For the past few days, they’ve taken turns talking each other into—and out of—coming to see this place. They’re running out of options. Local real estate prices have skyrocketed, unlike the Binghams’ income. The only homes in their price range are small, undesirable fixer-uppers across town by the highway. They saw seven such properties yesterday and another this morning, a forlorn little seventies ranch that smelled of must and mothballs. Eau d’old man, according to Trib.
Lynda smiles at him in the rearview mirror. “I’m not quite the professional wordsmith you are. I’m sure you can come up with a more creative adjective.”
Annabelle can think of one. She’s been trying to keep it out of her head, but everything—even the tolling steeple bells from nearby Holy Angels Church—seems to serve as a grim reminder.
“Gargantuan,” pronounces the back seat wordsmith. “That’s one way to describe it.”
Murder House, Annabelle thinks. That’s another.
“There’s certainly plenty of room for a large family here,” Lynda points out cheerily.
Optimism might be her strong suit, but tact is not. There are plenty of families that don’t care to grow larger; many, for one heartbreaking reason or another, that couldn’t expand even if they wanted to; and still others, like the Binghams, whose numbers are sadly dwindling.
Annabelle and Trib are only children, as is their own son. As of this past summer, all four of their parents are gone. Trib’s father, the last to pass away, left them the small inheritance that led directly to this long-awaited house-hunt.
They’ve outgrown the gardener’s cottage they’ve been renting since their newlywed days, and have been longing for more space. But this?
This is crazy. This is way too much house for three people.
Lynda, whose strong suit is also not intuition—waxes on. “There are fourteen rooms, including the third-floor ballroom and servants’ quarters, and over thirty-five hundred square feet of living space—although I have to check the listing sheet, so don’t quote me on it.”
That, Annabelle has noticed, is one of her favorite catch phrases. Don’t quote me on it.
“Is she saying it because you’re a reporter?” she’d asked Trib after their first outing with Lynda. “Does she think you’re working on an article that’s going to blow the lid off . . . I don’t know, sump pump function?”
He laughed. “That’s headline fodder if I ever heard it.”
Lynda starts to pull the Lexus into the rutted driveway. After a few bumps, she thinks better of it and backs out onto the street. “Let’s start out front so that we can get the full curb appeal, shall we?”
They shall.
Parked at the curb, they gaze at 46 Bridge Street.
Gargantuan—yes, there’s no disputing that.
The house looms, with a full third story tucked behind the mansard’s scalloped slate shingles. Its grillwork crest mirrors the pronged black iron fence encircling the property. A square cupola rises from the flat roof, its arched cornices perched atop paired windows like the meticulously sculpted, perpetually raised eyebrows of a proper aristocratic lady.
Fittingly, the house—rather, the events that transpired within its plaster walls—raised many an eyebrow a hundred years ago.
“Would you mind handing me that file from the seat back there, Charles?” Lynda asks Trib, who had been born Charles Bingham IV.
As one of several Charlies at Mundy’s Landing Elementary School, he was rechristened “Trib,” courtesy of his family’s longtime ownership of the Mundy’s Landing Tribune. The childhood nickname stuck with him and proved prophetic: he took over as editor and publisher after his dad retired a decade ago.
But Lynda wouldn’t know that. She’s relatively new here, having moved to Mundy’s Landing sometime in the last decade.
Annabelle and Trib had been born here at the tail end of their hometown’s midcentury boom years and had watched it succumb to economic decline.
Lynda wouldn’t remember the era when the grand mansions in The Heights had fallen into shabby disrepair and shuttered storefronts lined the Common. She’d missed the dawning renaissance as they reopened, one by one, to form the bustling business district that exists today.
“Let’s see . . . I was wrong,” she says, consulting the file Trib passes to the front seat. “The house is only 3300 square feet.”