The thing is, no matter how sweet they are, onions can make you cry.
Chapter 18
Time started to accelerate at Milkweed Mansion. Things happened fast because they had to. It took a week of intense work, but the electrician and his crew updated all the wiring in the house. He said there were some lights in the second-floor corridors that appeared to have wiring that went nowhere, but he got them hooked up, too, and an inspection led us to have that most precious of things, electricity. Air-conditioning would come later, but Landon brought in some big hurricane-level fans, and finally the Florida heat was losing its edge — about all we could ask of early fall.
The plumbers had good news and bad news. The good news was that the pipes had been replaced in the 1950s and were copper, in pretty good shape. The bad news was that one of the pipes upstairs had a leak that we found the hard way, when the water was turned on and it started “raining” in the kitchen.
At least it wasn’t the library, I kept telling myself.
As the dates for our fundraiser neared, we got a working sink in the kitchen and a working bathroom downstairs. There would be tons more to do, including complete overhauls of the upstairs bathrooms, but none of that had to happen before the haunted house. In fact, the crappier the rooms looked, the better they served our haunting needs.
There was soon a parade of artists through the house, chattering about what they would do with each room. I let Millie wrangle them and gave them the freedom to come up with whatever scenes they wanted, though I did go down the list just to make sure there wasn’t anything that would result in vomiting patrons. With Cali’s brother Damien, you never knew. His multimedia sculptures could be downright disturbing.
He and Penelope worked together on the concept for the outdoor sculpture. When I’d suggested they use the big oak stump as a base, Damien came up with the creepy framework for a wraith with a demented skull face and skeletal hands.
Penelope, the costume designer, created an ethereal, tattered robe for it. It had a base of gauzy white fabric layered with translucent orange and purple and strips of black, as well as a hood. Her lighting designer friend Alan came up with shifting special-effects lights in purple and orange and blacklight spotlights that made it glow. I had to admit, when they got it in place a couple of weeks before the VIP party and I saw it luminous and swaying in the breeze at night, I found it unnerving. It was beautiful and sinister at the same time, partly because it was so large — it must have been over twenty feet tall. Traffic slowed down on the river road to look at it, and within three days of it going up, ticket sales tripled.
Work crews were in and out, many of them donating time and material, but my bank account continued to dwindle. I had to nag Rick to pay me promptly for the Landon video, which he raved about. He even asked if Landon might do a commercial later on.
Landon laughed when I told him. “I did that just for you,” he said with a wink. So maybe it had all been a lark, but I still kept thinking about everything he’d said in the video.
We’d reached a delicate balance working together, though whenever we got into a tight spot in the house, like when I had to hold something in place while he screwed it — you know, with a screwdriver and screws, though I was definitely thinking of something else — my body still dinged like a pinball machine. I wasn’t sure how he’d worked his way into my blood, but he made it simmer with every joke and gesture.
For his part, he seemed more considerate than ever, jumping to my aid whenever I needed help, to the point where I wondered if the ghost had killed the old Landon and replaced him with this perfect man who would transform into a monster and eat me in my sleep.
I might’ve had a few fantasies about him eating me in my sleep, if you know what I mean.
But at night, he’d gone back to finding things to do out of the house or watching sports.
One rare night when he was in, he turned on TCM, and we ended up watchingThe Maltese Falcontogether. We had a great time quoting the quotable lines and commenting on the characters. It was probably my favorite Bogart movie, and it did weird things to my insides that Landon was as into it as I was. So hedidlike movies, and that was just one more reason to like him.
Still, I had the impression that outside of our renovation work, he might’ve been avoiding me. This weird hot and cold thing was happening. While the sexual tension ramped up like an action sequence in a Spielberg film, Landon became more polite and distant.
Maybe his obvious stepping back should’ve made me cool my jets, but it had the opposite effect. I was ready to launch whenever I saw him.
I focused on learning more about the house in the slim free time I had between the hard physical work we were doing and bedtime. The entries in Flora’s journal started simply enough, but soon it was about much more than roses and pineapples.
“While I snip and dig in the garden with my roses,” Flora Fountain wrote, “Stanford whiles away the hours in his workshop, inventing all manner of solutions in search of a problem. Last week, he created a pulley system to haul our trunks up to the second floor through the windows, though it is unclear if we will need them again. It is unlikely I will ever go back to New York. The warmth here is so much better for my lungs. Between his physical labor and my scandalous sunburn, the servants think we’re mad. But with no children to dote upon, we need our little baby projects.”
When the historical society’s Ken Motebarkle made a surprise visit on the day the new gazebo was being delivered, I was almost glad to see him. We chatted on the porch. I had a lot of questions about the house, but first I wanted to assure the tall, thin, graying historian, who made me think of Ichabod Crane, that we were doing everything we could to preserve the character of the mansion.
“But that’s new. Why didn’t you save the old gazebo?” He adjusted his glasses and stared at the noisy, beeping truck backing up to the gazebo zone with its unwieldy cargo.
The new octagonal gazebo was gorgeous, painted white with a tiny cupola atop the shingled roof. The cupola had a copper roof and a finial. This donation was assured with its own small plaque on the structure, since it was a great advertisement for the builder. Another crew was already working on stone steps for it and a paver patio that would make it a striking centerpiece of the yard.
“I love it,” I told the historian. “The old one was a safety hazard and beyond restoration.”
“Are you sure? Did you have an expert look at it?”
“If you mean a historian, no. If you mean an expert in construction, yes — Landon Putter, the manager of this project.”
“From Putter Homes? You mean the fellow over there directing traffic?”
Landon was now standing near the truck, gesturing so it would be perfectly lined up to tilt the bed and slide the gazebo in place. A handful of burly guys stood ready to guide it.
“That’s him,” I said.
“His company is a prime player in destroying the character of this area. What can he possibly know?” Motebarkle said with disdain.
