The Dregs of Murder

"Ten, plus mine, so eleven total." He turned into a room. "This okay?" he asked as he placed my suitcase on the bed.

The room was lit by another of the oil lamps I'd seen so many of already. The room wasn't large, or luxurious, but there was plenty of space, the bed looked comfortable, and there was an old-looking wardrobe standing in the corner. It looked exactly like the room Aunt Vicki was staying in.

"This is fine."

"Great," he said with a smile. "I'll see you at breakfast." He paused, looking at Vicki.

"I'll be there in a moment," she said, taking the lamp from me and handing it to Jim. He smiled and nodded before he left. Vicki nodded at the lamp on the table. "Take the lamp. Let me show you the nearest bathroom."

Holding the lamp, I followed her down the hall before she turned into a room. The room was larger than most modern bathrooms, with a large, deep, claw footed tub dominating the room. Sharing the corner with the tub was a sink with an old-fashioned pump handle, and most odd of all, a modern looking toilet beside the sink with the lid off the tank. I sat the lamp on the three-drawer table beside the door that seemed like was placed there just for the purpose.

Vicki pointed at the stand. "In the drawers are towels and washcloths. Once you pick yours out, you keep it with you until wash day." She moved to the sink and began pumping the handle. After a couple of strokes, water began to flow. "Water," she said as she ceased pumping, causing the flow to quickly dwindle and stop. "To use the toilet, you..." she began as she picked up what looked like a piece of guttering and placed it under the pump spout with the other end hanging over the opened tank. The use was obvious as she pumped the handle, the water running down the pipe and into the toilet tank. When the tank was full, she stopped pumping and flushed the toilet.

"Easy enough," I said. It might not be as convenient as a modern toilet, but it beat going to an outhouse by a large margin.

"To fill the tub, you," she said as she reversed the guttering, showing how it rested on the tub's edge to fill it.

"Cold baths, huh?" I said, my lack of enthusiasm clear in my tone.

Vicki smiled. "Most of us heat a couple of buckets of water on the stove to warm the water a little when we take a bath."

"Ugh..." I grunted.

"Sponge baths, Kiddo. They're great." Her smile spread. "I don't know why you're complaining. It's summer now. You should try it in the winter."

"Great," I said, drawing the word out, "That's just great."

She snickered. "It's really not too bad. Ten gallons of boiling water will warm enough water for a bath. If you want a soak, that takes a little more. By the end of a week, you won't even blink at taking a cool bath. After a hard day's work, it actually feels pretty good."

"If you say so. Why can't you heat water like the house?"

"You want to shovel the coal to heat it and then manually pump it into a tank? After all that, you'd want a cool bath. Easier to warm a couple of buckets and carry them to the tub."

"If you say so."

"Trust me. Think of it as an adventure."

"I guess."

"Anything else you want to know before bed? I'll give you the full tour tomorrow."

"No, I don't guess."

She nodded. "Breakfast is at sunup tomorrow. We're cooking." I sighed. "Don't be like that. This isn't a hotel, and everyone has to pitch in and help. Would you rather tote the coal and stoke the stove?"

"No."

She smiled. "There you go." She pulled me into a hug. "Get a good night's sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a busy day."

"Sounds like it," I murmured as I held her. She released me and I picked up the lamp before following her down the hall. "Do you need this?" I asked as I paused at my door.

"That's your lamp. Each room has one. Besides, I've been here for so long, I can walk all around the place in the dark."

"Okay. See you in the morning."

"Love you, Kiddo."

I smiled. "Love you too."

I entered my room and shut the door. I decided I was too tired to unpack tonight, so I placed my lamp on the table where I'd found it, dragged my bag close, and rummaged until I found my elephant pajamas. I quickly changed, placed my bag on the floor, and turned the wick down in the lamp until it went out. I stood, already disoriented by the darkness. Feeling low, so I wouldn't knock the lamp over, I found the table, then carefully felt along it, waving my hands as I inched in the direction of the bed until I found that. Sighing with relief, I followed the mattress until I located the corner, and then along the long edge to the pillows. Note to self... turn down the bed before turning off the lamp. By the time I was crawling into the bed, I realized I could see the outline of the window, a slightly less dark rectangle against the overwhelming darkness of the room.

I was tired, but I had trouble falling asleep, my mind scamping hither and dither as I worried about tomorrow. The moon was starting to rise as I finally began my slide into sleep. At the edge of my awareness, I heard the house groan and creak as if it were being battered by a strong wind. Moments later, only audible because of the profound silence, I heard a woman cry out softly as a man uttered a harsh bark.

I smiled sleepily as I sighed heavily. I was glad for Aunt Vicki... but it made me miss Hunter all the more.

I had no alarm clock, but being that I was used to waking early to open Coffee w/ Cream, my eyes popped open as the faint ruddy glow of early morning colored the sky. I groaned and stretched as I struggled to throw off the blanket of sleep. With a heavy sigh, after a moment I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I sat there a moment as my mind struggled to start working. My morning routine was messed up and I was having a hard time adjusting. Normally I got up, had a shower to wake up, brewed a single cup of coffee to kickstart my morning, and then I was off to work. Sniffing, I staggered to my feet and began to dress. I couldn't face a cold bath this early... though sitting in a tub of cold water would probably snap me fully awake.

After brushing my teeth, I felt almost human as I made my way to the kitchen, the rising sun giving me enough light that I didn't need my lamp. Aunt Vicki's bedroom door was open and I peeked into the room. Her bag was no longer on the bed, but it didn't appear her bed had been slept in. Not that I was surprised.

I returned to the kitchen. I seemed to be the only one up, and I paused to examine the stove. My trailer had an electric stove, so I had no clue what to do with this ancient pile of iron. I began opening doors.

"Good morning," Aunt Vicki said behind me, causing me to jump.

"You startled me," I said as I turned to face her.

"Sleep okay?"

"Well enough." I smiled. "You?" I asked, lilting my voice up.

She flushed. "Like the dead."

I started to say something about hearing her and Jim doing the wild thing last night but changed my mind. I was glad Vicki had someone. This morning she'd tied her hair back into a short ponytail, a style I'd never seen her wear before. She was dressed in jeans, an untucked work shirt opened two buttons down to show a hint of cleavage, and low boots. My aunts, even when dressing down, were always neatly put together and stylish... but this country girl look certainly worked for her.

"I was going to start breakfast... but..." I said as I gestured to the stove.

She grinned. "Here... let me help you." She opened the door on the side of the ancient device. "Oh... good. It's still burning." I watched as she moved a large steel bucket and scoop closer to the stove and proceeded shovel the coal into the opening. "Six or seven scoops is enough to keep the stove burning all day on low fire," she said as she worked. "Just don't dump it all in at once. Add a little at a time," she continued as she adjusted dampers and shuffled out the ashes.

Soon I could feel the slightly chilly room beginning to warm. As I placed the ash pan outside, Vicki began putting cast iron pans on the stove. Soon the smell of cooking eggs and bacon filled the room as she slid the pans around on the stove if she needed more or less heat.

About halfway through meal preparation, I had enough of an idea of what she was doing to start the coffee perking in the large metal percolator that shared stove space with the pans. While cooking on the stove wasn't as convenient as a modern stove, it wasn't as onerous as I thought it would be. What I did learn very quickly though was everything on the stove and pans become hot, and to always use a mitt to save the flesh on my fingers and hands.

As we were finishing, Jim and Landon entered the room. Jim was smiling and had a slight sheen of sweat about him, and Landon looked at the floor. I smiled to myself as Jim swooped Aunt Vicki into a quick kiss, causing her to scold him playfully, though she didn't seem the least upset to me.

Vicki and I scraped the eggs into a large, elaborately decorated bowl that appeared to be older than anyone in the room, and added the crisply fried bacon to a matching platter. I didn't know if the eggs and bacon were particularly good because they were cooked in a cast-iron skillet, on a coal fired stove, or for some other reason, but they were especially delicious.

Jim, Vicki, and I talked, while trying to draw Landon into the conversation, but he answered with only a few words and then fell silent again. I remember Jim telling me last night that no one knew Landon's gift, so I decided to go straight to the heart. I was the new kid, after all, and could probably get away with a lot.

"What's your gift, Landon?" I asked. "I just found out I'm gifted, and this is all so new to me."

"Nothing important," he murmured as he looked at his plate.

"Yeah, I know how you feel. I can't do a thing with my gift either. It's why I'm here. Somebody, two somebodies I guess, are supposed to teach me how to control it." Landon nodded but said nothing, and I considered what to say next. I nodded to Vicki sitting beside me. "When I first found out I was gifted, she made a picture fly across the room. I nearly peed myself I was so surprised." He nodded again. "How long have you known you were gifted?"

"A long time."

"Since you were a kid?" He nodded. He clearly doesn't want to talk about it, but then why is he here? I pressed on. "So you've been trained?"

"No," he muttered.

"Really? Why don't you come to class with me? We can learn together."

"Don't need to," he said softly.

"So you learned to use your gift on your own?" He nodded. "That's great! Maybe you can give me some pointers. I can't do anything with mine. It does its thing, when it wants to, and not any other time."

He finally looked up at me. "What's your gift?"

I presented my best smile. "I don't know for sure. Seeing the past? The future? Maybe both? I don't know. I can tell you, though, when it first started showing up, it made me as sick as a dog."

I said nothing else, willing him to ask me a question. "It doesn't now?" he finally asked.

"Don't know for sure. I haven't had an episode in weeks, but the last few didn't seem as bad."

"That's good," Landon finally murmured.

I decided to not press him anymore because I didn't want to come off as overbearing. "Think about joining me for class. It'll be nice to have someone else to work with." I grinned. "You know, to distract the teacher when I mess up."

He smiled wanly. "Maybe."

"Great!"

We finished eating and Vicki showed me how to properly care for the skillets before we quickly washed the china and utensils. I first worried about washing the plates in cold water, and by hand, but then I reasoned that people had done the same thing for hundreds of years before dish washers, and the human race had managed to survive.

"Think you can drive a boat?" Vicki asked as I put away the last of the china.

"I don't know. Maybe. Why?"

"It will be easier to take a boat across for Keller and Lena if you can. I suppose I could tow it across if you're not comfortable doing it."

"I think I can manage it," I said. "It didn't look that hard last night."

"It's not. Just remember... no brakes."

I suddenly wasn't so sure of myself. "Okay," I said softly.

She smiled. "When you get close to shore, just go slow and throw me the line. I'll pull you into the dock."

"Okay. I think I can manage that."

"Want the tour first?"

"I'd love one!"

The house was large and simple, with the two large rooms in the front forming the family room, complete with a huge fireplace, and the kitchen and dining room. That took up about a third of the structure, with the large, heavily insulated ice room, kept cool by giant blocks of ice cut from the lake in the winter, occupying a large section in the center of the house. The rest of the house was devoted to bedrooms and bathrooms. There were four large bathrooms, two on each side in the center of the house surrounding the ice room, with a large closet in between two of them holding linens, and the entrance into the ice room, where they loaded the ice, taking the place of the closet on the other side.

The bedrooms were arrayed around the exterior walls of the house beyond the kitchen, three on the two shorter sides, and five on the longer side, each with its own small coal fired stove for heat in the winter. Aunt Vicki said all the rooms were the same, except for Jim's, which was larger, had its own private bath and exit to the outside. It was square in the middle of the back of the house, with two guest rooms on either side. The house was simple, yet oddly charming, and clearly had been lovingly maintained.

"Who pays for all this?" I asked as we completed the tour of the house.

"The gifted."

"You've said that, but is it like a timeshare, where everyone pitches in a little money, or what?"

"Nothing like that. Most of us leave something after we stay, like a donation, but the land, the house, all of it, is fully paid for, and the maintenance is provided for by the Glenridge Foundation."

"What's that?" I asked as Vicki led me around the exterior of the house to a large wooden building set well away from the home. The building was about six feet off the ground, and I noticed the trolly tracks switched off to go to the building, while the other branch continued to the house.

"That's the coal bunker," she said as we approached. "This is where we store the coal until we need it."

There was a large wheel to one side that was clearly designed for a horse, that turned a shaft, that connected to a series of small hoppers that went up the side of the building. The use was obvious. A horse would turn the wheel, which would lift the coal in the hoppers to dump into the building. I suspected the hoppers would hold about one bag of coal.

She stopped in front of a chute that angled from the lowest point of the sloping bottom to stop on the ground. The part on the ground was wide and flat, with low sides, while the rest of the chute was covered. "This is where we get the coal out." She pointed to a wheel attached to a chain wrapped gear. The chain attached to another gear where the chute joined the bunker. "You turn that wheel, which opens the chute door. It fills the chute, you close the door, and then you shovel the coal out into buckets. Easy."

"If you say so. Why don't you use gas? You could buy those propane bottles and--"

"Because this is already here, and it works. This was part of the original building."

"From the Glenridge Foundation?"

"Yes. Matthias--I think that was his name--Glenridge bought the island back in the early eighteen hundreds. He made his money in coal. Anyway, his family was gifted, and when he died, he bequeathed all of this, along with a couple million dollars, so the gifted would always have somewhere they could go. There's a law firm in Burlington that manages it for us. We get a couple hundred thousand a year from the endowment, and we use it to maintain the place."

"Pretty good deal."

She nodded as we approached what was obviously a barn. The trolly tracks that went past the coal bunker ended there. The barn was nothing special. It had a hay loft above that made me wish Hunter was here so we could try it out. Landon was inside one of the stalls, using a shovel to clean the floor as both horses were outside pulling some type of mower, with Jim riding on the machine to control it and the team pulling it.

Leaving Landon to his work, the barn tour took less than a minute. As we stepped back outside, I nodded at the working horses. "Why don't you let the grass grow for the horses to eat?"

"That's for winter. Besides, the horses can't eat all of that, and it'd become overgrown in no time."

"Ah," I grunted.

She looked up at the sky. "Ready to take the boat across?"

I couldn't stop my smile. For all I knew, she was telling the time from the position of the sun. My aunts were not the women I thought they were. "I suppose. Just don't go too fast, okay?"

She grinned. "You'll do fine. Just do what I do."

She stuck her two little fingers in her mouth and cut loose with the loudest, shrillest, whistle I'd ever heard. It was effective, though it made me wince, because Jim stopped the horses and turned in our direction, even though he was a long way away. Vicki pointed in the direction of the boat, and Grand Island, and Jim raised his hand in acknowledgement.

"Can you teach me to whistle like that?" I asked, almost begging.

She snickered. "Sure."

After Vicki gave me a two-minute crash course on how to operate the boat, she untied my boat, Bewitched III, and shoved me away from the dock before I followed her across the lake. Driving the boat was fun and easy, and I was disappointed the trip was so short.

I hung well off the dock as she parked, docked, whatever, the boat. After she tied it off, and returned with the mail, I crept in, the big outboard never above idle as I engaged and disengaged the propeller so the boat wouldn't go too fast. When I thought I was as close as I could get without crashing into something, I threw her the rope. She pulled the boat next to the dock, hopped aboard, and then quickly backed us away. I was envious of her skill controlling the boat, and as soon as she taught me to whistle, I was going to have her teach me to handle the boat. At least she let me drive it back across the lake before taking over to dock it.

Once we arrived back, Vicki quickly shuffled through the mail she'd picked up at the dock office. Most of it appeared to be junk mail, but she opened one of the letters. She read a moment and then smile.

"We're going to have some company in a few days." She glanced at me, her smile widening. "Everyone probably wants to meet you."

"Why?"

"Because you're newly gifted and because you have such a rare gift."

"I'm not sure how I feel about that."

"What?"

"Being under a microscope."

"It won't be like that. Think of it like you're meeting Anne Hathaway."

I snorted. "I'm hardly Anne Hathaway."

"To us you are."

I pottered around the house until lunch. I brought in coal to replenish the bucket beside the stove, and helped Vicki clean the bathrooms and tidy the house. Jim and Landon came in for lunch, both slightly sweaty looking, Jim from mowing and Landon from picking up and dragging away limbs that had fallen from the many trees that dotted the island.

As we cleaned up from lunch, the men left to return to their tasks. "Now what?" I asked as I put away the last of the dishes I'd been drying.

"Now... we have the afternoon off," Vicki said with a sigh. "I think I'd like a bath... how about you?"

I smiled. "Sounds wonderful."