The Long Tenant

the first page

The house was narrower than the listing photograph had made it look. Ellen sat with the engine off and the car pressed against the curb — Verrill Street had been resurfaced at some point in the last thirty years but the curbs dated from before that, their alignment no longer plumb with anything — and took in the fact of the house from across the street. Listing photographs were shot from angles, and this one had been no different, its subject widened and softened against a flattering April sky. What stood on Verrill Street was more accurately a slot: two and a half stories of clapboard siding, wood-framed windows at close intervals, the whole structure crowded toward the street as if the previous century had run short of lot depth. It had been white at some point. It was now the particular gray of things that had been white before she arrived.

Spring light, thin and without opinion, moved on the south-facing windows.

She got out of the car.

The lockbox was on the porch railing, a combination type, four digits; the code had come in the email with the closing documents and she had written it in the margin. She had it open in two tries. The house key was inside: brass, cut for a Schlage, older-model cylinder. She mounted the porch — the boards at the south end gave a little under her weight, she noted this without stopping — and put the key in the lock.

It turned on the first try.

The front hallway was narrow. A coat rack on the right wall had come with the house — four brass hooks, all of them empty — and someone had painted the baseboard at some point and repainted it since, several times without stripping, so the baseboard was now thick with it, its corner detail submerged. The floor was wood throughout, the grain running parallel to the hall's length, the boards a little narrower here than in the room ahead. The house smelled of old wood and something she could not immediately put a name to — not the cold of vacancy, which she knew from other empty houses she had worked in or briefly lived in, but the older cold of rooms that had absorbed cold into themselves over time and held it. She stood with it for a moment and noted it the way she would note an inaudible passage in a transcript: marked, bracketed, the proceeding continuing. She took the legal pad from her bag.