Page 4 of Wilde's End
Kennedy’s smiling broadly as he comes back our way. “Listen to you two. You sound like a pair of city boys. This is probably the coolest thing we’ve ever done in our lives, and you’re complaining about the smell?” He fills his lungs with a deep inhale. “All I smell is grass and sunshine and fresh air.”
“And delusion,” Hartwell throws at his twin.
“Better than self-loathing and cynicism,” I point out.
Kennedy isn’t deterred by either of us. He takes off along the street, excited and overinterested in everything. Sometimes I wish I could see the world the way he does, like he’s incapable of a bad thought.
Hart shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “He’s going to love this place until you tell him it’s shit. You know that, right?”
“Lucky I don’t think it’s shit, then.”
“I saw your face in the car. You’re already freaking out.”
“I’m excited.”
“And freaking out.”
I turn my glare on him. “Shockingly, the world doesn’t revolve around you, so can you at leasttryand pretend for him?”
Hart stares at me, same speckled green eyes we all share studying my face. “No.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Well, that’s news to me,” he says flatly.
“Which house do you want?”
Hart turns his gaze back to the narrow, shiplap two-story structures, lips pulling into a sneer. Before he answers, he stoops down, picks up a rock, then covers his eyes. He throws it as hard as he can, and it bounces off the third house down before clattering back onto the road. “That one.”
“The roof looks a light breeze away from caving in.”
“Hope I’m under it when it happens.”
I don’t let his morbid comments get to me. “It’d be a fast way to shut up the whining.”
Hartwell doesn’t bother answering, just paces closer to the house he chose. He reaches it as Kennedy does, and before Kennedy can get a word out, Hart says, “Mine,” and takes the stairs two at a time ahead of him. He needs to slam his shoulderagainst the front door three times for it to unstick, and then he disappears inside.
Kennedy turns to me with hope lighting up his expression. “You know, I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, but I’ve got a good feeling that we’re onto something.”
Sepsis and gangrene?I bite back that response.
“If only we knew what that something was.” I scan the street again. I’m not an easy guy to rattle, but I now know why it’s called a ghost town. There’s something so deeply haunting about buildings that have been abandoned and now stand as markers of time. Apparently, this place had a hard and fast mining boom before a tragedy hit that caused the mines to collapse and people to move away. This was all left behind and forgotten about by everyone except the previous owners. And now us.
The oppressive silence weighs on me as discomfort creeps up my spine, like a primitive throwback to survival instincts I had at one point in my life.
“That something is money,” Kennedy says, bringing his hands together. “You’re right that we could turn this place into a rich-people haven. It’s going to take a lot to make the town sing, but I can see the vision.” He turns and points into the trees behind the storefronts. “There’s a river down that way. Clear out the trees, and there’ll be so much waterside property space. It doesn’t look like much now, but the possibilities are there. Can’t you see it?”
Through the panic trying to blind me, I can. He’s only repeating my words back to me, but when they come from Kennedy, it’s so much easier to buy into. He believes in what he’s saying, and we might be two hours’ drive from the nearest town, but that’s easy enough to make into a selling point. It’s secluded. Private. Exclusive.
And thank fuck we’ll be able to do most of it ourselves because it’s also going to be very, very expensive. Buying thisthrough the business and taking out loans was risky after everything we’ve built, but we still have contracts bringing in guaranteed income, and if we can pull this off, we’ll be able to take the foot off the gas for a minute. Living just to work isn’t how it should be.
We need this. All three of us.
It’s an overcast day, and while there’s enough light to see with, it’s a whole other experience when I enter the closest house. Dark and still. No sound except birds outside and the breeze that finds its way past cracks in the building and whistles ahead of us down the hallways. None of the cars or shouts or random sirens of LA, none of the slow, background construction work from the town we live in. It makes every creak in the floor or groan of a door sound so much louder.
I’m locked with tension as we pass from one barren room into another that consists only of a bed frame and a mattress half hanging off it. The walls are stained with age, and dirt and dry leaves have stolen their way inside to crunch under our feet.
“I keep expecting someone to jump out at me,” Kennedy whispers as he creeps deeper into the house. “Do you feel it?”
