This house was the embodiment of the life she wanted for her and Cody. A simple, old-fashioned life. With one notable exception. There would be no father in this traditional American family. Jane was mom and dad and everything in between. Everyone said she couldn’t do it all, that she was pushing herself too hard. But she could. And she’d do it without her family’s money. She wanted no part of the family business or the wealth that went with it. It was a rat race, everyone fighting to hold on to their share of the pie and always worrying about someone trying to take it from them. No. That wasn’t anything she wanted to be involved with.
This, though—this would be perfect.
“I never thought my modern-minded grandmother had a clue what to make of me,” she whispered as she moved through the modest entry hall and into the Gothic living room, with its high ceilings and intricate, darkly stained woodwork. “But Grandma Kate knew me better than I ever imagined. She must have, to have left me this place.” All around them, furniture stood draped in white sheets, like an army of ghosts.
“And that guest house out front will be perfect for my antique shop.” She couldn’t stop smiling. The place was her dream come true.
“The house isn’t the half of it, ma’am,” Sheriff O’Donnell offered. “It’s the history that goes along with it that makes it so special.” He’d carried in two of their suitcases, and he set them on the hardwood floor. “You’ve heard of quinaria fever, of course?”
“Heard of it?” Jane glanced behind her, but Cody was already off exploring nooks and crannies, flashing his ever-present penlight into closets and cupboards. Her heart twisted a little in her chest at the mere mention of the disease. “I nearly lost my son from it,” she said quietly. “He was exposed as a baby. Thankfully, we caught it in time.”
Frowning, the sheriff tilted his head. “Well, now, if that don’t beat all…” Then he shrugged. “Hell of a coincidence, ma’am, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Why’s that, Sheriff?”
“Well, Zachariah Bolton was the man responsible for finding the cure. Tryptonine, you know. Same drug we use today, with a few modifications, of course. If it hadn’t been for him— Ah, now here’s the dining room. Floor-to-ceiling hardwood cupboards on two walls. See there? Same as in the kitchen. And the ones here on the wall in between…” He opened a cupboard door, left it wide, then meandered into the kitchen. Opening the cupboard from that side, he peered through at her. “See that? Accessible from either side.”
“That’s very nice.” But she was more interested in the tale he’d been telling before.
Cody joined them then, having heard the tail end of the sheriff’s comments. “You’re dead wrong about tryptonine, Sheriff,” he said, then grinned innocently at his mom and added, “if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“Cody!”
“Come on, Mom. Everyone learns this stuff in fourth grade. The quinaria virus was cured by Bausch and Waterson in 1898.”
Jane scrunched her eyebrows and shook her head. “Are you a walking encyclopedia, or what?”
He shrugged and looked past her to Sheriff O’Donnell.
“Well, now, that’s a bright young fellow you have there, Ms. Fortune. Cody, is it? Well, Cody, m’boy, you have part of it right. But you don’t know the whole tale. Did you know, for instance, that Wilhelm Bausch and Eli Waterson spent most of their time competing against one another? Great researchers, sure enough. But more focused on getting the jump on each other than on the importance of their work. Blinded by ambition, you might say.”
Jane saw Cody’s eyes narrow suspiciously. But he listened.
“It was their friend Zachariah Bolton who finally brought them together. And only by working together were they able to find the cure.” He waved a hand to indicate that they should follow him and turned back toward the living room, then headed up the stairs. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
Jane knew she was grinning like a loon, but she couldn’t help herself. “Isn’t this great, Codester? A house complete with a ghost and a historical past?”
“Mom, you’re too into history. Get with the nineties, willya?”
“Yeah, yeah. Hurry up, I want to hear the rest of this.” She followed her son, noticing the way he paused just outside the door of the room at the top of the stairs. He stood still for a moment, staring at that door. Then shivered and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.
“You okay, pal?”
“Yeah. Sure, fine. C’mon.”
Sheriff O’Donnell headed into a bedroom farther down the hall, snapped on a light and waved his arm with a flourish when they entered.
Jane caught her breath. “My God,” she whispered, blinking at the portrait on the far wall. “It looks like a Rockwell!” She moved closer, ran her fingertips lovingly over the ornate frame, then touched the work itself. “But it can’t be. This has to be at least a hundred years old.”
“You have a fine eye, Jane.”
“I know antiques,” she said with a shrug. “It’s my business. This is unsigned. Do you know who did it?”
“Ayuh, unsigned, and no, I don’t know who the artist was,” O’Donnell said. “But it’s yours, along with everything else in the house. Including the old safe in the attic, still locked up. Might even be some of Zachariah Bolton’s old notes and such tucked away in there. Yours to do with as you please, just as your grandmother’s will specified.”
Jane couldn’t take her eyes from the portrait on the wall. A very Rockwellian painting of a dark-haired man, eyes passionate and intense, hair rumpled, white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. In one hand he held a small contraption with springs and wires sprouting in all directions, and in the other a tiny screwdriver. Gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, and those piercing, deep brown eyes stared through them at his work. And beside him, right beside him, dressed in identical clothes—though in a much smaller size—sat a little boy who couldn’t be more than five or six. He had carrot-colored curls and bright green eyes, and he was tinkering with a tiny screwdriver of his own. The two sat so close they had to be touching. And the connection between them was so strong it was palpable, though they weren’t even looking at one another. At the bottom of the painting was a single word: Inventor.
“That there is Zachariah Bolton, ma’am,” Sheriff O’Donnell told her. “And the boy is his son, Benjamin.”
“Benjamin,” she whispered. “That was my grandfather’s name and this child looks enough like Cody to be his…” Jane’s voice trailed off.
“Little brother,” Cody finished, stepping farther into the room.
“Bolton was a friend and colleague to Wilhelm Bausch and Eli Waterson. In fact, they both said publicly that they considered him one of the greatest scientific minds of their time. One of the few things they agreed on, it was. Well, sir, when little Benjamin died of quinaria fever—”
Jane gasped, her eyes snapping back to the mischievous green ones in the painting. “Oh, no. That sweet little boy?”
“Yes, ma’am. And the day the boy passed, Zachariah Bolton went plumb out of his mind. The grief was too much for him, they say. Locked himself in the boy’s bedroom and refused to let anyone in. When they finally forced the door, he was long gone. And he’d taken the poor little fellow’s body right along with him. Bolton was never heard from again. Now, Bausch and Waterson were distraught enough over it