The Unseen

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Young Officer Callaghan was right on the money. The real-estate office was exactly four doors down from the train depot. They hadn’t really even had to drive.

As they walked across the sidewalk to the office, Brendan reached and took Laurel’s hand. She looked at him, startled. “Darling,” he said, pointedly.

“Oh,” she said, realizing. Okay, so now they were a young couple looking for a house. She thought it was a premature bit of deception, but maybe they’d get more information if the agent thought there was something in it for—

Her. Definitely a her. The woman behind the desk by the corner window was on her feet in a flash, dazzling them with her smile. She was an archetypal real-estate agent, in her late forties, fake nails and lemon-yellow Talbots suit, overwhelmingly, positively cheerful. California agents had a little bit more subtlety going on, but that was really just a regional veneer. The overall driving quality was the same. It was about sales. Markets were depressed all over and it must be even more true in an out-of-the-way place like this.

Her name was Audra Lennox.

“Morning, ma’am,” Brendan was saying cheerily, and Laurel felt the “ma’am” was a bit of overkill, directed at her. She resisted the urge to kick him again. “I’m Brendan Cody and this is Mickey. We’re brand-new to North Carolina, and Mickey here and I have been driving through the area, looking at properties. Finally occurred to us it would be a lot smarter to consult a professional.”

“You couldn’t be more right about that,” Audra gushed. “I’d never in my life want to come into a new area without some reputable guidance.”

Laurel was already thinking of a million ways this ruse was going to backfire on them, but Brendan breezed right on. “Thing is, we have a good idea of what we want. I believe people around here call it the Old Folger House.”

The agent’s face fell so fast Laurel thought she might have to scrape it off the floor.

“I can’t imagine you’d find that property… suitable. I have so many properties more… more convenient to area amenities—,” Audra started.

“Oh, we’re not after convenience, are we, honey? We are looking to get as far away as we can, and that’s a fact.” He threw an arm around Laurel’s shoulders and squeezed her. Laurel was starting to feel trapped in an episode of the Andy Griffith Show.

She smiled weakly and agreed, “Something out of the way.”

“But my goodness—that old place is a handful. That’s nothing a young couple like yourselves needs to be getting into.” Audra’s eyes grazed Laurel’s left hand, ostentatiously bare of any rings, and Laurel saw her gaze narrow. Busted already, she thought. Some cover story.

“Oh, we’re up for a challenge,” Brendan beamed, oblivious.

“I wouldn’t call the Folger place a challenge. It’s more like a train wreck,” Audra said, matching Brendan’s wattage, but Laurel saw steel under her smile.

“Still, there’s something about it that spoke to us, didn’t it, hon?” He grasped Laurel’s hand affectionately.

“Have you seen the house?” Audra demanded, more suspicious by the moment. Laurel tensed, but Brendan covered smoothly.

“We’ve seen photos,” he said without missing a beat. “Even if it isn’t the place for us, maybe if we could walk through it with you; you would understand what it is we’re looking for in a house, and we could go from there. A sort of shorthand, so to speak.”

Laurel barely kept herself from cringing—it was so obviously a ploy.

And it worked.

They piled into Audra’s vanilla-cream Lexus and she drove them out a largely deserted road past gently rolling farmlands with sleek chestnut horses behind white rail fencing.

The huge advantage of having a real-estate agent in charge was that you could ask all the questions you wanted about the area—history, population, flora and fauna—and there was a good chance of getting a knowledgeable answer. Laurel had to admit—grudgingly—that Brendan had been right to persist. She also had to admit, also grudgingly, that he could charm a bird out of a tree. Which was not, in her opinion, a point in his favor. In the backseat Laurel narrowed her eyes at him and he returned her a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth look. 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 the stone gateposts from the photos. Laurel felt a little buzz of déjà vu at the sight of the sleek stone hunting dogs seated atop them, permanently frozen at attention.

A metal gate stretched between the posts, padlocked. Audra reached for the keys on the dash, and Brendan gallantly jumped out to unlock and open the gate for her.

As he did, Laurel caught Audra eyeing her in the rearview mirror and felt uneasily that they might not be pulling as much over on her as Brendan assumed they were.

But before either of the women could say anything, if either was going to, Brendan was back in the car, presenting the keys to Audra with a smile.

They drove forward, gravel crunching under the tires, past a perfect curve of pink-blossomed crape myrtles lining both sides of a split-rail fence along the road. Wind stirred the tall, spare pines around them. Laurel found herself craning forward to look. As the house appeared between the trees, she felt a jolt.

It was an English country house of white-painted brick with a steeply pitched roof of what looked like real gray slate, two chimneys, a round upper balcony with white-painted iron railing, and gray shutters. It seemed whole from the front, but the overwhelming feeling was that it was not. There was part that just seemed to be missing.

And angry, Laurel thought absurdly.

As Audra drove the circle to come up to the front, Laurel got a glimpse of the rest of the house, and realized what was so wrong. There was another whole house connected to the front one, this one much longer, made of brick with white columns and trim, set perpendicular to the white front part. Unbelievably, there seemed to be yet another white house behind that, at the other end of the brick part, but just as soon as Laurel had spied it that glimpse was gone. Audra stopped by the path leading to the front door and shut off the engine.

“Welcome to the Folger House.”