“What it is, is what Melissa calls stigmatized.”
I squinted. “Doesn’t that mean haunted? I saw a program on HGTV once about stigmatized houses, and they were haunted.”
“Ghosts are a stigma,” Derek agreed, “but a house can be stigmatized in other ways as well. Murder on the property, suicides, even just that someone with cancer or AIDS once lived there, unfortunately. And with this house… well, there’s been talk around town about it being haunted.”
“Why?”
He glanced over. “A man shot his family there.”
“Oh, my God!” I said, paling. “How horrible!”
Derek nodded.
“When? Did you know them?”
“Waterfield’s a small town. Everyone pretty much knows everyone else around here, or used to, until Melissa talked the town council into allowing all these new houses to be built.” He paused to shift gears up a steep hill. “It happened seventeen, eighteen years ago, when I was in high school.”
“How many people died?” My voice sounded hushed, lost in the humming of the truck tires against the asphalt.
“Four. The father killed his wife and his in-laws and then himself. Their little boy survived.”
How awful, to have one’s entire family wiped out like that, especially at such a young age. “Poor kid,” I said. “Was he hurt?”
Derek shook his head, eyes on the road. “He woke up when he heard the first shot, and instead of hiding under the blankets, he had enough sense to run.”
“What happened to him? Afterwards, I mean?” He must have had psychological problems, poor little guy, even if he hadn’t been physically hurt by the ordeal.
“Went to live with someone else, I think. Away.”
Away is the downeastern term for someplace outside Maine. Downeast is the stretch of Maine that lies along the Atlantic coast, where most of the population lives. My mother was a downeasterner originally, and I grew up hearing these localisms. I was hearing a lot more of them now that I lived here, but it helped that I’d had an early introduction.
Derek slowed the truck as we passed the entrance to the still-unfinished Devon Highlands, the new subdivision that the Stenhams were building and Melissa was selling. Her gorgeous face, fifty times magnified, smiled down at us from a billboard planted above one ostentatious brick gatepost, violet eyes gleaming and every pearly white tooth on display. “Devon Highlands, a slice of English country living in the heart of Waterfield,” the sign said, “Lots from $100,000.”
“A hundred grand just for the lot? That’s steep.” I looked away, determined not to notice the way Derek’s eyes snagged on Melissa’s face. Beyond the massive entrance, skeletal houses were rising. Mud and straw was everywhere, with little stakes driven into the ground at intervals to show property lines. I saw several of the black Stenham Construction trucks parked throughout the landscape. Miniscule human shapes scurried around like busy worker ants.
Derek moved his attention from Melissa’s perfect face to mine, which was not so perfect. After a moment, he smiled.
I grumbled, “Not exactly the heart of Waterfield, either, is it? We’ll be passing the city limits any minute, right?”
“I think they call that sort of thing puffing,” Derek answered, turning his attention back to the road. “It’s not exactly lying, but it’s not exactly true, either. Could be construed as someone’s opinion by a court of law.”
“Someone who doesn’t know the lay of the land, maybe.” I swayed against him and caught a whiff of Ivory soap and citrus shampoo as he turned the car into another, much more established subdivision just down the road from Devon Highlands. It didn’t have ostentatious gates with a carved name, but the prosaic street sign told me we were on Primrose Drive. After a few blocks, Derek turned right onto Becklea and rolled to a stop in front of a low-slung ranch, circa 1955, at the end of the cul-de-sac.
It was built of yellow brick, with a large picture window in the front, and it sat on a nice, big, level lot, framed by tall pine trees. “Nothing back there but woods,” Derek remarked as he came around the truck and opened the door for me. “David Todd has been taking care of the grass; that’s why it isn’t as high as yours was when you first came.”
I nodded. Mr. Todd was the person I had hired to cut my grass, which had easily been a foot tall when I arrived in Waterfield. And being a New Yorker born and bred, the intricacies of actually mowing my own lawn had been beyond me.
“He’s the one who told me about the house,” Derek added.
“That was nice of him,” I said. “So can we go in?”
He nodded, pulling a key out of the pocket of his jeans. “I told the lawyer I wanted another look. Since it’s been a couple of months since I saw it, and since you’ve never seen it.”
“It’s not… um…” I trailed after him up the flag-stone walkway toward the front door, distractedly admiring his rear view in the faded jeans. “What I mean to say is… they’ve cleaned up since the murders, haven’t they?”
He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Oh, sure. Nothing to worry about. It looks just like any other old, unliv ed-in house. Dusty, dark, dated. The lawyer hired people to cut the grass and maintain the place-make sure the roof didn’t leak and nobody broke in-but nothing else has been done here in almost twenty years.”
The key fitted the wooden front door, which opened with a drawn-out squeal of hinges. I shuddered.
Honestly, though, if I hadn’t known about the tragedy, I wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. Derek was right: It was just like any other old, unoccupied house. We’d seen plenty of them lately in our search for the perfect renovation project. The mini-blinds were closed and dusty, making the house chilly and dark. The carpets were old, and there was entirely too much dark paneling. The kitchen had brick red appliances and wallpaper with pictures of ketchup bottles. The floor was vinyl, with a raised pebble pattern, and the kitchen curtains were brown corduroy. Beyond, in the den, there was a threadbare, striped carpet and a wood-burning brick fireplace, not to mention fake beams across the ceiling. I looked at everything, shaking my head and sighing.
“I told you it needs work,” Derek said, defensively.
I turned to him with a smile. “I’m not upset.”
“You look upset.”
I shook my head. “It’s a great house. Big rooms, nice open feel. Once the blinds are down and the carpet’s up, it’ll look like a different place. I’m surprised it’s been sitting here gathering dust for seventeen years. Why didn’t they sell it?”
“Two reasons,” Derek said, leaning his excellent posterior against the fake-wood kitchen counter. “Everyone knew about the murders, and nobody would have wanted to buy it back then.”
“Makes sense. Is that going to be a problem for us, too, when we get ready to sell?”
He shook his head, causing a lock of sun-streaked hair to fall into his eyes. “I think it’s been long enough that some of the stigma has worn off. And with all the flat landers moving in, it shouldn’t be too hard to find someone who doesn’t remember what happened here.”
Flatlander is what a Mainer calls someone from the less mountainous New England states.
“I hope you’re right,” I said. “What’s the other reason?”
“The boy-Patrick-was the sole surviving member of the Murphy family. The house defaulted to him when his parents died. I guess his mother’s extended family, or whoever he went to live with, decided to hold off until he was old enough to make the decision himself whether he wanted to sell it or keep it.”
“So Patrick’s the one who sold it to us?”
Derek nodded. “By proxy. I dealt with a lawyer in Portland. Patrick probably did his part by fax, from wherever he lives now.”
“You’ve never met him?”
He shook his head. “If I did, I can’t remember. He was no more than five or six when the shootings happened. Dark-haired, I think, but I’m not even sure about that.”