The Murder Next Door

(entry for 8/28/24)

“A murder lives here,” says Bobby Rosenvold. I am eleven, and Bobby is nine. I look and act about eight. Bobby looks his age, but acts about six. We are standing on the floor of the living room of the vacant and abandoned house next door to my house of the moment. (My family has lived in three different houses—plus one motel for two weeks—during the three years we have been living in Montrose. The three years in question are 1949 through 1951)

I say we are standing on the floor of the living room, but I should explain that this house was abandoned long before it was finished, and the living room only has half a floor. (Technically and legally, this is considered a vacant lot, which it is, sort of. At least it’s vacant of people.) You can stand in the half of the room that does have a floor and see— down between the joists— directly into the full basement underneath, by looking down at where the other half of the floor would be if it was there. (It isn’t.)

Most of the rooms on the ground level have a similar situation. One of the smaller rooms on this level has its full floor, but it’s the only room in the house that does. The master bedroom has no floor at all, not even the joists. The second ‘floor,’ above this one, has no hint of floor. The house wasn’t designed to have cathedral ceilings, but does. You can stand where we’re standing, in the secure half of the living room, and look straight up, though the second story, through what was meant to be the attic, to the completely finished roof. It’s rather creepy, a feeling that Bobby seems to have picked up on. Or perhaps he knows something about my neighborhood that I don’t. It wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t know anything at all about my new neighborhood, except that my dog Ginger likes this house better than the last one, because the yard is bigger, and she knows better than to ever leave the yard.

I’m not sure why I’m ‘playing’ with Bobby today. I just met him yesterday. He and his family are new in town, his dad— a pediatrician— having having just joined the Montrose Medical Clinic where my dad works as bookkeeper. This has brought the total number of doctors in the clinic to three, which my dad feels is one too many. He was overworked with two, and this third one threatens to totally overwhelm his work load. The negative feeling is also complicated by the fact that Dr. Rosenvold is Jewish. My dad is a bigot. He thinks Jews are to be despised and not trusted. Which is odd, because he certainly seems to know that Jesus was Jewish, and he doesn’t hold that against Him! In fact he believes Jesus is God. Strange are the ways of mankind, and, in my case, particularly of dad-kind.

A little relevant history here: Just before I was born my dad went to work for Silver’s Auto Parts Company in Denver, whose owner, old man Silver, was a Conservative-Congregation Jew. They got along fine. My dad got rich and old man Silver got even richer. My dad worked four whole days and two half days a week, Sunday afternoon through Friday noon. The Silvers kept the Jewish Sabbath, and my dad (and our whole family, including all the relatives on both sides) were Seventh-Day Adventists, so they kept the same holy day in common. 

This worked fine, so long as old man Silver was in charge. But old man Silver was getting really old, and one day he turned the company over to his eldest son, who was not quite as religious as his father. The first thing young man Silver did was to abolish working on Sunday and to demand that all his employees work on Saturday, as he started doing himself. He said the rest of the world was making Saturday the busiest day of the week, with the best sales figures, and that the company couldn’t afford not to go along with the trend. My dad refused to comply. He said he would be glad to work any other time in the week that they wanted him to, but that he would not work from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, which he called ‘Sabbath,’ as had old man Silver. So young man Silver fired my dad, saying he must be lazy, if he wouldn’t work his assigned schedule. My dad appealed the decision to old man Silver himself. Old man Silver said it wasn’t his company any more, and that the decision wasn’t his to make. So my dad was gone. He got an even better job at Denver Auto Equipment Company, driving auto parts sales routes all over the state of Colorado, four and a half days a week: four full days Monday through Thursday, plus a half day Friday. By the time I was five years old, my dad was making an average of eight hundred dollars a month, which in 1945 was a fortune, and not a small fortune either.

Somehow my dad always managed to blame his firing from Silver’s on the fact that the Silvers were Jewish. I shook my head in disbelief then, and I shake it in disbelief now. How can you blame your firing on a guy because he’s Jewish and that same guy’s father was also Jewish, possibly in some sense even more Jewish than his son was, and the father had hired you to begin with! It boggles the mind. Plus which, as a result of the firing my dad had doubled his income. What’s there to complain about!

But such are the ways of dad-kind.

Enough history. Back to me and Bobby Rosenvold in the abandoned and unfinished house. (Rosenvold in Hebrew, by the way, means “offspring of a prince,” for what that’s worth. Bobby doesn’t seem particularly prince-like to me. In fact he is a pain in the butt.)

Bobby is trying hard to creep me out. It isn’t working. “Nobody lives here,” I say righteously, “and, besides, a murder isn’t a person. It’s a thing that happens when somebody gets killed on purpose. You mean ‘murderer,’ not ‘murder.’”

“That’s what I said,”

“No, it’s not. You said a murder lives here. You mean a murderer lives here.”

“That’s the same word.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Is.”

I give up. There’s no arguing with nine year olds, especially if they act like six year olds.

We go on ‘playing’ in the empty house, which isn’t easy in a place where a misstep can send you plunging headfirst into concrete oblivion.

(This isn’t the house of the story, which is long gone. This one is mostly concrete and that one was mostly wood. But this photo does capture pretty well the ‘feel’ of the house next door.)

Several hours later, Bobby’s mother comes to pick him up and take him home.

I saw him many times over the ensuing three years, till we moved from Montrose to Grand Junction, so that I could go to an Adventist high school. But I never played with Bobby again. And I didn’t miss him as a playmate. At all.

But years later, I got to thinking. Why was the house half-finished? Why was it abandoned, especially after they went to the trouble of putting a complete roof on it, and complete walls to hold the roof up? Who had owned it? What had happened to them? Was the house ever finished? Was it torn down? Was the lot still ‘vacant’?

In 1997, on a trip to Montrose to revisit my own past, I went to the library to do some research on a totally unrelated subject, which I may dredge up in a future reminiscence. While I was doing my investigation, to take a break from what was turning out to be a monstrous goose-chase, I decided to see what I could find out about that old unfinished house. Reading over some really old and discolored microfilm newspaper articles, I discovered that the work on the house had stopped when the wife of the man who was building it died suddenly and unexpectedly. The two of them had planned the house together, and they had a lot of their own history wrapped up in it. The guy couldn’t face living in it by himself, or with anyone else other than the wife who had helped him design it. So he simply stopped. Never laid another floorboard. Never drove another nail. Just went off and left it. Eventually some creditors took it over and sold it. The unfinished house was demolished and another, larger house built in its stead. People lived there. No ghosts, no moans in the night, no spooky sightings. No murders, or even murderers, living there, or anywhere else near by.

But maybe Bobby had picked up on something in the atmosphere. No way of knowing. Maybe some essence of the dead woman did live there, even though neither she nor anyone else had ever dwelt there. (Not that there was the remotest hint that she had died in any way other than strictly natural.) Sometimes six-year-olds know things that more mature people can’t and don’t. Or won’t.

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