The First Communion Murders: A Novel

By Mike Robertson

Sometime in the late 1950s, on the steps of an unknown church, somebody takes a black and white photograph of an assembly of boys making their first communions. Above the heads of eight of the boys, who are all fated to die within the next twenty years, are small carefully ascribed Xs. When the picture is found more than fifty years years later in an abandoned steamer trunk purchased at a neighborhood auction, the pursuit for an answer to the mystery of those marks begins. The First Communion Murders is the story of that search.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504901628

Mike Robertson

Mike Robertson, resigned for several years to the routine of retirement, continues to pursue the notion that he may have a literary aptitude, a belief that has sustained his endeavours for over a decade and the publication of various projects. His most recent effort, a novel entitled Picture Windows, is his tenth book, joining three collections of short stories, Casting Shadows, Parts of a Past, and These Memories Clear, three volumes of literary entertainments entitled The Smart Aleck Chronicles and three novels, The Hidden History of Jack Quinn, The First Communion Murders, and Gone and Back. Mike Robertson lives in profound anonymity in Ottawa, Ontario.

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© 2015 Mike Robertson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/23/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0199-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0162-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015904256

Print information available on the last page.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

The House

The Auction

The Trunk

The Trunk, Open

The Photograph

The Photograph Explained

Photographs Are Names

The Cabinets

Finding the Xs

The Xs: School Records I

Explanations, Records, Discussions

Introducing Malcolm Pratt

Another Revelation, Another Direction

The Pratt Report

Letting Himself Know

The Library Search IA

The Library Search IB

The Library Search 2A

Malcolm Pratt Again

Finding Former Police

Talking to Former Police: Day One

Talking to Former Police: Day Two

Talking to Former Police: The Next Week

Talking to the Hometown Police

Now What Again

Alison and Charlie Recalled

The Maitlands Remembered

Mrs. Maitland Tries to Remember

An Apartment Answers

Memories of a Trunk

The Search Continues Again

Too Late Revealed

Postscript

The House

It was a ruin that controlled the corner of Kirk and Dunn like a monolithic relic, a brick-and-black-shingle reminder of a neighborhood that had long faded into the memories of people who no longer lived there. The diminutive bungalow sat in a curious diagonal position on a half-acre of overgrown grass, and untended bushes bordered the property. A dilapidated carport, parked at the end of a short, broken-asphalt driveway, was attached to one side of the house, while a rusted oil tank was connected to the other. The front door of the place, a faded blue color, looked to have last been painted sometime in the 1950s. It featured a wrought-iron mail slot that may have been black at one time but now was a blemished gray. The house bore no street number, its address apparent only through the reasoning of anyone looking for it. To the left of the door was a comparatively large picture window, behind which stood drab, olive-colored drapes that never opened and never seemed to move. There was no back door; the rear of the house was adorned only by a small, frosted-glass window that presumably provided light to a presumably dank bathroom. The sole occupant, who was never seen, was rumored to be an elderly woman with two grown children, both of whom occasionally visited, evidence of which were their large, black trucks that were equipped with what appeared to be gun racks. Neither of her children was ever seen either.

The house had been of particular interest to Michael Townes ever since he and his family moved to Dunn Avenue, in a western area of Ottawa. That was fifteen years ago. His interest in the house was not unique. To most of the neighborhood, the house was something of a curiosity; its size and its curious positioning on a large plot of land were enough to prompt some wonder, even back then. But its evident distinctiveness grew as the houses surrounding it were sold, demolished, and replaced by much larger structures, neighborhood gentrification intensifying as younger and presumably more prosperous families moved in. What had been merely interesting became captivating, almost to the point of fascination—at least to Michael Townes, who was recently retired and therefore open to, if not desperate for, the exploration of new curiosities.

His days were predictable enough, now that he had settled into a retirement routine of going to the gymnasium, doing the laundry, pursuing lunch with former colleagues, watching television, walking the dog, and waiting for his wife to come home, she having three or four years of work before she could join her husband in the emeritus years.

Not surprisingly, he was having some difficulty adjusting to his new life. He had thought about it quite a bit and concluded that he was likely not alone in his predicament—that he was subject to a natural consequence of existence, one stage of life closing, another opening. It had been almost forty years of the mundane day-to-day, and then it changed, his existence irrevocably and forever altered. No wonder he was having trouble. It had been, and still was, having a profound impact on his daily life. He couldn’t get up in the morning at his usual waking time of 5:45. He couldn’t spend more than an hour reading anything without thinking of a nap; he was becoming addicted to television. He was becoming annoyed by any telephone call, any interruption of the serenity of his retirement. Even his daily walking of the dog was an unfortunate intrusion in his existence, which had become a constant recurrence of nothingness. The feeling reminded Townes of his afternoons skipping class in university, pretending to be a moody existentialist.

It was therefore not particularly unusual that he happened to be walking the dog—a charming little pooch named Benji—when a Damascus moment came over him, propelling his interest in the house on the corner of Kirk and Dunn from casual curiosity to something approaching fascination. Benji had barked, something he seldom did, and pulled on the leash toward the house. Townes looked up and saw the presumed occupant of the house—someone who had never been seen, at least as far as Townes knew. With the drab olive drapes open, she was standing in the picture window in the morning light, perhaps for the first time in days, weeks, months, years—who knew. She was just standing there, motionless, available for study. She was a short, heavyset woman, stooped over and leaning on a walker. She was possessed of a pudgy, disagreeable face, thatched gray hair, and old-fashioned spectacles. She appeared to be dressed in a nurse’s uniform, an odd outfit for an elderly woman to be wearing, particularly one who appeared to need assistance walking.

It took Townes less than a minute to conclude that the woman in the house on the corner of Kirk and Dunn bore an extraordinary resemblance to Marguerite Oswald, mother of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Townes, who was something of an aficionado of the Kennedy assassination, having read dozen of books on the event, was qualified to make the comparison. The woman could have been Marguerite Oswald, the only disqualification being that if she was, she would have to be over one hundred years old. After that minute within which Townes made his historical identification, the woman was gone, the drab olive drapes drawn back to their customary position. From then on, Townes referred to the house as Marguerite’s place. The name added another layer of mystery and dark wonder to the house.

So pervasive was his interest in the house—it having been revived, if not enhanced, by his discovery of the hypothetical Marguerite Oswald connection—that Townes sought out the historical memory of one of his neighbors, the old man who lived across from him on Dunn Street. The man’s name was Mario Marcello, and he and his wife, Anna, had apparently lived in their house since it was built sometime in the early 1950s. It was a small duplex that they shared with another elderly Italian couple to whom most of the neighbors, including Townes himself, assumed they were related. That house, like many of the older houses on the block, was likely living out its final years, to be replaced once its owners moved out to either a retirement residence or a cemetery.

A couple of days after he saw the apparition of Mrs. Oswald in the picture window of the strange brick house on the corner of Kirk and Dunn Streets, Michael Townes called on Mario and Anna and, once he managed to explain the purpose of his visit, was invited in with surprising enthusiasm. Though Michael had invited his wife, Patricia, to the consultation, she declined, remarking that Michael’s sudden obsession with the woman in the house on the corner was almost pathological. Michael thought—but wasn’t entirely certain—that Patricia was joking.

Townes eventually spent several hours listening to Mario and Anna elaborate on the history of a neighborhood that was no longer populated by the many people who actually could have provided much in the way of local detail. In fact, as Mario noted several times during their discussion, he and Anna were the longest-living occupants of the area, an assertion that Townes accepted without doubt. Although Mario and Anna were able to render considerable detail about the pasts of many of the previous residents of the neighborhood, their knowledge about the family who lived in the brick house on the corner of Kirk and Dunn Streets was comparatively scant—the lack of detail due, according to Mario and Anna, to the family’s reluctance to socialize with their neighbors, a deficiency that evidently went back fifty years, to when the family first arrived on the block.

While Townes was understandably disappointed with the lack of elaboration about the apparently unapproachable Mrs. Oswald and her family—Mario and Anna did not even know their real names, although they were sure that there never was a Mr. Oswald—he was compensated for his patience when Mario told him that the original occupant and builder of the house was an ill-mannered, and allegedly alcoholic, rabble-rousing handyman and career bachelor named Mr. Porter. According to the historian Mario, Porter—who was said to have inherited the land on which the brick house was eventually erected—was rumored to have lived in a tent on the property for almost a year, even in winter, during which time he built the house, usually but not exclusively without any assistance. In a humorous aside, Anna said that some people had suggested that Mr. Porter had arrived on the corner in a covered wagon.

It was said that Porter had placed the little brick house diagonally on the property to annoy his neighbors, who had constantly complained to him and the police about the fact that he had been living in a tent while constructing the house. Some of the neighbors had demanded that he produce a building permit, a requirement that evidently was not in effect during construction of the house. Interestingly, it was rumored—Mario called it a neighborhood myth—that the building of the Porter house had precipitated the introduction of municipal permits for such activity, so ambitious were the neighborhood protests. Again according to Mario’s chronicle, once Porter decided that the construction of his weird house was complete, he declined to landscape the property, providing his neighbors with yet another basis for complaint. And again their complaint fell on deaf ears, as civil officials were unable to find any specific ordinance that Porter may have violated. Another historical oddity Mario recalled was that one of the chief neighborhood grumblers, a certain Mr. McGovern, happened to be a city councilor, a position which, while apparently influential, gave him little or no power to do anything about the recalcitrant Mr. Porter, no matter how popular such action would have been. In fact, Porter was so delighted by the utter lack of civic response to his so-called violations of acceptable neighborhood behavior that he confronted his fellow citizens in the most contemptuous ways. One story goes that when McGovern himself called on Porter to present him with one of a series of petitions, Porter answered the door wearing nothing but jockey shorts and work boots and holding a shotgun—a greeting that prompted McGovern to wordlessly abandon the petition and run down the street, screaming and holding his gonads like a frightened eight-year-old. According to some historical accounts, which Mario said might not have been entirely accurate, Porter followed McGovern down Dunn Street, his maniacal laughter so loud that people heard it from several streets over, and some actually considered calling the police about the noise. Even more curious was scuttlebutt that a number of people actually wrote to McGovern to complain about some crazy man running down Dunn Street, yelling like an idiot.

No one bothered Mr. Porter after that incident. Within weeks, he folded up his tent, having apparently decided that his funny house on the dirt lot on the corner of Kirk and Dunn Streets was finally habitable, a determination with which most of his neighbors likely would have disagreed. After that—again according to the Marcellos’ account—little of significant historical import transpired at the corner of Kirk and Dunn. If nothing else, Porter was pretty predictable. After raising hell on the block for a couple of years—drinking, loud gatherings, and, allegedly, women of the evening figuring prominently in his activities—Porter was eventually incarcerated for stealing cars and engaging in activities that were an affront to public morality, or so the rumors were. He abandoned the house, and whatever financial institution had been dumb enough to provide Porter with financing put the house up for sale. Within a week, Mrs. Oswald, who the neighbors were convinced was somehow associated with Porter in unknown criminal endeavors, bought the house for a song, the price understandably low compared to those of the homes in the rest of the neighborhood. Unlike the previous owner, Mrs. Oswald was not satisfied with looking out on a vacant lot. She had sod put in, and suddenly there was a lawn. A row of bushes was planted, and a wrought-iron mailbox went up. Her new neighbors were initially content with Mrs. Oswald and her two boys. There was no evidence of any man.

However, within a couple of months, people started to notice that the Oswalds exhibited some rather unusual habits. First of all, the Oswalds were seldom seen; they were reclusive, virtual hermits. Mrs. Oswald didn’t seem to go to work, and the boys didn’t seem to go to school. They didn’t go out for groceries (which apparently were delivered once a week by some kid on a bicycle); they didn’t go to church (serious misconduct considering that this was the late 1950s); and they were never seen in the yard, back or front. They didn’t even own a car. They just lived there in silent solitude for the next several decades, their names unknown and their activities unseen. They remained a mystery, a puzzle that Michael Townes was surely not the first neighbor to contemplate. He was, however, the first to call them the Oswalds; most people just called them the weird family. Mario said he’d heard that the kids moved out ten years ago, although no one really knew for certain.

Townes had to admit to himself that he was disappointed with the Marcellos’ telling of the history of the house. He had anticipated a much more captivating story than the one Mario and Anna had recounted. He was hoping for enough material to use it as the basis for a series of short stories or maybe even a novel, his resurrected ambitions as a writer of fiction having overtaken his lack of confidence following his retirement. Nonetheless, despite his renewed literary ambition, Townes still had difficulty believing himself to be a writer. While he had authored several self-published collections including short stories, poems, and humorous observations, he still did not have the self-assurance to advertise himself as a writer, particularly to people who may have been unaware of his pretensions as an author. Townes generally took the view that unless people were prepared to pay you for your endeavors, unless you were a professional, you could not lay claim to any such designation. It was like, as he liked to point out to anyone, especially his wife, who encouraged him to identify himself as a writer, someone calling himself an architect because he could draw pictures of buildings or someone identifying himself as a musician because he could play three chords on a guitar. Besides, as he also noted in such discussions, he had met enough people who maintained similar illusions to realize how disagreeable such claims could be. Still, he had hoped that the history of the house, at least as it was told to him by the Marcellos, would include more spectacular revelations—major crimes or unforgettably dramatic events being the most highly anticipated. As she often did, Patricia would later suggest that Townes did not need any so-called facts on which to base a work of fiction. Inspiration and imagination were enough, she said. It was more than just words, she insisted. As she often did.

He did, of course, share with Patricia the information he acquired during his consultations with the Marcellos. She renewed her disapproval of what she thought was his obsession with the house, claiming that none of the historical details provided by the Marcellos, though mildly interesting, was really any of his business, and adding that everyone should leave the poor woman alone, even self-styled authors attempting to employ the woman as a character model. For that matter, Patricia said, she was particularly uncomfortable with his identification of the woman in the corner house as Marguerite Oswald, a reference that she considered not only rude but also mystifying. On the other hand, not everyone was a scholar, if not a devotee, of the Kennedy assassination. Patricia sometimes referred to her husband as a conspiracy buff, a charge he usually denied with a lack of confidence. Having read more than twenty books on the assassination and watched the Oliver Stone film JFK maybe a dozen times, Michael wondered whether his wife’s depiction of him was, in fact, close to some sort of truth. Regardless, he could understand that calling the old woman Mrs. Oswald might be inappropriate.

No matter what he was told about the fake Marguerite Oswald, Michael Townes still walked the dog past her house with the same level of curiosity, hoping for another glimpse of her. Even Benji, unaware of the brief historical lesson that his owner had received, strained on the leash when they walked past her house, though he did not bark. Further, it was his longstanding habit not to relieve himself in front of the house; he usually waited until he was well past it. It could be concluded that neither Michael nor Benji could put the phantom Marguerite Oswald and the apparitions of her two sons out of their minds. Patricia once suggested that Michael change the dog’s name to Jack or Ruby.

The Auction

The signs went up during the last week of May, stuck in three of the four corners of the property like fresh headstones, all but the northeast point covered. They advertised, in professional, cherry-red print, that an estate auction was to be held on the lot at the intersection of Kirk and Dunn Streets on the third Saturday in June. All specific items in the house, plus the house itself and the land on which it was situated—the signs threw in the term chattels, just in case, said some of the neighbors, someone born in the nineteenth century might attend—would be available to the highest bidder. Potential buyers were advised that there would be a tour of the house and its possessions starting at nine o’clock in the morning and that the auction itself would begin at ten o’clock. In an odd warning, inscribed with a marker in small, bright-blue italics on all three signs, attendees were asked not to bring pets to the auction. It was initially speculated that this condition was intended to ensure that only serious applicants attend, as the presence of a pet would be a distraction to earnest bidding.

Michael Townes had gone to a police auction a number of years ago, the only one he could recall attending. He had managed to purchase a bicycle for five dollars, being the only bidder on a silver bike with a banana seat and monkey handlebars, one of hundreds of abandoned items that the police department sold at a public auction in a parking lot behind a local high school. The auction itself was remarkably nonchalant, with maybe a couple hundred shoppers looking for a bargain without the enthusiasm and movement—the hands going up, the yelling, and of course the rapid-fire delivery of the classic auctioneer—that Townes recalled seeing in old Westerns over the years. This auction was remarkably casual because each item that was put up for bid attracted few specific offers—a couple of expensive mountain bikes, several large-screen televisions, and a motorcycle being the exceptions. The latter was the only item that prompted more than five or six bids before the presiding agent, a police officer who spoke in a halting baritone rather than the speedy delivery of the classic auctioneer, declared a sale. While the officer did say sold to wrap up a sale, there was no evidence that a judge’s gavel was used to finalize any specific proceeding.

Aside from that one auction, Michael’s personal experience with similar spectacles was the yard, street, or garage sale, which seemed to be regular events in the neighborhood every Saturday from May to September. Michael Townes did not care for garage sales. He thought they were simply an exercise of one neighbor paying another for worthless junk that would eventually be thrown out or donated to a public equivalent of the neighborhood garage sale, like the Salvation Army or Value Village. He often pointed out to Patricia, who was a serious devotee of garage sales, that their basement was already jammed with crap other people had sold to them in such sales: the cups and saucers, the painted plates, the soup bowls, the hideous paintings and wall hangings, the books and old VHS tapes, the discarded clothing, the discarded furniture, the card tables and kitchen chairs, and the ornate lamps, all purchased stupidly, for no apparent reason. Every year when the spring-cleaning tradition swept across every neighborhood in every city, he and Patricia would evacuate the contents of their basement, placing their unwanted belongings at the end of the driveway either to be collected by the garbage truck or, if possible, purchased by a neighbor at yet another garage sale. Patricia thought the process of identifying the crap to be discarded was an adventure, while Michael considered it a nuisance to be endured in order to keep the peace, so to speak. So they would haul the stuff up from the basement, put it out by the curb, and then haul whatever wasn’t sold or given away back to the basement, where it sat until another opportunity—a garbage sale or a trip to the Salvation Army, for example—arose. With what he thought was a provocatively witty characterization, Michael liked to call the basement a funeral home for junk. He even attempted to build a short story around the remark, imagining a history behind each piece of rubbish that was sitting in their basement—where it was made, where it was sold, who bought it, why it was discarded, and who bought it a second or even a third time. But the project was eventually abandoned, limping to the bottom drawer of his desk after several pages of disjointed prose. Still, it wasn’t an entirely uninspired idea. Patricia, who was always encouraging her husband in his literary ambitions, told Michael that it sounded like a good story idea. Michael did not believe her. He never did.

There was little doubt that Patricia would be attending the auction; she was quite enthusiastic about the idea. Though experienced with yard and garage sales, having sampled dozens in her own and other neighborhoods over the years, she had never taken part in an auction. Aside from the police auction at which her husband purchased the silver bicycle with the banana seat and monkey handlebars, she couldn’t recall any auction having taken place in the city or the surrounding area. The realization surprised her, since there was a plethora of farms surrounding the city—farms being likely locales, at least in her mind, for auctions, which she considered to be primarily rural transactions. On the other hand, she’d never invested any time in investigating whether there were, in fact, any auctions being conducted anywhere in the area. Though Patricia was invited, she did not accompany her husband to the police auction. The auction at the Oswald house—she did not know what else to call the place—would therefore be her first real auction, as her only experience was watching the several television shows based on auctions of one sort or another. While Michael was quite reluctant, if not dismissive, of the idea, Patricia’s obvious enthusiasm—which she demonstrated almost constantly by talking about the auction to her neighbors, her friends, her colleagues at work, her mother, who would have joined her at the event itself if she were able, her wheelchair too much of an encumbrance for such occasions, and of course Michael himself—convinced him to join her at the event.

To prepare for the auction, at least Michael thought she was preparing for the auction, Patricia began to accompany him in walking Benji past the Oswald house. Both of them started to speculate with the neighbors, including the Marcellos, as to the fate of Mrs. Oswald, her real identity still a mystery. The general consensus, at least according to Mrs. Patterson, who lived across the street and three doors down, was that Mrs. Oswald, or whoever she was, had either passed away or moved to a nursing home. Still, the exact circumstances were unknown, at least according to the intrepid Mrs. Patterson, who had been calling the mystery lady Mrs. Whoever and seemed to have taken the greatest degree of interest in the situation. The neighbors thought about asking the firm that was selling the place for information on its owner, but nobody, including Mrs. Patterson, ever developed the nerve to ask. Despite all the gossip and consideration about the woman who had lived and was now leaving her life in the strange house on the corner of Kirk and Dunn, Patricia never did tell anyone that her husband had been calling her Mrs. Oswald. To her, the nickname still seemed discourteous somehow, even though the woman had never found out that anyone, including Michael Townes, had called her that. Patricia also wondered whether the fictitious Mrs. Oswald would have recognized the name in any event.

Patricia took her participation in the upcoming auction quite seriously, maybe even too seriously. She investigated the availability of books on the intricacies of auction, eventually settling on printing out several articles she found on the Internet. Michael thought that she had gone a little too far, suggesting that the auctioning of a neighborhood house and its contents was unlikely to attract the services of a professional auctioneer, or at least an auctioneer with the expertise exemplified in the articles she had read. He expected a local realtor to preside over the auction, likely the agent selling the place, a guy named Nettles, whose picture was conveniently included on the billboard signs on the three corners of the lot at Kirk and Dunn—a thin guy with a goatee and a goofy smile. Patricia shrugged away her husband’s cynicism about her research. Besides, she had only read three articles, and he had read none.

So Patricia was more than ready when the third Saturday in June arrived. Fortunately, it was a fine morning—sunny, blue sky, gentle breeze, moderate temperature, a perfect day for an outdoor auction. By the time Patricia and Michael arrived at the corner of Kirk and Dunn, a sizable crowd had gathered and was lining up to go through the house. Obviously assisting Mr. Nettles were two men, a portly gentleman in a threadbare seersucker suit and a white straw hat and a younger guy wearing blue denim overalls and a baseball cap. They were standing by the front door of the house, prepared to conduct potential buyers on their tour of the place. In the backyard, two teenage boys were standing guard over a collection of household merchandise that was spread out across the lawn like carnival prizes—mainly kitchen and dining room items, with not a single stuffed animal, toy, or electrical device in evidence. At first inspection, all Michael saw was junk, pure and unadulterated by anything other than years of use. Upon approaching the house, where they got in line to go through the place, Michael whispered to Patricia that it reminded him of a museum tour: the history of Marguerite and her boys, to be told in shopworn furniture, regrettable wall decorations, and a multitude of tasteless trinkets.

Surprisingly, at least to Michael, if not to most of the other potential clients of Mr. Nettles, people were entering the house by a rear door, access that until then was not known even to exist. The surprise was not really that unexpected. The door could not be seen from the street; one would have to have been standing in the backyard to see it. But the discovery of a back entrance just added to the mystery surrounding the house as a whole, serving as further titillation for those fascinated by the prospect of another secret about the house to be pondered and eventually discussed.

The waiting line itself stretched across the backyard, across the front lawn, and into the street, reaching halfway across a property owned by a Mr. Dennis, who was sitting in a deck chair watching the festivities with a mildly disapproving look on his face. It was apparent by his haughty expression that Mr. Dennis would not be attending the auction. The family across Dunn Street from the Oswald house would not be attending the sale either, likely for the same reasons that Mr. Dennis had for embargoing the event.

The previously undiscovered back door led directly into a basement. The basement stairs were a strange arrangement, as there were no basement walls extending above the ground floor—there was just a rectangular hole in the floor, like a basement attic, unfinished wooden stairs disappearing into the concrete darkness. To the Townes and presumably to most observers, the curious arrangement explained the infrequent use of the back door. It was difficult to believe that anyone entering the house would want to step into the basement rather than the kitchen or living room. It was a curious detail, one that was a subject of discussion among the crowd waiting to enter the house.

So when Michael and Patricia entered the house, they were conducted into the basement, whose narrow stairs forced anyone going down into or coming up out of it to step a little sideways. One of the steps was a little unsteady. Watch your step, Mr. Nettles would repeat as each potential buyer entered the house. The basement itself was illuminated by two naked, low-wattage light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, giving the place the dreary and dank ambiance of a prison cell or a medieval dungeon, an atmosphere that spread like a shadow along the concrete walls and floor. All that was missing, Townes thought as he squinted into the darkness, were a couple of black-hooded men brandishing hot irons. Patricia, who was gripping her husband’s hand, started backing out of the basement as soon as she stepped into it.

Michael’s gaze slowly swept across the room. He was feeling a little frightened. All that he saw were four blank concrete walls that looked damp, as if it the basement had recently flooded, something that Mr. Nettles denied repeatedly in response to the question that a number of potential buyers asked. Aside from unfortunate impressions and scary images, which Michael was certain were shared by most of the people filing through the place, there was nothing in the basement; presumably whatever had been stored there was now spread out in the backyard, awaiting auction. Patricia and Michael took maybe four or five steps into the basement and then waited to withdraw to the relative tranquility of the ground floor. Most of the assembled likely shared their aversion to the cellar, with some perhaps wondering whether anything unusual had ever happened there.

There were four relatively small rooms on the ground floor: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The kitchen was at the center of the ground floor, if not the house itself. There were three doors in the kitchen, each leading to one of the other rooms on the floor, including, most peculiarly, the toilet, which was unusually small. It reminded Michael of one of those gas station washrooms that require the provision of a key from an attendant. Only this one was clean and included a bathtub, attributes that were hardly applicable to a gas station lavatory. Like the basement, the four rooms on the ground floor were empty of furnishings. The tables, the chairs, whatever had been hanging on the walls, and even the kitchen appliances had all been removed; some of the items were waiting in the backyard for purchase, while most of the others had probably been donated to neighborhood charities or taken to the dump. Even the drab olive drapes were no longer hanging in the front window.

The place was definitely peculiar. Neither Patricia nor Michael nor anyone else for that matter, could come to any other conclusion. Patricia described the house as creepy, an appellation that she made before she saw its inside. She thought the place was as peculiar as its last occupant, the curious Mrs. Oswald, now presumably awaiting sentencing in the hereafter, had been, or was thought to have been. Michael wondered fleetingly where the two Oswald boys had slept, and he whispered his inquiry to Patricia, who discouraged it with a finger to her lips. He also wondered whether the two sons were among the crowd taking in the auction. That would make some sort of dark, serendipitous sense, like a scene from a ghost story. He didn’t mention that speculation to Patricia. She would have thought he was being spooky, like the house that precipitated all his strange opinions.

As advertised, around ten o’clock, Mr. Nettles gathered the crowd that had just trampled through the Oswald house and announced that the auction was about to begin. He introduced the fat man in the seersucker suit and straw hat as Mr. Grayson—a professional auctioneer of some repute, Nettles claimed, mentioning that Grayson had conducted dozens of auctions. Nettles did not, however, introduce the younger guy in the overalls and baseball cap. He didn’t need to. Grayson confidently took the floor, hitching up his pants, which held their place for maybe ten seconds, and then letting them fall back to their accustomed position below his ample stomach. He reminded Michael of one of those ebullient and charmingly corrupt southern governors who were the main characters in a number of black-and-white movies. He began his spiel with a story about how he got his start as an auctioneer the old-fashioned way. He was in his late teens when his father, a dairy farmer, asked him to oversee the sale of several of his cows. At the time, such sales were usually managed through auctions, but Grayson’s father did not get along with the local auctioneer, a man named McMahon, and did not want to hire him. So he asked his son to conduct the auction, as he had witnessed dozens of such events.

Grayson never explained why his father did not run that first auction himself. Maybe it was the old man’s objective to encourage his only son to follow in his own choice of occupation, that of an agricultural auctioneer. Even if that was not the case, the junior Grayson eventually took up the role of part-time auctioneer anyway, combining it with a full-time position as a salesman of agricultural implements. It turned out to be an exemplary arrangement, with one job providing opportunities for the other, as buyers of agricultural impediments likely had need of the occasional exchange of livestock and related products, including the implements that Grayson may have sold to the sellers in the first place. From there, the young Grayson, who was now fat and middle-aged, attempted to entertain the crowd with a couple of stories of unsuccessful auctions, including one case where he unsuccessfully tried to sell two used tombstones. Aside from some middling titters from the crowd, his stories were met with general disinterest. Grayson took that as his cue. He moved on to the auction itself.

He explained the mechanics of the auction. There were a dozen lots of items to be sold, a listing of which was distributed to potential customers by Grayson’s assistant in the overalls. Grayson would describe each lot, there was a small sign with a number to designate each collection, and individual sales would commence, each bid to be signified by a person raising his or her hand. He asked, with a certain resignation, that there be no shouting. The guy in the overalls and baseball cap would point at the bidder, Grayson would inform the crowd of the bid itself, and if there was no response to the bid within thirty seconds, the lot would be considered sold. Grayson cautioned the crowd that each successive bid had to be at least ten percent higher than the previous bid to discourage, if not prevent, nuisance bids. Lots won were to be paid for by cash or credit card, no checks allowed, and had to be collected and removed immediately. Grayson then offered the group a broad smile and gave one nod to Mr. Nettles and another to the guy in the overalls and baseball cap, whom Grayson never introduced. The latter took a seat at a small card table just behind the auctioneer. However, Grayson did introduce two teenage boys. He identified them as his runners.

Lot one was the first in a series of abandoned crockery, this a set of six soft-blue dinner plates with various woodland scenes etched on them. Grayson claimed that these were fine examples of Victorian flatware, an assertion that most of the crowd likely doubted; the plates did not look antique. One wag, a spectator who may not have been entirely enthused about taking in the spectacle, asked whether there were many Walmarts in London in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, three people—two women and a man leaning on a walker—spent ten minutes exchanging bids until the man, someone neither of the Towneses recognized, secured the plates with a bid of ninety-six dollars. The wag wondered aloud how much the previous owner had paid for the plates at Neighborhood Services. A few people laughed, and the two women who had been outbid gave him a dirty look. Townes wondered about the last meal that may have been served on the plates and whether the plates had, in fact, even belonged to Mrs. Oswald. He did not know why the question came into his mind.

One of the two teenage runners then carried up a dark-brown box about the size of a small suitcase and laid it at Grayson’s feet. The auctioneer opened the box and invited the crowd to gather around for a look. It contained maybe a dozen glasses, or goblets, as Grayson called them. They were made of fine crystal with gold embellishments, again according to Grayson. There were a couple of whistles and gasps from the crowd, and the people who had circled around to inspect the box had to be moved away. This was certainly looking like it was going to be a successful sale. Nettles and Grayson were smiling like they’d found a winning lottery ticket in the box. It was hardly a surprise when Grayson started the bidding at an even hundred dollars. That opener was immediately trumped by at least five women whose shouted proposals ran the bid up to more than two hundred dollars. Within five minutes, the leading bid was more than five hundred dollars, offered by an older woman who was overdressed, at least for an outdoor auction, and whose voice was almost as loud as that of the auctioneer. While Grayson seemed somewhat annoyed, he remained enthused by the relentlessly high bids. There was clapping and shouting when Grayson awarded the crystal glasses to the inappropriately dressed older woman, who agreed to pay the inappropriate sum of $950 for them. The crowd watched as the guy in the overalls carefully carried the brown box to the woman’s car. Her presumed husband, who had been waiting in the car reading a newspaper, appeared to be rolling his eyes. In fact, everyone other than the three or four people who had actually made bids were rolling their eyes as well. Michael whispered to Patricia that the reaction was an expected community response to stupidity; Patricia nodded and shrugged. The woman who’d taken possession of the surprisingly expensive glasses was beaming from pricey earring to pricey earring. The boys carried the box to the edge of the lawn where she was standing.

Next up was a large collection of bedclothes: bedspreads, blankets, and some embroidered pillowcases and pillows, some of which were adorned with what looked like costume jewelry, and so were perhaps intended to be used for decorative purposes in a living room. Again, like the plates and glasses that had just been sold, the bedding, which was generally linen, silk, or fine Egyptian cotton, seemed inconsistent with the house from which it had supposedly emerged. It seemed impossible that the ramshackle abode about to be auctioned off and presumably torn down could have been the repository for the items that the intrepid Mr. Grayson was now attempting to auction off. It seemed