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By Root 2301 0

date down the street. Then she dreamed of the angel again. He was winged and tall and magnificent, but his face was an ovoid blank. In the dream she was waiting for a table at the Palm, a narrow little steak house on Manhattan’s East Side, and the angel was attentively taking an order from a young and beautiful dark-eyed woman when abruptly he looked up and met Freeboard’s gaze and warned, “Take the train. The clams aren’t safe.” “What the hell is your name?” the puzzled Realtor had shouted at him then and at that she was suddenly awake. She groaned and peered over at her digital clock. It was six A.M. Forget it. Too early. She lay back and stared up at the mirrored ceiling. “The clams aren’t safe?” she puzzled. What was that? Moments later her thoughts curled back to the mansion. The agent in charge of the owners’ affairs had explained how she could see it at any time.

She abruptly sat up. Today would be the day.

Comfortable in jeans, western boots and white sweater, Freeboard drove her green Mercedes Cabriolet with the top down across the George Washington Bridge and then north along the Hudson to Craven’s Cove, a tiny and sparsely populated village, and from there she took a motor bunch across to the island. At the wheel of the boat was its sole crew and owner, a taciturn, slender man in his sixties with brine-wrinkled skin and squinting eyes that were the pale bluish gray of a faded seashell. As they chugged through the mists of the morning river, he squinted at the mansion and asked “You gonna live there?” Freeboard couldn’t hear him. There was wind and the engine’s whiskey growl. She cupped a hand to her ear, raised her voice, and asked, “What?”

“I said, you gonna live there?”

For a moment she stared into those faded denim eyes, then glanced up at the stitching on the old salt’s nautical cap and the name of the boat: FAR TRAVELER. She turned back to the mansion.

“No.”

When they docked, the old ferryman remained on the launch, lighting up a briar pipe while he leaned against a rail and watched Freeboard as she clumped down the dock’s old planks and then entered a shadowy grove of great oaks until at last he couldn’t see her anymore. She troubled him. He didn’t know why.

The Realtor followed a gravel path that snaked through the wood about a tenth of mile and led her directly to the front of the house. Beside the front door she found a Realtor’s lockbox, expertly twiddled the combination, extracted a key, and then turned for a look at her wider surroundings. Past the woods she caught a glimpse of a shoreline and beach next to waters breathing placid and shallow and clear, and beyond, in a shimmer of sun and haze, gleamed the jutting and sprawling skyline of Manhattan, looming tall and commanding and implacably unhaunted. She peered up at the mansion’s forbidding hulk. Very good, she thought, satisfied. It’s not staring back. So far the fucking house has done nothing wrong.

The river’s breath caught a bright green scent from the trees, smelling sweet, and the earth and sky were quiet. Freeboard heard the soft rippling sound of her key slipping over the metal serrations of the door lock. She turned, pushed inward and entered the house.

She was standing in a gracious, vaulted entry hall. Beyond a pair of oak doors that stood open, she beheld a huge Great Room ghostly with furnishings bulging and misshapen under white slipcovers meant to guard them from dust and the beat of the sun. The owner—the heir to the original builder—and his family, a wife and two very young children, had been living in Florence for the past three years, and the house, though available for sale or lease, had during that time remained untenanted. No one would buy it or live there. “Haunted.”

With a lazy gait, hps puckered judiciously, Freeboard ambled into the room and then stopped with her hands on her hips and looked around. The room’s high ceding was heavily beamed in the crisscross style of an old Spanish mission, and in the middle of a wall a huge firepit yawned. The Realtor moved forward, her boot heels thudding on the random-width