It takes a few weeks, but you need only the patience of those weeks and a little driving distance between neighboring towns to find what you’re looking for. I always found plenty, more than I needed, and, after emerging from the library, I’d drive around with a Thomas Guide hunting down any places reporters might have mentioned in passing: Restaurant parking lots where somebody got shot. Liquor stores where a robbery’d gone wrong. Public schools where something awful had happened one weekend, left undiscovered until Monday.
It’s voyeur work. There’s no way it doesn’t leave some kind of mark on you. The case I picked for my second book involved a home health nurse intentionally blinding a millionaire on her caseload in order to effect a miracle cure and maybe get rewarded: the patient died, and the family hired a private detective to look into it, who, after a little legwork, scouted out the families of a few other former patients. They’d all been surprised to find themselves burying their parents and grandparents, who’d all seemed quite healthy for their age right up until their sudden and precipitous declines.
I called the book Spent Light. I remember parking my car in front of the house where the nurse had once lived, gazing up at its porch, and trying to imagine her walking out, handbag stocked with the wood alcohol she’d be administering daily to some ailing old man until he died of evidently natural causes. I remember sitting in that car for half an hour, watching the sun sink behind the low hills, and then thinking: This isn’t enough.
That was the night when, for the first time, I knocked on a stranger’s door to ask if they’d let me inside, and the night I stumbled across my method, which, like anything else in the world, I guess, has both good points and bad.
* * *
IN AN IDEAL WORLD, Whitney would have let me go into the property by myself for just a few minutes. I generally get great mileage out of first impressions. But I didn’t want to seem any weirder than I already did, and it wasn’t her job to safeguard my initial visions. So we walked in together: she with her practiced realtor’s monologue, pointing out unique fixtures and shiny improvements; me with my eyes on the ceilings, the walls, and the corners, looking firsthand at places I’d read about in clippings and seen on archival tape. I was trying to get a feel for how the scene might have splashed when the shock of entry was still raw. I smelled something—cherry-vanilla; an air freshener somewhere, or residue from the cleaning crew, I couldn’t tell which. The scent was dense, big-elbowed. You couldn’t ignore it once you’d isolated it from the other smells in the house: fresh paint, wax, oven cleaner.
“This kitchen’s all new,” she said as we rounded a counter that divided what looked to have once been a single room. She gestured gracefully from point to point as she continued: “Gas oven, all new tile above the counters. But they’ve kept the look that houses in this neighborhood often have.” She pronounced the t in “often” when she said it: off-ten.
“Vinyl floors?” I said.
“Linoleum, actually,” she said, cocking her head. “People are using it again.”
“Wow, really? Back when I was a kid—I don’t know. It feels like you weren’t supposed to like linoleum.”
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “It was out of fashion for a while. But it’s actually organic. All natural materials. Plus you can really do a lot with linoleum, actually. The color goes all the way through.”
They were nice floors, checkered in a brick-red-and-white pattern. I wanted to get down on my hands and knees and take a closer look at them, to compare them to what I’d seen in my initial research, but all that was going to have to wait.
“What were they before?” I said.
“This is an older place,” she said. “They were wood.”
“Did they tear out the wood, do you know?” I was trying hard to sound casual, but the more we talked, the further down in the zone I found myself: picturing the place as it once was, trying to see it with my mind’s eye.
“Well, a total refurb costs a lot,” she said. “I think the original floorboards are still under there, probably. But I know we hired a great firm to put down the new floors. They should be solid.”
I felt bad; she had the wrong idea—that she might miss the sale if something wasn’t right, that the house might not be nice enough for me. But it was nice; they’d prettied it up; the idea was to help it rise from its beginnings. What I represented, standing there, was a countervailing force to the current mood of the neighborhood. My interests lay underneath a surface in whose anticipated permanence people were investing time, and money.
“Oh, it’s great,” I said, “I’m always just curious about what houses looked like when they were new.”
She laughed then with an openness you don’t usually expect from people in her line of work. It was a small laugh, but genuine, coming from somewhere lower in the gut than you usually hear from strangers.
“It’s been a long time since this house was new,” she said.
* * *
I FELT GIDDY, almost light-headed, as we walked back out through the front door to the sidewalk; she gestured me toward her car, a light blue Chevy Blazer, meticulously clean, either new or driven to the office straight from the wash-and-wax. I’ve done first visits that involved lock-breaking and climbing through windows. Those properties were abandoned, but the field trips I took to them helped set the tone for the way I work: learn a lot about a site, then physically enter it, breaching the barrier from the conjectural to actual while they’re all still rich and vivid in my mind. To take this step with another person standing by the whole time, brightly outlining all the upgrades recently made to the place while leaving out all the details that accounted entirely for my presence there: it was disorienting.
Driving, she asked me a little about myself: my work, where I’d gone to school, if I had any children. But at lunch, seated in the outside patio of a Panera by a strip mall, she began to dig a little deeper. “Are you looking at any other houses while you’re here?”
“Actually, no,” I said. I looked up from my food; I didn’t want to seem evasive. “Just the one.”
“We have a number of really nice properties,” she said. “There’s neighborhoods in town that are quieter but not really much pricier. Two of them I could show you after lunch, if you wanted.”
“I leave later this afternoon,” I said. This wasn’t true; my reservation at the La Quinta was good until eleven the following day. Still.
“That’s fast!” she said. “Do you mind if I ask…”
She waited for me to make eye contact.
“Many of our clients are first-time buyers, and a house like that is often perfect for them. But I have several places in newer neighborhoods, places with a little more elbow room.”
Elbow room: she was young, and worked in a small market, but she was as good as or better than any high-end agent selling converted condos in Pacific Heights.
“It’s specifically this house I’m interested in,” I said.
“I know how that is,” she said, brilliantly, I thought: There was no way she wasn’t wondering what was wrong with me, why I’d want to get a place almost visibly destined for demolition. I suspected, faintly, that she was sounding me out for motives. People here had reason to be suspicious of outsiders. “But if you can find the time, at least look at this one other one. It’s less than a mile from here. It just went on the market. Super-cute. Newer, and a little nicer.”
I looked at my watch, which was strictly a performative gesture: my time was my own. “I can be a little flexible, I think,” I said. There wasn’t any need for me to seem busier than I was. I’m not sure what impression I was trying to make by tacitly suggesting I had a to-do list for the rest of the afternoon, but I did it anyway. You get used to this kind of talk in my line of work.
* * *