At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [41]
But it was not a secret room, or even another painted alcove. It was, as Ida Mae explained when she came up with a stack of freshly laundered towels for the guests, merely a covered wood storage bin.
“This was Miss Emily’s room,” she explained, “and when she got the notion to paint it all white, she thought the wood stacked up by the fireplace in the winter ruint the look of the room, and it did, too. Not to mention all the dirt it spread around on her white carpets. So she had them build a door to hide the firewood.”
Ida Mae set the folded towels on the bed and gave the dust ruffle a critical little adjustment. “Miss Emily,” she pointed out, “used to roll up the guest towels in a basket and put the basket at the foot of the tub. You want me to do that?”
“Sounds great,” Lindsay said, her voice partially muffled by her explorations of the bin. “Oh, look! There’s a pair of old andirons in here!”
She dragged one of the heavy, blackened objects out and examined it closely. “Is this brass?” She pulled out the other one. “I think it is! They’ll have to be cleaned up, but wouldn’t they look great in the fireplace?”
“They’ll only get all sooted up again.”
“Then we’ll polish them again. Say, look at this.” Using her fingertips she prized up what turned out to be a filthy piece of scrap carpeting, obviously put there to protect the wood floor beneath from the damaging effects of the firewood. As she pulled the carpet out of the cubby most of the detritus it had been placed there to hold spilled onto the floor.
“Broom’s in the pantry,” Ida Mae told her with a humorless look, and left to arrange the towels artfully in a basket for the bathroom.
Lindsay swept up two dustpans filled with shredded bark, dried leaves, and just plain dirt, before she noticed several sheets of newspaper, which apparently once had been used as fire starter, lodged at the back of the bin. She pulled them out, but they weren’t very interesting—classifieds from 1962—and she tossed them in the trash bag. The last piece of paper was smaller, and half caught between the floor and the baseboard molding. She almost tore it tugging it out, but she could tell immediately it was not newsprint.
The paper itself was heavy, like stationery or even sketch paper, and it was yellowed at the corners with age. At first she thought it was blank, but when she turned it over she saw a crudely executed sketch—some kind of four-legged animal with wings in the center, a banner on top, and the whole surrounded by a pointed oval with one half shaded and what appeared to be feathers springing from the top. As she looked closer, Lindsay realized the animal was a horse. Lindsay smiled in puzzlement and started to crumple the paper into the trash, then hesitated.
This playful product of a child’s imagination might have been drawn twenty years ago, or fifty. Perhaps it was even older. As she smoothed out the wrinkles in the paper, Lindsay could not help imagining some long-ago budding artist, rushing to show his mother his latest masterpiece, his mother faithfully tacking it up among the dozens of other similar works of art she couldn’t throw away. This drawing, like the long-forgotten ribbon in the alcove, was a part of the history of the house, and it deserved a place of honor.
Lindsay found a dime-store frame in her studio, and was hanging the drawing on the tall narrow wall in the entry hall that was dedicated to personal art when Cici came in. On the same wall was a charcoal sketch Noah had done of the house, and a framed invitation to a party held at the house in 1920, which a neighbor had given them for Christmas. There was also a collage of newspaper scraps and receipts from the turn of the century that Lindsay had found while taking down the wallpaper in her own room.
“Look,” she said as Cici came in with a bag from the hardware store. “I found another treasure.” She stepped back to admire the drawing.
Cici tried to look