Free Googleplex by James Renner

Alan’s father told him there was something wrong with
the house. He said the price was too low. Even in the post-bubble
Akron economy, it just didn’t make any sense. Not for the size of
the home, or for the location- drop-center inside the tony Merriman
Hills subdivision, not for the rich-kid school system their
would-be kids would someday attend. A four-bedroom Tudor with
original windows and a refinished bathroom? For $85,000?
    “Something’s got to be wrong with it,” his father
insisted.
    Alan waved his warnings off as paternal paranoia.
Nothing he ever did was quite up to his old man’s specs. This
wasn’t the same world his father had known at thirty. Men today
frequently changed jobs, changed careers, moved from Cleveland to
Akron to work for a competing dealership. Adapt to survive.
Companies didn’t reward loyalty anymore. This wasn’t TTR Steel. TTR
Steel didn’t even exist anymore. That was his point. In this world,
this new real world, people sometimes unloaded a home for pennies
on the dollar just to chase an opportunity. So Alan almost didn’t
hear him at all when his father warned him about the house. He’d
heard it before.
    Trish at least considered it for a moment. “What if
he’s right?” she asked, bending down to peer under the kitchen
sink, again. “What if there is something wrong, like a leak we
can’t see or a foundation issue and they don’t want to tell us and
then we buy it and it’s too late and we’re stuck?” When Trish
didn’t pause for punctuation it prickled the backs of Alan’s
eyeballs and gave him headaches. For a teacher, Trish talked an
awful lot like a kid sometimes.
    “There’s nothing wrong with the house,” Alan said for
the twenty-fifth time.
    If there was anything that did give Alan pause, it
was the lengths to which the seller maintained a distance from them
during closing. Alan and Trish only knew the man by a name on the
deed: Gregory Heslop. When they asked for a tour, and then a
second-look, they had to give 48-hours notice through the realtor
so that Heslop wouldn’t be there. When it came time to sign the
papers, Heslop used a lawyer as an intermediary even though there
was no haggling over the price. The keys were left in the mailbox.
All signs of Gregory and the Heslop family, if there had ever been
more Heslops than Gregory, had been erased from the property long
before Alan and Trish peeked through the windows one winter
afternoon after spotting the ‘For Sale’ sign in the front yard.
    Sometimes Alan caught himself wondering where Gregory
Heslop was now, why he’d moved away from this adorable Tudor in
West Akron. But mostly he wondered why Heslop had never cared to
correspond with the home’s new owners in any way, even if only to
wish them well and to thank them for their money.
    But Alan didn’t really think there was anything wrong
with the house. Not for a while.
     
    The house was not without a few problems. For one,
the house did not have central air. It was too hot in the summer,
even with ceiling fans spinning, and too cold in the winter, even
with the radiators chirping and a boiler growling away in the
basement. It was drafty-- the windows seemed to suck heat from
rooms like angry ghosts. And after heavy rains, the house shifted,
floor boards popping as if beneath little feet, especially in their
bedroom.
    Also, the living room had been designed in a time
before television, and so there was really no decent place to hang
the plasma TV. The best the nerd squad from Best Buy could do was
to mount it on a swivel in the corner by the mantel. But something
about that spot tended to make the picture static-y at inopportune
times.
    One of the things that Trish loved about the house
was the woods that wrapped around the back yard. Giant trees.
Bigger than any he’d seen elsewhere in Akron. Almost old-growth
big. But that couldn’t be. There were no old-growth forests in Ohio
anymore, right? The woods were beautiful, especially in the