At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [57]
It was a good-size round building with a tin roof and a stone floor, open on the sides like a gazebo or an open-air dance pavilion. The freestanding stone fireplace had a chimney that went right through the roof, and there were remnants of rusted-out and crumbling furniture—a table and a wooden chair, an old truck seat, an aluminum patio chair with frayed and missing webbing. It was a rather desolate-looking place on this cold morning in the middle of the winter-bare woods, but there was still enough of an air of romance about it to stir a young woman’s imagination.
“Wow,” she said. “So this is the folly.”
When she spoke, Noah whirled around guiltily, and several of the glass bottles he had been removing from their hiding place behind the fireplace spilled from his hands and clinked on the floor. Lori did not even notice his angry scowl as he began scooping them into his backpack. Bambi trotted over to her, hooves clattering on the stone floor, and she scratched the deer’s head absently as she looked around.
“I wonder what they used it for,” she said, “way out here in the woods. Do you think anybody lived here? Or maybe it was just a party house. Like the movie stars have in California.”
Suddenly she noticed the glass bottles he was stuffing into his backpack. “Say, did you find all those in the garden?” She dropped to her haunches beside him and picked up one of the bottles to examine it. “What are you going to do with them?”
He snatched the bottle out of her hand. “Sell ’em.”
“Oh.” She regarded him matter-of-factly. “You’re running away again, huh?”
He glared at her. “What’s it to you?”
She shrugged. “I don’t care what you do. But my mother cares a lot, and so does Aunt Bridget, and I think it would break Aunt Lindsay’s heart.”
His scowl deepened, and he jerked the iPod out of his jeans pocket. “You want to buy this?”
“No thanks. I already have one. Besides, it’s rude to sell a gift. What’s this?” She tugged at the corner of a rectangular glass plate that was sticking out of his backpack. When he tried to grab it back she turned away, holding the plate up to the light.
“That ain’t yours,” he demanded. “Give it back.”
“Look at that! It’s our house.” She looked at him. “Where did you get this?”
He regarded her defiantly, and she turned back to the sepia plate. “It must be really old. Look at the dresses the women are wearing. Does Aunt Lindsay know you have this?”
“She’s got plenty of them.”
“Well, you’re only going to break it if you carry it around like that, or scratch it up so badly it won’t be worth anything. Don’t you have anything you can wrap it in?” She handed it back to him casually and began rummaging around in the backpack.
“Hey, get out of there! Leave my stuff alone!”
He wrestled the pack away from her, but not before she had pulled out several more glass plates, an art box, a T-shirt with holes in it, and a small oil canvas of a fountain in a garden. Glass bottles rattled in the bottom of the pack as he started stuffing things back in, but Lori picked up the canvas before he could.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I know this place.” She looked at him as recognition dawned. “Is this the pool in the back garden?”
He shrugged, his scowl thunderous, but he did not immediately try to retrieve it from her. “That fellow, that Derrick, he said it was good.”
Lori said softly, “Wow. So this is what it’s supposed to look like.” She regarded him curiously. “How did you know . . . ?” And then her eyes fell on the glass plate he was clumsily wrapping in a T-shirt before returning it to the backpack. “Ah,” she said, “the photographic plates. They must tell the whole story of this house.”
She returned the canvas to him, but he hesitated, looking at the painting, looking at the plates. “Story, huh?”
Bambi wandered up and nudged Lori’s shoulder, hard, causing her to almost lose her balance. She caught herself with one