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DONNIE LOOKED AT ME, as if to say, “It’s your show.”
“Me? Right. Davison, your father and I might have an opportunity to buy the Brewster House and move in after we get married.”
“Aw, no!” Davison’s voice held a note of genuine panic. “The Brewster House? Where da kine, your friend, just died, yeah?”
“Yes. It was very sad. But I don’t think we should let our entire—”
“Cannot live there, Aunty, I mean Molly. Ugh! Get chicken skin just thinking about it.”
“I’m sure most old houses have seen some tragedy,” I said. “Enough people live there over enough generations, eventually something bad will happen.”
“But Aunty, Molly, Brewster House is haunted. Everybody knows that.”
“It’s not actually haunted. It just looks that way because of when it was built. The toys from the Victorian era look possessed too. Have you ever seen those dolls with the china heads? Anyway, there is one truly scary thing. Mrs. Masterman told me the Brewster House is in a tsunami zone. She thinks it’ll be impossible to get a traditional mortgage.”
“Maybe all of this bad news will push the price down,” Donnie said.
“That’s how come da kine, your friend, wen’ jump,” Davison insisted. “Was the keiki.”
“The what? The child?”
“Ai! Obake, but. Not one real keiki!”
“Davison,” Donnie interrupted, “speak English.”
Oblivious as he was to Davison’s numerous faults, Donnie wouldn’t tolerate Davison slipping into Pidgin in my presence. It didn’t bother me. I had no problem asking for clarification if I didn’t understand something. But Donnie didn’t like it for some reason, and come to think of it, I had never once heard Donnie speaking Pidgin.
“A ghost child?” I asked Davison. “What are you talking about?”
“Sometimes can hear her crying inside the house. All scary kine too, not like one regular baby. Gets you to follow her up the stairs, then makes you jump down an’ you die. Wahine see one cute baby, cannot resist. Ho, Molly. You get da kine try make you buy the house, ah?”
“Are you saying I’m being lured into this home purchase by a ghost?”
“Dad, you gotta stop her. You both gonna end up like da kine, the girl that wen’ jump.”
“Davison,” Donnie said, “Fontanne Masterman has lived in the Brewster House for decades, and nothing bad has happened to her.”
“Her husband died,” Davison said.
“Doc Masterman was ninety-four years old.”
“So you wouldn’t feel comfortable living there, Davison?” I asked.
“No way. Eh, Molly, come stay here. You go in the big bedroom wit’ Dad, my room right down the hallway. No need get one new hale.”
“English!” Donnie muttered through clenched teeth.
“We’ll figure something out,” I said.
Despite being situated in both a flood zone and a lava zone, the scene of a gruesome tragedy, and—as I had just learned—probably haunted, the Brewster House now seemed more appealing than ever. I drove home in a sunny mood, picturing Donnie and me as newlyweds setting up our new life together in the Brewster House. If Davison was afraid to visit us there, that was his problem.
My house phone started ringing as I was unlocking the door. I managed to get inside and grab the receiver before the caller hung up. It was Leilani Zelenko, my real estate agent.
You might have seen Leilani’s color newspaper ads, featuring a soft-focus photo of a beaming Leilani, a flowery lei po`o atop her cascading strawberry blond hair.
Unlike the serene island princess depicted in the Zelenko Realty ads, the real-life Leilani Zelenko was a whirlwind of disorganization. File folders were jumbled on the shelves of her office in no discernible order. Loose papers lay scattered around her desk where they had fallen, like soldiers at Antietam. Leilani’s convertible Le Baron was piled with suit jackets on hangers, old takeout containers, bags of candy, and even more papers and folders. The wind would seize the occasional burger wrapper or disclosure form and blow it out of the car with a disconcerting foomp as Leilani careened down the island’s narrow thoroughfares.
And yet, the chaotic Leilani Zelenko was one of the top real estate agents on the island. She knew how to work with appraisers, mortgage brokers, and escrow companies to get transactions to proceed smoothly. Her stated philosophy was “follow rules when you can, bend rules when you must.” The secret to working with Leilani was to tell her what I wanted and then avert my eyes and hope for the best.
“Aha!” Leilani proclaimed, at a volume that made me jerk the phone away from my ear, “At last you are at home. Okay, I have three listings you must hear.”
Between her Ukrainian accent and the fact she was eating something, I could barely understand her. I was about to apologize for bothering her in the middle of dinner, but then I remembered she was the one who had called me.
“Hi, Leilani, what’s going on?”
“I find you three. Two houses in price range, and one above, just little bit, we look anyway.”
“I appreciate your looking for alternatives, Leilani, but the Brewster House is the one I really want.”
“Ah, but maybe you change your mind about that. After this death of your friend, very bad. I drive you around, you see other options. Is just to look, Maw-ly.”
“I’ve seen what’s out there. Unless you have another pocket listing, there’s nothing else I’m interested in.”
I decided not to tell her about my arrest. Leilani was the only agent who had access to the unlisted Brewster House, and I didn’t want to alarm her into dropping me as a client. She would read about it in the paper anyway, if the news didn’t get to her from the coconut wireless first.
“But Brewster House is bad house and will also be very hard times to get financing.”
“I know. Mrs. Masterman told me. It’s in a tsunami zone and a lava hazard zone.”
“There is something else.”
“Termite damage?”
“A little, but not serious. The flying termites. Not ground termites.”
“Well, I already know there was a death on the property,” I said. “You’re not going to tell me the house is haunted, are you?”
“Ah. So you know?”
I pulled my shoulder up to brace the receiver against my ear while I poured myself a glass of wine.
“I heard it from an unreliable source,” I said. “Is there anything else?”
“Coqui frogs. Not in the daytime, when you have been there, but they are very loud at night. We have to disclose about coquis.”
“I know about coqui frogs. I have them here at my place. I’m used to them. So that’s it? Tsunami zone, lava hazard zone, coqui frogs, ghosts—”
“And several notorious deaths on property,” she said.
“Did you say several deaths? I just know about Melanie’s. There are more?”
“Of course there are deaths in Brewster house,” Leilani snorted. “How you think Brewster House is haunted to begin with?”