Nita dropped to her knees as she hugged her daughter to her, trying to comfort her. The baby was standing, petrified, screaming, and shaking her head from side to side. Nita dropped one of her mother's heirloom plates, shattering it on the hardwood floor, and dashed into the kitchen with Irene close on her heels. She had not been in there very long when she started screaming. She skipped past her mother and aunt and went by herself into the kitchen. The baby was left to her own resources and was skipping around the house, watching this, watching that, asking questions and generally having loads of fun. The family was absorbed in the mundane tasks of settling in. Smith hanging family pictures, Irene and Nita unpacking the fine china and putting it into the built in hutches in the dining room and "The baby," which is how they always referred to Nita's daughter, was heavily involved in everything, getting in the way, skipping, laughing. Smith directing the workmen moving the large furniture from the horse drawn drayage cart to the house, Mr. The five members of the Smith family all had their jobs in the move. Nita's little girl would sleep in a crib in the room with them. Irene had been given the option of sleeping in the guest room with her father's desk and files but she much preferred sharing the big double bed with sister (and best friend) Nita. Irene had been a 12 year old maid of honor when Nita had married her childhood sweetheart, just before he shipped out as a "Doughboy" to Europe where he tragically died only weeks later in a foxhole, just four months before his daughter was born. Although Nita had been adopted by the Smiths by the very informal method of literally being left on the Smith's doorstep 22 years before, she and Irene could not have been closer. The attic was actually an unfinished space on the third floor that could be made into more bedrooms. The third floor had one bedroom with a walk-in closet that Irene would share with her 22 year old adopted sister, Nita, and Nita's two and a half year old daughter. Smith's office, which would double as a guest room, and a small storage room. Smith, the bathroom, another bedroom destined to become Mr. The second floor held the master suite for Mr. The front entry led into the wide staircase wrapping around a central core and was open from bottom to top, giving a clear view of all landings and stairs. The first floor consisted of a huge kitchen with walk-in pantry and breakfast nook, a formal dining room with oaken hutches and sideboards built-in, a living room, and a separate "sociable parlor" for entertaining important guests. The house had big, airy rooms with large windows. You can have the other two basement rooms for your belongings." The owner's brother was apologetic that they could not have the entire basement for their use, but, he explained "The back storeroom of the basement is packed full of some of my sister's belongings that she hasn't sent for yet. Their new landlord explained to Irene's parents that he was merely the agent for the owner, his sister, who had "moved back east, because of her health" several years earlier. The rent was much lower than usual for the neighborhood. It was located on a corner lot in an upscale neighborhood of other stately Victorians. The house was a three story Victorian complete with attic and basement located only seven blocks from the State Capitol Building. Irene's father had found a great bargain. If the job did not work out, they wanted to move back. The job was probationary at first so Irene's parents had rented a house instead of selling the San Francisco house and buying another in Sacramento. The Smith family was moving from San Francisco, where their youngest daughter Irene had lived her entire 15 years, to their new home in Sacramento, where Irene's father had his new job. Irene is dead now and I have rewritten her story as a short story, almost exactly as she told it. I will call her "Irene" because that was really her name. The events she described occurring in the early 1950s had been reported in the local newspapers, and although there was now an empty lot where the house and a gas station once stood, the house did exist. In the 1970s, I personally confirmed some of the more mundane parts of her story. A devout Catholic (so much so that although she had been divorced by her husband, she did not consider the divorce valid and did not remarry until her husband died many years later) the landlady swore on her Bible, in front of my sister and me after she told us the story, that it was absolutely true. The following story was told to me by the woman who rented my parents their first home in California when they moved to Sacramento in 1939. The Landkady’s Tale, a Halloween Tradition on Freerepublic
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