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“Nothing has.”

“So then put it on a multiple and lower the price. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is the house’s reputation. Dark memories die slowly,

Mrs. Freeboard.”

“Miss.”

“Miss. Think it over, would you please?”

“Yeah, I will.”

Freeboard drifted to a small, round, white-pine table in the corner of her cherrywood-paneled study. On the table was a map, some printed sheets, a brochure, and several photos of a massive mansion crouched upon an island in the Hudson River. Freeboard slipped her hand into a pocket of her robe, withdrew a lighter and a package of Camel Lites. She lit one, dragged deeply, and picked up a photo, then she exhaled smoke and shook her head. No way, it’s a waste of time, she lamented; this screwed-up house is straight out of Dark Shadows. Brooding and oblong, made of gray stone, it was gabled and crenelated like an old Scottish castle, like Glamis, and here and there a sinister conical tower rose up like an eruption of evil thought. Freeboard sighed and let the photo flutter back to the table, where it landed with a soft, thin, papery click. Too bad this piece of shit’s not in Greenwich, she dismally mused; I could sell it for a fortune in a week. Yet she lingered by the table, picking at the photos, tantalized, drawn by this challenge to her boredom. Only You, Dick Daring, she reflected; right? At the edge of her consciousness she heard the crackle of her answering machine, her recorded announcement, a pause and then a hangup. Harry, she thought. She shook her head. Then her glance shifted over to a black leather folder containing the history of the house. She’d only skimmed it; since her youth she’d been afflicted with a mild dyslexia, a gift of brutal beatings by her alcoholic father, undernourishment, and long and frequent absences from school. Reading was arduous for her, a defeat. An assistant handled writing up most of her contracts. All she knew about the house was what she’d been told: that it was built in 1937 by a doctor who murdered his wife in some horrible fashion and immediately afterwards killed himself.

She picked up the folder. On the cover in large white letters was a word that she could read without strain: “ELSEWHERE.” And abruptly she remembered a fragment of her dream: a strange place. Some peril. Someone trying to save her, some luminous being, like an angel, like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life. In the dream he had told her his name, something memorable; now she strained to recall it but couldn’t.

The phone and then the click of the answering machine. She tilted her head to the side a bit, listening. Not Harry: Elle Redmund, the wife of James Redmund, celebrated publisher of Vanities Magazine: “… awfully cheeky of me, really, but this friend of ours has popped into town for the night, and we’d both rather die or go to France with Club Med or some such thing than miss out on your fabulous party. Would you mind if we …?”

Freeboard dropped the folder to the table, stubbed out her cigarette, lit another, then returned to her brow-creasing, thoughtful pacing, randomly scuffing from room to room like a chain-smoking wraith condemned to this vigil in a well-appointed, rent-controlled corridor of hell. About her were no photographs, no traces of a personal history, of affection or of unhappy times; but now and then she would pause in front of a painting, a small Monet or a Picasso miniature, not admiring its beauty or its craft but only taking wan comfort in the knowledge of its cost. Then again she would wander and puff and think until at last she grew weary and fell into her downy-soft four-poster bed, where she lay staring up at her mirrored ceiling groping for a way to solve the puzzle of the house. Once she heard an elevator cage clatter open, then a front door key slipping into the lock; Antonia and George, her live-in help, coming back from an evening off. She sighed and turned over. It’s a bitch but you can whip it, she brooded. Think! She soon fell asleep. And dreamed of her father, drunk and naked, chasing her high school