She was waiting in front of the house on Channel Drive when the phone rang. She wouldn’t have picked up, but her clients were late and she’d finished her newspaper.
“Paula? It’s Mom.”
“I know it is. What’s up?”
“Nothing’s up, why does something have to be up? What are you doing?”
“Sitting in the car, waiting to show a client a house.”
“How’s Danny? Is he out of school yet?”
“Another few weeks. The girls are fine, too, thanks for asking.”
“Oh, stop it, I was just about to ask about them. I don’t play favorites with my grandchildren.”
“What’s Danny’s birthday?”
“March fourteenth.”
“What’s the girls’ birthday?”
“Please. You think I don’t know?”
“What is it?”
“September third.”
“It’s September fifth.”
“Like I’ve ever missed one in twelve years. Anyway, I did want to tell you something exciting. It seems Kyle’s finally met a girl.”
“Seems to me he knows plenty of girls.”
“I mean someone he’s interested in. He told me.”
“Kyle’s messing with you, Mom.”
“You think you know everything about everyone, Paula. Why don’t you think she could be a girlfriend?”
“What makes you think she could be a girlfriend?”
“Well, they work together at the school, and it sure does sound like they’re spending a lot of time together. Her name is Rebecca.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe he’ll marry her and Wayne can finally move out.”
“Mom, you know Wayne and Kyle own that house together, right?”
“Well, Kyle could buy him out. Or the other way around. Maybe she could introduce Wayne to a girl.”
“You know, Mom, some days I have the patience to humor you and some days I don’t.”
“Humor me? Please.”
“Kyle and Wayne have been roommates since grad school. Kyle turned forty-two last year. They own real estate jointly. Neither of them has ever had a girlfriend. They have mailing labels with both their names on them.”
“You’re disgusting, trying to turn their friendship into something ugly.”
“It’s not ugly, Mom, it’s perfectly normal.”
“Paula, if your brother were homosexual, I’m sure he would have told me years ago. At least after your father died.”
“Okay, Mom, let’s move on.”
“Do you think it runs in families?”
“I don’t know.”
“You never met my uncle Chet. Grandpa’s little brother.”
“The one who got run over?”
“Hit by a streetcar. In San Francisco, if you get my meaning.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I think you do. He was a florist. And he moved from Ohio to San Francisco. And after he was killed by the streetcar, there was just a memorial service. No mass.”
“Okay. I’d say the preponderance of evidence points to him being gay. Not an easy thing for someone in his generation.”
“So if it were true, not just about Chet, but your brother, too?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Would that make it likely that Danny might be also?”
“Danny? I promise you have nothing to worry about on that score.”
“Because it’s a terrible sin, Paula.”
“Okay, listen, Mom, I gotta go, my clients just pulled up. Love you.”
She hung up, the clients nowhere in sight. Every year or two, her mother came up with an imaginary girlfriend for her brother in the nebulous vein of this Rebecca. Now that she was getting on, these fantasies were popping up more frequently.
The funny part of it was that her mother could be a very astute judge of character. When she’d first brought Rigby home, her father and everyone else in the family thought he was a swell fellow, but her mother had seen something dodgy about him right away. And now, after twenty years of marital osmosis, there was something dodgy about Paula, too.
The old girl was wrong to worry about Danny, who took after his father. A couple of months earlier, after she and Rigby and the girls had spent the weekend in San Diego without him, she’d come across a condom and a pair of panties in his bedsheets, the former item coming as a relief.
And now the nine o’clock clients pulled up in front of her. They were relocating from Indianapolis for the wife’s new job in Santa Monica, an hour and a half south of town on the best of days, which were rare. When she and Rigby had first arrived, the idea of Ventura as a bedroom community for Angelenos was still met with resistant disbelief; these days, though, it was considered an acceptable commute from west LA.
So far, they hadn’t liked anything. She didn’t expect them to like this one either, a classic 1920s bungalow, stucco with a detached garage and a decent-sized backyard, but something clicked with them as soon as they pulled up in front of it. The husband, normally silent to the point of sullenness, kept asking his wife what she thought, while she kept oohing and aahing over features that Paula had shown them in half a dozen other, better houses. Maybe it was the fact that the house, unoccupied for over two years, was completely empty, the client having ignored his realtor’s suggestion that they hire a staging company to give a sense of what the house would look like occupied. The unfortunate realtor was a friend of Paula’s, and she only brought the Handys over as a favor to said friend, who had begun to despair of ever unloading the property.
“The price is all right,” Becki Handy said.
“They’d probably go down a little bit. It’s been on the market for a while.”
Shane Handy shook his disproportionately large head. He had a very black, very pointed chin beard that contrasted with the sweaty alabaster of his face. “We’ll pay the asking.”
Jesus Christ. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said. “Now I have to tell you a few things about the house, why it’s been empty for a while. The previous owner took his own life in the master bedroom. He hanged himself from that exposed beam.”
The Handys looked in one another’s eyes for a moment, then back at Paula. “We’re good with that,” Becki said, the picture of dull equanimity.
“They didn’t find him for over a week, he was estranged from his family, and they had to replace the carpet and the hardwood underneath,” she said, leaving out the fact that her friend swore she could still detect an atavistically horrifying trace of odor in that room, despite the thousands of dollars’ worth of professional cleaning that went into making the place sellable. Paula smelled nothing and suspected that the poor woman was a victim of the power of suggestion, having spent too many hours devoted to the house and its myriad horrors.
“If they cleaned it up I don’t see what the problem would be,” said Shane.
“Of course not,” Paula said, and despite the fact that she needed the sale, and that she would dearly love to be rid of the Handys, she felt an irrational resistance to letting them buy this house. “There’s more, though.”
She found herself resenting the Handys’ bovine indifference more bitterly than before. They looked at each other once again and smirked in unison, and impulsively she hauled out the big guns, as Cheryl would have to do eventually before any paperwork went through.
“It’s not just the old man’s suicide that makes the place a hard sell. Before he put the place on the market his grandson decided to demolish the toolshed in the backyard.”
“No toolshed? Damn. That’s a deal killer,” Shane brayed, and he and Becki both erupted in mirthless, hostile laughter, as though what she was telling them couldn’t possibly be enough to disrupt their incipient love affair with this charming little charnel house.
Both of them still smirking, Paula kept a perfectly straight face, taking care to express neither amusement nor irritation in her tone as she continued. “When the handyman knocking it down got to the cement foundation, which he thought was odd, he found a handmade cedar chest underneath. He called the grandson in case it was something valuable. That shed had been up for forty years at least, and when they opened it up it had a canvas bag full of old gray bones.” For the first time it struck her that she knew this story in greater detail than might be considered normal for someone unconnected with it. “Including a human skull.”
“Ew. I’m glad they took that shed down before we bought it, then.” Becki made a little moue of distaste, then giggled.
“The dead man’s wife had supposedly up and left him without warning in 1969. That struck everyone as weird back then, because she left three kids behind, all of them in grade school. Husband said she met another man, ran away with him, and everyone believed it.”
“So now it’s solved. I don’t see how that affects the property value,” Shane said.
Of course you wouldn’t, because you’re a sociopath. If you weren’t, you’d know better than to wear that fucking Van Dyke. “None of the kids had easy lives afterward. The only one who did all right was the grandson’s father. He finally quit drinking and made a good living selling orthopedic shoes until he got killed at a railroad crossing.” The details were pure invention at this point, but their indifference to the house’s past infuriated her.
“Seriously, Paula, these kinds of things don’t bother us.” Becki was staring at the ceiling in the front parlor, which had a low crossbeam just like the deadly one in the master bedroom. “Let’s make an offer.”