False Pretenses - Kathy Herman [4]
“Don’t. That’s creepy.” She shoved him playfully.
Vanessa walked into the dining room and stood at the oblong window, inhaling the pervasive, musty smell of old wood, her eyes feasting on acres and acres of tall green stalks undulating in the summer breeze. “I love the way the cane fields sway in the wind.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “It’s like Mother Nature’s doing the wave.”
“It’s amazing to think that many of your ancestors stood at this very window, looking at these same fields. I wonder how much land Josiah Langley owned when he built this place.”
“Almost all the land that’s now Saint Catherine Parish.” Ethan came over and stood next to her. “But the fifteen acres we inherited with the house will be plenty for us to maintain. Be glad my great-grandparents had the foresight to sell the cane fields and use the money to give the house a face-lift. That’s going to make converting it to a bed-and-breakfast a lot more doable.”
“It’ll still be a monumental challenge.”
“We can work together on the big decisions.” Ethan kissed her cheek. “But I really want to make a go of my counseling practice so you can stay home with Carter and oversee the renovation. You’ll be great at it.”
Carter Langley darted out of the kitchen and over to her, his mound of strawberry-blond hair falling in a straight line just above his eyebrows, his tattered stuffed beagle, Georgie, tucked under his arm.
“I’m going a-a-all the way up.” He pointed to the stately white staircase, his sapphire blue eyes wide with resolve.
Ethan scooped the four-year-old bundle of energy into his arms before he could take off running. “Hold on a second. Daddy will go with you.”
“Georgie and me want to see the candy man. He’s nice. He gives us lemon dwops.”
“I thought we agreed to nip this in the bud,” Vanessa said.
Ethan put his lips to her ear. “That’s what I’m about to do. Do you really think we’re going to find a candy man up there?”
“But why feed his imagination when there are so many ghost stories floating around about this house?”
“If we let Carter explore every nook and cranny, he’ll see for himself that those spooky stories are ridiculous. The kid’s going to live here some day. We might as well dispel this myth up front.”
Vanessa tilted her son’s chin and held his gaze. “It’s important to remember that the man in the closet wasn’t real. He was just pretend.”
“He let me touch his whiskers,” Carter insisted. “They felt pwickly.”
“Let’s you and me and Georgie go take a look.” Ethan winked at her and started up the staircase as Carter let out a husky laugh.
Vanessa bit her tongue. Maybe Ethan was right. But she didn’t like it. She pulled up on the window and forced it open about a foot, letting the muggy July air flood the room. Not that it was much of an improvement.
She turned around and brushed the dust off her hands, admiring the spacious dining room, which was trimmed in white crown moldings, and the oval mahogany table with matching chairs, the only furniture still in the house. The red and white floral wallpaper seemed busy and overpowering and was at the top of her list of things to replace. What type of pattern would soften the room? Or should she forget wallpaper and just have it painted a solid color? She had so much to learn about preserving the rich history and yet making the place tasteful and comfortable. Was she really the right person to take the lead on this?
She studied the sepia photograph that hung in an oval frame in the nook leading to the kitchen. Ethan’s great-grandparents, Chester and Augusta Langley, were the last to reside in the manor house and chose to demolish all the outbuildings. They recorded in their Bible that those structures were reminders of a time when people had “wrongfully prospered on the backs of slaves.”
The plantation house was in remarkably good condition at the time of Chester’s passing and five years later when Augusta died. But years of it sitting empty had taken a toll. Though structurally sound, it needed furnishings and a great deal of renovating before it would