The Hummingbird House

  THE HUMMINGBIRD HOUSE

  By Donna Ball

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.

  Copyright 2013 by Donna Ball, Inc.

  Cover art by www.bigstock.com

  Published by Blue Merle Publishing

  Drawer H

  Mountain City Georgia 30562

  www.bluemerlepublishing.com

  First printing October 2013

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations and places in this book are either a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously and no effort should be made to construe them as real. Any resemblance to any actual people, events or locations is purely coincidental.

  ONE

  A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth.

  Oscar Wilde

  They all gathered around the hospital bed—those who were left, anyway—while the monitors beeped out the last moments of Annabelle Stephens’s life. She had lived ninety-seven remarkable years, married one man and outlived him, given birth to three children and outlived two of them. She had attended the funerals of all her friends and most of her enemies, and if there was one thing she knew for certain it was that growing old was vastly overrated. It was time for her to go. She was ready.

  The nurse came in on soft-soled shoes and walked over to check the IV drip. Annabelle’s daughter Marion sniffled into a tissue, and her husband Jim, who was comfortably ensconced in the armchair by the window playing Angry Birds, glanced up from his phone. Two of the great-nieces, each of whom suspected the other of having tried to manipulate Annabelle’s will and both of whom were right, moved closer to the bed, glancing at each other resentfully.

  The nurse made a minute adjustment to the drip valve, checked one of the monitors, and gave them all a sympathetic smile. “It won’t be much longer,” she said softly. “You should say your good-byes now.”

  Marion smothered a sob, and the two great-nieces bent over the bed, each of them clutching one of Annabelle’s thin, papery hands. Jim said, “How much longer, do you think?” And at his wife’s horrified glance, he added defensively, “My tee time is at two. I need to know if I should cancel, or what.”

  Whatever his outraged wife might have replied was cut off by the whooshing open of the door. Their daughter Megan came in, her tight brunette curls wind-tossed, her skirt and jacket rumpled, her face streaked with anxiety. “Mama, I’m so sorry, my plane was delayed at Dulles and then we circled Dallas for over two hours. I came straight from the airport. Am I too late?”

  “Oh, baby, I’m so glad you’re here!” Marion opened her arms for her daughter but Megan’s hug was perfunctory and her eyes never left the still, shrunken figure on the bed.

  Megan pulled away from her mother’s embrace and went to the bedside, edging around the two great-nieces for a seat on the bed. She smoothed away a wisp of iron gray hair from her grandmother’s cool forehead and let her heart fill with memories of this extraordinary woman, this life lived so hugely and over too soon. If she had lived five hundred years it still would not have been long enough.

  Some people, Megan knew, never got a chance to spend time with their grandparents as children beyond the occasional holiday visit, or to get to know them as adults at all. Megan could not imagine having missed out on the opportunity to be a part of the life that was now seeping out in slow stuttering breaths upon the hospital bed before her. At age sixty, Annabelle Stephens had won an amateur ballroom dancing competition. At age seventy-two, she had biked across Europe. She had taken Megan on her first zip line excursion less than five years ago and had earned her small-plane pilot’s license when she was sixty-five. For Megan’s thirteenth birthday, her grandmother had taken her to South Africa, and they spent two weeks traveling through unimaginable poverty and unbelievable beauty, staying in the villages and shopping in the open air markets. When she graduated from college, she and her grandmother had gone rafting down the Colorado River and spent ten days held in thrall by the vast, towering silence, the thousand shades of pink that sunrise could paint upon a canyon wall. Every day was an adventure to Annabelle Stephens, every moment a bright and sparkling gift that was to be overlooked or taken for granted at one’s own peril. How could such a brilliant light fade so quickly? How could it even be contained, much less extinguished?

  “Oh, Gram,” she whispered, curling her fingers against the old woman’s cheek. “Not yet. Please, not yet.”

  The beeping of the monitor grew slower, and then slower still. Marion sobbed and lurched toward the bed. Jim stood cautiously. The nurse stood by respectfully, ready to note the time for the death certificate. Megan’s face melted into a pool of raw sorrow, and she brought her cheek to rest lightly beside her grandmother’s on the pillow. “Oh, Gram. I’m not finished with you yet. I need you. Please don’t go.”

  Her grandmother took a deep, shuddering breath, expelled it, and was still. No one in the room moved, or spoke, for several seconds. Even the monitor stopped beeping. It was as though, having waited for the moment they all had known was surely coming, now that it had arrived they did not know what to do.

  The nurse stepped forward to turn off the monitor before it began shrilling its alarm, glanced at the screen, and hesitated. One of the great-nieces burst into tears. Marion cried, “Mama!” and surged forward.

  Annabelle Stephens’s eyes popped open and she looked around alertly. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “What’s all this wailing and carrying on? It’s enough to wake the dead!”

  Half an hour later, Annabelle was sitting up in bed, sipping orange juice through a straw. The ribbon of her pink satin bed jacket was tied in a floppy bow at her neck, her hair was neatly brushed and finger-waved, and a sweep of powdered rouge expertly applied to each cheek. Her lipstick, a saucy shade called Pretty in Pink, brought back color to her face and a spark to her eyes. Everyone had been shooed away except Megan, who leaned against the closed door with her arms folded across her chest, regarding her grandmother with indulgent affection.

  “They’re all pretty mad at you, Gram.”

  Annabelle gave an impatient wave of her hand. “Let them be. Bunch of ghouls, anyway, just waiting for the body to grow cold.” She tilted her head toward the door in a playful way and a mischievous glint came into her eyes as she added, “They all think I’ve got money. But shall I tell you a secret? Not a penny. Fooled them every one, all these years.” She broke into a laugh that was so light and so easy Megan couldn’t help grinning back.

  “Well, it wasn’t very nice,” Megan said, trying her best to look disapproving. “You scared us half to death and almost made Daddy miss his tee time. Why on earth would you want to pretend to be on your death bed?”

  Annabelle paused with the straw partway to her lips, looking surprised. “Good heavens, child, I wasn’t pretending. At my age, what would be the point? No indeed, if those fine young doctors say I was breathing my last, then I suspect that is precisely what I was doing. Only …” A thoughtful, puzzled look came over her face and she put the glass on the bed table. “I suppose I’m not quite as ready to go as I had imagined. I had the dream again, and I think there’s still something I need to do.”

  “What dream, Gram?”

  Annabelle’s hand was steady and sure as she pushed the swing-arm table to the side, and patted the place on the bed beside her. Megan came to sit beside her, and Annabelle watched her granddaughter with the smile of one who treasures deeply, loves long, and expects nothing beyond the moment of sweet, quiet watching. She wrapped her fingers around Megan’s and gave them a squeeze.

  “Sweet girl, I want you to do something for me.”

  Megan re
garded her tenderly. “Grammy, you’re the one who told me never to trust a man who bleaches his teeth. For that alone I’m your slave for life. You know you can count on me.”

  “I do know that for a fact.” Annabelle gave a single decisive nod of her head and pursed her lips. As she glanced around the small room with its khaki-colored walls and narrow window and steel-and-vinyl furnishings, her expression turned to disdain. “What a place to spend the last moments of your life. It’s a travesty, I tell you, a crime against God and nature. And …” she sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose, “it smells like old people in here.”

  Megan laughed softly. “You’re a card, Gram. Why do I have the feeling you’re about to ask me to do something that will make your doctors very unhappy with me?”

  “Oh, who cares what they think? A person has got the right to die where she wants to. But I’m not ready to die yet, and I don’t need you to get me out of this jail cell. I can walk out on my own two good legs.”

  Her expression sobered somewhat and her eyes, a paler shade of her granddaughter’s denim blue, turned introspective, carefully thoughtful, as though puzzling out a question phrase by phrase, turn by turn. “Sweet girl,” she said, “I want you to help me find something.”

  “Okay, Gram. What did you lose?”

  She replied slowly, “I’m not sure. But I know where I lost it.”

  Megan squeezed her grandmother’s fingers in reassurance. “Okay. Where is it?”

  Annabelle returned her gaze to her granddaughter but it was vague for a moment, as though her thoughts, travelling from such a long distance, needed time to catch up. Then she smiled. “That,” she replied, “is what I want you to help me find.”

  She caught a corner of the sheet, tossed it aside, and swung her boney legs over the side of the bed. “Are you up for a road trip?”

  ~*~

  Of Vice and Men

  By Paul Slater

  After twenty-three brilliant, flashy, and often outrageous years with you, Gentle Reader, the time has come for me to say good-bye to In Style and all it entails. We’ve laughed together, we’ve cried together. We survived mom jeans, Cuban heels, and Kim Kardashian together. But now the voice of adventure calls me in a different direction, and I know your best wishes for a safe passage are with me as I sally forth to boldly go where no self-respecting style guru has gone before.

  The country.

  It’s been three months since I left the hustle and bustle of the big city for the bucolic pastimes of the Shenandoah Valley, and I’m often asked what I miss the most. The traffic jams on the Beltway? The gangland shootings that dominate the nightly news? The clever cocktail conversations of Washington’s finest, those silver-tongued devils to whom we are eternally grateful for putting the hustle into the term “hustle and bustle”? Or perhaps simply the vastly underestimated delights of really reliable Internet service?

  The answer, my friends, is none of the above.

  Here in the country we watch the sunsets instead of musical theater. The musical stylings of the chickadees have replaced concerts in the park and we attend county fairs instead of the opera. Fusion cuisine may be a bit hard to find, but farm fresh produce is on every corner. The Manolo Blahnicks have been traded for gardening clogs and Fashion Week for the Founder’s Day Parade, but life has never been richer.

  “I certainly hope you don’t expect to support us with that drivel,” commented Derrick, reading the computer screen over Paul’s shoulder. His arms were filled with folded towels—half aqua and half peach, six hundred thread count, finest quality Egyptian cotton—and his reading glasses had slipped down to the tip of his nose. He was, in fact, wearing gardening clogs.

  Paul scowled at him briefly. “I’m experimenting with a new style.”

  “So I see. If you don’t mind a suggestion …”

  “I do.”

  Derrick lifted an eyebrow and used his index finger to push his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. The tower of aqua and peach towels tilted precariously. Paul sprang up to help him. “Sorry,” he said, transferring half the stack into his own arms. “I don’t mean to be cranky.”

  “My suggestion was going to be,” replied Derrick archly, “that you turn your considerable talent for the written word into producing advertising copy for our brochures. We’re supposed to be running a business here, you know. By the way, the towels arrived. Gorgeous or not?”

  “Gorgeous,” agreed Paul, admiring them. “You didn’t forget the white ones for the ladies to remove makeup, did you?”

  “Shipping separately.” Derrick nodded toward the cursor still blinking on the screen. “Where’s the ‘vice’ part?”

  Paul sighed. “Still looking for it.”

  “Aren’t we all?” The muffled sound of a car door slamming reached them through the tall, wavy-paned window of the small office, and Derrick’s face brightened. “That must be the girls. Bridget is bringing three dozen eggs and Cici promised to look at the leaky faucet. I ordered two cakes for tomorrow’s brunch, too, and Lindsay is bringing another landscape. I’m going to try to get Bridget to help with the demi-glace for the pork loin while she’s here. Come give us a hand, will you?”

  Paul glanced thoughtfully back at the half-empty screen of the laptop. “Maybe I’ll start a blog,” he said.

  “Boys!” a voice called from the kitchen door. “Are you here?”

  “Be right there, sweeties!” Derrick paused at the doorway to glance back over his shoulder.

  “Right,” said Paul. “Coming.”

  But he lingered in the office as Derrick hurried away, gazing at the words on the screen. “What do I miss?” he muttered. “My life.”

  He used his elbow to close the laptop without bothering to save the document, then he went to put the towels away.

  ~*~

  The lodge had begun its life, as far as anyone could tell, as a one-room way station for travelers in the days of rutted wagon roads and horse-drawn carriages, serving cold ale and hot stew, along with a straw mattress on the floor if you didn’t mind sharing with six other men, for twenty-five cents. A bath was extra. Paul and Derrick had scoured the countryside antique shops for a tavern sign from the era, but the best they could do was a hand-painted wooden livery sign that harkened from a hundred years later, which they hung from the arch of the twig pergola that led to the herb garden.

  When the Dry Creek gold mine opened in the 1830s, the lodge added a second story and another wing to accommodate the miners who flooded into the county to try their luck. A full course meal was offered every Saturday and Sunday night at the wide-board table in the dining room, and it became so popular that extra tables had to be set up on the porch in the summertime to accommodate the townspeople who drove out for the meal. The mine played out, and the lodge descended into the ignominy of a private home for a decade or two. Then came the Shenandoah Valley Railroad and the rooms were once again filled with the bustle of travelers and the aromas of good sturdy food. Derrick had salvaged a wooden bench from an old railroad station in Pennsylvania to commemorate the era, and it now welcomed modern day guests in the entry hall of the lodge.

  The provenance of the lodge became muddled during the early part of the twentieth century, but there was a picture of it in the archives of the local paper when it opened its doors as the Blue View Motor Court in 1955 and again as the Heavenly Hash Diner in 1968. Paul had found a set of chrome stools with red vinyl seats from an old diner in Georgia, had had them beautifully restored by an acquaintance of his from Washington who just happened to own an auto-body repair shop, and had them bolted to the floor around the stainless steel island in the kitchen, almost as they might have been in the sixties.

  The building was occupied by a group of lawyers in the eighties, stood empty in the nineties, and fell into disrepair until a private party undertook the task of restoration at the turn of the twenty-first century with the idea of turning it into a bed and breakfast. The result was a long rambling structure embraced by a wrap
-around porch with peeled-log support posts, tall narrow windows, and a mixture of log and lap siding stained a nature-loving brown. There were seven airy guest suites, each with a door opening onto the shady porch, and each door was painted a different color—bright fuchsia, canary yellow, cobalt blue, emerald green, purple, tangerine, watermelon red. It sat in the midst of a tangle of wildflower gardens accented by twisted laurel arbors and colorful folk-art bird feeders, and was surrounded by the flowing vista of lavender blue mountains. It had functioned as the Mountain Laurel Bed and Breakfast for a mere six months before Paul and Derrick came to stay there with the idea of retiring in the Shenandoah Valley and building their dream house. They were immediately drawn in by the funky charm of the place, the quiet evenings, the lush gardens, the comic antics of the warrior hummingbirds, and grew enchanted with the life of ease and hospitality offered by life at the B&B. When the opportunity arose to purchase the property and become the permanent proprietors and gracious hosts of what was now known as The Hummingbird House, they did so without hesitation.

  They were only now beginning to realize they had not entirely thought this through.

  Of course there had been renovation and redecorating to do, and one could not accommodate paying guests while construction was going on. They had made a point of continuing to open for the Sunday brunch that had been popularized by the previous owner, and they always had a waiting list for reservations, but they both knew that was due mostly to the fact that their friend Bridget did the cooking. The art gallery that Derrick had established in the front of the house always saw a lot of traffic on Sundays, and their friend Lindsay, an amateur artist of considerable talent, helped keep the display interesting by rotating her own paintings through the collection each week in keeping with the current theme. The one thing they hadn’t really given much thought to when they purchased the place was that older homes, particularly ones that are open to the public and required to meet certain health and building codes, demand a good bit of maintenance, and the only thing either one of them knew about maintaining property was how to dial the handyman’s number. Fortunately, they now knew how to dial the number of their friend Cici, who had restored a hundred-year-old mansion practically single-handedly, and who knew more about nail guns and ratchets and pipe fittings than either of them was likely to learn in a lifetime.