The House on Seventh Street

by Karen Vorbeck Williams

  Right away, in a lamb’s wool cape, Emily found a vintage aquamarine and amethyst necklace lying innocently in a pocket. She raised it into the light. “The colors—the stones are so large. What’s the period, Mom?”

  “I don’t know,” Winna said, taking it into her hands. “Maybe I should go get the book.”

  “We can study them later. Let’s just go mining now,” Chloe suggested. “We are assuming these are the real thing, aren’t we?”

  “Aha!” Emily cried. “The matching earrings are in the other pocket. Yikes, there’s something else—” She fished around and came up with a large ring.

  “It’s huge—diamonds—but what’s the stone in the middle?”

  “It glows like an opal, but it’s blue with green lights,” Winna said.

  “I want it. Oh, God, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It looks like the earth from space,” Chloe cried as she popped it on her finger. “It fits. It matches my aura. I’m so glad Daddy didn’t find these and hide them too.”

  From then on things went more slowly. The women probed every hem and pocket they could find. Finally, Winna came upon a hard lump under the bodice lining of a beaded gown. Carefully, she removed the hand-sewn stitches and revealed a lapis and gold bracelet.

  “This looks Victorian,” she said, as Emily and Chloe looked over her shoulder. “Look at all the pearls imbedded in the filigree.”

  The search continued. Winna found one gown with seven rings sewn inside the waist, then a glowing gold and red amber necklace. Emily pulled coral beads set with gold and pearls from the hem of a coat, then an emerald and diamond necklace sewn inside a fur cape.

  “It looks like something Elizabeth Taylor would wear!” she said, holding it up.

  “I love it,” Chloe said as she searched an elegant silk kimono. “You guys are finding everything.” She looked like she felt left out.

  “Wait a minute,” Chloe said triumphantly. “Here’s something.” Scissors in hand, she snipped away inside the cuff of a sleeve and pulled out a large piece made of gold. Chloe held it out for all to see. “What was Gramma doing with a rosary?”

  “What was she doing with any of this?” Emily said.

  “I think this is up your alley, Winna,” she said, dropping it into her sister’s lap as if it was contagious.

  Winna guessed that Chloe was trying to be funny. With a knot in her throat, she retrieved it from her lap and tried her utmost not to cry. She looked at the old rosary set with smooth-cut rubies and sapphires. It was very old, Winna guessed, maybe even medieval. During its long history, it would have meant a great deal to the faithful, but certainly not her grandmother. She wanted to kiss it, to claim it as her own, but knew that would be misunderstood. She put it on the bed with the other jewels.

  It was late and they were all tired—worn out with excitement, sated as if they had overeaten at a feast.

  “Where am I going to hide these?” Winna asked. “I sure don’t want to sew them back into the clothes.”

  “I know the perfect place,” Emily said. “Follow me.” She headed toward the front of the house, to the guest room.

  BEHIND FOUR LOCKED doors, Winna tried to sleep, but she was too excited. Thoughts of the hidden jewelry versus the rings and things she had found in Juliana’s magnificent jewelry box kept her awake. She assumed that the jewelry had been hidden for a reason—but why? Juliana had worn the jewelry in the chest on her dresser—some of it Winna remembered. They were gifts from her husband and parents, things she’d bought herself. Winna thought of the canary diamond and its value. While the things in Juliana’s jewelry box were costly and lovely, they could not touch that ring in value—and the jewels they had found that night, especially the ancient rosary which could be of museum quality, dwarfed the yellow diamond ring. Did Gramma have a love affair with a prince? Winna’s head spun wondering if she should get a larger safe deposit box.

  She could not sleep and padded down to the kitchen for a drink. When she opened the cupboard door where she kept the Johnny Walker, she half expected a hoard of precious jewels to tumble out like a pirate chest emptied on the sand. She splashed some scotch into a glass—about half an inch. Thinking it looked a bit meager, she splashed another half inch and dropped in some ice. She intended to lie in bed with the light on and anesthetize herself.

  31

  AFTER A LATE BREAKFAST, Winna spent a couple of hours working outside. It wasn’t hot, but sunny enough for sunglasses. She looked in the garage for Juliana’s old galvanized watering can and couldn’t find it, then went back inside. Had she seen it in the basement? Opening the basement door, she flipped on the light and began her descent. One of the stairs seemed to wobble. To steady herself she took hold of the railing.

  All of a sudden, Winna felt the railing let go. Instinctively, she reached for the rail on the other side, but too late. She let out a yelp and fell. Already halfway down the stairs, she did not have far to fall, but followed the rail as it broke off to her left, landing on her side among shattered pieces of wood.

  She lay there a moment on the cold earthen floor trying to understand what had happened. Across the basement lay the two holes hacked by her burglar. Winna rolled over on her hands and knees. The room spun. Deciding she needed to get her bearings before she tried to stand, she sat a while feeling utterly surprised and foolish. One side of her face and her hip hurt and she was shaking. Her sunglasses lay broken and twisted across the floor.

  Still afraid to stand, Winna tried to assess her situation. She moved one leg, then the other to see if she could. Nothing seemed broken. Still she felt too weak and dizzy to stand.

  She heard the kitchen door open and close. Surprised by her sudden terror, she tried again to get up on her hands and knees. Pain stabbed her shoulder and hip and she fell back to the floor.

  “Winna?”

  It was a man’s voice and she was a wounded animal hiding below, afraid to answer. She heard him walk into the hall, calling her name. The footsteps returned to the kitchen, to the open door at the top of the stairs. “Winna?”

  It was Seth. She shuddered and raised one hand to her face—the cheek stung. She felt terrified and embarrassed at the same time.

  Seth saw her. “What happened?” He started down the stairs.

  Winna could see from the concern on his face that he would not harm her. “Be careful,” she called. “One of the steps is loose.”

  Seth came gingerly the rest of the way. “What happened?”

  “I was gardening and needed something down here—I fell. One of the steps—I feel so silly—I can’t get up.”

  He got to his haunches. “Let’s see if everything moves.” He asked her to move her arms and legs. “Does that hurt?”

  “No, but when I roll over and try to stand, I get dizzy.”

  “You’re just shook up. Sit flat on your bum and raise your knees. Now give me both of your hands.” He braced his feet against hers and pulled. Winna was on her feet, dizzy, but upright and nothing felt broken.

  “Don’t let go of me,” she begged.

  Winna described how she had fallen and Seth slowly helped her up the stairs, testing each step before he stood on it. Once in the kitchen, he stopped to look at her face.

  “You scraped your cheek and are going to have a black eye,” he said, pulling out a chair at the table and helping her sit down. He packed a kitchen towel with ice and handed it to her. “Here, put this on your left eye.”

  “Thanks. I think I’d better find a chiropractor for the rest of me.”

  “You just sit there. I’m going to make you a cup of tea, then I’ll take a look at that railing.”

  “I hurt, Seth. Do you mind getting some aspirin out of that cupboard?” She pointed.

  Seth made tea and handed her a glass of water and the pills, then disappeared down the stairs. The tea tasted good. She sipped it slowly, promising herself a second cup, but first she wanted to take the pills and lie down. Carefully, she limped to the parlor and
stretched out on the sofa. She slept soundly and woke to the sound of hammering.

  Cautiously, Winna got up and made her way toward the sound. “Seth,” she called to the figure crouched below on the stairs. “What’s going on?”

  He stopped working and took a nail out of his mouth. “A number of these stairs are loose. It’s a wonder you didn’t fall from the first step.”

  “Come up. I want to talk. I’ll make tea.”

  “How about coffee—and I’ll make it,” he said, stepping carefully up the stairs.

  While Seth puttered around making coffee, he told her that the railing would have to be rebuilt and that several steps near the top of the stairs had stripped nail holes.

  “You were lucky. If you’d put your weight down wrong on one of those, the step would’ve let go.”

  “Oh, Lord. Maybe you should check all the stairs in the house.” Winna thought impatiently of her list of things that still needed doing.

  “I’ll do that. When did you have that railing worked on?” he asked, handing her a mug of coffee. “It looks like someone touched up the paint recently.”

  “That can’t be. I haven’t had any work done down there.”

  WINNA HAD A gruesome looking black eye. She had received an adjustment on her hip from a young chiropractor who cheerily informed her that falls were the number one reason for accidental deaths in elderly women. She spent the following days taking it easy, feeling stiff, sore, and—elderly.

  Chloe and Todd said they would drop by for a visit on Sunday after Winna got home from church. Winna was not looking forward to seeing her sister. She’d had time to think back, to stew over what Chloe had said and done when she found the rosary and was not ready to forgive her. She didn’t know why Chloe felt so free to put her down for her faith or why she had tossed Winna so many critical little asides over the years. Winna didn’t know how to deflect these comments and when she had tossed them back in the form of a protest or in anger, Chloe would say she was too sensitive—that she took everything personally. Chloe seemed to think that taking things personally was far worse than carelessly saying something hurtful.

  When she looked at her own behavior toward her sister, she thought of herself as understanding. She tried not to show her disapproval and was sure that she had hidden her judgments about Chloe’s casual approach to motherhood and all the men she’d lived with between marriages. She wondered if the undercurrents of her real feelings showed. Maybe Chloe was psychic—maybe that’s why she seemed not to trust her, why she sniped at her?

  Now, when they stood face to face, there was a huge gulf between them and Winna did not know how to build a bridge. She wondered what it would take to reconcile, to feel natural together again.

  WHEN WINNA OPENED the kitchen door and saw Chloe and Todd standing there, she welcomed her sister warmly. “I’m so glad you guys could stop by.” To distract from her lie, she smiled broadly. “What do you think of my beautiful black eye?”

  “Good job, Winnie.” Todd handed her a bunch of gaily colored supermarket flowers. “So you fell down the basement stairs?”

  “How sweet. You brought me flowers.” She hugged him.

  “Sorry we didn’t get here sooner,” Chloe said, pushing past Winna. She dropped her handbag on the kitchen table next to a stack of books and sat down. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, as I said on the phone, I’m fine. Just a bit banged up.”

  Chloe reached for one of the books in the stack beside her. “Gramma’s jewelry book. A Thousand Years of Jewelry. Have you looked up the ring I want—the big blue and green opal?”

  “Actually, I have and it’s called a black opal.”

  “Chloe told me about all the fun you gals had the other night,” Todd said, his eyes smiling.

  “Let’s go see them now—I want to show Todd.” Chloe grabbed Winna’s hand and pulled her toward the stairs. “Come on, Todd.”

  Chloe led Todd up the stairs toward the guest room. Winna followed. “They’re in here,” she said, running into the room, pulling the cushion off the window seat. She lifted the hinged lid and got down on her knees turning her head to look up at her husband. “Wait till you see these.”

  She reached in and felt around, then stuck her head inside the opening. “My God, Winna, the jewels are gone.”

  32

  “LOOK IN THE TRASH BARREL,” the authoritarian male voice boomed in the dream. Winna, hovering in a gray, murky place somewhere below, answered, “But all I’ll find is rubbish.” She was whimpering like a spoiled child.

  “Rubbish of rubbish,” said the judge. “Everything they left behind is rubbish. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will any who come after know you.”

  She woke with a start, certain that something profound had come to her in her sleep. In an effort to reorient herself and make sense of the dream, she sat up and looked around the room.

  Lit with early morning light, the stained-glass windows sparkled, sending shafts of violet, aqua, and green onto her pale coverlet. She thought again of her grandmother’s magical shade garden and the colors there, then of Juliana sitting here in the light on just such a morning, looking out that same window.

  In a moment of clarity, Winna understood the meaning of the dream.

  I cannot know them, not really. My search for the real Henry, the real Juliana, the real Edwin is useless. I can’t know the past—no more than I can know the truth—and what’s worse, when I die, no one will know the real me.

  The bedside phone rang and Winna jumped. She let it ring several times, then picked it up. It was John calling to invite her on a picnic. Could she be ready by nine o’clock? She hesitated, thinking of all the work she had to do.

  “I can’t, John. I’m so behind.”

  “Look, you’ve been holed up since your fall and I’ll have you home by two. You’ll have the rest of the day. Come on, don’t spoil this beautiful day with work. I’m taking it off.”

  Winna hesitated.

  “Aw please,” John begged.

  “Maybe it would do me good,” she conceded.

  “Put on something cool—sandals, a big hat.”

  WINNA WAS READY when John picked her up at nine. As she climbed into his white Mercedes convertible, she noticed a wicker picnic basket in the back seat. No amount of pleading on her part got John to reveal their destination. He headed west out of town as she told him about finding jewels sewn into Juliana’s old clothes.

  “But wait till you hear what happened yesterday.”

  “It looks like your grandmother hooked up with a rich man and it looks like you hooked up with a fist,” he said, referring to her black eye.

  “I’d better put on my new sunglasses so you can’t see,” she said. Their conversation had distracted her from the stunning view. “One last thing, then I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I want to be in the here and now.”

  “When Chloe and Todd came by yesterday, she wanted to show him what we’d found sewn into the gowns. She really upset me the way she pushed her way in. It was so obvious that she had come to see the jewelry, not her poor injured sister. I felt offended or territorial or something wicked like that. She dragged both of us upstairs to the guest room for a look and when she opened up the hiding place, the jewels weren’t there.”

  “The jewels are gone?”

  “That’s what she thinks. I didn’t tell her that I had put them in the safe deposit box. She thinks they were stolen. I still haven’t told her.”

  “That is bad—you are bad. How are you going to get out of this one?”

  “I don’t know. Do you have any ideas?”

  He turned to give her an affectionate smile. “Forget about it and look at the view.”

  Winna promised to try. “It’s been years since I’ve been up this road.”

  Built during the Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the drive snaked up Pinyon Mesa around sharp turns with precipitous drops to the canyon floor. Tunnels cut through solid rock in
places as the road traveled the very edge of the red sandstone cliffs, an impressive engineering feat, especially for back then.

  The breathtaking ascent into the blue cloudless sky was entirely familiar to Winna, like coming home. Twisted junipers and pinyon pines, the dusty green of rabbit brush topped by golden blossoms, tufts of heat-withered grasses, worn remains of long-dead pines gnarled and dry, lay along the side of the road. From that dizzying height, she could see dry creek beds lined with water-seeking junipers, meandering green ribbons at the bottom of the canyons. The faraway valley spread into the distance, fortified to the east by blue Grand Mesa and to the north by the white Book Cliffs.

  Suddenly, Winna remembered something she’d forgotten to ask. “Did you know your company tore down Whitaker’s boyhood home on First Street?”

  John looked puzzled.

  “It was on the site where you are building the donut shop.”

  “No. Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I found the address in the newspaper story about his death. Did you see the house—before you tore it down?”

  He described the house as a small bungalow. “But you should ask Todd,” he said, entering a tunnel carved through the canyon wall. “He ran the crew that took it down.”

  “Do you know if it stayed in the Whitaker family?” she asked.

  “Not many families like you Grummans keep the same house for eighty years,” John said.

  After several miles of steady climbing, he pulled over and parked at Cold Shivers Point.

  “This is where Edwin proposed to Juliana,” she said as they got out of the car.

  John grabbed his camera and they headed down the path to the canyon rim, Winna still walking with traces of a limp.

  “I grew up hearing stories about how Poppa had proposed to Gramma. They came up here in a mule-drawn wagon, with a crowd of their friends.”

  “Yeah,” John said. “Grandma got Grandpa at the very edge of the cliff and threatened to push if he didn’t marry her.”