AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In the immediate vicinity were vintage milk bottles, a hen cookie jar, a box of linen postcards, jadeite lamps, a Southern Comfort bank, a stack of old concert T-shirts, a tin whistle, three turntables, a mercantile scale, cake pedestals, a Howdy Doody doll, a brass crawdad, wind-up chatter teeth, a butterchurn, and an old jump rope. I couldn’t even imagine what wasinthe boxes stacked about.
“Whims, mostly.” He grinned. “Whatever strikes my fancy.”
I wandered into the living room, one side of which was being used as a gallery wall. From what I could see, there was no rhyme or reason to the subject matter or aesthetic of the artwork. The odd assortment of images included a fruit bowl, a ship at sea, pecking chickens, tap shoes, a can of peas, and a foggy road. In the midst of it all was one empty square that held only dusty shadows.
“Your fancy seems to be struck quite a lot.”
Dez laughed. “That is true. There’s something satisfying in the hunt for unusual pieces.” He glanced around. “And they make for good company.”
His hand went to the pendant he wore at his neck—a penny set into a silver mount. There was wistfulness in his voice as he spoke those last words that struck a sad chord within me. Did his collecting have more to do with loneliness than whims?
“But I’ve decided it’s time to let them go. The yard sale the weekend after next is sure to be a doozy. I’ve been sorting and pricing for weeks now. Everything goes!”
“Everything?”
“Everything!” he said again, his voice full of resolve and a touch of elation.
“Why?”
He chuckled. “Why not? Change is the spice of life!”
Even though he laughed, I heard an undertone of secrecy. There was most definitely a reason for his big cleanout, one he didn’t care to share with me.
“Let me show you around. We’ll make it quick like, and then I’m going to put you straight to work. I want to bring a load of these boxes to one of my storage units—that’s where I’m doing most of the sorting. A little more elbow room there.”
There’d be just about a little more elbow roomanywhereelse but here.
“There is a method to my madness,” he said. “I keep a detailed inventory and the boxes are labeled.”
I was grateful that most of his collection was in boxes. Sturdy ones, too, not beat-up banana boxes from the local grocery store like I used when I moved out of my mom’s place. There were just somanyboxes it was hard to believe he’d been keeping track of it all.
Narrow pathways had been carved through the forest of cardboard. To my untrained eye, I saw no trash hiding among the stash. No piles of newspapers, food wrappers, and other junk associated with hoarder houses. There were no terrible smells—the primary scent being staleness, which told me he didn’t spend much time at home. No signs of mice, either, thank goodness. I supposed Molly could possibly be the reason for that, though she looked too prim to be bothered to hunt.
I threw a look toward the pot on the stove, where her head was once again poking up. Her whiskers twitched as she watched me. I had the uneasy feeling she was sizing me up and finding me lacking.
Dez gave me a quick tour of the downstairs, the open layout at the back of the house making the tour quite simple. In the front of the house, on one side of the entryway, was Dez’s bedroom, a suite that was also filled with clutter. On the other side of the hallway, a powder room was tucked under the stairs. Next to it was a laundry room, which was so stuffed with clothes, towels, and bedsheets that it was hard to fully open the door.
The second floor had three additional bedrooms, the biggest being a suite at the end of a long hallway.
“This suite will be your room,” Dez said, “once it’s cleaned out.”
Right now it was decorated primarily in cardboard boxes and plastic bins. In the middle of the space, I could just make out the footboard of a queen-size bed. I eyed the unusual assortment on one of the nightstands: a tall metal cactus sculpture; a set of (somewhat creepy) Beatles dolls, each with a guitar; a stubby shaving-cream brush; a music box; and a brass whale ashtray. Whims.
“Oh ho! There you are, you sassy devil. I was wonderingwhere you’d gotten off to.” He was studying a framed painting on the wall. “This belongs downstairs. It’s been missing since Sunday from the gallery wall.”
Anothermisplaceditem. Interesting. “You didn’t move it here?”
“It’s probably my ghost playing tricks on me.”
I looked at the picture and froze. It was a framed monarch butterfly print from an old book, the page yellowed along the edges. One of the monarch’s wings had a white tip.
“If the ghost wants the picture to stay here, that’s fine by me,” he said. “It suits you, I think, seeing how butterflies represent new beginnings and transformation.”
I barely heard him as I tried to tell myself that it was coincidence that this print went missing the day I opened the mysterious letter that had a butterfly stamp. That it featured a butterfly with the same anomaly as the one I’d been seeing since I arrived. That the frame hadsomehowended up in a room destined to be mine.
A chill went down my spine, and I turned away from the picture. As I did, I caught a strange scent in the air. Something that was faintly fishy. No, not fishy, necessarily. It reminded me more of nori. Seaweed. Exactly like the scent that had engulfed us in the screen room yesterday when we talked about ghosts. Just like yesterday, the smell faded as quickly as it had come on.
Dez didn’t seem to notice the scent or my dismay. He rubbed his hands together. “Best we dive right in.”
