“Back then, sure,” said Betty. “But not for a long time. We got a little grant from the state to help with the restoration. We just had to agree to put it on the Christmas house tour when we were finished.”
Jake looked around. There was nothing he’d seen since coming inside that merited the word “restoration.”
“That sounds fun!”
Sylvia made an unhappy noise.
Betty said, “Sure, a hundred strangers stomping through your rooms, trailing snow. But we took the money, so we kept up our side of the bargain. Lot of people around West Rutland were dying to see the inside of this house, and that was nothing to do with the work we’d done. People knew this house their whole lives. And the family.”
Sylvia said, “That family had the worst luck.”
There it was again, that phrase, only by now it didn’t strike Jake as all that surprising. By now he had the relevant information: all four of them had died, Evan Parker and his sister and their parents, three of the four of them under this very roof. He supposed they were collectively deserving of the term “worst luck.”
“I didn’t know he’d died, till recently,” said Jake. “Actually, I still don’t know how.”
“Overdose,” Sylvia said.
“Oh no. I didn’t know he had that problem.”
“Nobody did. Or at least that he still had the problem.”
“I shouldn’t say this,” said Betty, “but my sister was in a certain anonymous group with Evan Parker. It met in the basement of the Lutheran church in Rutland. And he was a longtime member of that group, if you take my meaning.” She paused. “Lot of very shocked people.”
“He was in trouble with his business, we heard,” said Sylvia with a shrug. “That kind of pressure, it’s probably not surprising he picked up again. And owning a bar when you’re sober, that couldn’t have been fun.”
“People do it, though,” Betty said. “He managed it for years. Then I guess he stopped managing.”
“Ayuh.”
No one said anything for a moment.
“So you bought the house from Evan’s estate?”
“Not exactly. He had no will, but his sister, the one who’d died earlier, she had a kid. Her kid was the heir. Not the sentimental type, that one.”
“Oh no?” Jake said.
“She must’ve waited all of a week after her uncle died to put it on the market. The shape the place was in.” Sylvia shook her head. “If it hadn’t been for this one, nobody’d have come near it. Fortunately for her, Betty always loved this place.”
“I used to think it was haunted, when I was a little kid,” Betty confirmed.
“We made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.” Sylvia got up to lift another cat off the kitchen counter. “Or I guess we did. We never met her in person. Just dealt with the attorney.”
“That was no cakewalk,” said Betty. “He was supposed to get all the crap down in the basement cleared out.”
“And the attic. And half the rooms had stuff in them. I don’t know how many times we wrote to that joker, Gaylord.”
“Gaylord,
“That guy,” said Sylvia, grinning. “He put that Esquire on everything. Like, we get it. You went to law school. Insecure much?”
“Finally we told him we were having it all sent to the dump if she didn’t come and take it away. No answer! So that’s what we did.”
“Wait, so you just threw everything out?”
He had allowed himself to imagine, for one tantalizing moment, that there was a box of Evan Parker’s manuscript pages, still somewhere beneath this roof. But that was quickly dashed.
“We kept the old bed. Beautiful four-poster. Probably couldn’t have gotten it out if we wanted to.”
“Which we didn’t!” Betty said with satisfaction.
“And there were a couple of nice rugs we sent out to get cleaned. Probably for the first time in a century. The rest, we got in a hauler and sent the bill to Mr. Gaylord,
“I mean, if my family had a house for a hundred and fifty years I’d be going through every inch of it. Even if she didn’t care about, y’know, the ‘antiques,’ you’d think she’d want her own things. Everything you grew up with? Just throw it all away, sight unseen?”
“Wait,” said Jake. “The niece grew up here too? In this house?”
He was trying to understand the order of events, but it all seemed to resist him, somehow. Evan’s parents had lived and died here, and then his sister had lived here and raised her own daughter here, and then, after his sister died and his niece departed—
He thanked them. He had them write down their address for the signed book. “Should I send one for your sister, too?”
“Are you shitting me? Yes!”
They were behind him when he walked back down the hall, toward the front door. He stopped to put his coat back on. Then he looked up.
