HardScape by Justin Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

give me an appraisal?”
    â€œ Your house?”
    She glanced to either side. “Would you?”
    I had more time than a retiree, but fair was fair and friends were friends. “Well, Fred Gleason is—”
    â€œI’d like a private opinion.”
    â€œAh.”
    â€œAh?”
    I decided that the only way to talk to this woman was to talk as if I had not seen her making love to her boyfriend the night before. Which meant I had to be my totally nonjudgmental realtor self. What was a private opinion? Well, it was not the first time I’d been asked by one side of a marriage to appraise the honeymoon cottage.
    I said, “You know, of course, this is a hard time to sell, even a unique house like yours.”
    â€œBut I would still like an appraisal. I’ll pay the going rate.”
    â€œNo, no, no. I don’t work that way. I’ll come out and have a look.”
    â€œHow about after the cookout?”
    â€œI can make it out there by five.”
    â€œPerfect. I have to run down to the mall. I’ll make it back by five. After you look, it’ll be time for a drink.”
    ***
    As I’ve said, there was nothing flirtatious about Rita Long. Even so, I felt that drinks at the Castle was the best offer I’d had in a week. Vicky McLachlan approached while I was packing up my grill: A bunch were drifting over to the Yankee Drover for post-picnic beers. I said maybe later, but I had to work. I got a look, and a question: “Who’s the lady with the black hair?”
    â€œMrs. Long. She and her husband built the Castle.”
    That got me another look, and “Nice work if you can get it”—a reminder, not that I needed one, that the future governor of Connecticut had not been elected first selectman at age twenty-six on chestnut curls and smile alone.
    I showered the smoke out of my hair and put on my uniform, tweed jacket over my arm in the warm afternoon. I was about to get into the Oldsmobile when I thought, What the hell, last warm day for a while. I stashed the Olds in the barn and pulled the cover off the Fiat. It was a ’79 Spyder 2000 roadster, British racing green, that my father had bought new for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. It had less than twenty thousand miles on it because my mother felt it was too flashy, no matter how often the old man told her how pretty she looked in it. She did, in fact; but when she moved back to Frenchtown she left it for me.
    By daylight the grounds of the Long Castle were something to behold. The driveway paralleled a serpentine pond, complete with snowy egret, which would have done Regent Park proud. The hardscape surrounding the house was splendidly conceived and brilliantly executed.
    â€œHardscape” isn’t in Webster’s. It’s a word coined by landscape designers to distinguish elements constructed from those that are grown—masonry from nursery, cobblestones from coreopsis. (The designers are divided on the corresponding use of “softscape” for gardens, grass, and trees. The better ones I’ve known would cross a swamp at night to avoid even hearing the word.) Hardscape is what you see in winter when the flowers are dead and branches bare. It forms the character of a house, like the bones behind a face.
    I had heard that the Castle’s granite walls and flagstone terraces, the cobblestone motor court, the sweeping drives and the paths that meandered among the as-yet-unplanted garden beds had been built by Italian stonemasons, who usually worked down in Greenwich and Cos Cob. It showed. We’ve got a few good local masons around Newbury, but there was a finished polish to this work rarely seen north of Long Island Sound. Walls that looked like dry stone had been cemented by an artful hidden-mortar technique; while I could not have slipped my business card between the slates of the front walk.
    â€œI love your car,” Rita Long greeted me. She had changed out of