Harvestman Lodge (50 page)

“Must be hungry,” Eli said.

“Look … that Range Rover is still there, and so is Buster Crosswaite’s truck. They must still be talking, or maybe shooting footage.”

“Yeah … there they are, around to the side. Looks like they’re shooting B-roll.” Eli smiled. “You see? I do listen to what you tell me. I know what B-roll is.”

“Genius, pure genius … hey!”

Feely had just skidded to a gravel-slinging stop on the same end of the store building where the taping was under way, and came out of the vehicle in a bound, very effectively interrupting the video work going on.

“What the hey?” Eli muttered. “Why do you think he did that?”

“Don’t know,” Melinda replied. “Maybe he knows the PBS guy … hey, I know him, too!”

“Really? How?”

“We were in high school together, and he started out in the university with me, then transferred to UT.”

“Good for him!”

“After graduation he went to work for PBS. He’s produced quite a few great news and documentary programs, most of them about Tennessee culture and history.”

Melinda pulled into the far side of the Flea Plank Grocery parking lot almost as quickly as Feely had done at the other end of the building.

“Going to have a visit, are we?” Eli asked. “Hey, this isn’t an old high school boyfriend, is it?”

“Lord, no! He’s a nice enough guy, but nothing close to my type!”

“Lacking my dashing handsomeness and charm, huh?”

“Exactly. Or maybe it’s because you can belch so much louder than he can. A girl looks for an alpha male, you know.”

“That’s good to know.”

“C’mon. Let me introduce you to Len Cosner.”

They circled around the front of the building. There they found Feely in rapt conversation with a stocky young man, presumably Len, with hair stiffly spiked on his round head. He was in mid-sentence when he saw Melinda, and stammered to a halt.

“Mel? Is that you, girl?”

“Yeah, Len, it sure is!” Melinda went to him and hugged him hard. “Sorry to interrupt, but when I saw it was you, I had to stop.”

“I’m glad you did. This is amazing! I came up to do some work with Mr. Crosswaite and his wife, and then I get the bonus of seeing two friends, first Preacher Kyle, then my old pal Mel Buckingham!”

“How do you know Reverend here?”

Feely answered her question. “Len produced a fine PBS documentary last year about the involvement of East Tennessee churches in social justice issues. I and my congregation were lucky enough to be among those featured. Len did a terrific job … and we even had some discussion of a possible future project together that never quite came together, but maybe still could, someday.” Feely looked over at Eli. “That one is something you’d definitely find interesting, my friend. And part of the reason I got so heavily involved in that personal investigation we were talking about just a while ago.”

“You talking about … ” Eli thumbed back in the general direction of Harvestman Lodge.

“Exactly.”

Buster Crosswaite had wandered closer. “I heard that! You wouldn’t be dredging up that old Harvestman business, wouldja?”

“We were, sir,” Cosner said. “An interesting subject, so far poorly illuminated.”

Buster frowned and shook his head. “Some things are like me and my cousin: cast light on the subject and it just makes it more ugly. You’ll find not many people are willing to talk about that old lodge and its secrets, and most that will talk don’t have any solid facts.”

“Do you know those facts, Buster?” Feely asked. “The specifics, I mean? The who and when and why?”

“All I know is rumors, and if they’re close to whatever’s real, I’d rather not know what the real is. I’ve never been one to find any entertainment in knowing bad things.”

Eli asked, “If someone did want to know the facts, sir, who should they ask?”

“From what I hear, Coleman Caldwell knows more about it than most. Maybe wrote some about it in one of his books. He’s had several things published, you know. But supposedly he’s got a lot written that he just put away and didn’t do nothing with. You know who Coleman Caldwell is, I reckon: the man who lives in that overgrown house in the southeast part of Tylerville.”

“Yes, sir. I know who he is. I just haven’t had the opportunity to make his acquaintance. Yet.”

THE IMPROMPTU LITTLE GATHERING in the Flea Plank Grocery parking lot didn’t last long, Cosner needing to get back to Knoxville for other duties. Within ten minutes of their unplanned stop, Melinda and Eli had said another farewell to Feely and were back on the way to Harmony Road and the empty farm home of Eli’s late grandparents. Slade played on the radio, “Run Runaway.”

Just as when he was near the place during his county tour with Jake Lundy, the old farmstead looked much smaller than it loomed in Eli’s childhood memories. The porch surrounding the simple white farmhouse had seemed a mile long when Eli had circled it on the run as a little boy, but it had shrunk over the years. The shaded, sloping yard had somehow lost its remembered vastness. Only the house’s windows seemed as large as memory cast them, but now it was because they were dark and empty, big dead black eyes of the past.

Had Eli been driving, he might have put aside all sentimental journey ambitions and bypassed the place. He had no real business going there, the people who had made the dwelling meaningful to him now gone forever. Eli felt a rise in his chest and throat as Melinda turned down the driveway and crossed the little bridge over the narrow creek, climbing the driveway further as it veered around the house toward the barn, milking shed, corn-crib, and outbuildings.

“Where should I park?”

“Pull up beside the corn-crib, that building right there. The car is less likely to be seen there. We don’t really have any business being here, since my family no longer owns this property, and it’s always possible that somebody might nail us for trespassing, if we’re seen.”

“Well, we survived trespassing in Harvestman Lodge. Maybe our luck will hold up here, too.”

They exited the Bronco.

Chapter Thirty

AS ELI STOOD BESIDE the window in the empty living room, on the spot where his grandparents always placed their Christmas tree, he realized how pointless it was, in one way, to pay call on a house where only the past lived. One might as well dig up the corpse of a dead loved one and absurdly expect to find what once had been.

There was no warmth in this house now, no bustle of movement in the bedrooms upstairs, nor sound of pots and skillets clattering in the kitchen in the far side of the house. No muffled sound of his grandmother singing, while sweating over the hot stove, some old song she’d heard on last weekend’s Grand Ole Opry.

They’d entered through the mudroom at the back of the house, near the weed-grown garden spot where once vegetables had been grown in pristine rows, not a stray weed allowed to survive between them. The old wooden screened door had been just as flimsy as Eli had expected it would be, and three quick tugs had sufficed to pop it open.

Melinda had entered the crumbling house with a sense of playful glee as her only sentiment. This house was not part of her personal heritage and she knew nothing, directly, of the lives lived here. For her the entry and exploration were no different than other times she had made her way into abandoned buildings and explored them for fun, a questionable recreation she and a gang of other high school girls had pursued years ago, delighting in the risk of being caught. Astonishingly, they never were.

She wrinkled her nose at the smell of mold, mildew, staleness, and rodents. “Should we open the windows and air this place out, Eli?”

“If it were ours, I’d say yes. But the people who own it now live, if I recall rightly, in Oklahoma. They were here two, three years at most, then went west. Why they haven’t sold the place, I don’t know.”

Melinda looked around at the peeling wallpaper. “If I were rich, really and truly rich, this is exactly the kind of place I’d love to buy and completely renovate. Wouldn’t this be a great place for children to grow up! If it were cleaned up and fixed up, I mean.”

“Hey, if I ever propose and you say yes, who knows?”

“I was thinking the same thing, Scudder-friend.”

They stood in the midst of the empty living room and kissed. “Would you be willing to get in some preliminary practice in the kind of thing you do if you want children?”

“What kind of girl do you think I am, young man?”

“A hot one. But most of all, one I’ve fallen in love with. And hot. Did I mention hot?”

There had been no plan to make either romantic or propositional pronouncements during this excursion; Eli had followed the impulse of the moment.

She locked her gaze with his. “Do you really mean that? The part about love?”

“I do. I really do.”

“Right back atcha, big boy.” And she gave him a kiss that nearly dropped him where they stood.

“Melinda Buckingham, I’m glad you’re in this world,” he told her. “And I’m sure glad I’m sharing it with you.”

She smiled into his face, and for a moment realized how glad she was to be away from dark Harvestman Lodge, especially after hearing the things Feely had told them.

“Eli, show me this house, and tell me its stories.”

“You’ve not heard enough stories from old empty places today?”

“Not enough happy ones.”

“C’mon, then. Let’s explore.”

FOR ELI, BEING BACK inside a house where he’d spent some of his childhood Christmas mornings and eaten several Thanksgiving dinners, and outside which his father and grandfather had taught him to shoot a rifle and to make a throwing knife flip the right number of times to make it stick into a tree, was a wistful experience. He kept waiting for voices he would never hear, and shadows of people moving in the next room who now were no more than shadows themselves.

“I miss them,” he said to Melinda.

“They were good people, your grandparents?”

“The best. When we were here I felt like this was as much my home as theirs. My grandfather, especially, seemed glad to have me with him. He told the best stories, that old man did. I think he helped steer me toward wanting to write stories of my own, though I doubt he ever had the first thought about any such thing.”

“I wish I could have met them. Do you feel sad, being here?”

“A little, but also grateful for the good things that happened here, and the good people responsible for them. If Harvestman Lodge is haunted, it is probably by unhappy ghosts. Here, I think any ghosts, if there are such a thing, are happy.”

“That’s a nice thought, Eli.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“What’s upstairs?”

“What you’d expect. Bedrooms, a big closet or two. My grandmother’s old sewing room, where she’d sit and stitch, or knit, and look out the window and watch the world outside.”

“Was there a bathroom here?”

“Originally, no. By the time I was born, they’d updated the house, though, and there was a bathroom put in. I hope you aren’t asking because of any, er, personal need, because there’s no water turned on here anymore. But the good news is the old outhouse is still standing outside.”

“I’m fine. I was just wondering what all this house included.”

The kitchen, with a big row of windows above the sink that illuminated it far more brightly than the other rooms, was as degraded and neglect-filthy as the rest of the house, yet seemed more inviting because of the light. At least until they stepped onto the middle portion of the floor and felt the sagging of rot-weakened wood beneath their feet. Gingerly they stepped onto a firmer part of the floor.

“If we’d fallen through, what’s below?” Melinda asked.

“Under this part of the house, just a crawlspace. The kitchen wing was a later addition, you see. Now, in the center den area we crossed through to get to this side, if that floor gave way we’d have been dumped into Grandpa’s old cellar. Which was a place he never let me go. I suppose he thought there might be snakes or black widow spiders or the like. And there was a family story that, when he was a boy, his mother sent him to the cellar to fetch up a jar of preserves, and a skunk had gotten down there and let him have what skunks have to offer. It took days and days to get the smell off him, they said.”

“Cellars … I love cellars. My own grandparents have a cellar, and I love the smell of it. The earthen walls, you know.”

“You’re weird, Melinda. You realize that?”

“I do. And accept it as part of who I am.”

“Might as well, huh?”

“Can we go to the cellar?”

“Let’s look upstairs first. Then we’ll see about the cellar.”

UPSTAIRS HELD NO PARTICULAR enticements, and they explored it with dispatch and came down the creaking stairs again.

“How do you get into the cellar?” Melinda asked.

“There’s a big trap door out on the porch. When it’s closed and latched down, it’s part of the porch floor. Lift it up, and there’s stairs below.”

“Cool! Very mysterious sounding … ‘The two furtive lovers descended the cellar stairs into the darkness below … ’”