Hollyhock Ridge

by Pamela Grandstaff

  Hollyhock Ridge

  by Pamela Grandstaff

  For Betsy

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. No part of this may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Copyright © 2014 Pamela Grandstaff. All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  The sky was still as black as the bottom of a coal mine at 5:05 a.m. when Ed Harrison delivered the Pendletonion newspaper to the residents of Rose Hill, but Diedre Delvecchio had already smoked her first five cigarettes of the day. The ceramic ashtray, a Myrtle Beach souvenir from her sister’s vacation, had three packs worth of butts in it from the previous day. Unless her husband, Matt, emptied it while she was out of the house, the butts would continue to pile up until they overflowed onto the kitchen table.

  Diedre scoured the classified pages’ yard sale section like a four star general studied battle maps in a war room. She had to prioritize the most desirable locations in order to outmaneuver her competition.

  There was one out on Hollyhock Ridge described as a moving sale. There was nothing like facing the daunting prospect of packing up all your worldly goods and then paying by the pound to have them transported long distance to make a family a lot less sentimental about their possessions. It was a little way outside of her comfort zone as far as driving was concerned, but for Diedre, a moving sale was like an open bar to an alcoholic. Tired, stressed, and preoccupied, those poor suckers would just want the stuff gone and were likely to let it go cheap.

  Diedre left the newspaper on the table, where her husband, Matt, would read it while he ate his cereal, before he left for his job managing Delvecchio’s IGA, the business his father began back in the 1940s. After he read the newspaper, he would place it on top of the newest stack, now five feet high, that was accumulating in the dining room. He wouldn’t dare try to sneak it out of the house. Matthew hated a fuss, and Diedre could kick up a fuss like nobody’s business.

  They didn’t use the dining room anymore; no point, really. They didn’t invite people over. Matt’s family stayed away. Diedre’s sister, Sadie, sometimes stopped by, but Diedre always slid out the front door and spoke to her on the front porch. Matt and Diedre’s daughter had stopped coming home for visits years ago. Tina was embarrassed, she said, for her husband to see the house, and didn’t think it was safe for her children to be in it. Frankly, Diedre found her daughter to be a prissy prig who overdramatized everything, her son-in-law a sneering snob, and their whiny children exhausting. If they did come, they would just complain about the house, or worse, try to sneak things out when Diedre wasn’t looking. People thought she had so much that she wouldn’t miss a thing. They were wrong.

  The kitchen table was fine for eating, and there was still room left on top for two people to put down two plates. Stacks of broken down cardboard milk cartons that Matt had tied with twine took up the rest of the space.

  A toaster oven sat on top of the broken range; they didn’t need the full-size oven just to heat up frozen dinners and make toast. The kitchen counters were covered in nested stacks of used plastic containers, the sizes sorted from large to small, from cottage cheese down to yogurt singles. The defunct dishwasher contained all the good dishes they no longer used, kept there since they were last washed three years before, after a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner with her daughter’s family that ended in a volley of recriminations that couldn’t be taken back.

  If Diedre was the hunter/gatherer, it was Matt who was the compulsive cleaner/organizer; Diedre thought it must be from a lifetime of stocking shelves at the IGA. She was a saver, just like her mother and father, who grew up during the Great Depression. You never knew when you might need something, but when the time came, she would have it. That was what she always said, anyway, the truth being something long-buried under the tall stacks of clutter in her head.

  Diedre made sure she had her smokes and a lighter before getting into her twenty-year-old Buick Roadmaster station wagon with the fake wood panel sides. Garbage bags full of plastic bags took up the whole back seat, right where she could get to them when she needed them. On the passenger side front seat she kept her purse, a large tote bag filled with extra things she might need, including pens, notepads, maps, a half carton of cigarettes, spare lighters in case one ran out of fuel, packets of tissues, several small bottles of hand sanitizer, multiple packets of sugar and sugar-free sweeteners, a plastic bag full of quarters, and several rubber-banded rolls of one, five, and ten dollar bills.

  Three years ago her husband had issued an ultimatum: she could only bring home things they ate or otherwise consumed, or he was leaving her. No amount of fuss could back him down, so determined was he to gain control. Diedre couldn’t imagine life without collecting things. What would she have to look forward to? Why even get up in the morning?

  Shortly after Matt’s declaration of war, Diedre went to work at her brother-in-law’s hardware store, ostensibly to help out after his wife left him. If she used cash he didn’t know she had, and if she didn’t bring home what she purchased, she reasoned, her husband would think he’d won and get off her back.

  In the back of the station wagon were several milk crates, a stack of newspapers with which she could pack breakables, a laundry basket full of bungee cords, and a hand cart she could use for heavier things. There was a roof rack on top of the car she could bungee things to if her finds took up all the cargo area.

  Diedre loved this car. It was her best friend.

  “Let’s get this show on the road, Beulah Mae,” she said, patting the dashboard, where a bean-bag weighted ashtray held all the butts from the previous day’s hunt.

  When Diedre pulled off the road just across from the house on Hollyhock Ridge, she was gratified to see she was the first to arrive. There was a junk man who sometimes got there before she did, and a few amateurs who had the nerve to knock on doors, waking up the homeowners and asking to see what they had before anyone else could. Diedre preferred to bide her time, and didn’t consider it fair game until the front door opened or the garage door went up.

  She rolled down a window and lit her next cigarette off of the first. She took the last sip of her third can of diet soda, and then tossed it in the passenger side floor well, where thirty or forty others were already attracting bees.

  The advertisement had said “8:00 a.m. to noon.”

  It was 6:00 a.m.

  It turned out to be well worth her wait.

  She got over ten years’ worth of Mary Engelbreit magazines for ten dollars.

  “I hate to part with them,” the woman said, “but I just keep moving them from house to house, and although I mean to, I never go back and reread them.”

  Diedre had found it was best to say as little as possible when someone was parting with something that had great sentimental value. You never knew what could trigger them to change their minds about selling. Instead, she pressed her lips together and turned up the outside corners in what passed for a smile, and quickly loaded the magazines into the back of her station wagon.

  Among other things, she also acquired five dozen Mason jars without lids for fifty cents a dozen, a raggedy patchwork quilt made from feed sa
cks for ten dollars, a chipped McCoy Pottery planter for a quarter, and a plastic jack-o’-lantern full of nails and screws for fifty cents.

  “How much for the child’s wagon?” she asked the man, who looked as if he was nursing a wicked hangover.

  “I was going to throw that away,” he said. “You can have it.”

  It was missing a wheel and one of the wooden side guards, but it reminded Diedre of one that she had coveted when she was a little girl.

  Other people started to arrive, and Diedre felt that familiar, panicky feeling.

  What had she missed?

  What if someone else got something she might need?

  Quickly she inventoried the offerings, and although the back of the station wagon was full, she had the feeling she was leaving something valuable behind.

  “Do you have anything you were thinking about selling that you haven’t brought out yet?” she asked the woman.

  “Well,” the woman said, and Diedre’s heart rate sped up. This was how you got the thing no one else knew was available. “Dave’s been after me to sell an old treadle sewing machine that was my grandmother’s. I don’t sew, and it’s real heavy, and he says he’s not paying to move it one more time.”

  “I sew,” Diedre said. “I just love old sewing machines; I’ll give it a good home.”

  The husband helped her strap it to the top of her car.

  “Will you have someone to help you on the other end?” he asked her.

  “Sure,” Diedre said. “No problem.”

  Diedre pulled back onto the narrow two-lane road that wound around Hollyhock Ridge, anxious to get away before the woman changed her mind. Although the reflection in her rearview mirror was now full of her new things, in the side-view mirror she could see the woman still standing in her driveway, holding the fifty dollars Diedre had paid her for the sewing machine, looking as if she was already regretting letting it go.

  Diedre trembled with the adrenaline revved up by the sale. This was a great haul. Many of the items were dear to the heart of that woman, and those feelings were now Diedre’s to enjoy.

  Diedre preferred a storage unit on the back side of the lot, where she could unload in private without passersby seeing her station wagon. She removed the pad lock and pulled up the garage-style door to reveal a thirty-foot deep by ten-foot wide concrete pad and cinder block walls with a ten-foot high ceiling.

  None of her husband’s compulsive organizing took place here. It was stuffed full, floor to ceiling. As she surveyed her treasures, a feeling of calm, much like the nicotine wave from her first cigarette of the day, flooded her body with a feeling of well-being. To Diedre this was a comforting nest of her secret things. She could come here and be with them every day, to admire them, to feel the safety and security they provided.

  Although it looked as if she couldn’t cram in one more item, there were still pockets of space available. She unloaded and stowed everything except for the sewing machine strapped to the roof of her car, and was standing there regarding it when a truck came around the side of her section of units and parked nearby.

  Diedre didn’t like people looking at her things.

  She watched two men get out of the truck. With their shaved heads, scraggly beards, and heavily tattooed skin, they looked to her like drug dealers; probably did business out of here. It wouldn’t surprise her. People were always up to no good. One man lifted his head in a greeting, but Diedre pretended as if she hadn’t seen it.

  Diedre removed the bungee cords holding the sewing machine to the roof rack and eased it down the side of the station wagon to the ground. It was much too heavy for her and crashed to the ground, scratching the side of the car. She tugged it into the storage space, and then pushed as hard as she could to get it all the way in so she could roll down the door behind her. But it was no use; she couldn’t get it all the way inside.

  To the right of the door was a tall metal filing cabinet. If she could get the sewing machine up on top of that, she would still have room for some more things.

  One of the men came up behind her.

  “You need some help?” he asked. “Man, you got a lot of junk in here.”

  Diedre didn’t like people looking at her things, or touching her things, but she knew she couldn’t lift it on her own.

  “I can’t pay you,” she said. “I don’t have any money.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “No charge.”

  He smiled and revealed brownish teeth, and there were scabs on his face from a multitude of sores, but his eyes were the scariest part of his appearance. Diedre didn’t like to look in them for very long. Those eyes didn’t care about anything or anybody.

  “Can you get it up there?” she asked, pointing to the top of the filing cabinet.

  “Sure,” he said, and then turned and called out to the other man. “Hey, Ricky, come help me a minute.”

  The two men took either end of the sewing machine, heaved it up to shoulder height, rested a moment, and then pushed it up on top of the filing cabinet. It teetered a little.

  “That don’t look safe,” Ricky said.

  “It’s fine,” Diedre said, anxious to get them out of the storage unit. “Thanks for your help.”

  “No problem,” the first man said. “Have a nice day.”

  As they walked away, Ricky said, “What a load of junk,” and they laughed.

  Diedre pulled the door down, turned around, and leaned back against the filing cabinet. Whatever was behind it shifted, the cabinet scooted backwards, Diedre fell back with it, and the sewing machine came down on top of her.

  It was odd.

  Diedre found herself floating up near the ceiling of the storage unit. All she could see of her body beneath the sewing machine were her pink sweatpants-covered legs and her tennis shoe-covered feet.

  She didn’t feel particularly upset; in fact, she felt calm and detached. She floated up through the roof of the storage unit, and watched as one of the men raised the garage door to her unit, and then quickly lowered it again. He opened the driver’s side door of the station wagon, looked inside, and then shouted something to Ricky. The first man then drove off in her station wagon, with Ricky following in the truck.

  Diedre floated upwards, above the storage unit facility and the hillside next to which it sat, and looked down on her station wagon as it rolled along the narrow two-lane road. As she rose even higher, she could see all the way north to the four-lane highway, and all the way south to Rose Hill. The higher she rose the more peaceful she felt, as calm and serene as the puffy white clouds floating in the beautiful blue sky. The sun was shining so brightly she felt enveloped in its warm, brilliant light. It felt a lot like how she felt in her storage unit, in her nest of things.

  Safe.

  Secure.

  Loved.

  CHAPTER 2

  Kay Templeton woke to the sound of someone outside her bedroom window. She looked at the clock; it was 5:35 a.m. Her house had recently been vandalized with spray paint, and she was not going to let that happen again. She got out of bed and pulled on her robe as she stuck her feet into her slippers. She grabbed her cell phone off the bedside table, and thinking she might need a weapon, picked up her umbrella as she went out the front door.

  As she rounded the house, umbrella raised, ready to do battle with what she presumed were juvenile miscreants, she was surprised to find Sonny Delvecchio on a ladder, painting the side of her house with white paint. He had covered the orange letters spelling out “DYKE” and was just starting on “WITCH.”

  “Sonny!” she said. “What are you doing?”

  Sonny was a big man, clad in paint-spattered coveralls and scuffed work boots. He leaned back and looked her up and down.

  “Good morning, Mary Poppins,” he said. “Nice getup.”

  Kay lowered her umbrella, adjusted her robe, and smoothed down her hair as she walked through the tall, dew-soaked grass. The morning fog from the Little Bear River was thick in the air, and she cou
ld only see about half a block in any direction.

  “That’s evidence,” Kay said. “I don’t think I’m allowed to paint over it, yet.”

  “Well, now, I asked that substitute chief of police if he thought it’d be all right, cause it makes me so doggone mad every time I see it, and he said if you didn’t know anything about it you couldn’t be blamed. Think of it as a random act of reverse vandalism. I figure there’ve been enough pictures taken of it that nobody’s likely to forget what it looked like.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Sonny,” Kay said. “It’s been three weeks, but every time I look at it, it feels as bad as the first time.”

  “There’s not a person worth anything who could believe you’d have anything to do with black magic, and I’m pretty sure you don’t prefer the ladies; not that there’s anything wrong with that. I prefer the ladies myself.”

  He gave Kay an appreciative look that flustered her.

  “Jumbo wrote it about my foster daughter,” Kay said. “She’s on vacation with friends in Florida, so I’m glad she won’t have to see it when she gets back.”

  “Grace Branduff is a pip,” Sonny said. “Jacob Branduff was an ornery cuss, but she’s a good ‘un. Matt says Grace is the best worker he’s ever had at the IGA.”

  Sonny was the oldest brother of four in the Delvecchio family, and owned Delvecchio’s Hardware; Matt ran the IGA, Paul and his wife, Julie, owned PJ’s Pizza, and Anthony owned an insurance agency. Their mother was a tall, statuesque Italian beauty named Antonia; their father, Sal, was a tiny man who suffered from horrible emphysema.

  “I’ll leave you to get on with it,” Kay said. “Come in for some coffee when you’re done.”

  As Kay walked back toward the front of her house, she saw Diedre Delvecchio driving down Peony Street in her shabby station wagon. Kay waved but of course Diedre pretended not to see her. Diedre liked to pretend Kay didn’t exist, and Kay was glad to accommodate her.