“Would you look at this?” Colt remarked to Francie, who was sitting half in and half out of the car, trying without much luck to raise various preset stations on the radio. One slender leg extended from the car, the other resting inside. Her reddish blond hair was pulled into a ponytail, revealing the freckles that were scattered like snow across her usually concealed forehead, and the back of her neck. She noted with delight that they were out of the city’s broadcasting range.
The Good Neighbor 29
“Someone didn’t want to sell this place,” Colt said.
“What makes you say that?” Francie asked, without much in terest. She usually only half heard things Colt said until he had re peated them two or three times; it was a reflex she’d developed some years ago, after noticing that he rarely remembered what she said to him, or, for that matter, what he himself said to any one.
Colt cocked a hip impatiently. “Well, look,” he said. “They hid this sign under the leaves.”
Francie looked, paying attention now. “If someone really wanted to hide it they would have thrown it away,” she said. “Probably it just fell over and got covered up.”
This being the likeliest scenario, Colt decided she was wrong; he decided furthermore that it was evidence of some kind of plot. He would investigate later. For now, he considered wandering be hind the house to explore the backyard again, but he didn’t want to miss the agent when she finally pulled up, because he wanted to give her a good dose of the Eye of Doom, which was one of his most effective business techniques. It was the look he used when he had fixed on making a deal, no matter what the body count. The agent’s name was Marge Westerbrook, and after their initial chat on the phone, Colt thought he had her number pretty well: divorced, raising one child on her own, lonely. One of those women who pretended real estate was an actual career. It wasn’t that he was psychic. It was that Marge Westerbrook felt obliged to tell everyone her personal details over the phone, before she’d even met them. This was a habit Colt despised—people talking too much about themselves.
“She’s fucking late,” he snarled for the third time.
Francie sighed. It had been her hope that exposure to the coun try air would teach Coltrane how not to be in a hurry all the time. She could see now that this would take longer than a few minutes. “Do you still like it here?” she asked him, hoping to distract
him from his own impatience. “The house, I mean?”
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OWALSKI
He paused, lifting his head, smelling the air like an animal. “Sure,” he said. “Kind of place I always wanted.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.” Colt got back in the driver ’s seat, sniffed again, and let loose with a sneeze that rocked the car.
“Jesus,” he gasped. “I wonder if I’m allergic to something.” “I didn’t know that about you,” she said.
“I’ve never been around these many damn plants before,” he said, looking in the glove compartment for a tissue. “Plants every where you look. It’s like they’re invading or something.”
“No, I mean about the house. I didn’t know you
always
wanted a place like this.”
“Oh, that.” He found one and blew his nose. “Yeah. Always thought, you know, when I was a kid, I’d have a country place someday. Everyone who’s anyone has one. Forszak has one, re member? Good idea. Somewhere to get away to.”
She wanted to ask him,
But do you love it? Or do you just want it because of Forszak?
But questions along these lines irritated him be cause they were analytical, and she had no right to be analyzing anybody. Instead, she got out of the car and leaned on the roof, looking across the road where the river lay hidden from view be low the embankment. Instantly she felt better about everything, even the dwindling number of things in her life that had nothing wrong with them. You could be invisible over there, she thought. You could be down there soaking your feet in the water and no one would be able to see you. Not a soul.
“Here she comes,” said Francie.
She had spied a yellow Volkswagen, one of the new models, raising dust as it came around the bluff. Colt got out of the car and slammed the door.
“Half an hour she made us sit here,” he said. “Could of called.
She has my cell number.”
“Colt, please,” said Francie. “Be kind.” “Good Lord, she drives a bug,” said Colt.
The Good Neighbor 31
The Volkswagen scrabbled to a halt in the gravel driveway. A large, florid woman got out, already trilling at them before she closed her door. She had red hair, wore a flowery-yellow printed top with black slacks, and in the crook of one arm she cradled a clipboard to her oversized bosom as though it was a nursing child. “Helloo!” she called. “I’m so sorry, my son wouldn’t change his shirt, I just . . .oh, teenagers. Hello there, sir, are you Mr. Hart?”
“Hello,” Colt said, shaking her hand. The Eye of Doom, he felt, had gone unnoticed, but he had only loaded one shot; he didn’t re ally feel like causing trouble today. He would save that for negoti ating. Marge Westerbrook shook Francie’s hand by the fingertips and called her Fanny.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Francie. “We’re so glad you could come out.”
“Oh, my goodness,” gasped Marge Westerbrook, “this is my
pleasure
, this is my
job
, and all the way from New York you are, too. Oh, my. I am late, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” said Colt.
“It’s really okay,” said Francie quickly. “We’ve got the day off.
Colt does, I mean.”
“Oh, how nice!” said Marge. “And what do you do, Mr. Hart?” “Finance.”
“Oh, my, New York City
and
finance! How interesting. Listen, let’s go in, shall we?” She lowered her voice and leaned in toward Francie. “And we’ll just leave him out here, until he changes his at titude,” she said.
For one uplifting moment, Francie thought she meant Colt, un til she looked in the Volkswagen and realized there was a giant, sullen teenager lurking there, so hunched over that despite his size he was practically hidden by the dashboard. The teenager perked his head up, sensing he was being discussed, and then ducked again when the stares of two strangers confirmed it. Francie caught a luridly red flash of acne splashed across his cheeks like buckshot. Instantly she felt sorry for him; her cheeks had looked
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OWALSKI
like that once, when she was young, and she remembered all too well how much easier it was to stay hidden.
“Oh, he doesn’t have to,” she said. “He can come in, too, I mean. Don’t keep him out here on our account.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” said Marge, her voice suddenly tight as a jib. Whatever the teenager had done, he’d sinned mightily, that much was clear. “I’ve got the keys right here. Mr. Hart, would you do the honors, please?” She handed him a key. “The door sticks,” she explained. “You’ll probably have to put your shoulder into it.”
Colt mounted the steps, inserted the key, “put his shoulder into it” three or four times, and the ancient, heavy door swung open.
“Needs to be planed,” he muttered.
He became aware that the house was breathing on him open- mouthed, exhaling the taste of unknown years of emptiness. It was a bitter fragrance, not unpleasant, and it reminded him of something too deep to retrieve at the moment. He stepped down the house’s throat, a long foyer that led into a central room. The two women came along behind him as he paused for a moment, uncertain, and then strode forward, a willing Jonah now. He was already trying to imagine himself living here.
“The For Sale sign was hidden under some leaves,” he told Marge Westerbrook over his shoulder.
“Kids,” said Marge, though she didn’t say which kids; possibly she meant her own, thought Francie.
Marge crossed the room to a massive fieldstone fireplace and lay one plump hand on the mantel, which was a single slab of rock nearly six feet in length and about four inches thick. The fireplace opened on the back to an opposite room; apparently it was meant to provide heat to both areas. Its grate was clean, Francie noticed. No one had had fires here for a long time.
“Now, this is the living room, or one of them, I should say. You can see the other through there, plus there’s an upstairs parlor. This house has nearly ten thousand square feet in all.” Marge paused and bowed her head, as if such a place deserved her rever
The Good Neighbor 33
ence. “Four bathrooms, six bedrooms, a study
and
a den, a beauti ful dining room, pantry, servant’s quarters on every floor, a games room, an unfinished basement, an unfinished attic, a kitchen you’ll have to
see to believe
. And the property itself is almost fifty acres.”
Francie gasped. “Fifty acres! Colt, did you hear that?”
Colt had only half heard. He was scanning the beams in the ceil ing and corners of the living room as he listened. For an old house, the room was high. He was exactly six feet tall, and yet if he reached upward he could barely brush the ceiling with his fingers. He ran his hands over a corner beam and felt the long scallops in the wood that told him it had been shaped by hand. Colt had once had a client who was a collector of wooden antiques, and she’d taught him, or tried to teach him, some of the basic distinctions to be made when dealing with objects of wood; he was astonished to discover, ten years later, that he’d learned something.
“This is real,” he said, more to himself than the other two.
“All original beamwork,” said Marge Westerbrook proudly, as if she was responsible for it. “Well preserved, no dry rot, no termites. The place has really been looked after nicely. It’s a
real find
. You people have excellent taste!” She led them into the kitchen, their feet echoing on the floorboards until they came across slate tiles the color of angry November. Francie cooed; Colt stomped experi mentally, to see if anything came loose; Marge elaborated on the need for plumbing repairs, no sense in being deceitful, she didn’t believe in doing business that way—the place would need
work
. The last improvements were completed (here she consulted her clipboard) in the mid-1970s. She turned on the tap over the sink, and all three attended to a rush of air, like the hiss of radio signals from a distant star. After a moment it was replaced by a low, gur gling note, the pitch changing as the source of it approached at rapid speed from somewhere below their feet. They were re warded with a gout of brown water that smelled briefly of pond. Then, as if by magic, it ran clear.
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OWALSKI
“You have well water!” cried Marge Westerbrook, making Fran cie jump. They each held their hand under the stream for a mo ment, allowing it to impart its subterranean chill to their finger bones. Colt tasted it, cautious. It was sweet and clean, slightly chalky. There was none of the metallic, chemical flavor of city wa ter, no chlorine, no fluoride. No one had touched this water before him, no government official had approved it as fit for his consump tion. There had never been a liquid like this in his life before. He swirled it over his tongue like a vintage wine, closed his eyes, and thought of cave fish, stalactites, stalagmites. They had well water. Marge led them triumphantly through the rest of the house: the master bedroom, spacious and bright; the guest bedrooms, small, numerous, and dim; the parlor, impossibly oak-paneled, as was the den; the bathrooms, which were merely bathrooms. They even went to the attic, a warm, rustic space, floored with un planed boards. Light flooded through the bull’s-eye windows at ei ther end in surprising quantity. In one corner, a plastic tarp had been draped over a pile of something. Pulling this back, Francie found a stack of cardboard boxes. Opening one, she found comic books, mostly of the sci-fi variety from the 1950s and ’60s. Francie gave a coo of delight; she wouldn’t be surprised if some of them turned out to be collector ’s items, provided they hadn’t mildewed. There was also an aged steamer trunk, the kind she had seen on
Antiques Roadshow
many a time. She pulled up the fragile domed lid and saw that it was empty. She tried, with her poet’s mind, to imagine what kind of person had owned this trunk, and from where they had come with it, and why. Or perhaps it had been purchased for a journey that was never taken, and that was why it was still here, empty. You looked at a trunk and you thought these things, because a trunk meant traveling and dream ing, she thought. It smelled of cedar, as every good trunk should, and was lined in peeling paper, printed in a pattern not unlike
Marge Westerbrook’s blouse.
Francie looked quickly at Colt and Marge, who were at the
The Good Neighbor 35
other end of the long attic, talking about something. Unobserved, she grabbed a random comic book and stuck it in the waistband of her jeans, under her shirt. Then she closed the lid of the trunk and replaced the tarp. If they bought the house, the trunk and books would be theirs, and it wouldn’t be stealing. She didn’t intend to keep it, anyway—she was just going to take it to her friend Wal ter, who owned a used-book store in the city, and was an expert on everything that was printed, from Superman to Shakespeare. He would know what, if anything, they were worth. She pulled her shirt out of her jeans to hide it, and then it was time to go downstairs again.
They had already decided, back in the city, that if they liked the place they would put in an offer right away. They had never dis cussed
why
they wanted it; they just did, and in the elation of fi nally agreeing on something, they did not examine the matter any further. Also, Colt believed they would get a deal, which in his mind was reason enough to buy it. Who knew how long the place had been empty? Years. Whoever owned it would probably be desperate to sell. It was off the beaten path, far from conve niences, the perfect country retreat. Few, if any, interested buyers would have simply happened by, as they had.
Francie would leave that part of it to him; he was the master deal-maker, the negotiator, the man who could cause publicly held companies to flourish or wither on the vine with a single phone call. Colt arched his eyebrows at her inquiringly, and she nodded back decisively, trying not to giggle at her own seriousness. Marge Westerbrook, expert at detecting these types of exchanges, pre tended to study the floor.