She turned her head to the window to look out at the landscape, a series of flat-topped sandy ridges and broad flat valleys, blanketed with extensive open forests of longleaf pine. She lowered her window and breathed in the cool air, laced with the spicy scent.
Despite her initial resistance to showing the house, Audra was warming up to playing tour guide. “We call this region the Sandhills. Early settlers called this particular area the Pine Barrens.”
“Why was that?” Brendan asked, straight-faced, and this time Laurel did slide her foot past the seat to kick him. There were nothing but pine trees as far as the eye could see.
Audra laughed heartily. “Well, yes, the ‘pine’ part is obvious, but ‘barren’ is unfair. This place is anything but barren. We’ve got turkey and blackjack oak, American holly, sourwood, black titi, bay, gum, hickory, yellow poplar, persimmon and red maple … and in the spring, the dogwoods are out of this world—”
“Beautiful,” Brendan enthused. “Dogwoods, honey.” Without missing a beat he barreled right back on point. “Has the house always been ‘the Folger House’? I mean, did a Folger build it?”
“Had it built, yes. The first James Folger was a steel and railroad magnate. He came to Five Oaks from Pennsylvania in the last quarter of the century.”
In the backseat, Laurel eased her notebook out of her purse and began to take notes.
“The North was riding a wave of prosperity, while Southern plantations—around here that would be rice plantations—were going bankrupt. Northern millionaires began putting spare cash into Southern plantation land. The locals called them ‘Yankee Playtime Plantations.’ ”
Her tone of voice conveyed a hint of the illicit, and Laurel had a sudden flash of long drunken weekends, sexual escapades …
“James Folger purchased twelve hundred acres in the Sandhills and created an estate that—well, as you probably saw in the photos—included stables, tennis courts, and extensive gardens. The Folger family was very fond of fox hunting, and the house was used as a hunting lodge for the family and various friends.”
Fox hunting. A hunting lodge. Horrible, Laurel thought with a shudder.
Audra continued blithely. “The lodge was quite popular among the rich and famous. James and Julia Folger held parties where the servants outnumbered the diners. According to news articles the hunt parties would shoot everything in sight.”
“Charming,” Laurel murmured, and she saw Brendan grimace.
“After James Folger’s death in World War I, his grandsons divided the original house and the front half was moved to a neighboring town, by mule of all things—”
“What?” Laurel said, startled out of her fox-hunting thoughts. “They cut the house in half?”
“It was done with these old family houses,” Audra said airily. “More often than you’d think.”
What a strange history. No wonder that even in photos the house seems so—wrong, somehow, Laurel thought.
“Interesting,” Brendan murmured, as if he were thinking along the same lines. He turned back to look at Laurel and their eyes met in a questioning look.
What are we thinking … that that weirdness could set the stage for a poltergeist? We’re already looking for anomalies?
“Oh, the house is perfectly complete now, though,” Audra said, apparently opening her mind to at least the possibility of a sale, however unlikely. “In the twenties one of the brothers, also named James, rebelled against the family business and moved away from Philadelphia to pursue a literary career. He had his half of the original home redesigned and enlarged for his new bride, Julia Neville Folger. The Folgers moved into the house as their permanent residence, and began their family. After the success of James Folger’s first published novel, the Folger house became the center of a very lively social life in the 1920s and 1930s.”
Then she seemed to realize that she had slipped into hard-selling a house she didn’t actually want to sell, and hastily amended: “The whole area has a rich history. Whether it’s a Civil War pedigree or a literary background you’re looking for, I assure you, there’s a house here for you.
Amazing, Laurel thought. She’s actually bought into the idea that we could afford something on the scale of the Folger House.
But then she realized it wasn’t just Brendan’s charm that had convinced the agent. Audra had sized them up, and their California accents had trumped any estimation of their clothing. And for all Laurel knew, a decrepit manor house in the North Carolina Pine Barrens really was affordable, by California standards.
They had turned off the narrow road and onto a dirt one that led up to