Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera) (4 page)

Reagan was
watching her, his long arms folded causally across his chest, his polo shirt and jeans looking out of place. Taryn felt as if both of them were standing in the midst of a movie set. She was confused. “So you say that people don’t come in here and go through things?”

“That’s right,” he replied with a faint smile on his face.
He had seen all of this before and was watching her with amusement, waiting for her reaction.

“Well, it looks like someone came in and went through this room
,” she muttered as she walked over to the dresser and ran her hand over the keys. They were cold and heavy under her fingers.

“Wellll…not exactly. You see, this bedroom has been like this for as long as I can remember.”

Taryn turned and looked at him, confused. “What do you mean?”

“It’s
always
looked like this. I’m thirty-five years old and it’s been this way since I was a baby, probably before. The downstairs? Yeah, kids came and went down there some. But something kept them from going any further. Back in the 70s, my daddy said he ran a few off, some who had taken some silver and things from the dining room. But not in years. My wife, she come up here once and tried to clean. Pushed those drawers closed, put that jewelry back into the box, picked up those papers on the floor, even tried to make the bed. Said that it looking like this all the time bothered her. Then she went back downstairs for a little while. Heard some noises here. When she came back up, it looked just the same as it did before. This room just don’t want to be touched.”

Taryn and Reagan sat on the front steps of the old house, looking out over the fields and gravel lane. “It’s in remarkably good condition. I mean, to have been vacant for, what, how many years? Unbelievable.” She wasn’t sure if she was really going to believe that the house kept people from messing with it, but she was ready to admit there was something special about it.

Re
agan nodded. “Part of that is because it’s stone. Part of it because we’ve kept it covered and those old trees right here keep it shaded. I’ve patched the roof up over the years and there’s not a drop of water that can get into the house. It will come into the cellar, of course, and the whole thing smells musty. I’m sure if we knock out some of those walls we’re gonna find black mold up to our ears, but it
is
still standing.”

Making
both physical and mental notes while Reagan talked, now she stopped. “So why do it now? Why tear it down? Why not build around it? Restore it?” It really did break her heart to think of something that had stood there for so long to be knocked over in the name of a subdivision and “progress.”

“I don’t have the money.
People look at me and think I do, but I don’t. I borrow it, same as everybody else does. I have debts, too. I had a guy look at it once. He said it would cost as much to fix it as it would to build a new one. The foundation is fair, as far as we know, but you’re looking at a house that was built two centuries ago and hasn’t been updated since. No plumbing, no electric, weak floors, needs a new roof…It’s just not my project. And then there’s the other thing...nobody here would want to live in it. Would take an outsider. Fact is, if it wasn’t for the Stokes County Historical Society throwing a fit over it, I wouldn’t have even called you here to do your thing to it. No offense or nothing,” he added hurriedly.

Taryn nodded. That was usually the case
—the owners rarely took their own initiative in these matters. She was used to it. But at least Reagan was honest about it. But what had he meant about nobody from there not wanting to live in it?

“Well, I hate to see it go
, but then I hate to see all old houses go. It’s yours and you can do what you want with it. I can get started this evening,” she said as she stood up and dusted off her pants. “I like the sunset light the best, next to early morning. But I’m not really a morning person. Take me about three weeks finish, maybe a little longer. I’ll say five weeks to be on the safe side.”

“No worries,” Re
agan smiled. “We don’t plan on doing anything with it until the end of summer. I’ve got my hands full with some other business as it is. Feel free to poke around and do what you have to do. Just don’t get hurt.”

“Thanks. I usually spend the first few days just kind of getting acquainted with the place, looking around, doing some sketches and photographs.”

Reagan shrugged. “However you have to work. My wife? She’s a photographer too. Mostly kids. You do a lot of houses like this?”

“Not so much anymore,” Taryn answered quickly. “Mostly museums and historical sites. I don’t do a lot of private homes anymore. This one
…called to me, I guess you could say. Or else the ladies at the historical society were pretty persistent.”

Reagan smiled. “Well, they are that, I can attest.”

“I have my cell on me if you need anything,” she said as she started toward her car.

“Oh,” Re
agan called after her. “You won’t need it. Can’t get a signal out here. The company says there’s coverage but this must be a dead zone.”

W
hen the Stokes County Historical Society first approached Taryn about the job, she was reluctant. She didn’t do jobs associated with many private homes anymore. This was for reasons of her own, but mostly because the owners liked to nose around and make her nervous and she enjoyed having free run of the place. It had taken some pleading on their part for her to accept this one, and she did so only after they assured her it was vacant and nobody would bother her. And, of course, once they assured her that they could actually afford her. She hated to be petty about the money thing, but she really did need it.

It was the name that
drew her to the house from the beginning: Windwood. It didn’t take much to understand where it came from, either. With the house’s position atop the ridge the wind was certainly strong enough to blow you over if you didn’t watch your step. She was going to have to weigh her easel down and clamp her canvas to it. Luckily, the tall maple and oak trees blocked the worst of the wind. She assumed there had once been more woods than what were presently visible, but the ones she could see were thick and dark and almost romantic with their position at the foot of the valley.

She’d been in constant contact with the president and secretary of the
Stokes County Historical Society for almost six weeks and she knew the time was coming when she’d have to go over and meet the women (and presumably men) who were a part of it, especially since they were technically her employers. But so far she’d been engrossed with getting acquainted with the house and meeting Reagan, the rightful owner anyway.

They hadn’t told her anything about the property itself, just the dates of construction and architectural features she might find interesting. That was enough for her at the time. She’d especially enjoyed the pictures they sent her of the property. Looking back, she’d had no idea that photographs were about to become so important.

The house and surrounding farm certainly appeared ordinary enough in the images they’d sent her; maybe a little sad and forgotten, but those were the kinds of places that drew her.

Taryn started her degree program when she was eighteen, but she’d started her career much earlier. Since
Matt first got his license at age sixteen, he had driven them around to deserted houses and buildings so she could “explore” (a nicer word than breaking and entering), and the two of them could have mini adventures. Matt was usually just the chauffeur and sidekick in these excursions; they were really all about Taryn. She’d known Matt for more than twenty years and he’d been humoring her for all of them, even when their first mode of transport had been nothing but their bikes and he’d ridden her around on the handlebars, her pigtails flying in the wind.

At first,
she’d taken her 35 mm camera with them everywhere they went and snapped furiously at old barns, gnarled oak trees, and abandoned farmhouses with cracked windows and dilapidated roofs with daffodils growing through sagging porches. For every old house and ancient barn and warehouse they’d discovered, she created stories about the former inhabitants: who’d they been, what they’d seen, how they’d lived and worked. Matt had listened and humored her while her imagination spun tales from the past. She’d hated waiting almost a week for her pictures to be developed back then, but it was exciting, too. She’d had to be much more discriminate with her picture taking when developing the rolls cost money she didn’t really have. She’d made sure every shot was framed to perfection. He’d had such patience with her as she got down on her knees, on her stomach, and even had him boost her up on his shoulders from time to time.

Then, on her fifteenth birthday, her grandmother
gave her a Polaroid camera. That made things
really
interesting. Although the quality wasn’t as good, she loved having the instantaneous product right in her hand. Sometimes, she took both cameras along with her and snapped until she’d run out of film.

She hadn’t discovered her
flair for painting until she was in high school. Her choices for an elective were between art and shop and even though she loved architecture, she was terrible at woodworking (her parents mistook her 4-H birdhouse for a sailboat), so art it was. Her teacher was tolerant and understanding and helped her to develop a skill she didn’t even know she’d possessed.

The first building she had reconstructed in a painting
was a barn. She loved barns, especially the ones that were used for tobacco because they had all the “little doors” as she’d called them when she was a kid. This particular barn was falling in, but still boasted brilliant red paint that shone in the sun and it also had a glorious cupola, something she almost never saw. Using her imagination and other barns of similar design for inspiration, she painted it as though it was in its former glory. The painting won her a prize at a regional art contest for high school students and the hobby of painting dilapidated buildings as they had once been took place.

When she was eighteen
, she volunteered as a docent at a local historical home for the summer. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slave quarters existed on the grounds. Only half of one of the buildings still stood, although the sites of the others were marked. After gaining permission from the director, she spent a good part of her free time that summer reading through the letters, journals, and other documentation that were kept on hand at the museum from the family members and guests of the home during the time period. She also spent a lot of time at Vanderbilt University’s research library. Within three months, she was able to create a painting of the grounds that included an eerily accurate representation of the mansion and all of the outbuildings, including the former slave quarters and a grist mill that was also in ruins. The painting still hung in the front hall of the museum. And it helped her eventually win a scholarship. 

She wasn’t entirely sure she believed Reagan’s story about the dresser and the bedroom.
She admitted there was something off about the house, but,
really
, a house that didn’t want anybody to touch anything in it? Or rather—a room that didn’t want anyone to touch anything in it? Not that she blamed the poor woman, of course. She didn’t like her things bothered, either.

True, she felt something in the house. She wasn’t going to deny that. And there was some kind of interesting sensation
on the property she couldn’t put her finger on. But she had felt that before. And, true, she wasn’t sure she felt welcome there. But she had also felt that before. Of course, her vision
had
wavered in the living room. But maybe she could explain that, as well. She was tired, unfocused. It was hot outside, muggy. The air was old and musty. Who knew what kind of mold was inside those walls. She loved old buildings more than most people but black mold was serious business and could do funny things to people and it didn’t take much of it to make you crazy.

There was always an explanation for the weird things that happened in old houses and she tried not to get too excited and jump to ghosts right away.

Besides, if anyone had a reason to want to believe in ghosts, it was her.

D
ressed in cutoff jeans, an old Eagles T-shirt, and sneakers, Taryn headed back out to Windwood Farm in plenty of time to catch the evening light. She didn’t bring her paints with her on this trip because she first liked to sketch what she would later put paintbrush to. She’d go over that sketch nearly a dozen times before she was happy with it. And frankly, she would never really be completely satisfied with it. She’d even go over it in her dreams. The photographs she took would help. She hadn’t uploaded the previous ones to her laptop yet but she would that evening.

The weight of the day was starting to take its toll on her. She was still a little tired from the drive up. It had been three years since she’d worked at a private residence, even a deserted one, and the last one
was a little bit of a disaster. The owner watched her like a hawk and made her a nervous wreck and she’d still been recovering from a difficult time in her life. The painting wasn’t her best, even though her client, the Arts Council, was pleased with it. It was the longest month of her life.