"Oh, look, Robert! The old porch swing is still in place, just like it always was! I can't believe how many years it's been since I sat in that swing when I'd visit Grandmother and Grandad in this old house."
Martha and Robert Dabney stood on the sidewalk in front of the big white house, admiring its lofty architecture, its square columns on the low wall surrounding the front porch, and the massive brown rooftop that sported a tall white brick chimney on the west side.
"Isn't it gorgeous, Robert? Or would be, with a little fixing up."
Dark-eyed, dark-haired Robert looked down steadily at his blonde, blue-eyed innocent wife and groaned softly.
"A little fixing up," he repeated, with a half-smile. "A paint job alone for a house this size would break the bank, my sweetie. To say nothing of what I figure the plumbing bills would be, and new wallpaper, I'll bet, plus lots of carpentry repairs on the inside."
"I don't remember it ever being anything but first class," Martha said hopefully, gazing at the For Sale sign in the front yard. "Of course, several years have gone by since I was here, so you could be right. Why don't we talk to the realtor and find out a few things?"
And that's when the Dabneys, moving back to their home town, decided that the 95-year-old house might be worth the time, energy and money it would take to make it "first class" again.
After they bit the bullet and moved into the spacious old mansion, Martha realized Robert had a point. With creative enthusiasm, they had started out working tirelessly to make the place look like it did in days of yore. But after holding down their daily jobs, then coming home to work and more work, the regimen began to wear on the nerves — Martha's, especially. Robert, once his mind was made up, stuck by his guns and looked on the bright side. "It'll be first class," he'd say, scraping and hammering with a vengeance.
Occasionally Martha had second thoughts about buying the place. In fact, she was beginning to feel creepy about it. For one thing, the house was so over-sized that she had a sense of someone watching from behind closet doors and around stairways. Of course, she was sure she was imagining things, but the spell was cast and it was hard to get rid of. She even found herself trying to keep an eye on the house's six entrances, which were unlocked most of the time due to the couple's in-and-out busyness.
The expense mounted, too. Central air and heat had never been installed, so the upstairs bedroom, bath and closets especially, were hot in the summer and ice-cold in winter, until the Dabneys could afford the comfort of even temperatures throughout. Meanwhile, old-time heaters and window air conditioners served the house downstairs; not perfect, but okay.
Something else was even more disturbing. Martha began having flashbacks of how her big, extended family relationships really were, in the days she thought were so perfect. Looking back on it, she faced the possibility that hatred (yes, hatred;) between one or two family members was very real. Perhaps even dangerous.
One of her cousins, Jack, a dapper dresser, always wore a white hankie tucked in his shirt pocket with the initial "J" showing at the top. Jack was the young man who seemed to hold a grudge, big-time, against another cousin, Stanley.
But young and carefree Martha had always made it a point to cease unpleasant thoughts when she retreated to the swing, where she could be blissfully detached from any troubling situation; and she loved the silent swing with its therapeutic gliding back and forth.
It was on a youthful twilight evening, alone in the swing, that she heard voices around the corner from the porch; angry voices, tinged with a soft hatred, that no one heard but her.
"Some day, Stanley old boy, you're gonna be sorry for these pranks of yours," Jack said, almost whispering. "You try to blackmail me one more time, and you'll find out what kind of cousin you're dealing with here."
Stanley replied just as angrily, but the voices trailed off to the rear of the house as Martha sat like stone in the swing.
Years later, she wondered why she had not remembered that incident more vividly. And even though the old swing had been her refuge, it soon appeared that things are not always what they seem, whether close-knit families or angry cousins.
So on this day, a bitterly cold, snowy Sunday afternoon, in the midst of re-painting kitchen cabinets, Martha announced to Robert that she'd better run upstairs to check out the plumbing, maybe lighting the gas heater so the bathroom pipes wouldn't freeze.
The next thing Robert heard was a blood-curdling scream. Up the stairs he flew to the bedroom, where Martha stood frozen before the dead body of Cousin Stanley planted in a comfortable recliner, blood covering his head and face and a man's neat white hankie on the floor with the letter "J" shining in the semi-darkness.
Robert took Martha's hand and they vanished down the stairs to call 911. At the trial, where Jack was sentenced to 99 years in prison, the prosecution brought out that the only regret Jack had about murdering his cousin and placing his body in the upstairs bedroom while the Dabneys were at church, was that he dropped his handkerchief near the chair: A big oversight on his part, he admitted.
If the old front porch swing could talk, Martha wondered how many more secrets it could tell about the family who loved her, but kept their secrets to themselves.
