Are You Haunted (part twenty-nine)

Are You Haunted

(part twenty-nine)

“But people would assume Dennis, wouldn’t they…? Has rights, like you said.”

“Yes, of course. And that’s all there is to it.”

After a pause too long, Isobel finished without sarcasm, “The Drybrooks had ten years of storytelling by the time Davis came home. Davis had failed at Princeton, he had cost his parents good money to end his first mistake, and on the heels of that married a Tovey. After the accident the Drybrooks had Mrs. Lessing, a very good carrier into town of privileged information. People who didn’t know, which were all the newcomers hired for the war work, came to believe Davis a little cracked, a man led astray by grand ideas. Or low women. I don’t say it of poor Emmaline. I think she ended a bit mad, for the use she got. But she had spent her fight. She was a mouse for Davis, out of the stream of things…”

The expression seemed to give pause. “Here I am making you stand with that heavy load. And you’ve let me say such rude things to you. Powell.”

His name spoken in this sorrowing, affectionate way. He watched her gain momentum with a swing of the cooler, scale the slumped wall and disappear around the side of the house.

He put the radio at his feet. He threw the cot behind him and made a seat of the pitched concrete. In all his tours up and down the town’s thoroughfares, Powell had not seen the name Tovey on any business, not even a pawn shop.

Only he and Lloyd Guy would have keys…

Connolly had told him this, that the couple who did the housework would hand over theirs, since Powell could now let them in. They were Mrs. Lessing’s sister and her husband, and under her tutelage they would not hand over every copy.

Tovey, like any unrepentant thief, could get in if he wanted—

He was the brother of Mrs. Drybrook’s son. At the same time, her step-grandson, her husband’s flesh and not her own. And had lived for years with the illusion of a promise. Toveys circled the Drybrook house; they meant, as Connolly forced them out, to bedevil the trustees. They spoke in slips of the tongue.

Powell had not been brought here and showered with comparative largess because a kindhearted old woman saw grit, gumption…something…

In this vagrant, that no one else could see.

The trust now had a caretaker on the premises. Guy would use his grapevine to test what Powell concealed, what side he was on.

“Hand me up that radio,” someone said.

The face was fresh in the way of kids who had missed the war. A younger Tovey, dressed in baggies and an old man’s suitcoat. He had already picked up the cot.

“There’s no reason…”

Powell hefted the radio and hugged it to his chest, standing, wondering why he needed to argue. “I can get all that myself.”

“Broken, isn’t it? You want me to take a look.”

29

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part thirty)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)