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bright eyes that peered out from among the folds of skin were as sharp as ever.
    “Mr. Dolan!” said Holly in a squeal of delight intended to conceal her horror at finding him on the premises. “How wonderful to see you! I’ve brought somebody by to look at this marvelous house of yours.” She took the old man by the sleeve of his brown bathrobe and propelled him toward Bill’s outstretched hand. “Say hello to Bill MacPherson. He’s one of Danville’s up-and-coming young lawyers. Bill, this is Mr. Jack Dolan, the original owner of this incredible place.”
    Bill opened his mouth to say “But I thought the original owner was dead,” then thought better of it. This old gentleman looked dead. He was ninety if he was a day. The spotted pink skin of his face hung down in a cascade of furrows, giving his eyes a hooded look, reminiscent of a species of lizard. Bill couldn’t recall which species of lizard, but he was sure it looked better—and maybe more human—than the tottering specter of wheezing parchment standing before him. “How do you do?” he said faintly. He shook the old man’s hand gently, so as not to make it fall off.
    Over the old man’s shoulder, Holly was mouthing the word “later” to indicate that she did indeed have a good explanation for this apparition, and that Bill would hear about it as soon as they could speak together in private. Bill turned back to the old man. “You still live here, then?” he asked gently.
    “Just back there,” Mr. Jack jerked his head in the direction of the back of the house where a doorway led from the kitchen into a sunny room with glass walls and a linoleum floor. Bill walked to the threshold. He took in the glass windows, the faded linoleum floor, the unmade sofa bed, and the small space heater standing a few feet from the mattress. “But this is a sunporch. You own the house, but you live on the sunporch?”
    The old man favored Bill with a gummy smile. “Don’t own the house. Built it. Don’t own it.”
    “Mr. Jack’s son-in-law owned the house until two years ago,” Holly put in quickly. “He used the house as collateral in a strip-mall development deal, and unfortunately the company went bankrupt, and he lost the house to his creditors.”
    “But his father-in-law still lived here?”
    The old man, who had been following this exchange with rapt attention, nodded happily.
    “Well …,” said Holly. “Truthfully, the family had been trying to get Mr. Jack into a nursing home for years, haven’t they?”
    The old man smirked at her and nodded. “I like the sunporch. It’s warm.”
    “He refuses to have live-in help. When his wife died back in the mid-eighties, he sold everything out of the house in a tag sale and retreated to this one room here adjoining the kitchen.”
    “Less work,” Mr. Jack pointed out.
    “Umm,” said Bill. He thought cholera would have a hard time surviving in the grime and clutter of the sunporch.
    “Anyhow, he refused to move. Perhaps his family thought they could force him out when the house changed hands. According to the foreclosure agreement, Mr. Jack was given one year’s grace period to occupy the house before eviction could proceed.”
    “This was two years ago, you said?”
    The old man’s cackle turned into a wheeze. “They give me one year of grace. Nobody said which year. I’m staying put.”
    The Realtor sighed. “You see how it is. The new owners—Sunshine Properties—couldn’t forcibly move him. Well, they could have, but it would have been a public relations nightmare. So the year’s grace period came and went, but Mr. Jack stayed right here. The company didn’t feel able to do the structural renovations with him in residence. They’d wanted to turn the place into an apartment building, I believe. Or perhaps a clubhouse for an upscale development on the adjoining land. But that land was recently ruled a protected wetland, so it can’t be built upon—not even a parking lot for