Free The Good Neighbor by William Kowalski Page A

repainting, reroofing, adding drywall in some rooms, and modernizing the plumbing and electrical works that had been added around the turn of the century.
    This, as it turned out, was the major task of Helen’s life. She would never accomplish anything more useful than this. She was not the marrying sort, though it took her several tries to find that out. She wasn’t the mothering sort, either. It’s pleasant to think that an angel came to Helen one night and whispered warnings in her ear, that if she procreated, her children would be violent and hungry, that they would be a plague on the world, and that as a result, she denied her urge to reproduce; but there are no indica tions that the world works this way. Everything seems to be a strange blend of free will and chance, and it was this heady mix ture that led Helen to make one last bad decision about a man who beat her to death in a SoHo hotel room one night. She was in her fifties then, near the same age her great-grandmother Marly
    The Good Neighbor 61
    had been when she was trampled. She should have been home baking a pie and knitting, not lying in a pool of her own blood with a stomach full of Scotch . This is what was said by one of the cops who helped lift her body, who noted in her a resemblance to his own mother, and was disturbed by it.
    The year was 1975. For the first time in nearly a century and a quarter, the Musgrove house stood empty. It was not a showpiece house, but it was big. It was haunted by kind, anonymous spirits, the sort who merely watch, curious and lonely, never making a sound or disturbing anything. For a handful of years, the ghosts had the run of the place, until, like the old Captain, they began to grow bored, and slowly dissipated. The energy of the house and grounds experienced a brief surge whenever someone stopped to look, as though it were desperate to be lived in again. This was, in fact, the case. A house is like a person in this respect. It must be useful, or it dies. But finally Adencourt began to dim, like a candle drowning in its own wax, until the day the Harts showed up and peered in the windows. Francie thought she could almost cer tainly see things getting brighter inside before her very eyes, though she attributed that to the sun coming out from behind the clouds. Coltrane was already too busy calculating mortgage rates in his head to notice anything of the sort.

    Part Two ‌

    6 ‌

    The Prescription

    C oltrane and Francie did not prepare to leave New York until more than two months later. By then it was late November, and
    the weather had turned cold, threatening dire punishment on faithful and faithless alike. The bank had accepted Colt’s first of fer for the Pennsylvania house, with no attempt at negotiation— even though he’d deliberately underbid. Colt was surprised by this, and even a little suspicious, but not so Francie.
    “It’s proof the universe wants us to own it,” she said, delighted. “I knew it was going to work out like this! I just knew it.”
    “It’s proof there must be something wrong with it,” Colt said. “Think for a minute. It’s been sitting empty for twenty-five years. Why wouldn’t someone else have bought it by now?”
    “Because it was waiting for us,” Francie said. “Why do you al ways have to look for a reason for everything?”
    “Because there is a reason for everything. Things don’t just hap pen by themselves, Francie. They happen because something made them happen.”
    “I don’t care, I don’t care,” she sang. “It’s ours, and I love it.”
    66 W ILLIAM K OWALSKI

    She looked around at the apartment that they had shared for the past nine years. It had grown so cluttered with things that it was nearly impossible for a person to move: a dining room table that was far too big for their dining room; a credenza; a highboy; an overstuffed leather couch and chair; endless shelves of knick knacks and boxes of books that were all Francie’s, that had nowhere to