Out of the Frying Pan

Uncle Hayes at the Campbell Mansion, Part 8

"There was another large room off from the boiler room. I turned the light on in there and saw that there were small high windows around one side facing east. Each window was about a foot tall, two-and-a-half feet wide, and opened outward. There were shelves all around and pipes heading up and vanishing into the floors above. There was a door over on one wall so I opened it and found that there were steps that led out behind the house with double doors that opened outward at an angle. The room itself was massive and could easily be used for a living space.

"The walls were stone all around but I thought to myself, A person could sheetrock over them and paint if they had a hinkling to. The floor was concrete and I wondered if the original floor might have been hand-laid brick or even dirt before that. I was surprised to notice it wasn’t very damp down there at all. That might have been because of the thickness of the stone walls and who knows how thick the floor was.

"After my tour of rest of the basement, I went back into the room where the boiler was and read the temperature gauge. One hundred and sixty and holding. It seemed to me it was working fine. The maximum on the gauge was six hundred degrees. Why would anybody want to go higher than one eighty? I turned and saw that the fuse panel for the house was on the wall behind me, so I opened it up. Wow. There were a lot of fuses, there was even a space to keep extras. I pulled out my pocket tester and checked each one. All were working, no pennies behind any of them.

"I heard the boiler switch off, so I went back over to look at the gauge. The water temperature was one-sixty-five. That’s good. Now to go back upstairs to check all the faucets. The first one I checked was the bathroom off the livingroom. I turned the hot water on and after some air and some rust-colored water came out, the water became hot. I got the same results in the kitchen, the upstairs bathrooms and the sinks in the attic. That’s one less thing I would have had to fix.

"As I was coming out of the attic bathroom, I saw the window with the cracked glass. I looked at my watch and it was lunch time, so I figured I would eat and then come back and remove the window so I could drop it off at the glass repair place that Charlie Jenkins had told me about.

"Heading back over to where I was staying, I thought, So far, so good, no haints. I’ll know tonight if my plan will work or not. As soon as I finished eating, I went directly back to the attic. That window probably hadn’t been touched in decades, I had a time removing it. After I’d removed the whole window frame from its opening, I tacked plastic over the hole to keep the weather (and critters) out.

"I took the window downstairs and out to my truck and placed it in the back with a blanket wrapped around it. I opened the truck door and found the paper that Mr. Jenkins had given me. It said, Edgar Heiskell, Glass Repair and listed the address. Shucks, that’s clean over on the other side of town. So I hopped in and headed out.

"As I drove down the road, I looked to see where the police officer had pointed to and saw that it was another big house. I chuckled to myself, thinking how most of the houses around there were whoppers and that the folks who live in them must be pretty well off. It’s funny that rich folks only want to live where others are the same financially. Being a person who works on houses, I could tell by their design and the materials that were used to build those homes, about what time period they were constructed. Most were not as old as the Campbell house.

"Soon I could see the sign up ahead, Heiskell’s Glass Repair and Custom Windows. I pulled up front and went on inside. The fellow at the counter was about the same age as me. He asked what he could do for me so I told him how I was working over at the old Campbell place, that only one window needed new glass in it and it was out in the truck.

"He came around the counter and said, ‘Let’s go and take a look at it.’ We went out to the truck and he pulled back the blanket and shook his head.

"I asked, ‘Is there a problem?’

"‘No, no problem,’ he said, ‘I’m just admiring my grandfather’s work. He was the one that put all the windows in the Campbells’ house.’"

...To be continued...