Can we quote you on it? Annabelle wants to ask.
“I can’t imagine what it cost to heat this place last winter,” Trib comments, “with all those below-zero days we had.”
“You’ll see here that there’s a fairly new furnace.” Lynda hands them each a sheet of paper. “Much more energy efficient than you’ll find in most old houses in the neighborhood.”
Annabelle looks over the list of specs, noting that the “new” furnace was installed about fifteen years ago, around the turn of this century. The wiring and plumbing most likely date to the turn of the last one.
There are two parlors, seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, two porches, an eat-in kitchen, and the aforementioned ballroom, plus the only privately owned indoor pool in town. Some potential buyers might view that as a burden rather than the luxury it is for Annabelle, a lifelong daily lap swimmer.
Still, the house lacks plenty of key items on her wish list. There’s a ramshackle detached garage instead of the two-car garage she and Trib covet. There is no master suite with a bathroom. The lot is relatively small, like many in this historic neighborhood. It’s probably too shady for a vegetable garden like the one Annabelle happily tends where they live now.
“You’re never going to find exactly what you want,” Lynda has been reminding her and Trib from day one. “You have to compromise.”
They’re trying, searching for a home that will fit a happy medium—literally. Not too big, not too small, not too old, not too new, not too expensive, not a rock-bottom fixer-upper . . .
Goldilocks syndrome—another of Lynda’s catchphrases.
This house may be too old and too big, but it isn’t too expensive despite being located in The Heights, a tree-lined enclave adjacent to the village common.
“Since you both grew up here, I don’t have to tell you about how wonderful this neighborhood is,” Lynda says, as the three of them step out of the car and approach the tall iron gate. “Have either of you ever been inside the house?”
“I trick-or-treated at the door when I was a kid,” Annabelle says. “That’s the closest I ever got.”
Trib shakes his head. “I never even bothered to trick-or-treat here. Old Lady Purcell—that’s what everyone called her, because she was ancient even back then—never gave out good candy. Her nephew was the one who went out and got it for her, and he was a real cheapskate.”
Maybe, but Lester Purcell isn’t being much of a cheapskate now.
He’d inherited this house upon the death of his great-aunt Augusta, who died over a year ago, reportedly in the same room where she’d been born back in 1910. He could have sold it to the Historical Society for well above market value, but he refused to entertain a longstanding preemptive offer from the curator, Ora Abrams.
“I’m not going to cash in on a tragedy like everyone else around here,” he grumbled, adamantly opposed to having his ancestral home exploited for its role in the notorious unsolved Sleeping Beauty case.
Murder House—that’s what everyone in Mundy’s Landing has called this place and two other homes in The Heights, for as long as Annabelle can remember.
Back in the summer of 1916, 46 Bridge Street was the second home to gain notoriety as a crime scene. The first had been a gambrel-roofed fieldstone Dutch Manor house just around the corner at 65 Prospect Street; the third, a granite Beaux Arts mansion at 19 Schuyler Place.
The series of grisly crimes unfurled in the relentless glare of both a brutal heat wave and the Sestercentennial Celebration, marking 250 years since Mundy’s Landing had been founded.
As far as anyone knows, no actual murder took place inside the three houses. But what had happened was profoundly disturbing, especially for the people living there at the time.