I’d been staying at St. Mary’s women’s shelter in New Haven for exactly two weeks when Carmen called.
The number on my old flip phone showed an area code I didn’t recognize. But I knew her voice right away. Breathless. Excited. And something else I couldn’t quite name.
“Mrs. Henrietta, you need to come to the cabin right away,” she said. No hello. “We found something. Something important.”
My heart skipped. The way it had been doing ever since Randall died, whenever stress got the better of me.
“What kind of something? Are you all right? Is Sophia okay?”
“We’re all fine. But please. You have to see this. Can you come today?”
I looked around the shelter’s common room. A handful of other women who’d lost their homes sat reading donated magazines, or staring at a TV mounted too high on the wall. The whole place smelled like industrial disinfectant. The fluorescent lights hummed day and night.
That had become my life.
“I’ll be there in an hour,” I told her.
The drive to Beacon Falls felt different this time.
Instead of the crushing weight I carried on that first trip, I felt something I hadn’t felt in months.
Curiosity.
Carmen wasn’t the kind of woman who’d call unless something truly important had happened.
When I turned onto the dirt road, I couldn’t believe what I saw.
In just two weeks, Miguel had completely transformed that cabin.
The sagging front porch was straight and solid. The broken windows were replaced. The overgrown brush was cleared away from the foundation. Smoke curled up out of the chimney.
And somebody had planted little purple pansies in coffee cans on either side of the front door.
Carmen met me before I could even knock. Her face was flushed.
“Thank you for coming so fast. Miguel’s out back with Sophia. We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Carmen. What’s going on? You’re scaring me a little.”
She took my arm gently and led me around the side of the cabin.
“It started three days ago,” she said. “Sophia kept saying the floor was talking to her. Like she told you. Miguel and I thought it was just her imagination. You know how kids are. But she wouldn’t stop. She kept stomping on one spot in the hallway and saying, ‘Listen! It sounds empty!’ So finally we decided to humor her.”
We came around the back corner of the cabin.
Miguel was kneeling on the ground beside a hole under the cabin’s foundation. Sophia was sitting cross-legged in the dirt next to him. Carefully arranging old papers into neat little piles.
“Mrs. Henrietta!”
Sophia jumped up and ran over and hugged my legs.
“We found the talking place! It was under the house! Just like I said!”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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