“If the water problem comes back, that’s an issue.” He had warmed up to his topic. “It sure is strange why there was so much water down there. But I’ve lived in Fell for five years, and I see a lot of strangethings. I’ll get an expert to come take a look, but I’m not hopeful we’ll get an explanation. The best we can hope for is that the owners will tear down the remains of the house and fill in the basement.”
I nodded. “That suits me just fine.”
He looked at me, obviously curious but not willing to ask. “No one has complained about that lot before.”
“That’s because this house was empty,” I told him. “But I live here now, and I’m staying.”
“By yourself? No wife, no kids?”
“I’m a bit of a loner, I guess.”
“To each his own. I guess you have plenty of room.” He stood up. “Have a nice afternoon, Mr. Esmie.”
I watched him cross the street and get back into his car. When he looked back and noticed me, I waved.
—
I didn’t spend all of my time on the house. I was at the library in downtown Fell a lot, not just for renovating magazines but for everything else. I checked out detective novels and history books. I sat in the records room, reading old newspapers, learning about my town. There was a job board on a wall near the checkout desk—a corkboard with index cards pinned to it advertising help needed. From one of these, I called a landscaping company and picked up work. I weeded, mowed, mulched, and shoveled. I didn’t care about the hard labor or the early hours. The money was good, and it was mostly paid in cash.
“You’re big enough,” the foreman said to me on my first shift, “and you don’t look drunk. You got a driver’s license?”
“Yep.”
“Is it real?”
“Yep.”
“Then I don’t even care what your name is, honestly. I just care that the work gets done.”
Landscapers, it turns out, can gossip like nobody’s business. I learned about every house we worked—who was divorced, who was cheating, who was maybe going broke. I also learned how to keep an immaculate lawn, a talent I’d never had to have in my life of wandering.
I made a trip to city hall one day for land records. It was late November, after the leaves had left the trees bare but before the first snow, when the sky was stark gray and the air biting cold. I pulled the deed to our house and checked the property line. I compared it to the map that Violet had stolen from the FCCE. I had returned the map to the college myself, when I made a visit to the Local Literature room and slipped the map back where it belonged. But I had photocopied the map at the library first.
I made pencil marks on my photocopy, noting exactly what we owned. Our property stretched behind the house into the trees where Dodie and I had walked, which was why no one had ever built back there. At the back edge of the trees was a lot the city had markedUndesignated.
The undesignated land matched up with the spot on Violet’s map, marked with smallx’s, that was for graves unknown.
I put in a request to the city that the undesignated land be recognized as part of the Esmie property. If no one contested it, the land would be ours.
There were forms to fill out, of course, and bureaucracy to wait for. But I had nothing but patience and time.
No one cared about an empty plot of land, forty feet by forty feet, in backwoods Fell. The Thornhills had gotten divorced—landscaping gossip said their marriage had been miserable for years, if not decades, since their son ran away—and neither of them lived in the house while their lawyers argued over who would get it. The house the Chathams had rented hadn’t found another renter, so it sat empty. The lot across the street had no one, of course. I had most of the neighborhood to myself, at least for now.
The city didn’t care about the land, either, so eventually, with the help of some money to move things along, a line was redrawn on a piece of paper in the bowels of city hall. I now had ownership, with no interference from the city, of the Whitten family graveyard and my little brother’s grave.
When I got the notification in the mail, it was the first time I’d wept since Ben had disappeared from his spot beside me in my bed.
—
Dodie visited in the summer, bringing her boyfriend, Ethan. Dodie had never had a steady boyfriend before—no man, including me, could tolerate her for very long—and I hadn’t known what to expect. Ethan was quiet, kind of dorky, and he seemed to actually like my little sister. (To each their own, as the inspector had said.) Dodie really liked him, and God knew I didn’t want her to move back in here with me, so I tolerated Ethan as much as I tolerated anyone, and I mostly left him alone.
Violet, of all the men she could have chosen on this planet, had ended up with Bradley Pine. I loathed Bradley Pine. The few times we met, he tried to be nice to me, because apparently he’d mellowed since high school and had no recollection of beating me up. I was not a personable man at the best of times, and I definitely wasn’t personable with Bradley Pine. Violet would have to deal with it until I changed my mind.
Lisette, though—I liked Lisette. She was turning into a perfect cross of both of my sisters, incorporating their good and bad traits, which should have annoyed me but instead pleased me greatly. Apparently, she was nonstop trouble most of the time, but when she was in Fell—when she stayed in this house—she was relatively calm. She was comfortable here in a way that she wasn’t anywhere else. She laughed more, and there were fewer screaming fights. She slept deeply. She belonged here, though she was too young to know it yet.
She was, deep down, a creature of Fell, of this house, like me. Which fit, because someday this house would be hers.
She would do a lot of wandering before then. She would live a lot of life in other places before she came back. The house would be here when she was ready. I had nothing but patience and time.
