Oh, but it could.
The next day, they took a cab to 104 Glover, the second address from the corner on a block lined with tidy and welcoming redbrick nineteenth-century row houses. All had three tall windows on the top floor; two alongside the front door a level above the street, and smaller, iron-barred basement windows. All had corniced roofs and stone stoops atop twelve steep stairs bordered by ornate black grillwork. They were indistinguishable from each other save a few small details. At 104, the white trim was freshly painted and the stone planters flanking the bottom step were spiked with red fountain grass and trailing blue lobelia.
The property manager, Deborah, greeted them with a warning that it was brand-new to the rental market and they’d have to jump on it if they wanted it. Nora already knew that she did, but she wanted Keith to want it, too. She needed him to want it.
After Deborah’s tour and some wheedling on Nora’s part, he grudgingly agreed.
Flash forward a month and he’s acting as though it was all his idea, eager to show off the house to Piper, hustling her along as she dallies over texts to her friends back home.
“They’re not even awake at this hour, Pipe! Let’s go!”
“Okay, okay, just let me send this last one, Dad!” She presses a button, tucks the phone away, and picks up her own bag, then her sister’s, with a grunt. “What’s in here, boulders?”
“Books,” Nora tells her, “and I’m sure they’re all about Lizzie Borden. That’s her latest thing.”
Keith takes the heavy bag from Piper. “You know Stacey. She’s always obsessed over one thing or another. Too bad it’s never anything like—I don’t know—kittens, baking, yoga . . .”
“Who’s Lizzie Borden?”
Keith answers with a casual shrug. “Axe murderess who killed her parents back in the 1800s.”
“Ew. Why does Stacey like gory death stuff?”
“A lot of people are interested in true crime,” Nora points out.
“Well, I’m not.”
Piper is such an agreeable teenager, just as she was an easy baby, toddler, and child.
She was spared colic, terrible twos and threes, tantrums, baby fat, acne, adolescent angst, bullying. Spared everything that tormented her sister, and thus Keith and Nora, as they saw their firstborn through each stage. By the time Stacey was in preschool, they’d revised their plan to have a large family. Two children would be more than enough, and parenting was so all-consuming that Nora stopped toying with the idea of eventually going back to work.
They’re in the homestretch now. Next year at this time, Stacey will be preparing to head off to college. Until then, Nora hopes that things will go better for her here in New York than back in California; that she’ll find friends and fit in.
For her sake, she assures herself. Not for mine.
“Got the key, Nora?”
“Right here.” Her hand trembles as she fits it into the lock and turns it.
She opens the door, steps over the threshold, and takes a deep breath scented with furniture polish and something vaguely fruity.
The house is dim and shadowed, tall windows shrouded in shades and draperies. She feels along the wall beside the door, presses an old-fashioned button switch, and light floods from the vintage fixture high overhead.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Keith asks Piper.
She takes in the ornate oak staircase, polished hardwoods, and antique furniture, and points at a wall niche, where a glass case holds a coppery black orb the size of a cantaloupe. “What’s that?”
“Revolutionary War cannonball. It was dug up right here in the backyard. That doesn’t happen in California, right?”
“I guess not. What’s that?” She’s zeroed in on the cast-iron radiator tucked alongside the steep staircase, and Keith explains that it will heat the house when the weather cools.
Piper indicates the sepia Victorian family portrait on the wall above the stairs. “Who are they?”
“They lived here back in the olden days. See the carved mantel behind them? It’s the same one that’s on the living room fireplace. Here, I’ll show you.”
Keith leads Piper through the archway like a listing agent.
Remembering how reluctant he’d been to even consider this house, Nora marvels at his proprietary air now. She might find it sweet, or amusing, if she weren’t so numb.
The move was exhausting, and she hasn’t slept in so long, and . . .
And now that they’re here, emotion is swelling in her throat, threatening to spill over.
She closes her eyes.
Just breathe. It’s going to be good here. Everything’s going to be all right now.
When she opens her eyes, she spots the fruity scent’s source: a vase filled with spiky bright red blooms on the marble console table by the door.
Salvia elegans—pineapple sage.
“It symbolizes healing,” Teddy’s voice whispers in her head.
Nora smiles. It’s a perfect welcoming touch for their new lives in the perfect house for a perfect family . . .
On the surface, anyway.
Let the healing begin.
Jacob
Even now, a quarter of a century later, he visits the house.
Sometimes, it’s on the way to wherever he’s going, or just a slight detour—walk down one block instead of another. More often, it’s out of his way, yet he’s compelled to go.
He doesn’t linger and stare; nothing like that. Not the way people did back in 1994, after the murders. A triple family homicide—father, mother, daughter—drew attention, even in New York, even in those violent days, with the homicide rate at record highs amid the crack epidemic. The story made all the papers.
The crime faded from public awareness, but the killer who’d slaughtered the family at 104 Glover was never apprehended. According to the press, there were no suspects. Investigation coverage was minimal, and quickly dropped.
He wonders whether Anna had known what was happening as she drew her last breath on that January night, whether she’d suffered.
Some days, good days, he convinces himself that she hadn’t.
A few weeks before the murders, Jacob’s grandmother had gone to bed on Christmas Eve and failed to wake up on Christmas morning. Such a shame that it happened on the holiday, and without warning, people had said at the funeral.
Yet according to his grandfather, she’d died an easy death. “Berta was always tossing and turning, up and down, up and down. Me, I hear every little thing. That night, nothing. Best sleep I had in sixty years. And Berta—she just slipped away, peacefully.”
But there’s a difference between dying in your sleep of natural causes and being bullet-blasted in the brain.
On bad days, walking past 104 Glover and remembering the young woman who’d lived and died there, Jacob wonders whether Anna was awake in that last instant. Perhaps she’d been stirred from sleep by a footstep in the hall, or sensed someone standing over her bed.