The Good House: A Novel

by Leary, Ann

  We climbed into the car and drove around the green and down winding Pig Rock Lane to River Road, where I live. I bought my house on the river when Emily was a senior in high school. It was the first year my business really took off. I had the record number of sales in Essex County that year (and the two previous years). It’s a great house, a historic landmark, once owned by Elliot Kimball, a famous shipbuilder, who built the house in the mid-1800s. It’s supposed to be haunted, and though I love to play up that intrigue, I’ve never seen or heard any signs of ghosts. My daughters, however, refuse to stay in the house overnight without me because they insist they hear and see ghosts in the house.

  In the past, I’ve had clients offer me figures for my house that are triple what I paid for it, but until recently I couldn’t imagine ever selling it. Now I had started pointing it out as my own house to a few of my clients with deep pockets. I wasn’t going to list it, but if they wanted to make me an offer, I would listen. I had bought the house in 2004—the height of the market out here—and had mortgaged it heavily. It had been such a good year that I did something I would advise my clients against—I bought a house that I would someday be able to afford, not one that I could actually afford at the time. Yes, I should have known better, but I guess it’s the whole “cobbler’s children have no shoes” scenario. My dad had owned the only grocery store in town, but there was never food in our fridge when I was growing up. Now I, the top broker in the region (well, perhaps not the top anymore, but certainly right up there), stood a chance of losing my house to the bank.

  Well, it wasn’t really a huge risk. I just needed a good year.

  From River Road, I drove the Sandersons to Beach Street, which leads to the Hart Preserve. The Hart Preserve is the former home of Robert Hart, an early-twentieth-century industrialist who built a small castle on a beautiful eleven-hundred-acre estate with hills rolling down to one of the sandiest and most pristine beaches in Massachusetts. Most of the beaches here on the North Shore are rocky, but not Hart’s Beach. The Hart estate is now a state wildlife preservation. The castle is rented out for weddings and other functions. We admired the castle and the grounds and drove a little farther north to North Beach—the public beach with all the playground equipment.

  I showed the Sandersons three or four properties, but to be honest, there wasn’t much on the market in their price range. We drove down to the Crossing, and as we did, we passed the Dwights’ house, with the Good Realty sign planted on its lawn.

  “That looks like a cute place,” said Hillary Sanderson.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “That’s a great house, and it’s in your price range, too. I can’t get us in there today, but the next time you come up, give me a little notice and we’ll have a look.”

  We drove back along River Road, past all the protected estuary land, and then we turned up Wendover Rise. Wendover Rise is the name of the road that the McAllisters live on, but everybody calls the whole hilltop “the rise,” though there are many small roads that run across it. I always drive my clients along the rise, though there is rarely anything for sale up there. It’s just to show them the view. You can see the salt marshes and estuaries and, in the distance, the ocean. That day with the Sandersons was so mild that the ocean was dotted with the white sails and colorful spinnakers of diehards who wanted to get in one last day on the water before dry-docking their boats for the winter.

  Eventually, we drove back down into Wendover Crossing—the rather charming village that is centered around our MBTA train station. The train from Boston stops here in Wendover four times a day. We’re on the Rockport/Newburyport line. In the Crossing, we have what Scott used to call “the Stop & Shop of the Seven Gables,” the Coffee Bean, of course, the Wendover Public Library, the Hickory Stick Toy Shop, the post office, and a little pizza/ sandwich place called Big Joe’s. Hillary oohed and aahed at the quaintness of it all. I knew she was hooked. You can always tell. She would live in Wendover … or die. I would have to talk to Cassie and Patch about their house. If they could only clean it up a little.

  When we arrived back at my office, we were just starting up the front steps when Rebecca McAllister appeared from the side porch. It can be awkward sometimes, encountering my friends and clients leaving the therapist’s office upstairs, but honestly, it’s only really awkward the first time. There are very few people in this town whom I haven’t met going in or coming out of those side doors. Mostly, it’s parents bringing their kids to be “evaluated” by Katrina Frankel, who specializes in learning and developmental disorders. My office faces the side porch, and I have to admit, it boggles the mind that so many children in our town might have these disorders. My former sales associate Lucy and I used to joke that there must be something in the water, but I’m told it’s everywhere. Teachers send kids off for diagnoses if they sit wrong in their chairs, I’m told.

  Scott is a history buff, and he researched the old parsonage when we bought it. Apparently, the early ministers used it as an entrance for those seeking counsel from the clergy, so it’s rather fitting that it serves a similar purpose these hundreds of years later.

  I had seen Rebecca leaving Peter’s office before, always walking slowly, always with the dark glasses. The afternoon with the Sandersons, however, she came around the corner of the porch quite abruptly and actually bumped into Hillary as I unlocked the front door to my office.

  “Oh my God!” Rebecca exclaimed, breathless and then laughing good-naturedly. “I’m SO sorry.”

  “No, don’t be. I’m fine,” said Hillary.

  “How are you, Hildy?” asked Rebecca. She was looking so much better. She had looked quite depressed those few times I’d seen her leaving Peter’s office in the early summer. I’d never quite gotten over that thing she did with the mare and foal that morning. And then after the party and the incident at the beach with Cassie and Jake, I worried that we might be losing the McAllisters. If the wife decides she doesn’t like a place, nobody stays.

  “I’m great,” I said. “Rebecca, meet Hillary and Rob Sanderson. They’re thinking of moving to the area.” I turned to Hillary. “Rebecca and her family just moved here recently themselves,” I said.

  “We love it,” Rebecca said before they had a chance to ask. “So nice to meet you,” she added, and then, I swear, she literally skipped down the porch steps. It was that kind of day; you don’t get many like those in New England. I was sure the Sandersons would be back the following weekend. I gave them a folder with all the listings of the houses I had shown them.

  “What about that cute place on the hill going down to the town?” asked Hillary.

  “Yes,” I said, “the Dwight place. It’s a nice house. I promise to show it to you the next time you come up.”

  We made an appointment for the following Saturday.

  * * *

  I called Cassie Dwight on Monday morning. “I think I have the perfect buyers for your house,” I said.

  “Really?” Cassie said. “Hildy, that’s so great. We have a deadline to sign Jake up for that school in Newton.”

  “I need to come over and talk to you about it,” I said. “When would be a good time?”

  “Could you come this morning? Jake has school.”

  When I pulled into her driveway half an hour later, Cassie was planting yellow chrysanthemums around her front steps.

  “Lovely, Cassie,” I said. She was beaming.

  “Let’s go inside and talk about what needs to be done before the showing,” I said. “They’d like to come this Saturday. And even if these people aren’t interested, we could do an open house the following Wednesday.”

  The house was in the same state as usual, only this time there was oatmeal smeared all over the kitchen table. Cassie grabbed a roll of paper towels and started wiping it up, all the while describing the great program at the Newton school.

  “He would be there all day, with one-on-one therapy for most of the time. It’s a program specifically developed for kids with his types of delay
s. Where we have him now, he’s thrown in with kids with every disability under the sun. I mean, how is that going to help him?”

  “Okay, Cassie, look. We’ve got to do some work on your house by the weekend.”

  “I know. Patch and I’ll clean—”

  “No, I mean real work. I’ve been thinking about this. I think we should hire one of Frank Getchell’s crews to come in here, starting tomorrow, and do some real work. Did Patch ever find out what’s under that living room carpet?”

  “Yes, it’s nice hardwood, he was right. But we can pull the carpet up ourselves.”

  “It’s really a big job, Cassie. There’s the carpet, the padding beneath, the tacking strips. Frankie could have three guys do it in a couple hours. It would take you and Patch days … and what would you do with Jake while you were doing this? He could step on the tacks.”

  “We can’t afford to pay Frankie Getchell’s overpriced crew,” snapped Cassie. “Do you know how much Jake’s different therapies cost? And our insurance doesn’t pay the half of it. Both our parents are retired. We can’t ask them for any more money.”

  “I know. Here’s what I think we should do. I’ll pay Frankie myself. Then, once the house sells, you can pay me back. I don’t think it’ll be much. They’ll come in, rip out the carpet, patch up some of the walls. And they’ll need to paint—I think … everything. Frankie will get three or four guys in here and they’ll do in a few days what would take you and Patch weeks. The extra money you’ll make on the sale will more than pay for Frank’s guys.”

  Cassie looked down at her hands, which were resting on the grimy table. “Really, Hildy? You could do that?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I want to sell this house as much as you do. You have no idea how slow business is now. You’re giving me something to do,” I said. “A project.”

  I hadn’t admitted to anyone else that particular truth—that my business was slow. Most people thought I was still the top-selling agency in the area, but since the corporate real-estate firms, like Sotheby’s and Coldwell Banker, had moved into the area, it had become difficult for me to compete. I still managed to get some of the best listings, because I’d known the owners in this area all my life, but when buyers came to town from New York or Boston, they usually went to Sotheby’s, because they imagined a certain prestige, I suppose. When these new out-of-town owners decided to resell, which they often did within a few short years, having not fully explored the reality of our quiet community, our short summers and long winters, the sometimes prolonged commute and unreliable train service to Boston, they usually listed with the broker who had sold them the place. In recent years, this broker had often been Wendy Heatherton, who’d gotten her start in real estate working for me.

  Wendy had just moved here from New Jersey when her husband divorced her. I hired her, first as a receptionist, then later, after she was licensed, as an associate broker. I taught her everything I knew about the business. She paid me back by stealing my best listings and taking them with her to Sotheby’s while I was at Hazelden. She’d had a banner year, while I’d had one of my slowest since I opened my own company.

  * * *

  I tried calling Frank Getchell when I returned to my office, but he wasn’t there. He has no answering machine. He just figures if you need him that badly, you’ll go out and find him. Which I did, quite by happenstance, that afternoon, when I was filling up my car at the Mobil station just outside the Crossing. Frankie pulled up to the diesel tank behind me with his bright orange pickup, and when he got out and saw me, he shouted, “Hildy. How ah ya?”

  Frankie is one of the last descendants of the oldest family in Wendover. It’s said that Wendover’s first resident was Amos Getchell, who had some kind of falling-out with the settlement down in Salem and had paddled or sailed up here and lived for several years among the local Anawam Indians. He spent his first winter living in a massive English ale barrel down in what is now known as Getchell’s Cove. He hooked up with an Anawam girl, and now all the Getchells have some Native American blood in them, because it was several generations before the family finally started integrating with the colonists who had begun settling along the waterways that led inland from the coast.

  I’ve known Frankie Getchell all my life. He’s three years older than I am. He still lives in the house he grew up in—the dark old saltbox up on the rise. It’s an eyesore and many have complained about the condition in which he keeps his place. There have even been zoning meetings devoted entirely to Frankie, much to his pleasure.

  Frankie’s house is falling apart, paint is peeling from the decaying clapboards, and the roof sags. Strewn about his lawn are old pieces of plumbing (including about half a dozen toilets), railroad ties, pieces of architecture—lintels, fireplace mantels, stone slabs, wooden beams, balusters—and even a few monstrous oil tanks that he’s salvaged over the years. Apart from his salvage/construction business, Frankie is also the chief of our town’s volunteer fire crew, and he rescues some old fixtures if a house burns and nobody wants them. If you ask him, as I have on occasion, why he has a charred wooden beam lying, still smoldering, on his front lawn, he’s genuinely perplexed.

  “It’s perfectly good” is his reply. “Why would you wanna throw away a perfectly good thing like that?”

  It’s all “perfectly good,” and it’s all for sale, all except for the house and property. His weedy front lawn hosts this perennial yard sale, while off to the side, he keeps his fleet of five of the oldest, ricketiest pickup trucks you’ll find within a hundred-mile radius. We have no municipal garbage service here in Wendover, so you can either haul your own garbage to the dump or hire Frankie Getchell to come get it. I’d say 80 percent of Wendover’s 2,800 residents have contracted with Frankie to have his crew haul their garbage for fifty dollars a month, which adds up quite nicely—you do the math. In the winter, during snowstorms, his guys stay up all night drinking and plowing out Frankie’s customers—again, most of the people in Wendover. Frank also offers property management and caretaking, as he had done for the Leightons’ pony farm, as well as landscaping and carpentry services. Everyone in Wendover refers to him as the “fix-it man.” You can call on him and his crew to do just about anything that needs to be done in and around a house. His business thrives, but he appears to put not a penny of his earnings back into his own home or vehicles. His trucks regularly break down on the side of the road.

  When I drive clients by Frankie’s property, some ask about the “character” who lives in “that place.” I’m sure they imagine some poor, old, uneducated hermit. No, Frankie Getchell is whip-smart and easily one of the richest men in Wendover, or he was, until the wonderful McAllisters moved to town.

  Frankie’s property extends far behind his house; actually, it goes all the way down the rise to the estuary. He has 120 prime acres there, plus another twelve priceless acres that border my property along the river. The property has always belonged to his family. On the far side of his riverfront property are about fifty acres of wetland that can never be developed and that have been deeded over to the Wendover Land Trust. Sharon Rice and the Land Trust officials have been trying for years to get him to at least deed them the rights to his higher (thus buildable) riverfront land after his death.

  “That way, nobody will ever develop it,” Sharon has said, pleading with him. “It’ll be protected in perpetuity, just as it is today.”

  “Now, why would I care what people decide to do with that land after I’m dead?” he always shoots back.

  Frankie pays very little tax on the property because he has most of it registered as farmland. The acreage behind his house has been a Christmas tree farm for as long as I can remember. Plus, apparently he has some kind of tax protection due to his Native American ancestry. But it was mostly the clutter on his lawn that caused some of his neighbors to bring a complaint about him before the zoning board a few years ago. Wendover Rise is residentially zoned.

  Frank Getchell clearly operates a busi
ness—in the summer months, a very ugly, noisy, and smelly business. Often the crews finish garbage collection too late to go to the dump, so sometimes they leave the stinking garbage in the trucks for entire weekends. In the winter, there are actual traffic jams up there during the weeks before Christmas, because Frankie’s farm is a “cut your own tree” place, and people come from far and wide to traipse through the snow and choose a tree and cut it down themselves.

  Some neighbors wanted him to “cease and desist.”

  It’s funny in a town like this, the way some newcomers want to believe they’re tight with the locals—the real townies. Alan Harrison, a big-time Boston litigation lawyer who has a weekend place up here, is one of those, and he offered his services pro bono to Frankie, believing, as many do, that Frankie just barely manages to scrape by. And most of the town showed up at the zoning meeting to offer their support to good old Frankie Getchell, poor old persecuted Frank. They didn’t really need to. Frankie was within his rights. He was grandfathered in, having run his business long before the zoning laws were written up.

  Normally, I would have just waved back to Frankie but this time I needed to talk with him about Cassie’s place, so after I finished pumping my gas, I walked over to where he was leaning against his rusty old truck. The old Ford was idling and music was blaring from his radio. Frankie grinned at me as I approached. I didn’t care for the way he continued grinning at me as he filled his tank. We have a complicated little history, Frankie and me, a history that he finds amusing and I find, in parts, humiliating, which amuses him even more.