Yuletide Peril Read online

  The other three rooms had furnishings typical of the late nineteenth century. Each bed had a six-foot-high oak headboard with a footboard about two feet in height. Each room had a dresser and a table that matched the beds, and an armless high-backed wooden rocker. Small electric lamps stood on the tables. Soiled, tattered paper covered the walls, and a few ragged rugs lay on the pine floors. Filthy bedspreads and quilts covered the beds. Every window was broken, and flimsy, dirty, torn curtains hung through the openings.

  Cecil pointed to the many wasp and yellow jackets’ nests near the ceilings. “You’ll have to get rid of those pests before you can live here,” he said.

  While Janice considered the value of the furniture, Cecil and Lance checked out the structure of the house.

  “I don’t see any sign of leaks except where the rain blew in through broken windows,” Cecil said, pointing to brownish spots on the floors. “That’s what made the stains. The roof must still be in good shape.”

  A massive cupboard almost covered the rear wall of the hallway. Lance peered inside. “It’s empty. Looks like this piece of furniture was built right here—it couldn’t have been brought up the stairs.” He pushed on the cupboard and couldn’t budge it. “Sure is heavy.”

  “Let’s go downstairs to talk over what you can do,” Cecil said.

  Lance went down the ladder first, because if Janice slipped, he wanted to be in a position to catch her. He’d learned that Janice resented help, so he couldn’t make an issue of assisting her.

  Janice and Lance sat side by side on the deacon’s bench. Cecil pulled a ladder-back chair with a woven seat from the living room. He sniffed the air like a dog on a scent.

  “There’s a funny smell in here,” he said. “I can’t place it.”

  “I’ve been noticing it, too,” Lance said. “I didn’t notice it when we were here before. It smells like turpentine or ether.”

  Janice had moved into a lot of smelly houses, so she wasn’t concerned with the odor. “What do you think of the house?”

  Cecil pulled on his whiskers, hummed a little tune and gazed at the ceiling. “It’ll take a lot of work to make this place the way it was a hundred years ago. But as far as I can determine, the structure is good, so termites must not be working on it. It’ll take a lot of money.”

  “Which I don’t have,” Janice said. “How much will it cost to get the downstairs rooms in good shape so my sister and I can live here? The upstairs renovation will have to wait.”

  Cecil studied the ceiling again and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. Lance winked at Janice, obviously amused by Cecil’s idiosyncrasies. Wasps, buzzing around the ceiling, accompanied the contractor’s humming.

  “Lance,” Cecil said, after several minutes had passed, “you’ve had experience with a lot of construction at the school so speak up if you think I’m wrong. It’s my opinion that this house needs a good cleaning more’n anything else.” He appraised Janice with a keen glance. “You’ll have some expense to make the house fit to live in, but if you just do the downstairs, you can be comfortable without spending a lot of money.”

  “I agree,” Lance said, “but Janice knows I have reservations about her living here. It’s too isolated.”

  Cecil shrugged his skinny shoulders, peering at Lance under his shaggy brows. “That’s not for me to decide nor you neither, unless there’s something I don’t know.”

  Lance colored slightly, admitting, “It isn’t any of my business.”

  “I’ll give you an idea of what you’d have to do before you can move in,” Cecil continued. “First off, you’ve gotta replace all the broken windows to preserve the house. If you put new locks on the doors, that’ll give you protection from ordinary circumstances. You’d have to get rid of the curtains and the carpets. Later on, you might want to refinish the floors, but if they’re clean, you can manage if you add some rugs, here and there.”

  “You’ve encouraged me already, Mr. Smith. What else?”

  “Your biggest expense will be getting the plumbin’ checked and repaired. After ten years of neglect, you could have damage to the pipes. The gas furnace is old, so you might be better off to replace it. You can get somebody from the county seat if the local guys won’t work here. And I’d get all of this brush cleaned off the place, not only so you can see out, but so you can tell if anybody is looking in.”

  “Can you give a ballpark figure on how much this might cost her?” Lance asked.

  Cecil gazed around the ceiling for a while, closed his eyes and whistled a tune. He took a ragged notebook and a pencil out of his shirt pocket. He chewed on the end of the pencil and scribbled down some figures.

  “Not countin’ the curtains and rugs, and leavin’ the upstairs as is except the windows, and not painting the outside, I’d say she could get by with around ten thousand dollars. You got that much?” he asked.

  Janice nodded. That sounded like a lot of money to her, but she’d expected it to be more. The certificate of deposit she’d set aside to renovate Mountjoy would be enough, with some left for the driveway. The money in her personal savings would take care of their living expenses until she finished working on the house. She’d papered and painted her apartment once, so she could do a lot of the work herself. But should she spend so much money on an old house that someone was determined she shouldn’t occupy? She’d never had to make a decision of such magnitude before, and it wasn’t easy.

  Lance watched as Janice weighed her options. Her troubled eyes indicated uncertainty. Janice was too young to be thrown suddenly into the guardianship of her sister, ownership of this property and a sizable amount of money. Little wonder she seemed bewildered, but he’d leave it to her lawyer and Henrietta to advise her.

  “When could you start work?” she asked Cecil in a weary voice.

  “Like I said—I’ve got a couple of jobs to finish, which will take me about a week. There’s some other work pending, but nothing I can’t postpone.” He whistled again and stared at the ceiling. “I could start a week from this coming Tuesday,” Cecil decided. “That’ll give you time to clear the road, so we can haul in the materials we need.”

  “What do you think?” Janice asked, looking directly at Lance.

  “If you’re determined to live here,” he said, trying to keep concern out of his voice, “Cecil’s suggestions seems reasonable to me.”

  Janice stood and walked through the four downstairs rooms trying to envision the house with the improvements Cecil had suggested. Lance and Cecil watched her silently. When she returned to the hallway, she sat wearily on the bench beside Lance, and he wished he had the right to put his arm around her slumped shoulders.

  “The only other alternative is to sell the property, and I don’t want to do that. Besides, I don’t think it will seem so scary when we get all of the underbrush cleared away and we can see to the highway. Could I be ready to move within a month?” she asked Cecil.

  He whistled a line of “Amazing Grace.” “I’m not the fastest carpenter in the business,” he said, “and I’d judge it’ll take two months.”

  “I’ll be free while Brooke is in school, so I’ll work right along beside you.”

  “I can help with cleaning the yard,” Lance said, and when Janice started to protest, he held up his hand. “We have a men’s service club at the church, and we often take on projects like this. We’ve built a porch for one family this summer, we roofed a house and we mow a few yards every week for elderly people—Henrietta’s for example. I’ll talk to the men, and if there are enough of them free, we can come Saturday to work on your yard. You’ll be surprised at what a change we can make with one day’s work.”

  “But I don’t want people working for me unless I pay them,” Janice protested. “I want to be independent.”

  “Being independent can be mighty lonely, miss,” Cecil said. “There are some things you can’t pay people to do. And I doubt you could find anyone around Stanton who’d even take the job of cleaning up this
place, no matter what you paid. It’s hard to find people who’ll take on a grubby, dirty job, and that’s what this one will be.”

  Most of her life Janice had been on the receiving end of charity and she hadn’t liked it. In spite of Miss Caroline’s kindness, it had been charity. That was why she’d worked so hard to make enough money to be worthy of being Brooke’s guardian. She didn’t want her sister to grow up with the burden of being a charity kid. But she still had enough humility to take advice.

  Turning to Lance, she said, “I’ll appreciate having your men’s group clean the lawn.”

  Lance didn’t think she really appreciated it and he wondered why Janice found it so difficult to accept help.

  As he’d promised, the man came with the bulldozer on Wednesday and when he finished on Thursday evening, Janice couldn’t believe the difference his work had made in her property. All of the multiflora rosebushes that had taken over the driveway had been pushed to one corner of the lot. The man and his helper said they’d come back and destroy the brush when conditions were suitable for burning.

  The original driveway had been located, subsequently graded, and ditches laid out on each side for proper drainage. A wide parking area was cleared in front of the house. Several loads of coarse limestone had been put on the driveway and covered with a layer of finer stone.

  While the men worked, Janice started assessing how much renovation she would have to do in the kitchen. Without water, she couldn’t do much, but she did clear the shelves of items that would have to be thrown away and put them in large plastic garbage bags. She put usable dishes and pans on the table. The refrigerator was empty, but had an unpleasant odor, so she propped the door open so it could air.

  With an old broom she’d found in the pantry, she scraped everything out of the cabinets and off the pantry shelves. Then she swept up the refuse and dumped it in the garbage bags. The work was strenuous and at the end of two days, she was bushed.

  But she was now convinced that Cecil’s estimate was correct and that the house needed cleaning more than anything else. The furniture was well built. Although the stove and refrigerator were questionable, they didn’t seem to be more than ten years old and she’d certainly used older appliances than that in her childhood. She wouldn’t know for sure until she tried them, so she reserved an opinion on whether she’d have to buy appliances. But the red-checked linoleum seemed solid, and she thought restoring the kitchen would take a minimum of money. The kitchen had been her greatest worry.

  As the work on the driveway progressed, Janice kept wishing that Lance would stop by so she could ask his opinion if the work was done satisfactorily. He didn’t come, and she didn’t want to put him on the spot by asking him to approve the work. Although she was convinced that the contractor had earned the money, Janice’s hand shook with uneasiness as she wrote his check for three thousand dollars. How long would her money last if she had many more bills like this?

  On Thursday evening, after the road was completed, Janice took Henrietta and Brooke to see the house.

  “He did a good job on this road,” Henrietta said when Janice turned her car into the driveway.

  Henrietta walked slowly through the rooms on the first floor, nostalgically remembering the days she’d lived at Mountjoy. “Except for the filth, nothin’s changed,” she said. “I figured thieves would have hauled everything away by now.”

  Janice looked around for Brooke before she answered. Her sister still stood in the center hall, as if she were glued to the floor, looking around in dismay.

  “Cecil said it was probably because people think the place is haunted,” Janice said quietly, “and they’re afraid to steal anything.”

  “So much the better for you,” Henrietta answered. “There have been some strange things happening out here, according to rumor.”

  Joining the others in the living room, Brooke wailed, “I don’t want to live here. It looks awful and the place stinks.”

  “It will look a lot better when it’s clean,” Janice assured her, wishing she hadn’t brought Brooke to see the house until it was in livable condition. The child’s attitude depressed her. Did the house remind her of some of the unsavory places they’d lived during her childhood?

  “Besides a good cleaning, what else is necessary to make the downstairs livable?” Janice asked.

  “The davenport and chairs in the living room will have to go. You could refinish them and have them upholstered, but that would cost a lot of money. Besides, they’re uncomfortable, to my notion. They’d bring a good price in an antique store if you want to sell them, and you could use the money to buy a new couch and some chairs.”

  “Cecil said there was room to store them in the outbuilding back of the house, so I think I’ll tear the upholstery off and put them in the building. I can buy secondhand furniture and refinish the antique pieces when I have more time and money.”

  Following Henrietta’s advice, she took inventory of what was usable in a notebook, separating what she could sell and what she’d have to buy. Except for a few tables and two rocking chairs, she’d need to replace the living room furniture. In the hallway, beside the deacon’s bench, there was a closed cupboard, constructed of pine and poplar lumber, that would be great for storing their outdoor garments.

  “John had the kitchen overhauled and bought new appliances when the county water and sewer system was laid out this way. He got sick right soon after that and the kitchen in the town house was newly fixed when we moved, so he left all of these things here. He never did give up the idea that he might move back to Mountjoy. We took the washer and dryer to town with us so you’ll need new ones.”

  Janice shook her head. “I’ll go to the coin laundry in town. I’m used to doing that.”

  Henrietta peered at the dishes Janice had put on the table. “We took most of the dishes and pans with us so there’s not much here but odds and ends.”

  “I’m used to odds and ends,” Janice said.

  A pie safe with punched heart tin inserts in the doors stood in one corner of the kitchen. “I used this to store the canned goods and cereal. I kept the onions, potatoes and such like in the pantry.”

  “I worked in there yesterday. It’s a huge room. The floor covering seems all right.”

  Henrietta nodded agreement. “It’s the same vinyl tile that was here when I came, but it still looks good.”

  The dining room had a cherry corner cupboard that reached the ten-foot ceiling and a walnut extension table with matching chairs. “John’s mother bought the table and chairs sixty years ago,” Henrietta explained, “but that cupboard is as old as the house. An antique dealer once offered John three thousand dollars for it.”

  “Really!”

  “But John was tenderhearted about the past, and he didn’t like to change things. I don’t suppose his local kin have any idea how valuable these things are, but if they’d inherited, the furnishings would have been sold right away. They’ll do anything for money.”

  Henrietta pointed to the sideboard made of solid oak, neatly carved, with a good gloss finish. A large German beveled mirror was attached to the solid base. “This is a family piece, too.”

  “I’ll keep the dining room furniture and anything else that belonged to the family.”

  “This room was the parlor in the old days,” Henrietta said, when they came to the room across the hallway from the dining room. It was furnished with a high-backboard poplar bed, a matching chest and table, as well as two trunks.

  “When John got so poorly that he couldn’t climb the steps, he brought this furniture downstairs. These old houses didn’t have any closets—that’s why there’s so many cupboards and such.”

  Henrietta flipped back the quilt from the bed and poked around in the mattress. The mattress looked clean, but it smelled of mildew.

  “Nothin’ wrong with this that a good airin’ won’t take care of,” Henrietta commented. “Guess the mice had enough other things to chew on that they didn’t bother t
he mattress. Well, Janice, it looks to me as if you’re in pretty good shape. I don’t feel up to climbing the stairs, but I reckon everything is about the same.”

  “The furniture on the second floor is all right, but what happened to the steps?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There aren’t any. Come and see.”

  When Janice opened the door to the stairway, Henrietta stepped into the stairwell. A startled gasp escaped her lips, and she stared, a stunned expression on her face.

  When she found her voice, Henrietta said, “What has happened here? Who tore out these steps?”

  “Then this happened after you and Uncle John moved?”

  “Of course it did,” Henrietta snapped. “Who did it? And a more important question—why did they do it? Makes no sense to me.”

  “Cecil, Lance and I climbed to the second floor by using a ladder, and except for the one room, the furnishings were still there. We couldn’t figure out why the steps had been removed.”

  Shaking her head, Henrietta stepped out into the hall. “Appears like visitors ain’t welcome on the second floor.” Concern evident in her eyes, Henrietta glanced from Janice to Brooke. “Maybe you’d better not be in any hurry to move.”

  Hoping to reassure Brooke, whose hand clutched the bottom of her sister’s denim shirt, Janice said lightly, “We’ll not move for a while. It will take several weeks for the house to be livable.”

  Henrietta opened her mouth to speak but closed it after she took a look at Brooke’s frightened expression.

  “What’s your next move?” she asked Janice.

  “I can’t do much until Cecil replaces the windows and puts locks on the doors. After that, I can start cleaning. In the meantime, I’ll shop for curtains, and the few household articles I’ll need.”

  Henrietta nodded approvingly. “There are several used furniture stores in the area, so furniture ain’t no problem. But curtains will be. These windows are taller and more narrow than modern windows and store-bought draperies won’t fit. If you have them custom-made, it’ll cost a fortune.”