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turning leaves, wishing his father wouldn't keep making his mother worry so.
The next morning, the police sergeant said only, "Up by the aqueduct," when Nate's mother asked where his father had hanged himself. The officer didn't mention when his father had done it. And so Nate had no idea if he'd still been alive as he'd searched for him, too self-conscious to even call to him aloud.
About the months that had followed, Nate didn't remember much. Luckily, his closest friends treated him with kid gloves for only a week or two before starting to give him the same shit they always did, returning his life to at least a semblance of what it had been.
He thought of them now, Emily and Jason and Hal, tempted once more to ditch this tutoring nonsense and call them to see if they'd started hanging out yet.
As he walked farther toward Winthrop Street, the houses grew sparser, this being the oldest, wealthiest part of town, made up mostly of estates.
Charlotte Graves, 34 Winthrop, along with a phone number. That's all Ms. Cartwright had written on the note card. When he had called the woman to set up the appointment, she had been curt to the point of rudeness and offered no directions.
The mailbox bearing that number stood between two driveways, leaving it unclear which house it belonged to. The driveway to the left led down to a white-columned mansion stretched out along the river-bank, recent by the looks of it but built in a neoclassical style that invited you to forget the fact. Its thick cornices and stately windows and the perfect lawns that surrounded it were somehow resplendent even in the light of an overcast day. The other drive was a weedy track heading up to a barn and a shingled little box of a house, which looked as if it had been built centuries ago and not much cared for since.
A tutor of history, Nate thought. What were the odds?
He knew which his father would have picked. Which house he would have talked his way into, putting everyone at ease, charming them with his glittering words. For all Nate knew, his father already had. For all he knew, the mansion's owners were among those in Finden whom his father had convinced to lend him boats or vintage cars, a habit he'd got into during that last spring of adventure.
Slowly, he headed down the hill to the mansion, where he climbed the steps to press the brass bell. The first ring produced no response. Glancing through a window, he didn't see much of anything inside. He leaned over and, pressing his hand to the glass to block the reflection, saw that the entire front room was empty, not a stick of furniture in it. No rugs on the floor, nothing on the walls. On the other side of the door it was the same - a vast high-ceilinged room, a fireplace at one end, and nothing else but bare boards and plaster. One of the big new houses built on spec, he figured, waiting for an owner. He rang a second time, just in case.
Curious, he stepped along the front of the house and peered through another window into another bare room. The emptiness of the place intrigued him. All that finished space marked by nothing. Without content or association. A perfect blank.
But not quite, it seemed. Through the next window, he saw a flat-screen TV set up on a crate facing an old cloth couch. There were no chairs or tables here, no lights or fixtures, just the television and the couch and an empty beer bottle beside it. The real estate agent? he wondered; but then how could he or she show the place? It was an odd, slightly forlorn sight.
Giving up, he headed back across the circular drive, past a fountain with a cherub in the middle, and headed up the hillside to the neighboring house. This one looked as if it were sinking slowly into the earth. Hydrangeas had grown up to the lower panes of the downstairs windows and the peeling gutters overflowed with leaves. At one end, a drainpipe had broken off and leaned now against the side of the house. Up on the roof, the faded aluminum rods of an old television antenna had come loose from the chimney and tilted precariously toward the street.
There weren't many places like this left in Finden. Ever since Nate had been a kid, they'd been building new houses everywhere