The same limo, with the same driver arrived the next morning. Thuston sat in the front and Elaine sat in the back with me. My two suitcases were in the trunk, carefully placed there by what I had now identified as a chauffeur.
The road out of town went from four lanes paved to two lanes asphalt about two miles out from the outskirts of the city. The landscape quickly opened out from crowded urban to almost instant desert. Words like barren and desolate came to my mind from childhood story books.
There was nothing around us for miles in every direction, and for a city girl like me, it was real nothing. Cactus, sand, more cactus, and more sand, that was it. Mountains in the far distance, beautiful and remote in slightly blue haze.
After maybe an hour and a half hour of this, we reached a town, I suppose you would call it. We seemed to have passed a school on the outskirts first, then the town itself, which consisted of a saloon and a mom and pop grocery store gas station. They were huddled together, one on each side of the road, for mutual protection from the surrounding wilderness. The town didn't have a stop light, so you couldn't call it a one-stoplight town. Maybe you could call it a one-gas-station town. It's name was Santa Ingratia, I was informed.
The road became gravel leaving town. The owner glanced over his shoulder at me, maybe making sure my hand wasn't on the door handle. It almost was. I didn't say anything. The wife in the back seat said, "Pay no attention, Claire. You'll love it when you see it."
She sounded more forced than reassuring. I was not reassured. I said nothing.
At long last we turned right off the road and stopped at a stone arch covering a suddenly paved driveway. The chauffeur got out of the car, opened the iron gate, drove the car through it, stopped, got out, walked back to the gate and closed it behind us. I was so busy watching this that I didn't notice what was inside until we got moving again.
First I noticed to the left of the circular stone paved driveway maybe 50 yards away a very posh looking swimming pool. It sported a covered table and several chaise lounge chairs on a large expanse of tile. I noticed an outdoor shower against the wall of the concrete outbuilding. I also noticed that the pool didn't look clean.
When I looked back to the front I saw a covered porte-cochère, I think it is called, in front of the biggest house I have ever seen in real life. It reminded me of the one in front of the Golden Sunset hotel, except this one was nicer.
I don't know what I expected but it sure wasn't this. The thing was huge. And it wasn't a house, it was a castle, a real castle, just like in the movies. A castle in the desert. It had giant turrets on each side of the front door. I don't suppose you could actually pour molten lead on attackers from them, but at first glance it looked like you could. The whole thing was made of stone. It had a red slate roof. It had chimneys. In the desert, it had chimneys? Why? It was two stories tall and had tall pointed windows with so help me colored glass in them at the top. Little old me will feel like an ant on a picnic table running around here. The front door was a two-sided arrangement, I don't know what they are called but they are solid wood and I do mean solid and you can open then one half at a time. The owner opened the right-hand half and we went inside.
Elaine saw things a lot differently than I did. "This is awful. I hate your seeing it this way."
She was right about that, in her own way. The place needed dusting, maybe with a shovel, and more than that.
"I can clean it up. It'll take a day or so. Give me a week, say. I had seen all this in movies, but never before in real life. The inside was just as expensive as the outside. We were in a reception area with two white circular staircases leading up into the heavens. Two staircases? One up and one down? In the movies there would have been a butler taking our coats and hats, which is ridiculous in this heat.
I followed the owners into the kitchen, off to the right of the reception. He put some stuff on the kitchen table and led the parade into the rest of the downstairs.
The kitchen downstairs opened to an outdoor patio dining area, covered with flower pots and vines on two sides and a view of the mountains on the third. In the movies, a guy in a white vest would bring you a drink with an umbrella in it while you sat at the table looking at the mountains. In real life, the flowers needed water. Even a city girl with an art degree could see that.
The dining room to the left of the kitchen on the other side of the right-most turret was grotesque. There really isn't another word for it. It was a huge, high-ceilinged room with a stone tile floor and a massive array of windows on the long side looking out at the desolation. Unadorned rough stone walls enclosed three sides with a huge stone fireplace sharing the fourth with an equally huge open doorway leading vaguely towards the kitchen. The predominant color of everything was depressive medieval brown. Why did it need to be so big, I wondered? I mean, I get that the servants have to be able to move around behind the seated guests, but they didn't need ten feet on every side to do that, I didn't think. I knew I didn't have the costume necessary to dine in here, and wasn't likely to in the future.
A heavy ornate hardwood table and twelve matching chairs, five to each side with two more on the ends huddled in the exact center of this monster. The end chairs, I noticed, had arms. The others didn't. Got to establish the hierarchy somehow, I suppose. None of the chairs was in the least padded. Did people actually eat here?
I stood there for a moment, just inside the room, imagining myself seated in one of the very uncomfortable looking end chairs, all by myself, looking at eleven empty chairs, talking to the walls just to hear the echo, and eating my tuna fish sandwich. I wondered vaguely if the other eleven places would be set with plates and glasses for dinner and if there would be candelabras on the table. I thought momentarily of putting stuffed dummies in the other chairs, just to liven the place up. I vowed that I would never enter this room again for as long as I lived here.
From thence we moved gracefully past the reception area with the twin staircases into the living room, as I would call it in my country bumpkin language, but which was probably referred to as a parlor, or perhaps sitting room, or maybe the great hall. That's what the owner called it anyway. I just stood in the doorway and gawked. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, afraid to go in for fear of being even further reduced in size.
It was as grand and impossible as the dining room in its own way. The ceiling was arched and thirty feet above the floor. The walls were stone. There were two very colorful area rugs which covered one tenth of the tiled floor under two polished tables. Huge arched windows took up one side and looked out on the expanse of what would be lawn in England or somewhere wet but which was rock, sand, and cactus with mountains in the distance here.
Giant modern stuffed chairs and a couch the size of a bed were scattered around the dance floor. All of them were colored a not nearly far enough off white guaranteed to show every smudge. The tables and the floor showed a layer of sand.
I walked into the room and looked up and around, imagining myself seated in one of the chairs, perhaps the one next to the fireplace with the artificial gas log in it. I envisioned trying to talk to someone, twenty feet away on one of the other chairs or the sofa. I couldn't do it. Was this real? What was it used for?
To be absolutely fair, on the second floor there was also what the owner called a family room, where things were a little closer together and less imposing. A board with a chess game set up on it reminded one that this room was for actual people. The room had a bar and a bathroom all it's own and a separate entrance to the deck outside. I called it a deck. It was probably a balcony. It would be shady in the afternoon but didn't have any mountains.
Everything was dusty and sand-covered. Dust and sand don't have any respect for expensive surroundings.
The upstairs also included a study, the owner called it, filled with books with leather bindings. They were all the same size and the same color, as though the whole wall full had been bought as a set. It probably had been, for a whole lot of money. I didn't even walk into the room. Study what? I wondered idly. It wasn't to be used as an office, I found out. There was another room called that further down the hall.
From there we turned a corner to inspect the four, I think, bedrooms. There may have been more, I lost count. Each bedroom had its own bathroom. I have never seen that before. The owner didn't call them bedrooms, either. They were staterooms. Like on a ship. They didn't have numbers, but they probably did have names. I wasn't told what the names were. Oh well, I could name them myself, if I wanted to, I supposed.
Several other rooms with special uses which I have forgotten were briefly introduced. I looked into each one and said polite things like, "I see," and "very nice." They all shared sand on every visible surface.
Eventually we made it back downstairs, using the down side of the circular stairway. I tried to imagine myself coming regally down the stairs in an expensive evening dress showing lots of décolletage to meet my escort waiting in the reception area below. This was the obvious purpose of the circular stairway. I tried to imagine him with a sword and without one. The image didn't gel either way, and keeping the staircases dusted and vacuumed would be an all day job.
Other stairs scattered throughout the castle are used for actual movement from floor to floor. I was shown doors and told that they lead to staircases in each of the turrets for example. We didn't go up there. The doors were bolted from the inside.
The master suite downstairs is larger than any apartment I have ever lived in. Several rooms are divided into the woman's quarters and the man's quarters with separate closets, bathrooms, and dressing areas for each but with a single gigantic bed in the master's end of things. I wondered how the occupants found each other in the dark. I wondered if they tried. If either of them ever wanted to sleep separate there were lots of ways to do that without ever leaving the master suite.
The owners showed me the rest of the downstairs. The lady of the house opened a door off one end of the kitchen. It was a walk in room with shelves and cupboards and a small table and chair set in the middle. Those cupboards would hold a lot of food. She called it the butler's pantry. Why, I wondered? There were no other signs of any servants. Were there separate quarters for the slaves out back, maybe?
A laundry room lurked quietly next to the kitchen. I was pleased to see that. I haven't had my own laundry equipment since I left home. The last room on the corridor was what they called a conservatory, which I would call a plant room. The plants all needed water. In fact, the plants all over the house needed attention. For many of them it was too late.
Once more in the kitchen, my astonished reverie was broken by the husband. "You can live here, or in the gate house, whichever you prefer."
I hadn't seen a gatehouse. I didn't know what one was. Was that the servant's quarters? I didn't reply. It was all I could do to keep from giggling. I had crazy thoughts of Alice in Wonderland again, going from room to room in this palace having tea with the white rabbit. I have never seen such space, never had a choice of which room to sleep in, much less which house. I had two suitcases, period, one for each hand.
The upkeep on this place was going to take time and money. I mentioned that to the owner. He fixed that.
"I have a credit card account for this place. I'll put your name on it. I get the bill. You use the credit card for anything and everything, your own expenses and all the upkeep and maintenance."
That seemed to take care of all my financial concerns. Poof! Simple, huh. Just give the girl a bottomless credit card with someone else's name on it. A dream come true. This can't be happening.
"We are supposed to have a pool maintenance contract which you may keep or change. From the looks of it, the maintenance outfit hasn't been here in some time. I can't have that. The house and the pool need to be kept up for us to visit and possibly to show to a prospective buyer."
"Would you like to see the garage?"
"Yes, thank you." That sounded absolutely inane. I would have the servants bowing to me in another minute. I followed him out the front door past the swimming pool on the left to the garage. It was, as expected by now, huge. It had a concrete floor and finished walls, painted beige. There were shelves on the walls. It had two doors for people, front and back, and three more in the front for cars. You could actually park two cars in each space end to end. The van was parked in one of the three car spaces. Without the cars, you could play basketball.
"The van can go outside. There's plenty of room. Can you convert this into your pottery workshop?"
It was a real question. The guy was serious. He looked worried. I got the feeling that if I had said "No", he would offer to build me a workshop somewhere on the grounds. I reassured him.
"Yes, it will do very well. It's perfect, in fact," I added, fearing that my stupor would be read as lack of enthusiasm. I wanted to giggle again.
That was it. We walked back to the house and into the kitchen. The owner counted out five hundred dollars from his wallet, glanced at his wife for approval and put them in a pile on the kitchen table. He handed me a ring of keys, waved at the folder with information in it next to the pile of money and they left.
I parked my two bags in the mother-in-law bedroom and watched them drive away through the window, closing the gate behind them as before, and disappear. Then I just stood there, keyring in hand, staring at the arched gate, for several long minutes. What could be wrong with this situation? Why was this happening to me? I went back into the kitchen and looked at the pile of money he had left on the table. No, these guys are serious. They wanted somebody in here. Why? Has there been some trouble in the past? Is there something they aren't telling me?
I walked through the house and grounds again, by myself this time. The upstairs bedrooms, or staterooms, were smaller than those downstairs but just as nice. Nicer than any I had ever stayed in, for sure. Dusty, but nice.
Downstairs, I walked through the great hall, dining room, the two large bedrooms, the kitchen and the patio. The downstairs didn't look exactly like the upstairs somehow. The furniture was ever so slightly different. The same with the drapes. Even the paint didn't seem to be exactly the same. The owner had explained that he had had some work done after the previous tenants had left. Had the house been completely refinished? No, it was too new for any of that. But it was a little different, upstairs from downstairs.
That's when I remembered the two huge towers at either end of this place. I wondered if I could go up in them. I wandered around the ground floor once more, looking for stairways or possibly doors. There was one rather suspicious door in the kitchen. It opened to the inside, except that it didn't, because it was locked. I checked the keyring Thurston had given me. None of the keys fit the lock. I looked up on the wall right next to the door and there it was, a key on a nail high on the wall. I reached up and got it down. It didn't fit either.
But anyone could see it was meant for that lock. Not hidden, just high up so that the children wouldn't be able to reach it. But it didn't fit. I wondered about that. I also wondered if I could get up into the other tower on the other side of the house, but there didn't seem to be a door to that one at all.