Code Name: Camelot (Noah Wolf #1)(40)
Noah nodded, and opened his door. “Hey, by the way, how do I check out of the motel? I mean, there isn’t an office or anything. Where do I leave the key?”
“Just leave it in the room,” Marco said. “Somebody comes around to clean up after we leave, they’ll take care of it. Just make sure you take all your stuff with you, because once you leave the key, you can’t get back in.” Marco waved, and wandered back toward his own room.
Noah quickly gathered up the clothes that had been bought for him, carrying them out carefully and laying them on the passenger seat of the car. When he was done with that chore, he went back to get the computer and found that it had a satchel it fit into, so he packed it carefully and carried it out as well. The only things left were the snacks and pop he had bought the night before, and he was glad he hadn’t thrown away the plastic bags he’d carried them home in. They went back into the bags, and then into the floorboard of the car.
A quick glance around the room told him he hadn’t left anything behind, so he dropped the key onto the dresser and started out the door. At the last second, he went back and checked the bathroom, gathering the shampoo, soaps and razors, and taking those as well. He closed the door behind him and got into the Corvette, fired it up, then began following the map Allison had given him to find his new home.
Even though the compound wasn’t all that large, the drive out to his new house took almost 20 minutes, mostly because Temple Lake Road was full of twists and turns. He found County Road 640 with no trouble, turned onto it, and found the house only a couple of minutes later.
It was bigger than he’d expected. When Allison had said it was a refurbished farmhouse, he had thought of something like the one he had stayed in as a teenager, an old, rickety two-story that looked like a refugee from Green Acres. The house he found, however, was probably twice the size of the one he remembered from back then, and quite beautiful. It appeared to have been built from cedar, and he could see that it had undergone some extensive remodeling in the not-too-distant past.
He parked in front of the garage, then walked over to the door and opened it with the key. The sky was overcast, so he found the light switch inside the door and was amazed when he saw the expanses of oak that greeted his eyes. It took him more than fifteen minutes just to walk through the house, looking at all of the different decors that were used inside, and he couldn’t help wondering if it weren’t all lost on a man who didn’t even know how to appreciate such beauty.
He went out to the garage and found the button to open the garage door, then walked out and pulled the Corvette inside. He closed the garage and began carrying all of his things into the house. Snacks went into the kitchen, root beer into the refrigerator, and then he had to decide which of the four bedrooms he wanted to claim. In the end, simple logic won out, and he took the one on the ground floor that had the big master bathroom attached to it.
Allison had told him that he didn’t have anything scheduled for the rest of the day, so he gave himself a chance to look the place over. Once he had explored the house for the third or fourth time, he walked outside and began looking at the rest of his little estate.
The first thing to catch his eye was the barn, and he wandered over to it and pulled the big door open. A musty smell greeted him, the old scent of horses and cattle that always seems to be present in one of these buildings. It reminded him briefly of the farm he had lived on as a teenager, and he remembered some of his adventures in the loft of the barn back then. A quick look around showed him the ladder that led up to the loft in this one, and he climbed up it just to look around.
The loft had a lot of old hay bales in it, and there were quite a few boxes full of old dishes, knickknacks and other things that the previous owners had probably left behind. Curiosity, while it’s not an emotion, was something that did plague Noah at times, and he found himself rummaging through the discards. There were figurines and collectibles of different kinds, none of which, he was sure, had any true value, but some of them just appealed to him, even if he couldn’t say why. He emptied one box, and then began putting into it things he wanted to keep, like the many figurines of cats. Cats, he had decided years before, were a lot like himself. They didn’t operate on emotion, but rather on logic, and when they were done with you, they were simply done. A cat said goodbye by simply sticking its tail in the air and walking away. Noah thought that was a wonderful example, and tried to follow it whenever he felt like saying goodbye.
He carried the box down carefully, climbing one-handed until he got back to the ground, then took it inside the house and set it on the kitchen counter. Everything in it would need to be cleaned before it could be set out, but he would save that chore for later. He went back outside and began exploring the rest of the little farm.
He found the mobile home that came with it, and saw that Allison was right about it being in surprisingly good shape. It occurred to him again that he could rent it out, but then he decided he didn’t really want neighbors that close to him. He wandered over to one of the two workshop buildings, a fairly large one with overhead doors that was big enough to pull a truck into, and the pickup he’d been told about was sitting inside it at that moment, a Ford from the mid-nineties. The building was obviously intended for mechanical work. It still held a lot of old tools, and there was quite a workbench along one wall. Noah enjoyed tinkering with vehicles and machinery, and he could think of several ways to put this building to use.