Restoring The Castle Ch 05

What Angela had to say to Ally at breakfast in the morning two weeks later hit her doubly hard because of the telephone call she made before coming down to breakfast in order to get through to Europe while the embassies there were still open. She already was in a melancholy and edgy mood, because, although Miranda had recognized her on a few visits—not more than half of them, though—she had not again been as demonstrative toward Ally as on that first meeting of recognition. It seemed that, having done her duty of acknowledging that Ally was back home and in need of repair herself, Miranda had drawn away from her.

The first blow came in the call to the U.S. embassy in Prague, to the Foreign Service officer Ally's colleague at the State Department had put her in contact with.

"Yes, Ms. Templeton, we did do an extensive search. If the man you're seeking, Dennis Harris, is practicing his musical profession here at all, he just isn't coming up on our radar. And we have no one by that name listed in the American expatriate community either."

This was the opposite of what Ally wanted to hear—had assumed she'd hear. Rumors were floating on where Dennis Harris had gone after a big fight with Miranda. Angela said he was living in Prague now and playing his violin with orchestras. But Ally wasn't able to find him. Angela was Miranda's best friend in the world. They frequently said they'd do anything for each other. Ally was worried that their pledge had been sorely tested.

Ally went to breakfast determined to pin Angela down on exactly where Dennis Harris was. Angela beat her to the punch though, on dropping a bombshell.

"Ally," she said as Ally entered the dining room a sat at the table. "There's been something eating at me that I've meant to tell you ever since you came back."

"Yes?" Ally asked. Here it is, Ally thought. She didn't have to pursue the "where is Dennis?" question. Angela was going to spill the beans on this under her own steam.

"I'm sure you were wondering why I was denying Miranda the comforts of my home when she's in this state. Me living here all alone in this big house—all alone when I've been your mother's closest friend for decades."

"No, I haven't, really," Ally answered, somewhat confused, because, in fact, she had given it a thought initially and then had let it slip her mind when perhaps she should have given it greater thought. It hadn't seemed more than a curiosity, but now that Angela mentioned it, it did seem significantly odd.

"Lois explained that well enough to me. Mother is used to having Lois in the house with her, and Lois is trained to work with dementia patients. This arrangement also, I know, is a way to supplement Lois' income. Lois has been with mother so long, she deserves a pension from her. Those all seem like good reasons to me for mother to be with Lois."

"Ah, well. I'm glad to know it hasn't been concerning you. I assure you that it has concerned me and that I'd like nothing better than to have Miranda here with me. But . . . but, I think perhaps for other reasons I should go ahead and explain myself on this."

"Yes, of course, if you wish."

"I will flat out and say it. We made a pact long ago, Miranda and I did, that if either of us got in a state like Miranda is in, the other would help her pass on."

The bald statement of it—the natural logic of it that somehow had totally escaped Ally—took Ally's breath away momentarily.

"You and mother made an assisted death compact?" There it was, the pledge to do anything at all for each other.

"Yes. She's the one who pushed for it, but we made it at a time when my own mother was slowly dying from a stroke and I was determined I'd never let myself linger like that. But I never thought it would come to this. I'm the elder and have always been the one with more health problems. I assumed I would be the first one to go—and I've grown to give no credence to it anyway. Unfortunately, your mother, in her lucid moments, seems to be serious about this agreement."

"You are saying she wants you to arrange for her death?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so. On that basis, I almost welcome my visits with her when she is not quite lucid enough to raise the issue with me. It's a very private matter between the two of us. As far as I know, you are the only other person who has ever been told. I think I can cope with it just by visiting with her—I usually check with Lois and don't go over on one of her more aware days. I know your mother wouldn't say anything to Lois about it, but if I were there . . ."

"If you were there and she was fully lucid, she would be after you to carry through on the agreement. And if she lived here with you, there would be more of those moments, and they possibly would be more intense."

"Yes, that's exactly right. I'm glad that you see that. So, that's why I keep her, shall we say, a bit compartmentalized and mostly there rather than here."

"And you don't think you could help her in that way?"

"I keep struggling with it, but no, not now, at least. She seems comfortable, and when she isn't lucid, she isn't worrying or depressed. So, not now, no. And if the time did come, I'm not sure I'd be up to it. And I'm afraid it's tearing me apart. I don't want her to leave life thinking that I've let her down. But I don't want to live my life knowing that I took the life of my best friend, either."

And now it will tear me apart too, Ally thought. What she said, though, was, "Yes, I understand. I'm really sorry that your relationship has come down to this perplexity."

"I'm mainly sorry that your mother has come to this point. But you know the steel she has in her back. I don't think she's going to change her mind. Especially now."

"Especially now?"

"Yes. She had been saying that she had nothing else to be here for except for you to be home again. I'm afraid that she saw your intended marriage as an impediment to that. And now that you are home . . . and not married. I'm afraid she's said she thought you would be better off single."

"I noticed that our closeness hasn't built since that first meeting I had with her when she was fully lucid. So, you're telling me that she now wants to go—and wants you to arrange that?" Ally also was thinking that now she had to bear the responsibility of bringing this all to a head.

"Yes, I'm afraid so. When she's aware enough to talk to me about it, I try to keep Lois in the room with us as much as possible. She won't broach the subject while Lois is in the room."

"You mentioned depression, and Lois has told me that depression helps bring the effects of dementia on. Do you think there is anything we can do to lessen her depression at this point?"

"I've thought about that. The only thing I can think of is getting her out of the house occasionally. Taking her for rides, maybe even up to the castle so she can see that you are fixing it up. But it's not something I could do unless I took Lois with us, and I don't know how I would explain to Lois that she should go with us rather than have the time away from your mother to have a rest and to do what she'd like to do."

"I guess I can try to do that to see if it helps. But what if she—?"

"I don't think she would ask you to help her pass. I just don't think Miranda would ask that of you."

Angela, having already finished her breakfast, rose then and left Ally to begin eating hers. It wasn't until Ally was on the road in her BMW convertible—its delivery a symbol of her decision that she was staying here for a prolonged period—that Ally realized that Angela's revelation had completely knocked any thoughts of Dennis Harris from her mind.

Events later in the day were to force that question even deeper into the recesses of her brain.

* * * *

There was so much to think of now, plans to make, care to take, as Ally drove up to the castle, past the Mountain Castle vineyards, that she wasn't really all that aware of her surroundings until she cleared the stands of vines and entered the newly mown slopes of the castle's front lawn. She had contracted with a landscaping company to keep that cut down as a first assault on the garden. The more extensive, once-formal gardens at the other side of the castle would have to wait until later—probably much later.

The first thing she saw when she entered her own property was the old silver Airstream trailer off to the side near the edge of the woods. She frowned, not liking the look of it, and how she had just fallen into letting it be there. It was in excellent condition, considering how old it must be, but it still looked very much out of place to her. She had looked in that direction because she still was distressed at seeing the condition of the castle when she drove up to it. Improvements already were being made, but not to any area that could be seen from the frontal approach.

The old yellow truck that went with the Airstream wasn't there, so Hugh Coles must not be on the property. Ally felt a twinge of disappointment, but she was a little irritated that she did.

She still felt duped by and at odds with Hugh. He seemed so easygoing and amenable, and yet he always seemed to get his way. They would argue, never seriously, and have differences of opinion, which somehow would be resolved as Hugh had proposed but with Ally being left to feel that she had forced that very decision, with Hugh acquiescing to her opinion. It didn't help that when he made a suggestion about what she needed to do with a construction project, he always seemed to be right. He'd been hired just for the electrician duties, and yet he commented on other aspects of the restoration as well. He was just so charming and always with the gentle joke, though. At least that's how Ally saw it. She could see that Jake Monroe took Hugh's comments with a great deal more irritation.

The hiring of Hugh had been a fluke and had created some resentment among the crew Ally had put together to get started on the restoration. Jake had told her that his crew didn't do electrical work and that he had someone he'd send up to talk to Ally about subcontracting with her for that. So, Ally wasn't surprised when, working alone packing up what could be salvaged of her mother's things to store them away until those rooms were redone, she heard a car horn beeping at the front of the building.

"Hello, ma'am," a tall, slender young man of maybe thirty, with reddish-blond hair, a sheepish smile, and wearing a Georgia Tech T-shirt above worn jeans and sandals without socks, said to her as she appeared in the doorway. He tipped his baseball cap off his head, which Ally was rarely to see off his head, bill pointed to the back, from then on out.

"Yes, may I help you?" Beyond him was parked a sixties-vintage pickup truck that once had been a bright sunshine color but was now mostly gray matte paint encroaching from everywhere on a base of tired, faded yellow.

"I hope so, ma'am. I heard you might need some help up here—that you were restoring this castle."

"I'm trying to, yes."

"And doing the contracting yourself." It was more a statement than a question, and Ally steeled herself to get the same attitude and lip she was getting from most of the men in the construction industry she'd had to deal with so far—that contracting wasn't something she was going to be able to do. That it was not proper work for a woman, and especially not a "city girl."

She simply gave him a terse nod.

"Good for you," he said. "And good that you're restoring this beauty. There are those who would tear it down and put up a Lindal cedar house, I'm sure. But I think this is a perfect place for it. It should be everyone's fairytale dream."

Perhaps it was at this moment that no matter how Ally occasionally got irritated by this guy, he was in as a subcontractor if he specialized in anything she needed.

"I'm Hugh Coles. I'm a certified electrician. Got papers if you want to see them. From what I see, your first problem is that the line is down over there near the trees. That's the first thing that needs to be done, to get the line back up to the house. Now if you don't have an electrician yet, I'd start with that. If you do, you might want to look into why he didn't start with that."

"When could you start?"

"Right this instant, if you want. Or near enough."

"Well, let's go inside and we'll talk about what there is and we can set on the fees—and, yes, I'll need to see your certification." Almost as an afterthought, as they were walking into the central foyer, she said. "I guess Jake Monroe sent you up."

Rather than answering that, Hugh said, "I've got a trailer I can live in. If you don't mind and would like to get the job done sooner and have a watchman on the property at night, I could pull my trailer up here and put it over there away from your buildings."

"Why, I don't know. I suppose—"

"Once you get a lot of construction material up here, you're going to have to worry about vandals. You'll need someone on the property at night."

"I plan to have some rooms set up and live here from the early stages of restoration myself, but that can't be for a couple of weeks I suppose. So, I guess . . ."

"Well, OK, I'll be back in a bit and we can talk specifics then."

She was quickly and effectively trapped then—or at least felt the decision was made for her. He wasn't gone in his truck more than ten minutes before he was coming back up onto the property with an Airstream in tow. He couldn't have had it parked much farther down the road than just beyond where the stands of grape vines started.

He was out and already working on restringing the line to the castle over at the service entrance side when Jake Monroe drove up in his red truck with another man. The testiness started when Ally discovered that this was the electrician Jake was bringing to talk to her, not Hugh Coles.

Coles was already on the job, though; they had agreed on fees that Ally thought were quite acceptable; and Coles' certification for Virginia was established and he even showed her proof of an engineering degree from Georgia Tech. So, having made no commitment to Jake, Ally couldn't see a justification for switching gears. In the subsequent week and a half, Jake, who Ally was led to suspect would have been given a kickback from the other electrician if he'd been signed on, only spoke to Hugh when necessary, while Hugh always responded cheerfully as if nothing at all was wrong. Of course, Ally got the impression that some of the suggestions Hugh made on the construction work were said just to irritate Jake and that Hugh went out of his way to needle the older man. The two obviously had taken an instant dislike to each other.

On this morning, as she drove up to the building, Ally wondered why Hugh's truck wasn't there. He had always been somewhere around in the morning at least until other construction workers had arrived. He took his watchman duties seriously. She didn't have long to think about this, though, as Jake was rolling up the hill in his red truck.

Jake and Ally started off the morning with the same running argument they had been engaged in from the previous evening. Ally was saying it was time to take down the bookcase wall that was partitioning off the ballroom, and Jake was dragging his feet, making the argument that it was best the way it was and that the wall was too nice to take down. To Ally's chagrin, Hugh was agreeing with Jake on this.

They started in what had been Miranda's living quarters, though, on which work had begun on the fire damage. The three levels of flooring inside the tower and the staircase going up to the fourth level, with a narrower staircase there going up to a trapdoor that led to the tower battlements, had been completed, and Jake was ready to move on to something else.

"Yes, Jake the tower structure is very nice. But now I'd like the walls taken out of the rest of the first floor that aren't in the original plans."

"Don't you want us to finish off the rooms you want to occupy while the construction is going on?" he countered. It was an old argument now. He was dragging his feet on getting into the central section of the building. Again.

Before she could answer, he continued. "I've got to go down into Luray before my crew's ready to come up this morning. There's some building supplies I want them to truck up. You think about where you want to move next while I'm gone."

I've thought about where I want to move next already, Ally thought, fuming. But Jake liked to treat her like she was his pupil rather than his boss—the contractor—so she said nothing. She just stood there, by the gaping opening of one of the tall windows from the old ballroom area out onto the front lawn of the castle.

She watched Jake get in his truck and drive down the road. When the tail end of his truck disappeared into the sea of grape vine stands, she calmly walked over to the side of the room, where she'd put a sledge hammer the night before. Then she walked to the finely fitted book case wall in the partition that made the old ballroom into two rooms. She stood there and looked at the wall for a couple of minutes. She had to agree that the workmanship had been excellent, even though she had no idea who had done the work and when.

And then she lifted the sledgehammer, swung it way back and then forward, connecting with the wood of the bookcases. And started to destroy the wall. This would decide the issue forever. When Jake got back, the wall would be so destroyed that there would be no question that the partition was going.

It wasn't more than twenty minutes before she was breaking through from the bookcases on one side to the bookcases on the other side. She'd moved to a flush panel where a picture had hung and the electrical switches and outlets were located. The flush wall was about three feet wide. When she'd checked the other side, that section of wall was flush to the front of the bookcases there too. So, there were ducts or something back there. This perplexed her. There were no air conditioning ducts and the heat ducks should be on the side walls, because this partition was an addition, and it wasn't a load-bearing wall.

She took three good, solid swings at that section of the wall. She was raring back for a really strong swing, having broken through the wall with the previous swing, when she looked at the wall, dropped the sledgehammer dangerously close to her foot, and let out a scream.

The skull of the corpse that was wedged inside the wall was staring back at her with what seemed to be a hideous grin on its face.

Ally leaned over and vomited, and then she backed away from the wall several paces, one scream fading into the renewal of the next one. She turned and stumbled back through the central foyer and toward the back of the castle. When she cleared the building, she started into a panicked run through the overgrown back gardens, striking out toward the safety of the woods. Once inside the shade of the forest, she continued to dodge from tree to tree, moving uphill, putting as much distance between her and the castle as possible.

Her foot caught on the root of a tree at the edge of a clearing and she sprawled, heavily on the ground. The pain of her turned ankle broke through the haze of her shock, and she rolled over and sat up, rubbing her ankle and cursing.

She found she was staring into the face of Sheriff Ed Shiflet. He was dressed in camouflage hunting gear and was standing, staring in paralyzed surprise at the unceremonious arrival of the unexpected figure. He was holding some sort of iron implement in his hand, almost brandishing it like a weapon, and was planted firmly in front of what obviously was a puffing-away whiskey still.

* * * *

"Listen, Sheriff Shiflet," Ally said wearily as she sat, swathed in a blanket and steaming cup of coffee in hand, on the tailgate of an ambulance in the front court of the castle, "I don't care about whatever is going on up there in the woods. What I care about is who that is who is in that wall in my house and why."