The Rememberers, a novel by Martin Edic

Chapter 8

A dining room with a big old table covered in sheets. Chairs lined up against a wall. A butler’s pantry with a lavatory off to the side. Walk through into a kitchen, last remodeled perhaps in the sixties, with incongruous burnt orange counters and an electric range. Very dusty but not dirty, any of it.

There was a round table with two old chairs in the kitchen. I sat at it and looked out the window into the back. This house was a mirror of Maria’s and I might have been sitting at her table peering at a blank book.

A door in the stair hall opened into a passage that took me into the warehouse. There was a small office walled off in the far corner, otherwise it was open space punctuated by large wooden columns that held up great wooden beams perhaps 14 or 15 feet above the concrete floor. The construction told me it was turn of the century or older. The room was entirely empty as I walked across to the office. It had a dutch door and a window looking out into the warehouse space. The door was unlocked and I went in. If it weren’t for the dust and the overgrown windows that might once have looked out on the river, I’d have thought the occupant had just walked out for lunch. If this was the case it was a long lunch. A desk was strewn with yellowed papers and an old typewriter stood on a table of its own in the corner. Two large file cabinets and a sink and toilet in an alcove. I tried the water but nothing came out.

Curious, I sat on the old oak office chair and surveyed the desk. The first drawer I opened contained an old pack of cigarettes, Luckies, one of those ashtrays set in a beanbag and a bottle of bourbon, half empty. The papers were bills of lading, invoices and other business documents with the RF Freezy Co. label on them. Nothing much to look at but they might reveal what business the Freezy Co. conducted. But I had no interest in getting into that right now. I felt a sudden urge to get back to the house and back to my world. It was getting hotter and I felt drowsy and in need of some fresh air. I had a sudden irrational thought that I should not drowse off in here, that I might awake in another time and light a cigarette as I woke up, though I have never smoked. I got up and left the office and walked quickly back to the house. The door in the hallway locked from the inside and I made sure it was secure. Carrying my bowl and the abstract, I locked the house and walked up the hill, leaving an extremely odd morning behind me.

“Are you the one that bought the Freezy place?”

The voice, hacksaw raw and cigarette tinged, came from the porch of the third house up the hill, one that had escaped being boarded up. I looked over to see an ancient black woman in an old lawn chair with a thin cigar in her mouth. During our conversation the cigar never left her mouth. It was fascinating to see how she spoke without losing it. 

“Not exactly.”, I answered, conscious of the sheaf of papers in one hand and the copper bowl in the other. “More like the person who apparently owns the place. I didn’t buy it.”

“Did Randall give it to you? That old bird...”

She seemed to contemplate this for a minute.

“You’re a mover, aren’t you.” She looked hard at me and exhaled an enormous amount of smoke. For a moment it hovered around her head and then disappeared with a puff of air.

Before I could answer she said, “Of course you are. That’s why he did it. Baited the trap with the only thing he had left I guess.”

“I found the deed and title in the mailslot with my name on it. And someone sent me a key in the mail with no explanation. And then I was given an address...” She interrupted me.

“Given by whom. Who gave you the address?”

“Miriam at the coffee shop up the street.”

She contemplated this.