The house has a long and strange history, watching from its perch the busy humans marching up and down the hill, coming and going through the generations and the decades, building and destroying, toiling and resting. It was among the first houses to rise above Wink, the tiny town nestled at the foot of the hill, built by Mayor Arthur Wink, the son of the town’s founder. His intention was to store his mother and two spinster sisters in the slapdash structure way up on the hill to keep them from meddling in town affairs. The Wink women, however, had other ideas and marched or rode down to town, skirts gathered in their hands, almost every weekday to proffer their opinions and advice, chair committees, and generally meddle. Wink, it was widely known, was really run by these three headstrong women and not by the increasingly exasperated Mayor Art. He would pace and rub his thinning pate nervously while trying to placate the town’s elite and the women in his family. He missed his brusque and stoic father.

The Wink sisters, when not kicking up dust in town, ran the house in military fashion while their mother perched imperiously on her favorite chair in the tiny third story nest, a small room nearly empty but for the stiff and stuffy chair, a small sturdy table piled with ledgers and accounts, and a hurricane lamp. There she kneaded her aching fingers and handed down orders (requests she called them) for her efficient girls to convey to town. Queen Wink, the people of the town jokingly called her, and she effectively filled the role. Until she died, that is — in her sleep, in the chair, in the third story nest. The girls hauled the body down, down to the ground, put her in the earth, wept for a minute for their distant and difficult mother, and got back to the business of running their town.

A chilly and shallow duo, those Wink girls.

This, of course, was merely the town’s myopic perspective. Though gossip sets a course and calls itself truth, one can never really know another’s truth. Stories are personal and sometimes, in isolation and quiet tending, they don’t show their truth to the world. So the Wink girls, while solemn and efficient in town, allowed themselves to soften and dream a bit in the safe shelter of home. They were both pragmatic and prone to sullen states but they were also capable of high giddy spirits, especially Bea. They shared these light moods with one another and almost no one else.

Wink is small and, in the manner of all small towns, insular and incestuous. It has always been a world where everyone knows everyone else’s business, or thinks they do, though most everyone claims disinterest. In Mayor Art’s day, for instance, the sole doctor’s brother-in-law was the town’s only lawyer and the bachelor butcher was know to be ‘carrying on’ with the candlemaker while her husband plied his trade at sea. The boatmen gathered in Perk’s, the small timeworn bar by the river, while the town’s elite mingled in Steel’s and the various stodgy houses up in Stouffer’s Park. Social activity hummed along class lines, as always in these small American towns where the crimes are minor, the gossip flows, and progress is slow.

Bea and Ada were clever and careful with their social standing, a requisite in their fishbowl universe. They shared acquaintances among the well-heeled ladies of the town, hosting and attending teas and fulfilling social obligations, but remained fairly aloof and were known to be close only to each other. They took a monthly excursion down the river to the large and relatively cosmopolitan town of Increase to visit a rumored cousin and procure the latest fashions, but their Wink existence was metronomic and upstanding.

It is said that secrets die with secret keepers and when the spinster Wink sisters passed, each in late middle age, first Ada then Bea, their secrets and their stories went with them. Into the ground, into the ether, gone into the silent mists of history along with much of the petty doings of Wink. As is the case for most small towns, for most small humans. As is the case for most of us.

The house, however, held onto some whispered secrets. It stood for many decades after the second sister’s passing, largely abandoned, hardening around the stories within. Voices, memories, abstract philosophies that soak into the very floorboards of a structure that has hosted humans for long enough, things impossible for the average citizen to access. If only the walls could speak, as they say, if only the windows were mirrors.

What the Wink sisters forgot, what Bea particularly forgot, was the concrete, tangible evidence of her secrets, clues buried in the walls, stuffed in haste in secret stashes in her mother’s long ago nest on the third floor. The painted box, the letters, the ring, the promise. The lock of hair twined in the red silk ribbon. The ladies, as they drifted away, felt sure that they were a punctuation on the line, an end of sorts. They imagined the house dying with them, passing into nothing, forgotten and meaningless to future generations.

They didn’t count on the Franks. They didn’t count on curious children and they certainly didn’t count on the stranger ascending the hill more than a half century later, pockets full of his own secrets.

And so Corinne and Charlie Frank joined the Wink parade, added their names to the list of stories, that bright spring day when they bought the house — the long empty, quirky character sitting at the top of the hill — at a boisterous auction. They would christen it, the house and the seventeen-acre realm, Frank’s Folly.

The Folly was in dire need of love and tending, but the Franks were young, energetic and madly in love. They scrubbed and painted, mended and shined each room, top to bottom, until the babies started to come. And then, they filled the years and the Folly with cheer and industry, laughing and crying and shouting and singing their way through the seasons, inevitably making a home. Reawakening the lonely beast that had waited patiently, silently for the breath of life to return.