On Turpentine Lane(84)

Nick asked, “Was that what I think it was? A buyer?”

“An agent, doing some wishful thinking.”

Two days later, an out-of-town couple visited. It was not customary to have the current occupants present, but we were doing Tammy a favor, and I was curious to see who’d want to buy a notorious deathtrap. Sweet, wide-eyed, with crosses on chains around both of their necks, Betty and Mike Morelli were the answer. They seemed oddly unconcerned about the crimes. Their tour wasn’t a thorough one. It was as if their minds had been made up before crossing the threshold, before seeing the rooms or flushing the toilet. I found myself indulging in some negative salesmanship. Had they known about the unsavory things that had befallen previous owners?—earning a frown from Tammy.

“We do,” said her husband.

“And that’s okay with you?”

The woman said, “We’d take very good care of your house. We’d probably update the kitchen. But we’d honor its landmark status and its history.”

“We’re going to make an offer as soon as we know that it’s actually for sale,” said Mr. Morelli.

“My fiancé and I will decide,” I told them. “And if so, we’ll put our heads together to come up with an asking price.”

“We’ll have the right of first refusal?” the wife asked.

“You bet,” said Tammy.

After they left, I said, “They struck me as a little woo-woo. I was expecting more . . . I don’t know, people who wanted to monetize the place. Sell tickets. Give virtual tours. But I got the opposite impression: that there was an unnatural calm about them.”

“Do we care?” Nick asked. “I mean, is there any sentimental value after owning this place for six months?”

I said, “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that the sentimental value is standing right in front of me.”



My hunch was correct. Mrs. Morelli was otherworldly all right. She made her living communicating with the dead.

“What if she’s a charlatan?” I asked Nick.

“Perfect, when you think about it,” he said.

“Should we put it on the market for real? To see if there might be others out there? A bidding war?”

“Bird in the hand,” he said.

We asked them on their victory visit, “Why Everton?”

“She had a dream,” explained her husband. “And no one, especially me, ignores Betty’s dreams.”

“You dreamed about this house?” Nick asked.

“Not exactly,” said Mrs. Morelli. “I dreamed I was trying to get paint off my hands—it was oil based—and I was using turpentine, which was very odd because I hadn’t been doing any painting and don’t own any turpentine. I could even smell it in the dream! So I Googled ‘turpentine’ as soon as I woke up. And almost every link came up with this address.”

Tammy was smiling at them, as if this were as logical as their having skimmed the MLS listings.

“Clearly preordained,” said Nick.

“Where were you living when you had this life-altering dream?” I asked.

“Long Island,” she said. “But Mike is originally from Worcester.”

We told them we had much to do before we could close, because we were getting married in June.

“See?” Mrs. Morelli asked her husband.

“See what?” I asked.

“A lucky house. You two know that already, though, I bet. That carved pineapple on the newel post? That clinched it for us, too.”



In June the campus was in full bloom and free of students. The nonsectarian, nondenominational chapel would accommodate our small guest list. To perform the ceremony, we enlisted a judge, married to a woman in my mother’s book group, conveniently Jewish. The school’s chaplain knew a priest who wasn’t too sensitive about blessing mixed marriages and those not held in a proper church, so we asked him to semipreside.

My mother never abandoned the cause. She’d been reading Brides, Town & Country Weddings, Martha Stewart Weddings and TheKnot.com. She applied online (“Do you know a bride whose mother’s wedding dress needs a makeover?” read the summons) to a reality show devoted to exactly that, repurposing frightful hand-me-downs even though I’d already bought a perfectly beautiful dress off the rack from a sample sale.

We invited no one from the faculty or staff who’d ever sent an unkind word in my direction during the Hepworth crisis. That left a few hockey team members from the faculty; most administrative assistants; the basketball, football, and water polo coaches; and the dining-hall director.

The wedding was going to be short, sweet, dignified, scripted. Until Nick’s father, a gray-haired, stocky, shorter version of his son, rose from the front row, took the microphone, making me nervous when he exchanged what might have been a conspiratorial nod with the priest. But then he drew a piece of blue stationery from his inside jacket pocket. He claimed—and we had no proof otherwise to dispute this—that Nick’s mother had left this letter to be read at her son’s posthumous wedding. “Posthumous for her,” he corrected.

He got no further than “Dearest Nick” when the tears came. His wife, Nick’s stepmother of only three years, leading with a hanky, left her seat and took over. She prefaced her reading by saying, “I didn’t know Susan. But she had lovely taste in everything. And she is a hard act to follow, which I mean in the nicest way possible. On a personal note, I’m grateful to Nicholas myself because he was the one who bugged Paul to go to our class reunion. Soon after, not too soon, he asked me out to a show.”