since the last people … left.”
Brad and Elaine exchanged a look at his slight hesitation, but neither one of them commented on it.
“The place seems to be sound enough,” Brad remarked as Harney opened the front door.
“All the old houses are sound,” Whalen responded. “We knew how to build them back then.”
“How old is it?”
“Must be about fifty or sixty. If you want I suppose I could figure it out exactly. Don’t see any point in it, though.” His tone said clearly to Brad, Don’t bother me with foolish questions.
But Elaine plunged in. “Did your family build it?” she asked. Whalen looked at her sharply, then his face cleared.
“Might say we did; might say we didn’t. We sold the land the house is on and my grandfather helped build the house, then we bought it back when the Barons … left.” Again there was the slight hesitation, and again the Randalls exchanged a look. Brad wondered how much more there was to the story and why the chief didn’t want to tell them all of it Then he looked around and realized that Whalen hadn’t been kidding when he said the place hadn’t been cleaned.
If it hadn’t been for the layer of dust covering everything, Brad would have sworn the house was inhabited. Magazines and newspapers lay open on the chairs and floor, and the remains of a candle, burned to the bottom, sat bleakly on a table. There wasn’t much furniture—only a sofa and two chairs—and what there was had obviously been obtained secondhand.
“They left in a hurry, didn’t they?” Brad asked.
“Like I told you, skipped right out on me,” Whalen said. Then, before Brad could comment further, he began telling them about the house.
“That’s a double fireplace over there. The other side opens in the kitchen, and between the two of them the downstairs stays pretty warm. There’s a bedroom through that door that I suppose you’d want to use, unless you’ve got kids. If you do, I’d put them in there, just in case of fire. It’s a lot easier to get out of the first floor than the second.”
“We don’t have children,” Elaine said, and stuck her head in the bedroom. It was a large room, facing the beach, and one wall was partly brick. She heard Whalen behind her explaining.
“The brick’s part of the fireplace. The whole house is built around the fireplaces. You’d be surprised how much heat comes through those bricks, especially if you keep fires going in both rooms. Don’t know why they don’t build houses like that anymore—with all the talk about energy, you’d think they’d want to. But no, they build them with the fireplaces on an outside wall, and you can kiss the heat good-bye.
“If you go through there,” he went on, “there’s the bathroom—that opens into the kitchen as well. It’s not so convenient for guests, but for whoever’s living here it works just fine.”
Elaine followed his directions and found herself in a small and incredibly grimy bathroom. She went through it and into the kitchen, where she stared at the forbiddingly large and ungainly wood stove. It seemed to challenge her, and she glared at it, silently telling the stove that come what may, she would learn to make it behave. But she wasn’t too sure.
The kitchen was as filthy as the bathroom. The pots and pans used for the preparation of what had apparently been the last tenants’ final meal were still stacked unwashed in the sink. Elaine swallowed hard, wondering if she would be expected to clean up the mess in the event they rented the place, and pushed on into the dining room.
The table was set, and at each place there was the remains of a half-eaten meal. The food had long since decayed, but from the looks of things it was an abandoned dinner. In the center of the table an ancient glass kerosene lamp stood, and Elaine could see that it was empty: whoever had lived here must have gotten up in the middle of dinner and left without even putting the lamp out. The lamp—God knew how much later—had simply burned itself out.
She was about to ask Whalen what had happened—why his tenants had “skipped out” in the middle of dinner—when she became aware that Brad was already talking to the police chief.
“How much would you want if you were to sell the place?” he was asking. Elaine felt her stomach sink again, and was relieved to hear Whalen’s reply.
“It’s not