The most obvious result of the spill, however, was clearly evident, now that the carpet had been removed.
Arcing from the corner diagonal to the door to midway along the closet wall, a jagged crack showed stark and black against the concrete. On the far side of the break, the floor was stone dry, the typical grey of cement, with occasional dark brown rough spots where the padding had been glued down. Nothing unusual there, except for an inch-wide fissure along the back wall, perhaps two inches in from the floorboards-the extension of the crack Willard had first noticed in the living room and traced further in the kitchen. Now it was evident that the crack continued the entire length of the back wall. If he removed the carpet in the fifth bedroom-Willard’s office-he would no doubt find the same condition along the wall there.
On the near side of the break, however, the floor was still damp, almost black, with an odd sheen that suggested that it would be slippery. It looked miasmal, unhealthy.
Willard stepped into the room.
The floor wasn’t slippery at all, he was surprised to discover, but he could tell that it would take a while longer for it to dry completely. The kids would have to camp out in the family room for a couple of days, he realized.
Wilcox and one of the other men-Willard thought his last name was Kemp-stepped into the room after him.
“That’s some crack you got,” Wilcox said.
“Kind of reminds me of the Grand Canyon,” Kemp added. “Just not quite as wide or as deep.”
Willard nodded.
Wilcox moved past Willard and Kemp, toward the far corner where the crack began. He seemed to be pacing, measuring something.
He turned and looked at each of the other corners in turn, then at Willard and Kemp.
“You’ve got a bit of a slope in here, too,” he said. “I figure a good three, four inches difference between the door over there and this corner.” He gestured at the crack. “If it weren’t for that, the water would probably have run clear across the room, under the wall, and up into the studs. Could have been a real problem.”
Willard nodded.
Wilcox pointed along the back wall. “And you got another problem there,” indicating where the wall had separated from the foundation. “Never seen anything like that before.”
Then he brushed his hands against the sides of his pants, as if getting rid of a layer of dust or something, and said, “Anything else we can do for you, Huntley?”
Willard shook his head. For some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to speak. Perhaps because actually seeing the fissure running across the entire width of the room had startled him, perhaps because he was already fuming-yet again-at the incredible ineptitude, or worse, of the builders. And perhaps because he understood that whatever was happening here, whatever would be needed to make this place livable for him and his family might just be beyond his ability to fix.
3
The city engineer arrived the next Wednesday.
The boys were still sleeping in the family room-they had constructed a make-shift tent of chairs, quilts, and sheets in one corner and sheets and seemed perfectly happy to stay there for the rest of their lives. Sams was especially pleased with the arrangements. He would sit just under the front flap of the tent, blanket in hand, and watch the television, giggling to himself at some secret joke.
Yap seemed equally content in his new place on the wide window sill. He spent hours, it seemed, whirling around in the exercise wheel, the small whirr becoming an integral part of the atmosphere in the room.
The carpet and padding were still laid out in the garage. Thanks to the unusual weather, the garage was overheated for this time of year, hot and stuffy. The padding seemed dry, but the carpet retained an unpleasant stickiness when touched. Perhaps a couple more days would be enough, then it could be re-laid.
Willard answered the doorbell with a sense both of anticipation and of incipient foreboding. Whatever was going on with the house, at least the inspector would know.
“Mr. Huntley? I’m Edgar Sai, from the city inspector’s office. I hear you have some questions.” The man was short, official looking, with a calculator in one shirt pocket and a clipboard in his hand. He glanced down, as if to re-check his data.
“A few,” Willard responded. “A few.”
In a couple of minutes-after the introductions were made and Catherine went into the family room to keep herd on the kids-Willard and Sai were walking along the back of the house. Sai kept his head down, studying the earth along the foundations of the house, the way the concrete patio slab canted toward the grass, the surface of the yard itself. Occasionally he would nod. He did not speak.
They turned the corner and stood at the end of the narrow strip along the side.
“Here’s where I found it,” Willard said. He pointed to the shallow excavation that paralleled the wall, but the action was unnecessary. Sai was already on his knees, one finger tracing the exposed crack. He stood.
“Do you have a shovel?”
Willard indicated the one leaning against the fence.
It took Sai only a couple of minutes to continue the trench the length of the wall. He was more proficient with the tool than Willard had been.
“Okay,” he said when both of them could see that the crack extended from corner to corner, never less than half an inch wide, sometimes as much as two inches. “It’s pretty clear what happened. We’ve seen this often enough here.”
“What do you mean, here?”
Sai straightened and leaned the shovel back against the fence.
“Here, in Charter Oaks, as well as in Sunset Hills, over there toward the hills. There were a lot of problems when the subdivisions were built, improper materials, inadequate compaction of the soil, even some outright illegalities in construction. Happened, oh, twenty, thirty years ago or so.”
“But what…?”
“Basically, the builders failed to meet most of the codes then in place, and the houses started to fall apart within a couple of years.”
“Weren’t there laws…?”
Sai had apparently had this conversation many times before. He seemed to know what Willard was about to ask and had no compunctions about interrupting.
“Sure. But laws only work when you catch the bad guys breaking them. This guy-McCall-was too canny. It wasn’t until two years after this subdivision was finished, almost five years after Sunset Hills was finished, that the inspectors finally started to close in on him.”
“Did they get him? Put him in jail or something?”
“Actually, it was sort of ironic. About the time the indictments came down and the law finally got in motion, he…died.”
“Died? How?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, some kids found him…” Sai suddenly stopped. His eyes dropped to the clipboard in his hands. He took a second or two to read something, the looked up at Willard. For another couple of seconds his eyes widened and he just stared. “Uh, they found his body on Halloween night. Gave them quite a scare. Still a bit of a mystery as to how he died.”
Sai seemed unwilling to say more. He made a few notes on the form on the clipboard.
“From what I see here,” he said finally, “it’s pretty clear what happened. This McCall had a nasty habit of cutting corners wherever he could, regardless of what it meant to the integrity of the structures.
“One of his favorite tactics was supremely simple. He would set the foundation boards and lay the steel rebar, everything ready to pour the slab. The inspector would come out and find everything perfectly within code. He’d sign off on the house, then leave.
“And McCall would pull up the rebar, pour the slab immediately, and use the same rebar in the next house. Saved a lot of money that way. No one knows which houses, if any, finally got to keep the rebar.”
“So the concrete would just give way after a while,” Willard said, almost to himself.