them would have dissolved into tears. “Mean, but a perfect description. Wait until I tell Dad.”
A moment later she pulled away, leaving Lindsay standing at the curb, watching her go. In the rearview mirror, Kara could not see the tear running slowly down her daughter’s cheek.
Mark Acton was feeling great. The open house was over, and now he was at Fishburn's — the pub where half the agents in Camden Green seemed to hang out — with his third stein of beer sweating in front of him.
Around him, people he knew were bragging noisily about the huge deals they’d put together, but Mark knew it was mostly bullshit — three-quarters of the people in Fishburn’s had never sold a house for over a million, and that included him. And the Marshall place wasn’t going to go for anywhere near a million, either, despite the granite countertops in the kitchen and the nice furniture Kara Marshall had filled the place with.
Not that the open house had gone badly — it hadn’t. By eleven-thirty three caravans had come through, with Rick Mancuso and the Century 21 crowd as well as the bunch from ReMax.
And it wasn’t just caravans coming through, either — there had been a fairly steady stream of independent brokers and agents as well, and he’d done his best to make sure every one of them left their cards in the rosewood bowl he’d set on the table in the entry hall. He gave out a lot of flyers and talked to as many of them as he could, and more than a few of the drop-ins told him they’d be calling for an appointment to show it to a client. The Marshalls would be very happy with his report.
But mostly he’d done what he liked to do best when he was doing a brokers’ open: wander around, getting the feel of the place. He had figured out years ago that not only did every house have a unique feel to it, but so did almost every room in every house. The trick was to determine which rooms felt best and which worst, and then plan future tours so you got the bad rooms out of the way early and progressed steadily to the best ones. It was a strategy that had kept him at his agency’s Million Dollar Roundtable every year for almost a decade, and it would work perfectly for the Marshall house, because it didn’t have any bad rooms.
It was one of those houses that just felt good, and he’d known almost from the moment Kara and her daughter — Lindsay? Yeah, that was her name, Lindsay — had left him alone and he made his first quick tour, that it wasn’t going to be hard to sell. He’d adjusted Kara’s canisters and then gone into the living room, where he automatically picked a bit of lint from the carpeting and rearranged the pillows on the sofa and wing chairs. And just standing in the living room, he’d known. This was exactly the kind of place he himself wished he lived in.
Nothing in any of the other rooms had changed his mind, especially the kid's — Lindsay's.
He’d stood still in that room for a while, and it seemed he could feel her presence, and it felt good.
Pretty room for a pretty girl.
Then car doors started slamming outside, and he’d straightened the stack of color flyers one more time, checked his tie and his name tag, and put on his professional smile.
He opened the door, and the event began.
The hours had gone by quickly, and he listened to the same comments and answered the same questions, to the point where they almost became meaningless:
“Nice listing, Mark.”
“This place’ll sell in a heartbeat.”
“What’s the asking price?”
Over and over again he had patiently repeated every detail to every agent, all the time keeping an eye on the steady stream of agents who cruised through the downstairs, opening every door and checking the cabinets, then glancing quickly into the garage before heading upstairs to get a feel for the rest of the house.
After the agents came back downstairs, they’d checked out the kitchen one more time — always the kitchen, because that’s where people spend most of their lives — then dropped their business cards in the rosewood bowl on their way out and picked up flyers.
He knew that the more flyers they picked up, the better they liked the house.
And today they’d taken a lot.
Over and over, in the lull between each caravan, Mark went back through the house, moving things back to the exact places they’d been, doing his best to keep the house as the Marshalls had left it that morning. After all, even though almost everybody loved poking around in strangers’ houses, nobody liked having strangers poke around in their own. So he always did his best to make it look as if no one — not even he himself — had been there at all. When the Marshalls came home, everything should look exactly right.
It had been late in the day when Sam Cousins and Ike North showed up. He knew they’d be there at the end of the event so they could all go to Fishburn’s together. And he’d been especially pleased when they came down from their tour of the second floor and Ike spoke before they even hit the landing at the bottom of the stairs.
“Is this going to be open on Sunday?”
Mark nodded.
“I’ll bring some people by. I wish I could get them in tomorrow, but they’re in the city and won’t be able to make it until the weekend.”
“You’ll be lucky if this place is still available on Sunday,” Sam Cousins put in.
Music to Mark’s ears.
“So,” Ike said, glancing around at the house, empty now except for the three of them. “Fishburn's?”
Mark nodded. “Meet you there. I have to lock up, so order me a cold one.”
Alone, he’d gone through the rooms one last time, turning out all the lights, checking to see that the doors were locked and everything was exactly as it had been that morning. At the top of the stairs, he went first into Kara and Steve’s bedroom, then their bath. Everything looked good. He turned out the lights and closed the door, then did the same with Steve’s study and the guest room.
Then he’d gone to Lindsay’s room and smiled as he turned out the light and closed the door, knowing that this was the room that would sell the house. It was neat and tidy, and you could almost feel the girl who lived in it. A sweet girl — a girl the Marshalls were fortunate to have.
At the front door, he’d picked up his briefcase and the rosewood bowl and looked around one last time. Everything looked perfect, and he felt great.
And now, as he drained the third stein of beer and ordered a fourth, he still felt great.
Great, and lucky that the Marshalls had chosen him to sell their house.
Chapter Nine
I didn’t expect the house to smell so sweet.
Nor was it the fake smell of rose petals in a bowl, or the kind of canned aroma of baking bread that so many agents fill houses with nowadays — as if anybody really bakes bread anymore! No, the house today was filled with the scent of love and harmony, and the moment I walked through the front door, I could feel the warmth of affection as well.
Some houses fairly reek of suspicion or wariness or anger, and in an instant you can feel the misery of the family who lives there.
Even worse, some houses have no fragrance at all — the poison of indifference hangs in the air.
But not the house I went to today — the house I found on the Internet last week that set me to tingling from the moment I went on the video tour.
This house has balance. Wholeness. Wholesomeness. Here there will be no religious icons on the walls, no evidence of secret perversions hidden beneath the mattresses.
That is the wonderful thing about being utterly nondescript; it is almost the same as being invisible. And being invisible is like being God.
Today I had nearly a whole day of being like God, and the feeling was sublime. As I moved from room to room, seeing everything, touching everything, feeling everything, no one noticed me at all.
