Poison to Purge Melancholy Read Free Page B

was called for and it occurred to me that I could pump her for information at the same time. “Tell me about your grandmother.”
    “She’s old.” No insult intended. A statement of fact, with a silent “duh” for punctuation. Hugh had said his mom was sixty-five. She’d retired this past year from an accounting job she’d held since her divorce, when Hugh was fourteen. Another reason to be intimidated by her—she’d survived an office job well over a decade longer than I had.
    “I mean—” I paused to decide what I really did mean. “Tell me what sorts of things she likes.”
    “Old things.”
    I gave up on conversation.
    * * *
    Hugh had written the directions down for me but, of course, I couldn’t look at them and drive, too. I managed to remember exit number 238 before having to ask Beth Ann to read the rest. Since she saw the logic in my request, she agreed—one thing about her, no matter how grumpy she is, she stays logical—but between directions, she groused.
    “Why’d Grandmom have to move, anyway?” she asked when we were stopped for a light on Route 132. A sign for a hotel sat up on the hill, but otherwise the area was more of a park, all trees and well-tended lawn. “I liked her other house.”
    “Your father said her new place used to belong to your family. Your grandfather grew up there.”
    “So it’s not a ‘new’ place. It’s old .”
    “Old” was the word of the day. The light changed, I drove on.
    “And,” Beth Ann continued, bent on proving my total lack of knowledge, “it isn’t Grandmom’s house. The Foundation owns it.”
    Miss Maggie told me that the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation owns something like a hundred houses. The little Julia Bell Foundation that Miss Maggie and I dreamed up last May, and had been midwiving through birth pains since, only encompassed a couple hundred acres of mostly forest, which didn’t require much upkeep beyond trail maintenance, fire prevention, and discouraging vandals. I couldn’t imagine having to take care of a hundred houses, all in need of heating, painting, good roofs, and, worst of all, housecleaning.
    “That’s probably why she moved,” I reasoned aloud. “All her kids are grown and she’s retired, so maybe having her own home was too much trouble for her. Now that she’s doing volunteer work for the Foundation, she’s able to share one of their houses with an employee.”
    “That’s not what Dad said.”
    To me, Hugh hadn’t said much at all, simply that his mom moved less than a month ago and was now sharing her father’s childhood home with someone named Evelyn. I knew Hugh wasn’t happy about it, but I assumed that had to do with her selling the old house without consulting him or any of his four siblings. Now I wondered. “What did he say?”
    That was met with Beth Ann’s most profound silence yet, then, “I can’t tell you.”
    I was willing to bet she wouldn’t tell me because she’d been eavesdropping—maybe while he was on the phone with one of his brothers—and she didn’t want to get caught. Especially since she tried to redirect my attention with, “Three blocks farther, you’ll make a left onto Francis Street.”
    Route 132 was now Henry Street, the road narrowing as the trees gave way to low modern buildings on our right, then again, farther on, as older brick and clapboard shops lined the way. Older, but not very colonial, at least not colonial the way I remembered Old City Philadelphia, which is sort of what I’d expected, since Williamsburg had been the capital of Virginia when Philly was capital of Pennsylvania. Oh, this place was quaint all right, but the quaintness seemed more of a veneer, for the sake of luring shoppers. I was disappointed.
    I hung a left where Beth Ann indicated and the scenery changed. On the right, set back across a wide lawn dotted with fat magnolia trees, was a dignified brick building, half a block wide and two stories high, with multi-pane windows and a