The carriageway was still dimly defined by a woodland aisle through the tall trees. Burled oaks and hickories were interspersed with vine-shrouded magnolias and tupelos, rising through long shafts of morning light to fragments of blue sky. In the forest, the old road was innocent of wheel tracks, nicked only by neat heart prints of deer, the flutter marks of dusting quail, rat tail of possum and thin hand of coon, the wispy tracings of white-footed mice. Cardinal song, sweet plaint of titmice, the spring bell note of a jay in the fresh forest air.
In misty sunlight where the deepwood opened rose a white-columned facade with broad veranda, strangely out of scale with the frame house and the small kitchen wing stuck on behind. Its twin brick chimneys looked too thin, and an upstairs room under the eaves had a pinched small window. Chinked sheds and a dying barn sagged down amongst the live oaks; the worn pasture beyond had given way to ragged woodlots.
How odd that in this abandoned place, the ground-floor windows were unboarded and the grass all around the house appeared rough-mowed. No junked vehicle or rusted harrow, no litter of neglect, only the bareness of worn paint, only the silence. Everything looked tidied and in place as if the house awaited guests. Strangest of all, the kitchen door stood open. Had the inhabitants fled, hearing him coming?
He was startled by the shriek of a red-tailed hawk, poised for flight from its nest limb in an oak by the house corner. The nest’s location so close to the building was sign that the house was uninhabited and yet he felt a childish dread of arousing unknown denizens, quick or dead. Something-this heartbreaking spring wind-had swept the intervening years from the veranda where on such a morning Great-Aunt Tabitha Watson might have creaked in her high-backed rocker, gazing without forgiveness at the forest wall from which old friends from Carolina had never arrived for a long visit, hailing her gaily from among the trees.
After her death, the rich widower Sam Tolen had lived here all alone. In the years since, Kinard had said, others had come but quickly gone away again. All had shunned this high queer manse at the end of its dark path through the forest, this dwelling where the mold of dread could never be aired out.
Lucius stood still and simply listened. Though drawn toward the door ajar on the back steps, he hesitated to approach, but neither could he turn his back on it, lest the shade of Tolen loom into the opening, threatening to set his hounds on a damned Watson.
Returning down the shadow drive, he glanced back more than once at the lost house until finally it withdrew behind the trees. In the midmorning heat, birdsong had stilled. The crack of a dead limb, the rush and earth thump of its tearing fall. The doleful groan of cows from the feed barn on the far side of the county road came as relief.