The Family Plot (4 page)

“Bobby wasn't working here?”

“Nah. He's worked for us before, off and on—summers in high school, a job or two at a time when we needed a warm body and he needed beer money. But he's only been on the payroll for a few months. Dad took pity on him when Gracie went up the creek, so I guess he came on board right before you did.”

“Does he do good work?”

“He knows how to do good work.”

“A fine distinction.”

“Heh.” She started to smile, but the other Music City Salvage truck darted into the passing lane. She saw it in the side mirror, and her brewing mirth evaporated. Bobby was talking in an animated fashion as he pressed the gas, pulling up alongside her. Gabe looked bored. She said, “All you need to know about Bobby is this: good work, completed on time, zero bitching. Pick two.”

“Gotcha.”

Her cell phone rang, vibrating beside the gearshift with a tinny rattle. It was Gabe. He waved at her from the other truck.

She waved back, and answered the call. “You guys need a pit stop?”

“Dad wants coffee. I could use a Coke.”

“There's a McDonald's at the next exit; I'll see you there.” She hung up and asked Brad, “You want anything?”

“I wouldn't say no to some coffee.”

“Me either. I'm not usually up this early.”

When the brief detour was accomplished, she took the lead again. Somewhere around Monteagle, Bobby drew up to pass her, but she gunned the engine and wouldn't let him. She could practically hear him swearing back there, undoubtedly deploying one of his favorite expressions, stolen from a T-shirt, something about how if you're not the lead dog, the view never changes. He was probably trying to turn it into a life lesson for his son, who—thank God—was smart enough to recognize bluster and bullshit when he heard it.

She hoped.

The trucks took the Lookout Mountain exit around nine o'clock, and rolled under a railway pass into Saint Elmo a few minutes later.

It was a cute little place, in Dahlia's opinion—a Victorian enclave built around a tiny town center, nestled against the foot of the mountain. The Incline passenger railway launched from the middle, across from restaurants and a coffee shop. At first she didn't see anyplace to pull over and regroup, but then she spied a big, half-empty pay lot beside the Incline tracks. She pulled over there, and waited for Bobby to draw up beside her.

When he did, they rolled down their windows in unison. He asked, “Do you know how to get to this house?”

“Only sort of,” she confessed. “You know Dad's handwriting. You want me to try and find it, then come get you? The road's not paved, and we might have trouble turning both trucks around if we get lost.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Bobby was always happy to sit around with his thumb up his ass while someone else did the work. “Do you think they'll try and make us pay for parking?”

“Not if you're still sitting in the cab. Pretend you pulled over to take a phone call or something, if anybody asks. One way or another, I'll be back in ten.”

She rolled up the window and reached over Brad to fish around in the glove box. She pulled out a red spiral-bound notebook that was beat all to hell, and opened it up to a page her dad had dog-eared. “South Broad Street,” she translated. “That's the road right there. There ought to be a stoplight around the bend. The road splits, and the highway goes up the mountain. I think.”

“You don't really know, do you?”

“Worst-case scenario, I'm wrong, we get lost, and we're eaten by cannibal rednecks.”

“Dear
God
.”

“Or we could just stop and ask for directions.”

“Or that.” He gazed out the window at a row of buses. “I don't know. This looks like a little tourist town, or something. Probably not a lot of cannibalism. Only a few banjos.”

“That's the spirit.”

Dahlia put the truck into gear and pulled back out of the lot, leaving the directions sitting in her lap. She found the stoplight, marked with a historic designation sign, and a couple of stone monuments she didn't have time to read. Then up the mountain she went, on a crooked two-lane road that was steep enough to slide down, and barely wide enough to hold the twenty-six-foot truck's wheels between the lines. One tire skidded on fallen leaves and ground them into a slippery goo on the median. She swore, pulled closer to the middle, and kept on driving through a canopy half changed for autumn, and still falling by the day.

In another month, Lookout would be bald and wearing a ring of frost at its crown. But this was the start of October, and the air was only cool and a little windy. It didn't even shove the truck from side to side, and there was no need for either AC or heat.

She put the window down again, partly to enjoy the weather, and partly to get a better look at any signs she might otherwise miss. “Keep your eyes peeled for ‘Wildwood Trail.'”

“Is that it?”

A green city street sign leaned to the south, bent by accident or vandalism. She cocked her head to read it. “Yup. Good call.” She took the turn with a smooth pull of the wheel, onto a strip that was blessed with asphalt, but no medians or guiding paint stripes. “Now we're looking for the turnoff to the estate. It should be up here on the right, in another half mile.”

“This says it's covered by … a bath? Is that what it says? That can't be right…”

“Gate,” she corrected him without looking. She'd already decoded that particular bit of script. “Supposedly there's a gate, but it isn't locked. Like, it's barred off to keep cars out, but … you know what? I have no idea what it actually looks like. We'll find out when we get there.”

On both sides of the allegedly two-way thoroughfare, sheer rock faces came and went, and boulders the size of toolsheds broke up the gullies and pockets of trees. Finally, beneath an arch of ancient dogwood branches, they spotted a long, rusted triangle with one end lying on the ground. “That must be it.”

“That's not a gate. That's a knee-high obstacle, and it's about to fall over.”

“I can see that, but I'm still not driving over it,” she told him. “Get out and move it for me, would you?”

He opened the door and hopped down onto the leaf-littered street, tiptoeing up to the edge of the turnoff. He looked back at the truck, but Dahlia just waved her arms at him and said, “Go on…,” loud enough that he probably heard her.

He bent over and pulled, lifting the simple barrier and dragging it over to the ditch. He dumped it alongside one of the dogwoods, and flashed a thumbs-up before scrambling back into the cab. “I hope you're happy. Now I need a tetanus shot.”

“You haven't had one recently?”

“Not …
super
recently.”

“Jesus, Brad. When we get back to Nashville, I'm running you past a doc-in-a-box to get that fixed. Maybe even sooner, depending on what we find here. You need your shots, if you're going to work these sites. Lockjaw ain't pretty.”

He held his rust-covered hands aloft, like he didn't want to touch anything—or he was looking for someplace to wipe them. Giving up, he smeared them across the top of his thighs.

“I was going to say to clean your hands on the seat, 'cause Dad'll never know the difference. But I like the decision to run with your pants. It shows promise.”

“They're old and ratty. That's why I'm wearing them. I brought jeans, too, I'll have you to know.”

She nodded, and patted his shoulder. “Good for you, Sunshine. Now put your seat belt back on. Let's go find this place.”

Starting at a crawl, she drew the truck forward. Its top scraped the undersides of the trees with a noise like fingernails on a pie plate. Dahlia cringed, but pushed forward—and on the other side, the way was clearer than expected.

The road was so overgrown you could hardly call it a road, but it was wider than the erstwhile highway behind them, and the truck's axles were high enough to miss the worst of the brambles, shrubbery, and monkey grass that reached up to tickle the undercarriage. They drove on, to the swishing sound of vines and the damp crunch of rotting branches beneath the tires … angling the truck up and around on the mountain's eastern face, where the morning light shot sharply between the trees.

“How much farther, do you think?”

“See those pillars?” She pointed at a tall pair of crumbling stone columns, with one corroded iron gate hanging ajar by a single hinge. It'd once been part of a pair that closed together, but the other had long since fallen and been dragged away or scrapped. There was plenty of room to drive between the old sentinels, but she did it slow, in a cautious creep. Beyond those columns there was a stretch, and a bend, and then … at long last, the Withrow estate.

The photos hadn't done it justice, but Brad almost did, when he whispered, “Holy
shit
…”

The main house was two and a half stories tall. Once it might've been blue—but over time it'd faded like anything will if left too long in the rain. Now its columns, wood slat siding, and jagged remnants of gingerbread were all the color of laundry water. A rickety widow's walk stretched across the roof, accompanied by a skyline of snaggle-toothed chimneys—along with a fat, round turret wearing a spiral of weathered cedar shingles. A wraparound porch sagged out front and around to the north side, weighed down by a century of Virginia creeper, English ivy, and a dull green tsunami of kudzu.

“‘Holy shit' is right,” Dahlia agreed.

“You really think we can salvage this place in five days?”

“The house? Sure, no big deal. But the house, plus the barn…” she said, pointing at the property's westernmost corner. “And the carriage house beside it … damn. Now I wish I hadn't made any promises. If we had a full crew, it'd be easy enough. But with just the four of us … Then again, Dad'll be here on Friday.”

She pulled the truck around so it faced the house, perched with its back to the slope.

“This place was beautiful once,” Brad marveled.

“It still is.” Dahlia left the engine running, but opened her door and hopped down onto the yard. There wasn't any driveway, and no one would care if she left a few tire tracks. The bulldozers would do worse, come the fifteenth. She frowned at the thought. “Hey, Brad?”

“Yes ma'am?”

“You think you can find your way back to Bobby and Gabe? And bring them here?”

“I think so. It's only a couple of turns.”

“Great. Then the truck's all yours, if you'll go and fetch the boys. I'll open the place up, take a look around, and start prioritizing our demo plans.”

“Okay. I'll be right back.” He scooted over from the passenger's seat and slid behind the wheel, then pulled the door shut.

“Take your time.” She gave him a parting wave, but didn't look back to watch him go.

Truth was, she wanted a moment alone with the house, with nobody watching or listening. She tried to steal that kind of moment on every job, and she didn't always get it. Sometimes, she had to say her piece in a busy room, buzzing with saws and the thunk of pry bars biting into paneling. Sometimes she had to whisper it like a little prayer from the backyard, while forklifts pulled windows from their casings.

The truck rolled away, leaving her alone in front of the massive house.

She took the handrail and, one by one, she scaled the sinking stairs, where the creaking crunch of bug-eaten wood caused the small things under the steps to scatter. At the top, she found a porch cluttered with seasonally abandoned bird nests, brittle veins of creeper vines, and small drifts of fall's first offerings from the nearby oaks and maples.

The boards bowed beneath her feet as she stood before the great carved door, with its leaded glass transom and sidelights, and she tried not to think of the business—of the butchery to come. She tried not to calculate how hard or how easy it would be to remove the whole door in one piece with its transom and sidelights, or consider what Music City might sell it for. Ten grand, that's the price tag her dad would pick. Ten grand, unless they broke something.

She pushed the numbers out of her head, and pushed Augusta Withrow's old key into the lock. It stuck, but turned, and the door opened with hardly a squeak. It swayed inside like the arm of a butler.

“Hello,” she announced herself as she crossed the threshold, into the foyer. The ceilings were high, and the room dividers on either side had curvy white columns atop them. She breathed in the stale old air like it was sweet and fresh. She came farther inside. “My name is Dahlia Dutton, and I'm sorry about what's coming. I want you to know, it isn't up to me. I'd save you if I could, but I can't—so I'll save what pieces I can. In that way, you'll live on someplace else. That's all I can offer. But I promise, I will take you apart with love … and I'll never forget you.”

Her words hung in the speckled, dusty air. The broad, open space was gold with morning sun, filtered through long curtains in the parlor and sitting room, each drape as frail and light as cheesecloth. Dahlia went to those curtains, window by window, and carefully pulled them open. Their bottom hems dragged patterns in the dust.

Overhead, just inside the front door, a big light fixture stopped short of being a chandelier. Not enough crystals were strung across it, and it didn't have enough glittering bulk. It'd be categorized as a “large pendant” when it hit the warehouse floor.

“Old, but definitely not original,” she observed, her voice stuck in that reverent whisper she always used in old places when no one was around to hear her.

She wouldn't feel so bad about taking the pendant, but much of what she saw
was
original to the house, left over from the estate's very beginnings.

The front door behind her and its leaded windows, those were certainly first run—and now that she was inside looking out, she noticed a rose-like pattern with trailing vines across the arched transom. “Eleven grand,” she updated her assessment. It was one of Chuck's rules: If it's Victorian, and it has roses … add a thousand to the asking price. People will pay it.