“Cash isn’t a problem, Etta.”
“Then what on earth—?”
“Let’s say it’s personal.”
She looked at him thoughtfully, then swung her chair around and rolled it over to a gray filing cabinet. “Just to refresh my memory,” she said, leafing through a drawer of file folders. “Let me see now. Uh-huh. All right. I thought I remembered the house well enough. Peddle enough properties and they tend to merge when you get along in years but I still have a good memory for houses and a tolerable one for figures. You paid sixty-seven thousand five hundred according to what I’ve got written down here.”
“That’s right.”
“House was listed at seventy-five, you offered sixty-five, and you and the seller settled at sixty-seven five. I think that’s how it went.”
“That’s exactly how it went.”
“And you want to know what you’d get selling it... depends, depends how anxious you are to sell. And how anxious somebody is to buy it. You might list it today at seventy-five and sell it tomorrow, if just the right person happened to come along and he wanted it badly enough. Or if you were willing to put it on the market today and sit tight for up to a year, then you could be fairly certain of getting the seventy-five or close to it sooner or later. But if you want a fast sale and you don’t want to count on getting lucky, then you’re going to take a loss.”
“How large a loss?”
“Somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars. Plus my six-percent commission.”
He winced. There was no way he could sell the house and sustain that sort of loss. His total equity in the house was only a little over fifteen thousand in the first place. If he sold that cheaply they wouldn’t be able to move into another house.
“I guess I paid too much,” he said.
She shook her head. “You paid a fair price, is all. You found just the house you wanted and paid no more than fair market value for it. If you’re willing to wait for a buyer like yourself to come along I’d say you’ll get your money out of it, except for commission and closing costs. But if you want to sell in a hurry, well, it’s going to cost you. And that’s especially true when you’re dealing with older homes in town. They’re unique. Each of them is one of a kind. The charm of the house, the prestige value of the particular block, the special feeling a given prospective buyer gets from the house, all of these intangibles determine how fast the house sells and what price it brings, and you can’t get them down in dollars and cents and put them on the card in black and white.”
“I see.”
“You didn’t overpay and you didn’t wind up with a house you’re going to lose money on. Unless you want to unload it in a hurry. Real estate’s not the stock market, you know. You can’t call your broker and be sure of having money in your hand in four days’ time. It doesn’t work that way.”
“I know.”
“Why do you want to unload the place, David?”
“I don’t.”
She stroked her chin. “Your wife’s notion? You’ll have to forgive me but her name slips my mind. My memory’s better for prices and addresses than it is for people’s names.”
“Roberta.”
“Of course. She wants to move?”
“Yes.”
“Because of what happened to the boy? Pshaw. I’m a fat old woman, David, and that’s a fine thing to be because you can say whatever comes to mind and not give a damn how it goes over. Now it’s a tragedy when a baby dies and only a fool would say otherwise, but it’s a far cry from being the end of the world. She was not the first woman on earth to have a baby and God knows she was not the first woman on earth to lose one. If she’s going to run around the block every time something in her life takes a nasty turn, she’d be well advised to sleep in a track suit. It’s a hard life and it doesn’t get easier the more you see of it. All you get is used to it.”
“It’s not that. Or maybe it is, when all is said and done, but that’s not how Roberta sees it.”
“How do you mean?”
He hesitated, groping for words. It was hard to explain her feelings, especially in view of the fact that they didn’t make any sense to him.
“The house disturbs her,” he said finally.
“It disturbs her?”
He nodded. “It makes her uncomfortable. She acts as if it were a person instead of a thing. I don’t know how to describe it. She’s going through a difficult time emotionally, it’s obviously a result of losing the baby, and she’s reacted by putting all the blame on the house.” And on Ariel, he thought. But the house could be disposed of.
“She think maybe it’s haunted?”
“It’s as if she thought that,” he said. “Of course she’s intelligent, she’s an educated woman. She doesn’t literally believe in haunted houses—”
“Oh?” The dark eyes sparkled. “I do. Of course I’m not educated and I daresay I’m not terribly intelligent either but—”
“You believe in ghosts?”
“I don’t know if I believe in ghosts exactly. I believe houses get to be haunted, and I suppose it’s ghosts that haunt ’em. An old house like yours, a house on that street, it’s more likely to be haunted than not.”
“You’re not serious?”
“’Course I am.”
“You actually believe—?”
“Oh, I don’t believe in anything. I especially don’t believe in astrology. Know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a Sagittarius, and every Sagittarius knows astrology is a lot of hooey.” She lay back her head and cackled at her own joke. “I believe and I don’t believe, both at once,” she explained. “In just about everything, from ouija boards clear through to the Virgin Mary. There’s such a thing as haunted houses. You go into your neighborhood, into any of the good old blocks south of Broad Street, and I’d say three houses out of five are likely to be haunted.”
“Then you think that Roberta’s right?”
“You really want to know what I think?” She sat forward, planted an elbow on her desk top, rested her chin in her hand. “I think houses pick up some of the vibrations of people, who’ve lived in them, and especially people who died violently in them. That’s the theory behind ghosts. Somebody dies suddenly or violently and the ghost doesn’t know it’s time to go on to the happy hunting grounds. Anyway, ghosts or vibrations or whatever you want to call it... certain people are just more sensitive to the feeling of a haunted house than others. And certain states of mind make a person more or less sensitive. Your house has been standing over a century. The odds are pretty strong that more than a few people died in it, and it’s a safe bet that one of them somewhere along the way died in some sort of abrupt fashion. As a matter of fact—” She straightened up. “What’s the number of your house again? Forty-two?”
“That’s right.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Grace Molineaux lived there.”
“Who on earth was she?”
“Before your time,” she said. “Before my time, if you can believe it. It must have been in the eighties or early nineties. I remember people still talked about it when I was a girl.”
“What happened?”
“I’m trying to remember. Now I’m not sure I’ll get this entirely accurate. It seems to me she was a widow with small children. Was it three young children? I think so. It’s usually three in stories, whether it’s three little pigs or three bears or three wishes.” She rocked back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling. “I seem to recall she was married to a ship’s captain who was lost at sea and left her a young widow. With however many children, but let’s say there were three of them. And one night they were all murdered in their beds. The children, that is... and it wasn’t three, it was four. I’m remembering it now. They were smothered in their sleep, the four of them.”