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And where was her mother, anyway?
Gad. She’d told Nic teenagers were a handful. Turns out middle-aged adults could be mood-swing wrecks, too.
Get a grip.
She gathered up Nic’s fleece and a few other things and headed to the cellar, flashlight in hand. Surveyed the pipes before loading the washer—the last thing they needed was a flood.
No broken windows. A decade’s worth of cobwebs between the joists and a faint whiff of mouse, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Back on the first floor, she found a broom, then checked the doors and windows. None had blown open or been cracked by debris. They were mostly original, except for a window or two that had been replaced over the years. They ought to all be replaced, but double-paned, insulated upgrades would cost a small fortune. Add in the sagging roof and the loose gutters, and now the storm damage. Make that a sizable fortune.
In the sewing room, she swept up the storm litter. Among the rubble lay a long, curved cone from a white pine. When she was a kid, they’d gathered cones in late summer and Peggy and other teachers had used them for school craft projects—pine cone reindeer and hedgehogs, owls and elves. They’d dipped a few in wax to use as fire starters, stashed in giant baskets next to the fireplaces. Whenever she’d found a white pine cone with all its scales intact, a rare thing, she’d saved it and tucked it on a shelf in her bedroom—her treasure shelf.
They could spend Christmas at the lodge this year. If she managed to get it clean by then. If they kept it.
Keep moving, girl. She set the cone on the top step and made a quick circuit of the upper floors. Satisfied, she returned to the main floor and headed outside. The wind had not budged the heavy log tables and chairs, but serious sweeping was required. She walked down the stone steps to the lawn.
An object lay on the grass and she bent to pick it up. A nest woven of pine needles and grasses, a fragment of speckled shell stuck inside. The sight snagged her breath and she let out a strangled sob, her worry, she knew, even more for her own chicks than for the unhatched baby bird.
11
Sarah crossed the driveway to the carriage house and slid open the double doors. Specks of dust swam in the beams of sunlight.
This time of year, it stayed light until well after nine. Her bet: George had spotted a sightseer hoping for a surreptitious peek at the historic lodge. In the off-season, as long as the roads were passable, no one minded.
So why had he mentioned it?
Holy crap. In the twilight and her hurry the other night, she had not noticed. Peggy had said the carriage house needed to be cleaned out, but—whoa.
How had they ever accumulated so much junk? Tires and tools, skis and snowshoes, paddles and life jackets. An old band saw and drill press—her dad’s? He’d taken up woodworking after he retired, working in an unused corner of the lumber company shop. What were his tools doing here?
And that old wooden canoe. They ought to haul it out. Toss it in the water, see if it was sound.
She picked her way around a roll of field fence to the workbench, where wrenches and hacksaws and tools she could barely identify hung from hooks on the pegboard mounted to the wall. Another wall held odds and ends of tack—ropes and leads, bits and guards, cinches and straps.
Back home, her saddle and bridles hung in the storage room Jeremy had insisted they build in the garage, too good to get rid of. Too much a part of who she thought herself to be.
Maybe she would take up riding again. There were stables in Kenmore and Woodinville, or out at North Bend, where a horse could be rented for a few hours. Once she got the feel for it again—got her seat back, as horse people would say—there were miles of woodland trails to explore.
“Look what you started,” she said out loud to Con and Caro. “Four generations of pack rats.”
She wound her way through the piles to the staircase at the rear, glancing in the open crates as she went. Flipped the switch. Nothing happened. She aimed the flashlight beam upward, where thick cobwebs ran from the milk glass light fixture to the ceiling. A burned-out bulb. Finally, something she could fix.
Thick dust coated the steps. The floor creaked as she stepped onto the landing. This had been the caretaker’s apartment, furnished but unoccupied when she was a kid. Being allowed to play out here had been a treat, and she’d felt so grown up when her grandmother had finally deemed her old enough, and responsible enough.
The oak door was heavy and paneled, twin to the doors in the lodge. The brass knob—oval, with a domed top—fit neatly in her hand, despite the dampness in her palm. She turned it, but it didn’t budge. Rattled it back and forth and finally heard a slow groan as the bolt moved and the door opened.
She stepped across the threshold, head cocked. Quiet, the air stale. The living room was crammed with furniture, some upended, much of it draped with sheets. The beds and dressers from the boys’ bunk room, no doubt, and the ballroom couches. The kitchen was compact and efficient, meant for someone who took most of their meals in the lodge. Dust covered every surface. The mullioned window panes were caked with grime. She rubbed at one with the ball of her hand, creating a sticky swirl.
“Well, I didn’t come up here to clean,” she said out loud. “Just checking out the job.”
Where was the dollhouse? When she and Holly were children, it had sat on a low oval coffee table in front of the sofa. One summer visit, Jeremy and JP had carried it, oh so tenderly, into the lodge and set it up for Abby in a corner of the living room. She’d begged to take it home, but it never would have fit in their car, so they’d bought her one of her own. Sure enough, she’d outgrown dolls, dollhouses, and princess dresses not long after. Who’d built the replica of the Victorian, Sarah had no idea. A gift for Sarah Beth, Grandpa Tom’s little sister, it had been tucked away when she died, until the next Sarah Elizabeth McCaskill came along. Though she’d been both thrilled and terrified to share a name with a girl who’d died, playing with her namesake’s dollhouse had been pure joy.
When friends saw Peggy’s paintings of the lodge and the Victorian that hung in Sarah’s entry, they assumed those houses had sparked her love of decorating. But she traced her passion to the dollhouse. To the hours she’d sat on the floor here in the apartment, moving furniture around in the tiny rooms or cutting tiny pictures from magazines to tuck into the tiny frames that fit in slots on the walls. She’d been given a box of tiny plastic dolls, but they’d never appealed to her.
People. Too much trouble, then and now. Digging up old conflicts, getting themselves killed.
Moving all this furniture out here had been a major chore. Many pieces were genuine antiques. Should she hire a crew and move them back?
