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  “I need privacy,” she said, taking the key.

  “Bill said you were working on a book?” Annie said.

  “Oh, yeah … well, I’d rather not talk about it if you don’t mind.” The woman’s pale cheeks reddened. Beulah wasn’t sure if it was embarrassment or frustration.

  Annie arched her eyebrows and started to say more, but Beulah cut her off.

  “You can have the house if you want it, Ms. Hawkins. Go back out to May Hollow Road and take a left out of my driveway. Take the next left on to Gibson’s Creek Road. You’ll take another left a quarter mile back. You’ll see a bridge going over the creek. The house is just beyond the bridge. The other way is a dirt road straight back here behind this house, but I’d prefer you to use the paved road. The utilities are still on, so everything should be in working order.”

  Stella Hawkins nodded and pulled a thick white envelope out of her handbag.

  “Thank you,” she said, laying the envelope on the table.

  Beulah wrote her name and number on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to her. “Here’s my number if you need anything.”

  “Where are you from, Stella?” Annie asked.

  “Here and there, up North lately,” she said. “Okay, thank you.” She backed a few steps away then turned to go, nearly running into the doorframe before she found the handle to the door.

  After the woman left, Annie said, “That was weird, Grandma. Something is not right with that woman. You should have counted that money in front of her. It may be a wad of newspaper!”

  “Now, Annie, this woman will be living on our farm, and I don’t want to start right off showing her we don’t trust her.” Beulah laid the envelope on the kitchen table.

  “Well I don’t trust her,” Annie said. “I’ve lived in the city too long.” She sat down and started counting the bills.

  “Looks to me like she just needs a new pair of eyeglasses. Probably ruined her eyes with all the book writing.”

  “Maybe,” Annie said, and laid the last bill in the stack. “It’s all here.”

  “People usually become who you think they are. I want her to believe that we trust her and will keep our end of the bargain. And, this money will go a long way toward painting the house.”

  Chapter Nine

  Annie stared at the pile of clothes on her bed and fingered the faded colors and out-of-style fabrics, kept for what reason she didn’t know. The mound of shoes on the floor contained everything from her first pair of pumps to a worn pair of work boots. Still waiting for the garden to dry out, she threw her energy into cleaning out her bedroom. But now that most of her old stuff was out of the closet, she slumped on the bed and faced the formidable task of deciding what to keep and what to throw away. On top of that, there seemed a hazy memory attached to every single item she handled.

  Both prom dresses hung protected under a plastic cover by a hook on the back of the closet door: the long blue-satin dress she wore to her junior prom and the yellow chiffon she had worn her senior year. Both dates were with Brett, her high school sweetheart. Smoothing the skirt of the yellow chiffon, she remembered the crush she had had on Brett since the seventh grade when she first saw him in the middle school library. He never cast a glance in her direction until she made the cheerleading squad her sophomore year.

  He asked her to Homecoming and from then on they were an item, until he moved away to college and dumped her for another cheerleader. Her pride took a hit, but in a way it was a relief. Then there was nothing holding her back—no ties to Somerville other than her grandparents.

  Annie’s cell phone rang and jarred her back to the present.

  “What’s up?” It was Janice.

  “I was cleaning out my closet, looking at old prom dresses and thinking about a high school boyfriend. How are you?”

  “Speaking of old boyfriends, Stuart called to check on you. He said you won’t return his calls. He wants to know where you are.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said you were at home, but don’t worry. He thought I meant your old apartment, and I never corrected him. Good news! Beverly Enlo has an opening first of June, but you need to get your rent to her ASAP. She’s got several girls lined up behind you.”

  “Great! Her place is just a few blocks from my old apartment.” Annie scrambled for a pen and paper while Janice gave her the address and amount. “I’ll get it in the mail today. How’s it going with Mrs. DeVechio?”

  “She’s having a hard time adjusting. My kitchen is completely inadequate, according to her, and she keeps rearranging my drawers. But she’s good with the kids and doesn’t mind babysitting.”

  “And work?”

  “Crazy. Bob said he’s on the fast track to getting you back on. We need the help. They’ve got us selling bags of peanuts for five dollars!”

  “No! Does anybody buy them?”

  “Of course. You know how people are.”

  Annie smiled. Yes, she did.

  “Alright, gotta go. I’ll talk to you next week when I get back from Milan.”

  Annie barely knew Beverly Enlo, but apartments in Manhattan were hard to find. She didn’t know Prema at all when they moved in together and she had become one of her best friends. If it didn’t work out, she would hunt another situation, a thought that made her tired. Annie eyed the bed and ran her fingers through her hair. A quick nap would be nice. But her bed was covered with clothing, so back to work it was.

  A garbage bag soon bulged with torn or stained clothes and miscellaneous trash. Another bag was filled with items for the Goodwill. The rest was placed back in the closet. In the process, she had found old jeans, T-shirts and tennis shoes that would be suitable for working around the farm.

  A charcoal set she had used in a college art class caught her eye, and she left it out in case she might want to draw later. It had been years, and her relationship with art had gone from creator to admirer.

  Suitcase finally emptied and stuffed under the bed, Annie stood and stretched. How long since she had gone for a run, or exercised at all? It was time, even though she would rather sleep. She wrestled the two full garbage bags down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  “Well, looks like you’ve cleaned house,” her grandmother said. She was sitting at the kitchen table in her print housedress, mixing sugar with flour into a yellow crockery bowl.

  “I’ve made a start at least,” Annie said. “I’ll put these bags out here until we can get them to town if that’s alright.”

  “Joe hauls garbage off on Mondays. The rest is fine to sit there.”

  Annie filled a glass with tap water and drank it down. “I forgot how bad the water tastes here,” she said, grimacing. “Next time we’re in town, I’ll get some bottled water.”

  “Only get what you want. I’m used to it.”

  “I’m going out for a run,” she said and was out the back door before her grandmother could reply.

  Annie started off at a slow jog down the long drive. Lethargic after days without exercise, she tried distracting herself by taking in the surroundings.

  Broken planks hung cockeyed from the fence behind the trees, reminding her of a man whose glasses were knocked sideways on his face. Her grandfather had kept it manicured, the maples and oaks lining both sides of the gravel like great escorts to anyone entering the farm. Now weeds grew between the trees and the fence.

  At the end of the drive, she picked up her pace and turned left down May Hollow Road. The road was named after her grandmother’s family and was the reason for Annie’s middle name. For years she was called by the double name Annie May until she finally dropped the May in high school so it would sound more grown up.

  Falling into the rhythm of her feet pounding against the macadam road, Annie felt better as the blood coursed through her veins and the oxygen pumped through her lungs. She ran for a couple of miles, only seeing two cars, before she turned back. Both drivers waved, and Annie waved back as a courtesy.

  Nearing
home, she turned right down Gibson’s Creek Road, leaving the open rural road for a shadier tree-lined private road that separated the Campbell farm from the Gibson farm. Only the old stone house, the May family cemetery, and another entrance to Joe Gibson’s farm were off this road. It dead-ended at the swimming hole, a section of Gibson’s Creek wide enough and deep enough for a pool.

  Annie had intended to go on home, but the stone house drew her and she had to see it first. It was where she had lived with her mother until her mother grew too sick to live on her own and they had both moved in with her grandparents. The house had always been occupied during her visits over the last several years, and she had not seen it empty since she was in college.

  Annie slowed to a walk as she approached the entrance to the old stone house. It sat back off the road a thousand feet or more and was accessed by a wooden bridge that crossed Gibson’s Creek. Sycamore trees lined the creek, their wide leaves providing so much shade the sun had a hard time poking through.

  “You know, trolls live under that bridge,” her mother’s voice replayed in her head. “I’d keep away from there if I were you.” It was her mother’s way of keeping her off the bridge for safety, and it had worked. Instead, Annie spent hours behind a monstrous sycamore tree, waiting and watching for the trolls to appear.

  Moving past the bridge entrance, Annie had a view of the old stone house through the trees. Stella Hawkins’s silver car was parked in the gravel next to it. Annie examined the house and noted little had changed from her childhood. The plank fence still surrounded it, keeping cattle out of the front yard. Flagstone steps led from the parking place in front of the fence up to the front door. She wanted to go in, to see each room and remember the happy times with her mother, but with someone living there now, that was not possible.

  Movement in an upstairs window caught her eye. She moved behind a tree and watched from around the great trunk. A blanket fell over the upstairs window and was adjusted with unseen hands. As if there’s anyone around to look in the windows out here in the middle of nowhere, she thought. Annie watched a few more minutes as the downstairs windows were covered and never once did she see Stella Hawkins through the window. It was as if she took great care to stay out of the light. She would keep her eye on this Stella Hawkins. Something was off, but Annie couldn’t put her finger on it.

  The run back went fast as Annie fell into a rhythm. After stretching her legs again next to the shagbark hickory in the front yard, she plopped down on an old tractor tire that served as a flowerbed.

  The tire was surprisingly comfortable. Leaning back to look up, she tried to take in the house from a newcomer’s perspective, perhaps Stuart’s if he had ever visited with her. It was a two-story Victorian farmhouse, white paint chipping from the clapboard. A paint job would do wonders, but it was nothing like the spacious mansions Stuart eyed greedily whenever they traveled together.

  No, he would not like this place. He would have been charming to her grandmother, all the while making excuses about why they could only stay a couple of hours.

  Annie could almost see it back when she was young, painted and cared for, her grandfather sitting on the front porch swing and smoking his pipe. It was another favorite outdoor spot, second only to the metal chair under the maple tree out back. After supper, he gravitated to the porch for his evening smoke while her grandmother cleared the dishes and prepared for the next day.

  The porch ceiling was still painted sky blue. “It keeps the birds and wasps away,” her grandfather had told her. “They think it’s the sky.”

  It was also where she and her grandfather broke beans in the summer. They had sat gently swinging, a metal pan for the strings and ends, a pan for the broken beans between them, and a sack of freshly picked green beans from the garden. Annie looked at her fingers and remembered how sore they got after breaking beans several nights in a row. But that’s how it was with a garden. When the food was coming in, it had to be dealt with or go to waste. Neither of her grandparents liked to see anything wasted.

  Annie hadn’t really minded the work, but she’d griped like any normal teenager. Sometimes they worked on the back porch if her grandmother was helping, but Annie’s favorite times were in the swing on the front porch, working to the rhythm of katydids and the bullfrogs grunting dirges from the pond.

  During those times, they talked like two friends. He listened without judgment, unlike her grandmother, who always seemed to want to teach her something, making a lesson out of everything.

  When she told him about wanting to see the world, to do the things her mother was never able to do, he said, “I believe your mother would like that,” a twinkle in his eye. “But don’t forget to come home every now and again.” It was wholly unlike her grandmother’s response: “There’s nothing out there you won’t find right here. You’ll do better to get an education and a steady job.”

  They seemed always at odds, she and her grandmother. But her grandfather had been the buffer between them, drawing both of them to him, and in effect, to each other.

  “You two are just alike,” he had said again, not long before he died.

  Annie couldn’t understand. “How can we be alike when we are total opposites?”

  He chuckled, his lips quivering in amusement under his thick white moustache. “You’ll see it one of these days.”

  Annie missed him terribly. The pain was as fresh as the day she heard he was gone. Evelyn had called her in New York. She was between trips and able to get a flight to Lexington almost immediately.

  When she got home, she heard the details.

  “I saw him plowing the front field earlier that morning,” Joe Gibson had said. “Then near lunchtime, I noticed the tractor turning circles.” Joe’s voiced choked and it took him time to get the rest out. “I found him slumped over the steering wheel. He was already gone.”

  Her grandmother had gone to town that morning, and in the only time Annie had ever seen her cry, she allowed Evelyn to hold her while she said over and over, “If I had only been at home …”

  Annie pushed herself off the tractor tire and tried to shake off the darkness that fell on her with the remembering. It had to get better. If it didn’t get better, she would have to leave.

  Chapter Ten

  Beulah woke up thinking about the two thousand dollars hidden in the freezer. It was in a coffee can, tucked behind a frozen chicken and a loaf of bread. I need to get that money in the bank, she thought, what with the break-ins and robberies of late. Beulah wrapped a robe around herself and started down the stairs, holding the handrail and taking one step at a time. The early morning was quiet. Annie was still in bed, and the morning light had yet to break over the horizon.

  Her left knee ached. Dr. Bright had given her a prescription for the pain, but she had never been one to take much medicine. If it kept on, she might need to move herself down to the small room downstairs, at least until autumn when she could get that surgery. If she did, she would wait until after Annie left. There was no need to make a big deal out of all this in front of her.

  In the kitchen, she plugged in the percolator before calling Betty Gibson. The invitation to the Old Mill meant they wouldn’t be going out with the Gibsons to the Country Diner, their regular Saturday night plans.

  Betty was hepped up this morning, torn to pieces over her cousin Bobby’s troubled marriage. “It’s a mess, Beulah, a terrible mess. His wife’s done gone out and got a tattoo and a piercing in her belly button and her, a forty-year-old woman! Poor old Bobby Ray don’t know what to do. A full-blown midlife crisis is what it is, plain and simple. She had them babies too young, and now she’s awantin’ to live her teenage years all over again.” Beulah listened another few minutes before finally breaking in and telling Betty she had to get off the phone. Betty could go on and on when it came to her family.

  Beulah brought out her grocery list and looked it over. There were also a few things she needed at Walmart, much as she hated spending money at a store owned
by a big corporation. If there was any other place in town to buy the things she needed, she would. Why, she had even taken to buying smaller rolls of toilet paper at the locally owned grocery to avoid patronizing the big chain. It was either that or drive all the way over to Rutherford for more of the same big corporations.

  A new hoe from Duke’s Hardware was also on her list, as was gassing up her car and running it through the car wash. There was no weekly wash-and-set at the hairdresser for her. Every woman in town who went to the Snip and Curl had the same look. No, she could do just as well washing her own hair and rolling it herself. That was one less errand and expense on Saturday morning.

  “Good morning,” Annie said, stretching and yawning in the doorway.

  “You’re up mighty early,” Beulah said.

  “I’m ready to tackle the garden,” Annie said, pouring herself coffee.

  “It’s plenty dry enough now. Woody has the rodatilla gassed up,” Beulah said in her deep country accent. “You put it on choke, let it have gas, then pull the starter. It should start right up, but you might have to give it another pull.”

  “Choke, gas, pull the starter. I got it,” Annie said, sat down across from Beulah at the farm table and wiped the sleep out of her eyes. “I remember watching Grandpa run the rototiller, but I never used it.”

  “No, you were too young then and by the time you were old enough, you were gone most of the summer with church camp, cheerleading camp, practices and such.”

  “I do remember picking tomatoes and beans, and breaking beans until my hands hurt. But you always did the canning.”

  Beulah had wondered at times if they had done the right thing with letting Annie run around so much in her youth. She seemed to thrive with all the social activity and it was hard to keep the child sequestered on a farm with two old people, especially after losing her mother. As a result, they had slacked up on her chores, especially in the summer when there were so many other opportunities for young people. But she was here now and ready to learn. Maybe it wasn’t too late to impart some of the things her own parents had taught her and even to expect help from Annie while she stayed here.