by Michael Rowe
I peered through the window at the interior of the office. The glass was streaked and filthy, but I could make out a good-sized room with two clumsy old-fashioned-looking desks placed at complementary angles; a large file cabinet against the far wall, adorned with eleven-by-fourteen photographs of Georgian Bay in all four seasons; and framed photographs of cottages, boats, and families swimming and waterskiing. The photographs were in colour, the hard, flat bright colour of cheap mass-produced commercial photography of the 1960s and before. The families portrayed in the photographs were likewise of that era. The office could have been a period film set piece, or a museum installation. In any case, it appeared to be empty, even though I was expected.
A mechanical bell sounded when I pushed the door open and stepped into the dim office, which smelled like lemon oil and dust.
From a hallway beyond the farthest desk, I heard the sound of high heels on wood and moments later a woman whom I put in her late fifties to early sixties appeared in the doorway. Her hair was done in a dated marcel wave that had already been out of fashion when I was a boy in Ottawa. She wore a lavender pantsuit that had seen many washing cycles and better days. Her face was heavily powdered, and her eyebrows had been plucked almost into nonexistence and darkly pencilled.
The woman, whom I recognized as Velnette Fowler from the reedy voice I’d heard on the telephone, peered at me through the thick lenses of the harlequin glasses hanging on the chain around her neck and said, “Yes, sir, may I help you?”
“Mrs. Fowler? I’m Jameson Browning.”
She seemed startled at the sound of my voice, and peered at me again. “Mr. Browning! Of course! I didn’t expect you until . . .” She looked down at her watch. “Oh dear, it was today, wasn’t it. I’m so sorry.” She smiled, showing a mouthful of dentures. “I’m Velnette Fowler. Welcome to Alvina. It’s so nice to meet you, Mr. Browning.” When she stepped forward to shake my hand, I caught a whiff of stale breath, and some sort of inexpensive powdery perfume long past its shelf date. “Did you have a nice drive up? The weatherman’s been calling for rain for weeks. We’ve all been pretty sure it was coming today, but it’s already after three in the afternoon and it’s not here yet. With any kind of luck it’ll hold out till you get to Blackmore and your brand new house.”
“Not that new,” I said, stepping discreetly backward and tilting my head away in such a way that I hoped wouldn’t make my mild revulsion at the various smells obvious. I smiled at her. “More than a hundred years old isn’t new. A new house would be one of the cottages on your window there.” I pointed to the storefront. “This one is a bit older than that.”
“Yes,” she said, pursing her lips. My attempt at humour was lost on her, and I was once again reminded of our telephone conversation when she’d bristled at my suggestion that there could possibly be any sort of hidden catch in the sale of a seventeen-room mansion on a private island in Georgian Bay, even for the not-inconsiderable price I’d paid. “Wild Fell is ‘a bit older than that,’ yes. Obviously you could say that. But I think you’ll see that you’ve made a superb purchase.” She peered over my shoulder out the window where I’d parked in front of her office. “Did you bring your wife?”
“I’m not married, Mrs. Fowler. I don’t have a wife.”
She raised her pencilled eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Oh, I am sorry,” she said. “I was sure you mentioned that you had a family when we spoke. Wild Fell seems like such a large house for a single man, it never occurred to me that you weren’t married.” She squinted again. “Do you have children? Forgive my being so nosey, but it seems like just anyone can have children these days, with all the divorces going. You just never know. I wouldn’t want to just assume. That would be rude of me, you know, to assume.”
“I have a family,” I said, more sharply than I intended. “My father is back in Toronto. He’s ill.”
“Oh I am sorry,” she said again. “I am sorry. I hope it’s nothing serious. Your father, I mean.”
“He has Alzheimer’s. He’s in an assisted-living facility. I may have mentioned that, which may be the source of confusion,” I said, knowing I had done no such thing, but wanting to get her off the topic of my private life. Aside from being none of her business, it had been less than four hours since I had abandoned my father at MacNeil. I was too raw to put up with this woman’s questions for much longer, and I certainly didn’t want to begin my residency in Alvina with an altercation with the local real estate agent. Whatever I didn’t know about small-town social hierarchies, I did understand that a woman who was responsible for the buying, selling, and renting of vacation properties in a town whose primary industry appeared to be catering to a summer population would know everyone in town, and be well-connected locally. “But as for a wife and kids,” I added with what I hoped was a winning smile, “there’s still time, right? You just never know.”
“Indeed,” she replied. “One never knows what the future brings. And marriage is a serious matter, not something to joke about.” Mrs. Fowler pursed her lips again, pausing for a moment before speaking again, as though there was something she wanted to share with me but had ultimately chosen not to. “It’s still a very large house for a bachelor, but I suppose you knew that when you bought it, so I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”
“I’m not going to be living there, Mrs. Fowler. I’m going to be staying there off and on over the fall and winter, and fixing it up. I plan to open it as a guesthouse next summer. A sort of bed and breakfast-type place.”
“Well,” she said. “Well, well. That will be interesting. Not much of a call for that sort of thing up here, but there’s always room for someone to try something different. Mostly people that don’t own cottages here just rent them. From me,” she added pointedly. “Still, I suppose it might be good for both of us if we keep in touch about all this.”
“How so?”
“Well, if this plan of yours actually takes off—that is, if you’re able to make a go of it, you could refer people to our office. You know. In case they want to come back to Alvina and buy, or rent. Likewise, I could let people know about your guesthouse or whatever, in case they want to try a short-term stay. Doesn’t that make sense?”
The idea of being bound to Mrs. Fowler in any capacity, business or personal, beyond this afternoon was more than I could imagine, but for the sake of civility, I smiled and told her what an excellent idea it was. The reality of the potential folly of my impulsive purchase washed over me in another wave as I looked around the office; the dated furniture, the yellowed posters, and Mrs. Fowler’s garish, clownish hair and makeup—all of it serving to underscore how very far away I was from home. And not just geographically. I felt lonely all of a sudden, and what I wanted more than anything at that exact moment was to get out of that dim, dusty room.
Mercifully, Mrs. Fowler changed the topic, switching back into the present. “Now,” she said, “I wish we had more time to chat, but I imagine you’ll want to get going before the rain comes.” She handed me a slim manila envelope. “These are the names and phone numbers of some of the local contractors you might need to be in touch with in the next few days. We’ve had the power turned on, but in case you have any problems, the number for the hydro office is in there, as well as the number for the water people. The house was built winterized, and as you saw from the structural reports we sent you, the insulation is top-notch, all things considered. The vendors had a new furnace put in, so everything works along those lines, too. As a precaution, we took the liberty of having some cordwood shipped to the house. You’ll find it stacked outside the back door, adjacent to the kitchen porch.”
“That was very kind, Mrs. Fowler.”
“Not to worry, Mr. Browning. We factored in the cost of the cordwood and added it to your purchase price. It’s the least we could do. We wouldn’t want you freezing out there on Blackmore Island. Alvina doesn’t need any more ghosts.”
The ph
rase struck me as odd, coming as it did from this humourless woman, my interactions with whom had been remarkable for nothing quite as much as their lack of levity. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand—‘Alvina doesn’t need any more ghosts?’ What do you mean by that?”
Mrs. Fowler giggled. It was a grotesquely girlish sound, from a woman her age. She covered her mouth with her hand as though suddenly self-conscious about her false teeth. Her face turned bright red under the heavy powder. “Oh, never mind me. I was just making a little joke. Forgive me, it’s nothing.”
“Yes, but what did you mean? You didn’t say ghosts, you said more ghosts.”
“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I didn’t mean anything by it. And I certainly didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset.” I smiled and opened my hands in what I hoped she would read as a conciliatory, welcoming gesture. Adopting as light a tone as I could, I said, “I was just curious. You didn’t just sell me the local haunted house, Mrs. Fowler, did you?”
“What a question. Of course not.”
I prodded her gently. “So what did you mean?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. All right, I’ll tell you. But it’s just the silliest thing to be having a conversation with a grown man about ghosts.”
“You raised it, Mrs. Fowler.”
“Wild Fell—your house—is very old. Alvina is a very small town. There are all sorts of stories about Devil’s Lake, even about Blackmore Island. They’ve been around forever and no one pays any attention to them.”
“Go on,” I said. “I’m interested.”
“Well, there was a tragedy in the early ’60s. My late husband—Mr. Fowler—told me about it. I’m not from here, you see,” she confided, as though to separate herself from the specifics of the story she was about to tell, thereby establishing both her distance and her neutrality. “I’m from up Wiarton way. My brother moved here and married a local girl. I was visiting him when I met Mr. Fowler. We settled in Alvina after we married. I wanted to be near my brother and his family. I was very close to my niece. Oh, it was all a long, long time ago. We took over Mr. Fowler’s father’s family business. Anyway, this young couple drowned not far from the house, from what I heard. It was a bit of a scandal.” She lowered her voice, as though the details of this fifty-plus-year-old story were too potentially scandalous to be accidentally overheard. “They were . . . unmarried.”
“And they drowned at my house?”
“Heavens no. Near there, I think. Devil’s Lake is a substantial body of water, you know. And this was a long time ago, as I’ve already said, so even if they had . . .
well, they didn’t, in any event. You have nothing to worry about.” Mrs. Fowler smiled again, not bothering to cover her mouth this time. “Only one family ever occupied Wild Fell, the Blackmores themselves, and they were very happy, by all accounts. It was a happy house. Mr. and Mrs. Blackmore’s son and daughter loved the house so much they lived at Wild Fell their entire lives. Neither of them married, you see. They were deeply, deeply devoted to one another, almost like a husband and wife. Very touching. Yes, Wild Fell was—is—a very happy house,” she said again. “The only ghosts you might have to worry about would be happy ones.”
“What a relief.” I smiled. “Well, maybe I’ll call it ‘Happy Ghosts Bed and Breakfast.’ What do you think? Do you think people would go for that?”
She again ignored my attempt at humour and picked up her vinyl pocketbook from the top of her desk and looped the handle over her arm.
“If we want to get there before the rain comes, we need to get the show on the road. If you’d follow me in your car, Mr. Browning, I’ll lead you to the house. Just follow me and you won’t get lost. In the envelope I gave you, you’ll find both a map that shows you how to get to and from Blackmore Island from downtown Alvina, and also written instructions. But if you pay attention when you’re following me now, perhaps you’ll learn how to get to and from the island right off the bat.”
“I have GPS in my car,” I said. “It’s pretty reliable. You know, in case I get lost after today.”
“Is that so.” She smiled thinly. “Well, that’s good, I suppose, but I wouldn’t want to count on one of those computers, or robots, or whatever they are, especially not out here up north. It’s too easy to get lost. It’s always better to write things down, I say. Till the day he died, I told Mr. Fowler, write it down. He didn’t always, you know, but then again, men don’t always listen to women, even when it’s for their own good. ‘GPS.’” She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips again, and this time her disapproval was unambiguous and implacable. “Just like voodoo, isn’t it? Everything is changing so fast.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “So, I’ll follow you. I’m the white Volvo station wagon right here. Let’s go. I’m excited to see my house.”
I waited until I saw Mrs. Fowler’s ancient navy blue 1962 Chevy pull out in front of me from around the back of the real estate office, then I started the Volvo and followed her through downtown, then turned with her onto the first of a series of rural roads lined with red, yellow and orange-leafed trees that took us deeper and deeper into the northern Ontario countryside. Her car picked up a steady cloud of dust and road debris in its wake. Mrs. Fowler drove so slowly that it would have been easy to follow her even without the cloud of dirt, and I kept enough of a distance so that it didn’t obscure my vision. I had to smile at her choice of car. While it was apparently in a perfectly fine state of repair, it was of a piece with the rest of the time-warp effect of her presentation. I imagined that she would be considered something of a character in town, and I couldn’t conceive that I was the first client of hers to find her a bit bizarre. Certainly to city eyes, she was more like a cartoon small-town Ontario character than anyone real.
It was the second week of October, and the maple and sumac trees bordering the road were already well into their seasonal change. After a while I stopped trying to remember the various twists and turns of the roads, one into another, and focussed on a visual memory of the route. The GPS would do the rest, in conjunction with what I had no doubt were detailed instructions by the fastidious Mrs. Fowler.
My sense was that we were west of Devil’s Lake and north of Alvina itself. Every now and again, I caught a glimpse of the lake through the trees, always on the same side of the car. From this I maintained a rough sense of direction without relying too much on anything but the scenery outside the window and Mrs. Fowler’s dust devil in front of me. I kept the driver’s side window open so that the crisp pungency of the air, particularly pleasing after the staleness of the real estate office, continuously fanned my face as I drove. Slowly, slowly, the sense of euphoria returned in increments as the anxiety I felt in Mrs. Fowler’s company receded and I imagined myself in the landscape as an owner, not a visitor—as part of it, not someone in an alien milieu with which he had no connection. When we had been driving for just over forty-five minutes, Mrs. Fowler took a sharp, sudden right turn off the road without signalling.
I cursed her under my breath, but followed her gamely down a narrow road, this one even older and less maintained than the ones we had already travelled.
Here, the flanking pine trees were so thick they actually shuttered the available light. There was a sense of entering an abrupt, dark-green dusk created from natural gloom and road dust. As I followed her car through the piney murk, I had the sudden impression of not moving at all, as though the car was stationary and the alley of trees was creeping past the window.
The effect was disorienting. I shook my head in an attempt to clear it, but the sense of travelling down an otherworldly, lightless corridor persisted. Then, just as suddenly, the trees thinned and the light returned.
Mrs. Fowler parked the Chevy in a flat clearing. Beyond it there was a glimmer of blue through the thick curtain of trees, and I realized we were at the top of a hill leading down a winding path to what I had alre
ady come to think of as “my” beach, with “my” dock. There would be an outboard motorboat tied up to it, the boat that had been included in the price of the house, and which would have a full tank of gas.
It’s finally real, I thought. This is where it all begins.
Wild Fell. My house.
Mrs. Fowler stood beside the Chevy, staring out in the direction of the lake, her back to me. When she turned at my approach, I saw that she held her handbag tightly against her chest, almost like a shield.
She gave me a forced smile and asked me if I’d had any trouble keeping up. “I hope I wasn’t going too quickly for you,” she said with no discernible irony or sarcasm. “I was trying to go slowly enough that you’d be able to get your bearings. Do you have a sense of where you are in relation to the town? Did you take mental notes?” Before I could answer, she added, “Never mind. In any event, it’s all in the papers. We followed the exact route out here that I wrote down on that sheet of paper. You should have no trouble getting back and forth from this point.”
“Well, it might take me a bit longer,” I replied. “Perhaps when we get out to the house, you can show me where the town is. I imagine the highest point is the tower room, right? I believe I saw a balcony in the photograph. That will probably orient me best.”
She looked at me blankly. “When we get out to the house? What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?” I laughed. “I mean, when we get out to Wild Fell and you show me around the house. I assume the boat is just down there.” I gestured in the direction of the water. “I’ll run you back across afterward, of course, and walk you to your car.”
“Mr. Browning, you know how to operate the boat, don’t you? Most men do. You don’t need me. I don’t really have time to take you out to Blackmore. It’s just right over there. You can see where it is. Here,” she said, fumbling in her purse before extracting a heavy iron key ring to which several keys were attached. She handed it to me. When I didn’t take it from her, she jabbed the set in my direction again. “Mr. Browning, these are the keys to Wild Fell. They belong to you. The house is yours now. You don’t need me to go out there with you. It’s self-explanatory. The various keys have all been photocopied and I have noted which rooms they are for. It’s in the packet of notes in the manila envelope.”
