Domestic Adventures Part Three: The Mystery House
We closed on the Eastern Shore home on November 30, and one of the last bits of negotiation was the furnishings. I wanted the beds, because the place we bought has three levels, narrow stairs, and is on an island. I’m just not ready to play that game of Tetris. We got them, as expected, but we also got EVERYTHING ELSE, too, not so expected. Imagine a fully furnished, stocked, and decorated home, missing only the clothing, food, medicine, and bath linens of its previous occupants. In a previous installment of “Domestic Adventures,” I fretted about having enough forks to supply a new residence, not realizing that I was about to purchase a fork bonanza. But it wasn’t just the fully ready kitchen or the basement full of tools or even the canoe that really surprised us. It was the personal stuff—especially the stuff that was stashed away in the attic and under the furniture—that turned us into bemused explorers that first weekend we moved in.
Here are the clues, if you’d like to play along.
All of the appliances and furniture are from the 1990s, but most are in excellent condition. They’re just . . . last century, which equals style issues plus an element of suspense. (Related: Giant Sanyo CRT TVs are very heavy.) (Related: the color scheme is peach pink and dark green, but at least we dodged the mauve bullet.)
Many decent prints and silk art were left, all professionally framed, a few still in their shipping packages.
Thorough documentation of vacations: massive photo albums, cassette tapes of road trips.
A bible from the 1850s.
A video cassette of someone’s birth, according to the label. We didn’t check.
A locked briefcase. No key.
A tuba bell. Just the bell. A friend insists it’s actually from a sousaphone.
A photo album of a bunch of people taking turns sitting in a hammock.
The hammock.
An old passport.
The deed to a home in New Jersey.
A well-worn game of Gatoropoly.
A full set of Rembrandt pastel crayons, unused.
A set of sculptural thingies—carved ribbons of wood fixed to pedestals. Two are at least 4 feet tall.
Books: Science fiction pulp paperbacks, cookbooks, nature guides, and a hardback copy of Beloved.
A very well wrapped mystery package hidden in a crevice. It took us forever to open it, and it turned out to be a replacement shelf panel.
A crate of financial records from 2006 and 2007.
Oh right, a canoe. No paddles.
No pornography. We kept finding things stashed in dark corners (this place has awesome storage), so we were mentally prepped for the worst, but it never materialized. Yes, we checked the attic.
Lots of other super normal stuff and a daunting collection of lightbulbs.
We sent the bible, photos, recordings, and any item we could use to create new identities for ourselves to the seller’s agent. We never met the seller at any point of the process.
And yes, we had high hopes for the briefcase. We found it jammed under one of the sofas. We knocked it open with the owner’s left-behind hammer and screwdriver. It contained someone’s last day at work—desk name plate, happy retirement card, business cards, pens, and souvenirs like ticket stubs and token amounts of foreign currency. No secret files, no gold, no guns, but the truth is, the contents of briefcases have never been interesting. I don’t even know why they put locks on those things.
Were we disappointed? No. Being surrounded by another family’s archeology is kind of exhilarating. I have been dreaming of this house (or something like it) all my life.
When I was a kid, my parents used to take me to abandoned houses to look for treasures. I thought they were saying “bandit houses,” and the excursions made me nervous (because bandits). If you’ve read The Juliet, you might recognize that detail as part of Willie Judy’s backstory. My childhood was full of clutter. My dad was an antique dealer, my mom a rock collector, and my aunt, who lived across the road from us, ran a permanent garage sale. Our house was loaded with other people’s things, and my mom’s gem and mineral specimens filled in the crevices. An open floor plan would have terrified eight-year-old me.
I’m sure that’s why I’m always dreaming about mystery houses and the stories they tell. I’m always writing about them as well. A good chunk of the third installment of The New Royal Mysteries takes place in an abandoned fishing café. If it seems like I’ve only got the one idea, then all I can tell you is that I’m not done with it yet.
That said, we’re done with feeling sentiment for a past we never experienced. We’ve had our thrills, piecing together the story with each discovery (aided by some neighborly gossip), but at the end of the day everyone’s junk drawer is pretty much the same. Appropriately, for New Year’s Eve we’re returning to the Eastern Shore property with a car load of our own things to replace and displace what’s already there. Bit by bit, those ghosts will have to move on.