The structure was genuinely dangerous in several places. The staircase had three rotted treads, one section of the upper floor had given way over a weakened ceiling joist, and the roof was sound only across the rear 2/3. While the interior walls were covered in black mold, and the window frames had swollen shut against their casings. He set up safety barriers, hauled out the worst of the debris, and spent the first full week walking the structure with a flashlight and a notepad, tapping walls, testing joists, crouching under the crawl space to check the foundation, building the kind of picture that only comes from patience and from knowing what you're looking for. Beneath the decay, the bones of the house were extraordinary.
The mortise and tenon joints at the primary load-bearing frame had been cut with a precision he associated with craftsmen trained before power tools made careful hand-fitting optional. The newel post at the base of the staircase was carved with a shallow original spiral no catalog had ever stocked, and the fireplace surround was made of hand-thrown brick in a size that hadn't been standard since before the Second World War. A neighbor pausing at the fence told him he was taking a considerable risk on a property nobody had held on to longer than a season. That there had been some kind of dispute attached to the deed years back. Something involving the original owner that no one in the neighborhood had ever gotten a straight answer about.
And Sawyer thanked him and kept working because he was not a man who needed a straight answer to start. He needed a foothold, and the bones of the house were giving him one. He found the mark on a Friday afternoon, crouched at the base of the fireplace mantel with his flashlight angled low, small cut cleanly into the wood below the mantel shelf, easy to miss unless you were looking for something that shouldn't be there. Two initials intertwined inside the outline of a surveyor's compass, the letters W and T. He sat back on his heels with the flashlight steady and thought of his father, Lawson, who had left him a spiral-bound pocket notebook filled with job notes and phone numbers, and occasional observations about properties Lawson had worked on over the decades of his carpentry career.
And near the back, in a handwriting grown cramped by arthritis, there were two pages about a man named Warren Tate, a self-trained architect and master builder, who had worked Hollow Creek in the '40s and '50s, whose name had been methodically replaced on public records and building permits by the names of larger contractors who had taken credit for his work. Lawson had written that Tate didn't build houses, that he hid souls into the wood, that they took his name off everything, but he left something behind. And Sawyer had read those two pages so many times over the years that he could have recited them without the notebook in front of him. He photographed the mark, opened the notebook to that page, and set both side by side in the light of his phone to compare the initials before he touched anything else. Because he had learned from his father that the first instinct when you find something old and surprising is to reach for it, and the second instinct, the right one, is to hold still and look.