The Stroke of Winter(16)

Tess glanced at the clock on the wall. A couple of hours to wait.

She had been planning this renovation for months, but always made some excuse to delay the project. And, now, she remembered the reason why.

When she thought back on her childhood of growing up in this house on summer vacations and holidays, she realized she had always felt a sense of unease about that door. She’d hurry by it if she was going down the back stairway or, better yet, avoid it altogether by using the main stairs. There was always something vaguely malevolent about it to her. She could feel it, but her grandmother, and later, her parents, would always pooh-pooh it away as nothing but a child’s imagination.

It wasn’t just that door, she realized. She had remembered, earlier that day, feeling uneasy in the basement, too. But wasn’t that normal in very old houses? The basements weren’t exactly inviting. They were usually unfinished, dank, smelly, and filled with things that would scare young children: old trunks, ancient toys, mementoes from another time. History hung in the air in those types of basements. No matter how much spit and polish you used to renovate them, they still clung to the past. And whatever demons that past might contain.

But at the same time, Tess realized that, as the years passed, those childhood fears had faded, as childhood fears do. The boogeyman didn’t live under beds. Mirrors weren’t gateways to the unknown and didn’t harbor specters that would appear if you chanted their names three times. Monsters didn’t lurk in closets. Things that went bump in the night were just old radiators, and the groans of an aging house were just its bones settling down for a nap. Sure, they bubbled to the surface now, but Tess figured that was the memory of the past rekindling, as it did with other memories of her lifetime growing up in the house. Board games in the drawing room. Music after dinner. Playing in the backyard.

There was nothing so scary about that door or what lay beyond it.





CHAPTER SEVEN



The time it took for Wyatt and his crew to arrive seemed to drag on forever. Would they never come? Storm curled up at Tess’s feet in the living room as she tried to immerse herself in a book, the hissing radiators taking the chill out of the air.

Finally, the dog raised his head, ears perked, and growled. He glanced at Tess as he jumped to his feet and made his way into the kitchen. She followed. The knock came a few moments later.

Tess opened the door and ushered in Wyatt and two other men, red faced from the cold, all laden with toolboxes. One was carrying a metal trap that had been folded up, and the other was toting a step stool.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” she said, closing the door behind them.

“Tess, meet Grant and Hunter,” Wyatt said, motioning to the other men. “Grant does a little bit of everything around Wharton, and Hunter’s our guy from Salmon Bay who can handle that critter invasion problem for you.”

“Hunter?” she said, grinning at the burly man with thick reddish-brown hair. “Well, that’s appropriate.”

He let out a loud laugh, his eyes twinkling. “Don’t I know it? I guess my line of work was meant to be, now wasn’t it?” A slight brogue added music to his words. Tess couldn’t tell if it was Scottish or Irish, but whatever it was, it suited him. Tess warmed to him immediately. She wondered what had brought him to Wharton, but figured it was probably the same story as so many others: came as a tourist and stayed.

“We’ll get whatever has taken up residence out of here and back into the wild,” he went on, smiling broadly. “Don’t you worry about that.”

The man loved his work, that was clear, Tess thought.

The other man, Grant, was quieter, much more reserved. Older. He seemed uneasy. Almost uncomfortable. His hair was sort of that noncolor between blond, brown, and gray—maybe a mixture of all three, and he was thin and wiry. This man worked physically for a living, there was no doubt. His face was deeply lined, as though he had lived hard at some time in his life. But his eyes were a deep brown and held a kindness and depth that Tess could see right away. Still waters run deep, she heard her grandmother whisper in her ear.

As they hung up their coats, Wyatt was chattering.

“Okay!” he said, clapping his hands together. “First thing is getting the door off. I think all it’s going to take is removing those hinges, but we’ll see when we get into it.”

Hunter held up his hand. “Before that’s done, we need to make sure all of the doors of the other rooms upstairs are closed. And”—he turned to Tess—“is there a door at the bottom or top of the stairway? The last thing we need is that critter to run from the back room once we get that door off and find its way into the main part of the house.”

Tess had to think about that for a minute. “There’s a door from the second floor to the back stairway, so we can close that. But the front stairs are wide open, I’m afraid.”

Hunter squinted. “Okay, we’ll deal with that. It might mean moving a couple of boxes or pieces of furniture in front of the stairway, to block the animal’s hasty retreat, if it comes to that. They don’t usually get by me, but there’s always a chance.” He winked at her.

Tess couldn’t help laughing. Then she thought of the old steamer trunks she had bought on a recent antiquing trip with Simon. “I know just the thing. In the third bedroom down the hall, there are some antique trunks. That should do the trick.”