Taking in the Electric Sunset

The second she had shut and locked the door behind the fourth young couple of the day, Sarah Wilder dropped the smile she had plastered to her face all afternoon.

She sat down on the foyer bench and said "Have a good day" a few times quietly under her breath, each time emphasizing the word "good" with increasing sarcasm. She reached down to unbuckle her pumps and let them drop to the floor. She gave her ankles and heels a much-needed rub.

After a few deep breaths, she stood and walked to the back patio.

She drew deeply on the cigarette. It was the first she had risked for the day, because the smell of smoke does not sell homes.

If the past four months were any indication, neither does she.

She exhaled slowly and watched a black bird fly over the yard. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of other birds and the breeze rustling through the leaves of the old elm tree. She opened her eyes again and took in the greenery and the lack of traffic and neighbor noise. This, she thought, was beginning to feel like the setting for a perfect life.

But she couldn't afford it, and neither could any of the ambitious couples who had scheduled showings over the week and a half since it was listed.

She pulled out her phone.

The first thing she heard was "Hi, Mommy!" shouted from the background. Then Jack came on.

"Hey, Sarah. Sell the place, yet? Katy said today's the day. Didn't you, Katy?" There was an enthusiastic laugh and a "yeah" from the background.

"Hi. No, I haven't." She began to pace around the patio and looked at her watch, which still showed more than an hour before her next appointment. "Jack, do you think we could talk off speaker?"

"Oh. Sure." There was a muffled sound and then a click. "What's up?"

"I'm just not sure about the people I've got lined up on this one." She sighed and closed her eyes to see if the bird song would comfort her again. It didn't. This isn't her home. "The house is a steal at this price, but I just don't think people want to live this far out."

"I know. The market is rough right now," Jack said. "Or so you've told me. Wasn't the home a foreclosure or something? Can't you go any lower?"

"Not a foreclosure, Jack. Not this one. The guy died. The nieces and nephews it was left to came and stripped the place and listed it immediately. They won't budge on the price." She lit another cigarette. "What about you, Jack? Hear anything more on those jobs you applied to?"

"Not today." He sounded tired. "I sent out another one, though. Customer service job. I'm scraping the bottom here. I'm trying."

"I know you are. Anyway, I've got to get ready for the next showing. I love you."

The house was already ready for the next showing. There was nothing to do between showings except wander around and look, once again, at the furniture and possessions left behind. Perhaps there was a piece that she could put in a prominent position, Sarah thought, or a room she could rearrange in such a way that it would absolutely scream to the next visitors that this was the home they were looking for all along.

The upstairs study was a good candidate.

The room's reading chair, side table, and lamp were pushed off to the side, near the book cases, but could benefit from a central placement. There, she figured, they would be lighted well by the triple dormer windows and cameo, hopefully evoking a scene in a stage play. If the next couple to come—in about forty-five more minutes, which could be pushing the limits of the golden hour before sunset—were to see this room before seeing the backyard, they might see it more the way she saw it.

The backyard would seem more storybook than rural. The house would seem more fantasy than exile.

At this point, any new strategy was better than doing the same thing over and over with the same empty results, she thought.

She moved the chair first since it looked heavy. She wanted the biggest burden done while still under the influence of this strange surge in optimism. She dragged it across the room and then brushed the carpet with her foot to smooth the evidence.

In its new setting, the chair looked less the disused possession of a dead man and more the eager setting for the next great reading session, Sarah thought.

Despite her earlier calculations, the side table was significantly harder to move than the chair. She pulled and pushed and bent her knees to lift, but it seemed to be caught on something. She had ample time to figure this out—the next showing wouldn't be for another thirty minutes—so she hiked up her skirt above her knees and got down to look.

That golden light that had inspired this event was cutting deep shadows and blocking her view of the table legs, particularly the far back one that seemed snagged. She reached in and traced the hooked leg with her fingers and found herself digging beneath the carpet, which was loose around the leg. There she discovered an iron ring wrapped around the wood. It seemed to be impressed into the wood, so she dug a fingernail under it and twisted the table with her shoulder until she had freed the leg.

The table was lighter than the chair, now that it could be moved. She placed it and the lamp in their new spots before returning to investigate the loose carpeting and the ring.

The ring was, as she had thought, an implement to open a trap door below the carpeting. Beneath it was a small opening the size of a wall or floor safe concealing an old metal lunch pail. How very storybook, after all.

The pail itself proved disappointingly light. It contained only a little, black notebook filled with ornate scribblings. A quick glance at her watch showed only four minutes had passed since she had last checked. That left her a little time for reading in her newly-arranged reading area.

The first page was more than she had hoped for. Whoever had found this, it said, must not have been related to the owner of the home.

"Those people," the owner had written, "don't have an inkling of curiosity or a smidgen of imagination. Let's hope you, the reader, do. You'll need it."

If only he knew what I did with his reading nook, Sarah thought. That should be at least a smidgen of imagination. She read on.

The next several pages seemed to be a cathartic exercise in burning bridges that were never built on anything less than rickety foundations to begin with. The house was left to all of the man's nieces and nephews, he wrote, because none of them deserved it and splitting the proceeds down into such narrow shares would irritate each of them more than if they had been left nothing at all.

The writing became more spidery and scribbled as it went on to detail transgressions, real or imagined, performed by the man's family over the years. The man’s responses to each became increasingly vile and imaginative that Sarah was both put off and intoxicated. She read on until, finally, she turned the page to find the ranting suddenly stop.

It was replaced by a page of stately calligraphy in a new purple ink.

"But enough of my ramblings. You had the fortune not to have known them. If that weren't treasure enough, what you hold in your hand will presently prove to be treasure in the truest sense of the word."

Sarah was broken from her reading trance by a call of "Hello?" from lower in the house.

She jumped from the chair and shut the trap door, patting and smoothing the carpet to conceal it. She placed the book back in the pail and started for the stairs.

"Oh, hello," she called from the top of the stairs. She held up the pail. "I was having a quick snack and lost track of time. I hope I haven't kept you long."

The man below, in a polo shirt and sunglasses unnecessary for the inside and the beginnings of sunset outside, looked up from the doorway. Sarah imagined him blinking at her from behind his glasses.

"Only a couple minutes, ma'am," he said. Sarah winced, slightly, at his last word. "We'd actually like to reschedule, if it's good with you. Gemma thinks she might be starting contractions or something. Just now. We need to go get it checked out."

Behind the man, the women in the oversized summer dress smiled meekly up at her.

"Oh, certainly! Please do. You can call me to reschedule," Sarah said. She slipped from her surprised expression into her saleswoman smile. "Just remember, this house has just the space you'll need for a growing family."

"Yes, ma'am. It sure looks that way. We'll call you."

He shut the door and they were gone. Sarah walked back up the stairs and returned to the little black notebook.

"The only thing better than an obnoxiously small inheritance for those ungrateful kin," the book went on, "is to take even that from them.

"I caught the trapdoor ring on my side table in hopes this book would be found by anyone, from a mover to a cleaner to a real estate agent, before the home was sold. Assuming that is the case, I offer you a reward of $20,000 to prevent the house from ever benefitting any of them."

The next few pages, which Sarah read with wide eyes and narrow shoulders while hunched over in the chair, detailed a system of frayed and largely unnecessary wiring the man had distributed over flammable materials throughout the home. The wiring was unpowered at the moment, but, if Sarah chose, she could switch three switches on the breaker box and set the house ablaze with no evidence for arson.

Sarah looked through the dormer windows she had so loved less than an hour before. The elm tree's limbs looked dark and skeletal against the blazing reds, oranges, and yellows of the sunset behind. She did the math in her head. Twenty thousand dollars was more than seven thousand dollars over her six percent commission on the home when it sold. That would be if it sold, she corrected herself. Nothing was certain in this market.

She looked back to the book. The last page was an insurance beneficiary form with the owner's signature and the signature of a notary. The only thing missing was the signature and financial information of the beneficiary.

She thought about Katy. She thought about Jack. She thought about the past four empty months, and the meager year before them. She thought about the man at the door with the sunglasses and how he would never call to reschedule.

She squeezed the notebook to her chest and took one last look at the setting sun before heading to the basement and its poison fuse box.