The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir Read Online Free PDF

her husband’s passion. They have houses all over. He died six years ago.”
    “Where in the city?” Brent asked. I thought he was being a little too nosy, but since he rarely asked a question without a reason, I was willing to let him go on to see where he was heading.
    “The east seventies, I think,” Michelle answered.
    “Maybe I know her,” he said. “I used to be a geriatrician at Mount Sinai. We had a lot of patients from that area of town.” When Brent still worked at the hospital, he often tended to VIP patients—i.e., those who had donated large sums of money in hopes of one day dying with better service. We’d get calls at home at all hours of the night. I grew accustomed to being woken up from a deep sleep by a hospital phone call informing Brent that a 104-year-old billionaire patient had died “unexpectedly” in his sleep. Nowadays I was woken up by Brent’s BlackBerry, which buzzed all night with a stream of e-mails from Martha, who only slept four hours a day.
    “Her name is Edith. Edith Selzner,” Michelle added.
    “Nope,” Brent said, “doesn’t ring a bell.” But I saw where Brent was going with this. Now that we’d gotten the owner’s name and neighborhood, we could look her up and contact her. If anyone could work over an Upper East Side widow till she caved in on price, it was a good-looking “single” geriatrician. These women always had some daughter/niece/cousin they needed to marry off. And for this place, I’d actually let Brent get married to a nice Waspy girl…as long as I could come visit.
    The tour continued through the second floor, where there were five immaculate bedrooms, each of which had its own bathroom. The wide center hallway on the second floor was identical to the one below, except that it ended with the massive Palladian window overlooking the ancient maple trees. The fiery leaves outside made the entire cavernous hallway—large enough for ballroom dancing—glow.
    “That’s everything inside,” Michelle said. “Would you like to see the crypt?”
    “The what?” I said.
    “The crypt,” she repeated. “The Beekman Family Crypt. It’s just in the side yard.”
    Of course I wanted to see the crypt. Who wouldn’t? I wondered how she described that in the real estate listing. “Historic Mansion, 5BRM / 5BA / 7 FP / 1 CRPT.”
    Michelle led us out the kitchen doorway, down a slight slope past a row of apple trees, which were perfectly hung with bright red fruit—even bigger and shinier than the ones we’d picked yesterday. Does the caretaker shine the apples? I wondered.
    We turned the corner around a slight hill and were met with a double stone–walled entry, ending at a solid iron door. There was a giant white obelisk at the entry, carved with the names and pertinent dates of Judge Beekman, his wife, and his children.
    “Um, are they still inside?” I asked, not really wanting to know the answer.
    “Go ahead and look,” Michelle said, gesturing toward the iron door.
    “It’s unlocked?”
    “Yes. This whole area was overgrown during the time the mansion was abandoned,” she explained. “This entryway itself had completely collapsed. High school kids used to climb in through a hole on the roof and throw the bones around.”
    I made a mental note not to hire any local high school kids to do yard work. Once we owned the mansion, of course. And by now I was convinced that we would own this house.
    “But Mr. Selzner had it completely restored. Here, look at this,” Michelle said as she pulled what looked like a thick stick from between the cracks of the stone entry wall. “It’s a bone. There are lots of them around.”
    Oh God, she was right. In nearly every large crack in the wall was a protruding bone—arm bones, leg bones, unidentifiable bones. Whoever repaired this wall was one creepy motherfucker.
    “C’mon, let’s go in,” Michelle said cheerily.
    Brent slowly pulled open the heavy iron door and disappeared into the darkness,