The House on Butterfly Way
Berkley Trade
February 2012
Berkley Trade
February 2012
PROLOGUE
Eugenie Dashner had always loved the house on Butterfly Way. When she was a little girl, her friend Marianne Weatherly lived one street over from it, and whenever they rode their bikes around the neighborhood of Manitou Hills, they inevitably pedaled past. As a child, she thought the house looked like a wedding cake. A giant, three-tiered wedding cake dappled with buttercream frills and meringue lace, its pale pink front door a frosting rose at its base. The child Eugenie had been certain that gypsies lived in the house, because bright fringed curtains framed the front windows, and she once heard accordion music coming from inside. She was sure fairies frolicked in the baskets of fuchsia dripping along the front porch, that sprites splashed in the sparkling side yard fountain, and that pixies pranced in the purple clematis twining through the gazebo nearby.
She even convinced Marianne once during a slumber party to sneak out and visit the house under cover of darkness, to see if they could catch a glimpse of the magic. But the pixies, sprites and fairies must have heard them coming and quelled their wild rumpus before the girls arrived. Though Eugenie did spy of one of the gypsies watching them when a curtain on the second floor twitched enough to allow a slice of pale lamplight to sneak through. When she pointed out to her friend the faint profile of a woman in that window, Marianne squealed and dropped her flashlight, then scampered off into the night. But Eugenie waited until the curtain fell back into place before following. She’d never seen a real gypsy before.
As a college student, she had rented an apartment not far from the house, and she had deliberately routed her morning runs to include Butterfly Way. By then, though, the wedding cake had begun to spoil. Its once-white frosting was smudged, its frills and lace were frayed, its rosy front door was blistered. The fuchsia grew feral, the fountain went dry, and the gazebo listed to one side. Some mornings, the mailbox overflowed with uncollected correspondence, and others, the fading curtains were drawn tight. The magic that had made the house resplendent when she was a child had begun to fail, and something inside Eugenie grieved to see it.
Eventually, she graduated from college, then married and moved away. But often, when she came home to visit, she would find an excuse to drive through Manitou Hills to see how the house was faring. Each passing year brought greater failure to the enchantment. The house grew more weary, more unhappy, more hopeless. The frosting decayed. The fuchsia withered. The gazebo fell. And all she could do was watch helplessly as the palace of her childish dreams collapsed.
But then, a lot of things collapsed for Eugenie during those years. A lot decayed and withered and fell. Not just her dreams, but her career and her marriage, too. For a long time, she didn’t come home. For a long time, no place felt like home. Until one day, when she realized she had nowhere to go except back to the place where she grew up. On that day, with her son riding in the passenger seat and everything they owned in a trailer chasing behind, Eugenie returned to Louisville. But before driving to her brother’s house, where she would be staying for now, she turned into Manitou Hills, down Butterfly Way, to see her old friend. Her old friend who looked much like Eugenie now—exhausted, broken and old. Except, she noted, for one small difference.
A sign in the front yard that read, For Sale…
CHAPTER 1
The day Eugenie Dashner toured house for the first time, there was a Damnation Alley sized cockroach in the master bath. Dead, fortunately, though thoughts about what might still be prowling the house that ended the life of a creature she’d heard could survive the next apocalypse did give her pause. There were also mouse traps in the attic that contained only pieces of mouse. (She didn’t want to think about what had happened to the parts that weren’t there.) Mold sullied walls in the basement, the study, and a downstairs bath. Cracks crimped all three chimneys and bisected the terra cotta patio. Wallpaper peeled and plaster was scattered in virtually every room. The carpeting throughout was filthy. And the smell festering over all of it was...
Well. A charitable person might say the house smelled piquant. But Eugenie wasn’t charitable when it came to the safety and well-being of her family. She thought the house smelled like a bloated, fetid wildebeest.
On the up side, the place had been updated and redecorated relatively recently. On the down side, since it had been built in the 1880s, relatively recently translated to the 1970s. So unless one had a fondness for harvest gold shag carpeting and avocado appliances (which Eugenie did not), and unless one was enchanted by that phony antiquing crap people of that era brushed on their cabinetry (which Eugenie was not), no one in her right mind would want the place.
“You’re right, Eugenie. It’s perfect.”
But then, her brother Julien had never exactly been in his right mind.
“We have to buy it.”
They were exactly the words she had been hoping to hear him say when she convinced him to look at the house with her. But her sanity—the bulk of it, anyway—was one thing Lawrence hadn’t received in the divorce settlement, and she knew it would be nuts to take on a project like this. It was one thing to do some home improvement. A little paint here, a little spackle there. A jug of Murphy’s Oil Soap and a bottle of Febreze. But this…
This went beyond extreme makeover. This went beyond Damnation Alley. There wasn’t a cubic centimeter of the house that wasn’t damaged in some way.
She shook her head reluctantly. “I was wrong, Jules. From the outside, it looked like the place might have a chance. But after seeing its insides, it’s obvious there’s no way to salvage it. This place needs way more than just repair and renovation. What happened here…” She swallowed against the disappointment tightening her throat. “This is heartbreaking.”
“It’s a disaster, no question,” Julien agreed. “But c’mon, Eugene. You’ve never been one to back down from a challenge.”
Uh-oh. When he called her Eugene, it was an endearment—to him, anyway, never mind that their mother had always insisted she be called by the French version of the name, giving the second syllable a long a sound instead of a long e. That Eugene meant Jules was totally on board with using their pooled finances to buy this place together. And he was determined to bring her back to that way of thinking, too.
“This isn’t a challenge,” she said. “This is irreparable damage.”
Julien threw her one of his C’mon, Eugene smiles. “There’s no such thing as irreparable damage. Things that are broken can always be fixed.”
Spoken like a man who made his living fixing things. But even Julien knew that wasn’t true. In a lot of ways, he knew that better than anyone.
She sighed heavily, driving her gaze around the ugly kitchen again. It wasn’t a good idea, she told herself. It didn’t matter if she was half as solvent as she’d been before her divorce or that she had a teenage son who was fast becoming a stranger. She didn’t care if Julien’s investment in the place would be twice what hers would be because he’d made a boatload of money flipping houses before the real estate market collapsed. It made no difference that he had two motherless daughters who needed an adult female role model as much as her son needed someone like Julien to fill the empty space left by his dumbass father. And it was irrelevant that her and Julien’s mother had reached a point in her life where she wasn’t able to live by herself—or with anyone else who wasn’t obligated by blood ties to take care of her.
Okay, okay. All those things did matter, and Eugenie did care about them. She still wasn’t convinced this house could ever be restored to the bloom and buoyancy of its former self.
“It’s twice the size of all the other houses we’ve looked at in this price range,” Julien cajoled.
Which, she had to admit, did indeed make it perfect for blending the bunch of mismatched personalities that was her family. Which was an inescapable merger now thanks to A) Julien’s financial worth being a fraction of what it had been before his portfolio evaporated in the Wall Street debacle, B) Eugenie’s employment prospects looking equally evaporative in the current economy (provided evaporative was actually a word), and C) their mother having become even more of a handful than their children were, not to mention more childish.
“Mom will have a bedroom and bath to herself on the first floor,” Julien added, knowing it would count for a lot, keeping at least a floor between them and Lorraine. “The girls and I can take the second floor, and you can have the third.”
Oh, well, done, Jules. Put two floors between me and Mom. How could Eugenie resist that?
“And we can convert a good chunk of the attic for Seth,” he concluded, “so he’ll have his own space. That’s important when you’re sixteen, you know. A kid’s gotta have someplace to stash his stolen Playboys and Colt .45 tallboys.”
Eugenie managed a thin smile. “And what a convincing argument that is. There’s nothing that will sway my decision faster than envisioning my emotionally fragile, grossly underage son passed out in a drunken stupor on top of Miss February. Just show me where to sign.”
Julien expelled one of those sighs that told her he was worried about her. The same sort of sigh she’d heard from him the night she’d gone out with Lawrence for the first time. “Seth isn’t emotionally fragile, Eugene. He just has an asshole for a father.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Hey, we had an asshole for a father, too.”
“And look where we are. Buying a house together so we can live with our mom. Is it just me, or does this feel like junior high school all over again?”
“Mom paid for the house that time,” he pointed out. “And it was about the size of an electron compared to this one, not to mention a rental. And it was junior high for you, kid. I was embarking on my senior year when Dad took off, remember?”
Oh, did she ever. She’d just been starting seventh grade, completely unprepared for the turbulent social life that awaited her, ill-equipped as she’d been with braces, pimples, a bracken of unwieldy dishwater curls and absolutely no breasts to speak of.
Wow. This really was just like seventh grade again. Except for the braces. And the bracken of curls was more of a shrub now. A well-tended shrub. But still a shrub.
“There’s nothing wrong with this house that a little Clorox and paint won’t fix,” Julien said.
“Or a little nitro and acetylene,” she muttered.
“The kitchen is gigantic,” he pointed out, throwing his arms wide to encompass the room in which they stood. “Plenty of space for you to cook. And the whole family could have breakfast and dinner together at the same table. I know that means a lot to you. And I know you love to cook.”
No, she used to love to cook. Back when she cooked for her roommates in college. And early in her marriage when she and Lawrence could use up as many hours, bottles of wine and sticks of butter as they wanted to prepare dinner together. And then be together. Then had come two careers. Then Seth. Then suburbia and the whole fantasy mom thing she’d bought into before having to return it unused. Eugenie hadn’t actually enjoyed cooking since... Well, for a very long time. But then, she hadn’t enjoyed a lot of things for a very long time.
“Who was responsible for the seventies, anyway?” she muttered at the green appliances. “They should be taken out and flogged with a macramé belt.”
Julien moved to a counter top where the realtor had set out an incomplete place setting of stoneware and picked up a plate to inspect it. “Look,” he said, turning it so she could see. “This house even has its own dishes. Dishes with its name painted on them. Hell, it has a name period.” He pointed to the single word executed by hand in arcing, filigreed lettering around the rim. “Fleurissant,” he murmured with affected reverence. “That’s French. It means ‘blooming.’ Like when a flower blooms, not like how the English use it as a cuss word.”
Which would have been infinitely more appropriate, Eugenie thought. “And you know that how?” she asked.
In spite of their mother’s insistence that their surname had originally been D’Ashner and she had endowed both of her children with Gallic names, and in spite of her insistence all her life that she would someday return to her “native France,” a place she had never even visited, Julien didn’t speak a word of French other than garage. He hadn’t even gone to college. Before flipping houses—and meeting Cassie—he’d made his living being kept by women who had a lot more money than he did.
“The name was in the listing,” he said. “So I Googled it.”
Eugenie made her way over to have a closer look. The dinner, salad and bread plates bore a whimsical rendition of the house, but they and the soup bowl, cup and saucer were all either chipped or cracked or broken. She started to point out the significance of that, then decided it would be lost on Julien. Having educated himself in the arts of carpentry, masonry, dry-walling and plumbing, he was gifted at repairing things and making them whole again. Little faults like chips and cracks didn’t bother him. He’d experienced brokenness a lot worse than that. He’d watched his wife succumb to lymphoma, helpless to do anything that might fix her. If he could have Cassie back again, alive and healthy, he certainly wouldn’t have minded a few chips and cracks in her.
“Think how great it would be,” he said, “if the next time you talk to Lawrence, you can tell him you’re doing so well without him that you just bought a mansion with a French name.”
“Well, considering the fact that he knows exactly how much I received in the divorce settlement, he’s going to think it must not be a mansion—which it isn’t—and that it’s filled with mold, nasty carpeting, and dismembered mice—which it is.”
Julien frowned. “So you saw Mickey up there in the attic, huh?”
She nodded. “Minus his little gloves, jacket, bow-tie…and, oh yeah, his head.”
Her brother laughed lightly, his pale green eyes—the only feature they shared in common—crinkling adorably. Damn him. He was pushing fifty-five, a half decade older than she, but the lines on his face and threads of silver in his dark hair had only improved his rugged good looks. The same traits on Eugenie made her look haggard. Or maybe it was Lawrence who had made her look—and feel—that way. But Lawrence was gone now, and she still felt like that. What did a woman have to do to feel blooming and buoyant again?
“Will you stop worrying?” Julien said. “There’s nothing wrong with this house except that it’s been neglected for too long. All it needs is a little hard work—”
At her expression, he hastily amended, “A lot of hard work and a couple bottles of environmentally friendly cleaner—”
She hardened her expression.
“Several vats of industrial strength cleaner, hundreds of thousands of nails, and a warehouse full of building materials.” He smiled again. His charming-women smile, she noted. “And with your extremely gifted eye for color and fabrics, not to mention your exquisite taste in antiques, this place will look like the Beaux Arts beauty she was back before the rest of the neighborhood sprang up around her. Just close your eyes for a minute and imagine how this place could look.”
Eugenie didn’t have to imagine. She remembered too well the frothy, fairy-tale façade and the enchanted gardens she’d loved as a child. That was why she’d wanted to look at the house in the first place. But that façade was decrepit now, and the gardens were blighted. Who would want a house like this? How could it ever be made whole again?
“It costs more than we allotted in our budget,” she said halfheartedly, the foundation of her misgivings beginning to crumble. Maybe aiming for Julien’s wallet would yield a deeper nick than talking about mold and mortar.
“It’s been on the market for almost three years,” he replied, “and it’s way overpriced. Hell, the owners couldn’t have gotten their current asking price for the place even before the housing collapse. They haven’t had an offer in over a year. They’ll come down. A lot, I bet.”
Eugenie didn’t doubt he knew what he was talking about. In addition to flipping houses, Julien had been a card-carrying Realtor for more than a decade.
“Who are the owners, anyway?” she asked, deliberately stalling when she felt the crack in her convictions widen. “How could they have let a house like this, in a very upscale neighborhood like Manitou Hills, deteriorate so much?”
“The owner’s agent told me the house has been empty for five years. That’s when the previous owner went into a nursing home. When she died, it went to a second or third cousin, I think, up in Indiana somewhere. When he saw the comps for the rest of the neighborhood, he thought he could make a bundle off of it, not realizing—or wanting to accept—just how bad a shape it’s in. But he’s gotta be starting to sweat. Taxes for this neighborhood aren’t exactly easy on the wallet.”
“Every other house on this street would sell for high six figures, maybe seven, even in this market,” she said. In Louisville, houses didn’t get much more expensive than that. Not unless they were mansions. “And this house is way bigger than the others in this neighborhood, with double the lot. The owner may not be as amenable as you think.”
Julien sighed sadly. “This house isn’t like the other houses in the neighborhood. He has to realize that by now, too. The others have all been pampered like heiresses. They’ve been topped with tiaras, spoon-fed champagne and danced around ballrooms, then kissed by a worthy suitor beneath a plump, pink sunrise while Daddy smiled indulgently from an upstairs window.” He gazed through the door that led to the dining room, with its cloudy chandelier and ragged wallpaper. “This beauty deserved no less. I can’t understand how someone could have mistreated her so badly. She deserved better.”
Now Eugenie was the one to smile. Her brother could be a raging poet when it came to old houses. And this one had been magnificent once upon a time. But it looked out of place now amid the other homes on Butterfly Way, all of them proud Tudors and Queen Annes or elegant Colonials and Neo-Classicals. It went beyond neglect, what had happened here. And for some reason, she just couldn’t quite let it go.
What’s your story? she asked the house. Why didn’t they take better care of you?
But the house didn’t answer. Maybe the house didn’t understand, either.
Eugenie told herself she was crazy. The place was going to take more time, work, and inclination than she had in her to invest. But when she turned to look at her brother again with the word No firmly on her lips, she instead heard herself say, “No one moves in until the last vestige of mold and pestilence is gone.”
Julien grinned. “Not a problem, Eugene.”
She could only laugh at that. No, the house wasn’t a problem. It was scores of problems. So many, she didn’t even know where to begin.
But Julien did. Obviously fearing she would change her mind, he whipped out his phone, scrolled through his contacts and pushed a button. “Joanie?” he said when someone picked up at the other end. “Yeah, Julien Dashner. My sister and I would like to make an offer on the house on Butterfly Way.”
She even convinced Marianne once during a slumber party to sneak out and visit the house under cover of darkness, to see if they could catch a glimpse of the magic. But the pixies, sprites and fairies must have heard them coming and quelled their wild rumpus before the girls arrived. Though Eugenie did spy of one of the gypsies watching them when a curtain on the second floor twitched enough to allow a slice of pale lamplight to sneak through. When she pointed out to her friend the faint profile of a woman in that window, Marianne squealed and dropped her flashlight, then scampered off into the night. But Eugenie waited until the curtain fell back into place before following. She’d never seen a real gypsy before.
As a college student, she had rented an apartment not far from the house, and she had deliberately routed her morning runs to include Butterfly Way. By then, though, the wedding cake had begun to spoil. Its once-white frosting was smudged, its frills and lace were frayed, its rosy front door was blistered. The fuchsia grew feral, the fountain went dry, and the gazebo listed to one side. Some mornings, the mailbox overflowed with uncollected correspondence, and others, the fading curtains were drawn tight. The magic that had made the house resplendent when she was a child had begun to fail, and something inside Eugenie grieved to see it.
Eventually, she graduated from college, then married and moved away. But often, when she came home to visit, she would find an excuse to drive through Manitou Hills to see how the house was faring. Each passing year brought greater failure to the enchantment. The house grew more weary, more unhappy, more hopeless. The frosting decayed. The fuchsia withered. The gazebo fell. And all she could do was watch helplessly as the palace of her childish dreams collapsed.
But then, a lot of things collapsed for Eugenie during those years. A lot decayed and withered and fell. Not just her dreams, but her career and her marriage, too. For a long time, she didn’t come home. For a long time, no place felt like home. Until one day, when she realized she had nowhere to go except back to the place where she grew up. On that day, with her son riding in the passenger seat and everything they owned in a trailer chasing behind, Eugenie returned to Louisville. But before driving to her brother’s house, where she would be staying for now, she turned into Manitou Hills, down Butterfly Way, to see her old friend. Her old friend who looked much like Eugenie now—exhausted, broken and old. Except, she noted, for one small difference.
A sign in the front yard that read, For Sale…
CHAPTER 1
The day Eugenie Dashner toured house for the first time, there was a Damnation Alley sized cockroach in the master bath. Dead, fortunately, though thoughts about what might still be prowling the house that ended the life of a creature she’d heard could survive the next apocalypse did give her pause. There were also mouse traps in the attic that contained only pieces of mouse. (She didn’t want to think about what had happened to the parts that weren’t there.) Mold sullied walls in the basement, the study, and a downstairs bath. Cracks crimped all three chimneys and bisected the terra cotta patio. Wallpaper peeled and plaster was scattered in virtually every room. The carpeting throughout was filthy. And the smell festering over all of it was...
Well. A charitable person might say the house smelled piquant. But Eugenie wasn’t charitable when it came to the safety and well-being of her family. She thought the house smelled like a bloated, fetid wildebeest.
On the up side, the place had been updated and redecorated relatively recently. On the down side, since it had been built in the 1880s, relatively recently translated to the 1970s. So unless one had a fondness for harvest gold shag carpeting and avocado appliances (which Eugenie did not), and unless one was enchanted by that phony antiquing crap people of that era brushed on their cabinetry (which Eugenie was not), no one in her right mind would want the place.
“You’re right, Eugenie. It’s perfect.”
But then, her brother Julien had never exactly been in his right mind.
“We have to buy it.”
They were exactly the words she had been hoping to hear him say when she convinced him to look at the house with her. But her sanity—the bulk of it, anyway—was one thing Lawrence hadn’t received in the divorce settlement, and she knew it would be nuts to take on a project like this. It was one thing to do some home improvement. A little paint here, a little spackle there. A jug of Murphy’s Oil Soap and a bottle of Febreze. But this…
This went beyond extreme makeover. This went beyond Damnation Alley. There wasn’t a cubic centimeter of the house that wasn’t damaged in some way.
She shook her head reluctantly. “I was wrong, Jules. From the outside, it looked like the place might have a chance. But after seeing its insides, it’s obvious there’s no way to salvage it. This place needs way more than just repair and renovation. What happened here…” She swallowed against the disappointment tightening her throat. “This is heartbreaking.”
“It’s a disaster, no question,” Julien agreed. “But c’mon, Eugene. You’ve never been one to back down from a challenge.”
Uh-oh. When he called her Eugene, it was an endearment—to him, anyway, never mind that their mother had always insisted she be called by the French version of the name, giving the second syllable a long a sound instead of a long e. That Eugene meant Jules was totally on board with using their pooled finances to buy this place together. And he was determined to bring her back to that way of thinking, too.
“This isn’t a challenge,” she said. “This is irreparable damage.”
Julien threw her one of his C’mon, Eugene smiles. “There’s no such thing as irreparable damage. Things that are broken can always be fixed.”
Spoken like a man who made his living fixing things. But even Julien knew that wasn’t true. In a lot of ways, he knew that better than anyone.
She sighed heavily, driving her gaze around the ugly kitchen again. It wasn’t a good idea, she told herself. It didn’t matter if she was half as solvent as she’d been before her divorce or that she had a teenage son who was fast becoming a stranger. She didn’t care if Julien’s investment in the place would be twice what hers would be because he’d made a boatload of money flipping houses before the real estate market collapsed. It made no difference that he had two motherless daughters who needed an adult female role model as much as her son needed someone like Julien to fill the empty space left by his dumbass father. And it was irrelevant that her and Julien’s mother had reached a point in her life where she wasn’t able to live by herself—or with anyone else who wasn’t obligated by blood ties to take care of her.
Okay, okay. All those things did matter, and Eugenie did care about them. She still wasn’t convinced this house could ever be restored to the bloom and buoyancy of its former self.
“It’s twice the size of all the other houses we’ve looked at in this price range,” Julien cajoled.
Which, she had to admit, did indeed make it perfect for blending the bunch of mismatched personalities that was her family. Which was an inescapable merger now thanks to A) Julien’s financial worth being a fraction of what it had been before his portfolio evaporated in the Wall Street debacle, B) Eugenie’s employment prospects looking equally evaporative in the current economy (provided evaporative was actually a word), and C) their mother having become even more of a handful than their children were, not to mention more childish.
“Mom will have a bedroom and bath to herself on the first floor,” Julien added, knowing it would count for a lot, keeping at least a floor between them and Lorraine. “The girls and I can take the second floor, and you can have the third.”
Oh, well, done, Jules. Put two floors between me and Mom. How could Eugenie resist that?
“And we can convert a good chunk of the attic for Seth,” he concluded, “so he’ll have his own space. That’s important when you’re sixteen, you know. A kid’s gotta have someplace to stash his stolen Playboys and Colt .45 tallboys.”
Eugenie managed a thin smile. “And what a convincing argument that is. There’s nothing that will sway my decision faster than envisioning my emotionally fragile, grossly underage son passed out in a drunken stupor on top of Miss February. Just show me where to sign.”
Julien expelled one of those sighs that told her he was worried about her. The same sort of sigh she’d heard from him the night she’d gone out with Lawrence for the first time. “Seth isn’t emotionally fragile, Eugene. He just has an asshole for a father.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Hey, we had an asshole for a father, too.”
“And look where we are. Buying a house together so we can live with our mom. Is it just me, or does this feel like junior high school all over again?”
“Mom paid for the house that time,” he pointed out. “And it was about the size of an electron compared to this one, not to mention a rental. And it was junior high for you, kid. I was embarking on my senior year when Dad took off, remember?”
Oh, did she ever. She’d just been starting seventh grade, completely unprepared for the turbulent social life that awaited her, ill-equipped as she’d been with braces, pimples, a bracken of unwieldy dishwater curls and absolutely no breasts to speak of.
Wow. This really was just like seventh grade again. Except for the braces. And the bracken of curls was more of a shrub now. A well-tended shrub. But still a shrub.
“There’s nothing wrong with this house that a little Clorox and paint won’t fix,” Julien said.
“Or a little nitro and acetylene,” she muttered.
“The kitchen is gigantic,” he pointed out, throwing his arms wide to encompass the room in which they stood. “Plenty of space for you to cook. And the whole family could have breakfast and dinner together at the same table. I know that means a lot to you. And I know you love to cook.”
No, she used to love to cook. Back when she cooked for her roommates in college. And early in her marriage when she and Lawrence could use up as many hours, bottles of wine and sticks of butter as they wanted to prepare dinner together. And then be together. Then had come two careers. Then Seth. Then suburbia and the whole fantasy mom thing she’d bought into before having to return it unused. Eugenie hadn’t actually enjoyed cooking since... Well, for a very long time. But then, she hadn’t enjoyed a lot of things for a very long time.
“Who was responsible for the seventies, anyway?” she muttered at the green appliances. “They should be taken out and flogged with a macramé belt.”
Julien moved to a counter top where the realtor had set out an incomplete place setting of stoneware and picked up a plate to inspect it. “Look,” he said, turning it so she could see. “This house even has its own dishes. Dishes with its name painted on them. Hell, it has a name period.” He pointed to the single word executed by hand in arcing, filigreed lettering around the rim. “Fleurissant,” he murmured with affected reverence. “That’s French. It means ‘blooming.’ Like when a flower blooms, not like how the English use it as a cuss word.”
Which would have been infinitely more appropriate, Eugenie thought. “And you know that how?” she asked.
In spite of their mother’s insistence that their surname had originally been D’Ashner and she had endowed both of her children with Gallic names, and in spite of her insistence all her life that she would someday return to her “native France,” a place she had never even visited, Julien didn’t speak a word of French other than garage. He hadn’t even gone to college. Before flipping houses—and meeting Cassie—he’d made his living being kept by women who had a lot more money than he did.
“The name was in the listing,” he said. “So I Googled it.”
Eugenie made her way over to have a closer look. The dinner, salad and bread plates bore a whimsical rendition of the house, but they and the soup bowl, cup and saucer were all either chipped or cracked or broken. She started to point out the significance of that, then decided it would be lost on Julien. Having educated himself in the arts of carpentry, masonry, dry-walling and plumbing, he was gifted at repairing things and making them whole again. Little faults like chips and cracks didn’t bother him. He’d experienced brokenness a lot worse than that. He’d watched his wife succumb to lymphoma, helpless to do anything that might fix her. If he could have Cassie back again, alive and healthy, he certainly wouldn’t have minded a few chips and cracks in her.
“Think how great it would be,” he said, “if the next time you talk to Lawrence, you can tell him you’re doing so well without him that you just bought a mansion with a French name.”
“Well, considering the fact that he knows exactly how much I received in the divorce settlement, he’s going to think it must not be a mansion—which it isn’t—and that it’s filled with mold, nasty carpeting, and dismembered mice—which it is.”
Julien frowned. “So you saw Mickey up there in the attic, huh?”
She nodded. “Minus his little gloves, jacket, bow-tie…and, oh yeah, his head.”
Her brother laughed lightly, his pale green eyes—the only feature they shared in common—crinkling adorably. Damn him. He was pushing fifty-five, a half decade older than she, but the lines on his face and threads of silver in his dark hair had only improved his rugged good looks. The same traits on Eugenie made her look haggard. Or maybe it was Lawrence who had made her look—and feel—that way. But Lawrence was gone now, and she still felt like that. What did a woman have to do to feel blooming and buoyant again?
“Will you stop worrying?” Julien said. “There’s nothing wrong with this house except that it’s been neglected for too long. All it needs is a little hard work—”
At her expression, he hastily amended, “A lot of hard work and a couple bottles of environmentally friendly cleaner—”
She hardened her expression.
“Several vats of industrial strength cleaner, hundreds of thousands of nails, and a warehouse full of building materials.” He smiled again. His charming-women smile, she noted. “And with your extremely gifted eye for color and fabrics, not to mention your exquisite taste in antiques, this place will look like the Beaux Arts beauty she was back before the rest of the neighborhood sprang up around her. Just close your eyes for a minute and imagine how this place could look.”
Eugenie didn’t have to imagine. She remembered too well the frothy, fairy-tale façade and the enchanted gardens she’d loved as a child. That was why she’d wanted to look at the house in the first place. But that façade was decrepit now, and the gardens were blighted. Who would want a house like this? How could it ever be made whole again?
“It costs more than we allotted in our budget,” she said halfheartedly, the foundation of her misgivings beginning to crumble. Maybe aiming for Julien’s wallet would yield a deeper nick than talking about mold and mortar.
“It’s been on the market for almost three years,” he replied, “and it’s way overpriced. Hell, the owners couldn’t have gotten their current asking price for the place even before the housing collapse. They haven’t had an offer in over a year. They’ll come down. A lot, I bet.”
Eugenie didn’t doubt he knew what he was talking about. In addition to flipping houses, Julien had been a card-carrying Realtor for more than a decade.
“Who are the owners, anyway?” she asked, deliberately stalling when she felt the crack in her convictions widen. “How could they have let a house like this, in a very upscale neighborhood like Manitou Hills, deteriorate so much?”
“The owner’s agent told me the house has been empty for five years. That’s when the previous owner went into a nursing home. When she died, it went to a second or third cousin, I think, up in Indiana somewhere. When he saw the comps for the rest of the neighborhood, he thought he could make a bundle off of it, not realizing—or wanting to accept—just how bad a shape it’s in. But he’s gotta be starting to sweat. Taxes for this neighborhood aren’t exactly easy on the wallet.”
“Every other house on this street would sell for high six figures, maybe seven, even in this market,” she said. In Louisville, houses didn’t get much more expensive than that. Not unless they were mansions. “And this house is way bigger than the others in this neighborhood, with double the lot. The owner may not be as amenable as you think.”
Julien sighed sadly. “This house isn’t like the other houses in the neighborhood. He has to realize that by now, too. The others have all been pampered like heiresses. They’ve been topped with tiaras, spoon-fed champagne and danced around ballrooms, then kissed by a worthy suitor beneath a plump, pink sunrise while Daddy smiled indulgently from an upstairs window.” He gazed through the door that led to the dining room, with its cloudy chandelier and ragged wallpaper. “This beauty deserved no less. I can’t understand how someone could have mistreated her so badly. She deserved better.”
Now Eugenie was the one to smile. Her brother could be a raging poet when it came to old houses. And this one had been magnificent once upon a time. But it looked out of place now amid the other homes on Butterfly Way, all of them proud Tudors and Queen Annes or elegant Colonials and Neo-Classicals. It went beyond neglect, what had happened here. And for some reason, she just couldn’t quite let it go.
What’s your story? she asked the house. Why didn’t they take better care of you?
But the house didn’t answer. Maybe the house didn’t understand, either.
Eugenie told herself she was crazy. The place was going to take more time, work, and inclination than she had in her to invest. But when she turned to look at her brother again with the word No firmly on her lips, she instead heard herself say, “No one moves in until the last vestige of mold and pestilence is gone.”
Julien grinned. “Not a problem, Eugene.”
She could only laugh at that. No, the house wasn’t a problem. It was scores of problems. So many, she didn’t even know where to begin.
But Julien did. Obviously fearing she would change her mind, he whipped out his phone, scrolled through his contacts and pushed a button. “Joanie?” he said when someone picked up at the other end. “Yeah, Julien Dashner. My sister and I would like to make an offer on the house on Butterfly Way.”
