That lasted about a block. Then I pulled over to the curb and got out my map. I had no idea where I was going, or how far it was. Research indicated that it was about a hundred miles away, and in the opposite direction, naturally. I got there in two hours, about an hour before sunset.
The house was indeed huge, and it needed paint. It was on the corner of Main and Pine, almost in Downtown Pleasant Valley. The first thing I saw as I walked towards the porch was that there were two gas meters on the left side of the house.
To the right of the porch was the one surviving bush in the front lawn, none too recently trimmed or watered. Nothing grew around the skirting of the house and there was no lawn. Landscaping would have helped a lot. The house was pretty much without ornamentation. No shutters, not much trim of any kind. Just bare windows hanging out, three upstairs and two on the first floor. The place the middle window would have been was the small porch and front door. The lock on the door was new. There were actually two front doors, and two porches. The second one was set back and to the right of the first one, at the end of the porch.
The lock on the door was shiny and new, and the key I had been given fit perfectly. I went inside.
The large front room was to the left of the small entry way and accounted for the two first floor windows. The room behind it also opened from the first floor landing. It had side windows and might have been used as an office, or a downstairs bedroom. There was a half bath under the staircase and a kitchen to the right rear. The staircase went up to a corridor with three rooms off of it. The front one was a large bedroom and the two rooms behind it were smaller. There was not one stick of furniture anywhere in the house. It turns out that the third door from the upstairs landing was a connecting door between two apartments, and the room behind the door connected to a bathroom, a bedroom, a small kitchen, and a back staircase. This apartment was also empty.
The light was fading towards evening as I walked through the upstairs rooms, looking behind every door and in every nook and cranny, as the expression goes. No bookcase. No boxes. No books. Mrs. Honeycut had certainly moved everything out of the house, and it looked to be ready for sale. It was clean, too. No dust or debris at all. The inside walls needed painting badly, but I supposed that was to be left to the new owner.
I walked down the back staircase to the first floor of the second apartment. The front door to the second apartment was new also but I had no key to it. The door was not bolted from the inside. I carefully turned the knob that bolted the door from the inside and left it that way. Mrs. Honeycut had said I could stay there, so I walked back up the stairs, through the connecting door, down the front stairs and out the front door to the library van to get my gear.
A house with no furniture in it doesn't feel very inviting. I choose a corner in the second room downstairs near the space heater to unroll my bedroll and set my backpack down next to it, looking for as much protection from the open as I could find, I guess. The water was still on, and so were the lights, so it wouldn't be too bad.
I locked the front door with my borrowed key and went downtown looking for diner.