The Realm of Last Chances by Steve Yarbrough Page B

hurricanes hitting Massachusetts,” she said.
    “If you live here, you do. One of them flattened a good bit of the North Shore back in 1938. Tore the roof off my mother’s house.”
    “That house back there?”
    “No. It’s over on Pond Street. My uncle lives in it now.”
    While they walked, she held his right elbow. He noticed she wasn’t wearing boots, just a pair of black leather pumps. If she intended to stay here, she’d need some new clothes. He bet she didn’t even own a good coat. In California, she probably never needed one.
    When they got to her driveway, he remarked that her husband’s paint job looked great: the exterior of the house was now ocher, with gleaming white trim. He’d noticed him up there on the scaffold, working all day long for nearly a week. In late afternoon he always pulled his shirt off, and he didn’t look nearly as gaunt then. He packed some serious muscle. “Must be nice,” Matt observed, “being married to a guy who knows how to do stuff like that.”
    “Sometimes,” she said, pulling a key from her pocket and unlocking the door. He wiped his boots on the mat, laid down the umbrella and followed her inside.
    He’d been in the house before but not for more than thirty years. When he was young, he and Frankie had a friend, Kyle, who lived here with his brother, sister and their parents. The father was a cop, in Malden, if memory served, and his wife worked for a government agency in Boston, either the Registry or the MBTA, something to do with transportation. One Saturday night they went to dinner; it was a special occasion, an anniversary, so the kids stayed home alone. His and Frankie’s friend was the oldest, ten or eleven, and Matt remembered Kyle’s mother coming over and telling his mom that she’d instructed the kids to call her if anything went wrong.
    This was in winter, snow everywhere, big icicles hanging off the roofs. Though he couldn’t say for sure anymore, it might have been right after the blizzard of ’78. He recalled that just a day or two earlier, he and his parents had been jolted awake in the middle of the night by a popping noise that sounded like a shotgun blast and seemed to have come from the house nextdoor. While Matt and his mother waited at the top of the stairs, his father grabbed a flashlight and stepped outside. Moments later, he returned grinning. “Remember how mad I got,” he asked, “when Steve Aaron switched to Vermont Mutual? Well, I don’t hold it against him now. The snow just caved in the roof of his Coronet.”
    The night Kyle’s parents went out, the first indication they had that anything was wrong came when they heard his sister beating on their front door and screaming. Her little brother had gotten into a closet on the second floor, where their father kept his service weapon, and while playing with it he’d shot Kyle in the chest. Terry Drinnan ran down the street. When he came back, an hour or so later, he had blood all over his clothes. The next morning you could see a trail of it leading from the steps of Kyle’s house across the snowy yard to the street. An ambulance had carried him to the Cedar Park hospital, though he was probably already dead.
    The family moved away within six months, and since then the house had been sold three times. Kristin wouldn’t know any of this history, because in Massachusetts, unlike some states, sellers don’t have to inform potential buyers that a violent death has occurred on the property. And Matt wasn’t about to tell her.
    He trailed her down the hallway, glancing into the living room where he and Frankie and Kyle used to lie on the floor watching
Sanford and Son
or
Happy Days
. Back then it had a carpet on it, so it was easy to roll around and wrestle if you wanted to, but now the boards were exposed. They looked great, which surprised him, since the previous occupants hadn’t seemed like the kind of people who cared much about appearances. The guy drove a panel truck and