It was a beautiful September afternoon, warm and a little breezy beneath a perfect Wedgwood sky, the kind of crisp blue New England day that makes you want to settle under a horse chestnut tree and read Robert Frost aloud to the bunnies and the squirrels.

Gardner Young

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Gardner Young used to dream about days like this when he was a Wall Street banker trapped in the sunless canyons of lower Manhattan. It was the thought of days like this that finally convinced him to chuck it all and buy the old Camilla Lyman place in Rhode Island and move there with his companion, Greg Siner. He would be a gentleman farmer, a man of leisure.

And now here he was. But instead of sprawling under a shady tree with a well-worn volume of poetry, he was sitting in a cramped and dingy home office in a poorly lit corner of the old house, watching on his flickering computer screen as his meager fortune vanished into the swirling vortex of that decaying old house.

Leaking roofs, dry-rotted eaves, a sagging porch and — worst of all — poisonous water. Tests had shown that there was a high level of fecal coliform bacteria in the water supply and the only way to remedy it was to drill a new well. It would have to go deeper, far deeper than the current well, Young had been told, and at $30 a foot, God only knew how much it would cost.

At first, he and Greg made light of the daunting process of restoring the old house which had been vacant ever since the previous owner, the eccentric, transvestite heiress Camilla Lyman, had mysteriously disappeared almost ten years earlier. They had joked about her passion for slathering everything in the house with coat after coat of pale blue paint — "the dreaded blue" Greg had called it. And when they first learned about the contaminated water supply, they even made fun of that.

"It's probably Camilla's mustache," Greg had said.

But as Young watched his fortune — such as it was; a portfolio of not-terribly well-performing stocks and the lump sum payout he had gotten when he took early retirement — dwindle to almost nothing, his capacity to see the humor in the situation was starting to fray, like everything else in the old house.

Truth be told, the only thing that was keeping him in the ramshackle Victorian manse was his promise to Greg. All his life, Greg had dreamed of owning a kennel. A dog groomer by trade — he had run a successful dog boutique in the affluent New Jersey suburb of Montclair — Greg had always pined for the day when he could be just like one of his own customers, a gentleman of means with the time and money to raise championship Irish water spaniels. Young had tried to make Greg's dream come true.

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