by Tena Frank
“We should take a vacation,” Cally announced later at dinner.
“We were just on vacation.” Laurel seemed preoccupied. Cally noticed how she avoided eye contact and how her usual radiant smile was gone.
“I know, but I’ve been feeling really tired lately, and I was thinking maybe we could go to the mountains. It would be rejuvenating.” Cally watched as Laurel pushed the food around on her plate.
Something’s up. And I don’t want to know what. The thought had barely formed when Laurel began speaking again.
“I don’t think I can do that, Cally.”
“You can finagle it, Laurel. I know you can get the time off one way or another. It would just be for a long weekend. The Tetons are beautiful this time of year.” Panic caught Cally unaware and she started second guessing herself: The Tetons are beautiful any time of the year, but it’s November. It will be too cold and too wet. Maybe they’ll be shrouded in clouds and fog . . .
“Cally, this isn’t working.” Laurel let out her breath in a long sigh.
“What isn’t working?” Cally stalled. She knew exactly what Laurel was talking about. This discussion had occurred at least four times in the two years since Laurel had moved in with her.
“This. Us.” No elaboration needed.
“Laurel, we’ll get through it. We always do. Some time in the mountains would help.” Cally looked around as she said this, willfully pulling away from the painful conversation.
She scanned the beautiful condominium, now much nicer than it had ever been when Cally lived there alone. Laurel’s sense of style had turned a plain box done in neutral colors and bland furniture into a rich tapestry of color and texture. Cally loved the change, and though other areas of their relationship had never blossomed with the same vibrancy as their home, Cally was comfortable with Laurel. They had a good life together.
“Not this time,” Laurel said. “I’m leaving.”
Cally refocused. Her mind revved into overdrive and her body stilled. She felt a creeping sensation, as if being slowly encased in ice, starting at the top of her head and moving down over her face, to her shoulders, her heart, her stomach, all the way to the tips of her fingers and her toes. She felt like she was going to freeze to death.
I have to do something. There’s time. I’ve got to do something!
But she couldn’t move. Fear always had this effect on Cally. First, the dreadful, freezing immobilization and racing thoughts. Then decisive action when she kicked into gear and took charge of everything around her, hyperalert to all the details.
The iciness suddenly lifted, and Cally didn’t waste a second. “That’s ridiculous, Laurel,” she said. I wish I could say please, please don’t leave. I love you so much.
Laurel’s face hardened and her neck flushed. Her eyes flashed rage and Cally realized the magnitude of her mistake.
“Really? Ridiculous? It’s ridiculous I would leave you, or it’s ridiculous I would want to be happy? Which is ridiculous, Cally?”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Laurel, honestly.” Cally tried to backpedal. “I meant we shouldn’t . . . give up. We have a good foundation. We shouldn’t give it all up.”
“I’m not giving up, Cally. I’m moving on.” Laurel’s anger disappeared, quickly replaced with resolve.
Cally continued to fight the inevitable. “What does that mean, Laurel? How is leaving not giving up?”
“I’m not going to get sucked into one of your philosophical discussions, Cally. This isn’t a matter of semantics.”
Laurel’s strength is beautiful. Cally’s love for this woman surged to the surface of her awareness. “You’re incredibly beautiful!” Cally blurted this out before she could stop herself.
“What? You are a piece of work, Cally.”
“Okay, wait . . .” Cally tried to regain some control. “What I meant was . . .”
At that precise moment, something extraordinary happened. A vast hollow space opened inside Cally’s body and from within it came a clear voice. “MAKE THE CHANGE NOW.” The words filled her, shaking loose all her ingrained beliefs and creating a new internal landscape. Suddenly she saw everything from a different perspective.
She didn’t like the thought of losing Laurel, but Laurel herself was not the issue. Laurel represented what sat at the core of Cally’s longing. She represented home and belonging. She represented a resting place, a place of nurture and safety where Cally might someday feel at peace.
It’s all my imagination. That’s all it is. Cally recognized the past two years as her desperate attempt to fabricate something special with Laurel. Regardless of her wishes and her effort it had never existed with Laurel or any partner she had ever been with. She had experienced what she craved so strongly only once in her life a long time ago in another place, and she knew in that instant she wanted to go home. Nothing else mattered, regardless of what she would find there.
“You’re right, Laurel.” Cally realized how easy this acknowledgment had become.
Laurel saw the softening, the coming to resolution sweeping over Cally like a warm breeze.
“That’s the Cally I fell in love with,” she whispered as tears filled her eyes.
Cally knew she had changed since she and Laurel first met. She used to be soft, accessible, and responsive to all the nuances of the new romance. They had played together, spent long hours talking about important and inconsequential things, walking in the woods, lying on the beach, dining in quaint restaurants and taking long drives up and down the coast. But their life together had slowly changed. They had fallen into the comfortable trap of a familiar routine. The magical sex which had drawn them together originally had become a rare occurrence. Cally knew Laurel longed for the missing passion and suspected that as much as she loved Cally, she believed she had to leave in order to open that door again. Cally also knew the truth of Laurel’s conviction. The passion between them would never reignite.
“You’re right.” Cally looked at the woman she loved and knew the end of their relationship was really a good thing, for both of them. “When are you leaving?”
“I’ve rented a place in Venice. I’m taking time off work and I’ll be out by the end of the week.”
Leaving Los Angeles had been surprisingly easy. Laurel’s move proved uneventful once the initial drama of the break-up passed. They told their friends. Cally helped with the packing and liked the cute apartment on the beach Laurel had found for herself. They would remain friends, which pleased Cally greatly. When she returned to the condo alone, relief filled her. She had the place to herself once again. Now she could move on, too.
The next day she asked for a sabbatical. Pearson and Graystone were both shocked, each believing Cally, a publicity dynamo, had no life outside of the office. They reconsidered their plans to include her as a partner, and after some wrangling through the details, Cally left with the promise she could return to her job in three months. Her huge bank of accrued sick and vacation time ensured she would receive full pay for more than two months. Cally had a sizable retirement fund as well as cash savings and a fluid portfolio of stocks and bonds that earned dividends in up markets and down markets alike, so the continuing paycheck seemed like a bonus for taking care of herself, maybe for the first time in her life.
She packed some clothes and personal items into the Subaru Outback and headed east. Now, two weeks later, she could almost touch home. She had taken the scenic route. She stopped wherever she pleased along the way—small towns with not much to offer, hot spots like Sante Fe, Albuquerque and the Grand Canyon. A few days in Sedona had been plenty for her and left her wondering why so many people seemed to think of it as a mecca. The red hills seemed burnt with little of anything green to be seen. Once she hit the long, dusty, hot stretch of interstate highway through Texas and Oklahoma, she interspersed her favorite music with long periods of quiet time and only essential stops for gas, food and sleep. The trip gave her plenty of time to think, to dream, to reconcile and to sort out her life
.
She found the rolling green Ozark Mountains soothing after the long flat stretch through the plains. She took a detour to Hot Springs on her way through Arkansas and knew she would return someday to explore the town in depth. History fascinated Cally, and the little town had plenty of it to offer.
The urge to rush to her destination and the desire to meander through the mountains competed for control of the trip. Cally did a little of both, pushing hard one day, poking around the next, steadily working her way east. When she reached the Tennessee/North Carolina border, her pulse grew faster and getting to Asheville as quickly as possible won out. The exit to Harmon Den beckoned strongly, but she kept driving. Her great-great-grandmother’s maiden name, on her father’s side, was Harmon. She wondered if long-lost relatives lived in Harmon Den. I’ll have to go back there, too. And she pressed on.
She reached the Pigeon River Gorge at dusk. Here I-40 snakes through the mountains along steep inclines and declines, forcing traffic to slow down. No more cruise control along straight flat stretches for hours. Instead, every curve offers a new vista, each tunnel opens to the unparalleled beauty of the undulating Great Smoky Mountains. The curvy highway becomes narrow with retaining walls on both sides in places, producing the sensation of sliding through a long chute. Patches of light fog softened everything—sound, light, even the pavement it seemed to Cally. She turned off the air conditioner, opened all the windows and breathed in the wet, heavy air, filling her lungs with the freshness of the muted emerald mountains. Huge plumes of fog rose like smoke from the valleys around her, stretching into an evening sky streaked with bands of gold, pink and purple.
She had yearned for these mountains ever since being taken from them as a child. She knew now all the vacations to the western and European mountains over the years had been attempts to go home, but only these soft, ancient, voluptuous, rolling green mountains filled the longing in her soul.
Knowing she would arrive in Asheville within a day, she had made reservations the night before at the Princess Hotel. She found her way there and checked in, noticing as she did the magnificent wooden mantel in the sitting room and the welcoming fire burning in the hearth.
EIGHT
2004
A few hours after Tate’s early morning call to Holly, the two of them sat at a small table inside Heiwa Shokudo, a trendy Japanese restaurant on North Lexington Avenue.
Tate never let much time pass between thoughts, really no time at all; that’s just the way her mind worked, leaping from point to point, and all of it making sense to her. But she had trained herself with great effort to slow down while talking to others, even if she could not help but think way ahead of the actual conversation. So she stopped after telling Holly about the doors on her house and the one on Chestnut and waited for a response.
“What do you mean, it’s the same door as the one on your house?” Holly asked.
She thinks I’m crazy, Tate thought. She thinks I’m just going off on another tangent, pursuing yet another crazy idea I’ve gotten into my head. But that’s not the case. There really is something here, something unusual about those doors. I know it. It’s so obvious. It should be obvious to her, too.
But she said: “You know that fancy door on the house I’m renovating—the size of it, the scroll around the panels, the hardware on it?” She could barely contain her excitement. “Well, this old house on Chestnut Street has a door very much like it. It has the two panels, the scrolls, different hardware, but they are very close to the same in a lot of ways.”
Tate finished and sat back, careful not to say everything she thought about what this find might mean.
“Oh,” said Holly, “now I get it. You think there’s a connection. That’s interesting.”
“You think I’m crazy, right?” Tate asked, bracing for the answer.
“You’re kidding, right?” Holly asked, puzzled. She saw the veil drop just behind Tate’s eyes. “I mean about being crazy, not about the door.”
“No, I’m not kidding . . .” Tate saw the perplexed look on Holly’s face. “. . . about either,” she added.
They looked at each other and burst out laughing at the same moment, Tate with her full, body-slam laugh that turned the heads of the other customers in the restaurant, Holly with her fluttering, closed-mouth twitter that radiated love and enveloped Tate in cottony comfort. They laughed until tears ran down their cheeks.
“You are a bit of a nut case, Tate, but you certainly are not crazy. Tell me more about the doors.”
As they ate lunch, Tate told Holly everything she thought about the meaning of the doors on the two vastly different houses and Holly shared what she had discovered about the history of the house on Chestnut.
The place had only two owners on file in the tax records. The first, a man named Harland Freeman, apparently had it built in 1940. The current owner, a living trust created in January 1942 for the benefit of Leland Samuel Howard, had taken possession less than two years later.
On her way home, Tate pondered several questions. What happened to Harland? Why had he owned the house for only two years? Why did it sit vacant and deteriorating? Who, if anyone, was looking after the place? Who is Leland Howard? These questions ran helter-skelter through Tate’s mind, totally preoccupying her and culminating in a massive headache.
Tate enjoyed few things more than an afternoon nap, and a headache like this one provided a perfect excuse. The warm weather allowed her to open the windows in the bedroom, flooding it with sunlight and a fresh breeze. She dropped onto her bed, quickly sinking into a state of deep physical relaxation. But her mind kept working, as it often did during sleep, and she awoke an hour later with Pocket snoozing in the crook of her arm and a plan of action.
Her work in the following days left Tate feeling hectic and exhilarated. She managed to keep tabs on Dave who made slow-but-steady progress on the renovation project next door, but she spent most of her time at the public library on Haywood Street and in the archives of the Asheville Citizen-Times, searching for information about Harland Freeman and Leland Howard.
She found minimal, but shocking tidbits. Harland Freeman had committed suicide at his home at 305 Chestnut Street on February 13, 1942. She uncovered only three references for Leland Howard. Two of them mentioned him in passing as a craftsman of note engaged by wealthy Ashevilleans when building their stately mansions. In the third, he appeared as the husband of the deceased, one Marie Eleanor Howard, the victim of a vicious beating in her own home in 1965.
These revelations stunned Tate. The odds that one house had connections to two sensational deaths seemed unbelievable. Far from answering her questions, what she learned only generated new ones, and she became even more determined to uncover the full story of the deteriorating beauty that had ignited her curiosity.
NINE
1927
Ellie’s pregnancy put an end to all her girlhood fantasies. She could not finish school and move to New York to find fame and fortune the way she had dreamed for years. Instead, she would get married, have a child, make a life here in Asheville. Several aspects of her new plan plagued her, but finding a husband took top priority.
This problem occupied her totally in the face of her looming pregnancy. She walked through her life, attending classes and dispensing Coca-Cola at the soda fountain at Woolworth’s where she worked part-time after school, but all of it she did in a fog.
One afternoon, as she walked to her locker, head down, deep in thought, she ran right into Leland Howard. Shocked, they both tumbled to the floor in a heap.
“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” blurted Ellie as she scrambled to her feet.
“Uh . . . uh . . . oh . . . excuse me.” Leland could barely speak. “My fault . . .”
“No. No. Totally my fault. I’m so sorry.” Ellie’s mind raced. She knew Leland, but they traveled in different social circles. A senior like Harland, Leland’s demeanor tended toward quiet, even shy. Studious and always in the background, Ellie and the rest o
f the girls rarely noticed him. Now Ellie looked at him closely as they both got back to their feet.
Leland had a country-boy way about him, which Ellie found oddly attractive. She studied him carefully. Only a few inches taller than me, but that will have to do. A full head of light brown hair hung straight and shiny around his kind face. His worn clothes fit him well, and Ellie noticed his strong arms and weathered hands. Leland Howard did not constitute good boyfriend material, but he definitely made good husband material.
“You’re Leland Howard, right?” Ellie put on her come-hither smile and tilted her chin down a bit so that she looked up at Leland through her long eyelashes.
“Uh, yes . . .” The fact that Ellie knew his name came as a surprise to Leland.
“Well, Leland Howard, I think I owe you an apology. How about you walk with me to Woolworth’s after school and I’ll treat you to a Coca-Cola?”
“You don’t have to . . .” Leland broke into a fine sweat.
“Oh, but I want to! Please say you will.”
“Uh, okay, but . . .” Leland’s face flushed, and his breathing became shallow. He seemed to focus intently. “But, are you sure you want to . . . ?”
“Why, of course I’m sure, Leland. I’ll see you then.”
Leland stared after Ellie as she sashayed away, his heart pounding rapidly. The girl he had had a silent crush on for two years had literally knocked him off his feet and asked him out. He refused to let disbelief quell his excitement.
Ellie courted Leland with enthusiasm and determination. In a matter of days she seduced him into making love to her, not that it took a lot of urging. For Leland, however, intimacy at that level constituted a sacred act, and it confirmed what he had known since he had laid eyes on Ellie the very first time. He loved her. He loved her with his heart, his soul, every single part of his being. The unexpected news of her pregnancy filled him with happiness. How could she know so quickly? That question puzzled him, but his awareness of his overwhelming good fortune at having found his soul mate banished his doubt to the deepest corners of his mind.
