She’d never been inside the house before but she knew as much about it as was possible to find out. “Do you want me to give you a tour?” Sara needed the distraction of words to keep her from thinking about Mike. It seemed that lately all she did was compare him to Greg. Everyone who met Mike liked him. She couldn’t see that he was making an effort with anyone, but was just being himself. Greg worked hard to make anyone he sold things to like him, but with her family and friends, he didn’t conceal his contempt. “Country morons” is what he called the people of Edilean. Greg especially ridiculed Luke. “The man must make a fortune with those books he writes. So why doesn’t he hire someone to mow his lawn for him?” Sara had tried to explain that being a success was no reason to become a King Midas. That Sara’d mentioned a name Greg had never heard of made him furious.
“Sara?” Mike was looking at her in curiosity.
“Oh, sorry. My mind was elsewhere. What did you say?”
“I asked when you’d seen this place that you hadn’t told me about.”
“I have not withheld any information!” she snapped, then apologized. Her annoyance was from her memories of Greg, not from Mike. “I know about the interior of the house through HABS.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you know while we look around?” he asked gently, as though he knew something had upset her.
Sara turned away so he wouldn’t see more than she wanted him to. Why was it that Mike, who she’d known for only days, was becoming more clear to her than Greg, who she’d known for over a year? Greg was a man she’d been through a lot with. They’d set up the store together. Well, maybe Greg had made all the decisions and Sara had done the bulk of the actual work, but it had been together. Hadn’t it?
“Are you going to tell me about that haves?” Mike asked.
“HABS, all caps. Historic American Buildings Survey.” He was looking at her hard, as though trying to ascertain what she was thinking. Again, she compared him to Greg. Greg would never ask her to tell him what she knew about something. Sometimes it seemed that Greg believed Sara should only think and do what he told her to. Or worse, lately, starting about the same time as sex between them stopped, Greg had begun to say that if Sara truly loved him, she’d know what he wanted. She’d somehow intuit all his needs. One night he told her that if she loved him as much as she should, she’d have known that he didn’t want chicken for dinner because he’d had it for lunch. She said, “If you’d called and told me that, I could have—” Greg interrupted. “Do you have any idea how busy I am all day? You expect me to tell you what I ate for lunch? Next you’ll be telling me I have to tell you who I had lunch with. Is that what this is all about? Jealousy?”
Sometimes arguing with Greg made her head spin around until she had no idea what they’d been talking about in the first place.
“Are you okay?” Mike asked.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Maybe you should wait in the car.”
“And miss seeing my dream house?” Sara asked, then launched into talking about the house.
Mike didn’t know what had happened to Sara as soon as they entered the old house, but something about the way she looked pleased him.
He half listened to her telling a story about how HABS had begun, with President Franklin Roosevelt setting it up to provide jobs during the Depression. What he heard was that there were old photos and even floor plans for the house somewhere on the Internet—and he planned to look at them ASAP. But for right now he just wanted to see the house his grandmother—and Sara—had so rhapsodized about. And he wanted to try to find a reason why the Vandlos might be interested in the place.
As Mike searched, running his hands along walls, looking inside everything, Sara talked nonstop. “Crown moldings” and “original” seemed to be her every other word. She spoke of paneled doors and said something about there being a cross on them.
“To ward off evil,” she said.
They went through the four big rooms and the wide hallway downstairs. The house wasn’t grand or majestic like Edilean Manor, but Mike could see that with paint and repair, it could be quite livable. He imagined Tess’s child riding a tricycle inside the big dining room. But then, Sara probably wouldn’t allow that, for fear the old wood paneling would be damaged.
Quickly, he glanced at her, thinking that she might have read his thoughts, as she sometimes seemed to do that. But she was still talking about proportion and the height of the rooms. He’d never thought of himself as the marriage-and-kids type, but when he imagined living in this old house, Sara was in every picture.
He watched her as she gestured at the ceiling and kept on talking, and he was astonished at how much time she must have spent studying this house.
He turned back to his search. It couldn’t be possible that Vandlo had wanted the house because Sara did, could it? No other reason except to please her—to help persuade her to marry him? But Mike couldn’t make himself believe that.
As Mike was more interested in the present, he noted what Lang had done to it. The house was clean and tidy—and sparsely furnished. In the big living room the couch had a block under one leg and was covered by a well-worn canvas. The chairs were cheap to begin with and had been patched repeatedly.
There was little of a personal nature in the rooms. No photographs, no books, just a stack of well-thumbed catalogs from seed and plant companies that were on the old coffee table.
As Mike followed Sara through the rooms, he saw that if Brewster Lang was living there now, he hadn’t always done so. They were in what had probably once been the library, and he could see that there used to be books in the built-in shelves. He saw light squares on the walls from where pictures had hung.
He turned to Sara. “I know Lang and his family were caretakers of this house in 1941, and he lives here now, but who lived in it in between?”
Sara looked surprised. “You are observant, aren’t you? An historian from Williamsburg and his family lived here for ten or twelve years.”
“So why doesn’t one of the McDowells live here?”
Sara shrugged. “They don’t like the place. Ramsey can’t stand it, and neither can his sister.”
“Then why don’t they sell it?”