The Young Rosemary Woodhouse (nee Reilly)

Hutch looked at him for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps it’s simply that the notoriety of a pair of Trench sisters attracts an Adrian Marcato, and his notoriety attracts a Keith Kennedy, and eventually a house becomes a—a kind of rallying place for people who are more prone than others to certain types of behavior. Or perhaps there are things we don’t know yet—about magnetic fields or electrons or whatever—ways in which a place can quite literally be malign. I do know this, though: the Bramford is by no means unique. There was a house in London, on Praed Street, in which five separate brutal murders took place within sixty years. None of the five was in any way connected with any of the others; the murderers weren’t related nor were the victims, nor were all the murders committed for the same moonstone or Maltese falcon. Yet five separate brutal murders took  place within sixty years. In a small house with a shop on the street and an apartment overhead. It was demolished in 1954—for no especially pressing purpose, since as far as I know the plot was left empty.”


Rosemary worked her spoon in melon. “Maybe there are good houses, too,” she said; “houses where people keep falling in love and getting married and having babies.”