A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [3]
Bridget made a face and tried to step around the bodies, but with no success. She moved toward the window, where a flock of ladybugs took flight as she passed. Bridget gasped and ducked, covering her platinum bob with her hands. “The warm weather causes them to be more active,” Maggie observed, “but we get them all year long, even in the dead of winter. So, are you ladies on vacation?”
“Hmm,” Cici agreed, moving around the room. The ceiling had to be fourteen feet high, and the windows had the wavy look of leaded glass. “We drove up through Lancaster, and are taking the scenic route back home.”
“Oh, Amish Country. Don’t you just love it? All the floors are heart pine,” Maggie pointed out, “and the wainscoting on the walls is wood, not framed plaster. That’s one thing about these old houses. They didn’t take any shortcuts.”
Lindsay raised the camera and started snapping shots of the staircase. “Isn’t that gorgeous?” Maggie said. “Can’t you just see ladies in big hoopskirts going up and down those stairs—just like Tara!”
“How old is the house?”
“Well, probably not as old as Tara,” admitted Maggie. “I think it was built around 1900 by Abraham Blackwell, and it never left the family. The Blackwells were in phosphates, quite well-to-do. The house was a real landmark in its day. Copper pipes, gaslights, indoor bathrooms, all the best of everything. Hear tell, it even has its own ghost! Don’t you just love those glass doorknobs?”
Cici grasped the doorknob of a glass-inset door that led to a small enclosed porch, and the knob came off in her hand. Maggie looked dismayed, but Cici shrugged. “I can fix that,” she said, and loosely pushed the knob back into its opening.
“Well,” declared Maggie cheerfully, “shall we go upstairs?”
Six sun-filled, high-ceilinged, wide-plank-floored bedrooms and several thousand ladybugs later, they descended the staircase. Bridget kept absently brushing at her shoulders and hair, as though trying to rid them of ladybug scales. Lindsay snapped a shot of the stained glass window and of the big, dust-fogged chandelier overhead.
“All the wardrobes stay,” Maggie pointed out, “since the one thing they didn’t tend to do in the 1900s was build walk-in closets. There’s some other furniture stored in one of the attics, too, I think, but all of the good stuff was sold at auction.”
“There’s nothing to putting in a closet,” Cici said, “and the rooms are definitely big enough.”
“You could take that little hallway that connects the two rooms at the back and turn it into two nice-size closets,” Lindsay pointed out, adjusting her lens for another shot. “One for each room.”
“Of course the wardrobes are beautiful,” Maggie said. “They add a lot of character.”
“We’re really just looking,” Bridget insisted gently, as though she felt she needed to soften the blow.
“Can you imagine the work it would take just to keep this place clean?” observed Lindsay. “How would you even dust that chandelier?”
“Mr. Blackwell had a woman live in, but you could probably get away with having somebody come in a couple of days a week. It’s really not that hard to find household help around here.”
“Not to mention the heating bill,” Cici said. “What is it, an oil furnace?”
“Actually, no. It’s quite ingenious, really—a wood burning furnace in the cellar heats this whole house. With the fireplaces, of course.”
“So as long as you don’t run out of trees you’re all set,” Bridget said, and Maggie chuckled.
“To tell the truth, the first thing I would do is put in central heat and air,” she admitted.
Lindsay turned on the bottom step to get a shot of the landing, catching the newel post with her hand as she did. The carved pineapple post cap came off in her hand and she flailed for balance. Maggie gave a little cry and lunged toward Lindsay as the pineapple flew from her hand. Bridget