By that time, I knew what Stanley thought of the Caerphilly College baseball team’s season and how much he was looking forward to the town’s big annual fall fair, but I hadn’t learned much about our mission.
“Riverton, two miles,” I read on the road sign. “So isn’t there anything I need to know before we get to town? Like maybe the name of this newfound distant cousin of mine?”
“Annabel Lee. Like the Edgar Allan Poe poem,” Stanley said, with a chuckle. “She’s Cordelia’s first cousin—their fathers were brothers—which makes her your first cousin twice removed, I suppose.”
“Cordelia Lee.” I liked the sound of it. “Grandfather never mentioned her last name.”
“That’s because he didn’t remember it,” Stanley said. “All he remembered was that it was something short and common, like Smith or Jones. Well, Lee is common—the twenty-fourth most common name in the country.”
“But Cordelia’s not that common.”
“No,” he said. “So I started by looking through the social columns of the Charlottesville papers for the year before your father was born. Looking for Cordelias. When I found a note about a tea welcoming newcomers to town, including Miss Cordelia Lee of Riverton, Virginia, I knew I’d found the trail.”
“And she just went back to her hometown?” It didn’t seem possible that the answer could be so simple.
“Went home, then moved to Richmond when she married a man named Mason,” Stanley said. “No children, or at least none surviving. Widowed relatively young, and sold her house in Richmond to move in with Annabel, who never married and by now was living in the ancestral home. Which we’ll be seeing in a few minutes.”
He pointed to a sign by the side of the road that said, simply, WELCOME TO RIVERTON. You could see that they’d painted over smaller letters that had once proclaimed the town’s population. They’d probably grown tired of revising the number downward. It looked like the sort of town that inspired the occasional tourist to gush about how unspoiled it was and drove most of the high school graduates to leave in search of gainful employment.
Between the outskirts of town and the central business district, all but one or two buildings were over a hundred years old. A few solid brick houses or gingerbread-trimmed Victorians with rolling lawns and well-established banks of azaleas. A lot more plain frame houses with overgrown yards behind fading picket or wrought-iron fences.
Most of the storefronts in the main business district were occupied, but it was only a block long and the buildings, like the houses, were at least a hundred years old and looked as if they’d been kept going rather than well maintained.
“Makes Caerphilly look like a metropolis,” Stanley said.
Once we passed the business district, we were back to old, mostly run-down houses. And we were climbing steadily uphill. We’d climbed at least five hundred feet and nearly run out of town. For a quarter of a mile, I could see nothing but woods along both sides of the road.
“I thought Cordelia and Annabel lived in town,” I said.
“Within the town limits,” Stanley said. “But just barely. That’s their house up on the right.”
We had come to a cluster of four large houses—mansions, really, to my eyes—set far back on generous lots. Stanley was pointing to the largest, a sprawling white Victorian house in better shape than most in town. In fact, all four of these houses were larger and better maintained than anything back in the center of town, and I had the feeling we had arrived at what passed in Riverton for an upscale neighborhood.
I studied Cordelia’s and Annabel’s house. The requisite banks of azaleas nestled around the foundations—the place must have been spectacular in full bloom. Hundreds of orange daylilies lined the high black iron fence that surrounded the yard as far as we could see, and a few bright blooms peeped through the railings to the street side. The fence defined a large yard, and I could see several outbuildings—an old-fashioned detached garage, a gazebo, a white frame toolshed. Big, well-grown trees—oaks, tulip poplars, and mulberries. And several bird feeders of various types hanging from the trees or standing on poles guarded by metal squirrel baffles.
Beyond the iron fence on the left side of the yard the landscape became wooded again. The return to trees probably marked the edge of town—I could see the back of what looked to be another welcome sign. On the right side of the house, the fence was lined by a tall boxwood hedge. About halfway back along the fence’s length, a short, stout man in a straw hat was pruning the hedge. The fingers on my left hand began throbbing in time to the steady snick-snick-snick of his manual hedge clippers.