House of Secrets

“Like Forty-niners and Giants?” asked Brendan.

“Like CEOs and bankers,” corrected Diane.

“Shoot me.”

“Bren!” Mrs Walker scolded.

“You won’t feel that way once you’ve seen the place,” said Diane. “It’s a charming, rustic, woodsy jewel—”

“Whoa, hold on!” Cordelia interrupted. “Say that again?”

“With whom am I speaking now?” Diane asked.

With whom? Seriously? Cordelia thought – but the truth was she also used “whom” in her more intellectual moments.

“That’s our daughter Cordelia,” said Mrs Walker. “Our eldest.”

“What a pretty name!”

Don’t ‘pretty name’ me, Cordelia wanted to say, but as the eldest she was better than Brendan at being tactful. She was a tall, wispy girl with delicate features that she hid behind a dirty-blonde fringe. “Diane, my family has been looking for a new house for the last month, and in that time I’ve learned that estate agents speak in what I call ‘coded language’.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“Excuse me, but what does that mean, ‘I’m sure I don’t know’?” piped up Eleanor, aged eight. She had sharp eyes, a small, precise nose, and long, curly hair, the same colour as her sister’s, that sometimes had gum and leaves in it, if she’d been adventurous that day. She tended to be quiet except in moments when she wasn’t supposed to be quiet, which was what Brendan and Cordelia loved most about her. “How can you be sure if you don’t know?”

Cordelia gave her sister an appreciative nod and continued: “I mean that when estate agents say ‘charming’, Diane, they mean ‘small’. When they say ‘rustic’, they mean ‘located in a habitat for bears’. ‘Woodsy’ means ‘termite-infested’… ‘Jewel’, I don’t even know… I assume ‘squat’.”

“Deal, stop being an idiot,” grumbled Brendan, glued to his screen, irritated that he hadn’t thought up that line of reasoning himself.

Cordelia rolled her eyes and went on.

“Diane, are you about to show my family a small, termite-infested squat located in a bear habitat?”

Diane sighed over the speakerphone. “How old is she?”

“Fifteen,” Dr and Mrs Walker said together.

“She sounds thirty-five.”

“Why?” Cordelia asked. “Because I’m asking pertinent questions?”

Brendan reached over from the back seat and ended the call.

“Brendan!” Mrs Walker yelled.

“I’m just trying to save our family some embarrassment.”

“But Ms Dobson was about to tell us about the house!”

“We already know what the house is gonna be like. Like every other house we can afford: bad.”

“I have to agree,” Cordelia said. “And you know how much it hurts me to agree with Bren.”

“You love agreeing with me,” Brendan mumbled, “because that’s when you know you’re right.”

Cordelia laughed, which made Brendan smile despite himself. “Good one, Bren,” said Eleanor, giving her brother’s uncombed hair a quick rub.

“Kids, let’s try to be positive about the house,” said Dr Walker. “Sea Cliff is Sea Cliff. We’re talking unobstructed views of the Golden Gate. I want to see it, and I want to know about that ‘reduced’ price. What was the address?”

“One twenty-eight,” Brendan said without looking up. He had an eerie ability to remember things; it came from memorising sports plays and game cheats. His parents joked that he would end up a lawyer because of it (and because he was so good at arguing), but Brendan didn’t want to end up a lawyer. He wanted to end up a Forty-niner or a Giant.

“Plug it into my phone, will you?” Dr Walker waved the phone in front of Brendan while he drove.

“I’m in the middle of a game, Dad.”

“So?”

“So I can’t just pause.”

“Isn’t there a pause button?” Cordelia asked.

“Nobody’s talking to you, Deal,” said Brendan. “Could you guys just leave me alone, please?”

“You’re already practically alone,” said Cordelia. “You always have your head buried in your stupid games, and then you get out of going to dinner with us because of lacrosse practice, and you refuse to go on trips… it’s like you don’t even want to be part of this family.”

“You are a genius,” said Brendan. “You guessed my secret.”

Eleanor swooped in, grabbed the phone and plugged in the address – but she did it backwards, putting the street in first and then the number. Cordelia started to give Brendan a nasty retort but reminded herself he was at that “awkward” stage for boys, the stage where you were supposed to say horribly sarcastic things because you looked so gawky.

It was the house that was the real problem. Even Eleanor was suspicious of it now. It was going to be old enough for people to have died in. It was going to be falling apart and have crooked shutters and a layer of dirt an inch thick and an overgrown tree out the front and a bunch of snoopy neighbours who were going to look at the Walkers and whisper, “Here are the suckers who are finally gonna buy this thing.”

But what could they do? At eight, twelve and fifteen, Eleanor, Brendan and Cordelia were each absolutely sure that they were at the worst possible age, the most powerless and unfair.

So Brendan gamed and Cordelia read and Eleanor fiddled with the GPS until they pulled up to 128 Sea Cliff Avenue. Then they looked out of the window and their jaws dropped. They had never seen anything like it.

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Sea Cliff was a neighbourhood of mansions on hills, most built right up against the sunny street with its row of young trees trimmed into perfect leafy spheres. But the house the Walkers were looking at was set back, perched at the edge of the cliff from which the neighbourhood took its name, so far back that Brendan wondered if it was half supported by stilts. An expanse of emerald lawn buffered it from the street, with three wide pine trees that kept the grass in shadow. The house itself had gold and tan trim accenting the royal blue that wrapped around its slatted sides. An impeccably groomed pebbled path slalomed through the trees to the front door.

“I’ve biked by here tons of times, but I’ve never seen this place,” said Cordelia.

“That’s because you never look up from your stupid books,” said Brendan.

“And how do you figure I’m reading when I’m on a bike, genius?”

“Audiobooks?”

“Guys, no fighting in front of the estate agent,” Mrs Walker said under her breath. She had already called Diane Dobson back to apologise for how Brendan had hung up on her, and now they saw a woman who looked like Hillary Clinton standing at the front of the path. “That must be her. Let’s go.”