The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [60]
Nada stepped from the Miata and locked the door, leaving the top down. Tightly packed brownstones to her left. Tightly packed graystones to her right. Condos here and there, some carved out of century-old mansions. This was an old-money neighborhood. “The Gold Coast,” they called it, adjacent to the lake as well as to the tony Oak Street boutiques and the Magnificent Mile of Michigan Avenue beyond that. Perhaps some of the residents of the new glass high-rises had notched their first millions only recently, but if you were an actual landowner on this block, Nada knew, your cash had likely compounded more than a couple generations of interest.
Walking north on Astor, Nada admired the homes in the unfiltered midday sunlight. Each house was fronted by a secure iron fence, usually with a crest or cryptic scroll. The tiny square gardens behind the gates were geometric and professionally tended, frequently accented with an expensive-looking sculpture. Looking between open curtains, Nada cataloged the grand pianos, giant plasma televisions, Erté figures, antique sideboards, and oversize hanging original oils. The whole neighborhood was like a museum open to the public twenty-four hours a day. Parking was scarce, but there was little moving traffic. Permanent Jersey barriers ordered by political clouts meant these streets were convenient routes to nowhere else in the city. An aluminum ladder struck a dull tone as a pair of Latino workmen lifted it from the top of a double-parked van. Nearly every person she passed on the sidewalk was walking a baby or a dog, although Nada guessed that none of these pets or children belonged to the youthful, casual, and foreign-sounding women tethered to them.
She felt a shiver, an ominous sensation in the heat. Nada had always been sensitive to the slightest changes in barometric pressure. She was often more accurate than the TV meteorologists when it came to predicting the weather, but the price was frequent and uncomfortable changes in her equilibrium—dizziness, sinus pain, chills. She remembered now this was one reason she had settled in Las Vegas, a city where the weather hardly ever changes.
Nada approached the end of the block and a fence like the others, but longer and half again as tall. Between the leaves and fence pikes the Victorian mansion came into slow focus. Stories of red brick were separated by stripes of stone, layered like a cake. Towers and bays and juts created dozens of exterior sides and semicircles. Gables and dormers and caps were repeated in triangles across the enormous slate roof. Every surface seemed to have its own window and every window seemed to be a different size and variation.
And then there were the chimneys—she stopped counting when she got to fourteen—each a different height, like medieval spikes protecting the house from an aerial assault.
The property wasn’t big by Vegas standards, and in terms of its footprint the house was an old-fashioned idea of a mansion, practically a bungalow compared to the outsize modern castles the wealthy and even near wealthy built in the suburbs and exurbs these days. But it was more than four times the size of the luxurious home in which she had been raised, and she recognized the lot as relatively massive, considering its location was only blocks from downtown Chicago. Large enough to be bordered on three sides by named streets—State and Astor and North—a dozen of the expensive brownstones she had just walked past could fit easily within this fence. The elaborately landscaped grounds were big enough to dig the foundation for a high-rise, like the towering condos just steps to the east. For a front yard, the house had the shaded lawns and softball fields of Lincoln Park stretching as far north as Nada could see. Lake Michigan was to her right, just beyond the six lanes of Lake Shore Drive. Close enough to hear the water’s breath against the shore.
God, what’s the land alone worth? Tens of millions? More?
As she turned