He must have memorized the map because he never asked me to look at one for directions. Eventually, we pulled off the major highway and went down a progression of roads that kept growing more narrow with every corner we turned. As the houses grew farther apart, they went from brick with fancy beveled-gla.s.s doors and porches too small to use, to the traditional North Carolina wood frame with porches big enough to live on during the summer.

The beautiful green hills and valleys were salted with barns and houses falling down so picturesquely that my right index finger ached to push a shutter release b.u.t.ton.

"What's that look?" Newcombe asked, glancing at me.

"This is beautiful," I said, "and I'd like to take pictures of-" I waved my hand to indicate that I wanted to photograph all of it.

"Is that big black bag full of camera equipment?"

"Yes," I answered, but he didn't ask any more questions. Too bad. I would have loved to talk about my photography. After a while, I had one of those dej vu feelings. "Are we getting close, because I think I remember having seen some of this area before. There!" I said. "That bridge. I think I remember that." It was an old steel thing with a wooden bottom that had big holes in it.

"Right," he said. "Just a few more miles and we'll be in Cole Creek."

"You're good at remembering directions," I said tentatively.

He gave a little smile at the compliment and said, "Yeah, Pat said-" He stopped and clamped his mouth shut.

He didn't have to tell me who Pat was. Anyone who'd read his books had read the long, gushy thanks he'd written to her in each one. Her death had been national news, and I remembered seeing a photo of him taken at her funeral. He'd looked like a man who didn't want to go on living.

"Left," I said suddenly. "Turn left right here."

"This isn't-" he started to say, but he turned sharply and we took the curve on two wheels.

It made me feel good that he listened to me instead of relying on his memorized map. The road we were on followed a creek and was so narrow he drove down the middle to keep the overhanging trees from scratching the paint on his car. Maybe I should have been worried about oncoming traffic, but I wasn't.

On the banks above our heads we saw houses that didn't look as though they'd been remodeled since they were built in the early 1900s or so. It wasn't unusual to see a patch of land not far from the house filled with rusting cars, old refrigerators, and washing machines. Porches held an incongruous a.s.sortment of galvanized washtubs and kids' big plastic cars in gaudy colors that clashed with the weathered wood and lush green forest.

Abruptly, the trees ended and before us was a town that looked like something out of a book of photographs ent.i.tled Our Forgotten Heritage. If this was Cole Creek, and I was sure it was, then there was nothing modern in it. The few buildings on each side of the street were old and decaying rapidly. In the few store windows were items that would make a movie set dresser's heart leap in delight.

In the middle of the town was a pretty little square of land with a big white bandstand. The park was perfect for a Sat.u.r.day afternoon of strolling and listening to the local barbershop quartet. I could almost see women in long skirts, wide belts, and high-necked, long-sleeved blouses with pintucking down the front.

"Wow," I whispered. "Wow."

Newcombe seemed to be equally awestruck. Slowing the car down to a crawl, he was looking at the old buildings as hard as I was. "Think that's the courthouse?"

Across from the perfect little park was a big brick building with huge, two story columns up the front of it.

" 'Cole Creek Courthouse,' " I read on the perfect little bra.s.s plate beside the door. "'1866.' Right after the war." I p.r.o.nounced it "wahr" as was proper.

Newcombe slowed the car to a roll. He was looking on both sides of the street by the courthouse. To the left was an alley and next to it was a cute little Victorian house with a curved porch. Was this the house he'd bought?

On the right, across the street from the courthouse, was an impenetrable ma.s.s of tall trees which I a.s.sumed covered a vacant lot. Further left was another Victorian by the first one. It wasn't in such good shape, but it had an adorable little balcony upstairs.

"There," Newcombe said as he stopped the car.

Yippee! I wanted to say and already I was scheming to get the bedroom upstairs, the one with that balcony. I opened my mouth to start my campaign, but I saw that Newcombe wasn't looking at the little Victorian.

He'd driven ahead far enough that we could see into what I'd a.s.sumed was a vacant lot on the other side of the street.

I followed his gaze.

Closely planted trees surrounded about two acres of land, enclosing the s.p.a.ce so it was private and secluded. In the center was a majestic, n.o.ble-looking Queen Anne house that was a wedding cake of balconies and porches and turrets. On the first floor was a porch wrapping around three sides that had-someone catch me, I may faint-big bentwood frames, like parentheses, that ran from the rail to the roof. The second floor had a turret with a porch and curved bal.u.s.ters under a pointed hat of a roof, with a cute little weather vane on the top.

There were windows that had stained gla.s.s and some with beveled.

There were at least four little pitched roofs that held up tiny porches with big French doors leading out to them.

The whole house had once been painted bright colors, but had faded to pale gray and lavender-blue, with dusty peach brackets here and there.

It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful house I'd ever seen in my whole, entire life.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Ford

It was the most hideous house I'd ever seen in my life. It looked like a giant wooden wedding cake made of balconies, porches, and turrets. Everywhere you looked was another little roof and another tiny, useless porch. Skinny, carved posts ran across every edge and surrounded every window.

Windows seemed to have the sole purpose of adding more ornamentation to the whole ghastly edifice. The late afternoon sunlight glinted off the edges of beveled gla.s.s, highlighting stained-gla.s.s windows which depicted various animals and birds.

Even in good repair, the house would have been a monstrosity, but this one was falling apart. Three gutters hung by pieces of twisted wire. A couple of panes of gla.s.s were covered by Masonite. I saw cracked bal.u.s.trades, broken window frames, and porch floorboards that were split and probably rotten.

Then there was the paint-or the lack of it. Whatever color the house was originally had been lost to a hundred-plus years of sun and rain. Everything had faded to dull gray-blue, and the paint was peeling everywhere.

I turned the car into the weed-infested driveway and stared in disbelief.

The lawns around the house had been cut, but the old flower beds were knee-high in weeds. There was a broken birdbath and an old arbor that had vines growing through the paved floor. Back against the trees I could see two benches that sat at angles because half their legs were missing.

I really don't care about any story enough to stay in this house, I thought.

I turned to Jackie to offer an apology and tell her we'd find a hotel somewhere, but she was already getting out of the car, an unreadable expression on her face. Probably shock, I thought. Or horror. I knew how she felt. One look at this place and I wanted to run away, too.

But Jackie wasn't running away. Instead, she was already up the porch stairs and at the front door. I practically leaped out of the car to run after her.

I had to warn her that the place didn't look safe.

She was standing on the porch and looking around, her eyes wide. There had to be fifty pieces of old furniture on that porch. There were beat-up wicker chairs with dirty, faded cushions, and half a dozen d.i.n.ky little wire tables that weren't big enough to hold more than a teacup-or a gla.s.s of sarsaparilla, I thought.

Jackie seemed to be as speechless as I was. She put her hand on top of an old oak cabinet. "It's an icebox," she said and the odd tone of her voice made me look at her more closely.

"What do you think of this place?" I asked.

"It's the most beautiful house I've ever seen," she said softly, and there was so much raw pa.s.sion in her voice that I groaned.

I'd had some experience with women and houses and knew that a woman could love a house the way a man loved a car. Personally, I couldn't see it. Houses took too much work.

I followed Jackie inside. I'd asked the realtor how I could get the key to my "new" house and she'd just laughed. Now I saw why. No respectable burglar was going to waste his time on this place.

When Jackie opened the unlocked front door, I saw that it was even worse inside. The door opened to a large hallway, with a winding staircase directly in front of us. The staircase might have been impressive if both sides of each step weren't covered with foot-high stacks of old magazines.

The trail up the stairs was no more than eighteen inches wide.

In the entrance hall was an oak hall tree: big, ugly, with six moth-eaten hats hanging from hooks. On both sides of the hall were three-foot-tall stacks of yellowing and brittle newspapers. On the floor was a rug so threadbare there was no pile left.

"There's an Oriental rug under that, and it's made out of tile," Jackie said as she disappeared between double doors of a room on the left.

Kneeling, I lifted up the corner of the dusty rug and saw that beneath it was, indeed, an Oriental "rug" made of mosaic tiles. It was the work of a master craftsman and if it weren't so dirty, it would have been beautiful.

I followed Jackie into the next room. "How did you know about..." I began, but couldn't finish the sentence. She was standing in the middle of the parlor, better known as the living room. I'd been told that the house had been continuously occupied for over a hundred years, and when I looked about that room, I was willing to bet that every occupant had bought at least six pieces of furniture-and each one was still there. To walk between the furniture, even skinny Jackie had to turn sideways. In a far corner were three frighteningly ugly walnut-trimmed Victorian chairs covered in worn-out red velvet. Next to them was a 1960s fluorescent green sofa that had pillows on it printed with big lips. In the opposite corner was a square couch that looked Art Deco. Along the walls were old oak bookcases, new white bookcases, and a cheap pine cabinet with doors hanging by one hinge.

Every souvenir anyone had bought over the course of a hundred years was in that room. Above the bookcases were framed prints, dirty oil paintings, and what looked to be a hundred or more old photographs in frames of varying degrees of dilapidation.

"They've moved all the furniture into here. Wonder why?" Jackie said as she left the parlor and went into the room across the hall.

I started to follow her but I tripped over a stuffed duck. Not like a kid's stuffed toy duck, but a real bird, something that had once flown through the air and was now sitting on my living room floor, feathers and all.

As I untangled myself from the duck, three more fell off a shelf and pelted me. It was a mother duck and her ducklings, preserved forever in lifelessness. After I'd conquered my urge to scream, I ran out the door and into the room across the hall.

Jackie was standing in what I a.s.sumed was the library. Three walls were covered with grand old bookcases and the ceiling was magnificently coffered. The bookcases were filled with old leather-bound volumes that made me itch with wanting to look at them. But it would take a forklift to make a path to those books because in front of them were cardboard shelves -the kind with wood-grained wallpaper on them (as though that would fool anyone)-filled with thirty years of bestsellers. Everything Harold Robbins and Louis L'Amour had written was in those shelves.

"It's the same," Jackie said, her eyes still glazed over, as though she were in a trance.

As she turned to leave the room, I made a lunge to grab her arm, but I missed because my foot caught on an old coal bucket that was filled with paperbacks. Four copies of Frank Yerby fell on my foot. I stepped out of the books and started forward, but when I saw a copy of f.a.n.n.y Hill, I picked it up, put it in my back pocket, and went after Jackie.

I found her in the room behind the library, the dining room. Tall windows ate up one wall and would have let in light if two-thirds of them hadn't been swathed in dark purple velvet draperies. I started to speak but was distracted by what I was sure was a bird's nest at the top of the curtains.

"It's fake," Jackie said, seeing where I was looking. "It has tiny porcelain eggs in it." With that she left the room.

I started to run after her but three of the eighteen or so mismatched chairs in the room stuck out their legs and tried to trip me.

It was too much! I knocked the chairs over-after all, they were mine now -and ran into the hallway. No Jackie. I stood there for a moment, then I let out a bellow that sounded as though it were coming from the moose head I'd seen somewhere.

Jackie appeared instantly. "What in the world is wrong with you?" she asked.

Where do I begin? I wondered, then got hold of myself. "How do you know so much about this place?"

"I don't know," she answered. "My father said we lived in Cole Creek for only a few months when I was very young, but for all I know we lived in this house. Maybe my parents were housekeeper and handyman, that sort of thing."

"If you remember so much, you must have been older than 'very young.'

"I think you may be right," she said as she entered the big room across from the dining room. I followed her, but stopped short. It was a smaller room than the others and it was clean and neat. Even the windows had been washed. The ceiling was exquisitely painted with vines and flowers, and the floor was blond oak inlaid with a border of walnut. What was really good was that there wasn't one piece of furniture in the room.

Jackie stood in the doorway looking around, but I walked in to sit down on a cushionless window seat.

"I think Mr. Belcher moved everything out of here and into the other rooms," she said as she walked to a corner of the room and picked up a small brown prescription bottle. "I think this was his sick room, and he probably lived in here."

"Hey!" I said. "Is that an outlet for cable TV?"

Looking at me, she shook her head in disgust. "You're not much of an intellectual, are you?" she said over her shoulder as she left the room.

The thing I liked most about Jackie Maxwell was that she treated me as a man, not a best-seller, but a man. The thing I liked least about Jackie Maxwell was that she treated me like an ordinary human being and not with the deference that my success deserved.

I found her in the kitchen. It was a big room with white metal cabinets over worn and dented stainless steel countertops. The height of 1930s elegance. Truthfully, I was surprised to see that the house had been touched since it had been built in 1896. In the middle of the room was an oak table that had thousands upon thousands of knife cuts in it.

Jackie looked inside the cabinets while I opened the doors to the left. First was a big walk-in pantry, every inch of shelf s.p.a.ce crammed full of boxes and cans of food. Reaching to the back of the highest shelf, I pulled down a box of cereal with a photo of a man in a football uniform from about 1915. I was tempted to look inside the box, but thought better of it and put it back.

Two other doors revealed a powder room with a pull chain toilet and a maid's room with a narrow, hard-looking bra.s.s bed.

When I walked back into the kitchen I was. .h.i.t by a smell so awful I put my hand over my nose. Jackie had opened the round-cornered refrigerator.

She sneezed a couple of times and I coughed. "I got the contents of the 'frig in the deal?" I asked.

"Seems so. You ready to go look at the upstairs?"

"Only if I have to," I muttered as I followed her out of the kitchen back to the front staircase. I'd been looking at the endless spiral of old magazines and hadn't noticed the little bra.s.s dragon on the top of the newel post.

"Wonder if it still works?" Jackie said under her breath, then gave a sharp twist to the pointed tip of the dragon's tail.

I jumped back as a four-inch-long blue flame shot out of the dragon's mouth.

She twisted the tail tip again and the flame stopped.

"Cool," I said. It was the first thing I'd seen in the house that I really liked.

Jackie ran up the stairs, having no trouble stepping between the piles, while I stayed downstairs to investigate the dragon. It was amazing that the thing was still hooked up to a gas line after all these years, and even more amazing that it still worked. The tail tip could use a little oil, I thought as I turned it again.

"Can I have the mistress's bedroom?" Jackie called from above.

I was looking down the dragon's mouth, trying to see the gas pipe inside.

"Yeah," I said, "but who gets the wife's bedroom?"

"Very funny," she said. "Could you stop playing with that and look up at where I am?"

She was at the very top of the stair spiral, third floor. A huge, round, stained-gla.s.s window was in the ceiling above her head.