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with a vacant spot next to it for him when the time came.
    The pets, he explained, were buried around the perimeter, near their owners. “Let’s put Fido near Martha,” Uncle Tinsley said. “I think she would have liked
him.”
    Uncle Tinsley dug a small hole, and I placed Fido in it, using the Tupperware dish as his coffin. I found a nice piece of white quartz for a headstone. Uncle Tinsley gave a short eulogy. Fido
had been a brave and indeed a faithful turtle, he said, who had made the long and perilous journey from California in order to serve as a guardian for his two sister-owners. Once he’d gotten
them safely to Virginia, Fido’s job was over, and he felt free to leave them for that secret island in the middle of the ocean that is turtle heaven.
    The eulogy made me feel a lot better about both Fido and Uncle Tinsley. On the way back down the hill, I asked about the goldfish we’d found in the pond. “The fish
are koi,” Uncle Tinsley said. “That was Mother’s garden. One of the finest private gardens in all of Virginia, back in the day. Mother won prizes for it. She was the envy of every
lady in the garden club.”
    We swung around the barn and the big white house came into view. I started telling Uncle Tinsley about my house dream and how, when we first arrived at Mayfield, I realized it was the actual
house in the dream.
    Uncle Tinsley became thoughtful. He rested the shovel against an old water trough in front of the barn. “I guess you’d better see the inside of the house, then,” he said.
“Just to make sure.”
    We followed Uncle Tinsley up the big porch steps. He took a deep breath and opened the door.
    The front hall was large and dark, with a lot of wooden cabinets that had glass doors. Everything was a mess. Newspapers, magazines, books, and mail were stacked high on the tables and the
floor, alongside boxes of rocks and bottles filled with dirt and sand and liquids.
    “It may look a tad cluttered,” he said, “but that’s because I’m in the middle of reorganizing everything.”
    “It’s not so bad,” Liz said. “It just needs a little tidying up.”
    “We can help,” I said.
    “Oh, no. Everything’s under control. Everything has its place, and I know where everything is.”
    Uncle Tinsley showed us the parlor, the dining room, and the ballroom. Oil paintings hung crooked on the walls and a few were falling out of their frames. The Persian carpets were worn and
frayed, the silk curtains were faded and torn, and the stained wallpaper was peeling away from the walls. A grand piano covered with a dark green velvet cloth stood in the big ballroom with the
French doors. There was all this stuff piled on every available surface—more stacks of paper and notebooks, antique binoculars, pendulum clocks, rolled-up maps, stacks of chipped china, old
pistols, ships in bottles, statues of rearing horses, framed photographs, and all these little wooden boxes, one filled with coins, another with buttons, another with old medals. Everything was
coated with a thick layer of dust.
    “There sure is a ton of stuff in here,” I said.
    “Yes, but every single thing you see has value,” Uncle Tinsley said. “If you have the brains to appreciate it.”
    He led us up a curving staircase and down a long hall. At the end of the hall, he stopped in front of a pair of doors that faced each other. Both had brass door knockers shaped like birds.
“This is the bird wing,” Uncle Tinsley told us. “This is where you’ll stay. Until your mother comes to pick you up.”
    “We’re not sleeping in the barn anymore?” I asked.
    “Not without Fido there to protect you.”
    Uncle Tinsley opened the doors. We each had our own room, he told us. Both were wallpapered with bird motifs—common birds, like robins and cardinals, and exotic birds, like cockatiels and
flamingos. The bird wing, he explained, had been designed for his twin aunts, who were little girls when the house was built. They