A WORD FROM SARAH

People find interesting things in old houses. In and around our own early 19th-century home in Eastport, Maine, for instance, we've come upon clay pipe stems, jet beads, antique marbles, an ancient arrowhead, and dozens upon dozens of bits of elegant old hand-painted china, from the trash heap that was once behind a shed in the middle of what is now my vegetable garden.

Somebody must've smashed a lot of plates around here, and I wonder who and why. But a 200-year-old book with your name in it—written in blood, no less—must be among the most thought-provoking old-house discoveries ever made anywhere. As in:

Who wrote it? How'd they know your name? And—blood? What's up with that?

It happens in THE BOOK OF OLD HOUSES, the newest entry in the "Home Repair is Homicide" series starring old-house repair enthusiast Jacobia "Jake" Tiptree. And Jake's not the only one curious about the antique volume. One person's already died for it, another would kill to get it, and a third—

Well, that would be telling. But add to the mix a rampaging bathtub, a neighbor whose tinfoil hat protects him against aliens in his backyard, and a visiting old-book expert whose suspicions sow violence wherever he goes, and Jake's got more than a mystery on her hands. This time, she's got a two-centuries-old curse that won't quit until she stops it.

Or...does she? Common sense tells us, after all, that there are no such thing as evil spells, alien visitors, or old bathtubs that terrorize folks with their odd, even deadly, activities. But in Eastport, Maine, the fog still rolls in off the ocean just as silently as it did twenty decades ago, and the narrow streets at midnight are as quiet as a dark, lonely road through a graveyard.

Just as they have been, night after night, for 200 years. So whenever I pull down a cracked plaster ceiling, or open a long-boarded-up chimney hearth, or sink a spade into a tomato patch growing atop a pre-Civil War trash heap, like Jake in THE BOOK OF OLD HOUSES I tend to hold my breath in anticipation. Because whatever's in there has been hidden a long time, just waiting for someone like me to come along and finally unbury it.

And now it's been exposed: to the sunlight, of course, but also to that pale creeping fog, that silent night. Maybe thatŐs why, in Eastport, such strange things can still happen.

And why sometimes...

Sometimes they do.