Devil House

1

Chandler

1.

MOM CALLED YESTERDAY to ask if I was ready to come home yet; I went directly to San Francisco from college, and I’ve been in Milpitas for five years now, but she holds fast to her theory that eventually I’m coming back to San Luis Obispo. When you get done with your little experiment up there, she says. There are competing wrinkles in the mythical future she imagines for me; in one variant, she retires and finds a quaint little house in San Francisco, where I was living until I came here. Then we’d only be an hour apart from one another instead of three; we might see more of each other on weekends.

Mom, I tell her, nobody can afford to live in San Francisco anymore.

Oh, but that can’t be true, she says.

You’re right, I say, there are still rich people there. There are also people who spend all their money every month on rent and food, and have nothing left over.

It’s like that everywhere, Mom says.

It’s a little less like that here, Mom, I tell her. She doesn’t believe me. My mother is a prophet of ruin. The last time I went home, she kept pointing out places that would be, she said, the next to fall—old brick buildings, crumbling strip malls, grocery stores.

Everywhere, she says again. You’ll see. She’s probably right. A surveyor walked through the neighborhood last week; I watched from my window, and I saw several familiar faces doing the same from theirs. But it’s hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to do anything to a block like mine. Around the corner and down the street, somebody did get a big idea at some point in the 1960s, and put up the identical duplexes that stand there now in facing rows, one after the other, driveway distances between each of them soothingly uniform, unit after unit. My block’s the odd man out; there’s not enough of it to make it worth anybody’s while, though that didn’t stop somebody from trying, once.

We kick the ball back and forth for a while, comfortable and familiar. You’d like it if you saw it in the flesh, I say at one point, defending my house against the impression of it she gets from the pictures I share on Facebook: my porch with its flaking paint, the nasty seventies chain-link that marks the boundary between my backyard and my neighbor’s, the freeway visible in the background.

"But Gage, you’re descended from kings," she says, for the hundredth time in my life, or the five hundredth, or the five thousandth; and I smile, because it’s true, it’s all true.

†††

THE CHANDLER FAMILY’S CLAIM to royal blood traces back for generations; the only reason my last name is Chandler and not Davidson is that my mother spelled out the terms of engagement for my father long before she got pregnant. I’m giving the family name to my children, she’d said. Take it or leave it. It was the sixties; my dad didn’t care.

It’s hard to say how seriously Mom took any of it; she remembered challenging her own mother, my grandmother, regarding the bloodline, who, without a moment’s hesitation, began rattling off a now-lost genealogy that took fifteen minutes to recite. It was like she’d been saving all these names up to admonish me with, Mom told me, wonder in her voice. I was twelve; crawling through the library stacks that summer, I scouted out dusty, shelf-worn books that listed ancient names and estates. There were no Chandlers. Chandler was a workingman’s name, I learned from a reference book—a maker of candles, a city trade. Any and all Chandlers in the genealogies were a long way from the castle—even if, as Mom had a habit of pointing out whenever the occasion arose, we owned the house we lived in free and clear: her pride in the matter so evident, whenever it came up, that it made imagining kings further back in the bracket a little harder still.

I wondered, but I didn’t want to press her on the question. At some point we’d stopped being royal, I guessed. It can happen to the best of families.

But the story traveled with me as I grew up, learning along the way to let my mind wander: to tales of kings and princes wrongly deposed, sent from the great countryside to London, where they learned to live by the work of their hands, pouring wax into iron molds they’d spirited out of the castle’s workshops as the barbarians sacked the great hall. Carrying their meager but vital plunder in packs on backs by night to the outskirts of the city, learning their way. The Chandlers, great lights made small. I was good at telling stories when I was a kid. It became a habit.

I wrote my first book while finishing my undergraduate degree in journalism at Cal Poly. It didn’t hit the bestseller list, but in paperback it found its range. The White Witch of Morro Bay is the kind of true crime book around which small cults form; I knew about the White Witch from childhood. Her reign was my time, broadly speaking: I was three when she went to trial. From playground to playground and in every after-school haunt, her myth was still intoned with reverence and fear. She’d been a teacher at the high school; her legend told of how for years she lured young men to her many-windowed house overlooking the bay. There, having plied them with drink and sapped them of their strength, she would drain their blood while they slept; she rendered their bodies with flensing tools and then fed them, piece by piece, to the fish. It was this detail, the fable ran, that attracted enough attention from the authorities to force her into hiding, from which she’d never emerged: the tide turned red one morning while summer vacationers bathed in the surf.

The real-life White Witch, Diana Crane, had actually only killed two people, both students: high school seniors who, having arrived at her apartment unannounced, caught her in a headlock before attempting to drag her to her bedroom. She was shucking oysters when they showed up; in the struggle, she got her knife into the first boy’s eye, and then, looking up to find the coconspirator immobilized by the sight of his friend’s blood spraying out in jets, launched herself toward him and stabbed him in the neck three times. She continued stabbing until she felt sure that the present threat to her safety had been contained, which is to say, until both boys were dead; later, she dragged the bodies, in pieces, to the shore.

It was an ugly scene, and the jury sent her to the gas chamber; the prosecutors convinced them her tale of self-defense was a fabrication, something she’d made up to conceal her true nature: a crone-in-training who lived by herself in a seaside den, a place whose shelves and countertops boasted all manner of obscure arcana whose deeper meaning, they said, indicated that the downfall of young men had always been her goal.

Diana Crane’s story was that of a blameless schoolteacher who paid a terrible price for defending herself. Nobody involved in her prosecution, conviction, and execution had anything to be proud about. I still get mad thinking about it. One of the boys she’d killed had a track record with women; old classmates, now nearing retirement, told me stories as I sat listening in vinyl-upholstered recliners under fluorescent lights. They’d carried these burdens with them almost their whole lives. Diana Crane had done a service to society by ridding it of Jesse Jenkins and Gene Cupp; for her trouble, she’d been strapped to a chair and made to breathe poison until she died.

But the popular account omitted everything prior to the oyster knife, and from the resultant open question of what happened next, schoolchildren and bored night-shift workers crafted the White Witch, the one all schoolchildren knew and feared: a Bluebeard in reverse, her crime hidden by apartment walls and the moon above the bay. In the legend, she’d never even been arrested; Diana Crane fled the scene by night, carnage in her wake, and, for all anyone knew, was still living somewhere by the bay, lying in wait.

The movie they made out of my book later didn’t set any box office records, but I got paid up front. I’ve been writing about crimes ever since: the crimes people tell stories about, and the secret ones our stories seek to conceal.

†††

I WAS THIRTY-SEVEN when I came down to Milpitas. I had five books out under my own name and, under a pen name that I still keep secret, three paperback serial killer mysteries that sold well enough to get stocked in airport bookstores. My life was comfortable, if lonely. Ashton, my editor—he has three names instead of the usual two, all of which he uses in correspondence: Ashton Williston Clark—emailed me a news clipping about some especially lurid murders. The little town where they’d happened was a familiar name to me, not only because of the much more widely known case that had briefly thrust Milpitas onto the national stage—River’s Edge—but because a childhood friend of mine had lived there once. Back in those days, we’d even kept up a halting correspondence for a while, some of the first letters I ever sent or received. A proofreader was doing some fact-checking on a nonfiction book and she saw this, Ashton wrote. I knew you’d love it.

I did love it, with a few reservations. It was a very small clipping and there weren’t a lot of details. The few choice bits were tantalizing enough—dead bodies atop a pyre of pornography, cryptograms in graffiti, the specter of teenage Satanic rites jolting a sleepy old town awake—but the story seemed to have fizzled quickly somehow, which suggested to me that there was perhaps less than met the eye of a Mercury News reader in the mid-eighties, when catchy copy still meant real advertising dollars. I’d been having ideas about something more baroque and gothic than another California suburb.

I hear you, but I feel like you’re the guy, he said when I called him up to see if he was serious, mentioning my misgivings up front. You move down there, you do your thing, you meet all the people now that they’re grown up, you make your first really big book. You’re ready.

I’m tired of California, I said. It’s practically all I ever write about. I was thinking of trying to find something in the South. Louisiana, maybe.

The house is on the market, he said. These are your people, right? An actual self-made cult, grotto of the porno demons, teen devil worshippers in the Santa Clara Valley. You move in. Devil House. You move into Devil House. That’s the angle here.

It felt like a joke. I don’t want to buy a house just to write a book about it, I said.

It’s kind of a natural extension of your method, don’t you think? Ashton has this way of talking about things as if they don’t have any consequences. It’s contagious. I try to be on my guard about it.

Knocking on doors and buying houses are two pretty different things.

That’s what makes this a different book, he said. That’s how it gets bigger. You own the place. It’s yours. Past history suggests it takes you about eighteen months to get it together. You can turn right around and sell it when you’re done, it’ll be like a short-term lease with return on your deposit.

Did something happen I don’t know about? My advances don’t really cover down payments on houses.

Chandler, he said. This isn’t the city. There’s not even fifty thousand people there. You’ve got to have a decent enough credit history after your last few years. Besides, we get a cut of your movie rights. I know you’re not exactly starving out there.

There was quiet for a few seconds.

Even if you prorate for the down payment you’ll be paying less on the mortgage than you pay now on rent in the big city, he said. Come on. This has your name all over it.

That call was five years ago, all the way back in December of 2001. This was a different place then; the cracks in the tech bubble were still fresh and raw, though property values would start to climb again soon enough. I’ve been hard at work ever since, but I haven’t turned the book in yet, in part because, while this is that book, it’s not the one that my contract obligates me to eventually write: DEVIL HOUSE, a work of nonfiction, between 80,000–120,000 words, about the multiple murders committed in the ADDRESS TK block of Main Street in Milpitas, California, on or about the night of November 1, 1986.

It is instead a book about restoring ancient temples to their proper estates. I got the idea from my grandfather, I like to say. I tried counting up the great-greats it would take to really get all the way back, but after a while you lose track and get lost. It happens every time. My grandfather, anyway. He lived in a castle but never forgot the grassy glades and wooded byways of his youth.

2.

THE OLD-FASHIONED GENERIC ANSWERING MACHINE was still holding its own against voice mail back in spring of 2002, even in burgeoning tech enclaves. I listened, with real pleasure, to the sound of moving parts forced into labor far beyond their intended life spans. On the outgoing message, a voice burbled through the warp and wobble of aging tape, managing to sound both bubbly and professional, a hard combination to hit: Thank you for calling New Visions Properties. This is Whitney Burnett. None of our associates can take your call at this time.

It was a woman’s voice, maybe someone in her twenties. I start categorizing people from the moment I first meet them; it’s a good habit to pick up if you’re going to try to put stories together from the messy loose ends of people’s actual lives. I imagined a young woman who, at some unfixed point down the line, intended to own her own business; a person whose ambitions were modest, and who had more drive than she really needed to meet them. Please leave us a brief message telling us how we may be of assistance to you, and we will return your call. If you require immediate assistance, you may reach me on my mobile phone—here she sounded out the number twice, area code included, in a cool, forceful voice that made me feel obligated to follow through.

Thank you, and have a pleasant day.

I left a clumsy message, talking for longer than I needed to and interrupting myself frequently, but when Whitney called back an hour later she cut directly to the chase.

I would love to show you the property, she said. It’s actually a really nice old building. I should warn you, it’s kind of a mess right now, though. But it’s nice, you’ll see it. It’s had a lot of lives. In the fifties it was even a soda shop for a while.

About the soda shop I already knew. I hadn’t been able to find many stories about it online, but small scraps I’d managed to dig up—postings in local listservs, scanned pictures on people’s still-standing Angelfire sites—all mentioned what a nice place it had been, once upon a time. It was called the Sunliner Grill back then. The building itself had origins dating a full century back, but there are no records of its function prior to the Ford Motor Company’s announcement, in 1954, of intentions to open their Central California plant in Milpitas the following year. Few locals remember the soda shop now; the population wasn’t yet young enough to support one, and there were two well-liked restaurants just down the road on Main Street, one of which had a license to serve alcohol. The Sunliner Grill did not survive the decade.

The building’s timeline gets murky after that. I’ve been told once or twice that someone ran a hardware store out of it, but I haven’t found any proof. Briefly, in the early seventies, someone seems to have had the bright idea to turn it into some kind of theater: a clipping from The Mercury News about regional growth makes note of an anomalous little cinder-block building near the freeway, referring to the short-lived, unlamented Nite People Cinema, but the article offers no further details. A single-screen movie house in a building so small in the shadow of the freeway feels almost unfathomably optimistic.

Sometime after 1974, when completion of Interstate 680 seemed to guarantee future traffic through town, somebody took out a lease on the building and began operating a newsstand out of it. The newsstand became a porn store, and then a sort of house in which a crime took place, about which I knew mainly what Ashton had told me over the phone—some teenagers holed up in a dark porn store, the specter of devil worship and arcane private ceremonies culminating in at least two deaths. Few details, plenty of innuendo: this was how I had come to be talking to Whitney Burnett about making the drive south despite a nagging hunch that, if there were really more to know, I was a person who’d already know about it.

I’d love to see it, I said. I felt a little weird putting on the mask of the reluctant client, since I meant to buy it no matter what condition it was in. If it looked uninhabitable, I would still make a way. There was even a sort of grim appeal in the possibility of finding the place a total wreck. I’m in San Francisco, but I can be there next week, or even earlier, if you think there’s any hurry.

I imagined I could hear her smiling patiently as she answered. I wouldn’t say there’s a rush, she said. It’s actually really nice, as I said, but this is still a developing neighborhood.

†††

THERE ARE PLENTY OF TOWNS everywhere, I guess, whose reputations beyond their borders, if they have any at all, reside in single instances of popular misrepresentation or outright caricature. I try to be sensitive to this dynamic—The Music Man is all that millions of people will ever know about Iowa. Each instance of this effect further distorts our overall field of view, our sense of who we really are. Still, I couldn’t help but feel some weirdly mystical twinge in the moment when I pulled in off the freeway, knowing that the town just over there on the other side of the windshield would be my home for the next year or two: a place that would be a totally blank slate if not for a single murder case that had made the national news some years back, and another that had managed to evade the radar.

Everything about the spot looked temporary, dreamlike. I could safely attribute some of this to finding myself a little off my bearings; I’d been at the wheel for forty-five minutes just getting out of the city, and the hour it ought to have taken after that had been stretched by traffic. It was a small freestanding building, a relic of a transitional age; there was a placard reading NEW VISIONS, LLC on the near side of some Persian blinds in its windows. The shadow of the freeway in which it stood was permanent; had it been even a quarter mile down the street, the bulldozer would have come for it ages ago. The town had been growing up and outward all around it, consigning it to a disappearing past. It was waiting for its turn.

I stood before it and took a few measured breaths. My mother always taught me to take stock of the moment you’re in, to not miss the big transitions. If you miss one, you don’t get the chance to see it again, she said. When I was a kid, I thought this was just her way of trying to pry me away from the little Mattel handheld football game to which I’d become addicted like everybody else in my class. But after I started writing about murder investigations, I realized Mom was right: any given moment is loaded. You have to look hard at all the details of a scene before it changes on you. There may come a day when all you’ve got left are the notes you took: maybe a photograph or two, if you’re lucky.

It was a sunny day, out beyond the reach of the interstate’s shadow. The sidewalk in front of New Visions Properties was badly cracked; it looked like a bunch of giant jigsaw puzzle pieces turned image-side down and thrown into a pile. A couple of trees were doing their straggly best to outgrow the dirt squares in which they’d been planted, years ago, probably before the highway made it harder for them to find light. I looked around from the spot where I stood to find signs of anything else nearby, but in California there’s often an agreed-upon solitude to the places where people join in with or depart from the flow of freeway traffic. Gas stations fit into such corners sometimes; neighborhoods don’t, or didn’t, anyway, before people began running out of room.

You’re Gage, do I have that right? said Whitney Burnett, opening the door while I was still standing outside looking around. I felt like she was probably sizing me up, but she didn’t let on; she took my hand and shook it with a firm, authoritative grip, her eyes meeting mine. Any aspiring salesman can learn about the importance of making eye contact, but it takes a natural to find the sweet spot like she did. It knocked me off balance. Welcome to Milpitas!

We walked into her odd, doomed little office building, a white cinder-block single-story number that had to’ve been at least fifty years old, and she motioned me toward her desk, which was new, spotless, meticulously ordered in its pencil cups and picture frames, and had almost certainly been shipped to the U.S. from Malaysia by way of Taipei.

†††

IDEALLY, YOU LEAVE AS LITTLE FOOTPRINT AS POSSIBLE when you’re telling a true crime story: your job is to gather the facts of a case and arrange them as vividly as possible. Somebody else has already done all the dirty work for you. Arm yourself with some steady work habits and a well-lit work space, and there’s really nothing to it—just the simple pleasures of research, footwork, and presentation. It’s like being a florist. You ask a few questions about the occasion you’re being asked to mark, and then you hide your own signature somewhere in the arrangement.

I wrote The White Witch without a blueprint, green behind the ears and itching to make an impression. When I started it, I held fast to a rule I’d heard repeated so often by creative writing teachers that I couldn’t imagine a world outside it: Write what you know. Keep it local. Start in your own backyard and spread out from there.

But I didn’t know of any other cases in San Luis Obispo like Diana Crane’s. People get murdered everywhere, but not every murder blooms into myth; and few of the myths that do find enough oxygen to live on from generation to generation can be followed—by means of supplementary materials: clippings, transcripts, photographs—all the way back down to the flesh and blood at their roots. So I burrowed down in library basements north of Carpinteria but still well south of San Francisco, and I scrutinized old newspapers in the harsh light of the microfiche reader, practically throwing darts in the dark: Does this victim seem like someone the neighbors might have gossiped about? Did this killer use some method gruesome enough to fire the local imagination? Does this story sound like kids might have spread rumors about it in their do-nothing towns?

It takes a few weeks, but you need only the patience of those weeks and a little driving distance between neighboring towns to find what you’re looking for. I always found plenty, more than I needed, and, after emerging from the library, I’d drive around with a Thomas Guide hunting down any places reporters might have mentioned in passing: Restaurant parking lots where somebody got shot. Liquor stores where a robbery’d gone wrong. Public schools where something awful had happened one weekend, left undiscovered until Monday.

It’s voyeur work. There’s no way it doesn’t leave some kind of mark on you. The case I picked for my second book involved a home health nurse intentionally blinding a millionaire on her caseload in order to effect a miracle cure and maybe get rewarded: the patient died, and the family hired a private detective to look into it, who, after a little legwork, scouted out the families of a few other former patients. They’d all been surprised to find themselves burying their parents and grandparents, who’d all seemed quite healthy for their age right up until their sudden and precipitous declines.

I called the book Spent Light. I remember parking my car in front of the house where the nurse had once lived, gazing up at its porch, and trying to imagine her walking out, handbag stocked with the wood alcohol she’d be administering daily to some ailing old man until he died of evidently natural causes. I remember sitting in that car for half an hour, watching the sun sink behind the low hills, and then thinking: This isn’t enough.

That was the night when, for the first time, I knocked on a stranger’s door to ask if they’d let me inside, and the night I stumbled across my method, which, like anything else in the world, I guess, has both good points and bad.

†††

IN AN IDEAL WORLD, Whitney would have let me go into the property by myself for just a few minutes. I generally get great mileage out of first impressions. But I didn’t want to seem any weirder than I already did, and it wasn’t her job to safeguard my initial visions. So we walked in together: she with her practiced realtor’s monologue, pointing out unique fixtures and shiny improvements; me with my eyes on the ceilings, the walls, and the corners, looking firsthand at places I’d read about in clippings and seen on archival tape. I was trying to get a feel for how the scene might have splashed when the shock of entry was still raw. I smelled something—cherry-vanilla; an air freshener somewhere, or residue from the cleaning crew, I couldn’t tell which. The scent was dense, big-elbowed. You couldn’t ignore it once you’d isolated it from the other smells in the house: fresh paint, wax, oven cleaner.

This kitchen’s all new, she said as we rounded a counter that divided what looked to have once been a single room. She gestured gracefully from point to point as she continued: Gas oven, all new tile above the counters. But they’ve kept the look that houses in this neighborhood often have. She pronounced the t in often when she said it: off-ten.

Vinyl floors? I said.

Linoleum, actually, she said, cocking her head. People are using it again.

Wow, really? Back when I was a kid—I don’t know. It feels like you weren’t supposed to like linoleum.

Yes, that’s right, she said. It was out of fashion for a while. But it’s actually organic. All natural materials. Plus you can really do a lot with linoleum, actually. The color goes all the way through.

They were nice floors, checkered in a brick-red-and-white pattern. I wanted to get down on my hands and knees and take a closer look at them, to compare them to what I’d seen in my initial research, but all that was going to have to wait.

What were they before? I said.

This is an older place, she said. They were wood.

Did they tear out the wood, do you know? I was trying hard to sound casual, but the more we talked, the further down in the zone I found myself: picturing the place as it once was, trying to see it with my mind’s eye.

Well, a total refurb costs a lot, she said. I think the original floorboards are still under there, probably. But I know we hired a great firm to put down the new floors. They should be solid.

I felt bad; she had the wrong idea—that she might miss the sale if something wasn’t right, that the house might not be nice enough for me. But it was nice; they’d prettied it up; the idea was to help it rise from its beginnings. What I represented, standing there, was a countervailing force to the current mood of the neighborhood. My interests lay underneath a surface in whose anticipated permanence people were investing time, and money.

Oh, it’s great, I said, I’m always just curious about what houses looked like when they were new.

She laughed then with an openness you don’t usually expect from people in her line of work. It was a small laugh, but genuine, coming from somewhere lower in the gut than you usually hear from strangers.

It’s been a long time since this house was new, she said.

†††

I FELT GIDDY, almost light-headed, as we walked back out through the front door to the sidewalk; she gestured me toward her car, a light blue Chevy Blazer, meticulously clean, either new or driven to the office straight from the wash-and-wax. I’ve done first visits that involved lock-breaking and climbing through windows. Those properties were abandoned, but the field trips I took to them helped set the tone for the way I work: learn a lot about a site, then physically enter it, breaching the barrier from the conjectural to actual while they’re all still rich and vivid in my mind. To take this step with another person standing by the whole time, brightly outlining all the upgrades recently made to the place while leaving out all the details that accounted entirely for my presence there: it was disorienting.

Driving, she asked me a little about myself: my work, where I’d gone to school, if I had any children. But at lunch, seated in the outside patio of a Panera by a strip mall, she began to dig a little deeper. Are you looking at any other houses while you’re here?

Actually, no, I said. I looked up from my food; I didn’t want to seem evasive. Just the one.

We have a number of really nice properties, she said. There’s neighborhoods in town that are quieter but not really much pricier. Two of them I could show you after lunch, if you wanted.

I leave later this afternoon, I said. This wasn’t true; my reservation at the La Quinta was good until eleven the following day. Still.

That’s fast! she said. Do you mind if I ask . . .

She waited for me to make eye contact.

Many of our clients are first-time buyers, and a house like that is often perfect for them. But I have several places in newer neighborhoods, places with a little more elbow room.

Elbow room: she was young, and worked in a small market, but she was as good as or better than any high-end agent selling converted condos in Pacific Heights.

It’s specifically this house I’m interested in, I said.

I know how that is, she said, brilliantly, I thought: There was no way she wasn’t wondering what was wrong with me, why I’d want to get a place almost visibly destined for demolition. I suspected, faintly, that she was sounding me out for motives. People here had reason to be suspicious of outsiders. "But if you can find the time, at least look at this one other one. It’s less than a mile from here. It just went on the market. Super-cute. Newer, and a little nicer."

I looked at my watch, which was strictly a performative gesture: my time was my own. I can be a little flexible, I think, I said. There wasn’t any need for me to seem busier than I was. I’m not sure what impression I was trying to make by tacitly suggesting I had a to-do list for the rest of the afternoon, but I did it anyway. You get used to this kind of talk in my line of work.

†††

BACK AT THE MOTEL, I sketched in my tiny notebook: the entryway, the home-improvement-store ceiling fan in the living room, the fresh tile above the counters. I also thought about the other house, the one we’d walked through after lunch: how it was nicer, just as she’d said. It was maybe forty years old, built in the hacienda style, with a freestanding garage original to the property: blue ARCO oil cans on its wooden shelves indicated that it held more history than much of the town that had long since outgrown its quaint modesty. According to market wisdom, the chief present virtue of the former porn store under the freeway was that it had been completely refurbished, inside and out; past that, there wasn’t much to say about it. The nicer house was the sort of space people like me usually imagine themselves living in.

I told her I’d call her by the end of the week, another needless feint. I could as easily have stated my business and asked her to draw up a contract. But it would have been cheating, I thought. The proper procedure involves several needless steps.

So I waited two days after I got home, and then I wrote her at the email on her business card. She still had an AOL address. I hadn’t thought we were that far outside the city. Most of my friends wouldn’t have been caught dead.

But you couldn’t have gotten a closet in San Francisco for what New Visions wanted for the whole of the Main Street house, anyway. From ceiling to floor, front yard to sidewalk, and including the modest backyard that ended at an ugly, awkward stretch of cyclone fencing, over which you could see some overgrown asphalt that had once been a parking lot. Had I been able to get to it before they put in all that new tile, it would have been even cheaper; I haggled anyway. You never know if you don’t ask.

As I discovered going over the paperwork in subsequent months, I’d probably still bid high. Prior to the renovation, it had been officially standing empty since 1986. Nobody had lived inside Devil House since forever.

3.

IT’S GOOD TO BE TIDY—not good like virtuous; I don’t hold any medieval ideas about our outer selves reflecting the inner ones. I’ve lived with slobs, they were fine people, and I don’t really mind other people’s clutter. Messy people are like astronauts or long-distance truckers to me: I’m curious about how their lives feel. Not curious enough to try out their habits and live like they do—when I inhabit a place, the extent of my immersion usually ends at my skin—but curious enough