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the ceiling with his fingers. He ran his hands over a corner beam and felt the long scallops in the wood that told him it had been shaped by hand. Colt had once had a client who was a collector of wooden antiques, and she’d taught him, or tried to teach him, some of the basic distinctions to be made when dealing with objects of wood; he was astonished to discover, ten years later, that he’d learned something.
    “This is real,” he said, more to himself than the other two.
    “All original beamwork,” said Marge Westerbrook proudly, as if she was responsible for it. “Well preserved, no dry rot, no termites. The place has really been looked after nicely. It’s a real find . You people have excellent taste!” She led them into the kitchen, their feet echoing on the floorboards until they came across slate tiles the color of angry November. Francie cooed; Colt stomped experi mentally, to see if anything came loose; Marge elaborated on the need for plumbing repairs, no sense in being deceitful, she didn’t believe in doing business that way—the place would need work . The last improvements were completed (here she consulted her clipboard) in the mid-1970s. She turned on the tap over the sink, and all three attended to a rush of air, like the hiss of radio signals from a distant star. After a moment it was replaced by a low, gur gling note, the pitch changing as the source of it approached at rapid speed from somewhere below their feet. They were re warded with a gout of brown water that smelled briefly of pond. Then, as if by magic, it ran clear.
    34 W ILLIAM K OWALSKI

    “You have well water!” cried Marge Westerbrook, making Fran cie jump. They each held their hand under the stream for a mo ment, allowing it to impart its subterranean chill to their finger bones. Colt tasted it, cautious. It was sweet and clean, slightly chalky. There was none of the metallic, chemical flavor of city wa ter, no chlorine, no fluoride. No one had touched this water before him, no government official had approved it as fit for his consump tion. There had never been a liquid like this in his life before. He swirled it over his tongue like a vintage wine, closed his eyes, and thought of cave fish, stalactites, stalagmites. They had well water. Marge led them triumphantly through the rest of the house: the master bedroom, spacious and bright; the guest bedrooms, small, numerous, and dim; the parlor, impossibly oak-paneled, as was the den; the bathrooms, which were merely bathrooms. They even went to the attic, a warm, rustic space, floored with un planed boards. Light flooded through the bull’s-eye windows at ei ther end in surprising quantity. In one corner, a plastic tarp had been draped over a pile of something. Pulling this back, Francie found a stack of cardboard boxes. Opening one, she found comic books, mostly of the sci-fi variety from the 1950s and ’60s. Francie gave a coo of delight; she wouldn’t be surprised if some of them turned out to be collector ’s items, provided they hadn’t mildewed. There was also an aged steamer trunk, the kind she had seen on Antiques Roadshow many a time. She pulled up the fragile domed lid and saw that it was empty. She tried, with her poet’s mind, to imagine what kind of person had owned this trunk, and from where they had come with it, and why. Or perhaps it had been purchased for a journey that was never taken, and that was why it was still here, empty. You looked at a trunk and you thought these things, because a trunk meant traveling and dream ing, she thought. It smelled of cedar, as every good trunk should, and was lined in peeling paper, printed in a pattern not unlike
    Marge Westerbrook’s blouse.
    Francie looked quickly at Colt and Marge, who were at the
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    other end of the long attic, talking about something. Unobserved, she grabbed a random comic book and stuck it in the waistband of her jeans, under her shirt. Then she closed the lid of the trunk and