Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera) (5 page)

Taryn
spent the afternoon driving around town, checking out Vidalia’s center and some of the local historical sites. There weren’t many, but the town tried. They seemed to be particularly proud of their railroad and their depot was restored, offering visitors a small museum with relics from the Great Depression and mid-century that were especially interesting. Unfortunately, like many small towns in the south, urban sprawl paved the way for strip malls and big shoebox stores and Main Street was dead or on its way out. There had once been some charm to the town with its turn-of-the-century courthouse and wide, tree-lined streets but much of that was lost when pitted against the heavy traffic flow, the vacant storefronts, and the flashing neon billboards.

She
drove up on a ridge that overlooked the valley and was startled to see several housing developments full of identical structures, all with the same roofs and fences. They looked like dominoes from where she sat in her car. She’d heard from construction friends of hers that the new houses weren’t built nearly as strong as the old ones, so she wouldn’t be surprised if a strong push really would topple them over one by one.

Parking her car in the middle of the driveway, she hopped out and grabbed her canvas bag filled with her sketchpad and charcoals and started toward the middle of the
wide, flat yard. The curtains fluttering in the breeze on the second floor caught her attention. Because she was looking up at the movement, she didn’t notice the stone jutting out of the ground, and suddenly found herself on her face.

“Shit!” she screamed
. Her ankle twisted painfully under her as her bag landed a few feet away. Turning over, she looked back at the culprit. A large creek stone was stuck in the ground behind her at an incredibly awkward angle, its sharp edge pointing up into the sky. “Good thing I didn’t fall on it,” she muttered to herself, imagining blood squirting from her head and not being discovered for days as she slowly bled to death from a head wound (she was nothing if not dramatic).

Crawling over to
the rock, she inspected it more closely. There were several others around it, making a complete circle. On closer inspection it appeared to encircle a hole that had been filled in. She hoped whoever had done it had filled in well and with more than just loose dirt. She wasn’t keen on the idea of falling into a century old abyss and left alone for several days…if she was ever discovered at all. She didn’t do well with dark, hollow places.

“
Hope it’s not a sinkhole,” she sighed. It wasn’t unusual for her to talk to herself. She always worked alone and sometimes she got tired of the quietness. Recently, she actually tried working with an assistant once or twice and it made her nervous. Sometimes, though, she missed having noise. Talking inside her head made her feel crazy, but talking aloud made her feel eccentric in a nice kind of way.

Within a few minutes
, she was able to quickly make a few sketches of the front of the house, including the maple and oak trees that filled the front yard and the winding driveway that wound its way back to the barns. She paid careful attention to the quivering curtains and boarded up door and windows and after finishing with the charcoal put her sketchpad away and pulled out her Nikon. “Okay, Miss Dixie. It’s your turn. Do your thing.”

The light
was almost faded by then but she still had more than enough time to walk around the perimeter and do some sunset shots before getting back in the car and grabbing some dinner before going back to the hotel for the night. She would focus on one area of the house at a time as she painted but when she photographed, she liked to catch as many angles as possible.

It really
was
a beautiful area. Although she preferred the mountains to the east and even the flat, sultry thick deltas of the south, these manicured green valleys had their own gentle beauty that was hard to deny. She began to imagine what they must have looked like even half a century ago when the fields were full of tobacco and corn and the air was still and quiet.

She’d once been commissioned to paint an isolated cabin in West Virginia
. It was located nearly twenty-five miles off the interstate. It was located so far off the main road that she’d ended up camping out up there the entire two weeks it took to get the job done. Amazed at how quiet the air had been without the sound of airplanes and cars around her, the stillness was both soothing and unsettling. She’d needed that at the time, even if she hadn’t known it at the time. She didn’t have cell phone service, television, or internet service the whole time she’d been up there, so she’d relied on her battery-powered CD player and the stack of CDs she’d brought with her. It was a bit like going through detox. By the time she was finished, she’d lost all track of what was going on in the rest of the world and she’d emerged as though she’d been living in a cocoon.

The “magic hour” wasn’t so much an hour as it was a fleeting few minutes and she used every
second to her advantage, snapping pictures left and right as she bent, stretched, and stooped, straining to get every angle of the house and property that was humanly possible (and then a few more). Her phone beeped furiously, a reminder she had missed her pre-planned phone call from Matt, but she ignored it. She couldn’t call him back now. He would understand.

So used to framing the images she wanted, she barely took the time to even glance in the viewfinder before she moved on to the next image that caught her eye.
She never checked her LCD screen while she was taking shots. She considered it bad luck. She and Miss Dixie shared a special rhythm and understood one another.

Taryn took the images that called to her. Every house and property spoke to her in a different way. Sometimes it was
the yard. Sometimes it was a house’s view. Sometimes it was a house’s porch and the way it framed the world in front of it. There was no doubt about it, though. For Windwood Farm, it was the windows to the house that contained its soul. Even the ones that were boarded up and should have been emotionless called to her in ways that were inescapable. Without realizing it, she had soon taken hundreds of shots and nearly used up her memory card as the last rays of sunlight fell into the darkening sky.

Gathering up the remainder of her equipment, she tossed
her canvas bag back into her car and turned around in the driveway. Again, she felt the unnerving feel of eyes on the back of her head as she deliberately drove down the gravel toward the gate. Her cell phone gave off its steady beat, the pale light flashing a radiant green into the car’s dark interior. The faint smell of death clung to her clothes, prickling at her skin.

“
O
h, honey, we’re just so glad you made it there okay!”

The woman on the other end of the
line possessed the rough, whiskey-voiced sound older women tend to get after years of smoking. At first, Taryn thought she was talking to a man but then when the voice went into a coughing fit and Taryn heard the rattling sound in the back of her throat, she put it together.

“I made it here without any problems,” Taryn agreed. “Found it just fine.”

“Well, listen, I’m Priscilla and I’m the secretary for the Stokes County Historical Society. We’ve talked through email of course, but I thought you deserved a call now that you’re here. I’m so sorry we weren’t there to meet you but one of our members is in the hospital with pneumonia and we’ve all just been beside ourselves checking on her and taking care of her house. We’ve been running around like chickens with our heads cut off!” With that, the woman went into another coughing fit that concerned Taryn a great deal. She waited until she was finished before she spoke.

“That’s okay. I’m fine. I went out there today and got started. It’s a beautiful place,” she added. Taryn was a little forlorn that her baked potato and soup were getting cold while she was having this conversation but she really couldn’t put it off. The woman had already called her three times that day
. She’d ignored those calls because she was busy. (Once she was driving, once she’d been in the bathtub, and the third time she’d been having a self-imposed time-out.)

“Oh yes, I knew you’d like it. It’s a wonderful farm. Such a shame what’s going to happen to it, isn’t it? Of course, none of us remember what it used to look like
, but you should have seen the farm on the other side of it, too. Now that was something to see! The house was one of the grandest in Kentucky. It was torn down years ago, though,” Priscilla said sadly.

“Oh, what happened?”
Taryn asked, both out of politeness and interest.

“A tornado took most of it and then it became dangerous. The family had the rest demolished and then they put in one of those subdivisions. It was a real southern beauty, though. The family, the
Fitzgeralds, they owned most of the county at the time,” Priscilla added.

“Wish I could have seen it,” Taryn said sincerely.

“Well, listen, I’ll let you get back to your dinner. I just wanted to let you know that we’re grateful you’re here and that we will see you soon!” As Priscilla hung up the phone, Taryn could hear her coughing again.

The coffee shop soup and baked potato were mostly warm by the time she got to them and the sweet tea felt nice after a long day out in the sun. She’d bought herself a pitcher and some packets at the store and was planning on making her own and taking it out to the farm with her
while she worked. Her New Year’s resolution included cutting down on caffeine. Normally, she tried not to unleash a decaffeinated version of herself on humanity, but she was really trying to get healthier these days.

“
I
wasn’t even thinking when I called you earlier. It was just about dusk, wasn’t it?” Matt apologized.

Taryn could hear him clanging on metal in the background. He was
either cooking or thinking about cooking when she talked to him. They almost always put one another on speakerphone when they talked to each other. She wasn’t offended. Neither one of them were capable of sitting still for long periods of time. They had to be doing something. She was currently in a partial stage of undressing herself and had her shirt over her head while she attempted to give him a muffled reply. “Hmuuhyphh…”

“Did you get anything accomplished today?”

Having tugged on her nightgown, she plugged in her flash drive and sat down in front of her computer in the middle of her hotel bed and began uploading her pictures. It was an old laptop and she wasn’t optimistic that it was going to be a quick process. It never was. In the meantime, she fell back on the pillow and began flipping through the limited television channels.

“I think so. It’s an interesting one. Lots of stone. Bad feelings, you know?”

“Already? That’s fast. Hold on just a minute. I’m boiling over…”

Matt
loved to cook more than he loved to do just about anything. As a physicist, cooking was his stress reliever, and it was a sad irony he didn’t have anyone special in his life to share any of the grand meals he concocted. More often than not, he ended up tossing out all of the gourmet recipes he created night after night. She did appreciate hearing about them, though. “So what are we having tonight?”

“Nothing special. Just some gumbo. I was feeling New Orleans. It’s been stewing all day though. It smells so good. I also made some rosemary
ciabatta to go with it. The whole house smells nice and toasty.”

“Nice! I had Taco Bell
for lunch. And to make it a little classier, I also stopped at Panera Bread and finished it off with a chocolate chip bagel.”

Matt
sighed. “You’re going to die of food poisoning.”

“Probably.”
She didn’t tell him what she really had because she was afraid it would ruin her reputation.

A glance at the computer screen showed her the images were loading unreasonably slow this evening, although a few had
already popped up. Oh well. There wasn’t anything she could do to hurry them along.

“Do you want to hear about the house?” she asked. She knew he wouldn’t ask on his own accord.
Matt wouldn’t think to. He was a little cerebral. Always trapped in his own head.

“Okay.
But first, the bad feelings? Are they about the house or are they because…”

“
I think it’s the house, Matt. I don’t think it’s me this time,” she answered shortly, a little annoyed.

“Are you sure?” he asked gently. “Because sometimes you can get the two confused. It’s not easy working alone when you’re in a place like that.”

Trying to remember he was just being helpful, she closed her eyes and thought of all the times he had been supportive of her. “I know that sometimes I fall apart a little bit, but it’s not like that. This is different. It’s the house. Do you want to hear about it or not?”

“I do
, I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

“Okay…
I can see why the Stokes County Historical Society is interested, even without the Governor part. The stonework is beautiful. The property is beautiful. I think the owner is doing a big disservice to someone. Instead of putting in a subdivision, if he doesn’t want to renovate, then he could at least just build another house there and take advantage of that nice yard and those views. You’re not going to get that with all those houses crammed in there.”