Crooked House (2 page)

They were standing on a
flagstone drive, looking at the craziest house Robert had ever seen. It was enormous. He’d stayed in hotels smaller than this place. But he answered himself with the same mental breath: Yeah, but never one this weird. It was shaped like the letter L, but the post and the leg of the L looked like two different houses that had been smashed together.

Weird.

The part he took to be the main portion of the house, the part where most of the family time got done, was actually the smaller of the two legs. It was two stories high, the façade a pale, earthen brown with regularly spaced double windows bracketed by dark brown wooden shutters. Ivy climbed the walls, threading between the windows like varicose veins, twisting and twining around the shutters. Nearer to the ground, purple sage, lavender and rosemary hugged the walls.

It was simple, even elegantly so, and it wasn’t unattractive
. Except that the other leg of the house was a classically-inspired Mediterranean villa, complete with white adobe walls and a flaming red tile roof. The east-facing wall of that leg was awash in greenery, fatsia and oleander, pomegranate and toadflax.

Weird
.

But again, it wasn’t an unattractive house.

Intrigued, he walked closer. He stopped at the base of the front steps to look up at the house. Ever so slowly, the delighted smile faded from his face. From this angle, the house’s aspect seemed to change. There was a darkness about it, a brooding look emanating from its windows. It loomed above him, ominous and cold, and it looked…the first word that came to mind was deathly, but that wasn’t it. Something was definitely off about the place, though. Looking up at the house he felt disquiet and an odd but nebulous feeling of alarm. What had Poe written of the House of Usher, that it brought forth an insufferable gloom? Perhaps that was it. One could usually count on Poe to get such things exactly right.

And yet, he sensed that
wasn’t right. It was hard to know for sure, the whole of it was just so –

Crooked.

Yes, that was it. The house, from this angle at least, looking up at it, its pediments jutting overhead like the prow of a battleship as seen from the waterline, was crooked.

Just a hair, maybe, but definitely crooked.

And the more he looked at it, the woozier he felt, like a first time sailor. He wanted to look away, to relieve the pitching feeling in his gut, but he couldn’t. Without realizing it, he groaned.

“Hey, you okay?” Thom asked
. “Did you hear me?”

Robert turned, his mouth hanging open
a little. “Huh?”

“You okay?”

Robert nodded.

“Did you hear what I said?”

Robert shook his head. “I’m sorry. I got – ” He looked up at the house. “No, I’m sorry, I…I didn’t.”

Thom grinned
. “Don’t worry about it. This place gets a lot of people that way. I was saying that we’re not buying this for you. Not exactly anyway. Might as well be though.”

Robert waited for him to say more
. That woozy feeling was just starting to leave him.

“You’re gonna be an adjunct, so I can’t make a house part of the job offer
. Maybe, when you get tenure, we can change that. But for now, I’m doing the next best thing.”

Robert shook his head
. He was still a little out of it, not following the conversation.

“This house is managed under the auspices of
Lightner’s English Department.” He offered Robert a wide grin and a slight nod. “Of which I’m the chair. That’s done in lieu of the Gertrude Millard Estate, of course – they’re the owners – but what it all boils down to is that I get to decide who lives here and how much they have to pay to do it. You get what I’m telling you, Robert?”

“Uh, I think so.”

“You and Sarah and Angela, you can live here, while you get back on your feet, for…Oh, I don’t know, a hundred dollars a month. That sound fair?”

“A hundred dollars
? For this?”

Thom nodded.

“What’s the catch?”

“There’s no catch, Robert
. Just a friend offering a helping hand.”

“Oh my God,” Robert said
. His composure had returned, and with it, his sense of humor. “This is totally a haunted house, isn’t it?”

“Excuse me?”

“You see that, right? Tell me you do. It’s a big, crazy looking house that I couldn’t possibly afford, but it’s getting handed to me at a song. I mean come on. I’ve read my Henry James, my Shirley Jackson. Christ, I even read
The Shining
. This place is crawling with ghosts, isn’t it?”

“Nice,” Thom said
. He offered Robert an uncharacteristically impatient smile, like he was suddenly eager to be done with all this. “You know what I say?”

“What?”

“You call it a haunted house, I call it fourteen bedrooms and a conservatory for less than you’d pay for government housing. It doesn’t get any better than this. Seriously, I mean that. All kidding aside. You need to step back and evaluate your options. It doesn’t get any better than this. It
won’t
get any better than this.”

The smile
slid off Robert’s face. “Fourteen bedrooms?”

Thom nodded.
“And a conservatory. Among other nifty little features. Now am I right, or am I right?”

“Ye
ah,” Robert said. He looked back up at the house. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

*

Thom threw open the front doors and stood to one side. “Go on,” he said. “Check it out.”

The lights were of
f, but it was still bright enough for him to get a sense of the grandeur of the place. He looked back and saw Thom fiddling with the light switch, flickering it up and down, looking in consternation at the large, teardrop-shaped chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with this thing,” he said
. “Oh, there it goes. Well, don’t worry about that.”

Robert barely heard him
. With the lights on, the place was transformed. Robert had thought he got a feel for it with the lights off, but now he saw how wrong he’d been. The place was enormous from the outside, an imposing mash-up of architectural styles, but from the inside, it was a palace, as finely wrought as anything he’d seen in magazines or history books.

He was
standing in a room the size of a baseball diamond’s infield. It went all the way to the back of the house, where a hallway led off to other rooms he couldn’t see. But the fact that there was more to this place than this entranceway didn’t really register, because the entranceway was cavernous. The ceiling was two stories high. In the center of the room, beneath a tear drop-shaped wrought iron globe chandelier, was a delicate mahogany champagne table topped with a stone vase, and inside that, a bouquet of white lilies. Very breakable-looking side tables were spaced along the walls, bracketed by high backed chairs on spindly little legs of finely carved hardwood. The floor was a black and white diamond-shaped marble checkerboard, and his footsteps echoed around the room as he walked. But even the echoing click of his footfalls failed to pull his eye away from the twin staircases that wound up both the east and west walls of the room. They curved toward a wide landing that commanded a view of the floor below, embracing the entranceway like a man hugging a barrel.

Robert had read enough Southern literature to recognize the layout
. This was not the kind of furniture one kicked one’s feet up on and read a good book. An entranceway like this was rarely used by the family. They were, instead, used as the reception area for large parties and formal visitors. And the landing up there, that’s where the lady of the house would appear, and glide down the stairs like Scarlet O’Hara in giant hoop skirts to the appreciative “ohs” and “ahs” of high society.

“Christ,” Robert said, “
all I need is some cow shit to step in.”

“Huh?” Thom said.

“From Faulkner’s
Barn Burning
, remember? The father comes into the mansion with cow shit on his shoes and pivots around the entranceway, smearing it everywhere. That’s kind of what I feel like right now. I’m the guy with shit on his shoes.”

“Robert, come on.”

“No, Thom. I can’t afford this place.”

“You can’t afford a hundred dollars a month?”

“It’s not just a hundred dollars a month. It’s the electricity, and the water, and the gas. The garbage, the phone, the upkeep, all of it. It’s all the little things. Add them all together and it probably equals more than I’m paying on the mortgage I can’t afford right now. And did you see that lawn? What is that, like eight acres?”

“Twelve, actually.”

“Twelve,” Robert said. He shrugged helplessly. “Thom, I don’t even own a lawnmower. Seriously, I pay some kid from down the block twenty bucks every two weeks to do my lawn. He does the whole thing with a weed eater. It takes him like twenty minutes. What am I gonna do with twelve acres?”

“Stop worrying, Robert
. I told you. I’ve got this figured out for you. Everything’s covered. As part of our agreement with the Millard Estate, Lightner University is responsible for all expenses and upkeep on the house. That means everything. The utilities, the lawn service, even a maid service.”

“Really
? A maid service?”

Thom nodded, smiling
. “Yeah. And that switch over there, I’ll have Facility Services come out and fix it first thing tomorrow morning. It’ll work like a charm when you guys move in.”

Robert was speechless
. All he could manage was a grunt of mystified satisfaction.

“Come on,” Thom said
. “Let’s see the rest of the house.”

“The rest of it?”

“Oh yeah, this place is great. And like I told you in the car, I saved the best for last.”

*

They explored the first floor, Robert falling silent as they went through the master suite, the bathrooms, a conservatory, a family room, a kitchen that was going to send Sarah over the moon with pleasure, a covered balcony, a laundry room with a brand-new washer and dryer set. It was just incredible. And there was a ballroom, and leading off of that, a library.

They paused there, in the library
.

“Parties would have started in there
, I guess,” Thom said, pointing to the ballroom. “And then, afterwards, the men would come in here for cigars and drinks.”

“Just like in the movies, huh?”

“Looks like the kind of place that’d be in the movies, doesn’t it?”

Robert wandered
around the library. Windows along the south wall looked out on the flagstone drive, where Thom’s shiny black Lincoln waited next to an elaborate stone fountain. The painted walls and the sofa and the chairs were of a light, muted palette that reminded him of the sand from Cape Cod. There was a settled look about the furnishings and the window dressings that seemed to imply they’d been there a long while, yet the tones and ample light felt like more modern touches. “It’s perfect,” he said, studying a side table of stone-bleached antique wood.

“I’m glad you like it, because that’s the one stipulation about living here
. You can’t make any changes.  None. The Gertrude Millard Estate wants it left exactly like it was when James Crook built it, or rebuilt it, rather.”

“Yeah, you mentioned him in the car
. This place is called Crook House, right?” Robert chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a house that had a name before.”

“I can’t imagine it’d be that hard getting used to.”

Robert laughed. “No, I guess not.” He crossed to the bookshelves along the west wall. “Hey, you said he rebuilt it. What’d you mean by that?”

“It burned down sometime in the late
‘20s. Half of it did, anyway.”

“Which half?”

“The east wing, I think. That’s where most of the bedrooms are.”

“Ah.
” Robert studied the shelves, nodding to himself. The titles were all popular novels and biographies, nice hardbacks, a mix of writers, some accomplished, some overrated. So apparently the Gertrude Millard Estate’s injunction against making changes didn’t extend to the books on the shelf. That was good, because he had quite a few he’d want to replace from his own library.

“What do you think?” Thom asked.

“Nice.”

“Ha!
This is just the house library. It’s meant for entertaining, not for working. You ready for the real surprise?”

“You mean there’s more?
”

“
Oh God yes!  Come with me. Let’s go upstairs.”

Intrigued, Robert followed him
. They passed through the entranceway and climbed the west stairs. Robert stopped midway to inspect a framed print of some ancient Chinese drummer, complete with a broad, upside-down bowl-shaped hat. “Nice,” Robert said sarcastically.