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"Hello in there" calls out a tall guy stooping down to peer into the semi-darkness of one of a strange line of garages along the overgrown side of an old apartment building on a hill.
"Oh" Karma stammers as she leaps down from the sideboard of a dusty old carriage. "I live here and was just looking around."
"Don't worry, I'm doing the same thing" laughs the young man with a huge camera hanging around his neck, his long brown hair glistening with blond streaks in the orange glow of an Indian summer evening. "I won't tell if you won't."
"Deal" she declares, emerging into the light and flashing him a brilliant smile that lights up her face and squinting eyes. "Are you photographing this amazing old house?"
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That amazing house was the Evergreens, the decaying former estate of the LaMonte-Kerns-Mason family, benefactors for the borough of Bound Brook. By 1973 the old southern family had long since built a modern mansion they called Piedmont Farm, leaving in their financial wake a community pool, library, sports field, campground, and three schools all subsidized by housing developments on LaMonte farm land. The ultimate gift from their antebellum largesse was the updating of their original pre-electric home in the 1920s into low income housing occupied primarily by the war widows of central New Jersey.
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"Matthew Berry at your service" he replies, reaching down a hand. "The photos are for my Masters thesis, and I'd like to have one of you up on that old coachee."
"I'll do it if you'll take me to dinner sometime" she bargains with tilted head and a sly smile, taking his long fingers in hers and holding onto his wrist with her other hand.
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