Then I noticed something else.
“Those vines,” I said. “The ones with the hairy stems. They’re poison ivy.” Just the thought of being that close to such a huge stand of poison ivy made my skin itch all over. “I don’t want the boys within ten feet of those vines.”
“Roger,” Natalie said from her post in the third seat. I noticed this morning that she was wearing a pith helmet, like her great-grandfather, only hers had been dyed black, and around it she’d tied a filmy black scarf accented with silver glitter.
Michael drove on, following my grandfather beneath the sign. We came into an open and relatively flat area, rather like an oversized ledge on the side of the mountain. The road ended up ahead at a ramshackle picket fence around a faded old farmhouse. There were pastures on either side of the road and a barn to our left. I also spotted the remains of a tall chain-link fence that had presumably once enclosed the pastures. In some places it had merely fallen down, but in others it appeared to have been bulldozed.
Grandfather parked just outside the picket fence, and Michael pulled in beside him. All the other vehicles followed suit, and the volunteers poured out. Grandfather’s bodyguards hurried to his side. I noticed that they were equipped with binoculars, communications radios, and stout walking sticks that could double as weapons in a pinch. Caroline began organizing the rest of the volunteers into parties. Grandfather headed toward the barn, trailed by his bodyguards and the film crew, who were capturing his philosophical pronouncements about the rapidity with which nature claimed its own after humans had abandoned formerly cultivated land. The twins scurried in Grandfather’s wake, which suited me, since the barn looked free of poison ivy and Michael and Natalie were following them.
I headed for the house. Original site of the Biscuit Mountain Art Pottery workshop. Ancestral home of Cordelia’s family. An important bit of the history of the one branch of my family I’d never known anything about until this week. It was a weather-beaten gray farmhouse with a rusty tin roof. The front door was closed, but when I tried the doorknob I found it was unlocked.
I stepped inside, looked around, and immediately realized that Miss Annabel’s father had made a wise decision, building the enormous gingerbread-trimmed Victorian mansion where she still lived.
The Biscuit Mountain house wasn’t a hovel, but it looked exactly like what it was: a very old farmhouse that had been added onto or modernized haphazardly over the years, with an eye more attuned to function than beauty. The ceilings were low—maybe seven and a half feet. The rooms were small and pokey, and full of awkward angles where they had been retrofitted with small closets. The one bathroom was large and antiquated—although rusty water still ran from the vintage taps in the sink and the toilet flushed when I tried it.
The rooms were empty except for a few broken pieces of furniture and enough trash to suggest that the house had occasionally given shelter to passing hikers or teenagers in search of a hangout.
Everything seemed structurally sound, but still—Mother would have called it a fixer-upper, and then sniffed and added, “though why anyone would bother is beyond me.”
I wandered back into the living room, feeling vaguely disappointed. I was hoping for something magical. I felt a sudden surge of sympathy for Rob, who had taken it badly when one of Mother’s cousins had disproved the old family legend that one of our ancestors had been a noted Yorkshire highwayman.
Sometimes getting to the bottom of something wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. Couldn’t the cousin have kept his mouth shut and let Rob go on reveling in his notorious ancestor? And should I keep my mouth shut about this being an ancestral home? Annabel’s Victorian mansion was also a family home, and would make a much nicer memory.
I felt a sudden random twinge of resentment at Grandfather for starting all this in the first place. Which was unfair. Because if I’d heard he was planning to look for Cordelia, I’d have been all for it.
Of course, I’d been hoping we’d find a Cordelia who had always wanted to track down her son and grandchildren but for some reason had been unable. It might even have been somewhat comforting to learn that she’d died shortly after Dad’s birth, longing to be reunited with him but prevented by cruel fate. I wasn’t at all happy with what we’d found so far—a grandmother who seemed to have led a full and perfectly contented life less than an hour from us, well aware of our existence and yet happy to keep her own a secret. And if the current state of affairs bothered me, how much harder was it for poor Dad?
Still brooding on the unfairness of life, I drifted to the back of the living room, where the back wall was entirely made up of several sets of large, rough plywood doors—retrofitted closets perhaps? No, apparently they led out into the backyard.