Excerpt of The Great Houses of Pill Hill by Diane Josefowicz

My real name is Hannah Cooke, but no one ever calls me that. New Preston’s druggist gummed me to my nickname, murmuring Cookie, Cookie, Cookie Cooke while my mother signed for her tranquilizer refill and I faked an interest in the paperbacks on the spinner rack. I was a lousy actress and a ruinous blusher, a child unused to attention.

It could have been worse. He could have called me Hard Tack or Sour Pickle, both accurate assessments of my personality in those days. But he chose a sweet name, and like all sugary things, it stuck. Occasionally he slipped me an old-time candy—a licorice, a horehound drop. Accepting these gifts, I discovered myself: a body with a sweet tooth and an appetite for nostalgia. Like the houses I restore, I’m built for a more extravagant era, when architects made allowances for the sweep of a woman’s hip. As an interior designer, I believe all curb appeal is relative, specific to a time and place; as a person who values appetites, I am unmoved by appeals to curb mine.

If that sounds harsh, blame New Preston. We use things up; we wear them out. If there’s a wound, we salt it. Isn’t that what wounds are for? Sometimes I wonder if I’d be happier elsewhere, away from this small town with its elaborate historic houses and the secrets they conceal. It’s not that my doubts take me by surprise. Not much, at this point, takes me by surprise. But I do find it strange how the question keeps coming up, like an upholstery tack I don’t know I’ve lost until it lodges in the callus of my heel.

Cross my heart, hope to die: That first time in Chuck Halsey’s bedroom, all I took were measurements. I paced them off the old-fashioned way, heel-to-toe, no tape. With its top-nailed floor and fireplace of marble veined delicately as flesh, the room set me to dreaming as soon as I laid eyes on it. Okay, fine—on him.

Chuck had many requirements for the room in which he failed to sleep. Chief among them was that he should not have to share it with his wife. To that problem I had my own solution but as it was not décor-related, I kept my mouth shut and my options open. I once asked Chuck to describe his ideal bedroom. He said: Give me an oblivion of light.

He was a neurosurgeon, and in expansive moods he talked like one—imperious, boastful of his smarts. I gave him what he wanted: I painted the bedroom a clinical white and finished the trim in the same shade, maximum gloss. I installed a skylight, modern up-lights, a galaxy of spots. Bright enough during the day, the room at night frankly blazed, in deference to Chuck, who preferred to work through his sleeplessness rather than spinning in his bed like a pig on a spit—which, in terms of char, is more or less what he became. The authorities say they’re better equipped to judge such matters, having seen all manner of human destruction, but they don’t know him the way I do. Did.

Better to remember what was beautiful: the sailcloth blinds in pale straw, the kantha quilt of sun-bleached silk, the snowy flokati I set adrift beside the bed. Whenever I touch the replica, a tiny manufacturer’s swatch, I remember the spring of the original against the bare soles of my feet.

The deadbolt was Chuck’s addition. I suppose he felt safer with the door locked against all comers, including those inside the house. But could I be blamed for providing what his wife would not? I stepped in; I stepped up. There was a need; I met it. Just as I am doing now, after hours in the basement forensics lab of New Preston’s finest, attempting to complete this absurd commission.

Reproducing a crime scene in miniature should, in theory, be no different from making a mock-up of any other room. But this time, I’m working for the police, and the project is extremely personal. Detective Bill Phelps, who has commissioned similar items from me in the past, joked that I might even find the gig therapeutic, given my prior involvement.

The deadbolt wasn’t the only oddity. There was a fresh gouge in the window casement, and a dusting of powder revealed a handprint on the pane. After a UV beam lit up bloodstains on the flokati, I opened a vein for verisimilitude’s sake and allowed my blood to pool on the swatch. To reproduce the smoke stain over the mantel, I used a custard torch. The stain matched the one in the evidence photos only after I’d folded Chuck in half—the doll-sized version, I mean—and tucked him up the chimney. Whereupon my torch died, and I was forced to resort to oven matches. The fire burned differently around his bulk, a detail that had escaped me until I burned my own hands reconstructing the catastrophe.

You can learn a lot from a miniature. I kept the scale of mine conventional, one inch to the foot.