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Authors: Chris Columbus,Ned Vizzini

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BOOK: House of Secrets
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“What?” Brendan asked.

“Are you kidding?” said Cordelia.

“The original owner, Mr. Kristoff, wanted to make sure his house would survive an earthquake like the one he’d just been through. So he underslung the foundation with air-filled barrels. If the Big One comes and the house falls off the cliff, it’s designed to hit the ocean and drift away.”

“That is
so cool
,” said Eleanor.

“No, it’s absurd,” said her father.

“On the contrary, Dr. Walker—they’re doing it now with homes built in the Netherlands. Mr. Kristoff was ahead of his time.”

Diane led the Walkers into the living room, which had a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge. That didn’t seem right to Brendan—he thought it was on the opposite side of the house—but then he realized that they had turned around, doubling back from the great hall. Crystal vases, alabaster sculptures, and a mounted suit of armor had distracted him . . . and so had the stone angel he knew was out there, reaching forth her broken hand and staring with mossy eyes.

The living room had a Chester chair, a glass coffee table with driftwood for legs, and a Steinway piano. “Is the furniture for sale?” Mrs. Walker asked.

“Everything’s for sale.” Diane smiled. “It’s all included in the purchase price.”

She moved on with the Walkers—except Brendan, who lingered by the view of the bridge. Growing up in San Francisco he’d gotten used to seeing it every day, but from this angle, so close he was almost beneath it, the bridge’s salmon color struck him as unnatural. He wondered what the house’s original owner, Mr. Kristoff, had thought of the bridge when it was first constructed. Because if the house was built in 1907—Brendan’s mind quickly accessed dates and facts—then it was standing thirty years before the bridge did, and the view back then would have simply been a great expanse of ocean, framed by two giant rocky outcroppings. Was Mr. Kristoff dead by the time the bridge went up?

“Hello?” Brendan suddenly asked, realizing he was alone. He rushed out of the living room to find Diane and his family.

Meanwhile, Cordelia was thinking about Mr. Kristoff too. She’d heard that name before but couldn’t think where. It taunted her as she entered the next room, which she knew by smell alone: dust, musty pages, and old ink.

“Welcome to the library,” Diane said.

It was stunning. A vaulted ceiling spanned books stacked on mahogany shelves that reached all the way up the walls. Two ladders ran on casters to enable access to the shelves. Between them, a massive oak table lined with green-glassed bankers’ lamps split the room. A few gleaming dust motes circled the table like birds on updrafts.

Cordelia absolutely had to see what books were on the shelves. She always did. She poked her nose up to the nearest one and realized where she’d heard of Mr. Kristoff.

C
ordelia could read anywhere. She had been reading on the car ride to 128 Sea Cliff Avenue even though she was sandwiched between her siblings going up and down San Francisco hills with a dyslexic in charge of the GPS. “Losing yourself in a book is
the best
,” her mother always said, and Cordelia had a feeling her grandmother had said the same thing to Bellamy as a young girl.

Cordelia had started early, embarrassing her parents in a fancy restaurant at age four by reading a newspaper over an old lady’s shoulder, causing the woman to shout, “That
baby
is
reading
!” As she got older, she moved on to her parents’ collection of Western literature: the Oxford Library of the World’s Great Books, with their thick leather spines. Now she was into more obscure authors, people whose books she had to find in first editions or old paperbacks with names like Brautigan and Paley and Kosinski. The more obscure the better. She felt that if she read a writer that no one she knew had heard of, she kept him or her alive single-handedly, like intellectual CPR. At school she got in trouble for sneaking books inside her textbooks (though Ms. Kavanaugh never minded). In the last year she’d discovered a man whom Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft had cited as an influence, quite prolific, who’d written adventure novels in the early twentieth
century.

“‘Denver Kristoff,’” she read from a book’s spine. “Diane, the Kristoff who built this house was
Denver
Kristoff, the writer?”

“That’s right. You’ve heard of him?”

“Never read, definitely heard of. His books don’t even show up on eBay. Fantasy, science fiction . . . instrumental in the work of the people who later invented Conan the Barbarian and our modern idea of the zombie. Never got much critical acclaim—”

She had to stop speaking because of Brendan’s exaggerated gagging.

“Will you stop that?”

“Sorry, I’m allergic to book geeks.”

“Dad, we could be living in the home of a well-known obscure writer!”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

Diane led the family out of the library (Dr. Walker practically had to drag Cordelia) and presented a pristine kitchen, the most modern room they had seen so far. New appliances glittered under a sprawling skylight. It looked like a place germs would be afraid to enter. An impressive array of knives, in order from smallest to largest, hung magnetically over the stove. Eleanor asked, “Can we make cookies here?”

“Sure,” Dr. Walker said.

“Can we make
only
cookies here?”

“Viking, Electrolux, Sub-Zero,” Diane checked off, leading the family past the stainless steel double-doored fridge. Brendan wondered if there might be something weird inside it, like a head, so he peeked . . . but he didn’t see anything more disturbing than clinical emptiness.

Diane took the Walkers upstairs. The contemporary décor of the kitchen was instantly lost in a spiral wooden staircase that Eleanor insisted on climbing up and down and up again. The spiral stairs were wider than any the Walkers had ever seen; they served as the main stairs between the first and second floors. Upstairs, a broad hallway ran the length of the house, ending at a bay window and another, smaller staircase that led back down to the great hall.

The walls featured old portraits, in color, with a faded pastel tint. In one, a grim-faced man with a square beard stood next to a lady in a frilled dress gripping a carriage. In the next, the same lady looked over her shoulder on a wharf as men in newsboy caps eyed her. In a third, an elderly woman sat beneath a tree holding a baby in a dress and bonnet.

“The Kristoff family,” Diane explained, noting Brendan and Cordelia’s fascination. “That’s Denver Kristoff”—the man with the square beard—“his wife, Eliza May”—the woman on the wharf—“and his mother”—the woman under the tree with the baby. “I forget her name. Anyway. The pictures are just for show. When you move in—
if
you move in—you can put up pictures of your own family.”

Brendan tried to imagine Walker photos on the wall: him and Dad at a lacrosse game with Dr. Walker holding the stick incorrectly; Cordelia yelling at Mom because she didn’t want her picture taken without makeup; Eleanor crossing her eyes and smiling too wide. If you took stupid pictures and added a hundred years, did they end up looking eerie and important?

“There are three bedrooms on this floor,” Diane said. “The master—”

“Only three? You guys promised me I’d have my own room,” Brendan said.

“The fourth is upstairs. In the attic.” Diane pulled a string on the ceiling. A trapdoor swung down, followed by steps that folded out to lightly kiss the floor.

“Cool!” Brendan said. He climbed the ladder hand over fist.

Cordelia entered one of the bedrooms off the hall. It wasn’t the master (which had a king-size bed and two bedside tables) but it was a nice-sized room with fleur-de-lis wallpaper. She said, “I’ll take this one.”

“Then which one is mine?” Eleanor asked.

“Guys, this is all hypothetical . . . ,” Dr. Walker tried, but Cordelia pointed Eleanor to the third bedroom, which was more of a maid’s bedroom—or a closet.

“I’m stuck with the smallest?”

“You are the smallest.”

“Mom! It’s not fair! How come I get the little room?”

“Cordelia’s a big girl. She needs space,” Mrs. Walker said.

“Hear that, Cordelia? Mom says you need to go on a diet!” Brendan called from the attic.

“Bren,
shut up
! She means I’m
older
!”

Alone, upstairs, Brendan smiled . . . but then the attic began to hold his attention. It had a rollaway bed set up by the window
,
a bureau with various tchotchkes on top, and a bat skeleton on a shelf jutting out of the wall.

The bat skeleton was mounted on a smooth black rock with its wings outstretched. Its head tilted up like it was catching bugs. It was one of the creepiest things Brendan had ever seen . . . but he wasn’t scared. He pulled out his phone to take a picture.

“Brendan, apologize to your sister!” Mrs. Walker yelled, and Eleanor joined in: “Yeah, Bren, get down here!”

Of course when he wasn’t scared of something, there was no one around to be impressed. Brendan descended the ladder. Cordelia glared at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t need to go on a diet. But—look what they have upstairs! I took a picture—”

Cordelia grabbed his phone and deleted the photo.

“Hey!”

“Now we’re even.”

“You didn’t even look at it!”

Diane tried to hide her exasperation with a smile. “Shall we continue?”

The family followed her down the hall, passing a knob sticking out of a square cut into the wall. “What’s that?” Eleanor asked.

“Dumbwaiter,” Diane said curtly.

They reached the end of the hall. “That’s it,” Diane said, glancing out the bay window at the Walkers’ used Toyota, then back to Dr. Walker. “You haven’t asked the critical question.”

“The price,” Dr. Walker said dolefully. Truth was, when he’d heard “rustic” and “charming,” he’d thought the same thing as Cordelia: that the house was a fixer-upper he could afford. But two stories plus an attic, fully furnished, with a library and bridge views, in Sea Cliff? This was a five-million-dollar residence.

Diane said, “The owners are asking three hundred thousand.”

B
rendan saw a look of disbelief ripple across his father’s face. Then Dr. Walker pulled himself together and put on his business voice. It was good to hear. Brendan used to hear it often, when his dad did interviews or advised other surgeons, but for the last month, since “the incident,” Dr. Walker hadn’t had occasion to make those sorts of calls. Now he spoke with purpose.

BOOK: House of Secrets
10.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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