NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Daisy Briscoe parks her Taurus wagon under a maple tree outside 1861 Havisham Place. I sit in the back, chauffeur style, next to her bowler hat and Cam’s ukulele. Daisy has not yet fixed the front passenger door which is both dented and jammed shut. The driver-side door opens with a loud crack and closes more quietly.
She leads me up five steps to the brown front door of a large brick rowhouse. Her thick black hair is piled on top of her head accentuating her long neck.
“Here goes Fred, I am going to see inside this place after fifty years or more.”
She finds the key on her ring and her bracelets tumble down her arm to her wrist.
“What is this? I can’t make it fit. You try!”
I try it without success.
“Any other doors?”
“Yeah, around back.”
We walk around to the basement door, off the minimal backyard, where another maple shades both yard and the alley beyond the high vertical-board fence. Thistles and curly dock rise between the irregular paving stones, largely covered in dead leaves. We descend the concrete steps by the door to the old coal chute. Desiccated leaves and samaras clog the drain outside the door. She unlocks it easily. It is thick with many brown repaintings and draped with cobwebs sagging in accumulated dust. Daisy can’t find a switch and flips her phone light on.
A huge brick coal-burning furnace fills the far corner. Long since converted to burn oil from a tank by the door, which replaced the coal bunker.
“Mom used to talk about her visits to this place a lot. I heard about a closet down here with a built-in secret. That’s when she gave me a key.
“When was that?”
“Oh, when I was a teen. I kept it in my jewelry box. Not that I had any jewels!”
I turn on my phone light.
“Over there, by the boarded-up window.”
“Yeah, Fred there it is!”
She opens the door.
“Oh, the commode! Be my guest if you need to.”
The red wooden seat has cracked, and it is half on the floor and half up. It is dry.
“Thanks, but no need.”
“Have you seen any light switches?”
“No, is the current running in here?”
“I thought it was.”
She holds up her phone and catches an empty ceramic light fixture hanging from a floor joist on a cotton insulated cord.
We can also see the boxed-in stairs up to the ground floor, and another closet opposite. Walking over, I accidentally kick an empty Miller Highlife bottle in the shadow of a post.
“Oh, look at that!”
She picks it up.
“Miller ‘HigLeaf’.”
“What?”
“Mom said the French used to call it, ‘HigLeaf’!”
“Why would they drink our beer?”
“I don’t know. After World War two, you know the GIs brought Jazz and all kinds of good stuff.”
The door to the stairs is locked. She leaves the empty on a bench by the closet and rattles the handle, trying to turn it. It comes off in her hand. The door opens far enough to get her fingers behind it and pull, scraping the bottom along the uneven stone floor, when something falls to the ground.
“Was that part of the lock?”
“Don’t know?”
Our phone lights sweep the floor’s flat stones.
“Well look at this, Fred!”
“An Indian head penny!”
“When did you last see one of these?’
“Years ago, in the last century, in my cousin’s coin jar.”
She pockets the coin and steps through.
“Okay, this is it. The middle shelf should pull out.”
“Look at all that old food!”
The small closet is full of cans, crowding shelves on three sides. Our phone lights reveal five shelves across the back. Among the still legible labels are, Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli, Del Monte Fruit Cocktail, Fray Bentos Prepared Beef, and Clover Leaf Red Sockeye Salmon, all partially hidden behind a narrow rail across the front of each shelf. Some of the aging cans are khaki-colored, World War II military C Rations. Some are bald and silvery, others rusty and once seeping and now dry.
Daisy steps in and props her phone on a side shelf to illuminate the cans.
“Here, put these out on that bench.”
She hands the Del Monte Fruit Cocktail. As I breathe out, a dead fly blows off the top and makes a final descent. Fray Bentos Prepared Beef is next. Labels curl off and disintegrate at our feet. Finally, I move a bunch of C Rations and the shelves are empty. She starts pulling on the center shelf.
“This thing isn’t moving.”
“Why should it?”
“It is a secret door the bootleggers supposedly used. The shelf is supposed to move up and out to open the door.”
We both jiggle the shelf loose pushing and pulling repeatedly. It opens and we look through a tall entrance only wide enough to enter sideways. Even then my belt buckle catches on a loose and redundant strike plate.
“Okay, there is supposed to be what Mom called a ‘gambling den’ up here.”
Daisy pauses moving her light around.
“What do you see?”
“Some wooden stairs and dead spiders.”
“Too bad we can’t question them.”
“Come on in and look.”
I step in and brush a moth’s wing off my shoulder. It turns into powder.
“You think we could hear a spider speak?”
“There must be an app for that.”
“Too bad Cam is in New York right now.”
“Call her.”
“I did, and left a message.”
“Does she know?”
“Yes, I told her right away.”
“Maybe she can move in here?”
“No, she isn’t interested, but I wish she could see this.”
“Is she into time travel?”
“Not in this heat!”
“We are going to sell as soon as I check it out for art and relics.”
“What do you think these old townhouses fetch?”
“Huh! In DC, in this shape, half a million, maybe?”
“Out here I think it’s going to be less.”
“Sure is.”
One step in we start a steep, ladder-like climb spiraling from the back of the basement three stories up to an attic.
“Looks like a long way up.”
“I can’t see the top.”
Daisy grabs the rope serving as a banister and it breaks off as she pulls herself up to the first step.
“Glad that didn’t happen further up!”
The wooden stairway is unpainted, and the faint smell of camphor grows stronger as we climb.
We pause at the ground floor, sweating and looking by phone-light, for signs of an exit concealed in the old, stained boards and studs. The planks slanting across the studs have faded into a light silvery brown. Some look as if water had run down them years ago, now dry as a desert wadi.
“Look at those burn marks.”
“Yeah, that’s where Auntie installed upstairs plumbing, back in the fifties.”
“I guess there is no door at this level”
“Maybe it goes straight to the stop?”
“Yeah, without passing GO!”
The last step puts us in the attic with a wall on the right and the back of a dull red velvet couch serving as a rail along the top of the stairwell to the left. It smokes with dust on contact. A small bookcase loaded with National Geographic magazines from the thirties and forties serves one end.
The attic is one long room with a wide slit of a window facing next door. The view is obscured by cobwebs on the inside and accumulated grime, leaves, and moss on the outside admitting a dim nicotine light, barely bright enough for a dust particle to dance.
“Do you see any paintings?”
“Ah, no but the light is poor.”
“There should be some work by my distant cousin, Lily Briscoe.”
“Where does your namesake live?”
“She was a Brit. She died a while back, don’t know when.”
“Maybe her paintings are hanging in the other part of the house.”
“Yeah, hope so!”
“So, all this is now yours!”
“Yup, one hundred percent of the dust and every dead fly, spider, and moth.”
“Haven’t seen any roaches.”
“They have eaten everything they can and moved next door.”
“Quite a substantial place.”
“Right, and I can’t even get into it!”
“We are in it right now!”
“I mean the living room, kitchen and bedrooms and all that!”
“At least you have a year’s supply of canned goods.”
“Yeah, some of that was probably stored here in case they needed the basement as a fallout shelter.”
“A lot of those cans predate the cold war.”
“I see a sink over there.”
“So where is the roulette table?”
“Don’t see anything big enough under the dust.”
“How old is this place?”
“Not sure, but it belonged to my grandmother’s sister who never married and lived here most of her adult life.”
“I guess that makes it late nineteenth century.”
“The foundation and basement are 18th century.”
“So, what’s with the hidden staircase?”
“The story is that it was a stop on the Underground Railroad.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Seems like the stairs were built after that.”
“Family lore is so often unreliable.”
“I think Auntie was a bootlegger.”
“What gives you that idea?”
“She had the money to keep up this house and Mom said she had some interesting friends.”
“Did she marry?”
“No, well, unofficially.”
‘Meaning?”
“She lived with her companion.”
“Sounds amicable!”
“She was killed in a trolly car accident.”
“How very sad!”
“Yeah, I am so sorry I never met her.”
“Her companion?”
“Yeah, she was a younger woman. Mom knew her as, ‘Cousin Fanny’.”
“Let’s get out of here. This heat is suffocating!”
We start down the spiral, back down to the cool eighteenth-century stone.
“You know, I thought that letter from the probate company back in 2019, was a prank!”
“Sure, who wouldn’t?”
“I called them up in Chicago.”
“Have you spoken to Sherman Shroud about it?”
“He vouched for Edward and Sherwood Crow and said, go for it.”
“Crow?’
“E. S. Crow, they are the Chicago probate firm. They have been working this case for years.”
“So how did they find you?”
“The internet, I think. I don’t really know.”
“I gather there are a lot of unsettled legacies out there.”
“It has taken nearly three years to clear the case, thanks to COVID.”
“And you didn’t know it was coming to you.”
We both cough and sneeze in the dust and drip with sweat as we get to the last few steps.
“No, we visited here when I was about four and Auntie was, ah, I don’t know how old, but she fitted right in with this old house.”
“Why didn’t she tell you about her legacy?”
“It wasn’t supposed to come to us.”
“Why?”
“It is complicated, but Cam and I are the only relatives left who qualify to get it.”
“Great! Looks like this place has been empty ever since she died.”
“Right, sometime in the fifties.”
Well, somebody has kept the roof intact and the heat on in Winter. I mean it seems structurally sound even if it does have a creepy antique atmosphere.”
“I think, some local guy was hired by the trust to keep it up.”
“You can get the keys from him!”
“Sure, if I could find him.”
“Oh, so she had made a trust, then!”
“Yup, the probate company gets twenty-five percent for their fee.”
“Not unreasonable for all that work.”
“There is a lot more to find out.”
We close the hidden door and Daisy pushes the closet door shut, leaving the cans on the bench.
