The House on Persimmon Road (30 page)

“Oh, go break a hip, Agnes. Now, where was I? Oh. My job. I’m going to be working in the gift shop at the museum. The director was thrilled to get the sculpture on loan.” She suddenly turned on Pip. “But you, young man, have no appreciation for the finer things in life. We found bubble gum stuck behind the ears.”

Justine frowned. “Pip, you didn’t.”

“You said it was disgusting to keep it in the fridge.”

Judy Ann wandered in and was ignored. While the conversation rose and fell around the table, Lottie scooped her up and put her on a stool by the sink. “How’s my little darlin’ today?”

“I’m hungry. Are you a friend of Grandma’s too?”

“I’m a friend of yours.”

“I’ve never seen you before.”

“That’s because you couldn’t. Now you have special eyes and you can.”

“I do?”

“We played dolls one day, but you got scart.”

Judy Aim gasped. “You made Mrs. Pratt drink tea all by herself!”

“And now I’m makin’ you toad in the hole.”

Judy Ann giggled. “Little girls don’t eat frogs.”

“Piffle!” Lottie laughed. “You’re too smart fer me. Later on you git me some eggs outta Tucker’s henhouse an’ I’ll make you some little puddin’s fer supper.”

Evelyn gushed with delight at the food Lottie set before her. “I haven’t had toad in the hole since I was a little girl! My grandmother’s cook used to make it.”

Lottie beamed and refilled coffee cups all around. Wheeler showed up at the back door. “Tucker left for work ’afor I got up,” he said. “I ain’t been fed.”

Lottie put him in the chair next to Pip. “Mind yore manners, we got company from town,” she admonished Wheeler.

Justine watched Wheeler exchange glances with Agnes, and Agnes shook her head. Before she could decipher what more could possibly be going on between those two, her attention was drawn to the opposite end of the table. Lottie sat down and Judy Ann climbed onto her lap, allowing the woman to feed her.

“You’re not hearing a word I’m saying, dear,” Pauline said.

Justine sighed. “I was just wishing I was an embryo again.”

“I’m going to finish packing. I do hope Mrs. Roberts works out because you need the help, Justine. However, you shouldn’t allow servants at table. And keep the liquor cabinet locked. Come along, Evelyn, keep me company.”

“I haven’t hired—oh, never mind.” Justine moved on. “Agnes, if you don’t have any plans for the day, perhaps you can run into town and pick up a few things for me.”

“We need some meat, some nutmeg, and some orange flower water,” said Lottie.

“I never heard of orange water,” said Agnes.

Prob’ly not
, thought Lottie
’cause orange water ain’t purple
. “I’m of a mind to dobe a rump of beef and make some snow cream. I need apples and oranges. An’ don’t fergit the apples. I been aching fer some snow cream.” She smiled sweetly at Justine. “It was fair hard to come on sugar during the war and after’ards. Twern’t nobody left to cut cane.” Lottie looked at Agnes. “Git me a banana, too. I ain’t never had no banana.”

“You said little puddings,” accused Judy Ann.

“I got the makin’s fer puddin’,” Lottie told her. “You run along an’ git dressed now, little darlin’.” She pointed at Pip. “First chance you git, which is after you clean your room, you run yonder an’ find Milo and tell him to be up hereabouts when shadows is longest, and to bring his shovel.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see why,” she promised mysteriously. The sun wasn’t going to set another day without she had retrieved her money, silver, and wedding ring. “Law! I recollect I can keep busy till then.”

Busy doing what? Justine wondered. “Mrs. Roberts, thank you for cooking breakfast. I shouldn’t have let you.”

“You couldn’ta stopped me, an’ that’s a fact.”

“I…think I’ll get dressed,” Justine said and made a beeline for the telephone in her office. Mr. Kessler came on the line at once. She hurried through greetings.

“Everyone’s fine, thank you.” She inhaled deeply. “I know this sounds silly, but has there ever been any comment about the house, other tenants complaining about noises that go bump in the night, that sort of thing?” There was dead silence on the other end of the line. “Mr. Kessler?”

“You moving out?”

“No!”

“Waal, there’s always talk.”

“Like what?”

“Ghosts, hauntings, and such like in houses as old as the one you’re in.”

“You ever hear of an Elmer Roberts?”

“You been talking to Milo? I told him! I sure told him. I ain’t never gonna git that place sold if’n he keeps running off at the mouth and digging the place up. I imagine if you want to buy the place now, you’re gonna want to knock a couple thousand off the price we talked about?”

“I…” Opportunity knocked. Justine had learned to open the door. “Well, yes, if we have to put up with a ghost,” she said, to see what response that would get.

“Figured so,” said a disappointed-sounding Mr. Kessler.

“What’s the story on our ghost, Mr. Kessler?”

“It ain’t documented or anything, but the tale that traveled down the years mostly just had carpetbaggers cleaning out the house and carrying the woman off to parts unknown. Some say she just up and died, but nobody ever found how…y’know what I mean?”

Justine was afraid she did. “What’s her name?”

“Lotus, or Lottie, some such.”

She gripped the phone until her knuckles were bloodless. “I see. Well, thank you.”

“Not gonna let her run you off are you?”

“Not if she can cook,” she said lightly.

“Har, har! Ain’t you somethin’!”

Justine cradled the phone. Okay, she told herself, it was a bizarre situation, but nothing she couldn’t handle if she just kept an open mind and didn’t panic. The main thing was to make certain that the children were safe.

She hurried Agnes and Wheeler on their way with the grocery list and insisted that Pip and Judy Ann accompany them.

“We’re supposed to clean up Tucker’s yard from yesterday,” Pip argued. “He said so. Besides we want to stay and talk to Lottie.”

“Well, you can’t.”

“But she might disappear!” Pip cried.

Justine had high hopes of exactly that.

“Go with your grandmother!”

No amount of coaxing could stop Lottie from doing dishes and later clearing up the debris Pauline had left behind in her room. Justine sighed and watched her for a moment from the threshold. The woman looked as much of flesh and blood as she herself.

“Please, Mrs. Roberts, can we sit down and talk over a cup of coffee?”

“Reckon you ought to call me Lottie.”

“Lottie, then.”

Reheating the coffee, Justine found her hands trembling. The idea of a ghost that cooked and cleaned was so preposterous, so alien a thought, that she had an intellectual skirmish with herself before she could raise the first question.

“Lottie…I want you to know that I don’t believe in voodoo, the occult, or anything supernatural.”

“Me, either. I’m a Christian an’ don’t hold with heathen ways.”

“But you expect me to believe that you have somehow returned from the dead?” Just saying the words made Justine shiver.

“I don’t recollect I died. I jus’ woke up an’ I was betwixt and between. I weren’t of this world or the next. I could see myself—”

“An out-of-body experience?” Justine didn’t comprehend it, but she remembered an article on it in Reader’s Digest and some people who professed to have experienced such things had been on a couple of talk shows. “How long did it last?”

“Best I can figure, better’n a hundred years.”

Justine closed her eyes. Lottie Roberts was a real nut case. “You have a social security card?”

“Don’t recollect as I do. I knowed I was gonna have a hard time convincin’ you, Justine. I don’t know where I’ll go if you don’t let me stay here. Sure as shootin’ I ain’t got a relative left. None that I know anyways. You wanna see where I been keepin’ all these years?”

Now we’re getting somewhere, Justine thought. “Can you show me?”

Lottie led her into the pantry. “Elmer built this secret door up to the attic after the war started. Then, once he was called up, an’ I had ter be here alone, we put all our good stuff up in the attic. Union soldiers were fierce about lootin’. It’s all here, ’cept fer our silver and such. That’s buried.” She demonstrated the wood panel that pushed in and released the latch. Next Lottie swung the door open to reveal a steep, narrow flight of stairs.

Cautiously Justine followed her up the stairs.

Sunlight streamed through a dusty dormer window, casting light and shadow over an attic crowded with beds and tables, wooden boxes of dishes, crystal, and oil lamps. Feather mattresses and quilts were rolled into heaps. Bed-slats were of rope. An old trunk was open and overflowing with fabric. Justine lifted out a dress, it crumbled in her hand.

“Like I said, rotted through and through,” said Lottie.

“You lived up here?”

“I liked to be around my things. ’Course, my chair was downstairs. I used ter sit in it and mull things over.”

“Your chair.” Disbelief and presentiment warred in Justine’s mind.

“Elmer built it. It was the first piece of furniture he carved out fer me. It’s special like.”

Justine felt the low roof and walls closing in on her. She hurried back down to the kitchen, out onto the porch and sucked in great gulps of warm summer air.

“There’s no logic to this at all,” she said when Lottie followed her out. “Not one bit! You’re asking me to believe in some kind of magic!”

Lottie scoffed “Magic!” She grabbed Justine’s arm and pulled her over to the washer. “This is magic,” she cried. And still holding Justine’s arm pulled her into the kitchen and through the house. “That microwave is magic, and your computers! Computers. Law! I never heard of such. An’ television that brings pictures right into the parlor, an’ electricity. Why, I didn’t extend myself on magic. I don’t know magic. I used electricity!”

Justine slumped onto the sofa. Lottie moved to sit in her chair.

“How?”

Lottie shrugged. “I just plugged me in. Settin’ right there at your desk.”

Justine gasped. “The skeleton, a little boy named Jimmie—”

“My bones,” Lottie agreed. “Nobody ever came to collect ’em so I figured I could use ’em over again. My plan was to extend myself an’ live out my life.” She straightened the apron she was wearing. “Which I done and which I aim to do. This is the only home I know, but I reckon if you cast me out, I’ll manage. Howsomever, I been countin’ on you to be my friend. An’ you need my help, Justine. Why you can’t hardly run this house and work, too. I seen that fer myself. Agnes ain’t no help. And now she’s goin’ off to college or some such. Just lookit how she’s neglected Judy Ann since Wheeler come into her life. That child needs me. I recollect you show me how to use that iron of your’n and you won’t never see her wearing wrinkled clothes. Shameful, that’s what that is.

“An’ lookit my house! Why, I could grow peas under the beds, dust is so thick.”

Justine held up her hand. “Enough.”

Lottie eyed the dust balls under the liquor cabinet. She itched to set the house to rights, but her future rested with Justine, so she sat there, hands folded in her lap.

“I do need help,” Justine mused aloud, but she was talking to herself. “But I’d be worried all the time about the children.” She turned her head and gazed at Lottie. “The thing is—you don’t look dangerous.”

Lottie gaped. “Why I ain’t. I ain’t never hurt nothin’ past flies an’ mice… except…”

Justine’s heart lurched. “Except what?”

“Well, once, I don’t rightly recollect the exact night, but a passel of Union scouts was camped up the river a piece and one sneaked down to my henhouse. I hit him a powerful blow with the hoe. He fell like a sack of rocks. I left him a-lying there, but next mornin’ he was gone. Don’t rightly know if I kilt him or not.”

“But that was a long time ago.” The comment ran through Justine’s mind a second time. Even to her own ears it sounded as if she was accepting a cosmic impossibility. It made her scalp tingle.

Lottie chuckled. “I reckon it was. You wanna show me how ter use that washing machine? I’m fair itching to wash a load of sheets. After’ards, I spec I’ll sprinkle down the floors, then I got to git them little puddin’s bakin’ fer Judy Ann. I promised.”

Against all odds Justine felt herself giving in to the improbable. No way could she put an old woman out on the street to fend for herself. “You like doing housework and cooking?”

“Law, I ain’t hardly done nothin’ else. ’Cept when I helped in the fields or in the curing barn. ’Course, back then, we had cows to milk, hogs to slop, an’ I kept a mess of fowl—chickens, ducks, and geese like. Don’t spec you’d be needing butter churned or water boiled fer washin’, howsomever, I do aim to bake my own bread, sweet cakes an’ such.”

“Home-baked bread?”

The kitten strolled into the room and leaped into Lottie’s lap. “Flea catcher,” she said, but she stroked it until it purred contentedly, knowing that all the while Justine was watching her like a ferret. She didn’t think there was much more she could say. It was all up to Justine now.

They sat together in silence for over a minute.

The lure of help won out. Hiring Lottie would free her of much of the burden of housework and leave her to press on with her computer project. “I couldn’t pay you much,” Justine said finally. “And I would be keeping an eye on you.”

Lottie’s face was suddenly so flushed she had to dump the cat and fan herself with the apron. “Law!” she exclaimed, feeling good all over, and before the feeling had a chance to run its course, she said, “Pauline’s room use ter be mine and Elmer’s. I reckon I’d be satisfied with it again, seein’ as she’s moved out an’ all.”

Justine nodded. “Well, for the time being.” There was nothing more to be said. She felt unsure of what she was doing—hiring a self-proclaimed ghost! Despite a natural cynicism, she halfway believed Lottie. And if she tried to justify the story, she would probably talk herself out of hiring the woman. She stared at Lottie for a long second. “There is one more thing. Do you come and go, I mean disappear—”

“I ain’t fer certain.” Lottie floundered. “But if parts of me start disappearin’ all I got to do is extend myself with a piece of copper wire in one them ’lectric sockets. I reckon I’m here to stay. Only thing, when I die regular-like, you got to be certain, certain, y’hear—that I’m buried proper like, prayers an’ all. With a preacher, if’n you can git one. I figure that was my problem last time.”