It wasn't a huge porch, but it was large enough for a little bit of outdoor furniture, maybe a nice swing. The beadboard overhead was covered in peeling paint and spiderwebs; the columns that supported it all were squared off, not quite in the Craftsman style but leaving behind a slender, more fluid nouveau influence.
The place had been built by someone with means, any fool could see it. Every detail whispered money: the fish scale siding that offset the round windows in the attic; the enormous entrance—a huge carved door with dentil molding and a tarnished thumbscrew dead bolt; hell, the size of the place alone was enough to make a flush and flashy statement. If you included the unfinished basement, it was more than five thousand square feet of rotting vintage living space.
And it was all mine. My home. My project. My problem.
Inside, I heard Kate ask Jeff, "Why do you hate this house? It's...lovely."
Something about the way she said "lovely" worried me, so I quit standing there, marveling at my overwhelming impulse purchase, and headed inside for the first time. That's how it goes when you buy a place at auction because the owner is dead and the bank lets you have it for cheap. You roll the dice, and you take your chances.
The foyer was enormous and dark. It smelled like mildew and wet sawdust, fried knob and tube, and wood that had long ago rotted to black mulch. At the back of my sinuses, I detected something else, something dark and sweet and very gross, but I kept it to myself.
I tried to be optimistic. "Once I take all the boards off the windows...get a little light in here, it'll be a really beautiful space. Look at these high ceilings—and that's good quality woodwork around the stairs."
Jeff dropped a set of keys with a clattering thump; they landed on a round table that was covered with a drape. "I'm glad you like it, because the house and everything in it belongs to you as is, with all its mold, asbestos, and, and...everything else..." He petered out.
"It's cool," Kate said with a feeble thrust of optimism.
"Yeah, it is. It'll be a lot of work, but I'm down for it. Even if it takes me a lifetime."
"Oh God, don't put it that way." Jeff took an envelope out from under his armpit, and he held it by the bottom corners to shake out some paperwork.
"Why not?" I wanted to know.
"A guy 'died' here, you know that. We had to disclose it with the listing. You signed off on it," he added, finding and waving the piece of paper that had warned me yes, a man had died there. In the middle of a too-hot summer the year before, in a hundred-year-old house with no air-conditioning. He'd decomposed straight through the second floor.
"Yeah, I knew." I nodded idly while I looked around and tried not to think about how much work it'd be to repair.
But that smell. Faint and distinct, very close. Maybe I only picked it up because I knew it was there. Maybe some rat or raccoon had crawled into the place and died since the human being had liquified and soaked and ruined...what was this, three-quarter-inch white oak flooring?
A crinkle around the edge of Jeff's nostrils implied that he could smell it, too. "Dead bodies don't bother you?"
"Have you checked out the Seattle real estate market lately? Everything under a million bucks is a tear-down. That flipper's dead body is the only reason I could afford the place."
"They should've torn it down years ago." He fished around for a specific piece of paper, some final thing that needed one last signature.
"That's just crazy talk," Kate told him.
Jeff looked up, his face a wild blend of earnest and demented. "Oh? You think so? Did either of you even google the address before you put in the offer? Did you do any due diligence?"
I was only half listening to him. I was staring around at a lovely historic house with a grand entryway and sweeping staircase, never mind the boarded windows and drop cloths on the furniture. So what if the wallpaper was peeling down in sheets and the ceiling drooped. It had potential. Right? Good bones and all that.
"Well?" Something in Jeff's voice startled me. I looked up, and he asked again, "Did you look the place up before you put in your bid?"
"No," I admitted. "I saw the picture and the price estimate on the foreclosures list. But I 'did' look it up after the bid was accepted. That's how I found out about the guy who died last year. Before you gave me the paperwork."
He snorted. "Hugh Crawford, that's the one you read about. The flipper, right?"
"Right. He bought it from the city, I think? No one was paying taxes on the place, something like that."
"I can't believe you didn't even do a basic internet search first... Jesus. Well, it's your funeral."
I rolled my eyes. "Oh, come on."
