Wild Orchids Read online

  There were windows that had stained glass and some with beveled. There were at least four little pitched roofs that held up tiny porches with big French doors leading out to them.

  The whole house had once been painted bright colors, but had faded to pale gray and lavender-blue, with dusty peach brackets here and there.

  It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful house I’d ever seen in my whole, entire life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ford

  It was the most hideous house I’d ever seen in my life. It looked like a giant wooden wedding cake made of balconies, porches, and turrets. Everywhere you looked was another little roof and another tiny, useless porch. Skinny, carved posts ran across every edge and surrounded every window. Windows seemed to have the sole purpose of adding more ornamentation to the whole ghastly edifice. The late afternoon sunlight glinted off the edges of beveled glass, highlighting stained-glass windows which depicted various animals and birds.

  Even in good repair, the house would have been a monstrosity, but this one was falling apart. Three gutters hung by pieces of twisted wire. A couple of panes of glass were covered by Masonite. I saw cracked balustrades, broken window frames, and porch floorboards that were split and probably rotten.

  Then there was the paint—or the lack of it. Whatever color the house was originally had been lost to a hundred-plus years of sun and rain. Everything had faded to dull gray-blue, and the paint was peeling everywhere.

  I turned the car into the weed-infested driveway and stared in disbelief. The lawns around the house had been cut, but the old flower beds were knee-high in weeds. There was a broken birdbath and an old arbor that had vines growing through the paved floor. Back against the trees I could see two benches that sat at angles because half their legs were missing.

  I really don’t care about any story enough to stay in this house, I thought. I turned to Jackie to offer an apology and tell her we’d find a hotel somewhere, but she was already getting out of the car, an unreadable expression on her face. Probably shock, I thought. Or horror. I knew how she felt. One look at this place and I wanted to run away, too.

  But Jackie wasn’t running away. Instead, she was already up the porch stairs and at the front door. I practically leaped out of the car to run after her. I had to warn her that the place didn’t look safe.

  She was standing on the porch and looking around, her eyes wide. There had to be fifty pieces of old furniture on that porch. There were beat-up wicker chairs with dirty, faded cushions, and half a dozen dinky little wire tables that weren’t big enough to hold more than a teacup—or a glass of sarsaparilla, I thought.

  Jackie seemed to be as speechless as I was. She put her hand on top of an old oak cabinet. “It’s an icebox,” she said and the odd tone of her voice made me look at her more closely.

  “What do you think of this place?” I asked.

  “It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen,” she said softly, and there was so much raw passion in her voice that I groaned.

  I’d had some experience with women and houses and knew that a woman could love a house the way a man loved a car. Personally, I couldn’t see it. Houses took too much work.

  I followed Jackie inside. I’d asked the realtor how I could get the key to my “new” house and she’d just laughed. Now I saw why. No respectable burglar was going to waste his time on this place.

  When Jackie opened the unlocked front door, I saw that it was even worse inside. The door opened to a large hallway, with a winding staircase directly in front of us. The staircase might have been impressive if both sides of each step weren’t covered with foot-high stacks of old magazines. The trail up the stairs was no more than eighteen inches wide.

  In the entrance hall was an oak hall tree: big, ugly, with six moth-eaten hats hanging from hooks. On both sides of the hall were three-foot-tall stacks of yellowing and brittle newspapers. On the floor was a rug so threadbare there was no pile left.

  “There’s an Oriental rug under that, and it’s made out of tile,” Jackie said as she disappeared between double doors of a room on the left.

  Kneeling, I lifted up the corner of the dusty rug and saw that beneath it was, indeed, an Oriental “rug” made of mosaic tiles. It was the work of a master craftsman and if it weren’t so dirty, it would have been beautiful.

  I followed Jackie into the next room. “How did you know about…” I began, but couldn’t finish the sentence. She was standing in the middle of the parlor, better known as the living room. I’d been told that the house had been continuously occupied for over a hundred years, and when I looked about that room, I was willing to bet that every occupant had bought at least six pieces of furniture—and each one was still there. To walk between the furniture, even skinny Jackie had to turn sideways. In a far corner were three frighteningly ugly walnut-trimmed Victorian chairs covered in worn-out red velvet. Next to them was a 1960s flourescent green sofa that had pillows on it printed with big lips. In the opposite corner was a square couch that looked Art Deco. Along the walls were old oak bookcases, new white bookcases, and a cheap pine cabinet with doors hanging by one hinge. Every souvenir anyone had bought over the course of a hundred years was in that room. Above the bookcases were framed prints, dirty oil paintings, and what looked to be a hundred or more old photographs in frames of varying degrees of dilapidation.

  “They’ve moved all the furniture into here. Wonder why?” Jackie said as she left the parlor and went into the room across the hall.

  I started to follow her but I tripped over a stuffed duck. Not like a kid’s stuffed toy duck, but a real bird, something that had once flown through the air and was now sitting on my living room floor, feathers and all.

  As I untangled myself from the duck, three more fell off a shelf and pelted me. It was a mother duck and her ducklings, preserved forever in lifelessness. After I’d conquered my urge to scream, I ran out the door and into the room across the hall.

  Jackie was standing in what I assumed was the library. Three walls were covered with grand old bookcases and the ceiling was magnificently coffered. The bookcases were filled with old leather-bound volumes that made me itch with wanting to look at them. But it would take a forklift to make a path to those books because in front of them were cardboard shelves—the kind with wood-grained wallpaper on them (as though that would fool anyone)—filled with thirty years of best-sellers. Everything Harold Robbins and Louis L’Amour had written was in those shelves.

  “It’s the same,” Jackie said, her eyes still glazed over, as though she were in a trance.

  As she turned to leave the room, I made a lunge to grab her arm, but I missed because my foot caught on an old coal bucket that was filled with paperbacks. Four copies of Frank Yerby fell on my foot. I stepped out of the books and started forward, but when I saw a copy of Fanny Hill, I picked it up, put it in my back pocket, and went after Jackie.

  I found her in the room behind the library, the dining room. Tall windows ate up one wall and would have let in light if two-thirds of them hadn’t been swathed in dark purple velvet draperies. I started to speak but was distracted by what I was sure was a bird’s nest at the top of the curtains.

  “It’s fake,” Jackie said, seeing where I was looking. “It has tiny porcelain eggs in it.” With that she left the room.

  I started to run after her but three of the eighteen or so mismatched chairs in the room stuck out their legs and tried to trip me.

  It was too much! I knocked the chairs over—after all, they were mine now—and ran into the hallway. No Jackie. I stood there for a moment, then I let out a bellow that sounded as though it were coming from the moose head I’d seen somewhere.

  Jackie appeared instantly. “What in the world is wrong with you?” she asked.

  Where do I begin? I wondered, then got hold of myself. “How do you know so much about this place?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “My father said we lived in Cole Creek for only a few months when I