the Silent Man (2009) by Berenson Alex

Author:Berenson, Alex [Alex, Berenson,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-26T18:06:26+00:00

PART THREE

ADDISON, NEW YORK

The Repard family had owned the house for more than a century. Then, on a rainy March morning, just outside Elmira on Route 17, Jesse Repard took a turn too fast and flipped his Ford Explorer into a ravine. He was thrown through the driver's-side window and died instantly. His wife, Agnes, fractured her spine at the C-2 vertebra and was paralyzed from the neck down. In the back, their two-year-old son, Damon, was untouched, not even a cut.

The Repard house was impossible to navigate in a wheelchair and too expensive for Agnes to maintain. She had no choice but to sell it and the thirty-seven acres of land around it, quick. But upstate New York's economy was worse than lousy, and the property was too small to be farmed efficiently but too big for most families. For three months, the place sat on the market without attracting even a low-ball bid. Agnes's agent told her she needed to chop her asking price fifteen percent, maybe more.

Then a young couple came to see the property. He was in charge, Agnes saw that right off. He was a surgeon from Mercy Hospital, down the road in Corning. She walked a step behind him and didn't say much. But immediately they seemed to take to the place. They liked its thick stone walls, the heavy stand of oak trees that screened the front of the property. They especially liked the big stable behind the house.

The Repards hadn't owned horses in decades, and the stable had been crumbling when Agnes and Jesse married. A year before the accident, Jesse had started to restore it. He'd torn out the stalls and reshingled the roof, turning the stable into a giant shed, fifty feet long by eighty feet wide with dirt floors and wooden walls. Agnes had handled the exterior, painting the walls fire-engine red.

"Chose the colors myself," Agnes told the surgeon from Corning. "I figured we'd have lots of kids and one day we'd have horses for them. They'd grow up here and one of them would take over the house from us, keep it in the family." She knew she shouldn't talk so much but she couldn't help herself, as if by telling him her plans she'd bring them back to life.

"Interesting," he said.

But he didn't seem interested, much less interested than he'd been when he pulled a tape measure from his pocket and wrote the stable's dimensions on a memo pad. Or later, when he stood on the porch of the house and scanned the grass and the trees and the hills with binoculars.

"You can see," Agnes said. "I mean you can't see anything, you can see that. It's nice and quiet. Private." She was nervous now. She needed a good price for the place, enough money for Damon to have a decent childhood. Damn you, Jesse, for your speeding and not wearing your seat belt. For leaving me, and for leaving me like this. She hoped she wouldn't start crying, the more so since she couldn't even wipe away the tears herself.

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