The Color of Dust Read online

  Mr. Dumfries smiled fondly at the door and then resettled his glasses on his nose. “Gillian is about your age. If, while you’re here, you find yourself in need of some girl talk, I’m sure she’d be happy to lend an ear.”

  Carrie wasn’t sure what “girl talk” translated into in this part of the country. For her, it meant something close to “pillow talk,” the soft, unguarded conversation that two worn-out woman had when the sun was just starting to lighten the sky. She doubted very much that was what Mr. Dumfries had in mind, but she smiled her thanks as politely as she knew how.

  “Now, to continue.” He rattled the papers again and shuffled them around on his lap. “Your father, Michael Bowden, no middle name, of Colchester, Connecticut, married your mother in 1953 in Chicago. He died in 2002 with you, yourself, being his sole surviving heir. Do I have that right?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t swear to the dates, but the names and places were right.

  “To whit, that leaves you as the sole heir to the estate of Celia Covington Burgess, your mother being her only offspring and you being a direct descendant. Is it correct that you have never been married, Miss Bowden? I ask only because, Virginia laws being what they are, your being married or divorced would complicate things a bit.”

  “I’ve never married,” Carrie said dryly. She would have been married if it were legal. But then again, she would also be in midst of an ugly divorce. A nasty settlement dispute. A custody battle over the cat. So maybe there was a bright side after all. For her, at least.

  “Very good.” Mr. Dumfries reached for a pen and made a tick mark on the blue paper. “So, you don’t have any specific ties to Chicago?”

  There was a question underneath the question that Carrie could hear but couldn’t quite catch. “I was born and raised in Chicago. I think that counts as some sort of a tie, but I have no other family there, if that’s what you mean.” Not since Megan left her for a barely-into-her-twenties cocktail waitress with a short skirt and a bunny tail. Not since their ten years together disappeared in the twitch of a nose, the swing of a fist. Their apartment was empty now of anything she cared about, which, at this point, meant the cat. She really missed the cat.

  “Have you ever thought about moving to Virginia?”

  Carrie sat up straighter. It hadn’t occurred to her to think about it. Up until the letter arrived, all she knew about Virginia was that it lay somewhere around the middle of the east coast on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon Line. She had heard of Mount Vernon, Jamestown, Richmond and Robert E. Lee, though she only had a vague notion of where Mount Vernon was and no idea at all of what the E. stood for. Prior to her arriving here, thoughts of Virginia brought to mind small green mountains and screechy fiddle music played by old men with no teeth.

  Even after arriving, she didn’t have too different a picture. On her way to Richmond, she drove over and through a series of small green mountains, and Carrie met some interesting people on her drive to Columbia, especially during her wrong turns. Virginia surprised her. She had not been prepared to like the small green mountains and the tall trees that covered them, or the old man in the checkered shirt sitting on the front porch of the convenience store who told her a funny story while his wife laughed with her mouth wide open, slapping him on the knee. It stirred something inside her that she hadn’t known was there. She couldn’t help but wonder if her grandmother had been a woman like that and what she had missed by not knowing her.

  Carrie shook her head hesitantly. “I wasn’t thinking about moving. The truth of it, Mr. Dumfries, is that I’m not sure why I drove down here. I had the vacation time and I guess I just wanted to see things for myself.”

  “An admirable sentiment, Miss Bowden, and a wise decision. I suppose I should get on with showing you the things you drove here to see.” Mr. Dumfries paused to take a sip of his tea and then put it back down on the old cork coaster. He shuffled through the papers and pulled out a thick stack, grayish white and stapled at the corner. He handed them to her. The papers had the same small dense type covering all the pages, with whereofs, hereins and therefores scattered all across them. Carrie frowned.

  Mr. Dumfries chuckled softly at her expression. “This will was written in 1972, before you were born and before every office in town had a computer sitting on every desk.” He cast a disparaging eye at the large flat screen sitting on his credenza. “Your grandmother was eighty-two years old when she wrote that will and she never changed a thing.” Mr. Dumfries took off his glasses and pinched at the bridge of his nose. “She was one hundred and eight when she died. Short of the record for this county by only six months and for all of Virginia by only six years. Even so, her death was something of a shock.” He put his glasses back on and gave her a thin smile. “We all thought she would outlive the mountains.” Mr. Dumfries reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a small flat box. “Here are a few of the things that go along with the will.” He handed it to Carrie.

  She put the will on her lap and opened the box. Inside was a large brass colored key, a small gold ring with stylized flowers etched into it and a very old pocket watch. She picked up the watch and looked at Mr. Dumfries.

  He shrugged just a little. “I’m afraid I’m only the keeper of the things. I don’t know what they mean exactly. The key, I imagine, is to the front door of the house, but I’m not sure because no one has used the front door since 1953. That was the year your mother ran away to marry your father. The rumor of it is that after your grandmother found her note, she closed up the front part of the house and never went in it again. The pocket watch, I believe, belonged to your grandfather, Robert Burgess. Leastways, his initials are on the back. I have no idea who the ring belonged to or why your grandmother thought it was important.”

  Carrie put the watch back in the box and looked at the key with some surprise. “She left me a house?”

  “Yes.” Mr. Dumfries shifted in his chair. “Forgive me if I wasn’t clear about that on the phone. There’s an old house and a little bit of land to go with it, about twenty-five acres or so. It’s detailed on page eight of the will.”

  Carrie touched the key. It was big, for a key, with fancy scrollwork on the turning end but only three plain teeth on the other end. “Twenty-five acres. Is that a lot?”

  Mr. Dumfries pursed his lips and wiggled his hand back and forth. “It depends on what you want it for. It’d be a bit much for a front lawn, but it’s a right decent size for a horse or five, though not enough for a herd of cattle. A few goats or sheep would be all right.”

  A picture flashed across Carrie’s mind of herself dressed like Little Bo Peep chasing a flock of fuzzy white lambs bouncing across a bright green pasture. She grinned.

  Mr. Dumfries gave her an odd look but he didn’t ask. “I’ll be happy to drive you out there and show you around. Please keep in mind that it’s an old house and it’s been sitting empty for a while. It needs a bit of work, but it could be nice if someone put some care into it.” His eyes shifted down. “It would be good to see it lived in again.”

  An old house. The Bo Peep image vanished as Carrie thought of moldy drywall and sagging ceilings, swollen doorframes and wallpaper peeling off the walls. She didn’t mind doing some repair work. She was handy with a hammer, knew which end of the screwdriver to hold and was passably efficient with a paintbrush. Maybe, instead of taking the historic tour of Richmond, as she had planned, she would stay here for a week or two, throw on a coat of paint, fix the leaky faucets, patch the drywall and tighten the screws. She could do that. She would even enjoy it. It would be good to be busy.

  “There aren’t many formalities left,” Mr. Dumfries said, pushing his glasses further up onto his nose. “I just need for you to sign a few papers. I can file them with the court first thing tomorrow then we can get to work putting everything in your name and paying off the tax man, etcetera.”

  Carrie hadn’t thought about that. Maybe this was the trick. This could be the part where the kindly old lawyer asked
her to empty out her bank account and then stuck her with a tax bill that she would be paying on for the rest of her life. She put a hand back on her purse. “Is there enough money in the estate to cover the expenses?” Carrie watched Mr. Dumfries very carefully.

  He blinked at her for a second. “Just flip over to the last page of the will. The estate totals are listed there.”

  She flipped the pages and froze. There were numbers there that hardly made any sense. “I thought you said there were only twenty-five acres?”

  “You asked about the house. Twenty-five acres is what surrounds it. The rest of the land is scattered all over the state. If you add together all the various holdings, it’s about four thousand acres in all. Most of the land is rented cropland or pastures, but there are a few more lucrative holdings. Those are leased to companies that have buildings on them and they bring in a bit.”

  A bit? Lucrative? No shit. Even by Chicago standards, it was a respectable income. Almost three times what she was making shuffling papers around her desk and spending the day avoiding her boss. She wouldn’t need that job if she didn’t want it. There were choices here and decisions to be made but none to be made lightly. She thought of Megan again and her forever questing for things that were bigger, better, younger, stronger. She would have wanted Carrie to sell everything fast and cheap and run with as much as she could stuff in her pockets back to Chicago. She would have insisted, and Carrie would have fought her, if only for the sake of fighting. It was a good thing that Megan wasn’t here with her.

  The taste of regret lay sour on her tongue as she thought of the many things they had both done wrong. That was the bad thing. The good thing was that she could take her time deciding what to do. This time she would do the right thing instead of doing the impulsive thing.

  Mr. Dumfries cleared his throat. “If you’ll just sign and date the back page and initial all the rest. I’ll need to make a copy of your driver’s license, get your tax ID and then we’ll be done here. When you’re finished with your tea, I’ll drive you out to the house. It’s not too far.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  They drove back through town in Mr. Dumfries’s big box of a car while he pointed out the things she might need to know about if she was planning on staying for any length of time. There was the city municipal building, the post office, one of two grocery stores and, most important, a hardware store that could put her in touch with good local workmen and that also sold things like buckets, brooms and mops.

  They drove south over a long narrow bridge with the grayblue water of the James River sparkling brightly underneath them. They didn’t pass any cars once they got over the river, just farms and houses and trees. Mr. Dumfries drove slowly, well under the speed limit, keeping both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. Carrie stared out the window at a herd of cows as they passed by them. A big cow with a bright white stripe around its middle stood by the fence licking a little cow’s head. The calf stood with its feet splayed far apart teetering under the rough strokes of its mother’s tongue. It staggered, shook its head and looked at her forlornly. They rounded a bend in the road and the cows fell out of sight. Yes, Virginia surprised her in all sorts of ways.

  They turned off the main highway, away from the afternoon sun. The road thinned as the pavement changed from a dark black to a pebbly gray, the hum of their tires dropped in pitch, and the farmlands faded into the woods. Carrie thought of the small flat box and the key, the watch and the ring inside it.

  “Tell me something about my grandmother’s house, Mr. Dumfries.”

  Mr. Dumfries cleared his throat and shifted his hands on the steering wheel. “The house sits on the inside bend of the river only about a half mile from it, as the crow flies, but it’s up high on a ridge, so you don’t have to worry about flooding. Even during the last hundred year flood, the water never rose that high. It’s about five miles from town as the car drives. That puts you pretty close to everything you need while still being out in the country. If you want to stay at the house instead of at a motel in Richmond, rumor has it that it looks habitable. The electricity and the water are still on.”

  “Even though the house is empty?”

  “We thought we’d get things settled, one way or another, a lot sooner than we did, so we never cut anything off. And it wouldn’t do to let the pipes freeze in the winter. We had the old groundsman go around once a week and peek in the windows to make sure nothing had burst or caught on fire.”

  “But nobody went inside?”

  Mr. Dumfries paused. “I suppose I should’ve given you more time to read the will. It said pretty explicitly that no one was to enter the house until the heir took possession. Your grandmother probably thought that would be your mother.” His fingers tapped against the steering wheel. “It didn’t end up that way, as you know. No one has gone into the house since the day after your grandmother died. That very evening, the head nurse tidied up a bit, locked the doors, turned in the keys and that was that. We clean up storm damage every once in a while, patched a place on the roof once and were going to replace a window that got broken, but Mr. Bell decided to just have his son board it up from the outside.”

  Carrie thought again of the large brass key resting in the box. “If my grandmother was dead, what did it matter if anyone went into the house or not?”

  Mr. Dumfries seemed to think about that for a moment. “Well, I like to think that I’m an honest sort of a lawyer. I believe strongly in following my client’s instructions, even if they’re dead, since that’s what they pay me to do.” His fingers stopped tapping and his shoulders hunched a bit. “Besides, Celia Burgess was a formidable woman. She’s the last person I’d want haunting me from the grave.” Mr. Dumfries flashed her a quick smile and laughed, but the smile was brittle and the laugh faded into an awkward silence.

  Carrie didn’t smile. She remembered how strange her father’s apartment felt just after he died. It seemed like he was always peering over her shoulder approving or disapproving of everything she touched. Almost three months passed before that feeling went away and she could finally pack his things. Not that there had been much to pack once she trashed all the empty bottles, but she never wanted to go through that again and especially not for a woman she’d never met.

  “Just how long has this house been empty, Mr. Dumfries?”

  He coughed lightly and the tips of his ears turned pink. “About twelve years.”

  Her eyes widened with surprise. “Twelve years? It took you all that time to find me?”

  Mr. Dumfries cut his eyes toward her but he didn’t turn his head. “No, Miss Bowden. It didn’t. My predecessor, Mr. Bell, chose to interpret the will’s instructions in an unusual way. He argued that the will stated the estate was to rest in the executor’s hands unless an heir came forward voluntarily. It wasn’t until he retired and I had the opportunity to reread the will that I came to understand his error.”

  And there was the trick. Carrie felt relieved, almost elated. She knew there had to be one. Good things didn’t happen without bad things to balance them. Still, she gave Mr. Dumfries as hard a look as she could muster. “Was this an error in interpretation or an error in judgment?”

  “I imagine the latter would be the more correct.” Mr. Dumfries leaned back in the seat, his shoulders slumped rather than hunched. “Please understand, Miss Bowden, that Mr. Bell was a close friend of mine, a mentor and a teacher. He was, for the most part, a good man. It was just that he had these aspirations that weren’t entirely in keeping with his means.” His mouth turned down in a sharp crease. “You can rest assured that it all came to nothing in the end. He’s in a nursing home now and a good day is when he can remember his own name.” Mr. Dumfries’s voice rumbled deeper than usual, dragged down by the weight of grief.

  Carrie understood his sadness. Her father had been a good man caught in a tragic circumstance. It had turned out bad. “I guess even good men do bad things sometimes.”

  Mr. Dumfries nodded his head
slowly. “That is most unfortunately true. There’s a full accounting of the fees that Mr. Bell subtracted from the estate. At a later time, you and I can sit down and go over a repayment plan. The firm of Bell, Dumfries & Howe is not a rich one, but I do believe in paying our dues. It is, of course, your option to take further action or to retain other counsel if you should so desire.”

  Carrie considered his words and the downturn of his mouth that made his long face look even longer. She thought of his daughter, her warm smile and the friendly eyes that seemed so genuine and decided there wasn’t any point in getting angry over something that no one present was responsible for doing. “I respect your efforts to put things to rights, Mr. Dumfries. Let’s take a look at the house first and then we can decide if any further action is necessary.”

  Mr. Dumfries turned his head to look at her. He smiled, nodded once and then looked back at the road. “Fair enough. But just to warn you, the grounds are a mess. The grass is knee high to an elephant since we only have it mowed once a quarter, and I truly don’t know what the inside is like. I only know that it’s not flooded or burnt and the heat still comes on in the winter.”

  “Did you ever go over and visit my grandmother?”

  “Me?” Mr. Dumfries asked. “Lord, no. Other people did, or at least they tried. Mr. Bell went over there occasionally, and the Reverend went over at least once a week, but she would never let either of them inside.”