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Moving day. Nick and I spent the morning making sure that everything got on the truck, then drove to the new house. As the movers unloaded we routed boxes and furniture to the right rooms. James, the architect who’d designed our house and overseen the build, called to check in and wish us the best. By the time the truck pulled away, disappearing down the long driveway through the woods, it was late afternoon. Nick and I popped a couple beers and sat on the front stoop, letting the day sink in. More than just the day. Our decision to uproot and move across the country, to move here, into the kind of house we’d dreamed of having but never thought we’d be able to afford.
We both liked the clean lines and airy, light-filled spaces of modern architecture. Think magazines like Dwell or Azure. Or maybe you remember the old Tumblr called Unhappy Hipsters, which did a pretty good job of poking fun at those magazines and the people who read them. People like us.
And, I mean, I get it. There’s a certain point at which the proportions or minimalism of modern architecture can be laughably sterile or impersonal. But the stuff Nick and I liked best balanced the modern with more natural, rustic accents that kept it grounded.
Our first morning in the house I woke to sunlight pouring into the bedroom through the tall windows, and walked the broad planks of engineered bamboo down the hall into the bright, inviting kitchen with its butcher-block island and lacquered cabinetry. I made coffee and was about to step out to the deck when I stopped in my tracks.
Stretched out a few feet beyond the sliding door was a long black snake. At first I thought it was dead. But when I rapped on the glass it began to move. I hate snakes. I’d been bracing myself to see one since we started building the house, knowing we were moving into their territory, but we hadn’t seen any during construction. Apparently this one, all six fat feet of it, was waiting until we’d moved in to make an appearance. In no hurry, it slithered its way off the deck.
I decided I’d go out the front door instead, taking my coffee up the driveway to get a look at the house from the outside, to see if it struck me any differently now that it was inhabited.
The horizontal lines of its low-pitched roof, composite exterior panels, and long windows played off sections of vertical cedar planking around the door and windows, the way a stone outcropping might play off the trunks of trees. Beyond the small deck the land dropped away, affording the view that had led us to select this perch. A good choice.
Not so long ago, Nick and I had been living in the Bay Area, renting an apartment and saving to buy a place. We weren’t loaded or anything but made decent money for a couple of people who’d just rounded thirty. We worked at the same company, which I won’t name. But it’s a game slash game-creation platform that you’ve probably heard of – a company big enough that our paths rarely crossed at work. I was a UX designer and worked on the look and feel of the game-space. Nick was a software engineer and worked on the underlying mechanics of the platform, defining the parameters in which a person could build and play.
Anyway, where we were living a basic starter home would’ve set us back the better part of a million bucks. We’d have been lucky to afford anything, much less the kind of place we really wanted, the kind you might see on the pages of the design magazines fanned across our coffee table.
Quickly and dramatically, however, our circumstances changed. First, Nick’s uncle died and left us an undeveloped plot of land all the way across the country in the South Mountain range of the Appalachians. This uncle hadn’t had kids of his own, and Nick and his sister were his only living blood relatives. We got the land while Nick’s sister got the uncle’s house in the DC suburbs.
Nick’s uncle was cremated and we flew east for a small interment ceremony. While there we took a day trip to visit the land. It was truly beautiful, twenty acres of rolling wooded hills bisected by a rocky stream. We hiked around, talking about how nice it would be to live there, far from the daily bustle. Upon returning to the West Coast we even began to contemplate how to make it happen. But the sticking point was work. There just weren’t many jobs in our field within a reasonable commute of the property.
Then the pandemic hit. We started working from home. The company continued to grow and started hiring from all over the country. It became clear after the pandemic that permanent remote work was a real option – at our current company and also more broadly in our respective fields. We talked to our managers about going fully remote and got the go-ahead. So we moved to a suburban town in the Baltimore-Washington corridor about a ninety minute drive from the land. Nick had a friend there and we figured it would make a pleasant base of operations while we had a house built.
This is when we began to realize that we might have the sort of architecturally distinguished, thoughtfully designed modern home we’d always wanted. We’d read about prefab, or prefabricated, houses. Not the kind you often see strapped to a trailer on the interstate – a basic rancher bisected for transport – but the kind that we saw in our design magazines. These were manufactured offsite, then shipped in standard sections for easy assembly. We priced it out and found that this option was within our reach.
And now here we were.
Nick and I took some PTO to unpack and set up. Navigating around the boxes and clutter, we were constantly clipping the edges of things – the kitchen counter, doorknobs, walls where they turned a corner – with our shoulders and hips. And we kept bumping our heads when leaning into or out of the little built-in storage nooks and cabinets. To the point where it got to be a running joke. At the end of the third day, together in the spray of the dual-head shower, we pointed out each other’s scratches and bruises.
Otherwise we found that the house’s design anticipated our needs and preferences. All our stuff found a place, our furniture arranged itself, and our hangings looked at home on the walls. I set up my office in one bedroom and Nick set up in the other – the one we’d earmarked, per the architect’s repeated urging, as the eventual nursery for a hypothetical baby.
We drove to nearby towns, to the hardware store for landscaping equipment, to flea markets and secondhand shops for decorative grace notes. In one of these shops an unusual sculpture caught my eye: abstract, about three feet tall and narrow, like a vase, brushed chrome, a kind of climbing spiral, heavy at the bottom, tapering as it rose.
“It’s like a staircase,” I told Nick.
“More like the base of a lamp.”
“Ha ha. No, see, the way it sweeps up. Almost like it’s taking flight.”
“Or a baseball bat set upside down.”
Anyway, we bought it, and I spent a few days trying to find the right home for it, finally settling for a shelf in the corner of the living room.
We quickly established a rhythm around our newfound solitude. After concluding a workday’s virtual interactions, it was easy there at our house in the woods to feel like we were the only two people in the world. Quite a contrast to the past few months during construction when the architect and his building crew were such a consistent presence.
Sometimes the solitude caught up with me. At least that’s what I figured it was. Every now and then I’d be staring out a window, or doing something in the kitchen, or laying in bed, when all of a sudden and for no clear reason a peculiar feeling would come over me. A feeling of some other presence besides Nick and me. Not like being watched exactly. But like someone or something was close at hand, waiting.
It’s hard to explain. And anyway the occasional feeling didn’t make me any less content with the new life we were living. Even if that life seemed to entail frequent bodily injury. While Nick soon stopped bumping into things, I continued to accumulate bruises.
“Lena? You OK?” he would call out from across the house, hearing the thud of me running into one thing or another.
“I’m a klutz,” I said to him one night when changing for bed I noticed a new purplish bloom on the flesh of my hip. “Clinically, I think.”
“That’s OK. I still think you’re sexy, even all banged up.”
This brief exchange came to mind a few days later. It was a rare day when we were both away from the house for an extended period. Per the terms of our remote working agreement Nick and I had to attend two regional meetups with our respective teams every fiscal quarter. These were held on the third Friday of every month, and with the end of the quarter coming up we both needed another meeting to hit our quota.
My team’s meetup was in Baltimore. Nick’s was a bit further afield, in Philadelphia, so I was the first one to arrive home that evening. Letting myself into the empty house I found on the kitchen island a box of lingerie topped with a fifty-cent piece.
I should probably explain.
Years ago, Nick and I had been living in the first apartment we shared when he had to take a day trip for work. It was going to be a long day, a lot of driving. He was getting ready to go and I told him I’d have dinner waiting for him when he got back.
“And a cold beer?” he said.
“Sure.”
“And you’ll be wearing something slinky?” Said with an exaggerated lechery – joking but maybe not totally joking.
“Hmm. I’m not sure I own anything ‘slinky.’ I’m not even sure I know what that means.”
“Revealing. Maybe see-through.”
“Ah. You’re saying I should be ready to please you. Like I’m some two-bit whore.”
I don’t know what brought that phrase to mind. It’s not like it was in my repertoire. It was just something I grabbed to keep the joke going.
“Oh, no,” Nick said. “I would never say such a thing. How much is two bits?”
“A quarter.”
“Then I’d say four bits at least.”
“Well, sure. For four bits I’m down for anything.”
And that was that – ha ha, etc. – until the next day when I got home from work to find, on the kitchen counter, a box from Victoria’s Secret topped with a fifty-cent piece. I had a little laugh at the gesture and opened the box to find this little translucent negligee thing, along with a note. “Thank you for always thinking of me,” it read. “I love you.”
It was sweet and silly. I put on the negligee. There was a six-pack of beer in the fridge, so I put a couple in an ice bucket. I took it to the bedroom and was waiting in bed looking trashy and swigging from a bottle when Nick got home a short time later.
Ever since, we would do this from time to time. What began as a joke had become Nick’s way of reminding me that he appreciated me and found me attractive. I mean, it was also still a joke. It was both. The fact that it was a joke is what made it sincere, if that makes sense.
For a long time a box of lingerie topped with a fifty-cent piece would show up every few months or so. The year before we moved into the new house, though, it had been much more frequent. There just so happened to be an adult entertainment store around the corner from the place we were renting and it had the most ridiculous lingerie for sale, really cheap. So it became more of a monthly thing, each piece of lingerie surpassing the last in terms of sleaziness. It was of such poor quality that it practically fell apart after one washing but Nick would put it in a fancy box – that was part of the joke.
This was the first time, though, since we’d moved in to the new house. Truth be told, our sex life had hit a bit of a lull. I’m not sure why. Usually a change of scenery does the opposite – think hotel sex. Whatever the reason, it seemed to have something to do with the move.
I thought of Nick’s comment the other day about how he still thought I was sexy despite my recent bumps and bruises. Smiling to myself, I pocketed the fifty-cent piece and opened the box. Inside was a stocking-and-garter getup, lacy mesh. Trashy in its way but clearly not cheap. I checked the fridge and sure enough there was a fresh six-pack. I texted Nick, telling him to let me know his ETA as soon as he had one. When he got home I was waiting in bed sipping from a bottle.
“Well well well,” he said, “isn’t this a nice surprise.”
“Yeah, sure. Come here.”
It was a good night. Whatever barrier might’ve been building between us, physically, broke open, and we didn’t get to sleep until late.
A couple weeks later I missed my period. I didn’t say anything to Nick, not right away, not until after I took a home pregnancy test, then another the next day. Both positive.
I was on birth control, had been for years. But of course it’s not foolproof, as my doctor liked to mention. We knew couples who’d had to spend big bucks on fertility treatments. It figured – it’s when you’re not trying for something that you end up getting it.
When I did tell Nick he was quiet for a moment, reflective. Then he looked at me and something like wonder spread across his face. “We’re going to have a baby,” he said.
I started to cry a little. After the first test I hadn’t really known what to think. After the second test the questions had quickly flooded in: Should I keep it? Am I ready? Are we ready? How would I know? What does it even mean, “ready” Within a moment however these questions resolved, all answered by a simple statement of fact: I was going to have a baby.
My tears, now, were of happiness mixed with relief – relief that Nick had found the same unexpected joy in the prospect as I did.
That night I was in bed reading and Nick was brushing his teeth. He has a habit of talking to me while he brushes his teeth, barely comprehensible with his mouth full of foam. “So exciting,” he said. Or at least that’s what I heard.
“I know. It’s like we moved in just in time.”
“That’s what I was thinking. It was meant to be.” Again, so far as I could tell.
“Little did you know what it would lead to when you set out the fifty-cent piece.”
“When I did what?”
“It must’ve been that night. When you set out the lingerie.”
“I didn’t set out the lingerie.”
But of course he must’ve been saying something else. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I said I didn’t set it out.”
“Go spit please. I can’t understand you.”
But after he rinsed his mouth he came out of the bathroom and repeated what I thought he’d said – what I couldn’t understand his reasons for saying. I told him to knock it off, that it wasn’t funny. He said he wasn’t joking; I could see he too was getting angry. We were at an impasse.
Finally, I just stated what I knew. That I’d returned home from the regional meetup in Baltimore and had found a box of lingerie topped with a fifty-cent piece, per tradition, and a six-pack in the fridge.
He told me he believed me. And he said he didn’t do it. I know Nick, and know when he’s telling the truth. Right now he was telling the truth.
My stomach lurched.
We talked it through. What had happened? How was this possible? Not only for someone to enter the house and place these things, but to think to do it. I’d never told anyone about this little joke of ours. He swore up and down that he hadn’t either. Maybe when one of us had had too much to drink we’d mentioned it to a friend? Not totally impossible, but why in the world would one of our friends break into our house? And, speaking of which, why wasn’t there any sign of forced entry?
A possibility occurred to me – though it struck me more like certainty. I found myself walking to the storage closet, to look for the box of odds and ends in which I knew I’d find answers.
###
A prefab modern house was within our price range but only if we didn’t go nuts. The price tag for such a house can vary widely depending on the size of the home, the degree of customization, and the quality of materials. So with what seemed like a reasonable number in mind we began researching our options. I don’t remember exactly how we stumbled upon Mensa Modular. At first it was just one of several dozen bookmarks in my browser, one of the companies in the region that offered the sort of thing we were looking for. The website doesn’t exist anymore but I recall that it was sleek and clean in the spirt of the homes pictured in its project portfolio. And I remember its whole pitch seemed targeted at people like us, couples with a discerning eye for design who wanted a place to settle in and start a family. Mensa Modular was a stupid, pretentious name for a company, I thought, but then a lot of the companies we found had stupid, pretentious names. Something like half of them ended in “-haus”.
Choosing a company was a whole process, even after we’d whittled down the choices to a handful. It involved providing rough specifications, sifting through prepackaged and semi-customized options, gathering quotes, and talking to reps. Most of the companies were large enough that the reps were sales people or project coordinators. Only in the case of Mensa was the rep the architect, builder, and contractor. “I’m a one-man operation,” he told us the first time we spoke.
It was a virtual meeting. Nick and I were in our living room and the architect, James, sat at a desk in what must’ve been his office, the wall behind him hung with abstract art and floating bookshelves full of design books in several languages.
He was one of those people whose age is hard to determine; he might’ve been our age, he might’ve been fifty. His receding hair was shaved to stubble and his large, pale, ovoid head gave him a slightly alien appearance. An alien attempting human friendliness, smiling in thick-framed glasses and a quarter-zip fleece. “I have subcontractors I work with for the transport and build,” he continued, “but you’ll be working with me directly, should we move forward.”
This, we were given to understand, wasn’t entirely our decision to make. Because his prices were reasonable – very reasonable, in fact, just a tick above what would’ve seemed suspiciously so – and because he only worked on one home at a time, he could be selective about his projects. “It’s about finding the right fit,” he said. Which seemed to have something to do with family, because he came right out and asked us if we intended to have kids.
Nick and I looked at each other. “We’ve talked about it,” I said. “We like the idea. We don’t have any particular timeline in mind, but yeah. At some point, sure.”
I asked James what about him, if he had kids.
He shook his head no. “I have what you’d call a non-traditional family. I grew up without that sense of belonging. But I always wanted it. That’s why it’s important to me, to create spaces where it can grow.”
He went on to explain that he didn’t think of design as purely aesthetic – that done correctly he considered it a sort of catalyst. I liked what I heard. Glancing at Nick I could tell he did too. And we liked the designs that James shared. His take on modernism wasn’t the muscular, brutalist sort; his lines and arrangement of space were organic, suggestive. Before the meeting concluded he provided a list of references, previous clients for us to call.
Over the next few weeks, we talked to these references in a series of video chats. James hadn’t been kidding about targeting a certain type of client. They were all couples around our age, moderately affluent, and they all either had a very young baby or one on the way. And no older children – these were couples in the first stages of growing a family. Nick and I figured this gave us a real shot at working with James, should we decide we wanted to.
The references made a strong case for him. They clearly loved their houses and led us on virtual tours, carrying their laptops through bright, serene spaces, showing off the features they loved best: reading nooks, courtyards, lofted offices.
Oh, and nurseries. All of them lingered in the nurseries, commenting on how perfect they were or would be for the baby. To me the nurseries looked unremarkable. I mean, they were nice enough, and they’d been decorated with care, they just didn’t seem architecturally distinguished in any particular way. But these were new parents and their excitement was understandable.
Geographically too Nick and I fit a pattern. James seemed to favor homesites along the eastern reaches of the Appalachian ridge, be they rural like ours or suburban, as was the case for a couple of the references. Together the sites formed a gradual arc extending a few hundred miles. The office address listed on the Mensa Modular website was in the western exurbs of Philadelphia about halfway along this arc.
Finally, our decision was between Mensa and one other company. Before deciding, Nick and I thought we’d better meet the finalists in person. For the other company this involved visiting their office in Rockville. James however asked if he could visit us instead. “In case we do work together, I’d like to get a sense of the space you live in now.”
“Our natural habitat?” I said.
“The more natural the better. I know the tendency is to clean everything up when company’s coming, but I’d urge you to leave it as it is. If you can stand it.”
“Twist my arm. I won’t lift a finger.”
James arrived at the small house we were renting on a beautiful autumn afternoon. In person he cut a curious figure. He was taller than I expected and had a strange way of moving, with certain movements or gestures unusually smooth and languid and others abrupt, spasmodic – like he’d pieced them together from different people, according to no discernible pattern. But he had that friendly smile and after greeting us at the door he asked for a quick tour around the house.
Nick and I led him around. There wasn’t much to show. But James took it all in, nodding. Back in the living room he said, “Well, let’s get down to business,” and withdrew a laptop from his shoulder bag.
We led him to the dining table and were about to sit down when something out the window seemed to catch his eye.
“It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “Should we sit out at the picnic table?”
In the small backyard, visible through the window, was a picnic table in the shade of a maple, its leaves barely tinged with the season’s color. James was right; it was the sort of afternoon you didn’t want to miss. So we all went outside and sat around the table and James began walking us through the plan he’d put together per our specs. We went over pricing and what the building process would look like.
“Looking at a floor plan,” he said, clicking his laptop, “it can be difficult to get a real sense of a place. So I like to put together something more immersive.” He turned the screen to face us. “This is a 3D model. I’ve programmed a little tour to guide you through the house. Then you can click around yourself. Explore.”
As we did, he asked if he might use the bathroom and excused himself.
Nick and I watched the tour, suitably impressed, then navigated around the model, imagining ourselves living there. It was exactly what we wanted. It didn’t take us but a couple minutes to realize we’d made our decision.
We wanted to tell James but he still hadn’t returned to the table.
Nick said, “Probably on the phone or something.”
Probably so. Still, I went inside to make sure everything was OK, and found James returning our small stepladder to its place beside the fridge. “Hope you don’t mind,” he said, holding up a clenched hand. “Saw a boxelder bug. You want to kill these things when you see them or else they breed in the walls.”
“Oh, yeah, we’ve been seeing them ever since the weather turned cool.”
He grabbed a paper towel from the roll on the counter and used it to wad up the contents of his hand before tossing it in the trash. Washing his hands in the kitchen sink, he asked what I thought of the 3D tour.
I told him we had good news.
We didn’t sign the papers that afternoon, but made a verbal commitment. Then in the shade of the maple we talked through a few final modifications to the plan. To this end, James urged us to think through the purpose of each room. The master bedroom was obvious – it was the one with the master bath – but there remained the matter of which room might be the future nursery, which one might serve as an office, and so on. James was a good listener, the sort of listener whose attention is so complete that you hear the words coming out of your own mouth as if they’re being spoken by someone else, someone very interesting.
The next few months were a flurry of activity interrupted briefly for the holidays. James knew his way around the necessary permits and got that process in motion. Meanwhile we went with him several times to visit the land, where we’d chosen a site for the home – a hilltop perch that would afford a view through the trees of the stream below. We made minor adjustments to the house plan based on the site, optimizing the views and light. James arranged everything: clearing and leveling the land, digging the well, and installing the septic system.
Eventually he was ready to pour the foundation, the concrete slab atop which our house would be assembled. We were excited about it, and a couple days before the official groundbreaking met James for one last look at the house’s empty footprint. Nick and I paced around the clearing, trying to picture how it would come together.
Walking his characteristic, convulsive walk – despite all the time we spent with him I never quite got used to his unusual physics – James went around to the back of his SUV, where the hatch was open, and emerged holding flute glasses filled with bubbly.
“A toast,” he said. “To the beginning of the build. Of your home, and of the life you’ll live in it.”
On the drive back Nick and I decided to stop for dinner at a roadside restaurant we’d passed many times on our way to and from the property. The food was greasy and blah. Worse, it made us seriously sick. By that night we were both suffering.
Given the unlikelihood that we’d both come down with a stomach bug at the same time we figured it had to be food poisoning. This was confirmed a few days later when Nick’s symptoms hadn’t improved and he went to the doctor. My symptoms went away on their own after about a week but he got antibiotics and wasn’t right for another week after that.
By the time we could both last long enough in the car to drive to the homesite again, the foundation had been poured and the plywood subfloors were down. In our absence, James had been sending us photo updates and giving us site tours by video chat. Still, it was exciting to see the progress for ourselves. The modular panels would soon be arriving by flatbed truck, dropped into place by crane, and assembled.
This all happened relatively quickly. It had been about five months since we’d hired James, but the actual onsite construction only took a month. Our trips to the property became more frequent during this phase, so that we could keep up with progress. It was like one day there was nothing but a patch of boarded-over concrete, and the next day there was a house.
Another month followed in which James and his crew built out the interior finishes, installed the HVAC, hooked up the necessary wiring, etc. Sometimes I’d watch him work out the corner of my eye, fascinated by his strange way of moving, and entertain the notion that his skeleton and musculature were somehow different under the skin from most people’s. Were that the case, though, it didn’t hold him back. He did excellent work and at a good clip.
At that point we were in the throes of packing up our rental house, boxes everywhere. Our landlord was letting us out of the lease a month early, which was kind of him, so we tried to be good sports about it when he sent his property manager to inspect all the appliances and systems ahead of the incoming tenant. Nick and I had been gentle with the house and everything was in good order. The landlord had new, ten-year smoke detectors shipped to the house and asked us to swap out the ones that were there. We did, and stashed the old ones in one of the moving boxes in case James didn’t think to install them in the new house.
Of course, we needn’t have worried about it. He’d thought of that. He’d thought of everything.
###
In the storage closet I found the box of odds and ends where I’d stashed the smoke alarms from the rental house.
I hadn’t thought to ask the landlord why he’d ordered replacements – I assumed he must’ve been upgrading. But was it possible he replaced them because the old ones didn’t work?
“What are you doing?” Nick asked as I began breaking apart one of the alarms.
The only way for anyone to know about our inside joke with the lingerie and coin was if someone had been watching.
I thought of the day that James had visited the rental, the afternoon when we’d all sat around the picnic table. Of how I’d walked inside to find him returning the stepladder to its place beside the fridge. Killing a bug, he said. Holding up a clenched fist. And that had been enough for me to believe him.
Of course, why would I have doubted him, or suspected him of anything? Because he had a funny way of moving? Because there was a certain intensity in the way he watched you speak?
I explained to Nick what I was doing. What I expected to find.
Once the cover was off it was obvious what we were looking at, even to us, who had no experience with such things. A small rectangular enclosure with a round lens.
A camera.
Nick and I broke open the rest of the alarms. Then we googled how such devices worked until we understood all the pieces. Besides the cameras, each “alarm” held a small transmitter. These could’ve reached a recorder or relay device within a hundred or more yards of the house. James might’ve placed it anywhere.
Before going to bed we checked all the new house’s smoke alarms. They were real and functional and weren’t hiding anything. We checked inside vents and light fixtures and anyplace else it seemed like monitoring equipment might be hidden. Nothing. Then we barricaded the front and side doors with the heaviest furniture we could reasonably lug. Which felt in one way like an overreaction but in another way like the only realistic way we were going to get any sleep, knowing that James had been watching us in the old house.
And he must’ve been watching us here as well to know that Nick and I were away from the house that day, so that he could come in and leave his little surprise. Of course, he needn’t have been watching us very closely for that. It would’ve been enough for him to see that our cars weren’t in the driveway. Still, there in bed the feeling of being watched, of being un-alone, was intense.
The occasional feeling I’d experienced of some nearby presence could now be explained. It must’ve been a kind of intuition.
We had the locks replaced, of course, and new deadbolts installed that could only be locked from inside. We got exterior cameras that recorded to the cloud and could stream to our phones. We called the police both locally and in the jurisdiction of our rental house. I have to give them credit; they took what we were saying seriously and did their best to help.
They too combed the new house for cameras, without result. And they made every effort to locate James. Although it was unlikely that was his real name: James Smith. Again, in retrospect, yes, it sounded suspiciously generic. The phone number we had for him had been disconnected. The office address we had was an empty rental space. All our checks had been made out to Mensa Modular, an LLC associated with similarly useless contact information.
The police tried working an angle that focused on the freight companies that had delivered the modular panels. But they’d been paid by the same LLC and had picked up the deliveries at a warehouse that was now as empty as the office address.
We even put the police in touch with the families who the architect – I couldn’t think of him as “James” anymore, knowing it was a lie – had used as references. They too were no help. They had the same name and contact information for him as we did and the few leads derived from their construction paperwork led to the same dead ends. We reached out to the families ourselves to see if there might be some detail they remembered that the police had overlooked – also, I suppose, to commiserate.
They were probably freaking out, we figured. If this had happened to us, who was to say that it hadn’t happened to them? Except when we reached them they seemed oddly unconcerned. It was too bad, they agreed, and they were friendly enough, if not as sympathetic as we’d expected.
Nick and I tried to put it behind us but it was unsettling to know that the architect, whoever he really was, was out there somewhere. What bothered me most though was the question of why. Why had he done what he’d done?
Before long, I had an explanation.