The rose-faced clock told Cally she needed to hurry if she wanted to be in time for breakfast. She shooed the cat back out the window onto the belvedere. “However you got up here, you can just find your own way back down again,” she told it. She pulled the casement window closed enough that the cat – probably – couldn’t slip back in again.
The view outside the window now included two of the horses, the black and chestnut ones, running over the horizon in the morning sun. The sky was bright blue and utterly cloudless, and the previous night’s rain had freshened the meadow to a brilliant green. Ignacio came into view, walking along the fence and whistling an old Beatles tune as he carried an armload of gardening tools toward the barn.
Cally threw her nightgown on the bed and dug through the suitcase still open on the luggage rack, pulling out a deeply creased sundress. She told herself she should put her clothes away in the dresser and closet, since she would be staying for a while, especially if she started writing soon. She wasn’t sure why she was reluctant to get too comfortable here. Looking out the window, down into the yard at her little car packed with boxes, she felt as if Joan were standing right beside her, pointing a red-nailed finger and accusing her of being some kind of charlatan, one of Ian’s “freeloaders and hangers-on” who were never going to leave because they had no place else to go.
Well, she would certainly be able to pay her bill for a few more weeks, at least, she thought, and hung up a couple of dresses in the closet.
Stuffing her notebook into her purse, she opened the door to see young George smiling there with his back to the Gallery railing. He was dressed smartly in a linen shirt and black trousers. His hair today was done in sleek corn-rows which swept back over his head and hung nearly to his collar. “Miss Bethany has served breakfast on the porch today,” he informed Cally.
“Oh, that sounds lovely.” She stepped past him into the hall. “Do you need me to leave the door unlocked for you?” she asked, assuming he was there to change the linens and towels.
“No, thank you.” He shifted slightly as Cally shut and locked the door, but he continued smiling at her. “I am just making sure you’re happy here.”
“Everything’s fine,” Cally assured him. She went down the stairs and found Ian May standing in front of the desk. He was surveying a row of papers which had been spread out upon it, each with a sticky note attached reading “Ian please sign here.”
He looked up as Cally reached the bottom step. “Ms. McCarthy, I trust you slept well?”
“Once I did get to sleep, yes, I did. The Rose Room is very comfortable. And please, call me Cally.”
Bethany came into the Hall from the porch. She was carrying a pot of coffee in one hand and a platter of pastries in the other. “Good morning!” she greeted them. “Breakfast is on the porch this morning. I thought we’d take advantage of this lovely fresh air the storm has brought us. Come, let me introduce you to the Iversons.” She started out the door, then turned back and looked at Ian. “Please remember to sign those things,” she said to him. “They’re due this week!”
“I promise, I will. But for now...” He picked a napkin off the tray Bethany was carrying and wrapped a Danish in it. “I think I’ll just take this back to my rooms with me.” Then, grinning, he also picked up a muffin. “I have some reading I need to catch up on,” he said by way of explanation.
Bethany shook her head as he made his way toward the back hall. “God love him,” she said. “He always does that.”
Cally followed Bethany out to the porch, where small tables had been set up next to the wicker chairs. Katarina was taking up empty plates from in front of an older couple seated there. The Captain was also seated in one of the wicker chairs, but he held only a cup of coffee in his lap, and appeared to be dozing in the sunlight slanting in from the meadow.
Bethany refilled everyone’s coffee cups, except the Captain’s, while she introduced Cally to the Iversons. Mr. Iverson was an older gentleman with golden curls and a white beard, and was definitely not the preacher Cally had encountered the day before. Mrs. Iverson (“Please, call me Celeste!”) was delighted to meet Cally, as she was her Biggest Fan. “How exciting it must have been to live in a house with so many ghosts!” she said. “Oh, I know most of them were not very nice ones, but just the thought that there is more to this life than science can explain, it gives you hope, doesn’t it?”
Cally gave the very pleasant woman her usual ambiguous reply, and gave herself a mental pat on the back for successfully stopping herself from saying “Hope is overrated.” She thanked Celeste Iverson for her kind compliments, and made herself a breakfast sandwich from the sausage and brown bread Katarina set on the little wicker table between them. “Please, no coffee,” she said, putting her hand over her cup. “I thought I’d go in to town today and visit the coffee shop, and I don’t want to be up all night again.”
“Oh, you’ll love the Bean Garden!” Katarina assured her. “Won’t she?”
“You will!” agreed Mr. Iverson. “They have local artwork displayed on the walls. And the proprietor is a lovely woman.”
“She is!” his wife agreed. “And while you’re in town be sure to stop in at the Wyrd Systers book store. Those two young ladies have an amazing knowledge of the spiritual world. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to meet you. Raven might even give you a free reading!”
“I’ll see if I have time...”
Nell came out onto the porch, then, but she didn’t join them for breakfast. “Foster and I have business in Blackthorn today,” she said, sitting down on the front steps instead. “We’ll have to get fast food on our way.”
Katarina gave her a sad look and went into the house. Nell waited patiently for Foster, extending a hand toward the cats sitting on the steps with her. The skittish little calico crept closer to Nell and allowed herself to be petted, but the gray tom, who had apparently found his way down from the belvedere, just gazed quietly at Nell as he dozed off in the sunshine.
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The Iversons excused themselves and departed for their excursion to Coppersmith where, Mrs. Iverson explained, there was a railroad museum of interest to her husband, which she was willing to endure for his sake, even though it was not haunted, or was it? Bethany carried the rest of their things inside, and Cally picked up her plate and went to sit on the step beside Nell.
“I’m fine,” Nell said, as if Cally had already asked how she was feeling this morning. “I slept right through the storm.”
Cally hoped that was true, and the two women watched together as two horses ran back from where they had been cavorting in the meadow and dropped their heads near the fence to graze. As they did so, a third horse – the white member of the trio – came running from the field beyond the pond and, leaping in mid-stride, sailed straight over the fence to join them. Nell laughed and shook her head at this. “She’s a mess!” she declared.
“Do the horses belong to you and your father?” Cally asked.
“I don’t think they belong to anyone,” Nell said. “But they sure do love that meadow. They come to it almost every day. It’s not our meadow,” she added, answering the next question on Cally’s mind before she asked it. “It kind of belongs to everyone around here.”
Cally cast a quick glance over her shoulder at the front door to make sure Nell’s husband wasn’t there before asking, “Do you think you’ll have time later to tell me your ghost stories?”
“Oh,” Nell didn’t look at her. “Maybe I shouldn’t. Foster says it’s not good for me to keep on about those kinds of things. He says I don’t want to end up in the hospital like my mother did.”
“I’m so sorry...” Cally backpedaled quickly to get out of the murky waters into which she had inadvertently stumbled. “Sorry, Nell, I didn’t mean to pressure you.” She tried to think of a way to change the subject, and her eyes fell on the cats.
“This one is Cyndi Lauper,” said Nell, also welcoming the change of subject. She scratched the little calico under the chin, and it purred and arched its back against her hand. “She’s mine, but she lives here with Dad because Foster is allergic. That’s Doctor Boojums.” She nodded toward the gray cat. “He used to belong to Bethany, but he lives here now, too. You can call him Boo, for short.”
The screen door opened behind them and Bethany came back out onto the porch. Instead of a coffee pot, this time, she was carrying her purse and a thick brown envelope. “I have to make a quick run into town for Ian,” she said to Cally. “Would you like a lift?”
“Oh, no, I really think it would be nice to walk, this morning,” Cally said honestly. “But thank you just the same.”
As they watched Bethany’s car leave the parking lot, Nell told Cally, “I have a painting for sale in the coffee shop. It’s a view of this meadow. I painted it while sitting right here on this step.”
“I didn’t know you painted,” said Cally. “That’s wonderful. Everyone should do what they love. I’ll be sure to look for it while I’m there.”
Foster burst out of the house, then. “Time to go!” he called briskly to Nell, letting the screen door bang shut and causing the cats to scatter into the shrubbery. “Would you like a lift into town?” he asked Cally, and she repeated her wish to walk instead. Nell smiled and waved at her and followed Foster to the car. Cally decided she should stop talking about walking, and start doing it.
---
Instead of going out through the parking lot and the main gate, she turned the corner around the south side of Vale House and followed a gravel path through the wild-looking shade garden between the house and the line of oaks along Main Street. Here, the thick canopy overhead rang with a joyful racket of songbirds. The path wound through plantings of ferns and vinca and led her past Vale House’s small side porch, so overgrown with rhododendrons and Virginia creeper Cally might not have noticed it at all but for the bright red cardinal in the middle of its stained glass window. Beyond it, the south wing of the house extended into the little green lawn with its gazebo, which Cally had glimpsed from the dining room the evening before. She could see a dozen chickens scratching busily for early worms around the doorstep of the little stone cottage.
The shade garden ended at a low gate through the hedge. It was made of the same white-painted wood as the gazebo, and Cally had only to pass through this to find herself standing on the sidewalk in the shaded residential portion of Woodley’s Main Street.
It seemed that, as she walked toward downtown, people in almost every house were just then coming out onto their porches to take their dogs for walks or to let their cats come out to sit on the railings. Each one of them waved to Cally, and she began to realize they were all curious about the newcomer, the so-called celebrity in their midst. Nobody attempted to speak to her beyond “Good Morning,” though, so she relaxed and waved back with a smile each time. She looked at all the cats getting comfortable on their porch railings, and thought she would like to someday have a porch with a railing and a cat to sit on it. Her former husband had never been willing to consider having a pet.
The sun was already growing hot, shimmering on the concrete by the time she stepped out from under the trees and entered the town proper. The storm the night before had swept away some of the humidity, but Cally could already feel it beginning to return – an unavoidable fact of life in the south, she had been warned by her daughter when she’d first spoken of coming here. As she passed the feed store, its proprietor came out onto his loading dock and touched the brim of his baseball cap to her, saying “Morning, Ms. McCarthy. Gonna be a hot one.”
Cally recognized the little Dawes News Store across the street, and decided she should buy a newspaper to take with her to the coffee shop. She crossed the street and tugged on the stubborn door until it opened.
Ben was nowhere to be seen at the moment. Cally convinced herself she was not at all disappointed about this as she selected a local newspaper and a magazine. The old woman at the register, however, was not fooled.
“He won’t be here today,” she said without looking up as Cally handed her purchases to her.
Cally ignored this. “How good is the coffee at the coffee shop?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t know. Overpriced gimmick, if you ask me. Folks seem to buy a lot of it, though. You can have some of this boring old ordinary coffee if you want.”
“Thanks,” said Cally, pocketing her change. “But I thought it would be nice to get to know the local businesses, while I’m here. How do I get there?”
“It’s on this same side of the street,” Bree said. “Just keep going. You can’t miss it. You can’t miss much of anything in this town.” Then she gave Cally an impish grin. “While you’re at it, you should check out the Wacky Sisters book shop, too. Might get some real inspiration there. Apparently they Know All!” She waggled her fingers in the air and made “woo woo” sounds as Cally kicked the bottom of the door to leave.
The owner of the feed store was sitting in a lawn chair on his loading dock, reading a newspaper of his own, when Cally emerged back onto the street. The proprietor of the hardware store next door to him came out of his store at the same time. “Morning Merv. Morning Ms. McCarthy. Looks like it’s gonna be a hot one.” He flipped the sign on his door to read “open” and went back inside without waiting for a reply. Cally wondered if all the stereotypes about small towns were true, after all, but she was surprised to realize that she was smiling even as she shook her head.