“I hope one of you has a green thumb,” Janie June said breezily.
She took us upstairs via an unassuming set of servants’ steps between the dining room and the conservatory. The second floor was devoted to several bedrooms and a spacious bathroom at the end of the hall.
Jess, who for years had bemoaned the lack of space in our apartment in Burlington, lingered in the master suite, which occupied the second-floor curve of the turret and boasted both a sitting room and an adjoining bathroom.
I was more taken with an area on the other end of the hall. The bedroom with the slanted ceiling and towering armoire seemed perfect for Maggie. I suppose it was the canopied bed that made me think that. It was just the right size for a girl her age.
“The armoire is one-of-a-kind,” Janie June said. “William Garson had it made special as a gift to his daughter. This was her bedroom.”
Jess examined it with the appraiser’s eye she inherited from her father. “This is all hand-carved?” she said while running a hand over the cherubs and ivy that scaled the armoire’s corners.
“Of course,” Janie June said. “Very rare and, most likely, very valuable.”
Maggie stood in the doorway, peeking inside.
“This could be your room, Mags,” I told her. “What do you think of that?”
Maggie shook her head. “I don’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s cold.”
I raised a hand, trying to detect a chill. The room’s temperature felt normal to me. If anything, it seemed a little warm.
“I’m sure you’d grow to like it,” I said.
The third floor, which was where Janie June took us next, was half the size of the second. Rather than an attic, we entered an open and airy study with built-in bookshelves covering two of the walls and two pairs of round windows that looked out over the front and back of the estate. They were, I realized, the tiny windows I had seen when we first arrived. The ones that resembled eyes.
“This was originally William Garson’s study,” Janie June said.
And it could now be mine. I pictured myself at the great oak desk in the center of the room. I loved the idea of playing the tortured writer, banging away at my typewriter into the wee hours of the night, fueled by coffee and inspiration and stress. Thinking about it caused a smile to creep across my face. I held it back, worried Janie June would notice and think she had the sale in the bag. Already I feared I had expressed too much excitement, hence the ever-quickening pace of the tour.
My wife’s feelings were harder to decipher. I had no idea what Jess thought of the place. Throughout the tour, she had seemed curious if cautious.
“It’s not bad,” Jess whispered on our way back down to the second floor.
“Not bad?” I said. “It’s perfect.”
“I admit there’s a lot to love about it,” Jess said, being her usual careful self. “But it’s old. And massive.”
“I’m less concerned about the size than the price.”
“You think it’s too high?”
“I think it’s too low,” I said. “A place like this? There’s got to be a reason its listed so low, plus the furniture.”
Indeed there was, which we didn’t learn about until the tour was over and Janie June was ushering us back onto the porch.
“Are there any questions?” she said.
“Is there something wrong with the house?”
I blurted it out with no preamble, leaving Janie June looking slightly stricken as she locked the door behind us.
Tensing her shoulders, she said, “What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“No house this big has an asking price that small unless it’s got major problems.”
“Problems? No. A reputation? That’s another story.” Janie June sighed and leaned against the porch railing. “I’m going to be up front with you, even though state law doesn’t require me to say anything. I’m telling you because, let’s face it, Bartleby is a small town and people talk. You’ll hear about it one way or another if you buy this place. It might as well come from me. This house is what we refer to as a stigmatized property.”
“What does that mean?” Jess asked.
“That something bad happened here,” I say.
Janie June nodded slowly. “To the previous owners, yes.”
“The ones in that photo?” Jess said. “What happened?”
“They died. Two of them did, anyway.”
“In the house?”
“Yes,” Janie June replied.
I made Maggie go play on the front lawn, within eyesight but out of earshot, before asking, “How?”
“Murder-suicide.”
“Good God,” Jess said, her face blanching. “That’s horrible.”
This prompted another nod from Janie June. “It was indeed horrible, Mrs. Holt. Shocking, too. Curtis Carver, the man in that picture you found, killed his daughter and then himself. His poor wife found them both. She hasn’t returned since.”
I thought about the family in the photograph. How happy and innocent the little girl looked. Then I remembered the father standing at a distance with that scowl on his face.
“Was he mentally unstable?” I asked.
“Clearly,” Janie June said. “Though not in an outward way. Nobody saw it coming, if that’s what you’re asking. From the outside, the family looked happy as could be. Curtis was well-liked and respected. Same thing with Marta Carver, who owns the bakery downtown. And that little girl was just the cutest thing. Katie. That was her name. Little Katie Carver. We were all shocked when it happened.”
“Poor Mrs. Carver,” Jess said. “I can’t imagine what she must be going through.”
She meant every word, I’m sure. Jess was nothing but empathetic, especially to the plights of other women. But I also sensed relief in her voice. The kind that came from a bone-deep certainty that she’d never experience something as terrible as losing her husband and daughter in the same day.
What she didn’t know—what she couldn’t have known until much later—was how close she’d come to having that exact scenario happen to her. But on that May afternoon, the only thing on our minds was finding the perfect home for our family. When Janie June took Maggie for a walk around the grounds so Jess and I could confer on the porch, I immediately told her we should buy the place.
“Not funny,” she said with a derisive sniff.