He lived there until his death and then his son lived there. Of course the house has been renovated, wired and plumbed and that sort of thing. Are you interested enough to drive out and take a look at it?

That’s why I’m here.

Greaves arose. And that’s why I’m here, he said.

Outside it was blinding hot, the sun searing white off the decks of parked cars. The sky was a bright cloudless blue. Binder paused to put on sunglasses, Greaves clipping dark lenses over his spectacles.

We’ll go in the Jeep, Greaves said. The road’s not real good going in.

On the way Binder tried to find out all Greaves knew about the Beales, but the real estate agent professed to know very little at all. Or any Beales either, there being none remaining in the town that had been named for them. Greaves was handling the property for a descendant in Memphis, a great-great-granddaughter who was not even named Beale anymore.

Binder rode in silence then, watching the country slip past, the ends of cornrows clocking past like spokes in a neverending wheel, fields of heat-blighted corn segueing into dusty fencerows of sumac and honeysuckle and elderberry, all talcumed alike with thick accretions of dust from the slipstreams of passing automobiles. Here and there a tidy white farmhouse tucked well back from the road in the shade of a grove of trees, a distant tractor slowmoving and noiseless, towing a great wake of white dust.

He guessed whatever had afflicted the Beales had driven them apart and ultimately scattered them like a handful of thrown stones. He didn’t know what he had expected, or even what he had hoped for. A descendant, perhaps, who would tell him old stories heard at Daddy’s knees. Hearthside memories you couldn’t buy with gold. Old foxed papers in spidery penscrawls, journals from a pastoral corner of dementia.

The road kept branching off, steadily deteriorating until the Jeep seemed to be leaping from one raincut gully to the next, steadily ascending, the red road winding through a field promiscuous with wildflowers and goldenrod, leveling out when the cedar row began. He smelled the cedars, faintly nostalgic, the road straightening and moving between their trunks, and then in the distance he could see the house.

A great graywhite bulk looming against the greenblack of the riotous summer hills, tall and slateroofed and stately and, he thought instantly, profoundly malefic. He was suddenly of two minds about it: he wanted to flee back to Chicago and he wanted the peace he intuitively felt he could find within its walls. There was a timeless quality about it that seemed to diminish any problems he might have. In this bright moment of revelation he knew that it was less than he had expected, and incalculably more. Part log, part woodframe, part stone, it seemed to have grown at all angles like something organic turned malignant and perverse before ultimately dying, for Binder saw death in its eyes, last year’s leaves in driven windrows on the front porch, two of the second-story windows stoned blind or blown out by hunters’ guns. The house seemed mantled with an almost indefinable sense of dissolution, profoundly abandoned, unwanted, shunned.

Great God, Binder said.

Greaves glanced at him sharply. Been added on to a time or two, hasn’t it?

Once or twice, Binder agreed. Or else they kept changing their minds while it was under construction.

Greaves stopped the Jeep. Water’s down there, he said, pointing southward where beyond gray and weathered cornstalks a stream moved bright as quicksilver in the sun. That comes down from the wellhouse. Good water, he added professionally, going into his pitch. Cold as ice, it’ll ache your teeth. The spring flows out of a cave on yonder hill.

Beale Cave, Binder said automatically.

That’s right, Beale Cave. But if you buy it you can call it Binder Cave or whatever you want.

It surprises me that a house in that good a shape sat empty so long.

Say it does? Hell. I could show you a halfdozen others in a ten-minute drive. They ain’t no work around here.