The Color of Dust Read online

  Carrie stretched her tired arms high over her head, sat straighter and began to wipe at the leather blotter with her rag.

  She cleaned the top of the desk and each little knickknack. The inkwell with its quill pen and penknife, the old rotary bakelite telephone with the cloth wrapped cord and no dial tone, the empty cut glass vase. She peered into the cubby holes and found that they were stuffed with bills from the early 1950s, one from a tailor, the green grocer, one from a workman for painting and repairs, two from a boarding school far north of Virginia.

  She shook the dust from the papers and put everything back the same way she found it. That seemed important for some reason and, if she wasn’t entirely sure why, she didn’t question the notion. The drawers she opened held more of the same, but the bills were a bit older, the paper more brittle. Dark stripes of old glue stained the flaps of the envelopes, the papers inside cracked at the folds. The very bottom drawer held a bundle of letters sitting on top of a large old leather bound Bible. The dried remnants of a rubber band stuck around the middle of the bundle. She slipped the top letter out and opened it.

  My Dearest Robert, I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear through our mutual acquaintances that you have arrived home safe from the wars…

  Carrie turned the letter over to see the signature. The name didn’t mean anything to her, though there wasn’t any reason why it should, and there wasn’t a date. What wars was the letter referring to? Her grandfather could have been in any number of wars, the times of his life being what they were. The Spanish-American War? World War I? The Korean War? Carrie couldn’t remember when Mr. Dumfries said her grandfather had died.

  She would have to look it up. She folded the letter carefully and opened the next one.

  Dear Sir, Regarding the matter to which we have had some previous correspondence…

  That one was, on the whole, a most uninteresting letter, and Carrie wondered why anyone had bothered to keep it. Maybe it wasn’t so much keeping it as it was just not throwing it away. She imagined that most of the letters in the bundle would run in the same vein. Carrie opened the last one just to see.

  Robert, Please don’t neglect to send back a bolt of chenille while you’re in Paris. Kindest Regards, Celia.

  It was a scrawl of spidery handwriting and a lot of blank white space. Not a love letter, by any means. The things it didn’t say struck Carrie as being a very sad thing. Carrie looked at the bundle of letters, a frown pulling at the corners of her mouth. She folded the last letter and put it back into the envelope. Suddenly, she didn’t want to look through the desk anymore.

  She shut the drawer and stood, stretching onto her tiptoes with her hands pressed against the small of her back. It was time to quit for the day. The sun was starting to set, and there were only two lamps that worked in the entire library. The dim light at night made the place look big and cavernous and just a bit gloomy. She decided to make a sandwich, grab another book from the upper shelves and curl up on the couch with the one comforter that survived the washing machine, even if sleeping on the couch was starting to get old. Once she had brushed and blown the dust off, the couch turned out to have a busy floral print. It still had a deep maroon color showing along the stitches and seams, but it was faded nearly to pink everywhere else. The thinly cushioned seats and carved wood trim weren’t very cozy, even with extra padding, but it worked well enough.

  She’d go buy sheets tomorrow. Maybe she’d even call Mr. Dumfries’s daughter, what’s her name, Gillian, and ask her where the best places were to buy such things. Carrie shook out her dust rag and hung it over the arm of the chair. The way it hung in gentle folds reminded her of Gillian, how she had walked into the office, the ice cubes clinking in soft counterpoint to the swishing of her dress, her warm, friendly smile. Yes. Calling Gillian sounded like a good idea. Which meant, as Carrie knew full well, that it probably wasn’t.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Morning came with a new kink in her back and catch in her hip. Carrie stared up from the couch at the cobwebs still hanging off the chandelier. Sheets were definitely on the agenda today. So was cleaning the master suite. Carrie yawned and scratched her head, rolled herself off the couch and headed for the bathroom.

  She had been using the bathroom in her grandmother’s room since the shower mostly worked and the toilet flushed with moderate efficiency, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to sleep on the narrow cot. She didn’t know, because she hadn’t asked, if her grandmother had died in that bed. But even if she hadn’t, the thought of sleeping in a room where an anciently old woman spent her last lonely years gave her a creepy feeling. The couch was more comfortable than that.

  The shower worked, but the water was only lukewarm at best. There was another job for the electrician or the plumber or both. She toweled her hair dry, slipped on her terrycloth robe and headed for the kitchen. She stood looking inside the ancient refrigerator at the nearly bare shelves. It hummed and whirred, clanked sometimes and made a funny buzzing sound when the icemaker dumped cubes into the bin, but it stayed cold inside and that was the main thing. She hadn’t bought much on her brief excursion into town the other day, only bread, lettuce, a deli package of sliced roast beef, a jar of mustard and one tomato.

  Nothing she wanted for breakfast. She remembered to buy coffee but forgot the cream, and she couldn’t find a coffeepot anyway, though she did find the crusty remnants of what might have been sugar in a pretty tin canister sitting on the counter.

  She closed the refrigerator door but didn’t bother to open the freezer. There was nothing in there but opaque plastic containers with very old dates written on the top in felt-tip pen. She wasn’t brave enough to try something that had been in the freezer for twenty years, but she hadn’t thrown it all away either. To Carrie, there was something very personal about freezer food. Someone had once taken the time to box the remnants of a meal, date it and stack it neatly. Looking at the green and pink plastic boxes made Carrie feel like more of a guest than the house’s new owner, like the house still belonged to someone else who was absent for the moment and she was just cleaning it a little before they got back. She didn’t know what she would ultimately do with the house, stay or sell, rent it out or turn it into a museum, but that wasn’t anything she had to decide in a hurry.

  What she did decide was to go into town for breakfast to the diner that she and Mr. Dumfries ate supper in a few days ago. He said they served a good, if not fancy, cup of coffee, which was just what a morning full of busy errands needed.

  She threw on some jeans and a blouse and tied her hair back in a damp ponytail before her curls had time to turn to frizz. She jumped into her car and drove the five winding miles into town.

  There wasn’t much traffic, one or two cars ahead of her, three or four passing her on the other side, but Carrie suspected that there wasn’t ever very much traffic. That made a nice change from the five o’clock gridlock she was use to that routinely kept her four blocks away from home until six. She pulled up to Danni’s storefront diner and parked in between two very tall mud-splattered pickup trucks.

  She got out of her car and stood for a moment just breathing.

  The air still had a slight chill clinging to it, but the sun’s promise of warmth pressed like a gentle hand against her skin. She could smell the mud on the truck tires, a strong reek of damp earth with a not-so-subtle hint of cow. What she didn’t smell was exhaust, or the taco vender’s cart, rotting Dumpster trash or unwashed bodies, or the thick miasma of clashing perfumes and colognes.

  She didn’t smell sewage and concrete dust and, for just that moment, she wasn’t sure she missed it.

  The door of the diner opened with the tinkling of bells, real bells not electronic ones. A middle-aged lady in a powder blue dress with a pink apron tied around her waist glanced up from where she was pouring coffee for a man in a dirty checkered shirt and a ball cap.

  “I’m sorry, honey, but we’re not hiring right now,” she said topping the man’s cup
with a well practiced dip of her wrist.

  Carrie sat at the counter, two seats away from the man and looked around her. She was the only woman sitting. The others had trays of food or coffeepots in their hands, scurrying in between tables. It wasn’t a good sign. Carrie felt the beginnings of a headache stirring just between her eyes. Dinner with Mr. Dumfries hadn’t been like that, but then she’d had a lot to think about then and hadn’t really paid very much attention. She turned back to the woman who was looking at her strangely. “I’m not looking for a job. I just want a cup of coffee and maybe some eggs and bacon.”

  The woman looked at her for a long second, put her coffeepot down, pulled a notepad from her pocket and flipped it open. She licked her thumb and turned a page over. “Scrambled or fried?”

  she asked, pencil poised. “We have a Wednesday morning special on dirty eggs and bacon with hash browns. You ever ate dirty eggs before?”

  “I don’t think so. What are they?”

  “Eggs scrambled up with a little bit of everything thrown in, tomato, onion, bell pepper, cheddar cheese, just a touch of jalapeño…all diced up fine and scrambled in together.”

  Carrie’s stomach grumbled. “That sounds good.”

  “Right.” She scribbled on her pad, tore the paper off and clipped it next to the line of other papers hanging behind her in a small window. She leaned into the window and yelled. “Hank, one dirty egg special and make it a good one. It’s for the lady out at the Covington place.”

  “Right-O.” The answer came with a rattle of pans, the scraping of a spatula and the hiss of steam.

  The lady turned back around, grabbed a cup from off a stack, flipped it right side up and put it in front of Carrie. She reached for the coffee pot and poured into the cup with one hand while putting a small cream pitcher on the counter with her other.

  Carrie reached for a packet of sugar, shook it and tore it open.

  “Anything else? Juice, grapefruit, a slice of pie?” the woman asked flipping her notepad back open.

  Carrie stirred cream into her coffee. “How did you know who I was?”

  The woman closed the notepad and put it back in her apron pocket. “You came in here with Jack Dumfries the other day.

  Betty said you talked all northern. She works the dinner crowd.”

  Carrie took a sip from her cup. It was hot, sweet and strong, just the way early morning coffee should be. “Why did you call the house the Covington place? It seems like it should be called the Burgess house or something.”

  The woman wiped her hands on her apron and looked at Carrie with a slight squinting of her eyes. “You look a bit like your mother, you know. Like she was when I knew her. Young, I mean.”

  Carrie set her cup on the counter. The old familiar sadness rolled through her chest making her hand tremble just a little.

  “Did you know my mother well?”

  The lady shrugged. “As well as any, I suppose. Better than most. We were best friends in grade school.”

  The man in the dirty shirt spluttered into his coffee. “Amy-Lee, you weren’t best friends with nobody in grade school.”

  “You just shut your hole, Chuck.” Amy-Lee shot him a wicked glare. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The man huffed into his cup and half turned his face toward Carrie. “You watch it, missy. Amy-Lee’s feeding you a line of bullshit. The next thing you know, she’ll be hitting you up for a loan.”

  “I’m not going to do any such a thing. I’m just trying to have a conversation here, and you’re butting your big nose in where it don’t belong.” She turned back to Carrie with a fist placed firmly on a canted hip. “Chuck’s just being ugly because I won’t go out with him.” Her stenciled eyebrows rose into a pointed arch. “Maybe I would if he took a bath and changed his clothes once in a while.”

  She said that louder than she needed for Carrie to hear.

  Chuck’s face turned red as he scowled into his cup. A bell dinged and a plate slid into the window piled high and steaming.

  “Golden dirty’s up,” a voice yelled through the window. “Stop gabbing, Amy-Lee.”

  Amy-Lee huffed. She grabbed the plate and slid it in front of Carrie. “Ketchup?”

  “No, thanks.” Carrie picked up her fork and turned her attention to her plate. Amy-Lee moved down to Chuck’s place at the counter where they leaned their heads together and whispered to each other in low furious tones. There had to be a story there, but Carrie wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it, so she did her best to tune it out. She ate her eggs, which were surprisingly good, but left the thin pale toast with the soggy spot of butter in the middle. She drank her coffee and listened to the mutter of conversation around her. It was mostly about weather and prices, politics and rumors. No one talked to her again, even as she paid her bill and left.

  She was putting on her seat belt when she realized that the woman, Amy-Lee, hadn’t answered her question. Why did she call it the Covington place? Carrie decided that since she was already in town, she would go see Mr. Dumfries and ask him.

  Maybe Gillian would be there and she could ask her about a good place to shop for linens and things.

  Carrie rolled her eyes at herself. Yeah, right.

  Mr. Dumfries was sitting at his desk, reading papers with his half-moon glasses perched far down the slope of his nose. He looked up and smiled as the receptionist showed Carrie in.

  “Welcome, Miss Bowden,” he said gesturing for her to sit.

  “What brings you into town?”

  “Breakfast, Mr. Dumfries.” Carrie sat and put her purse on the floor.

  “And how was it?”

  “The food was good, the coffee was hot, the conversation was a little strange.”

  “Was Amy-Lee working this morning?”

  Carrie nodded. “Yes, she was.”

  Mr. Dumfries’s smile turned into a scowl. “Did she hit you up for a loan?”

  “Um, no. She didn’t get the chance. She was too busy arguing about something.”

  “Hmm. I take it that means Chuck was there.” Mr. Dumfries shook his head. “Those two have been in love for the last twenty years, but they’re both too stubborn to be the first one to admit it.” He looked at her over the top of his glasses. “Don’t you do that, Miss Bowden. When you find someone you love, latch on to him with both hands and don’t ever let go.”

  “Even if it was someone you didn’t approve of?” She thought of Megan for the first time in a few days. Her father hadn’t liked Megan. Megan hadn’t liked him either, and it made Thanksgiving and Christmas a little uncomfortable.

  Mr. Dumfries looked at her with his clear, bright eyes.

  “Especially if it was someone I didn’t approve of. I’m an old man, you remember, and firmly set in my ways. What do I know of love these days?”

  “It hasn’t changed. Love never does. Only the expression of it changes.”

  He smiled again and sat back in his chair. “I take your point, Miss Bowden. And I appreciate it. It helps me a little. Now, what can I do to help you today?”

  “I’d like to ask you something.”

  “Of course.”

  “The lady at the diner, Amy-Lee, called my grandmother’s house the Covington place.”

  “Ah.” Mr. Dumfries leaned his elbows on the armrests of his chair and steepled his fingers. “Your grandmother’s married name was Burgess. Her maiden name was Covington. Her grandfather built the original portions of the house and it descended to her father when he died, but her father didn’t like the place very much, for whatever the reason, and so he gave it to your grandmother and her new husband on the occasion of their wedding. He built himself a smaller house a little ways down the river. That one, alas, did not survive the test of time. I believe it burned down a bit after World War II.”

  “You’re quite the historian, Mr. Dumfries.”

  He took off his glasses and polished them against his lapel.

  “Well, the truth of it is, Miss Bowden, that
it isn’t me. Gillian studied American history in college and did her thesis on our local historical figures. The cotton mill your grandmother’s father built was of some importance for reindustrializing this area after the Civil War and the burning of Richmond or some such thing.” He put his glasses back on and thumbed through his Rolodex. “Tell you what. Why don’t you give Gillian a call and ask her about it? She’ll tell you more than you want to know, I’ll bet.” He took out a card from the holder on his desk and tapped it against the leather blotter. “Just to warn you, she’ll probably ask you for a tour. She’s been aching to get inside that house for more years than I can remember. She runs a little antique shop the next town over, you see, and is just dead sure that the whole place is crammed full of important things. I think that was why she wanted to be here when you came.” He smiled a little enigmatically and handed her the card. “Here you go. She should be there today.”

  The card said Carriage House Antiques, Goochland, Virginia. There was an engraving of an old carriage in the upper right corner. “Thank you. I was thinking about asking her where to go shopping for bed linens and things.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be able to point you in all the right directions.”

  Carrie grabbed her purse and stood. Mr. Dumfries stood too.

  “One last thing, if you don’t mind. Amy-Lee said that I look like my mother a bit. Is that true? I don’t remember what she looked liked. There was only one picture of her in my father’s apartment and it wasn’t a very good one.”

  Mr. Dumfries scratched at his chin. “Well, you do look a bit like her. There’s a family resemblance in the shape of your nose.

  But if you were to ask me, and you did, I’d say that it wasn’t so much your mother that you look like but your grandmother. In fact, I’d say that you were the spitting image of her done up a bit more modern. There’s a picture of her in the town library. They hung it up when she donated all of her husband’s books after he passed. You ought to go take a look.”