chairs, two metal racks of clothing in garment bags, a treadle sewing machine, a dressmaker’s dummy, a silver tea service swathed in plastic wrap and row upon row of pictures in frames, standing on the floor, turned face-in. The shelves that lined the walls held boxes of various sizes, all clearly labelled.
“I saw one of those sewing machines in a museum once,” Norah remarked. “It’s cool how you don’t need electricity to run them. Just your own feet.”
“Yes, I suppose anything that old is a museum piece,” agreed Aunt Caroline, dryly.
Norah’s cheeks warmed. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“Why not? It’s very old. I haven’t used it myself in a very long time.” Aunt Caroline opened the flaps on one large cardboard box and set the pieces she had been ironing inside.
“So this is where you keep all your needlework,” Norah realized, peering into the box with her. “Did you finish that piece you were working on last night?” She picked up a square of needlepoint, filled with black-eyed Susans and brilliant butterflies. “It’s so colourful. Did you ever think about framing some of it, Aunt Caroline? You have enough here that you could decorate the whole house.” She met her aunt’s scowling gaze. “If you wanted to, I mean.”
“Which I don’t. As I told you last evening, I do it to keep my hands busy. Nothing more.”
Norah was standing next to the row of large, framed canvasses on the floor, and she turned the first one around to see the front. It was an oil painting of a vase filled with sunflowers—great, floppy circles of sunshine, dripping petals onto a blue tablecloth. “This is nice,” she said and reached to turn the next frame towards her.
“They are all oil paintings,” Aunt Caroline informed her. “Please just leave them!”
Norah pulled her hand back as if she had been burned.
“They hung in this house for many years,” her great-aunt explained. “But I have no use for such things now.”
“Why not?” Norah asked.
“I have my reasons,” replied Caroline Stoppard. From the stony look on her aunt’s face, Norah knew the subject was closed.
“I thought when you first came in here that you might be looking for your Christmas decorations,” Norah tried again. “I could help you find them and take them downstairs.”
“Christmas isn’t until the twenty-fifth,” Caroline Stoppard retorted. “Or it was the last time I looked.”
“I know. But that’s just five days from now. If you told me which box they’re in, maybe I could do the decorating for you. I’m really pretty good at it. Do you get a real tree?”
“You won’t find any of that stuff up here, so there’s no sense poking about. I haven’t bothered celebrating anything in years,” the woman declared.
It suddenly occurred to Norah that her father’s aunt might recognize another holiday this time of year. “My friend Ashley celebrates Hanukkah,” she began. “And in school we learned about . . .”
“If I bothered with any of it, it would be Christmas,” Aunt Caroline snapped, cutting her short. “Come along now. I keep the door to this room shut to conserve heat.”
For the rest of the morning Norah lay on her bed, wrapped in the scratchy blanket and nursing hurt feelings. No matter how often she tried to make friends with Caroline Stoppard, her great-aunt did not hide the fact that she resented Norah being there.
Her mind kept returning to the paintings in the spare room. If her aunt owned such beautiful things, why wouldn’t she hang them on the walls, instead of storing them away where they couldn’t be seen? What possible reason could she have for taking them down? So many things puzzled her about the woman.
And then there was the boy in the yard. Who was he, and why was he watching the house?
Knowing she would get no answers from Caroline Stoppard, Norah finally picked up one of her books and read it straight through to the end. Her mother would arrive tomorrow. Maybe Ginny would be able to thaw Aunt Caroline’s icy exterior.
Six
Unless he came up with a better plan to find out who she was and why she was here, Jody intended to catch the girl when she was alone sometime and ask her.
He remembered from when he had been here before (not the first time, when he had come as a companion to Joseph, but later when Joseph had gone back to university) that Caroline Stoppard used to go out to work every day. But now she seemed never to leave the property. How was he going to meet the girl if the woman was always around?
He wondered if something had happened to Caroline Stoppard’s beautiful car, if that was the reason she stayed home all the time. He would have to check the garage on his next visit to the house.
In the years after Joseph had left, Jody used to watch Caroline Stoppard back the vehicle out of the garage every morning. She would secure the wooden doors, slide in again under the steering wheel and drive slowly down the lane, sunlight glinting on polished metal, the colour of midnight.
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