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remember the last time I was on this road. Can you?”
    “Yeah, but it was years ago when JR attended summer camp. They had a field trip out to the old railroad station and JR signed up for it. Had I known Herbie Waddlemeyer would be driving the bus, I never would have volunteered to go along.”
    “Why on earth not? The man’s an excellent driver,” said Mary, coming to her employee’s defense. “He’s never had an accident or even a ticket. Honestly, Gin, sometimes you’re so judgmental.”
    “Well, you would be, too, if you had to spend two hours on a hot bus with no one to talk to except Herbie,” I said, steering the van around the rotting remains of unrecognizable roadkill. “I missed the entire tour thanks to him and his big, fat head.”
    “What in the world does the size of Herbie’s head have to do with your missing the tour and spending two hours on the bus?” asked the bewildered Mary.
    “Because, my dear Watson, that’s how long it took me to free Herbie’s oversized noggin from the clutches of the automatic door. At the time, I thought it was a freak accident,” I added before changing the subject. “Keep an eye out for some sign of civilization like a mailbox or a driveway. Somebody, either Dona Deville, or maybe it was her personal assistant, said the place faces Old Railway Road. Supposedly, it’s not far from the old railroad station and the interstate.”
    “I don’t see anything like that, but I just saw a sign for getting on the interstate so we must be pretty close,” said Mary before shouting, “Oh my stars, there it is! There’s the cottage!”
    Thanking God for Mary’s keen eyesight and the van’s new set of brakes, I safely negotiated a quick turn onto the narrow gravel driveway that circled the property. After bringing the van to a halt in front of the cottage, I stepped out and looked around. There was something about the place that seemed vaguely familiar. I was baffled until I spotted the school bell and pole that stood just off to the right of the porch.
    Surrounded on three sides by a thicket of mature trees and hidden somewhere beneath the peeling and faded red exterior with its mustard-colored trim was the building’s original footprint. Once a humble center of learning, the little schoolhouse had since been transformed into a two-storied cottage. The architectural style was classic Stick.
    The Stick style evolved from Carpenter Gothic, an offshoot of Victorian architecture popular in the mid-to late-nineteenth century. Purely American, Stick style is distinctive for its use of board-and-batten vertical siding minus the fussiness of classic and romantic ornamentation generally found in Victorian and Carpenter architecture.
    The faded, reddish-brown front door had an overhead transom window of clear glass. Around the door someone had painted a border of hearts and flowers in the same mustard color that trimmed the windows, front porch, railings, and banisters. The porch ran the width of the cottage and like the cottage, it had a shake roof. A porch swing of faded red was to the left of the front door at a right angle to the door and a trio of faded, mustard-yellow-trimmed windows. The cottage sat on a foundation of fieldstone.
    One look at the cottage’s exterior and I immediately rid my mind of the blue, green, and gray palette along with the New England decor that I’d been considering. Instead, I visualized doing the cottage inside and out in an array of earth tones. I would paint the exterior in a medium shade of brown and in keeping with the earth-tone palette, all trim on the cottage would be done in a forest green. Wooden shutters of forest green would flank the windows and like the trim around the chocolate-colored front door, they would be decorated with hand-painted stenciled hearts and flowers in a pale yellow-green.
    The existing porch swing, which sat at a right angle to the front door, would be given a fresh coat of forest green paint. A pair of green