The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ becoming, the home seemed to greet her like a bridegroom. Cheyenne seized a breath. Magnificent. Even the high heat couldn’t distract her from this architectural belle.

      The Department of Natural Resources had arranged for a local broker to show her the house that afternoon, and a middle-aged woman in a blue pencil skirt and white blouse with a Peter Pan collar was standing in the driveway. Light brown hair hung neatly to her shoulders from a center part. She wore silver earrings and sensible shoes. She leaned in the window of a parked black SUV and smiled flirtatiously at the driver, whose face was hidden from Cheyenne. Cheyenne willed the woman to speed it up. She was desperate to get a look inside. There was no chance the photos posted on the realtor’s website did this beauty justice.

      Cheyenne undid the silk scarf on her head, shaking loose her dark sheeting of hair. She retied the slip of fabric in a soft knot around her neck and shifted her weight and one hand to her hip. She stood at a polite distance, impatiently biding her time.

      “Of course, Mr. Allen,” Cheyenne overheard the woman say.

      She caught snatches of conversation interspersed with laughter.

      “Pro forma . . . required to show it to anyone who makes a request . . .

      “. . . can’t be serious . . .

      “. . . gorgeous property, good bones . . .

      “. . . want that river view you promised me . . .

      “You have a good holiday, now.”

      Cheyenne watched as the SUV’s window rolled up to seal out the sunlight and the woman straightened her back and cleared the playful look from her face.

      “Miss Cotterell?” The woman held out a hand as Cheyenne closed the distance between them. “I’m Lanie Brevard. We spoke on the telephone.”

      “Yes. Nice to meet you, Lanie. If I may, who was that just leaving?” Cheyenne’s voice landed on a nervous high note. Her lips puckered with concern. Someone had scheduled a viewing. Competition.

      “Oh, him.” Lanie Brevard’s tone was playful again, as if she were still speaking to the man himself. She cleared her throat. “That was Mr. Allen. Mason Allen. One of the pillars of our town.”

      Cheyenne frowned. “He’s interested in the Hold House?”

      “Everyone around here is interested in the Hold House, Miss Cotterell. Surely you’ve read about the controversy in the papers. The Hold estate has been an economic boon to this town for centuries. With any luck, we’ll see its fortunes rise again after the auction next week. Let me show you the house.”

      She escorted Cheyenne up the wide front steps, dangling a key labeled Hold like a forbidden delicacy. The metal parts of the lock released. The broker turned a knob on one of the twin oak doors that held a sign on a ribbon. Cheyenne stepped into the foyer after her. The house had a stale, closed-in smell despite the scent of cleaning products that betrayed a recent mopping. The air felt cool and still, like a root cellar. Cheyenne crossed her arms, stroking her bare skin in the sudden chill.

      The broker watched the motion of Cheyenne’s hands. “Handmade bond brick,” she said. “Keeps the house cooler than a cave. You’re from Atlanta? Did I remember that right?”

      “You did.”

      “Mr. Allen does business down in the city every once in a while, but most of us prefer to stay here in the mountains. Our town is just right for us, fits like a hammock. Have you been up this way before?”

      “Back in elementary school, we toured the Hold House. It was something like a fifth-grade pilgrimage. And I used to go to summer camp on Fort Mountain. Camp Idlewood?”

      “Yes,” the broker said. “I’ve heard of it. Idlewood was an African American camp that started as a school for former slaves, wasn’t it?”

      “It was a school for fifty years. The camp’s founders bought the lot in the 1920s and repurposed the old Freedmen’s Bureau buildings. African American families from all over the South, and a few from the North, paid a fortune to send their children there every summer.”

      “Hmm,” the broker said noncommittally. “I believe the buildings are used for crafts and whatnot now. The state purchased the land to expand Fort Mountain State Park—which, by the way, is just one of the gifts of the Allen family to our county.”

      Lanie Brevard broke off her homage to the Allens and turned to the drawing room. Cheyenne followed, pushing back worry as her Giambattista Valli skirt swirled around her knees. This was it. She was here. Inside the arms of the Hold House. She took in the elaborate carvings on the fireplace mantel, the plaster moldings that framed the walls and ceilings, and the hand-blown windows languidly filtering light.

      They exited the drawing room, entered the dining room. She scanned the nine-over-nine leaded-glass panes topped with gold-leaf fixtures in the form of phoenixes rising. Dried pine needles and okra pods rested on the window sills. An old-fashioned brick of tea sat on a saucer made of blue transferware china. The antique textiles and furnishings collected over the years remained in place in the house. Some of the pieces had belonged to the Hold family; others had been donated by wealthy patrons over the years. Cheyenne had read in Southern Living that the table settings in the Hold House were replicas of the fragmented dishware uncovered beneath the outdoor kitchen by a state archaeologist in the 1950s. The property would be auctioned with its contents intact, sold “as is.” Spacious by nineteenth-century standards, boasting three stories, eight rooms, broad hallways, back and front porches, and a cellar, the house brimmed with the contents of generations. And it could all be hers. It had to be.

      Lanie Brevard led Cheyenne through the first floor with chatty narration about the upstanding families who had lived in the home before the museum opened. Cheyenne tried to tune her out. She wanted to focus on the house.

      Back in the front hallway, where a half-opened cardboard box held forgotten copies of Chief Hold House brochures, Cheyenne turned with the broker toward the wooden staircase. They mounted the grand oak steps with carved balustrades, reached a large, superfluous landing crafted solely for show, and continued to the second story. At the front of the center hallway, a seating area flowed into a covered veranda that faced the road leading off the estate. Cheyenne turned on the crisp heels of her slender Bottega Veneta sling-backs to make her way to the master bedroom behind Lanie Brevard.

      It was divided from the rest of the home by a lateral bridge that echoed the structure and form of the staircase. The oddly placed bridge connected the front and rear of the second story. It rose in an arch from the center hallway and crossed the open space of the downstairs hall. Cheyenne had read that architectural historians debated the reason the bridge had been built. Some said it represented the split sides of James Vann Hold’s racial identity; others argued it was Hold’s calculated attempt to keep his private life separate from the scrutiny of United States Indian agents and white missionaries.

      Cheyenne crossed the elegant arch of the bridge, the sharp edges of her sling-backs digging into the floorboards. She faced the entry to a spacious bedroom and saw a closed doorway farther down the hall—leading up, she supposed, to an attic. She watched as Lanie Brevard unlatched the velvet rope that cordoned off the master bedroom, protecting its heirloom contents from long-gone tourists. Inside, Cheyenne’s gaze caught first on the full eastern view of the Blue Ridge, then on the hand-worked lace canopy atop the mahogany bedstead, and next on the folding antique game table splayed with period playing cards. The room had no proper master bath, but one could be added without even knocking down СКАЧАТЬ