seems as if mysteries just pile up one after another.”
—Carolyn Keene, The Message in the Hollow Oak
“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
Booktrope Editions
Seattle WA 2015
Copyright 2015 Karen Vorbeck Williams
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Cover Design by Rhianna Davies
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
Print ISBN 978-1-5137-0210-0
EPUB ISBN 978-1-5137-0252-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015911450
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
Epilogue
About the Author
More Great Reads fsrom Booktrope
For Bette, my mother
Acknowledgments
A huge debt of gratitude goes to Marcia Ford. Writing a book is a solitary task until the manuscript is ready for an editor. You hope your editor will care about your work as much as you do. Marcia did, and for that alone, I can’t thank her enough. To editor Angie Kiesling, thank you for your good-natured mad dash to the deadline for the BEA. Lee Rudolph, I truly appreciate that you mounted a white horse and came to my rescue. During the long life a book has on the road to publication, editor Laurel Busch appeared as a gift. I am grateful to her and my Booktrope team. Thanks also to my agent, Carolyn Jenks, who is brilliant and tends to lead with her heart. I happen to be lucky enough to have two highly talented family members who have also contributed to the success of this book. David Ragsdale and Meredith Rubin, you are and always have been the lights in my life and a real help to me. Architect Bruce Landenberger kindly agreed to draw the floorplans for the house. Thanks, Bruce. The Nancy Drew mysteries I enjoyed as a kid inspired this book. Carolyn Keene—with all “her” many faces—not my schoolteachers, taught me that reading could be fun.
Prologue
October 1998
NEVER IN THE HISTORY of the old house on Seventh Street had anyone locked the kitchen door. A locked front door was caution enough in Grand Junction. One October morning, Henry Grumman opened the door, stepped out into the sunshine, and shuffled toward the ‘86 Cadillac in the driveway. It was Sunday, time for his weekly drive.
He opened the car door and settled in the driver’s seat, then backed down the drive away from the old house where he was born. Heading south, he drove through a neighborhood that had not changed in fifty years. For Henry Grumman, sights in town had never lost their appeal. He welcomed the old streets leading to old parks, public buildings, stores, and his favorite, the railroad station with its fine brick depot built when he was a boy. Of the people he had known over his lifetime, most were now dead or had moved away. In Henry’s memory, they still lived in the houses and worked at the stores. These days he was just a little forgetful, just a little more comfortable in the past than the present.
This Sunday he wanted to visit Unaweep Canyon and drove south out of town into the desert. Whitewater and the mouth of the canyon were only fifteen miles away. He remembered the stories his father had told about the early days, when there was nothing here but desert—just brown tracks through the dry white lakebeds. Back then, timbers were left alongside the way for stranded travelers to lay over a flooded wash or a sink of mud. Folks depended upon that and the blanket and water they carried in the trunk. If there was trouble, a car might have to wait for hours before another car came along. There was no need for that now. He felt pride in the progress made, grateful for the ease with which he now traveled.
Henry turned right at State Road 141 and soon entered the canyon. He slowed and rolled down his windows. How fresh and green the air smelled! He looked up at red canyon walls to his right and across the divide to the other side, the colors muted and misty through highflying dust in the air.
Over the years, he had come to Unaweep Canyon with his first wife, Nora. She had loved the canyon. Nora was an artist, the mother of his daughters, a beautiful woman he had married in 1937. They had twenty-three years together before her fatal heart attack. She always brought a lunch and a sketchpad along. He brought his camera and they would stay all day walking trails or just sitting and taking in the view, hardly talking. He had kept all her paintings and drawings and still thought about her every day.
Alongside State Road 141, the colors of fall had come on. Shrub oak and skunk brush glowed red, tall grasses flamed gold against low spreads of straw colored cheat grass, weathered sagebrush stood gray and dusty green. In spring, the canyon floor held green meadows and patches of wild blue lupine. In time for Henry’s visit, the aspen and cottonwood trees had turned yellow below the dark shaded cliffs—and above everything a piercing blue sky. He came here because he felt like he was part of the cliffs and distant views—like the way he felt he was part of the town. He was more at home here than he had ever been in the rooms on Seventh Street, and not since his wife, Nora, had he felt part of another human being.
Once, Nora had told him what the Indian word “unaweep” meant. He tried to remember.
Though he had wanted sons, Nora had two daughters. He had not known how to be a father to them. He would have known with sons. He would have taught them the business, taken them fishing, and to ball games—maybe even played catch in the driveway. His daughters were both very pretty girls. He was glad of that, but he hadn’t known how to talk with them, or what went on in their heads. He didn’t know what to teach them—except for correcting their childish English and making them put their napkins in their laps. Later he taught them how to waltz and foxtrot.
Looking back on the past to his failures made him uncomfortable, but sometimes those things rudely pushed into his mind and before he knew it, he would linger there for a time. Henry knew he had not been much of a father to those girls. He regretted that.
He turned left on a dirt road heading toward cli
ffs formed of granite and large Dakota sandstone blocks. The road would take him up to the overlook—the place he liked to sit and watch the clouds roll in. From that spot, he could see illimitable space stretching west to Utah and onward.
The old Cadillac bumped along the dusty road following the curves of the foothills and the crevices in the canyon walls. From a distance, the cliffs appeared as a solid face, but up close there were openings, gorges carved through the ages by streams and wind. The road took him there.
Canyon with two mouths, he remembered. That’s what “unaweep” means.
The road narrowed, becoming steeper and more twisted as he pushed his old car over imbedded stones and deep ruts. She groaned and whined, her wheels spun in loose gravel, and he gave her more gas. He had sat in the driver’s seat since he was twelve. Henry knew how to maneuver a car over rutted roads. The car responded to him. Master of this day’s adventure, Henry rolled up his window to keep out the dust and the road wound higher, above a deep ravine.
Henry was beginning to think he had taken the wrong road. He did not remember driving so long on such a rough road to his favorite overlook. He could see a dry creek bed far below and the road was so bumpy that he wanted to turn around and go back. This was not the road he knew.
Henry pushed the car on, looking for a place wide enough to turn around, but if anything, the road narrowed. Pushing on, he felt the undercarriage hit hard against a stone in the road. He bounced in his seat, his head almost hitting the ceiling. Still no turnaround. He gave it the gas and felt something rip from below. The car gasped and came to a stop. Smoke came from under the hood and soon flames.
Henry quickly opened the door and looked straight down at a deep ravine. There was no place to put his feet on solid ground. Something was on fire. He could smell it. Struggling to breathe, his heart pounding, he scrambled over to the passenger door. Fire licked up the hood. Flames darted toward the windshield.
Henry tumbled out to the road. The intense heat forced him to his knees. Aware that he had better get as far away from the car as he could, he grabbed onto a sapling growing between the rocks above his head and struggled to his feet.
No longer fast on his feet, Henry felt his heart beat, his lungs clamp down as he tried to run up the road. Fighting for each breath, his legs like water, he hoped he would not fall. The very moment that hope came to mind, he felt his right ankle twist and he stumbled. His hands reached out to break his fall. His wrists crumbled from the weight of his body and he fell on his face, crushing his glasses.
Raw fear propelled him to his knees. He pulled up and looked back over his shoulder. The whole car was in flames. Henry tried to stand, but his ankle would not hold him. He crawled until his knees were bloody and he could no longer feel the heat of the fire. He turned for a look in time to see and hear the explosion.
As if he had come to the end of a long race, Henry pulled himself up on a flat rock at the edge of the ravine. Still struggling to catch his breath, he looked toward what was left of the burning car. Sparks flew and bits of flaming debris floated down to the parched streambed.
He looked out over the canyon to the distant cliffs and off to the west, to the endless mesas and mountain rises, and a sky of drifting clouds. Henry knew he could not walk out of there. There was little chance that he would be found. This was the place where he would die.
He thought of his daughters, remembering that he had left them a fortune. They would want for nothing.
Henry looked out over the view he loved so well knowing that tonight he would see the sun set and fall away, leaving him alone in the dark.
1
June 1999
WINNA JESSUP PARKED outside the old house on Seventh Street and slowly got out of the car. She turned to look past the circular drive to the lawns and how the house rested in what was left of the gardens. Wondering if there had ever been a time when the sight of her grandparents’ house did not excite her, she stopped a moment to study the eighty-seven-year-old frame structure, its tall windows, its turret with the bell dome, and the carved garlands under the eaves. Except for the remaining curls of white paint, the trim lay nearly bare; the house’s once gray-green paint had faded to chalk and was peeling. Winna thought it looked like Dickens’ vision of Miss Havisham’s moldy wedding cake.
She turned to the broad street and the sidewalk. Winna and her sister had played hopscotch and jacks on the neighborhood’s smooth sidewalks. Now, more than fifty years later the pavement was cracked and heaved up by tree roots, a sight that made Winna feel old. Wondering if little girls still played sidewalk games, she thought back to her daughter’s childhood. Had Emily? She couldn’t remember.
Shaded by towering trees, Seventh Street was home to imposing old houses settled in like becalmed ships in a green sea of well-nourished lawns. Most of the houses, in random architectural styles, were built within the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century. Seventh Street had always been the right address.
First Winna wanted to look at the gardens where so many happy childhood memories took root. Stepping through ankle deep lawn, she approached her grandmother’s rose garden, once the most formal part of the landscape. The ornate cast-iron birdbath still stood at the center of the cross-path. How strange, she thought, someone has recently edged the beds.
When she was a child, the garden’s neat grass paths running along the mounded beds of roses had been her favorite place to play. Standing there in its ruins, Winna remembered how important that garden had been to her. With their dolls, she and her sister Chloe had pretended that the paths were rooms. She and Chloe had hidden behind fragrant rose walls during a game of hide and seek with neighborhood friends. Most days they played alone, spending all day in the garden. When their grandmother called, they would run to the summerhouse where lunch waited.
Winna’s grandmother and the rose garden had declined together and after her death, it fell into ruin. Her father, Henry, who had lived in the house the last twenty years of his life, wasn’t a gardener. All but the red rose still climbing over the summerhouse had long since disappeared.
The birdbath had not changed, held as it was by a slender lady whose iron arms cradled it at her waist. It was empty, the bowl encrusted with the dust of dried algae. A sudden breath of wind rustled the leaves in the trees across the lawn, bringing Winna a memory. Her grandmother had given her the job of keeping the birdbath filled with water.
Dropping her handbag on the lawn, she made her way to the hose coiled neatly by the house and returned to wash out the dirt. The water rose in the basin and the sun danced in its ripples, evoking her little sister’s fingers splashing and stirring the water.
“Please let me do it,” Chloe said.
“No, you can’t. Gramma said you can’t because you left the hose running. You wasted water.” Even then, she knew that Chloe wished she was old enough to do all the more grownup things Winna could do.
Winna turned for a look at the old house again. Two summers ago, she had made her last visit to see her father. At the time, the house seemed to need a paint job, but now it appeared in terrible decline. She returned the hose to its coil and walked to the front of the house, looking toward the pillared verandah, up to the second story topped by a large attic with prominent dormer windows. In one, a shadow seemed to beckon. She smiled to herself and thought again of her grandmother Juliana.
Bordered by tall etched-glass panels, the grand front door loomed above the steps to the verandah. How gloomy the old place looks. They are all gone. Winna was stopped for a moment by the thought that her generation would be the next to die.
Digging into her handbag, she climbed the stairs, laid her hand on a long ornate key, and slipped it easily into the keyhole. The door gave way to a gentle push and Winna stepped into a narrow vestibule leading to the large reception hall.
The moment she opened the door, a blast of heat overcame her. The reception hall and the parlor looked lifeless and smelled of decay. Bracing herself, her face bru
shed by a spider’s web. Faded walls seemed to sigh, exhaling dust as she hurried to open the windows. Harsh sunlight slanted in through the hall and parlor, casting shadows across the floors, igniting the dust particles she stirred as she moved through the overheated rooms. In that light, everything looked callously abandoned and lonely. What had once seemed opulent and antique now looked shabby, neglected. Winna fought tears as she struggled to throw open the windows, but they had been nailed shut. Again she thought of her father, wondering what had possessed him.
Her father had disappeared the previous fall. For six terrible months, she and Chloe had wondered what had happened to him. From New Hampshire, her frequent calls to her sister were fruitless. Chloe had no news. With the snowmelt had come the spring hikers, one of whom found Henry’s body—food for mountain lions.
After his funeral and burial in the family plot, Winna returned to her home in New Hampshire. It took several weeks to rearrange her schedule, pack up her car, and drive over two thousand miles back to Grand Junction to finalize his estate and put the Grumman family home on the market. Everyone said she should fly, but Winna was in no hurry. She had accepted a job photographing the Dakotas, a history piece in American Roads. A fine art photographer, she had not done photojournalism in a long time and jumped at the chance. Eager to return to her home and her work in the East, she planned to stay in Colorado only as long as it took to settle her father’s affairs.
Winna was not prepared for what she found in the old house that day. In May, when she had flown in to arrange for her father’s funeral, she had stayed with an old school friend. The overpowering smell and heat of long pent-up rooms, the specter of draped spiders’ webs everywhere, the refrigerator now a morgue for leftovers, drove Winna out of doors, back to her car.
The house has been shut up for eight months. What on earth did I expect?
Exhausted and surprised by the sudden realization that she could not spend a single night in that house, Winna turned up the air-conditioning in her car and drove to a downtown motel. She picked up the phone in her room and called her daughter, Emily, to tell her she was in town. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she promised.
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