by Wendy Wax
He turned to motion toward the house and they turned with him. The pale pink façade was almost completely obscured by the walled jungle in front of it. All she could make out at the end of the driveway was an outbuilding of some sort in an even paler pink.
“This property is one of the best known and most historically significant on Pass-a-Grille. It was built for the Eugene Price family back in the 1920s right around the same time as the Don CeSar—the big pink hotel you passed on the way here.”
He looked at them as if this should mean something. Madeline smiled, but she didn’t think any of them really cared who had built it or lived in it. They just wanted to know how much money they could get for it.
“The Prices were related to Henry Plant, who built Plant Hall and is credited with bringing the railroad down as far as Tampa. A very prominent family. The house remained in the Price family for over sixty years. In 1978 a distant relative named Sam Paulding inherited it and spent a great deal of time and money on it. That work stopped when Sam Paulding died unexpectedly in 1990. It’s changed hands a number of times since then.”
Nicole looked pointedly down at her watch. When the Realtor paused briefly to take a breath, she asked, “Do you think we could go ahead and take a look?”
Madeline winced at the impatience that underscored her tone.
“Why, of course. Of course.”
They moved through the opening in the low wall and followed the path through a veritable forest of palm trees and overgrown shrubbery. The courtyard felt overcrowded and out of control, as if man had simply given up and allowed nature to have its way. “Anyone happen to have a machete in their purse?” Nicole asked, pushing a low lying palm frond out of her face.
Avery smiled. “It is a bit overgrown, but I bet it was gorgeous back in the day.”
“Oh, yes,” Franklin said. “Most of the garden is original to the house. There are plants here that were put in when the house was built and are still thriving.”
“Taking over the world is more like it,” Nicole muttered as Madeline did the math. Apparently the house, like John Franklin and much of the local population, was over eighty years old.
“It just needs a little attention,” he continued. “Maybe a little pruning. My wife is president of the garden club and she says . . .”
Nicole sighed as the Realtor nattered on, but this time she didn’t interrupt.
“And look at this fountain,” he continued as they pushed their way through a stand of big leafed plants and stepped around a group of pointy-edged cactus-like things. It was a weathered concrete basin shaped like an upside down urn. A frieze of dolphins had been carved into its sides.
“It’s beautiful,” Madeline said.
“It’s classic Art Deco,” Avery added enthusiastically, but all of them were already looking over the top of the fountain to the house itself. Madeline’s pulse skittered in her veins as she considered it.
The brick walkway opened to a series of steps, which led to a wooden double door framed in a rectangle of carved stone. Two-storied wings fanned outward on each side, stretching almost the width of the property before folding backward in an inverted U. The pink stucco was faded and splotchy like an old woman who’d had an ill-advised love affair with the sun but had nonetheless moisturized faithfully. The first floor was lined with full-length arched windows; those upstairs were square or rectangular and framed by stone and wrought-iron balconies. The tile roof angled and straightened in numerous directions. Above the roof line two chimneys and a bell tower rose up toward the sky.
“This is a great example of Mediterranean Revival architecture,” Avery said. “The style was hugely popular in Florida and California in the twenties and early thirties. I actually did my thesis on the style’s greatest architects in college.”
Franklin smiled his approval. “Yes, it was a style that was not only elegant but functional for the climate and the times. The walls are a foot thick and the profusion of windows and balconies provide cross ventilation, which was critical in those days before air-conditioning. And inside those foot-thick walls is hollow tile construction reinforced with steel. It was built to last, and it has.”
Madeline knew John Franklin was giving them a sales pitch, but nonetheless her excitement continued to build. For the last three months she’d been clinging by her fingertips, praying for a miracle; now it looked like at least some of her prayers had been answered.
She and Avery and Nicole crowded around John Franklin, the anticipation written on all of their faces as they walked up the steps. It’s a mansion, she reminded herself as Franklin fit the key into the front lock and jiggled it to engage the old brass lock. With a brick drive and a walled courtyard and a name.
The heavy door creaked open and he stepped back with a courtly bow to allow them to enter. “There we go,” he said.
Madeline felt an embarrassing urge to close her eyes and hold her breath as the three of them stepped over the threshold together. She managed to resist the first but apparently none of them did that well with the second. Because they’d hardly set foot in the foyer when there was a loud whoosh of released breath. Which was, unfortunately, accompanied by what sounded like the frantic flapping of wings.
Seven
“Look out!”
The bird dipped so low over their heads that Nicole could feel the air its wings displaced as it flew past them, just missed John Franklin, and shot out the open front door. Inhaling in surprise, the smell that assaulted Nicole’s nose made her want to bail out with the bird.
She took another breath because there was no alternative and drew in a lungful of heavy air that smelled like a bathing suit that had been rolled up wet, stuffed in a suitcase, and then forgotten.
“Oh, my God!” Madeline pinched her nose shut with her fingers. Her brown eyes were large with panic.
Nicole cleared her throat. Avery did the same beside her. The Realtor stepped into the center of the foyer, which was large and square, and somehow managed to breathe normally. “It’s been closed up for quite a while,” was his only concession to the stench. “Let me open a couple of windows and let some fresh air in.”
None of them answered, but Madeline and Avery were wearing the same kicked-in-the-gut look that Nicole felt on her own face. They hadn’t made it past the foyer and already it was clear that the old lady had a lot more wrong with her than blotchy skin.
Above them hung a rusted iron chandelier choked with dust and trailing cobwebs. Beneath their feet the wood floors were scratched and scuffed and stained with lighter spots where furniture must have once stood. A wooden staircase angled up to the second floor, gap-toothed with missing spindles, its surface chipped and peeling. The once-white walls were speckled with yellow age spots and amoeba-shaped stains.
John Franklin took a spot beneath the chandelier and began pointing out the home’s features as if they weren’t all gasping for breath while trying not to breathe, and beginning to feel like even bigger victims than they’d been when they arrived.
According to their “tour guide,” the central hallway stretching to the back of the house was a classic Mediterranean Revival feature as were the wide arched openings that ran along both sides. It all sounded quite lovely except that the whole place smelled like that rolled-up bathing suit—dank and sodden. Despite the open front door, the large fixed glass on the landing, and the vast number of uncovered windows, the bright sunlight outside seemed no match for the accumulated layers of dirt and grime.
Madeline, the hausfrau in the white capris, ran a hand over a squared knob of the banister and came away with a palm full of dust and grit, which she stared at woefully.
“What a shame,” Avery, whom she’d mentally christened the little blonde with the big bust, said. “I don’t know how anyone, even Malcolm Dyer, could neglect a house like this.”
Nicole wondered if Malcolm had ever actually set foot here or had simply purchased it to add to his investment portfolio. He’d started buying up estates and
properties shortly after he’d made his first million—a milestone they’d celebrated together and of which Nicole had been exceedingly proud. For children who’d been evicted from as many places as they had, owning anything was huge. Owning homes as large and larger than this had been a validation of just how far her little brother had managed to come.
“Yes, it’s a fine old home,” the Realtor said as if their surprise had been of joy. “And as you’ll see a large portion of it has been renovated. It just needs a little tender loving care.”
“More like hospitalization,” Nicole said. “Or a team of paramedics.”
Relentlessly positive, John Franklin led them through the downstairs with its large rectangular rooms and ceilings beamed with Florida cypress, pointing out the architectural details with great delight. They toured the formal living room with fireplace, the study/library, the salon, the formal dining room, a lounge with an elaborately tiled bar, Moorish decor, and torn leather banquettes, then speed-walked through a kitchen that had clearly been modernized in a blaze of Formica—sometime in the 1970s.
He gestured toward an open-air loggia that stretched between the kitchen and the waterfront salon. The French doors that spanned the back of the house would have undoubtedly provided a fabulous view if they hadn’t been quite so caked with grime and salt. Nicole tried to make out the detached garage and pool and beyond that the narrow pass, where the bay and Gulf met, but it was like being inside a somewhat murky aquarium; everything outside the glass was vague and out of focus.
Franklin continued his monologue as he led them through another archway and up the back stairs, but Nicole was too numb to process anything besides the fact that this house was in no condition to be listed for sale. Her partners’ faces reflected the same mixture of horror and disappointment.
Upstairs was more of the same. They found the escaped birds’ nest in a corner of the master bedroom just beneath one of many grime-stained windows that were either missing panes or didn’t quite close. The room had been enlarged at some point, and with its dressing area and master bath filled with funky green tile and ancient fixtures, it took up the whole west side of the upper floor. But the plaster had fallen off a sodden section of the ceiling, where shards of daylight and blue sky could be seen, and lay in clumps on the floor, which was covered in a moldy pile of green shag carpet undoubtedly installed at the same time as the kitchen.
They saw three more bedrooms and two more funkilytiled bathrooms as Franklin expounded on the damned Florida cypress, the tile and woodwork, the stone accents, the house’s symmetry and generous proportions. The 1920s hardware, dull and scratched though it was, might have been the crown jewels. At least in his eyes the broken windowpanes, dripping sinks, flaking chrome, and peeling wallpapers, along with the other countless signs of age and neglect, simply didn’t exist.
“They just don’t build houses like this anymore,” John Franklin said as he led them back into the master bedroom. “Not at any price.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Nicole crossed her arms and looked the Realtor in the eye. She’d spent close to a year hiding her fear and desperation. Now she felt as if she’d crawled on her belly through the scorching sands of some desert only to discover that the oasis shimmering in the distance was a pile of camel dung.
“It does have great bones,” Avery Lawford said. “And I can see they’ve tried to renovate within the original footprint of the house, but . . .”
“Maybe it just needs a facelift to get it ready for sale?” Madeline asked hopefully.
Nicole snorted. “This house needs serious reconstructive surgery.” She could feel her anger mounting. She didn’t even have enough money for a Lifestyle Lift. Not for herself, and not for this house. Full-blown plastic surgery was out of the question.
“If we put up a sign and sold it ‘as is’ what could we get for it?” she asked.
Franklin shook his head. “I wouldn’t do it. You’d get maybe a million, which would be like giving it away.”
They looked at each other. A million sounded like a lot until you deducted the sales commission and divided it in thirds. She might end up with enough to spend the summer in the Hamptons trolling for clients, but only if it sold quickly, like in the next twenty-four hours.
“Come on,” Franklin said. “Let me show you why you don’t want to do that. You have a significant ace up your sleeve. I really should have started there.”
He put a key into a deadbolt lock on one of the master bedroom’s French doors, manhandled it open, then led them out onto the balcony. A peeling wrought-iron stair wound down to the patio below, but no one looked straight down. They all looked out over the barrel roof of the loggia, past the cracked and empty pool and out over the seawall, their gazes inexorably drawn to the house’s true reason for being.
“Wow.”
“Oh, my . . .”
“Good God!”
They stared in wonder out over the very tip of the tip of the barrier island and watched the bay and Gulf meet head-on in a choppy dance of whitecaps and sea swell. The water slapped into itself, swirling and eddying. They were surrounded by water on three sides, the house at their back. To the west a jetty angled out toward the shipping channels and, presumably, the distant shores of Mexico. On the east lay Boca Ciega Bay. But in front of them in this slim comma of water, the vastness of the Gulf funneled into the more intimate confines of the bay. Beyond the pass, small mounds of land poked haphazardly out of the water, seemingly uninhabited but for the birds using them as landing strips.
It was an intensely personal experience. Like having all of nature—sky and sea and everything that lived in either—performing for your own enjoyment.
“Now this,” Nicole said, “is worth serious money. But the house . . .” She didn’t even turn to look at it. “Maybe we should just knock it down.” Her hands fisted at her sides. Given all she’d been through, all she’d lost, she could probably pull the place down with her bare hands and call it therapy.
The little blonde tensed beside her and Madeline gave a small gasp of surprise as Nicole turned from the view to meet John Franklin’s eye. “There can’t be many pieces of property available with a better view or situation.”
“Well, no, there aren’t,” he conceded. “But you can’t just raze a home of this significance. It’s on the National Register as a designated property.”
“So we’re not allowed by law to demolish it?” Avery asked with what Nicole thought sounded like relief.
The Realtor looked distinctly uncomfortable. His ears turned a bright red. “I don’t see how, in good conscience, you could do that.”
“Conscience aside,” Madeline asked, her tone tentative, “could we?”
There was a protracted silence while Franklin apparently tried to come up with a stronger argument. Finally, he sighed and shifted his weight on the cane. “Unfortunately, we don’t actually have the power to prohibit that.” He brightened. “But there are some powerful tax and financial incentives to restore rather than tear down. And you gain an exemption from the FEMA fifty percent rule, which would allow you to put as much money as you wanted into the restoration.”
Nicole thought about just how much she could afford to put into this house. That amount was zero. “But we could tear it down and just list the lot?” Nicole asked, thinking at the moment she was, in fact, desperate enough to rip the structure apart with her bare hands.
“Well, you’d have to come before the preservation board and we, um, I mean they would most likely impose a ninety-day waiting period in which you would be asked to hear reasons for choosing to restore or renovate. I think the community would do everything it could to stop the loss of such a significant property.”
“Such as?” Nicole pressed.
Franklin removed a white handkerchief and mopped his brow while Avery and Madeline looked on. In the end he didn’t answer her question, but said, “Even in this economy there is a market for well-restored, or even renovated, historic homes.
I have a Realtor in my office who specializes in that and has a list of potential clients across the country. I believe that’s how we originally found Mr. Dyer.”
“Gee, and look how well that turned out,” Nicole said.
John Franklin cleared his throat; the wattle of extra skin that surrounded it shook. “Shall we?” Despite the cane and his age, he motioned them down the circular stair that led to the back courtyard, then followed carefully behind. He must have realized walking back through the house might send them running for the wrecking ball.
The exterior damage was worse back where the house met the elements head-on. Chunks of pale pink stucco and pieces of red roof tiles lay dashed against the concrete pool deck and surrounding bricked courtyard.
A drainpipe hung down the corner of the east wing and tapped rhythmically against the dented and chipped stucco, the tune dictated by the breeze. But it was harder to focus on the signs of neglect when you were surrounded by water that sparkled so brilliantly under such a cloudless blue sky.
“We’ve had sales of several renovated Mediterranean Revivals in the last year, none of them anywhere close to your property in size or relevance. And every one of them sold for several million dollars.”
Clearly, John Franklin was not yet ready to roll over and play dead. Nor had he forgotten how to sell. “You’ve got one hundred fifty feet of prime waterfront, far more than any of the others.”
“So how much do you think we could get just for the land?” Nicole asked. She felt like a dog with a bone in its mouth; one she couldn’t quite bring herself to drop or bury.
“Probably about three million,” Franklin conceded, turning his hound-dog eyes on the three of them. “But as an active member of the Gulf Beaches Historical Society and president of the preservation board, I have to say it would be criminal.”
There was a silence broken only by the caw of a seagull and the high whine of a wave runner speeding along the seawall’s edge. They were all smiling over the three million, their collective relief palpable. Nicole could taste it; her share would go a long way toward getting her life back on track in every way possible.