Saturday Snippet: The opening
1:00 AM
Upon
entering the old-fashioned parlor, Emmeline took a deep breath, inhaling dust
and the faint smell of her father’s pipe-tobacco.
These were
the smells of memories.
One of her
earliest memories was of peeking through the crack in the door of this very parlor,
her small fingers picking at the chipping paint of the doorframe. She could see
her papa and Mr. Carter smoking their pipes by a cheerful fire. She should have
been in the playroom with her sister, Cassandra, and Miss Carter (as Geraldine,
the pretentious daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Carter, insisted on being called).
However, Emmeline preferred to be with Papa.
“George,” Mr. Carter declared. “You allow your
wife too many liberties. She is making all the decisions for your house.”
Her father’s deep, rumbling laughter filled
the parlor. “This is the twentieth century, Clement. Women now have the right
to vote and all sorts of things. Besides, the Good Book says that we are to
love and care for our wives. She is a good woman, and I don’t mind giving in to
her whims. I have to admit that the electric lights she had put in last year
have helped my eyes very much.”
“Progress isn’t all it is cracked up to be,”
Mr. Carter grumbled.
It was the
only memory Emmeline had of her father’s joyous laughter, or of his best
friend, Mr. Carter. Clement Carter, along with Emmeline’s own mother, had died
of the influenza epidemic that fateful year of 1919. They were only two of the
many the epidemic had claimed in the small Pennsylvania town of Ashbury.
Emmeline
reached out and caressed a vase that had stood on the mantel where her mother
had always kept it. While the rest of the house had been redecorated and
modernized as much as she could persuade her father to allow, this room was
like a time capsule of twenty-five years before, when her mother and father had
moved into the house.
“Deep in
your own thoughts, I see,” a deep, masculine voice said.
Emmeline
didn’t even turn around, but continued her dusting. “Most people knock when
entering a home that isn’t their own, Fredrick,” she said dryly.
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