Songbird Cottage Read online

  But up here was like a different world from that lush farmland and the wide sea it bordered. She turned around and looked back at Songbird Cottage.

  The field was covered in arid grassland. The ground under it was pockmarked with gopher holes and little dry gullies where water had run during rainy seasons. What had once been a manicured field not unlike the farm below had long ago turned into a wild place of twittering birds, scurrying field mice, and honeybees feeding on the wildflowers.

  Her mind wandered as she pictured the way she would fix up the property. She realized as she stood listening to the birds chirping in the dry brush, and watching monarch butterflies and fat bumblebees flittering across the fluffy pink milkweed, that she didn't want to make this place too groomed, too manicured. Here was one time her perfectionism would ruin something better left raw and unpolished.

  So she would pull out the worst of the thistles to make walking paths, and would sow more flowers to encourage the wildlife to flourish. And then she would allow nature to do its thing out here, as it had for so many years.

  She leaned back against the old apple tree and gazed up through its branches, breathing in the distinctive scents of ripe apples and dusty brush and the sea air all around her.

  And then froze. She'd been here before. Looking up, just like this, through the spreading branches.

  This was the apple tree with yellow apples from the picture she'd drawn as a little girl.

  "Come on, Robin. Let's look at the big water," her mother's voice came to her out of the past, and she shivered as the chill washed over her.

  Her mother had stood right here, holding her hand, and pointing out at the great expanse of blue reaching to the horizon. "See how pretty the big water is, my little bird?" her mother had said, and in some way her child's mind had realized her mother was trying to be cheerful for her, was trying to wipe away whatever sorrow had overcome her inside the cottage earlier.

  Then her mother picked her up and hugged her tight. "Nothing matters more than family," she whispered into Robin's tiny ear. "Never forget that."

  Robin shook her head and the memory faded back into the past. How could she have forgotten the words? The scents, the sights, the air out here all brought it back to her like it was yesterday. This was her home. It was meant to be hers. And she would make it so. Somehow.

  She left the apple tree and its memories, and headed off through the field toward the little cottage that had belonged to her family, and would now be hers, no matter what it took.

  Robin stopped in her tracks when she heard something in the brush near her, a rustling.

  It was probably just a mouse. But what if it was a snake or something? Ugh. She cocked her head and listened.

  The birds twittered away, oblivious.

  There it was again. A very small rustling. But this time accompanied by a plaintive little cry that sounded more pitiful than scary.

  She made her way over to the spot where a dead branch had fallen from the old apple tree, and now lay crumbling to dust in the weeds.

  The crying grew louder, and when she realized what it was she forgot all about the thought of some reptile rearing up out of the weeds at her.

  "A kitten!" she said in surprise. "Where are you?"

  The cries continued, and she followed the sound. She soon found herself on her hands and knees in the dirt, peering under the log.

  A pair of frightened eyes glistened in the dark at her. The tiny meowing echoed under the log.

  "Who are you?" she asked, though she figured she knew. It was one of the feral cat's tiny kittens Ava said had been missing for the last couple of days.

  "Did you lose your mama?" she asked softly. "Join the club, kid." She reached in and pulled it out, hoping it wouldn't bite.

  It blinked when she brought it out into the bright sunlight, and cried frantically in terror at the monster who had grabbed it out of the dark.

  "There, there," Robin soothed, holding it against her silk blouse. It was just skin and bones, dirt covering its gray fur and dusting its little white belly and socks with brown smudges.

  It kept meowing, but cuddled against the warm softness of her shirt.

  "You poor little thing!" she said softly. "Come on."

  She would take the kitten back to Ava after she looked around inside. She pulled out her phone and glanced at it. Still no signal, not surprising out here, but it did give her the time: nearly one. She had to get back to her office—and clear the road so Ava could get past—so she'd just take a quick look around the cottage, and then get going.

  "And we'll get you home, pipsqueak," she said to the kitten.

  She held the kitten in one hand while she pulled the leaning plywood away from the cottage's front door.

  The door wasn't locked, so she just pulled at the latch.

  When it came open with a rusty creak, the kitten clung harder to her. "Ouch!" she cried out. "Let's find you some place to sit down before you tear me to ribbons."

  She left the door open and it gave her enough light to see her way. There was no good place to set the kitten down, so she took it with her when she headed to the stairs.

  It was the attic bedroom she wanted to see first. There had been books and other junk up there, and she might find more clues to her grandmother's life.

  The crack in the window covering gave her enough light to see in the dusty little attic room. She soon found an empty wooden crate, and took the feather boa she'd seen before and made a little soft nest out of it.

  The kitten had no intention of letting go of her at first, but she finally managed to pry its claws loose from her shirt and nestle it gently into the box. It started crying again at being abandoned, but soon realized how soft the boa was, and settled down.

  That finally gave Robin a chance to do a bit of exploring. She checked her phone again. She'd have to hurry.

  She looked through the junk quickly. All the boxes were labeled in fine handwriting, a kind of script that one now saw only in computer fonts. But these labels had been hand-written.

  She went from box to box, reading each label, savoring the writing that was at least something personal from the woman in the photograph.

  Sweaters. Poly Fabric. Christmas Ornaments. LP Records. Pots And Pans. All the mundane things that made up a life had been abandoned up here for fifty years, because there was no one who knew, or no one who cared enough to sort them out and do something with them.

  She paused at the little wooden crib. It was small, more of a bassinet really, and now that she knew the story she realized her own mother would have slept there, had Birdie lived. Instead, her mother had slept in some cold institutional place for orphans.

  She shook her head. If she thought about that too much she'd get depressed. She went over to the desk and looked over the contents.

  If she could find more family photographs, that would be a treasure beyond price.

  She sighed. Somehow she still felt unsettled, even after confirming that this house had been her grandmother's and that her own early memories of her mother had been true.

  Thoughts of her mother had always been clouded in sadness and she now realized that the sorrow came from more than just the thought that her mother died soon after they had come here. It was the memory itself that was clouded with sadness: the tears of her mother, the grief that seemed to hang over the visit to the little abandoned cottage.

  Now she knew the reasons for the grief. Her own mother had a past that echoed her own: placed into foster care after her parents died, denied the legacy of her family name and heritage, struggling to make her own way and carve out a life for herself.

  But her mother had been so much braver than she felt. Robin knew she had been given every luxury, every privilege, every advantage that came from being adopted by a wealthy businesswoman who made sure she had everything from the finest schools to the best grief counseling.

  She felt guilty, even ashamed that others had much worse luck than she had, yet she couldn't seem
to get over it and move on. She was sure her hangup about buying her own house was part of that, as if she had been waiting for this house, this home, this legacy from her own family to come along.

  And now that it had, some faceless corporation was trying to outbid her. She'd been in the real estate business long enough to know that those anonymous LLCs used for buying property were usually a cover for rich people with multiple investments, or property flippers whose business was buying and selling houses for profit. In either case, it wasn't likely to be someone who cared about this cottage the way she did.

  She knew she was being petty to hate the other bidder, but she couldn't help it. They could buy something else. This one was hers. She was going to make sure of it.

  She would keep upping her bid until she won the bidding war. She was going to get through to those thick-headed Thackery attorneys and make them see the light if it was the last thing she did.

  She heard a thump, and ran to the stairs. She peered down the stairs into the darkness. There was nothing down there. So she went back to the attic room. The kitten was sound asleep in its nest, and she only had a couple more minutes before she needed to leave.

  She hadn't finished checking all the desk drawers. So she did that. And found nothing. Some lint, a few buttons, two pencils, and a tarnished penny.

  The sewing machine stood in its spot on the desktop. She noticed there was a bit of paper sticking out from underneath it.

  She tried to shift it over a foot, and realized it must weigh twenty pounds or more. She had never thought of seamstress work as heavy labor, but if Birdie had lifted that old machine around, she would never have needed to join a gym.

  Robin touched the gold pattern on the machine with a finger. The sphinx on the machine stared endlessly off to the side, looking elegant and remote like the Egyptian god it portrayed.

  She pulled out the picture of Birdie from her purse. She also seemed elegant and remote, an Egyptian goddess in wild 1960s fashion, a woman with Robin's face, but a mystery just the same.

  Had she been funny? Or wise? Talented for sure, but kind? Robin would never know her thoughts. Never make that connection that still seemed just beyond her reach. This old photograph was tantalizing but vague, like the cold words of the obituaries she carried in her purse.

  She grabbed the sewing machine and tipped it to its side, so the paper underneath could be slid out from under. Then she set the machine back down and it made a big thump on the desktop.

  "That's gonna leave a mark," she said aloud.

  The paper she pulled out turned out to be just the instructions for how to use the sewing machine. Well-worn paper, often thumbed-through, but nothing special.

  It was just a user's manual, but it was heavier than she'd expected, and felt slippery on the back.

  She turned it over and saw there was a thin notebook stuck to the manual. It had a slick vinyl cover, and it was bright orange. Like the rest of the cottage, it felt like something from another time. She pulled the manual and notebook apart, and the paper manual came unstuck with a ripping sound like opening velcro. It left a mark on the vinyl cover of the notebook, but she could still read the word imprinted there: DIARY.

  A diary!

  She took it over to the window so she could see it better. It was a cheap dime store diary, with a tiny lock holding the cover flap closed.

  She pulled at the flap, but the lock wouldn't give. She could pull it apart slightly at the top, just enough to see the handwriting on the pages matched that on the box labels.

  It must be Birdie's. She tried pulling it farther open.

  The grief I still feel every day is difficult to bear—

  She felt it begin to rip and stopped.

  That was all she could read. Birdie must have just lost her husband when she wrote this. Robin might be able to learn enough about Lewis Smith to track down his family—her family. She was so excited she wanted to tear it open, but stopped herself.

  She pulled at the lock again, wanting to see more, but the little lock held. She would rip it to shreds if she had to. But maybe there was a key somewhere and she could avoid destroying the precious thing.

  She set it down on the window ledge and went back to the desk.

  No luck. She went through the drawers again, but nothing came to light.

  She crouched down to feel around under the desk, hoping the little key had just fallen down somewhere.

  Nothing. She would have to take the diary with her and maybe she could get it open with a screwdriver without totally destroying the old thing.

  She stood up and found herself coughing. The dust was a bit much.

  She laughed when the kitten echoed her cough with a tiny one of its own. Then another little cough. And another.

  Robin stopped laughing. That wasn't dust she and the kitten were breathing. It was smoke.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Someone had a fireplace going in the neighborhood, she thought.

  What neighborhood? She was in the middle of a bone-dry grass field—and fire season wouldn't be over until the first winter storms came.

  She ran to the top of the stairs and saw a haze of smoke in the darkness. It was thicker down there.

  She ran back to the attic and grabbed the kitten unceremoniously from its nest, wrapping it in the feather boa to keep it from scratching her. "We gotta go, baby."

  She ran downstairs and to the front door. But when she put her hand on the iron door handle to push it open, she quickly pulled back.

  It felt warm. Not boiling hot, but uncomfortably warm. Way hotter than it should feel.

  She put her hand on it again, and gently pushed the door open.

  Flames met her, and she quickly slammed the door shut again. The grass outside was on fire! She had to go out a different way.

  But as she ran from room to room in the cottage, she quickly realized it wasn't going to be that easy. All the windows were boarded up with thick plywood on the outside.

  She set the kitten down and tried to open a window on the side of the living room farthest from the front door. But the casement windows swung outward, and were blocked by the thick wood. Even if she could get the window open, how was she going to break through the heavy plywood?

  First she had to find something to break the windows with, and then she needed to kick out or pry open the plywood covering.

  She remembered the tools in the attic, so swooped up the mewling kitten who was still trapped in its feather boa and ran up the stairs.

  In the attic she got one of the big trowels and started to head down, but the smoke looked like low fog covering the brick floor. When she started down the stairs, she was seized with a fit of coughing that drove her back up.

  She went back into the attic bedroom and shut the door. She stood there for a minute, wondering what to do, then noticed the feather boa's vibrant orange color flickering in the moving light from the window.

  The plywood on the attic window was cracked!

  She set the kitten down in the crate again, where it mewed pitifully. "I'm going as fast as I can," she told it.

  She took the trowel over to the gorgeous round window with its blue dot in the center. The framework around the window was open, and she could see the back of the redwood exterior siding under the lath work for the unfinished plaster.

  She pounded at that for a bit, but it was ineffective, and she found herself cursing at Stockdale's craftsmanship. She could break through the lath on the inside, but not the two-inch thick boards outside.

  She looked down in the gap between exterior and interior walls, and saw a dark labyrinth of framework and wiring and pipes. The whole building was so solidly built there was really only one way out. Inwardly lamenting the damage to the antique glass window , she slammed the handle of the trowel into the blue dot and the glass shattered.

  She ran over and tore open the crate labeled Poly Fabric. She grabbed several yards of material in a weird yellow and brown paisley pattern that just screamed 1
960s. She wrapped it all around her hands and arms and worked to get the shards of glass out of the window frame.

  She kept stopping to cough, and she found herself muttering, "hurry, hurry!" as she worked to clear the dangerous fragments out of the way.

  Finally she had a clear circular opening. But there was still the plywood covering. She tried to fit the trowel into the opening, but it was too thick.

  She bent down and pulled off one of her Gucci boots. Balancing on the other foot, careful not to set her stockinged foot down in the broken glass, she inserted the heel of her Gucci into the crack in the plywood and pried at it.

  It was a close call which would give out first, the heel or the plywood, but the old wood gave up the ghost, and with a satisfying cracking noise, the wood panel broke open.

  She put her boot back on. That would show Dylan. "And you thought my shoes weren't practical," she said.

  She put the trowel to work again, banging at the plywood pieces that still hung from the window until they both tumbled to the ground—a disturbingly long way down.

  She looked at the "bird perch" beam sticking out of the outside wall just below the now-open window. It was purely a decorative folly, a bit of silliness in the Stockdale style. Surely he had never imagined it would need to bear anyone's weight.

  She ran over and grabbed the mewling kitten, orange feather boa and all, and her purse, which she'd left on the desk and totally forgotten about.

  Then she went to the window opening, grabbed the final item, the diary she'd set on the unfinished sill, and, piling up the paisley fabric to cushion her from any remaining shards of glass, hauled herself up onto the edge of the round window frame and began to ease herself out onto the beam.

  When her head was outside she breathed the cool, fresh air with relief. She could see smoke rising from the other side of the building as the grass burned. The house itself didn't seem to be on fire yet, but the dry wood would eventually catch aflame.

  She couldn't wait any longer.

  She began to ease herself out onto the wooden beam, which looked much narrower and less sturdy close up.