as he departed. “You know you’re not supposed to be up here,” she told him. “Now, where were we?”
I had left my iPad in the car. Wanting to have a record of our conversation, I hauled out my phone instead and then joined her at the dining table. “Do you mind if I record this interview?”
“Heavens no,” Hilda said. “Go right ahead. What do you want to know?”
It took a moment to get my phone’s recording app up and running. “What can you tell me about the Mayfields?”
“Pretty much everything,” she told me. “We were neighbors and good friends for years and years. Peter Mayfield’s people came here to West Seattle early on, you know,” Hilda answered.
“What do you mean by ‘early on’—as in pioneers?” I asked.
She nodded. “His great-grandfather, Harold Mayfield, didn’t show up with the Dennys and all those other first-on-the-ground guys, but Harold’s arrival wasn’t all that much later. He laid claim to a chunk of land, cleared off the trees, and started a dairy farm. During the Roaring Twenties, when housing was in short supply, Pete’s grandfather Richard, who inherited the property from Harold, cut what he thought was going to be a great deal with a local builder. They subdivided the farm and turned it into a slew of lots. Rather than giving Richard cash money for the land, they worked out an arrangement so each of his four sons would come away with his own lot, along with a brand-new house that was bought and paid for. Those were the first houses to be built. The contractor and Richard expected to split the proceeds from the sale of all the other houses. Three or four more houses, including this one, got built before the crash happened, and that was the end of that. After that, the whole project ground to a halt.”
The crash in question was obviously the one in 1929. All of this was interesting, of course, but it was also ancient history. Still, it seemed best to let the old lady tell the story in her own rambling way. “The Mayfields lost everything?” I asked.
“Yup, every single thing except for those four newly built houses. Figuring he was going to make a fortune selling the other houses, the old man had mortgaged the original farmhouse to the hilt in order to pay building costs. He lost that, too, and ended up committing suicide. The family managed to hold on to the other four houses during the Depression, but only just barely.
“When World War II came along, all four brothers enlisted in the army. Pete, Agnes’s husband, was at Normandy for D-day and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Of the four boys, he was the only one who came home. Since none of the other brothers had kids or wives when they died, Peter inherited the other three houses and hung on to them as well, renting them out some of the time, paying the taxes, and thinking that one day they’d be worth a pretty penny. Peter and Agnes married right after the war, and the two of them looked after his widowed mother, which probably explains why they didn’t have kids of their own until later in life. That woman was a handful. When Peter died, Agnes ended up with the whole shebang. She probably should have sold out a long time ago, but like a lot of people our age, she was set in her ways.”
“So what did Peter do once he came back from overseas?” I asked.
“He went to work for that steel company over by the Duwamish. My husband, Clyde, worked there, too. That’s where they met and became friends. Pete was the one who told us the house across the street from his—one of the few from that original project—was about to be sold. We managed to snap it up, and we’ve been here ever since.” Then, after a pause, she corrected, “I’ve been here ever since. But Pete and Clyde carpooled back and forth to work for years, right up until Clyde got hurt. Pete passed away in the late seventies. I forget which year.”
“But he and Agnes had kids?” I prodded.
Hilda nodded. “That’s right—a boy and a girl, Lenora and Arthur. Lenora was whip-smart and pretty as all get-out, but mean, just like that grandmother of hers. Lenora’s married to some kind of Microsoft bigwig and lives over in Bellevue.”