That was the end of the neighborhood. At first the students were all young ladies and therefore civilized, but no matter how refined their manners, they were transients, and the houses did not belong to them. Then came the end of segregation, and the women's college became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Frats and sororities swallowed up the best of the houses near the growing campus. The rest of the houses were cut up into ever-smaller apartments, with students packed in shoulder to shoulder, or so it seemed. They cared nothing for the yards; the landlords seemed to care even less.
All of these things happened to the Bellamy house, including a brief stint as a sorority in the early sixties. But when gentrification came to the neighborhood in the early eighties, the Bellamy house was passed by. In 1987 the aging landlord moved to Florida, and in the vain hope that leaving it empty would help to sell it, stopped renting the rooms. It quickly became a derelict, boarded up, vandalized, lawn gone to weeds and only mowed a couple of times a year. The FOR SALE sign stayed up long enough for the red paint to disappear completely; then it fell over in a storm and no one put it back up again. No one wanted the house, it had been so badly deformed when it was cut into apartments. No one even wanted the land, with its corner location and a gully in the back yard. The landlord forgot he owned the property.
And, as if to rebuke the house even further, the carriagehouse and servants quarters next door remained in good repair. Long since converted into a residence, it was old but well tended, the yard neatly trimmed. It seemed to thrive as the Bellamy house itself withered.
Until the day in August 1997 when Don Lark drove by in his slightly beat-up red Ford pickup, then turned around and came back for another look. He parked on Baker Street, got out of the truck, and walked all the way around the house, sizing it up. He found the fallen FOR SALE sign, turned it over, and took down the name and number of the real estate agency.
The realty had changed names twice since the sign went up, but the phone number was still the same. Don stood at the payphone at the Bestway on Walker and explained to the woman on the telephone that the only FOR SALE sign on the property had her agency's phone number on it.
"I'm sorry, but we don't show an active listing for that address."
"What about a passive listing?"
"I'm afraid I don't understand what you're—"
"I don't really care who's listing it, ma'am. You have real estate agents there, right? And real estate agents are able to look up the ownership of property and tell buyers—namely me—who the owner is and whether he wants to sell and if so for how much. Does any of this sound familiar?"
"No need to get snide with me, sir."
"Sorry, I didn't mean to offend, ma'am. I just want to find out about this property and it wasn't me that painted your phone number on the sign."
"Hold please."
He held. He had to put in another quarter, he held so long. And then another woman came on the phone.
"This is Cindy Claybourne, can I help you?"
"Are you a real estate agent?"
"I sure hope so." A cheerful voice, gratefully heard.
"My name's Don Lark, and I'm interested in a derelict property on the corner of Baker and Motley. The FOR SALE sign had your phone number on it, but the sign was old and it fell down a long time ago. The receptionist said you didn't have a listing for it. An active listing, anyway."
"Well, it sounds like a mystery."
Don remembered Reverend Gardiner from his childhood, who used to answer Don's endless questions by saying, "Well, I guess that's a mystery."
Smiling, Don said, "Will we need a divine messenger to solve it?"
"No, more like Sherlock Holmes. I'd be glad to look up that property for you. Can I have your number?"
"You could if I had one."
"Business phone, then?"
"Like I said. I'm a legitimate buyer, cash in the bank, don't worry about that, I just don't happen to have a phone. So I'll have to call you or stop in and see you."
"Mysteriouser and mysteriouser," she said. "Tomorrow afternoon at five? Here at the office?"
"Where's here?"
She gave him directions. He thanked her and hung up. Then he got back into his truck and drove back to the Bellamy house.
Don Lark didn't see what most people saw, looking at Calhoun Bellamy's dream house. The weedy yard, the weather-chipped paint, the boarded windows, the half-painted-over graffiti, those were almost invisible to him. What he saw was a pretty good roof—almost miraculously good, considering the house's obvious neglect. That meant that the interior might not be water-soaked and warped. And neither the roof nor the porch was sagging—this suggested a sturdy structure on a solid foundation. It was a strong house.
He walked the property again, looking for signs of termites, break-in sites that would need to be closed off, and practical information like where the power and water entered the house. A coal chute at the back told him where the alley used to be; as for the ancient coal furnace, Don assumed that it was still in the cellar—who could move such a monster?—but that it hadn't been in use for fifty years at least. Good riddance. Nobody better get nostalgic for those old days of coal-fired furnaces. On one house Don had fixed up a few years back, he got curious, brought in a small load of coal, and stoked up the furnace. Besides the black filth all over him by the time he got the thing going, an astonishing amount of soot spewed from the chimney. Flecks of it fell like ash from Mount St. Helen's, or so it seemed to him. No wonder people stopped using coal the minute gas or heating oil became available. This stuff made car exhaust seem clean and healthy.
The more he saw of the house the better he liked it. The wood trim was beautifully made and, despite the fading of the paint, very little of it would need to be replaced. Where a board or two had weathered and sagged away from the windows, he could see that the original glass was still intact. Where were the neighborhood boys with rocks? Apparently the boarding up had been done before the vandals could get to work. The work this house required was enormous, but it was also worth doing. Whoever built this place had used only the best materials, and the workmen had clearly made it a labor of love. Restoring it to its former glory would be hard, intense labor, months and months of it. But when he was done, the house would be magnificent.
I want this place. Don hated to admit it to himself—he knew that this meant he would probably pay more than it was worth. But then, after so many years of neglect, it was possible the owner would be glad to get it off his hands. The price might be low enough for Don to pass the threshold: He might be able to pay cash for the place instead of borrowing from the bank. He had walked away from his last fixer-upper with almost a hundred thousand dollars. If the house came in for under fifty, he'd have enough left over for materials, the occasional subcontractor, and his own meager living expenses during the year it would take to renovate the place. No more borrowing, no more banks, no more money poured down the interest rathole.
And then, as always when he started feeling too good, he remembered one pair of eyes that would never see this house, one pair of feet that would never walk its floors and stairs, one voice that would never be heard calling out to him through the high-ceilinged caverns of the rooms or outside in a newly landscaped yard.
He walked back to his truck. Dark was coming on. He drove to a truckstop out on I-40, paid a couple of bucks for a shower, ate a lousy meal in the restaurant, and slept in the camper on the back of his pickup truck, bedding down among his tools.