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shook his head, and said he couldn’t believe any of the Fremantles cared enough to put money into saving the place. Susan disagreed, saying it should be on the National Register of Historic Places. So Doug began baiting her, with the sarcasm that made him effective in court.
    Privately, Jim agreed with his brother, but he didn’t want to raise Susan’s agitation level any higher by weighing in on the discussion. “Come on, you two,” he called from the top of the stairs. “Enough quarreling over something neither of you has the power to control. Let’s see if we can make this bathroom and bedroom bearable for the lady.”
    The other three joined him, but their morning stint had drained their energy—especially Doug and Mimi’s, who weren’t used to such hard physical work. However, even Susan felt daunted by the second story. Liz Fremantle had stopped housecleaning some years before her death, and the six bedrooms were filled with old newspapers, a train layout, laundered clothes that had never been put away, as well as boxes her children had sent home for safekeeping while they moved around the world.
    Susan clucked her tongue anxiously over the patch of blue-black mold around the master-bedroom fireplace. She pulled out a tape measure, and announced that the mold had spread three more inches since she’d last looked in August.
    The four of them did their best to clean the main bedroom, with its fireplace, marble washbasin, and heavy cherry furniture, but gave up on the rest of the second floor.
    “If this Gina Haring cares about clean, she’ll take care of it. If she doesn’t, she won’t notice,” Doug pronounced.
    “No one could help noticing all this,” Mimi said. “I hope the Fremantles aren’t charging her much. Really, they should pay anyone who’s willing to stay here.”
    They packed up their cleaning gear and stowed it in the truck. Before they started home, Jim walked the perimeter, making sure the basement was sealed. He saw that the two-by-four was still bolted across the outside entrance to the old coal cellar but didn’t bother to check the bolts. Mimi and Doug came over to him.
    “Susan just remembered that all the dishes are dirty. She’s washing enough to set out and look hospitable, or something,” Doug said.
    “What’s that house out there that’s fallen over?” Mimi asked.
    Beyond the barn, visible in fall through the bare trees, stood the remnants of a small single-story house.
    “It used to be a bunkhouse,” Jim said. “Back when the Fremantles farmed ten thousand acres, they had four, maybe six, hands who lived there.”
    “And they just let it fall over?” Mimi said. “It’s so—so dreary, like the House of Usher, or Miss Haversham.”
    “It burned down,” Jim said, “the first year Doug and I were living with Gram and Grandpa.”
    “Mrs. Fremantle took it into her head to rent it to some hippies,” Doug explained. “You know, back in the wide-open sixties Lawrence was quite the counterculture heaven, and there were a lot of communes dotted around the county, kids trying to harvest the local weed.”
    “Local weed?” Mimi wrinkled her forehead.
    “During the Second World War, when the Philippines were blockaded, the government tried to get farmers all over the Midwest to grow marijuana for hemp, because we got all our rope hemp from the islands,” Doug said. “It made poor-grade rope, and poor-grade dope, but if you were a lazy hippie you could get enough of a crop to make enough cash to buy the real thing. So Liz Fremantle, who liked to thumb her nose at local convention, she rented out the bunkhouse to some hippies. It really riled Myra Schapen. And then one night the bunkhouse burned down.”
    Jim had only hazy memories of that fall. He was nine, and his parents were newly dead. Arnie Schapen used to talk about the hippies all the time at school. He was Doug’s age, two years older than Jim, and he was always bringing tales into school about what the