Lacy led Ginger toward it. “Do you think it opens?”
“One way to find out.” I hopped down and walked Polly to the metal slats, pushing against them, but the gate wouldn’t give because of the vines growing beneath the entrance. I dropped the reins and put my shoulder into the effort, but it barely budged. After yanking up the weeds while trying to avoid the prickly ones, I tried again. This time, the gate opened enough for me and Lacy to squeeze through. “I guess we can tie the horses here while we check things out.”
“It’s strange what the Finches want to do with this part of the property,” Lacy said, once we were inside the gated perimeters.
“Yeah, it’s weird, right? Putting a pageant museum out here when no one has been through this gate in a long time.”
“Unless there’s another way back here,” Lacy added. “Maybe that’s part of the appeal—a secret passageway. Mr. Finch seemed just eccentric enough to appreciate something like that.”
A few steps more and we realized we’d arrived at the edge of an expansive garden, wild and untamed, stretching for acres in every direction. Directly ahead of us was a glass greenhouse with a dome rising from the center. Panes had been shattered and some were missing, creating a kind of gap-toothed grin. A picturesque hillock rose and fell, and behind it stood an abandoned two-story stone structure with steps ascending to a front door.
“This is the original house where the Finch family stayed while the Rose Palace was being built,” Lacy noted as we ambled toward it. The looming mountains made this space feel nestled and held, and I realized that the acres featuring a beautiful home, a greenhouse, an overgrown grassy expanse, and a spacious garden had been “roughing it” for the Gilded Age Finch family.
We stepped up the stairs and opened the door to the house, our eyes adjusting quickly to the low light. The style of construction reminded me of the historical homes in Williamsburg. Every Christmas Aunt DeeDee asked me and Momma to tag along with her while she walked through house after house, decorated with evergreens, candles, and holly berries. Momma and I would make it through two mansions before leaving to find hot chocolate until Aunt DeeDee finished.
In this house there were rooms branching off a long breezeway that stretched all the way from the front to the back door, a design that had allowed air to circulate before the era of air conditioning. A musty scent of closed rooms and abandoned belongings permeated the house. I ran my hand along the peeling sage-green paint on the wall and tried to envision the late-nineteenth-century family who’d walked these halls. Each room’s entryway featured crown molding, and only one had a modern door. From behind it, I could hear a motor running.
“I bet that one room is temp-controlled to preserve whatever is inside,” Lacy said as she approached. “In college when I shelved books at the on-campus library, the archivist had a repository like that.”
I could see the Finches bringing out a crew to install AC in just one room in order to preserve history. But then, why not keep the items in the main house at the front of the property? Unless there was something they didn’t want visitors stumbling across?
I jiggled the handle, but it didn’t budge.
“Allow me,” Lacy said, stepping forward. She took an ID badge from her pocket and slid it between the doorframe and the lock mechanism. It took her a full minute of wiggling the card, but the click eventually let us know that her method had worked.
We walked inside a room that must have been the dining area at one point. The rectangular layout would have seemedspacious if not crammed with boxes and random pageant paraphernalia. I shivered in the much cooler air.
“Jackpot,” Lacy said, coming up behind me, studying the stacked metal boxes around the room. “This must be where they keep the goods.”
The space was filled with memories of the pageant world. I lifted a drop cloth in the corner to find a guitar that had been signed, “To the Rose Palace Pageant, Love Dolly Parton.” Next to it was a large, framed photo of a young Dolly singing her heart out on the pageant stage. There were a few dresses on wire mannequins, and cutouts of all kinds of people who’d visited the show over the years: movie stars, politicians, singers.
“I could’ve used these for the tent decorations,” Lacy mused, running a hand along Elizabeth Taylor’s cardboard hair.
I tapped my fingers against the lid of one of the black metal storage boxes before I took the one on top, lifted it, and peered inside… to find a handful of items scattered along the bottom: a Rose Palace cookbook from 1964, charcoal sketches of women in gowns, a sweatshirt with the wordsWe’re All Queenswritten across the bust.
“That’s a bit…” Lacy started.
“Unimpressive? Unhelpful?” I finished.
We moved to other boxes.
The next one contained stacks of rough-edged file folders from 1982 to 1988 filled with faded receipts and crumbling bank statements. The box after that had a litany of pageant advertisements, some decent and some downright sexist.You can be pretty or smart at the Rose Palace, one read from 1993.Which one will you choose?
I shook my head as I pushed aside the material and kept searching.
It took me seven boxes until I found what I was looking for, and I almost skipped it because the label read,Misc.I figured thecontents would be more of the same, but when I lifted the lid, I almost froze when I realized what I was holding.
“Lacy,” I said, gasping as I thumbed through material harkening back to the 2001 pageant. Here was the welcome packet, the contestant itinerary, and the program. The papers had yellowed and the edges were crinkled, but every word was legible. “Why would they keep an entire box for this one show? And label it as miscellaneous?”
“Maybe they’re planning a whole exhibit around it? To explain what happened to Miss 2001?” Lacy suggested. “It could make for an interesting story.”
“Or maybe they wanted to ensure all of the evidence is in one tidy box that they can get rid of if needed,” I suggested less generously.
I flipped through the program and the alphabetical order of contestants, going straight to the Ps for Peabody, but someone had taken a pair of fine-point scissors to where her name and biographical information should’ve been. This person had excised Cathy Peabody from the pageant.
Lacy came to my side and squatted next to me, taking the program from my hand. “Why would anyone go to such painstaking effort to remove all traces of this woman?”
“A better question might bewhowould go to such lengths?” In my mind, the likeliest culprit was the runner-up that year: Mrs. Glenda Finch.
