“If you need help, you know you can count on me and my mother,” I told her, and left her office for Eileen’s.
Just as Eileen got up to go, she received an unexpected call from an out-of-town client who’d decided to make an offer on a house he’d seen the week before. The house was listed with Today’s Homes, but the client had been referred to Eileen personally, so she had shown it along with a lot of Select Realty listings. It took Eileen some time to hammer out the client’s offer, assure the client that she’d call Today’s Homes that very second, then hang up and immediately lift the phone to dial. I had fished my book out of my purse several minutes before and was reading contentedly.
“Franklin? Eileen. Listen, that Mr. and Mrs. McCann I showed the Nordstrom house to last week, they just called… Yep, they want to make an offer… I know, I know, but here it is…” As Eileen relayed the offer to Franklin, I became immersed in my book. I was almost through with the Catherine Aird.
Finally Eileen was ready to set out. I tot’d her the good news about the probable sale of my own house as we got into her car.
“Does Idella seem okay to you?” I asked cautiously.
“Lately, no.”
“I think something’s wrong.”
“What? Anything we can do something about?”
“Well-no.”
“If we don’t know, and she doesn’t ask for help, seems like we aren’t wanted,” Eileen said, giving me a straight look.
I nodded glumly.
At the first house, the owners were on their way out as we pulled up to the curb. Eileen had cleared the showing with them first, of course, and she went up to talk to them while I surveyed the yard, which badly needed raking.
“How are the two of you?” Eileen said in her booming voice. “Ben, you ready to go out with me yet?”
“The minute Leda lets me off the rope,” the man answered with equally heavy good humor. “You better get out your dancing shoes.”
“Haven’t you found Mr. Right yet, Eileen?” the woman asked.
“No, honey, I still haven’t found anyone who’s man enough for me!”
They chuckled their way through some more faintly bawdy dialogue, and then the couple pulled off in their car while Eileen unlocked the front door.
“What?” Eileen said sharply.
I hadn’t known anything was showing on my face.
“Why do you do that, Eileen?” I asked as neutrally as I could. “Is that really you?”
“No, of course not,” she said crisply. “But how many houses am I going to sell in this small town if Terry and I go out in public holding hands, Roe? How would we make a living here? It’s a bit easier for Terry in some ways… Franklin actually wanted someone working for him who was immune to his charm. He didn’t want to fall into bedding an employee. But still, if everyone knew… and the people who do know have to be able to pretend not to.”
I could see her point, though it was depressing.
“So here is the Mays’ house,” Eileen said, resuming her realtor’s mantle with a warning rattle. “We have-three bedrooms, two baths, a family room, a small formal living room… mmmm… a walk-in closet off the master bedroom…”
And we strolled through the Mays’ house, which was dark and gloomy, even in the kitchen. I could tell within two minutes I would never buy this house, but this seemed to be a day for pretense. I was pretending I might, Eileen was pretending the preceding conversation hadn’t taken place. Idella had been pretending she wasn’t upset by the phone call in her office.
My lack of sleep began to catch up with me by the hall bathroom, which I viewed dutifully, opening the linen closet and yawning into it, noting the hideous towels the Mays had wisely put away.
“Are you with me today, Roe?”
“What? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t sleep too well last night.”
“Do you even want to go see this other house?”
“Yes, I promise I’ll pay attention. I just don’t like this one, Eileen.”
“Just say so. There’s no point in our spending time in a house you don’t want.”
I nodded obediently.
We were short on conversation and long on silence as we drove to our next destination. Lost in daydreams, I barely noticed when Eileen began to leave town.
Just a mile east out of Lawrenceton, we came to a house almost in the middle of a field. It had a long gravel driveway. It was a two-story brick house, and the brick had been painted white to set off the green shutters and a green front door. There was a screened-in porch. The second story was smaller than the first. There was a separate wide two-car garage to the left rear, with a covered walk from a door in the side of the garage to the house. There was a second story to the garage, with a flight of stairs also covered, leading up to it.
The sun was beginning to set over the fields. It was much later than I’d thought.
“Eileen,” I said in amazement, “isn’t this-”
“The Julius house,” she finished.
“It’s for sale?”
“Has been for years.”
“And you’re showing it to me?”
She smiled. “You might like it.”
I took a deep breath and got out of the car. The fields around the house were bare for the winter, and the yard was bleached and dead. The huge evergreen bushes that lined the property were still deep green, and the holly around the foundation needed trimming.
“The heirs have kept it going all this time,” I said in amazement.
“Just one heir. Mrs. Julius’s mother. She wanted to turn the electricity off, of course, but the house would just have rotted. There’s been surprisingly little vandalism, for the reputation it has.”
“Well. Let’s go in.”
This was turning out to be an unexpectedly interesting day. Eileen led the way, keys in hand, up the four front steps with their wrought-iron railing painted black, badly needing a touch-up now. We went in the screen door and crossed the porch to the front door.
“How old is it, Eileen?”
“Forty years,” she said. “At least. But before the Juliuses disappeared, they had the whole house rewired… they had a new roof put on… a new furnace installed. That was… let me check the sheet… yes, six years ago.”
“And they had the extra story put on the garage?”
“Yes, it was a mother-in-law apartment. Mrs. Julius’s mother lived there. But of course you remember.”
The disappearance of the Julius family had been the sensation of the decade in Lawrenceton. Though they had some family in town, few other people had had a chance to get to know them, so almost everyone had been able to enjoy the unmitigated thrill of the mystery and drama of their vanishing. T. C. and Hope Julius, both in their early forties, and Charity Julius, fifteen, had been gone when Mrs. Julius’s mother came over for breakfast, as was her invariable habit, one Saturday morning. After calling for a while, the older woman had searched through the house. After she’d waited uneasily for an hour, and finally checked to see that their vehicles were still there, she’d called the police. Who of course had at first been skeptical.
But as the day progressed, and the family car and pickup truck remained parked in the garage, and no member of the Julius family called or returned, the police became as uneasy as Mrs. Julius’s mother. The family hadn’t gone bike riding, or hiking, hadn’t accepted an invitation from another family.
They never came back, and no one ever found them.
Eileen pushed open the front door, and I stepped in.
I don’t know what I’d expected, but there was nothing eerie about the house. The cold sunshine poured through the windows, and instead of sensing ghostly presences of the unfound Julius family, I felt peace.
“There’s one bedroom downstairs,” Eileen read, “and two upstairs, plus a room up there used for an office or a
