Bred In The Bone

Excerpt from

Bred In The Bone

Chapter One

St. Augustine gives off a different vibe than Daytona Beach, I discovered. Never mind that both cities border tidal rivers feeding (or fed by) the Atlantic Ocean; that both lie on the east coast of Florida; that both attract tourists. For, while Daytona garners fame for its beach and stock car racing, St. Augustine bills itself as “the nation’s oldest city.” In fact, a billboard along I-95 proudly proclaims: “St. Augustine - 24 miles of beaches...and the rest is history.”

Not that Daytona Beach lacks history, but you certainly won’t see trams winding through the streets, with tour guides using loudspeakers to point out the home of founding father, Mathias Day. Nor will you hear the clop-clop of a horse-drawn carriage, driven by a somewhat more leisured tour guide, but with the same spiel.

So St. Augustine constantly surprises me. Standing on Avenida Menendez, overlooking the Bridge of Lions with its four towers, I’ll watch the gulls wheel overhead, screaming. Ospreys and herons glean the tidal flats for food. And I’ll close my eyes and imagine myself back at Belgrath House in Daytona Beach. Then Old Town Trolley Tours passes by, and the driver spouts some trivia about the Fort or about the Second Spanish Period or about the British occupation, and I’ll awaken to the fact that I’ve been transplanted.

Not that this constituted my first transplanting, for while Otis is a native Floridian (a rare bird) I hail from two border states: Kentucky and Missouri. Unable to reconcile whether I was a Yankee or a Rebel, I finally settled on Midwestern. Don’t get me wrong, I love the South. But some things about it drive me crazy.

Recent events at Belgrath necessitated this latest transplanting. Those happenings unsettled my husband Otis, Miss Letty (our ninety-year-old permanent guest and former star of the Silent Screen), and me. After the discovery of a skeleton in our dumbwaiter, followed by a second murder at the house and a Category Four hurricane, we reasoned that we had earned a change of scene. Hence, the move to St. Augustine.

Otis had spotted the advertisement in Innkeepers:

“Wanted! Fellow innkeepers desiring an exchange. Do you need a break from your own B & B but can’t afford it? Are you envious of everyone else on vacation except you? Try a “busman’s holiday” by exchanging with the owners of Castle Keep, located in historic St. Augustine, Florida. Call 1-904-INN-KEEP for particulars.”

“It sounds ideal for you and Otis, Clarice,” Miss Letty’d said.

I hesitated. “What about Fat Cat?”

“Leave Fat Cat to me,” Miss Letty offered, but she didn’t deceive me. She wore that noble, dying-swan-in-a-thunderstorm look - the same languishing look she’d used in all of her silent films.

Right on cue, Otis said, “Nonsense! You’d come with us, of course. How do we know these innkeepers would look after you properly?” My own feeling? Miss Letty would have ruled the exchange innkeepers.

“We’ll take Fat Cat along.” Otis’s decision, as I’d rub into him later.

“Pell Mell,” I said. I referred to our disabled pelican, whom I had reason to revere. He had saved my life.

“Mellie Pellie looks after him quite well,” Otis said. Mellie Pellie was Pell Mell’s mate.

“The kids.” My last-ditch objection. Our twins--a son, Pat, and a daughter, Kitty--both attend the University of Florida in Gainesville; they are apt to come home on weekends (when the Gators play an away game) and bring their starving college friends.

“Gainesville lies slightly closer to St. Augustine than to Daytona Beach,” Otis replied. “Unfortunately,” he added under his breath.

Thus we decided. And Otis, Miss Letty, Fat Cat, and I installed ourselves, by Thanksgiving, at Castle Keep - a misnomer if I ever heard one. For it wasn’t a castle, and the word keep, as applied to castle, means fortification, safe haven. So not a keep, either, we discovered later.

When my hormones roller coaster more than usual, I remind Otis and Miss Letty that I sensed uneasiness from the beginning. Why did we never meet our exchange innkeepers? Why did their attorney handle all arrangements? Why did they give us almost no background on the house?

Simple, Otis says: If we, or anyone else, had known everything going on in Castle Keep, no one in their right minds would have taken on the job.

But I jump ahead of my story...

* * * *

Tuesday of Thanksgiving Week, 1992, found us tired, cold, and hungry at the back gate of Castle Keep. The chill of north Florida struck my bones the instant I stepped from the car in spite of St. Augustine lying only about forty-five minutes north of Daytona. Even allowing for twenty-twenty hindsight, my first glimpse of the house brought a sense of foreboding.

I dismissed that impression impatiently, attributing it to the cold mist blowing into my face. Thus I viewed Castle Keep for the first time through narrowed eyes. Dusk had fallen, appropriately enough. Even considering these conditions anyone would still have thought the house odd.

For one thing, it backed onto Avenida Menendez instead of fronting that major thoroughfare, as did its neighbors. Casting my flashlight around the overgrown, walled yard, I discovered the remnants of a parterre garden with brick outlining flowerbeds of all shapes: round, rectangular, oval, even trapezoidal. The overgrowth of unpruned trees and shrubbery obscured the house that sat far back from the main road.

I cursed as I walked smack into the Spanish moss literally dripping from a huge live oak. I tripped over a protruding root of that same oak. So my first real survey of the house came from a kneeling position.

“Oops!” Otis said, extending his hand to hoist me up.

Too mesmerized to speak, I gazed at the house of many angles and shapes. Three stories high of weathered timber, the house presented a straight back relieved by the tumorous bulges of two towers that I guessed to be either hexagonal or octagonal. The sides of the house angled abruptly.

“Clarice,” Otis said, still holding out his hand. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, belatedly rising from my awkward position. “You look after Miss Letty. I have to see the front of this monstrosity.”

 “I want to see the front, too,” Miss Letty protested.

“Let’s go in the back way and through the house,” Otis suggested. He handles her so much better than I do.

They made their way, Miss Letty firmly clasping Otis’s arm, to one of the towers. The inner window of each tower on the first floor actually functioned as a door. I watched them enter and then carefully picked my way around one side. Here I found another bulge, only two stories high, almost like a lean-to.

My feet found a brick walkway circling to the front. I followed that as it curved to meet a front walk, pursued it to the front gate, and turned to face the house. There’s method to someone’s madness, I thought.

For the house appeared symmetrical in its very asymmetry. Again, two towers angled out from the front, one on each side, three stories high. Each tower had four windows on the first and second floors capped by a dormer window on the third. The center of the house, only two stories, sat back from the towers. A screened porch lay in front of the house’s center, between the towers. As I gazed upward, I directed the beam of my flashlight toward the roof where I noted two chimneys, each just off center. Each side of the house formed a perfect mirror image of the other.

Just then the streetlight behind me blazed to life, making a bug-zapper noise in the process. The illumination threw the chimneys into bold relief, enabling me to see, adorning each chimney in terra cotta, a face: a man’s on my right; a woman’s on my left. Not a profile or silhouette, but facing front. Death masks?

Ungodly noises coming from inside the house interrupted my reverie. Otis shouted (Otis never shouts) and Miss Letty screamed (Miss Letty never screams except on cue, in front of a camera, and for money). I heard another noise I can only describe as a fiendish wail. I stumbled up the front steps, wrenched open the door to the screened porch, and, with trembling fingers, inserted the key into the Yale lock.

A scene of chaos met my eyes and ears. For some reason Otis hung by his hands from the chandelier, which creaked and rocked precariously. Miss Letty held a chair in midair, making ineffectual stabs as though she were keeping something at bay. An escaped lion?

“Get back! Get back!” she said to me, removing one hand from the chair to motion me behind her. Her grasp with one hand wasn’t strong enough, and the chair thudded to the floor.

With the same pumping motion children employ with swings, Otis catapulted himself behind Miss Letty, landing on his feet, safely away from enemy lines. He disengaged Miss Letty’s vise-like grip on the chair back and began walking toward the beast. Then I caught my first glimpse of The Dog.

He sat back on his haunches, watching us with curiosity, as though he had never encountered a species quite like ours. He couldn’t have weighed more than twenty pounds. I recognized the breed at once, for Nancy Reagan had one during her White House years: a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, one of the pumpkin and white variety known as Blenheim. His eyes bugged out eyes like a Pekingese but he lacked the pushed-in face. Long ears framed his narrow face, and feathery plumage adorned his coat.

Hardly a figure to strike terror. “He’s just a baby,” I said.

Miss Letty and Otis spoke at once. “Just a baby, yeah, right.”

“He almost tore the seat out of my britches.”

The Dog shifted his fury to the advancing chair, an enemy he could understand and deal with. He pounced, dug his teeth into the lower rung of what I hoped wasn’t a Windsor chair, and held on. I remembered tales of snapping turtles who won’t turn loose until it thunders and hoped his jaw power didn’t rival that. Or an alligator’s.

Otis salvaged his dignity and the situation by lifting the chair attached to The Dog and depositing both behind a door leading to a room off the hallway. The starting eyes of our canine welcoming committee glared indignantly.

We shoved open the pocket doors to the kitchen in back of the house and flung ourselves into chrome, Fifties-style red Naugahyde chairs. By tacit agreement we postponed unloading and unpacking.

Otis, still panting slightly, pointed wordlessly to an envelope propped against the napkin holder. It was a note, obligingly left by Mrs. Innkeeper.

I read it aloud: “This is to introduce you to Charles Dickens, Dickens for short…”  An apt name. “…Since Dickens is so attached to the house we hated to uproot him. But that makes him such a fine watchdog…” I wondered how many guests he’d ravaged. “...although he tends to be somewhat territorial…” No! “He won’t be any bother…” Sure! As long as no one crosses him! “...I’m sure you’ll find everything you need. There’s an armoire on each floor filled with guest linen. We made no bookings over Thanksgiving, wanting to give you time to settle in. However, the Donner party… ” The Donner party? How could she write that with a straight face    “… (a wedding) is booked for the Saturday after Thanksgiving… ” Did she mean this coming Saturday? Four days after our arrival? “…but don’t worry. Brandy, one of our part-time maids and full-time Flagler College student, has worked a wedding before and knows the drill.” Great! An eighteen-year-old girl who probably kept a filthy dorm room would be waiting tables and making beds!

And I knew, too, that moving in two days before Thanksgiving wouldn’t excuse me from cooking the traditional Thanksgiving dinner. I thought longingly of my own kitchen, my cozy bed, and my wrap-around veranda on my private island, all usurped by Mrs. Innkeeper. Bet she’d maneuver out of cooking Thanksgiving Day! Anyone who foists Dickens and the Donner party onto perfect strangers can easily finagle a restaurant meal out of her family.

After a brief rest we unloaded the car and superficially unpacked, meaning just what we needed for the night. I, for one, wanted to familiarize myself with the rest of the house, and to decide what to do about Dickens.

Had he been fed? Did one throw a raw chicken carcass into the parlor with him and listen for sounds of rending? And shouldn’t he go out before bedtime?

I ransacked the kitchen shelves and found Milk Bones, Alpo Liver Snaps, and Bonz; surely bribery must work with him. Typical male, tamed by food.

It worked. Sniffing disdainfully at my proffered treat, to rule out poison, no doubt, he condescended to follow my trail of crumbs to the back door. After completing his business in a timely and lordly manner, he returned to the kitchen and inhaled his supper of Alpo livened with Fat Cat’s dry Tasties.

We soon discovered that Dickens would eat ANYTHING, and it became a game with us to tempt him with the weird and exotic, all to see if he’d turn up his nose. He never did.

Sated now and presumably resigned to the inevitable, Dickens curled up under the kitchen table, so handy for ankles, and slept. I took advantage of his slumber to further explore.

I began in the front hall. In most old houses, the staircase dominates the entry room that exists merely as a backdrop for emphasis and showcasing. But in this case two circular staircases, one for each side, mounted to the upper regions. The staircases sat offstage, so to speak, in the wings formed by the towers. Heart of pine, usual for this area, formed the floors, but I noticed a faint line in the middle running the length of the house.  

Had the house been subdivided into two dwellings at one time? In this century, I knew, before the restoration craze had hit, many fine old homes deteriorated first to boarding house status in the Thirties, and were finally cut up and divided into apartment houses. A partition, or wall, at one time must have separated the two sides.

I pirouetted in the hall, taking in the high ceilings, the wainscoting. I hadn’t noticed, on entering the house, but the twin front doors also supported the notion of a dual dwelling. Each door bore a fine example of Tiffany stained glass above it, although not the same pattern: one featured wisteria, the other hummingbirds. A small half bath, obviously added later, intruded in the reception area, destroying the symmetry and openness to the tower wings. The entry hall contained a lot of wasted space, I thought, considering it lacked a focal point.

I turned to one of the tower sides of the house. The circular staircase graced the center of a short hallway formed by the juxtaposition of two rooms, front and back, and that odd, lean-to room which bulged from the side of the house. The staircase, extremely narrow, allowed for the passage of only one person at a time, two if they squeezed sideways. What was that smell? Cedar? And it was enclosed so that it resembled a spiral box. I shivered claustrophobically. Picturing elderly tourists towing Pullman suitcases up those stairs, I hoped Mr. and Mrs. Innkeeper carried heavy insurance.

Poking my nose into the room at the front of the house I swiftly noted an onyx marble fireplace and identified the room as a formal parlor.  Octagonal. I decided not to take in details on this first run, but rather to receive an overall impression of the layout. Crossing the hallway once again, I skirted the circular stairs and entered the back room: also octagonal, and furnished as a formal dining room. For the breakfasts? I noticed a door leading into that side room. I peered in and discovered some sort of music room/multi media/ entertainment center, which formed half an octagon. I observed that access to this room came only through the dining room or, yes, a door from the formal parlor.

The kitchen/dinette area, where Dickens still lay slumbering under the table, ran along the back of the house in the main section. The other back octagon room functioned as a family room by the current owners, judging by its informality. However, since it lay close to the hall bath, I decided to allot it to Miss Letty, not trusting her on those circular stairs. She took birdbaths anyway. The kitchen, large enough to accommodate a TV and a couple of chairs culled from elsewhere in the house, could function as our kitchen/family room combination.

The lean-to room in the right tower wing boasted a library of sorts. The front octagon room appeared to be a less formal version of its counterpart on the other side. A morning room perhaps?

I backed into the hallway and braved the staircase on the right side of the house. The lean-to room on this floor had such a steep, pitched roof that there was little living space. I guessed that in former times the room had served as storage; now it was a bathroom. Its door opened into the back octagonal room on the right side of the house. Judging by the furnishings, eclectic leftovers, I assumed this room belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Innkeeper, and now, by extension, to Otis and me. Crossing the hallway, here merely a landing, I peeked into the front octagon room: one of the bed and breakfast rooms with a fireplace, but not ensuite. I searched for a theme, and came up with Gay Nineties.

The narrow hallway opened out into a large common area that might function as a sitting area if the furniture weren’t so stiffly arranged. The chairs almost shrieked, “Don’t sit on me!” The overall effect evoked a museum setting. Two bathrooms, side by side, one bearing the universal sign for women, one for men, opened onto this common area.

The tower wing on the left side had one octagon room without bath; sort of romantic and Valentiny. The front octagon room came with the lean-to private bath. I glanced in the bedroom. Ah, the Bordello Room.

I wound up the stairs to the third floor. Here the ceilings lowered. There were only two rooms, each with a dormer window, one at the front of the house, one at the back. They were quite obviously former servants’ quarters, and no one had attempted to enhance these rooms or even to make them livable. The back room housed a goodly collection of the kind of junk and cast off furniture we all tend to accumulate.

However, Otis would deem them “plenty good enough” to house starving Gator children and their friends. After all, if they could camp out in the unrestored third floor ballroom at Belgrath House, the third floor servants’ quarters wouldn’t demean them.

Since I saw no direct access to the other third floor tower wing, I decided to postpone my inspection of it. After all, it was probably more of the same, right?

Back in the reception area, I tried to capture a potential guest’s first impression upon entering. But my own first impression would forever be emblazoned on my memory: Otis swinging from the chandelier. Useless. I couldn’t get past that image, nor the one of Letty, the Cavalier Tamer.

I turned instead to inspect the Tiffany stained glass windows above each door, and noticed the small table between the doors. A table containing business cards for Castle Keep with the owners’ real names: Hallie and Jacob Morecamb. There were also brochures.

I grimaced. Should have read that first. Taking the brochure along, I settled myself comfortably at the kitchen table. Dickens sighed in his sleep.

* * * *

Castle Keep was built in the 1850s from timber salvaged from a shipwreck off the coast. Although the house possesses its complement of square and rectangular rooms, and even one that appears to be round, Castle Keep is largely octagonal, a shape thought to protect against gales and hurricanes. In the 1870’s Lord and Lady Devizes, a Savannah couple that had purchased a defunct British title, bought the house. They employed New York architect, Stokely Chambertin, to add the Queen Anne features to the house and to lay out the parterre garden, the outlines of which remain today.

Matching octagonal towers anchor each corner. Three stories high and originally containing twenty rooms, the house underwent some changes when the Devizes’ marriage irretrievably broke down.  A modern phrase, surely? 

Their marital discord resulted in the house being divided down the middle: she lived in one side with her servants; he lived in the other half with his. They never spoke to each other again as long as they both lived, a matter of some twenty years.

I wondered what caused their falling out. But, more importantly, why stay together in such a weird fashion? Of course, back then, divorce stigmatized people and rendered them social pariahs. But separation existed. Was the house that important to them? At least I now understood the dual front doors and the mark on the floor of a former partition running from front to back.

The rest of the brochure listed the rooms, their prices and features. Only two of the second floor octagon rooms were billed as, “Ensuite with fireplace.” The other two rooms listed, “shared bath.” The less formal morning room in the right front corner was the designated smoking room. All rooms featured bed turndown, afternoon tea, sherry upon arrival, and a Full English Breakfast. A vestige of Lord and Lady Devizes?

Except that Lady Devizes wouldn’t cook it. She’d delegate that chore to the cook, probably someone like, well, me. Neither would Hallie Morecamb fry sausages, grill tomatoes and mushrooms, and make fried bread. Oh, no, she’d set out the cereals, muffins, juice (even though fresh squeezed), and coffee of the continental breakfast served at Belgrath House.

I thought of climbing those circular stairs umpteen times a day to change beds and clean rooms. I thought of cooking a full breakfast for four guest rooms, probably each at a different time, Of trying to look cool, regal, and Lady of the Manor at afternoon tea, before preparing lunch and supper for Otis and Miss Letty. Then I thought of keeping Dickens and Fat Cat apart. Some vacation!

Lord! Fat Cat and Dickens! I had remembered to bring Fat Cat indoors, but had forgotten to release her from her pet carrier.

I smiled grimly in anticipation. “Payback time, Dickens.”  He snored, blissfully unaware of the end of his days of supremacy.