“Father left you a property. You’re not getting nothing.”
“Your father left me a mystery,” Peggy said. “A house I’ve never seen in a town I’ve never heard of. You and your siblings got millions of dollars and this mansion and the satisfaction of knowing your father valued you as his legacy. I got a rusty key and 30 days to disappear from the only home I’ve known for four decades. So no, Steven, I don’t think you have any concept of what this has been like.”
She got in her car before he could respond, before she could say anything else, before the numbness that had been protecting her could crack entirely. The brown envelope sat on the passenger seat next to her purse. Her GPS showed the address she’d entered: 47 Oakwood Lane, Milbrook, MA. Two hours and 14 minutes to a completely unknown future. She started the car and drove away from Brookline, from the mansion, from the life she’d thought she was living. And as she drove west through Massachusetts toward Milbrook, and whatever waited for her there, Peggy Anne Morrison made herself a promise.
Whatever she found at 47 Oakwood Lane, whether it was shelter or complete ruin, value or utter worthlessness, she would find a way to survive it. She was 68 years old with nothing left to lose except her dignity. And she’d be damned if she’d lose that, too. Because sometimes, she was beginning to understand, having absolutely nothing left to lose becomes its own peculiar kind of freedom.
Milbrook, Massachusetts, turned out to be exactly as small and rural as Catherine had implied, though perhaps not quite as forgotten. The main street consisted of maybe 15 buildings clustered around a small town square. A general store with a faded awning. A diner with checkered curtains. A tiny post office. A gas station with two pumps. A white church with a modest steeple.
A library that looked like it had been built in the 1800s. And a handful of other shops that appeared to have been there since Peggy was a child. As she drove slowly down Main Street following her GPS directions, Peggy noticed something odd. People stopped what they were doing to watch her car pass, not with hostility or suspicion, but with something else entirely. Recognition, almost as if they’d been expecting her.
An elderly man sweeping the sidewalk in front of the general store paused mid-sweep and lifted his hand in a small wave. A woman arranging flowers outside the diner turned to watch, nodding slightly as if confirming something to herself. A group of teenagers outside the library looked up from their phones with genuine curiosity rather than the usual teenage indifference.
Her GPS directed her to turn off Main Street onto Oakwood Lane, which started as regular pavement for about 200 yards before becoming a dirt road that led into increasingly dense forest. Ancient oak trees, massive trunks that had to be hundreds of years old, lined both sides of the road, their spreading branches creating a tunnel of green shade that filtered the afternoon sunlight into patterns that danced across the windshield.
The road was rough, rutted with old tire tracks, and Peggy had to drive slowly to avoid bottoming out her low-clearance sedan. After what felt like forever, but was probably only about a mile, her GPS announced in its cheerful mechanical voice,
“You have arrived at your destination.”
Peggy stopped the car and sat for a long moment, almost afraid to look up, afraid of what she might see, or more accurately, afraid of what she might not see, afraid that Catherine had been right and she’d find nothing but a collapsing ruin. Then she took a deep breath, lifted her eyes, and stared at what lay before her.
The property wasn’t what Catherine had described at all. The house sat in a large clearing surrounded by those massive oak trees like sentinels standing guard. It was old, certainly, built from gray fieldstone that had to date back to at least the 1800s, probably earlier. Two stories, with a steep slate roof that looked remarkably intact. White-painted wooden trim around leaded-glass windows. A heavy oak front door under a small covered portico with carved supports.
Ivy grew up portions of the stone walls, but in a way that looked intentional, decorative, like something from an English country estate rather than abandoned neglect. The grounds immediately surrounding the house were overgrown, but clearly had once been formal gardens. Peggy could see the bones of the original design: stone pathways now partially obscured by grass, organized beds where roses bloomed wild and untamed, what looked like had once been a kitchen garden now given over to a tangle of herbs and wildflowers.
There was even a fountain, silent and dry but still elegant, standing in what had obviously been a formal garden area. It was wild, yes, overgrown, certainly, but it was also hauntingly beautiful, like a secret garden that time had partially reclaimed but not quite destroyed.
As Peggy sat in her car, trying to process what she was seeing, she heard footsteps approaching on the dirt road from the direction of town. An elderly woman was walking toward her with surprising purpose for someone who had to be in her mid-seventies. She wore a simple cotton house dress and carried a wicker basket covered with a checkered cloth.
“You’re Peggy.”
It wasn’t a question. She said it with complete certainty, as if she’d been waiting for this exact moment.
“Yes,” Peggy managed, climbing out of her car on legs that felt unsteady. “How did you know?”
“We’ve been waiting for you,” the woman said simply, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. “Richard told us you’d come eventually after he passed. He said to watch for a woman named Peggy driving an older Honda. I’m Dorothy Harmon. I run the general store in town.”
She held out the basket.
“Bread, eggs, milk, coffee, cheese. Figured you might need supplies. The house has been maintained, but there’s no food stocked.”