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Why would you remodel a haunted house? The house breathes, has a heartbeat, and gets physical when it gets mad. But Tucker Whitby is an experienced builder who is also haunted. He feels responsible for his wife’s death and his daughter’s murder. Because of this, he is emotionally stunted and denies himself love. Can rebuilding this unusual house jolt his life back on track?
Tucker gets far more than he hoped—the house decides that if Tucker is rebuilding it, then it will rebuild him. Through a series of dreams involving a ten year-old boy kidnapped by Comanche Indians in 1870, Tucker witnesses the savage life of a boy who becomes a warrior. But soon he’s not dreaming—he is becoming the boy. Before long, the pain and horror of the boy’s life takes Tucker’s real life towards violence, murder, and an encounter with the house’s deepest secrets. |
Read two chapters
PROLOGUE
Late September, 1870
Cyrus Mulvaney felt the sweat on his upper lip as he stepped from his single-horse carriage onto the wood plank walkway that fronted the stores around the plaza. He was a large man—a good five inches above six feet and three hundred pounds—and was not accustomed to the desperation that made his hands shake as he tied the horse to the post. It was late as he turned and walked in front of the stores, the sun hovering just above the horizon. The shopkeepers were shuttering their windows while the saloons, gambling halls and bordellos were preparing to accommodate the raucous crowds that would soon appear and remain all night.
Cyrus hesitated in front of the law office door. Throughout the long ride from the ranch, he had rehearsed what would play out once he opened the door. He now hoped he had the courage to follow through.
Mulvaney and Hetley had been the dominant law office of Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory for several years. Taking advantage of the loose laws imposed when the former northern part of Mexico was made a U. S. Territory, the two lawyers cheated, intimidated, coerced, and extorted the original land owners out of much of the property bestowed on them as part of Spanish and Mexican land grants. Under the guise of representing the holders in matters of land arbitration, the men charged a percentage of the land for their services instead of the usual monetary fees. Delaying the wheels of justice as they worked through a system that flowed in English but balked in Spanish, the native language of most of the land holders, they bilked their clients on a consistent basis, ending up owning more than a million acres without spending a penny of their own money.
Three years ago Cyrus Mulvaney traded his scattered parcels of land to his partner to buy one monstrous tract of land northeast of the city, a hundred thousand acres of prime tall-grass prairie that he intended to turn into a cattle shipping depot. It was his expectation that, once he became a wealthy cattle baron, it wouldn’t be long before he was ushered into the position of Territorial Governor.
But all his plans had gone wrong.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Clarence Hetley said as his former partner stepped through the door. The short rotund man leaned back in his office chair behind a huge desk, his feet propped up, a mild sneer on his face.
Cyrus moved slowly to the chair in front of the desk, lowered himself into the padded seat, and stretched as he leaned back. He couldn’t remember ever being so tired. The last two months had been a blur. First Sam, then Violet, now Lucy.
“I’m sorry about your boy,” Hetley said, plopping his feet down against the rug and pulling his chair up to his desk. “About Vi, too. I hear she’s gone addled.”
Cyrus only nodded. He was sure that Hetley’s commiseration was sincere, but his former partner’s backroom dealing with the railroad boys was responsible for a lot of Cyrus’s troubled finances.
“I’ll get to the point,” Cyrus began, looking across the desk. “The cattlemen changed their trails to the east, taking away their need for pasturing on my land. Your under-the-table deal with the railroad cheated me out of their business and made my planned depot business a complete failure. The Comanche wreaked havoc on my ranch, and building the house drained me of every spare nickel. Sam was taken by the Indians, Violet’s gone mad, and I just sent Lucy to St. Louis to live with family until I can get Violet back there and into an asylum. Everything I planned for has failed, and everything I own has become a liability.”
Cyrus leaned forward, his hand gripping the edge of the desk. “I give up. I need to get out of here, go back to St. Louis, and start over. But I need to sell everything I own to start free and clear, to have enough money to set up an office.”
He looked Hetley in the eyes. “I want you to buy me out. I’ve improved the land considerably—stockyards, fencing, corrals, hay barns, water tanks. The canyon has the house, barn, sheds, and bunkhouses. And the house is worth every penny that I’ve put into it; you’ve been there and you know there’s nothing else like it in the Territory.
“For all the things that we did together, for helping make us both rich, I need you to do this.”
Clarence Hetley listened, his face impassive. He let the silence stand for a beat or two, then started his pitch.
“Cyrus, I said I was sorry about the boy, and I’m even more sorry about Violet, she being a favorite of mine. But that railroad business was exactly that, business, and you know it. You make money when you can, and you do whatever it takes. You just misjudged the situation.
“I told you three years ago that becoming a cattleman was a bad idea. Law is always the way to make money and develop power. But you were bullheaded and wouldn’t listen. You went ahead and then things didn’t work out like you planned. I understand your plight. I really do. And I understand your desire to move back to St. Louis. But the railroad out here wants to move people and goods, not cattle, and you built that monster house of yours smack dab in the middle of the Comanche’s backyard, not to mention that it’s a half day’s ride from town.
“That precious land that you wanted so bad is too dry to farm and too big to fence so the buffalo don’t eat all the grass. The house is too damn big and expensive to maintain, which shows that your high falutin’ tastes got the best of you. But I sympathize, and so here’s what I can do.”
Hetley wrote a number on a piece of paper and slid it to other side of the desk.
The knot in Cyrus’s stomach flared into a burn. He expected that Hetley would make him squirm, but he thought the man had enough grit not to cheat him outright. The price was a tenth of what the land was worth and would leave him penniless.
“That’s not enough,” Cyrus said, bitterly. “You’re leaving me nothing. I couldn’t buy a drink with what’s left after I pay the debts.”
Hetley was unfazed. “Cyrus, you got this idea of being governor in your head, and you suddenly went moral on me, started talking about how noble this country is and how you could lead it into greatness, how bad the Indians and the Mexicans had been treated by the white man and how we needed to reform the laws. Suddenly, you were better than the rest of us and made us out to be a bunch of damn crooks. I was happy to trade you land just to get rid of you. You were beginning to make me sick.”
The sneer on his face turned into something more sinister.
“Now you’re back with your tail between your legs whining about how bad life has treated you, and how you need to get out of this noble land and go back to the big city. Meanwhile, you got all the people riled up against me and the legislature, making it a lot harder to get my business done. Well, if you want to leave, then have at it. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. But it’s going to cost you. You made me out to be a criminal, a leech on society, if I remember correctly, so don’t expect that, just because you had an attack of conscience, it’s earned you the right to leave without regrets.”
Cyrus Mulvaney’s Irish heritage had brought him his size and his flaming red hair, but he could hear every ancestor roll over in their grave when he got out of his chair, kneeled on the floor, lowered his head, and begged.
“Clarence, I’m asking you as a longtime friend. If you don’t consider me a friend anymore, then at least remember the money we made for each other. Maybe I did get a little heady with my pride and all, and maybe I was already practicing politics, but I didn’t do you any lasting harm. Please,” Cyrus said in a low voice, “don’t bottom me on this. I need to get out and I need money to do it. Please.”
Cyrus could beg but he wasn’t about to raise his eyes to see Hetley gloat.
Hetley stood, walked around the desk, bent down to see Cyrus’s face, and smiled.
“No one will give you better, Cyrus,” he said softly. “I’ve made sure of it. My friends and I want you to leave. You’ve been a burr under our saddle for a long time. But if you’re going to run like a little rabbit, then I want everything you have. I want everything you’ve even thought of having. I’ll take your land and your house, and I don’t care if you’re left with anything more than the clothes on your back.”
Hetley extended his hand and patted Cyrus Mulvaney on the cheek.
The ferocious fist that exploded from the man kneeling on the floor, a fist that had years of resentment behind it, caught the smaller man beneath the jaw, close to the neck. The power in the blow lifted Hetley’s body several inches off the floor.
Cyrus heard a sharp sound as Hetley’s head jerked back and to the side, and he knew that Hetley’s neck had snapped like a chicken’s.
There was silence in the office as the body slumped onto the desk, then slid to the floor. Cyrus, his chest heaving, stood tall over the body.
His fount of rage slackened but he could find no sorrow for his action. Cyrus had not planned on even touching the man, but Hetley deserved what he received. Cyrus’s mind raced as he tried to figure out what to do next. He briefly thought of throwing the body in the floor of the carriage, hiding the murder, and escaping in the night. But there were too many people around the plaza to go out the front unnoticed, and the alley was always full of drunks and whores. He thought about making it look like an accident, but the chances of him being believed were slim. He thought about setting fire to the building and attempting to cover up the crime, but it was a sure thing that he would be caught before he got out of town. Even a fire wouldn’t disguise a broken neck.
The only advantage he had was that the confrontation had made little sound, probably not even being heard outside the office. Even doing nothing, the body would not be discovered until Hetley’s assistants came to work in the morning. That would give Cyrus time to get back to the ranch, a thought that gave him a sense of certainty that he had not had recently.
Since Sam had been kidnapped, Cyrus’s life had been a rollercoaster of emotions. Violet had always been delicate, but the loneliness of the frontier had turned her fragile. When Sam suddenly vanished and the horrors of what must have happened to him settled in, she must have snapped on the inside, losing first her ability to cope, then to communicate, and then shuttering herself completely, staying in a corner of the house where she alternated weeping with staring blankly. She no longer talked nor heard anything around her.
Cyrus had almost joined her as he watched her descend into madness. It made the decision to send six year-old Lucy to Violet’s sister both easy and hard—easy because Violet’s condition would no longer be a daily presence to the child and hard because she was all he had left. With his daughter gone, his abandonment was total. As would be his daughter’s sense of her own life as well, he was sure. Her sweet disposition and loving ways would never be the same.
Lucy had cried in the arms of the lady companion hired for the trip as they said goodbye, and her departure left Cyrus feeling utterly alone and weary, sorrowful to the bone to have seen his family disintegrate before his eyes. He pledged to himself, as he watched the dust of the stage retreat to the horizon, to close down the ranch and raise as much money as he could. Selling everything to Hetley was his last choice, but it would allow him to pay off the massive debts that were driving him toward prison. It didn’t help to see Hetley’s friends lurking as they watched his demise, waiting to pounce on the remains like vultures.
Now, standing over Hetley’s body and running through all that he might do, Cyrus sharply regretted that his life had come undone. He knew there was only one real option now, even as he yearned to be back in the house, the home he had built, for it all to be resolved.
Cyrus closed the office like he used to, drawing the front curtains, dousing the flames of the lamps, and locking the door. He was soon back in his carriage, winding through the loud streets of the night.
Several hours later, he came out of the narrow canyon and drove through the gate of the Mulvaney ranch. Of the large staff that used to care for the house and grounds, only the two housemaids remained. Their time was now spent watching over Violet. Pulling up to the barn, Cyrus calculated when the body would probably be found, when the sheriff would get organized, and how long it would take them to ride to the ranch. All taken into account, he expected to see a posse about noon.
There would be no question that Cyrus Mulvaney killed Clarence Hetley. Cyrus had made no attempt to hide his visit the evening before. As big as he was and as well-known a figure as he had become over the years, he would not have gone unnoticed by the people milling about the plaza. His very presence at the office would be enough for the sheriff, and Cyrus expected that justice would be served at the end of a rope. Such was the no-frills loyalty that Hetley had bought, for the sheriff had been on Hetley’s payroll for years.
Cyrus was in no rush. He took the rigging off the horse, gave the beast a well-earned brush by the light of a lantern, then let it into the side corral. He added an extra scoop of oats to the feed trough. Walking to the house, he looked up at what two years of building had produced. It would have been a major house in St. Louis, but out in the barren adobe-dominated Southwest, his Victorian mansion was one of the grandest houses for five hundred miles in every direction. He had always been proud of the place, even when he was spending far more than he had estimated. Living in it, entertaining in it, receiving all the important people that he could find had been his delight. This was his magnificent dream home, and its opulence was to have been a statement of his success.
He caught a short nap until the light of dawn came into his room, then rose, showered, dressed, and went downstairs. In his office Cyrus composed such legal papers as were needed to complement his will, formally updated the situation with regard to the children, and made specific recommendations for Violet. He expected that her father would take care of the arrangements in St. Louis, and he might even come to escort her back to her childhood home. Cyrus did not have any positive expectations regarding her condition, and the thought made him feel guilty. Violet had been a good wife, and he would never have brought his family to the ranch had he known how much she would suffer from the isolation.
It was midmorning when he finished his paperwork, called in the housemaids to witness the changes, walked to the barn to get a rope, then returned to his third-floor bedroom. Forming a good noose around his neck, he tied a short length of the rope to the balcony railing, and stepped off into the thin air.
Chapter 1
Present Day
I should be unfazed by heat and cold, but in fact, I hate them both. The intense cold of winter makes me feel hard and brittle, and the waves of endless radiation from the summer sun make me slump all over. Today hardly even counts as summer, but the heat has already made me listless and inattentive. It wasn’t until the snake moved out of the rocks that it finally caught my attention.
A large diamondback rattler had slipped onto the grass and was on its way to the back door. It slithered up and over some miniature sand dunes next to the old gate, and then slid down onto the sidewalk. Apparently not bothered by the hot cement, I watched the snake smoothly zigzag until it reached the thick pile of rubble. Several winters ago, a massive snowfall collapsed the back porch roof, crushing the porch under hundreds of heavy slate shingles, leaving a large mound of broken wood and stone heaped against the house. One corner of the roof above the door had failed to break loose and still clung to the brickwork like a ripped curtain.
Picking its way through the mess and around the bottom of the lopsided roof, the snake levered its belly against a mound of shingles, lifted itself through the empty doorway, and glided over the worn threshold. It stopped, moved its head side to side, flitting its tongue in and out, tasting the air. Apparently satisfied, it moved further into the abandoned kitchen, sliding around the tumbleweeds piled against the cabinets, and skimmed over the dirty linoleum tiles with a perfect quiet. Coiling itself near a back corner of the room, the snake lowered its head and watched.
Not long afterward, a deer mouse peeked out of a hole in a floorboard. Cautiously, it crawled out, erratically moved its head back and forth, and twitched its nose hairs like the feelers of an ant. Feeling safe, it skittered along the base of the wall.
The snake struck in an instant, drove its fangs into the mouse’s neck and held it firm until the quivering stopped. The snake then worked its lunch through its jaws and squeezed the lump downward into its body. Finally content, it stretched into the familiar zigzag pattern and returned the way it had come, slithering across the floor, out the doorway, and down onto the wreckage of the porch.
As the snake glided beside the hanging portion of the old roof, I wiggled out a couple of nails that held a shingle in place. The shingle shifted slightly, let go, and the heavy sharp-edged piece of slate slid past its neighbors, gained momentum in the six or seven feet of freefall, and struck the snake directly behind its head. The snake’s body twisted rapidly into a spiral, released and reversed, then curled up and around and sideways in a frenzy of deathly confusion. I watched until it finally relaxed and lay still.
It wasn’t that I disliked the snake. I had just grown fond of the mouse.
Dealing with the snake was, at best, idle play, minor entertainment to keep from being completely bored. Few things of interest ever happen here anymore, and the tedium can be wearing. So I sometimes play as if there is a point to my being the dominant presence in the canyon. Being dominant is not what I chose to be—I’m made to be protective not aggressive—but my abilities do make me overwhelming compared to the other creatures.
I am a house, and a very nice one, at that. Not that I have other houses to compare myself to, having lived a solitary life in the canyon, but I accept the accolades given me by many of my visitors through the years. They never knew that, when they were looking me over, I was looking back.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The fact that I am a house and am alive is not easy to comprehend for most people. I understand. Living entities are usually, well, lifelike, and structures assembled from inanimate pieces don’t normally display lifelike qualities. But hear my story, if you will. I will start at the very beginning, a long, long time ago.
I was already fully built and furnished when clouds of smoke slapped me awake. My windows and doors had been opened and there were bonfires roaring in the yards on each side of me. The billowing clouds of smoke from burning logs and branches flooded my rooms, my stairways, my cellar, and attic, making me woozy to begin with but then shaking me to attention. It was as if I had awakened inside a deflated bag and was slowly expanding myself against the fabric to inhabit it. I felt my individual parts: my foundation, my timbers, the supports on my porch, the wood within my walls, the glass in my windows, and the slate upon my roof. I could even feel the large decorative brass rods attached to my roof, hot and sizzling beneath the desert sun.
The wonder of waking up and feeling my housely parts was nearly dwarfed by the feel of the grass jostling in the current along the banks of the river, the swishing of the tall cottonwoods in the wind, the sand swirling on the road, and even the sun beating down on the cliffs behind me. I was feeling not only myself but the whole canyon in which I resided. It was as if I had roots fanning out below the ground and spreading their way throughout the soil and rock of the valley, roots bringing me vibrations and pressures and textures as if I had a vast multitude of fingertips. Were the roots part of my structure? If so, was I built that way or somehow acquired them after being here for some period of time? Or were the roots no part of me at all, but part of the earth and I just shared in their connection somehow? I was not sure what do with those bewildering sensations.
All I know is that the more I felt alive, the more I wanted to be alive. I swallowed. I gulped. I inhaled long deep breaths. I was enthralled with this awakening. I also found myself with abilities that surprised me. As I absorbed more of the smoke, I began to smell its pungent odors, as if I had a nose. I could taste, too, though I knew I had no tongue. I could hear, though I knew I had no ears. I could see, though I had no eyes.
Now more engaged with my surroundings, I discovered a man—tall, deeply tanned, bare-chested, muscled, and covered in colored stripes. He was dancing around the bonfires. He twirled, he leaped, and he ran from one fire to the other, singing. He came in my doors, onto my floors, into my rooms, commanding the smoke that swirled about him.
He must have been the one who called me from darkness. He must have used the smoke to bring me to life. Whoever he was, I fell into the rhythm of his singing and felt the cadence of his dancing.
As he danced, his movements drew me in. As he sang, the sounds swept around me. I was not one place and not one thing—the wall, the chimney, the lights, or the air—I was all of the place. The four levels of my many rooms, the large porches around me, the vast roof, and the big yards—it was all me. I was flooded with sensations.
The panting, sweating, painted man finally ended his dance and came to my front door. He sprinkled powder across my threshold and threw it against my door’s lintel and the frame. Taking a knife from his belt, he sliced across his palm, a cut that rapidly filled with blood. Opening and closing his hand until it was covered with red, he placed bloody handprints on my lintel, then on my uprights, and finally bled on my threshold until tiny droplets ran together on my floor. He rubbed his hands together, placed them both flat on my threshold, then chanted in a low voice.
As soon as his bloody hands touched me, a frenzy of feelings jolted me. My first emotions were of surprise and terror, but then more and more emotions assaulted me—pain, joy, anger, agony, happiness, tragedy, excitement. So many I felt caught in a swirling brew of feelings.
Memories flooded me and pulses of energy rocked me. Thoughts flashed into my senses and the man became known to me. I began to see his history, who he was and where he had been and what he had done. And I felt his loneliness; there was a great deal of loneliness.
Even as I was feeling his emotions, I began feeling my own. How confusing emotions are! Initially there were only external sensations, but now I was swelling with internal feelings that were not his but mine.
I had building within me the heart-centered qualities of a soul.
As powerful as becoming conscious was, being vested with a soul brought even more wonder. I was not the man at my threshold—I was a house, not a man—but I now had a context for my life, a framework of what had happened to me from the time I was built and the roles this man had played before my awakening. As savage as his life had been, my own life had been shocking as well. I was first built out of optimism and pride, but I was soon invaded by evil. Terrible things happened within my doors. My story spoke of pain, misery, sadness, and shame. My rooms were soaked in tragedy and tears had etched themselves into my floors.
The tall man in my doorway, his hands still on my threshold, finished his chanting. He spoke to me. “This is what I want,” he whispered. “This is why I brought you to life.”
He talked to me of protection, of patience, of preservation, and of the secrets that existed within me. Then he gave me a charge, a command, for what I was to do.
“Keep all things in order. She will come. I will return.”
The man declared my purpose, set my destiny. I was now complete. All that had happened that day, the fullness of being awakened and the soul that I was given, culminated in the simple task of maintaining myself to protect the secrets inside me until the woman and he returned. My secrets would then be revealed.
The man wrapped his hand, mounted his horse, and rode into the canyon of the river.
That was many, many years ago.
I have waited. Forever, it seems, I have waited. But she never came. He never returned.
I tell my tale of sadness and of pain because I am dying. My roots are over-extended and broken, my foundation trembles, my structure sags. My vision is cloudy and I do not sense all that is around me like I did years ago. The vibrations and pressures at the end of my fingertips go unanswered, and I, though still dominant in the canyon, feel aimless and distracted. Abandoned, I am ready to collapse, ready for what remains of my great heights to fall down and to slowly sink into the ground.
I deeply regret that the charge the man gave me goes unfulfilled, but there is nothing I can do. My future is now as simple as the snake’s. I expect to return to darkness as suddenly as I arose out of it the day the man danced and chanted in the smoke.
But there is a vehicle coming down the canyon road. I can hear the tires on the gravel and I can feel the lugging of the engine as it goes up and down the dips. I used to be curious about who was coming and what they were coming for. I would watch them, and I would listen, thinking that they might make a difference in my existence, be part of my destiny.
I have always been disappointed. In the past years, people have come only to stare and to walk around, then insult me—saying I am old and decrepit and smell stale and dirty, that my yards have returned to weeds and wildness. Of course I look old. I am old, older than anyone who looks at me.
It has been years since an experienced builder has looked me over. Any craftsman would see my fundamentals and admire them. He could see my potential, my fine lines, and my beauty. If the right people would only look and listen and touch, they could see me and I would see them.
If anyone would only give me the time, I would surprise them.
I should be unfazed by heat and cold, but in fact, I hate them both. The intense cold of winter makes me feel hard and brittle, and the waves of endless radiation from the summer sun make me slump all over. Today hardly even counts as summer, but the heat has already made me listless and inattentive. It wasn’t until the snake moved out of the rocks that it finally caught my attention.
A large diamondback rattler had slipped onto the grass and was on its way to the back door. It slithered up and over some miniature sand dunes next to the old gate, and then slid down onto the sidewalk. Apparently not bothered by the hot cement, I watched the snake smoothly zigzag until it reached the thick pile of rubble. Several winters ago, a massive snowfall collapsed the back porch roof, crushing the porch under hundreds of heavy slate shingles, leaving a large mound of broken wood and stone heaped against the house. One corner of the roof above the door had failed to break loose and still clung to the brickwork like a ripped curtain.
Picking its way through the mess and around the bottom of the lopsided roof, the snake levered its belly against a mound of shingles, lifted itself through the empty doorway, and glided over the worn threshold. It stopped, moved its head side to side, flitting its tongue in and out, tasting the air. Apparently satisfied, it moved further into the abandoned kitchen, sliding around the tumbleweeds piled against the cabinets, and skimmed over the dirty linoleum tiles with a perfect quiet. Coiling itself near a back corner of the room, the snake lowered its head and watched.
Not long afterward, a deer mouse peeked out of a hole in a floorboard. Cautiously, it crawled out, erratically moved its head back and forth, and twitched its nose hairs like the feelers of an ant. Feeling safe, it skittered along the base of the wall.
The snake struck in an instant, drove its fangs into the mouse’s neck and held it firm until the quivering stopped. The snake then worked its lunch through its jaws and squeezed the lump downward into its body. Finally content, it stretched into the familiar zigzag pattern and returned the way it had come, slithering across the floor, out the doorway, and down onto the wreckage of the porch.
As the snake glided beside the hanging portion of the old roof, I wiggled out a couple of nails that held a shingle in place. The shingle shifted slightly, let go, and the heavy sharp-edged piece of slate slid past its neighbors, gained momentum in the six or seven feet of freefall, and struck the snake directly behind its head. The snake’s body twisted rapidly into a spiral, released and reversed, then curled up and around and sideways in a frenzy of deathly confusion. I watched until it finally relaxed and lay still.
It wasn’t that I disliked the snake. I had just grown fond of the mouse.
Dealing with the snake was, at best, idle play, minor entertainment to keep from being completely bored. Few things of interest ever happen here anymore, and the tedium can be wearing. So I sometimes play as if there is a point to my being the dominant presence in the canyon. Being dominant is not what I chose to be—I’m made to be protective not aggressive—but my abilities do make me overwhelming compared to the other creatures.
I am a house, and a very nice one, at that. Not that I have other houses to compare myself to, having lived a solitary life in the canyon, but I accept the accolades given me by many of my visitors through the years. They never knew that, when they were looking me over, I was looking back.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The fact that I am a house and am alive is not easy to comprehend for most people. I understand. Living entities are usually, well, lifelike, and structures assembled from inanimate pieces don’t normally display lifelike qualities. But hear my story, if you will. I will start at the very beginning, a long, long time ago.
I was already fully built and furnished when clouds of smoke slapped me awake. My windows and doors had been opened and there were bonfires roaring in the yards on each side of me. The billowing clouds of smoke from burning logs and branches flooded my rooms, my stairways, my cellar, and attic, making me woozy to begin with but then shaking me to attention. It was as if I had awakened inside a deflated bag and was slowly expanding myself against the fabric to inhabit it. I felt my individual parts: my foundation, my timbers, the supports on my porch, the wood within my walls, the glass in my windows, and the slate upon my roof. I could even feel the large decorative brass rods attached to my roof, hot and sizzling beneath the desert sun.
The wonder of waking up and feeling my housely parts was nearly dwarfed by the feel of the grass jostling in the current along the banks of the river, the swishing of the tall cottonwoods in the wind, the sand swirling on the road, and even the sun beating down on the cliffs behind me. I was feeling not only myself but the whole canyon in which I resided. It was as if I had roots fanning out below the ground and spreading their way throughout the soil and rock of the valley, roots bringing me vibrations and pressures and textures as if I had a vast multitude of fingertips. Were the roots part of my structure? If so, was I built that way or somehow acquired them after being here for some period of time? Or were the roots no part of me at all, but part of the earth and I just shared in their connection somehow? I was not sure what do with those bewildering sensations.
All I know is that the more I felt alive, the more I wanted to be alive. I swallowed. I gulped. I inhaled long deep breaths. I was enthralled with this awakening. I also found myself with abilities that surprised me. As I absorbed more of the smoke, I began to smell its pungent odors, as if I had a nose. I could taste, too, though I knew I had no tongue. I could hear, though I knew I had no ears. I could see, though I had no eyes.
Now more engaged with my surroundings, I discovered a man—tall, deeply tanned, bare-chested, muscled, and covered in colored stripes. He was dancing around the bonfires. He twirled, he leaped, and he ran from one fire to the other, singing. He came in my doors, onto my floors, into my rooms, commanding the smoke that swirled about him.
He must have been the one who called me from darkness. He must have used the smoke to bring me to life. Whoever he was, I fell into the rhythm of his singing and felt the cadence of his dancing.
As he danced, his movements drew me in. As he sang, the sounds swept around me. I was not one place and not one thing—the wall, the chimney, the lights, or the air—I was all of the place. The four levels of my many rooms, the large porches around me, the vast roof, and the big yards—it was all me. I was flooded with sensations.
The panting, sweating, painted man finally ended his dance and came to my front door. He sprinkled powder across my threshold and threw it against my door’s lintel and the frame. Taking a knife from his belt, he sliced across his palm, a cut that rapidly filled with blood. Opening and closing his hand until it was covered with red, he placed bloody handprints on my lintel, then on my uprights, and finally bled on my threshold until tiny droplets ran together on my floor. He rubbed his hands together, placed them both flat on my threshold, then chanted in a low voice.
As soon as his bloody hands touched me, a frenzy of feelings jolted me. My first emotions were of surprise and terror, but then more and more emotions assaulted me—pain, joy, anger, agony, happiness, tragedy, excitement. So many I felt caught in a swirling brew of feelings.
Memories flooded me and pulses of energy rocked me. Thoughts flashed into my senses and the man became known to me. I began to see his history, who he was and where he had been and what he had done. And I felt his loneliness; there was a great deal of loneliness.
Even as I was feeling his emotions, I began feeling my own. How confusing emotions are! Initially there were only external sensations, but now I was swelling with internal feelings that were not his but mine.
I had building within me the heart-centered qualities of a soul.
As powerful as becoming conscious was, being vested with a soul brought even more wonder. I was not the man at my threshold—I was a house, not a man—but I now had a context for my life, a framework of what had happened to me from the time I was built and the roles this man had played before my awakening. As savage as his life had been, my own life had been shocking as well. I was first built out of optimism and pride, but I was soon invaded by evil. Terrible things happened within my doors. My story spoke of pain, misery, sadness, and shame. My rooms were soaked in tragedy and tears had etched themselves into my floors.
The tall man in my doorway, his hands still on my threshold, finished his chanting. He spoke to me. “This is what I want,” he whispered. “This is why I brought you to life.”
He talked to me of protection, of patience, of preservation, and of the secrets that existed within me. Then he gave me a charge, a command, for what I was to do.
“Keep all things in order. She will come. I will return.”
The man declared my purpose, set my destiny. I was now complete. All that had happened that day, the fullness of being awakened and the soul that I was given, culminated in the simple task of maintaining myself to protect the secrets inside me until the woman and he returned. My secrets would then be revealed.
The man wrapped his hand, mounted his horse, and rode into the canyon of the river.
That was many, many years ago.
I have waited. Forever, it seems, I have waited. But she never came. He never returned.
I tell my tale of sadness and of pain because I am dying. My roots are over-extended and broken, my foundation trembles, my structure sags. My vision is cloudy and I do not sense all that is around me like I did years ago. The vibrations and pressures at the end of my fingertips go unanswered, and I, though still dominant in the canyon, feel aimless and distracted. Abandoned, I am ready to collapse, ready for what remains of my great heights to fall down and to slowly sink into the ground.
I deeply regret that the charge the man gave me goes unfulfilled, but there is nothing I can do. My future is now as simple as the snake’s. I expect to return to darkness as suddenly as I arose out of it the day the man danced and chanted in the smoke.
But there is a vehicle coming down the canyon road. I can hear the tires on the gravel and I can feel the lugging of the engine as it goes up and down the dips. I used to be curious about who was coming and what they were coming for. I would watch them, and I would listen, thinking that they might make a difference in my existence, be part of my destiny.
I have always been disappointed. In the past years, people have come only to stare and to walk around, then insult me—saying I am old and decrepit and smell stale and dirty, that my yards have returned to weeds and wildness. Of course I look old. I am old, older than anyone who looks at me.
It has been years since an experienced builder has looked me over. Any craftsman would see my fundamentals and admire them. He could see my potential, my fine lines, and my beauty. If the right people would only look and listen and touch, they could see me and I would see them.
If anyone would only give me the time, I would surprise them.
Chapter 2
Tucker Whitby slid off the gray leather passenger seat to stand on the hard-packed dirt in front of the house. He could see that the house was obviously large as they drove up, but now, standing in front of it as he craned his neck upward, removing his ball cap to see the topmost gables, he realized that it was far beyond large. It was huge, easily the biggest Victorian house he had ever seen. The picture in the ad hadn’t come close to revealing its true size.
“So, this is the Mulvaney Mansion,” he said. “It looks pretty good for being almost a hundred and fifty years old.”
“It was started in 1867 and finished in 1869,” Lynn Anderson said. “That makes it a hundred and forty or so. But we’ve had it inspected and it’s in really good shape, all things considered.”
Lynn had opened the back of the SUV and gotten the Mulvaney file from a cardboard box. First snugging a broad-brimmed floppy hat on her head to shield her from the hot sun, she pushed a button and the door was closing as she walked up next to Tucker.
“You want to see the outside, or do you want to go inside first?” she asked.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go back up the road and start at the gate.”
“That’s fine. Whatever you’d like to do. At some point, though, you have to walk along the riverbank. It’s a wonderful feature of the ranch, and I haven’t seen a property with this much river frontage in a long time. You’ll love it.”
Tucker took a small bag from the SUV and the two of them walked fifty or so yards back to the open metal-pipe gate that represented the start of the Mulvaney Ranch. He already knew that the house was much too big for him, but it was always fun to check out a new place. No reason to waste the trip completely.
“The property includes what?” he asked.
Lynn removed a property map from her folder, and holding it flat in her hand, oriented it to the scene before them. She pointed to where the fence ran across the river from the cliffs on the left to the cliffs on the right, stretching across the river in the middle. That was the north boundary. The cliffs along each side of the valley determined the west and east boundaries. She pointed to where the cliffs turned and came together in the distance, the river disappearing through a gap in the middle. That was the south boundary.
“An official plat survey hasn’t been done in thirty years, but it’s about sixteen or so acres. If you decide to buy, we’ll get it updated. All the water and mineral rights come with the property, and there’re only a couple of state laws about the amount of water you can pump from the river if you want to irrigate a garden or an orchard.”
The river was a lazy, flat-rock laden, quiet piece of water bound on each side by yards of green grass, flat angular boulders, and cattails. There was a slow but steady flow, Tucker noted, as water rushed through the occasional rock contours, and the riverbed was sufficiently wide to make a good dip in the landscape. The view was the definition of peaceful.
Living in this valley would be a dream, Tucker thought, and he was already wishing the house was smaller. It had been almost twenty years since he had lived in a house for longer than a year or two, preferring to fix a house up, sell it, and then move on to another one. But he was going to be sixty in a couple of months and he thought it was time to look for something permanent. He had saved enough money to buy whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was an old place with land, an interesting house that was challenging enough to be a long project, and someplace remote.
And if this place was anything, he was thinking, it was remote. It had taken most of an hour to get to the ranch from town. The southernmost tip of the Rocky Mountains was directly west about forty miles, right on the other side of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Between there and where Tucker stood, the foothills of the mountain range splayed out into a vast high-altitude prairie, rich in grass and fertile topsoil.
Within a few miles of the ranch, the land fell off into a maze of canyons that started an almost thousand-foot drop in elevation, which to the east of the property resulted in the land finally becoming the real prairie, the Great Plains. Extending across to Oklahoma, the Plains went as far north as the Dakotas and as far south as halfway through Texas.
In the middle of the canyons, right under Tucker’s feet, a man named Cyrus Mulvaney decided to build his house. That he began this house in 1867 was hard to grasp. The builder was digging ditches for the foundation just a couple of years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
Tucker walked into the sage brush to get a better look at the course of the river. Behind him, about two hundred yards upriver from the fence where the canyons of the Mora and the Canadian rivers came together, was a grove of cottonwood trees. Closer to the house, a wide patch of purple flowers carpeted a portion of the bank, and on the other side were thickets of dark green and red oak trees bunched along the bottom of the east bluffs. The river then narrowed considerably as it disappeared between the south cliffs. Quite a picture, he thought. The ranch was a rare find.
“Okay,” he said. “We can move closer to the house.”
He and Lynn moved up a small rise from the gate, followed the road down to where the SUV was parked, then walked toward the river to an old cement sidewalk that circled the house. It ran from the front porch to behind the house and then over to the cliffs of the south boundary, where it turned, followed the riverbank where the stream was straight, and came back to the house. Tucker guessed the entire loop might be a quarter mile or more in length.
“Who put in the flagpole?”
Lynn looked to the side of the house at the large open yard. A pole with splotches of silver color stood in the center of the grass, a small ring of rocks around the base. No flag flew, but an old steel cable hung loose from swiveled pulleys at the top and bottom. The pole appeared to sag in the afternoon heat like everything else.
“The VA, I would guess,” she answered.
Tucker had taken a pair binoculars from his bag and was peering at the outside details of the house.
“What are you looking for?” Lynn asked.
“Trying to see the ‘bones,’” he said. “Most people think that the interior of a house tells you the important things about its condition. I look for those things that are mostly hidden, like the internal timber structure, the basic proportions of the floors and walls, the foundation, the shape of the roof, the straightness of the chimneys, the way the dormers and gables are attached—things like that. You can’t actually see the bones so you have to imagine what they look like by judging what’s on top of them.
“So I start outside. The roof is the biggest element of protection for a house in this climate. It takes the rain, the snow, the sun, the wind—all the big weather that happens hits the roof the hardest. If you’ve got a good roof, you’ve probably got a house that can be rebuilt. If you’ve got a bad roof, it will take a lot more money and effort and may not be worth either. But if what I’m seeing are real slate shingles, fixing anything wrong with this roof may not even be possible.”
He lowered the binoculars to look at the house without them, then raised them to his eyes again.
“The foundation is next and then everything in between, like where each story of the house connects to the story below it. I look for bulging walls, misaligned porch connections, crooked window frames, sway-backed eaves, and sagging timbers.
“I also check the overall straightness of the house.” He reached into his bag and held up a weight on a string. “Using a plumb bob, I can get an idea of whether the corners of the house are still straight up and down. You hold this at arm’s length and look at the house to see if the corners line up with the string.”
Tucker showed Lynn how to site down her arm, and then how to hold the plumb bob so it lined up with the corners, trim, and posts of the house.
“Wow. You must be a pro at this stuff.”
Tucker smiled, appreciating that the woman seemed genuinely interested.
“Well, hardly as a good as a professional. My dad was a carpenter, and so I worked on a lot of houses when I was a teenager. That convinced me to go to college, but my educated life didn’t turn out like I expected, so I came back to construction. I took a fancy to rebuilding Victorian houses, which is what I’ve been doing for the last several years.”
“You’ve remodeled a Victorian house before?”
“Seven, but none were this big.”
Seven? Lynn sighed at the thought. She should have known that a house this different was going to bring in the fringe players. She expected experienced builders or remodelers but somebody who actually specialized in Victorian houses?
She had moved from Century 21 to the Coldwell Banker office a year ago. She’d been a realtor for a long time but balanced a part-time job with staying at home with her kids, who were now grown. Her husband of thirty years had finally signed the divorce papers and they were waiting for their house to sell. Being a single woman demanded more income, and so she switched to the realty office that had the most houses on the Multiple Listing Source. The choice was proving to be a good one and she was doing better than she had expected. It was a competitive office, but in spite of having a few more years, and pounds, on the flashier women with the god-awful nails, she had held her own. Five hundred thousand dollars more in sales this year and she could take home the Realtor of the Year trophy.
She hadn’t hesitated when they asked her to represent the Mulvaney property, but she realized later that she hadn’t understood the situation. Advertised as a historical ranch house with river frontage, it was, in fact, an ancient, broken down monstrosity of a house in the middle of nowhere.
When she went through the master file, she found years of efforts by a dozen realtors to find a way to characterize the Mulvaney house as something someone would want to buy. The current owner was an oil company in Texas, which had bought the property thirty-odd years before, expecting to convert it into an executive retreat center, a fun place for executives to bring their families on vacation and for the occasional off-site business meeting. After discovering how much it would cost just to make it usable, the company decided it was more profitable to over-state its value, write off the taxes, and take the improvement and maintenance costs as depreciations. That wasn’t a bad strategy at the time, but they neither improved it nor maintained it. Less than a decade later, they were stuck with a house and property valued at far less than their original investment. So the place was given over to realtors to market as they could.
In fact, after the company was bought by a bigger corporation last year, the pressure to sell the ranch had increased. With the house a continuing liability on paper, the decision was made to sell it, burn it, or tear it down—whatever it took to get it off the books.
It was now Lynn Anderson’s responsibility to sell it before any drastic measures had to be used. Tucker Whitby was the only person who responded to the ad, and she had met him for the first time that morning. She prided herself on being able to read people, and he fit right into the preferred profile buyer for such a property: a retiree with money who was looking for something to keep himself busy. She thought he was probably in his mid-fifties, possibly a little younger, and noted that he had broad shoulders and muscular forearms, that his hands were thick and calloused, and he stood straight and tall. She liked him.
He talked well, if not very much, and they had a good visit during the drive to the ranch. She had already gleaned that he was an experienced builder. He didn’t seem to have a family, didn’t seem to be married, and didn’t seem too worried about the price of the property. By the time they had made it to the ranch gate, she thought she had a buyer.
And, a little embarrassed at noticing more than once, she thought that he was reasonably handsome—his eyes were a beautiful blue and he had a ready smile. It had been a long time since she’d talked that long with an attractive single man, and by the time they’d arrived, she was hoping he’d want to see more of her. Worn out by the years of working on a divorce, suffering it, and now biding her time to get the details finished off, she had little to no social life. She could use a good friend.
But Mr. Whitby was turning out to be far more experienced with old houses than she had anticipated, which dashed her hopes for a quick sale; it didn’t take an expert to see how much work this house would require. From what her officemates had told her, anyone familiar with remodeling, rebuilding, or restoring houses would not be interested in the Mulvaney Mansion because it would obviously cost far more than anyone could possibly want to spend on it.
Now the best hope for selling the place was finding a buyer who would tear the house down and salvage the materials to build a new house. That was the approach her bosses had recommended: let the guy look at it, decide not to take it, then draw him a picture of how great a nice bright new house would look in this beautiful river valley. Sell it, even if she had to give him the price of the land without the house, were her instructions.
That plan was clearly not going to work with Tucker Whitby. Anybody who had rebuilt seven Victorian houses was not going to tear one down, no matter what shape it was in. He’ll just walk away.
Lynn came out of her reverie and noticed that Tucker had stopped looking through his binoculars and was walking up and down the sidewalk, peering at the house. He was chuckling.
“What?” she asked.
“Look at the front of the house. It’s watching us.”
She looked but didn’t see anything. “What do you mean,” she asked.
“It’s watching us. Have you seen those pictures of people, portraits to which the artist has done something to the eyes so that, no matter where you are, the eyes seem to be looking right at you?”
“Oh, okay. It’s some kind of optical illusion, right?”
“Yeah. Well, look at the front of the house. Imagine the windows are eyes. Now, walk to the side. See? It’s like, wherever we are, the windows seem to be looking straight at us.”
Lynn thought it was a little spooky. She didn’t want a house looking at her.
Tucker laughed, then reached for his bag. He noticed the purple flowers a few feet away. “Oh, hey, lavender.”
Lynn watched her client suddenly brighten as he walked into the patch of blossoming stalks between the sidewalk and the river. Before she knew it, he was absorbed in the haze of the light purple plants bunched along the slope and had lost all focus on the house.
There were several large plants scattered along the bank, obviously planted as part of a flower garden. Uncared for, the plants were thin and haggard and crowded by an invasion of weeds, grasses, and yucca plants.
Tucker dropped to his knees, picked a couple of long stems, rolled the flowers between his hands, closed his eyes, and held them to his nose.
The aroma flooded his sinuses. It was Jennie. Most people had roses at their weddings, but Jennie would have nothing but the soft purple flowers of lavender. Every table at the reception had its own bunch, making the whole room smell of soft purple. Every time they went to arts and crafts fairs or farmer’s markets, she’d buy bouquets of lavender, bars of soap made with lavender, or bottles of lavender body wash. Every bathroom in the house smelled purple for a month.
Just like her, he thought. Soft, kind, and gentle—a whiff of simple beauty in the air.
Tucker opened his eyes. It had been a long time since she had become so vivid in his thoughts. He was used to keeping the memories in the back of his mind, holding them far away so they seemed small, but the smell brought everything forward. When thoughts of her barged in, the pain and sadness came with them and he had to allow the feelings their due, then wait for the feelings to subside.
She would have loved this place, he thought, as he struggled back to reality. She would have loved having her own lavender garden. And she would have dearly loved this house.
There was a faint clanging of the cable against the flagpole as he finally stood and brushed the dirt from his knees.
“I’ve never seen a man who knows the name of a lavender plant much less be so taken by the sight of one,” Lynn said as Tucker came back to the sidewalk. He had surprised her, bounding suddenly away from his deliberate and measured style of looking at the house only to delight in flowers. What a free response, she had thought, and he did it without a hint of embarrassment. She felt like reaching down and grabbing a few stalks herself, and she didn’t even like lavender.
Tucker’s face reddened with his response. “My wife loved lavender,” he said. “She’d buy bouquets, soaps, scented candles, whatever she could find that had lavender in it.”
“Then she’ll really love this place,” she said, failing to notice his use of the past tense.
“Oh, my wife died several years ago, in a car accident,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lynn said hesitantly, not wanting to say the wrong thing.
“No, no. That’s fine. I had a teenage daughter, and she also died. I’m just a single wandering builder-guy now,” he said with a soft smile.
“I am so sorry. I hope that… Well, I mean that it must have been terrible… I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. Let’s move over into the shade. It’s pretty hot out here.”
He and Lynn moved across the yard. Tucker touched the flagpole as they passed, swinging the worn cable, listening to it clang as it clumsily swung back and forth against the pipe. It was a sharp sound but, at the same time, lonesome as it echoed from the surrounding rock walls. A faint memory of its sound occurred to him, but realized that there was no breeze to swing the cable; he must have imagined it.
They stood in the shadow of the south cliffs, on the sidewalk that now ran along the bottom. They were on the opposite side of the house as the gate. Tucker’s bag was open again, the binoculars and plumb bob out, and he was focused on the southern side of the house. With one pass over the south view of the roof, he lowered the binoculars and was silent as he cocked his head to one side.
He had worked on houses for a long, long time, and he had built up considerable intuition about them, and his intuition was telling him that some things weren’t adding up.
“What?” Lynn asked, seeing him again distracted.
Tucker wiped the sweat from around his eyes, raised the binoculars, and reexamined the various high points of the house, half talking to her and half to himself.
“The best lookout spot in this whole valley is on that roof. You can see twice as much grass at half the distance from up there as you can from anywhere along the canyon rim. But if there had been birds on the roof, there’d be big splotches of poop all over it. Pigeons, ravens, crows, hawks, eagles, owls—they all poop a lot. Against the dark of the shingles, you’d see it everywhere. But there’s not a single splotch, not on the ridges, the gables, or even below the metal roof ornaments. It looks like not a single bird has spent time on the roof.”
He looked at her with a puzzled expression. “Why would they not perch on the roof? And look at the window sills—nothing. Clean as a whistle. I’ve never known a pigeon or a dove that could resist a window sill. Weird.”
Lynn was hoping that her red face wasn’t noticeable in the shade. After she had accepted the responsibility of selling the house, her boss had taken her aside and told her the stories and rumors: strange noises, music, lights that went on and off, horses refusing to come close to the house, stray cattle that wouldn’t eat the grass in the yard, dogs that wouldn’t venture inside the front door. “Things aren’t natural with that house,” her boss had said. “We’re pretty sure it’s haunted.” She hadn’t believed any of it on general principle. New Mexico had hundreds of ghost stories, and although it was sometimes fun to imagine historical spirits flying around old houses, she didn’t believe any of them.
She did have a favorite ghost story that was connected with this house, however. It was from a collection of ghostly tales published years ago for a Las Vegas historical celebration. The story was called “The Dancing Lady of Mulvaney Mansion.” Supposedly, right after the house had been abandoned in the 1870s, reports came from prospectors, ranch hands, Indians, and others passing by of a lady wearing a long white dress dancing on the porch of the house. Sometimes she was in the yard and sometimes down by the river, but the stories always had her swinging and swaying, led by an invisible partner as if they were dancing to an orchestra. Lynn couldn’t help but prefer that image over faces in windows or howling noises on full-moon nights. That particular ghost story was romantic, she thought, with her kind of ghost.
Still shaking his head, Tucker glanced over at the dormitory building.
“That’s the dormitory built by the VA? What’s the history behind it?”
Lynn readjusted her floppy hat and flipped through the pages of her file. She pulled out a history crib sheet that gave a detailed description and dates of the various major owners of the house.
“Let’s see,” she said. “The house was finished in 1869 and abandoned within a couple of years. Around the turn of the century, the property was leased by the Sisters of the Holy Light out of Santa Fe and opened as a tuberculosis sanatorium. Lots of people were moving to New Mexico and Arizona because of the dry climate, and the Archbishop of Santa Fe felt it a good idea to develop a facility for them. The house was updated at that time, though it didn’t need much beyond paint and a good cleaning because it had been virtually untouched for years.”
“TB asylums were a big deal in the early 1900s,” Tucker said. “Tucson had to build tent cities to accommodate everyone who came.”
“The sanatorium,” Lynn continued, “did well enough, and then was swamped by troops coming back from the First World War when it was expanded to treat soldiers who had been exposed to trench gasses. The place was crowded but well-regarded for the services it performed. The dust bowl and the depression in the twenties brought the business to a standstill. The sanatorium was officially closed in 1931, though some of the Sisters of the Holy Light stayed on for a number of years, the church in Santa Fe using it as a convent and a retreat center.
“World War II created the need for rehabilitation facilities for injured troops, so the Veterans Administration bought the property in 1943 and completely redid it. That’s when they put in electricity, new plumbing, new floors, laid on new paint, installed a telephone system, and changed the heating system from coal to gas. And that’s when they built the dormitory.”
“Let’s take a look,” Tucker said, slipping his binoculars back into the bag. He was still thinking about the birds, but a few steps later he was laughing again.
“See, see,” he said, pointing at the windows. “Now the windows on this side look like they’re watching us. This is great.”
Lynn was just sorry to leave the shade of the cliffs.
They followed the sidewalk up to the austere-looking building. Built along the base of the cliffs behind the house, the dormitory was located about fifty feet from the back door of the house. Tucker smiled as he recognized the rudimentary construction as the kind of building that became the run-down flea-bag motels that he remembered seeing along the highways in New Jersey as a kid. The building had two long wings, each wing having six rooms one after another like dominos in the box. It had a flat roof pitched to the back that was supported in front and back by slanted metal pipes. The common areas of the structure centered between the two wings consisted of his and her bathrooms and shower rooms and what Lynn referred to as an entertainment room. All the walls were concrete block, the floors cement, and the ceilings nondescript fiberboard sandwiched between the steel trusses and the tarred plywood of the roof.
Lynn following close behind, Tucker made a quick inspection of the hallway rooms, which were barren and made for two beds. Each room had two built-in desks, one closet, a sink, and a steel-framed window centered on the back wall. He checked the bathrooms to find only a few toilets intact, no sinks, and a deeply engrained bad smell. The entertainment room had been used as a dump for leftover papers, books, and magazines, two ancient plastic-covered sofas, old bed springs, and a broken office chair.
Tucker assumed that the building had been ignored by any owners or renters after the VA, although some industrious family had converted the last bedroom in the north wing into a chicken coop. Having tame chickens in their own coop at least confined their mess to one place; the rest of the dorm looked like an abandoned zoo. Poop was everywhere, discarded bones, old snakeskins, feathers, nests, and large piles of whatever the raccoons, skunks, and coyotes could find to shred for beds.
Once back out the front door, Tucker and Lynn stood in the shade of the corrugated overhang of the entry patio taking deep breaths of fresh air.
“The VA made the house a hospital? And built the dorm?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “The house was remodeled into a hospital environment, with doctors upstairs and the first floor wings for patients and the kitchen facilities. The dorm was used to house the nurses and staff.”
“This is hardly the place for emergency medicine,” Tucker said. “Was it a mental institution, by chance?”
Lynn had skipped over the name—the Veterans Hospital for the Insane. She hated to use that last word; soldiers deserved better. “Well, yes. It was created for those returning from the war who had, um, mental difficulties. I think they called it ‘shell shock’ in those days.”
“What happened after the war?” Tucker asked.
“In the mid-fifties,” Lynn continued reading, “when the VA decided that the hospital wasn’t needed anymore, the ranch was again abandoned. It stayed on the government surplus property list for several years and was eventually bought by the Boy Scouts. However, with the growth of the Philmont Scout Ranch, they defaulted on the loan a few years later and let the place go.
“After that, it was rented, leased, or owned by small ranchers, a civic organization, and a historical society who had more vision than money. It was finally bought by the current owner, a Texas oil company, in 1980.”
“That’s quite a history,” Tucker said. “It’s amazing that a house this old is still standing, much less a house that has had such rugged use. It’s a great location, but imagine a house full of people with no air conditioning, one kitchen, and only one bathroom. And the radiators must have creaked and pinged and moaned all winter long.”
When they reached the corner of the house, passing by the large pile of rubble from the collapsed back porch, Tucker looked at the abandoned power pole that stood twenty feet away. He wouldn’t even guess at the number of years since the house had seen electricity.
They walked down the north sidewalk. Tucker was satisfied that he had noted all of the house’s exterior features and possible problems. Reaching the SUV, he set his bag on the front steps and the two of them retreated into the shade of the house.
“What do you think?” Lynn asked.
“So, this is the Mulvaney Mansion,” he said. “It looks pretty good for being almost a hundred and fifty years old.”
“It was started in 1867 and finished in 1869,” Lynn Anderson said. “That makes it a hundred and forty or so. But we’ve had it inspected and it’s in really good shape, all things considered.”
Lynn had opened the back of the SUV and gotten the Mulvaney file from a cardboard box. First snugging a broad-brimmed floppy hat on her head to shield her from the hot sun, she pushed a button and the door was closing as she walked up next to Tucker.
“You want to see the outside, or do you want to go inside first?” she asked.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go back up the road and start at the gate.”
“That’s fine. Whatever you’d like to do. At some point, though, you have to walk along the riverbank. It’s a wonderful feature of the ranch, and I haven’t seen a property with this much river frontage in a long time. You’ll love it.”
Tucker took a small bag from the SUV and the two of them walked fifty or so yards back to the open metal-pipe gate that represented the start of the Mulvaney Ranch. He already knew that the house was much too big for him, but it was always fun to check out a new place. No reason to waste the trip completely.
“The property includes what?” he asked.
Lynn removed a property map from her folder, and holding it flat in her hand, oriented it to the scene before them. She pointed to where the fence ran across the river from the cliffs on the left to the cliffs on the right, stretching across the river in the middle. That was the north boundary. The cliffs along each side of the valley determined the west and east boundaries. She pointed to where the cliffs turned and came together in the distance, the river disappearing through a gap in the middle. That was the south boundary.
“An official plat survey hasn’t been done in thirty years, but it’s about sixteen or so acres. If you decide to buy, we’ll get it updated. All the water and mineral rights come with the property, and there’re only a couple of state laws about the amount of water you can pump from the river if you want to irrigate a garden or an orchard.”
The river was a lazy, flat-rock laden, quiet piece of water bound on each side by yards of green grass, flat angular boulders, and cattails. There was a slow but steady flow, Tucker noted, as water rushed through the occasional rock contours, and the riverbed was sufficiently wide to make a good dip in the landscape. The view was the definition of peaceful.
Living in this valley would be a dream, Tucker thought, and he was already wishing the house was smaller. It had been almost twenty years since he had lived in a house for longer than a year or two, preferring to fix a house up, sell it, and then move on to another one. But he was going to be sixty in a couple of months and he thought it was time to look for something permanent. He had saved enough money to buy whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was an old place with land, an interesting house that was challenging enough to be a long project, and someplace remote.
And if this place was anything, he was thinking, it was remote. It had taken most of an hour to get to the ranch from town. The southernmost tip of the Rocky Mountains was directly west about forty miles, right on the other side of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Between there and where Tucker stood, the foothills of the mountain range splayed out into a vast high-altitude prairie, rich in grass and fertile topsoil.
Within a few miles of the ranch, the land fell off into a maze of canyons that started an almost thousand-foot drop in elevation, which to the east of the property resulted in the land finally becoming the real prairie, the Great Plains. Extending across to Oklahoma, the Plains went as far north as the Dakotas and as far south as halfway through Texas.
In the middle of the canyons, right under Tucker’s feet, a man named Cyrus Mulvaney decided to build his house. That he began this house in 1867 was hard to grasp. The builder was digging ditches for the foundation just a couple of years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
Tucker walked into the sage brush to get a better look at the course of the river. Behind him, about two hundred yards upriver from the fence where the canyons of the Mora and the Canadian rivers came together, was a grove of cottonwood trees. Closer to the house, a wide patch of purple flowers carpeted a portion of the bank, and on the other side were thickets of dark green and red oak trees bunched along the bottom of the east bluffs. The river then narrowed considerably as it disappeared between the south cliffs. Quite a picture, he thought. The ranch was a rare find.
“Okay,” he said. “We can move closer to the house.”
He and Lynn moved up a small rise from the gate, followed the road down to where the SUV was parked, then walked toward the river to an old cement sidewalk that circled the house. It ran from the front porch to behind the house and then over to the cliffs of the south boundary, where it turned, followed the riverbank where the stream was straight, and came back to the house. Tucker guessed the entire loop might be a quarter mile or more in length.
“Who put in the flagpole?”
Lynn looked to the side of the house at the large open yard. A pole with splotches of silver color stood in the center of the grass, a small ring of rocks around the base. No flag flew, but an old steel cable hung loose from swiveled pulleys at the top and bottom. The pole appeared to sag in the afternoon heat like everything else.
“The VA, I would guess,” she answered.
Tucker had taken a pair binoculars from his bag and was peering at the outside details of the house.
“What are you looking for?” Lynn asked.
“Trying to see the ‘bones,’” he said. “Most people think that the interior of a house tells you the important things about its condition. I look for those things that are mostly hidden, like the internal timber structure, the basic proportions of the floors and walls, the foundation, the shape of the roof, the straightness of the chimneys, the way the dormers and gables are attached—things like that. You can’t actually see the bones so you have to imagine what they look like by judging what’s on top of them.
“So I start outside. The roof is the biggest element of protection for a house in this climate. It takes the rain, the snow, the sun, the wind—all the big weather that happens hits the roof the hardest. If you’ve got a good roof, you’ve probably got a house that can be rebuilt. If you’ve got a bad roof, it will take a lot more money and effort and may not be worth either. But if what I’m seeing are real slate shingles, fixing anything wrong with this roof may not even be possible.”
He lowered the binoculars to look at the house without them, then raised them to his eyes again.
“The foundation is next and then everything in between, like where each story of the house connects to the story below it. I look for bulging walls, misaligned porch connections, crooked window frames, sway-backed eaves, and sagging timbers.
“I also check the overall straightness of the house.” He reached into his bag and held up a weight on a string. “Using a plumb bob, I can get an idea of whether the corners of the house are still straight up and down. You hold this at arm’s length and look at the house to see if the corners line up with the string.”
Tucker showed Lynn how to site down her arm, and then how to hold the plumb bob so it lined up with the corners, trim, and posts of the house.
“Wow. You must be a pro at this stuff.”
Tucker smiled, appreciating that the woman seemed genuinely interested.
“Well, hardly as a good as a professional. My dad was a carpenter, and so I worked on a lot of houses when I was a teenager. That convinced me to go to college, but my educated life didn’t turn out like I expected, so I came back to construction. I took a fancy to rebuilding Victorian houses, which is what I’ve been doing for the last several years.”
“You’ve remodeled a Victorian house before?”
“Seven, but none were this big.”
Seven? Lynn sighed at the thought. She should have known that a house this different was going to bring in the fringe players. She expected experienced builders or remodelers but somebody who actually specialized in Victorian houses?
She had moved from Century 21 to the Coldwell Banker office a year ago. She’d been a realtor for a long time but balanced a part-time job with staying at home with her kids, who were now grown. Her husband of thirty years had finally signed the divorce papers and they were waiting for their house to sell. Being a single woman demanded more income, and so she switched to the realty office that had the most houses on the Multiple Listing Source. The choice was proving to be a good one and she was doing better than she had expected. It was a competitive office, but in spite of having a few more years, and pounds, on the flashier women with the god-awful nails, she had held her own. Five hundred thousand dollars more in sales this year and she could take home the Realtor of the Year trophy.
She hadn’t hesitated when they asked her to represent the Mulvaney property, but she realized later that she hadn’t understood the situation. Advertised as a historical ranch house with river frontage, it was, in fact, an ancient, broken down monstrosity of a house in the middle of nowhere.
When she went through the master file, she found years of efforts by a dozen realtors to find a way to characterize the Mulvaney house as something someone would want to buy. The current owner was an oil company in Texas, which had bought the property thirty-odd years before, expecting to convert it into an executive retreat center, a fun place for executives to bring their families on vacation and for the occasional off-site business meeting. After discovering how much it would cost just to make it usable, the company decided it was more profitable to over-state its value, write off the taxes, and take the improvement and maintenance costs as depreciations. That wasn’t a bad strategy at the time, but they neither improved it nor maintained it. Less than a decade later, they were stuck with a house and property valued at far less than their original investment. So the place was given over to realtors to market as they could.
In fact, after the company was bought by a bigger corporation last year, the pressure to sell the ranch had increased. With the house a continuing liability on paper, the decision was made to sell it, burn it, or tear it down—whatever it took to get it off the books.
It was now Lynn Anderson’s responsibility to sell it before any drastic measures had to be used. Tucker Whitby was the only person who responded to the ad, and she had met him for the first time that morning. She prided herself on being able to read people, and he fit right into the preferred profile buyer for such a property: a retiree with money who was looking for something to keep himself busy. She thought he was probably in his mid-fifties, possibly a little younger, and noted that he had broad shoulders and muscular forearms, that his hands were thick and calloused, and he stood straight and tall. She liked him.
He talked well, if not very much, and they had a good visit during the drive to the ranch. She had already gleaned that he was an experienced builder. He didn’t seem to have a family, didn’t seem to be married, and didn’t seem too worried about the price of the property. By the time they had made it to the ranch gate, she thought she had a buyer.
And, a little embarrassed at noticing more than once, she thought that he was reasonably handsome—his eyes were a beautiful blue and he had a ready smile. It had been a long time since she’d talked that long with an attractive single man, and by the time they’d arrived, she was hoping he’d want to see more of her. Worn out by the years of working on a divorce, suffering it, and now biding her time to get the details finished off, she had little to no social life. She could use a good friend.
But Mr. Whitby was turning out to be far more experienced with old houses than she had anticipated, which dashed her hopes for a quick sale; it didn’t take an expert to see how much work this house would require. From what her officemates had told her, anyone familiar with remodeling, rebuilding, or restoring houses would not be interested in the Mulvaney Mansion because it would obviously cost far more than anyone could possibly want to spend on it.
Now the best hope for selling the place was finding a buyer who would tear the house down and salvage the materials to build a new house. That was the approach her bosses had recommended: let the guy look at it, decide not to take it, then draw him a picture of how great a nice bright new house would look in this beautiful river valley. Sell it, even if she had to give him the price of the land without the house, were her instructions.
That plan was clearly not going to work with Tucker Whitby. Anybody who had rebuilt seven Victorian houses was not going to tear one down, no matter what shape it was in. He’ll just walk away.
Lynn came out of her reverie and noticed that Tucker had stopped looking through his binoculars and was walking up and down the sidewalk, peering at the house. He was chuckling.
“What?” she asked.
“Look at the front of the house. It’s watching us.”
She looked but didn’t see anything. “What do you mean,” she asked.
“It’s watching us. Have you seen those pictures of people, portraits to which the artist has done something to the eyes so that, no matter where you are, the eyes seem to be looking right at you?”
“Oh, okay. It’s some kind of optical illusion, right?”
“Yeah. Well, look at the front of the house. Imagine the windows are eyes. Now, walk to the side. See? It’s like, wherever we are, the windows seem to be looking straight at us.”
Lynn thought it was a little spooky. She didn’t want a house looking at her.
Tucker laughed, then reached for his bag. He noticed the purple flowers a few feet away. “Oh, hey, lavender.”
Lynn watched her client suddenly brighten as he walked into the patch of blossoming stalks between the sidewalk and the river. Before she knew it, he was absorbed in the haze of the light purple plants bunched along the slope and had lost all focus on the house.
There were several large plants scattered along the bank, obviously planted as part of a flower garden. Uncared for, the plants were thin and haggard and crowded by an invasion of weeds, grasses, and yucca plants.
Tucker dropped to his knees, picked a couple of long stems, rolled the flowers between his hands, closed his eyes, and held them to his nose.
The aroma flooded his sinuses. It was Jennie. Most people had roses at their weddings, but Jennie would have nothing but the soft purple flowers of lavender. Every table at the reception had its own bunch, making the whole room smell of soft purple. Every time they went to arts and crafts fairs or farmer’s markets, she’d buy bouquets of lavender, bars of soap made with lavender, or bottles of lavender body wash. Every bathroom in the house smelled purple for a month.
Just like her, he thought. Soft, kind, and gentle—a whiff of simple beauty in the air.
Tucker opened his eyes. It had been a long time since she had become so vivid in his thoughts. He was used to keeping the memories in the back of his mind, holding them far away so they seemed small, but the smell brought everything forward. When thoughts of her barged in, the pain and sadness came with them and he had to allow the feelings their due, then wait for the feelings to subside.
She would have loved this place, he thought, as he struggled back to reality. She would have loved having her own lavender garden. And she would have dearly loved this house.
There was a faint clanging of the cable against the flagpole as he finally stood and brushed the dirt from his knees.
“I’ve never seen a man who knows the name of a lavender plant much less be so taken by the sight of one,” Lynn said as Tucker came back to the sidewalk. He had surprised her, bounding suddenly away from his deliberate and measured style of looking at the house only to delight in flowers. What a free response, she had thought, and he did it without a hint of embarrassment. She felt like reaching down and grabbing a few stalks herself, and she didn’t even like lavender.
Tucker’s face reddened with his response. “My wife loved lavender,” he said. “She’d buy bouquets, soaps, scented candles, whatever she could find that had lavender in it.”
“Then she’ll really love this place,” she said, failing to notice his use of the past tense.
“Oh, my wife died several years ago, in a car accident,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lynn said hesitantly, not wanting to say the wrong thing.
“No, no. That’s fine. I had a teenage daughter, and she also died. I’m just a single wandering builder-guy now,” he said with a soft smile.
“I am so sorry. I hope that… Well, I mean that it must have been terrible… I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. Let’s move over into the shade. It’s pretty hot out here.”
He and Lynn moved across the yard. Tucker touched the flagpole as they passed, swinging the worn cable, listening to it clang as it clumsily swung back and forth against the pipe. It was a sharp sound but, at the same time, lonesome as it echoed from the surrounding rock walls. A faint memory of its sound occurred to him, but realized that there was no breeze to swing the cable; he must have imagined it.
They stood in the shadow of the south cliffs, on the sidewalk that now ran along the bottom. They were on the opposite side of the house as the gate. Tucker’s bag was open again, the binoculars and plumb bob out, and he was focused on the southern side of the house. With one pass over the south view of the roof, he lowered the binoculars and was silent as he cocked his head to one side.
He had worked on houses for a long, long time, and he had built up considerable intuition about them, and his intuition was telling him that some things weren’t adding up.
“What?” Lynn asked, seeing him again distracted.
Tucker wiped the sweat from around his eyes, raised the binoculars, and reexamined the various high points of the house, half talking to her and half to himself.
“The best lookout spot in this whole valley is on that roof. You can see twice as much grass at half the distance from up there as you can from anywhere along the canyon rim. But if there had been birds on the roof, there’d be big splotches of poop all over it. Pigeons, ravens, crows, hawks, eagles, owls—they all poop a lot. Against the dark of the shingles, you’d see it everywhere. But there’s not a single splotch, not on the ridges, the gables, or even below the metal roof ornaments. It looks like not a single bird has spent time on the roof.”
He looked at her with a puzzled expression. “Why would they not perch on the roof? And look at the window sills—nothing. Clean as a whistle. I’ve never known a pigeon or a dove that could resist a window sill. Weird.”
Lynn was hoping that her red face wasn’t noticeable in the shade. After she had accepted the responsibility of selling the house, her boss had taken her aside and told her the stories and rumors: strange noises, music, lights that went on and off, horses refusing to come close to the house, stray cattle that wouldn’t eat the grass in the yard, dogs that wouldn’t venture inside the front door. “Things aren’t natural with that house,” her boss had said. “We’re pretty sure it’s haunted.” She hadn’t believed any of it on general principle. New Mexico had hundreds of ghost stories, and although it was sometimes fun to imagine historical spirits flying around old houses, she didn’t believe any of them.
She did have a favorite ghost story that was connected with this house, however. It was from a collection of ghostly tales published years ago for a Las Vegas historical celebration. The story was called “The Dancing Lady of Mulvaney Mansion.” Supposedly, right after the house had been abandoned in the 1870s, reports came from prospectors, ranch hands, Indians, and others passing by of a lady wearing a long white dress dancing on the porch of the house. Sometimes she was in the yard and sometimes down by the river, but the stories always had her swinging and swaying, led by an invisible partner as if they were dancing to an orchestra. Lynn couldn’t help but prefer that image over faces in windows or howling noises on full-moon nights. That particular ghost story was romantic, she thought, with her kind of ghost.
Still shaking his head, Tucker glanced over at the dormitory building.
“That’s the dormitory built by the VA? What’s the history behind it?”
Lynn readjusted her floppy hat and flipped through the pages of her file. She pulled out a history crib sheet that gave a detailed description and dates of the various major owners of the house.
“Let’s see,” she said. “The house was finished in 1869 and abandoned within a couple of years. Around the turn of the century, the property was leased by the Sisters of the Holy Light out of Santa Fe and opened as a tuberculosis sanatorium. Lots of people were moving to New Mexico and Arizona because of the dry climate, and the Archbishop of Santa Fe felt it a good idea to develop a facility for them. The house was updated at that time, though it didn’t need much beyond paint and a good cleaning because it had been virtually untouched for years.”
“TB asylums were a big deal in the early 1900s,” Tucker said. “Tucson had to build tent cities to accommodate everyone who came.”
“The sanatorium,” Lynn continued, “did well enough, and then was swamped by troops coming back from the First World War when it was expanded to treat soldiers who had been exposed to trench gasses. The place was crowded but well-regarded for the services it performed. The dust bowl and the depression in the twenties brought the business to a standstill. The sanatorium was officially closed in 1931, though some of the Sisters of the Holy Light stayed on for a number of years, the church in Santa Fe using it as a convent and a retreat center.
“World War II created the need for rehabilitation facilities for injured troops, so the Veterans Administration bought the property in 1943 and completely redid it. That’s when they put in electricity, new plumbing, new floors, laid on new paint, installed a telephone system, and changed the heating system from coal to gas. And that’s when they built the dormitory.”
“Let’s take a look,” Tucker said, slipping his binoculars back into the bag. He was still thinking about the birds, but a few steps later he was laughing again.
“See, see,” he said, pointing at the windows. “Now the windows on this side look like they’re watching us. This is great.”
Lynn was just sorry to leave the shade of the cliffs.
They followed the sidewalk up to the austere-looking building. Built along the base of the cliffs behind the house, the dormitory was located about fifty feet from the back door of the house. Tucker smiled as he recognized the rudimentary construction as the kind of building that became the run-down flea-bag motels that he remembered seeing along the highways in New Jersey as a kid. The building had two long wings, each wing having six rooms one after another like dominos in the box. It had a flat roof pitched to the back that was supported in front and back by slanted metal pipes. The common areas of the structure centered between the two wings consisted of his and her bathrooms and shower rooms and what Lynn referred to as an entertainment room. All the walls were concrete block, the floors cement, and the ceilings nondescript fiberboard sandwiched between the steel trusses and the tarred plywood of the roof.
Lynn following close behind, Tucker made a quick inspection of the hallway rooms, which were barren and made for two beds. Each room had two built-in desks, one closet, a sink, and a steel-framed window centered on the back wall. He checked the bathrooms to find only a few toilets intact, no sinks, and a deeply engrained bad smell. The entertainment room had been used as a dump for leftover papers, books, and magazines, two ancient plastic-covered sofas, old bed springs, and a broken office chair.
Tucker assumed that the building had been ignored by any owners or renters after the VA, although some industrious family had converted the last bedroom in the north wing into a chicken coop. Having tame chickens in their own coop at least confined their mess to one place; the rest of the dorm looked like an abandoned zoo. Poop was everywhere, discarded bones, old snakeskins, feathers, nests, and large piles of whatever the raccoons, skunks, and coyotes could find to shred for beds.
Once back out the front door, Tucker and Lynn stood in the shade of the corrugated overhang of the entry patio taking deep breaths of fresh air.
“The VA made the house a hospital? And built the dorm?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “The house was remodeled into a hospital environment, with doctors upstairs and the first floor wings for patients and the kitchen facilities. The dorm was used to house the nurses and staff.”
“This is hardly the place for emergency medicine,” Tucker said. “Was it a mental institution, by chance?”
Lynn had skipped over the name—the Veterans Hospital for the Insane. She hated to use that last word; soldiers deserved better. “Well, yes. It was created for those returning from the war who had, um, mental difficulties. I think they called it ‘shell shock’ in those days.”
“What happened after the war?” Tucker asked.
“In the mid-fifties,” Lynn continued reading, “when the VA decided that the hospital wasn’t needed anymore, the ranch was again abandoned. It stayed on the government surplus property list for several years and was eventually bought by the Boy Scouts. However, with the growth of the Philmont Scout Ranch, they defaulted on the loan a few years later and let the place go.
“After that, it was rented, leased, or owned by small ranchers, a civic organization, and a historical society who had more vision than money. It was finally bought by the current owner, a Texas oil company, in 1980.”
“That’s quite a history,” Tucker said. “It’s amazing that a house this old is still standing, much less a house that has had such rugged use. It’s a great location, but imagine a house full of people with no air conditioning, one kitchen, and only one bathroom. And the radiators must have creaked and pinged and moaned all winter long.”
When they reached the corner of the house, passing by the large pile of rubble from the collapsed back porch, Tucker looked at the abandoned power pole that stood twenty feet away. He wouldn’t even guess at the number of years since the house had seen electricity.
They walked down the north sidewalk. Tucker was satisfied that he had noted all of the house’s exterior features and possible problems. Reaching the SUV, he set his bag on the front steps and the two of them retreated into the shade of the house.
“What do you think?” Lynn asked.