The House on Seventh Street

by Karen Vorbeck Williams

  Winna watched Chloe check herself before she replied.

  “I guess you’re right. That makes sense, actually,” she said, thoughtfully. “But how much will I have to live on?”

  “Reed figures it will be anywhere between eighty and ninety thousand a year, depending on how it’s invested.”

  “Good Lord, that’s way more than I make now.” Chloe gave Winna a hug.

  “Look, Chloe, we don’t really know what’s in that house. Remember the ring I found? Who knows what else we might find.”

  “Let’s hope we find the Hope Diamond,” Chloe said, kissing her sister’s cheek.

  Winna laughed. “No thanks. I think the Hope Diamond is cursed. Now, why don’t you show me your paintings?” she said, returning the kiss.

  “Do you really want to see them?”

  “Sure I do. Then I want to tell you about Gramma’s short story—I think we have a mystery on our hands.”

  Chloe led Winna from the kitchen to the glassed-in back porch. “Look, I even have a northern exposure—it’s perfect.”

  Finished canvases leaned along the walls. Two easels with oil paintings in progress sat in the center of the room. The first canvas depicted the Book Cliffs under a stormy sky. In the foreground, a shaft of sunlight lit a peach orchard in full rosy bloom. The second canvas looked like Ute Canyon with twisted pinyon trees, a stand of yuccas in full bloom, and a hawk circling the evening sky.

  “Chloe,” she gasped, delighted. “I had no idea. These are impressive.”

  Emboldened, Chloe showed her everything.

  “My little sister has become an accomplished painter.” Winna was awed. The paintings were highly disciplined, uniquely styled, and finely crafted—by no means the work of a dilettante.

  The sisters spent the day together, talking about their lives as children. Chloe had not done well in school and confessed that for years she thought she was retarded. That was after one of her teachers forced her to read in front of the class. Chloe struggled with the words and her teacher embarrassed her by saying, “How on earth did you qualify for second grade?”

  “I had a hard start with reading too,” Winna said. “One night Daddy offered to help me with a new book. The words came slowly and I could feel his impatience. ‘I don’t have time to sit here while you horse around,’ he said. ‘Now straighten up and look at this sentence.’”

  “You can guess what happened next. I didn’t do well and he called me a ‘dummy,’ got up from the davenport, and walked off, leaving me in tears. I was sure I was the dumbest kid alive.”

  “I remember how you used to get in trouble,” Chloe said. “Actually, I hated the way Dad treated you. The way he looked at you put me on guard. Remember the time you were wearing a nice new dress to go and visit Gramma and Poppa—the day Lucky jumped up on you and put his muddy feet on your dress?”

  “Yes, and I kicked him,” Winna said. “Dad saw me and yelled, ‘I’ll teach you how not to treat a dog.’ Then he kicked me across the driveway.”

  “He was horrible to you when we were little. I was always trying to be as good as I could possibly be because of all the spankings you got. Then I got closer to Dad—loved hanging out with him at the store—he taught me to shoot—to drive. I guess that’s one of the reasons it hurt so much when he disinherited me. I knew Gramma favored you and hoped that Daddy favored me.”

  Winna forced a laugh. “Right now I’m going to forget all about that and try to remember something wonderful about our childhood. Help me.”

  Chloe’s face brightened. “How about the flume? I think that was my favorite thing.”

  On hot summer days, the sisters had played in the flume, a long metal trough designed to move water from the canal to the fields and orchards. It stood high over the ground, just big enough for Winna, Chloe, and the water bugs. No grownups could reach them, only voices calling them home. Feeling far away, the sisters laid back and let cool bronze water pass over their bodies. Up high, where the wind rustled the leaves in the trees, they watched the cars whiz by on the distant road and made up a guessing game: where had each car been and where was it going?

  Often in their play, they pretended to be orphans, but in the flume, they were orphan fairies having a bath. They made believe that they had been born under nodding blue flowers, lived on nectar, and dressed in white frocks spun from cottonwood silk.

  21

  IN THE SMALL adobe house high on Little Park Road, “Mood Indigo” played full blast on an old record player. The day had been reasonably warm, instead of unbearably hot, and Winna had driven into the foothills for dinner with her daughter’s family.

  Emily filled a wine glass with Chardonnay and handed it to her mother. “Let’s join Hugh on the deck.”

  “Aren’t you old-fashioned this evening,” Winna said, glancing at the Duke Ellington album cover lying beside the vintage phonograph. “I love it.”

  “That would be my husband’s choice of music.” Emily opened the slider to a hanging deck built into the rocks. Below and perpendicular to the house, the couple had made a garden of native plants. Cactus and yucca were the only ones Winna recognized. The garden birdfeeder was busy with doves and quail.

  They found Hugh waiting for the sunset with Isabelle in his arms. From that height, one could see most of the Grand Valley.

  “It’s like the view from an airplane and I never get over it,” Hugh sighed.

  When standing, Hugh was six feet tall, had a muscular build, and wore his blond hair and moustache in a style that made Winna think of pictures she’d seen of General Custer. He had to wear a jacket and tie at work, but when he relaxed, he wore jeans, plaid shirts, tees, and sneakers. Hugh never affected cowboy dress with hats or boots—he knew he had come from Boston.

  “Hi, Granny Winna, have a seat,” he said, rising to greet his mother-in-law.

  “Don’t get up, Hugh. You look too comfortable, but let me have the baby.”

  “No, it’s my turn.” He chuckled. “I’ll let you hold her when she starts to fuss.”

  Winna smiled at her son-in-law. Her affection for Hugh Rogers, the youngest son of pop-novelist David Tellison Rogers, was sincere. She knew that as managing editor of the Daily Sentinel, he held an important job, but most of all she loved reading his weekly column on Grand Valley history. Hugh wrote with humor and style. Emily had met him in college where they both studied journalism. Not long after their marriage, and by pure coincidence, Hugh was offered a job at the Sentinel. He told Winna that he’d had an interest in paleontology and had always wanted to live in the West where he could spend his weekends scouting for fossils. She was astonished when Emily and Hugh had moved to the town where she was born.

  He smiled at Winna, as if he understood how eager she was to hold Isabelle. “Here, Granny, take your favorite grandchild,” he said, handing her the baby.

  She received the child, who responded with a sunny grin, babbling and pulling at Winna’s earrings. “Are you going to join us, Emily?” she called.

  “Here I am,” she said, exiting the kitchen with a platter of cheese, olives, and crackers. “It’s hard to tear myself away from my masterpieces.”

  “I’m hungry,” Winna said.

  Emily’s face lit up. “I can’t wait to read the story—you did bring it?”

  Winna reached for her bag and pulled the old notebook from the side pocket. “It’ll only take a few minutes—then I want Hugh to read it.”

  While Emily read Juliana’s story, Winna gently bounced Isabelle on her knee and told Hugh the story her grandmother had told her years ago about her first love and his death on the train. At her story’s end, Winna grew silent as an old sadness crept inside and the landscape disappeared in purple shadows. She’d been having flashbacks to her first love and not all the memories were happy. She remembered how controlling and possessive Johnny had been, how his words had sometimes descended to abuse.

  “I think my old boyfriend John Hodell lives up here somewhere,” she said, watchi
ng the last gleam of the sun slip behind the mesa. “You know John, don’t you?”

  “Yes, we are very neighborly up here in the boonies,” Hugh said, pointing several hundreds of yards below and to the left. “That’s John’s house down there.”

  Nearly the same color as the boulders around it, John’s adobe house blended with the earth itself, red as sandstone. In the last dim light, the house took the shape of a large rock formation. As they sipped their wine and nibbled, they watched the sky darken and a full moon rise over Grand Mesa. The stars twinkled above, the city lights twinkled below, and a young coyote crept near the bird feeder in the garden.

  “Let’s put Isabelle to bed,” Hugh said.

  They left Emily alone, reading by the light of a hurricane lamp. When they returned, Emily had finished the story. She had leaned her head against the back of the chair. With her eyes closed, the notebook lay open in her lap.

  “Well?” Winna asked. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily sighed. “She barely disguised her characters and settings with made-up names. My instincts tell me she wrote her very purple prose from experience.”

  “That’s what Chloe thinks. What do you think of the fact that she didn’t finish it?”

  “She couldn’t bring herself to make it real. Maybe she didn’t want to spend her time confessing her adultery and mercenary tendencies.”

  “I think that she simply had a good imagination and embellished her love story,” Winna said. The thought of her grandmother having an illicit affair as described in the story about Charlotte Blackleash was hard for her to welcome. “Gramma had wanted to be a writer and might have thought a sizzling romance novel would be commercially successful. I’ve found lots of old nineteenth and early twentieth-century romantic novels on her library shelves.”

  “You’re probably right. But what if Poppa Henry was Adolph Whitaker’s son?” Emily added.

  “Emily!” Winna cried, then reconsidered. “I guess it’s possible.”

  “Well, who did Poppa Henry look like?”

  “He looked like his mother.”

  “Her hair wasn’t dark. Poppa’s was almost black. What about your grandfather? His hair wasn’t dark, at least not in the photos I’ve seen. Neither of them had Poppa’s coloring.”

  “No, but—that’s impossible. She already had a child in the story she told me.”

  Winna reclaimed the notebook and handed it to Hugh. “Please read this. We need your opinion.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Hugh said. “It’s getting buggy.”

  Emily had set up a buffet with salads and bread. Winna helped herself to a green salad, a delicious-looking Niçoise cold pasta, and settled down on the sofa facing the picture windows and the view of the valley. Hugh took the notebook and his dinner to a chair on the other side of the fireplace where it would be quiet.

  As they ate, Winna tried to make sense of things. “First we found the letter from Whitaker—written on the train and mailed from Rhode Island—which proves the story she told me long ago was true.” Winna took a sip of wine. “Then I found the letter from Juliana to Edwin, saying goodbye, as though she expected to die—her handwritten will enclosed.”

  Emily looked as if she couldn’t wait for her mother to finish her sentence. “That letter may have been written when she decided to leave her husband and go away with Whitaker. Maybe she wanted him to think she was dead.”

  “My Lord,” Winna said, realizing that if Edwin thought Juliana was dead, she wouldn’t have to worry that she’d be remembered as a faithless wife and mother. “Wait a minute. In the goodbye letter with the will, Juliana already has a baby. That jibes with the story she told me about not being able to leave her child and kills your theory that Whitaker could be his father.”

  “Why did Juliana keep the letter and the will—and who opened it?” Emily wanted to know.

  “As far as I can tell, she saved everything—I don’t suppose she forgot about it.”

  “It’s too confusing,” Emily said. “I think we need to write all this down.”

  “If you really want to be confused, let me tell you what the Denver jeweler said about the ring we found. It’s a clear yellow diamond, about four carats and worth over $120,000.”

  “How did it get to Denver?”

  “I mailed it.”

  “You’re kidding. Where is it now?”

  “In the safe deposit box at the bank.”

  “Good. Don’t ever mail a $120,000 anything again,” Emily said, looking distracted. “Is it a coincidence that a yellow diamond appears in the choker in Juliana’s story?”

  “Good question.”

  “Hugh?” Emily called, interrupting her husband who was engrossed in Juliana’s story. “How can Mom find out if Adolph Whitaker really died on the train?”

  “It probably got picked up by the paper. Do you know what year?”

  “Gramma told me he came back to town when Dad was about a year old. That would make it 1917.”

  “All you have to do is go down to the library and look through old editions—they’re on microfilm.” Hugh thumbed back a few pages. “Charlotte’s letter to Andrew is dated June 15—no year. But I wouldn’t count on the letters or anything else in the story being true. It reads like fiction to me.”

  When Hugh had finished Juliana’s story, he joined the women. “The young architect in the story could not have become rich enough to afford the jewels described—architects do okay but not that kind of money.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Winna admitted. “Maybe that’s why she stopped writing—her plot was faulty.”

  “In any case,” he said, “in the archives it won’t be hard to look through a whole year and even the years before and after. You can scan the headlines rather quickly.”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow,” she said, suddenly willing to abandon rooms full of work waiting impatiently on Seventh Street.

  Emily looked at her mother and smiled. “Okay, Mom, now why don’t you tell us about your old boyfriend, J-O-H-N-N-Y?”

  Winna laughed. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, was he a good kisser?”

  Winna rolled her eyes. “On a scale of zero to ten, he was a—ten.”

  “Is he still?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Winna joked as her mind flashed on scandalous scenes from her past when she and Johnny Hodell steamed up his car’s windows and matted the tall grass in the apple orchard. Stirred by her memories, Winna sighed and wondered if … no. Not now, she told herself.

  22

  1956

  ALL IT TOOK was for Winna to load up her old Mercury with a bunch of girlfriends for a night at the picture show and a drag down Main for Johnny to feel threatened. Then they would fight. She would accuse him of never taking her anywhere anymore, never wanting anything from her but sex, and he would say that was about all she was good for. Ashamed that she had become no more to him than a toy and furious with him for bringing that to her attention, she would break up with him again.

  But always after their fights, he swept her away by the sweetness of his apologies, the earnestness of his promises, the urgency of his kisses. She would go back to him, only to wonder in a very few days why she had been so stupid. Why she could not part with him. They didn’t talk anymore, not even about their plans for college because, to Johnny, that meant separation from her. All she knew was that he thought he would study history or business and that he wanted to be rich.

  One night, they parked on a dirt road that ran alongside a farmer’s field. The stars and a sliver of moon gave off enough light for them to make out the silhouette of a hay wagon parked in the middle of a newly mown field. Johnny did not reach across the seat for her, but got out of the car and walked around to the passenger door.

  “Come on, baby,” he said, opening the door for her. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  The evening was warm and dry as a bone. She crossed the field in ballerina f
lats and a cotton sleeveless blouse, her full skirt catching a sudden gust of breeze. Enveloped in dark night air and quiet, they walked toward the hay wagon. No words were necessary. Winna knew where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there.

  They climbed up on the hay. He first, his hand extended for her. He removed his cotton shirt, spread it out on the hay for her to lie down on, then crawled into her arms. She wrapped her arms around his strong bare back and looked up at the stars, shining like bright pinpoints in the sky. She loved him—loved how they came together, how he made her feel.

  Alone in the dark, deeply lost in one another, they suddenly found themselves at the center of a bright light. Winna screamed. Voices spoiled the night silence—hoots, whistles, laughter—mocking, suggestive male noises she’d always hated. Johnny took Winna’s hand and helped her up. They jumped off the wagon and ran. Terrified that someone would recognize her, Winna lifted her skirt over her face as they raced for his convertible. Petrified for her reputation, she hurled herself on the floor of the front seat and sobbed. Johnny sped away chuckling. He thought it was funny. She hated him.

  ONE AFTERNOON, AFTER they had parked a while on the canal road, Johnny looked her up and down and said, “Did you know you’re getting fat?”

  “I’m not. That’s not true—nobody else has said that.” She wanted to cry and rage at him. At the back of her mind, she knew she had not been picked for cheerleading last spring or homecoming royalty that fall and her pedal pushers did seem tight. Swallowing a huge lump in her throat, she looked at the emerald ring her grandmother had bought her, twisting it in the sunlight to make it sparkle.

  “Everyone wonders why I date you,” he said coolly.

  Winna couldn’t speak. She believed him and that scared her.

  “You are lucky that I date you at all.”

  She wanted to run. “You’re mean!” she yelled.

  “No one is going to marry you because you aren’t a virgin,” he said. He was quiet a moment. Both stared straight ahead past the canal as his words took hold of her. “I probably shouldn’t marry you either,” he said flatly, as if he were discussing the weather.