The moldy, beaten-up brick bungalow at 21 Orley Ave. in East York looks like the set of a slasher flick.

“It’s really not livable. There’s no nice way to say it,” said real estate agent Shelly Howe.

But she was confident it would sell, she said — “Location, location, location.” The asking price of $369,000 is a steal, considering the average semi-detached home in Toronto goes for almost twice that.

She says, since July 15, she’d received “over 35 offers.” The house sold Tuesday for $490,500.

The home was sold by the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee, an agency that protects the property of adults deemed mentally incapable of managing their own finances and haven’t appointed anyone to assist them. The office said it couldn’t comment on specific cases for privacy reasons.

Howe doesn’t know how the house became so dilapidated but said she finds it “sad that what was once such a great little piece of property has been neglected for whatever reason.”

Linda Mortimore knows what happened to the little house, how it went from being a picture-perfect brick bungalow with a peach tree and chrysanthemums in the back yard and a rock garden in the front when she moved in with her family on her seventh birthday, Nov. 10, 1953, to the mess it is today.

“It was just the prettiest place,” she recalled. “To have a house like that . . . is probably anybody’s dream.”

The family was Linda, her parents Arthur Mortimore and Lila Fleming and her younger brother David. The couple paid $10,000 for the house, according to the deed.

Her parents met in a Toronto dance hall, the Palais Royale, near the end of World War II. Lila had hazel eyes, strawberry blond hair which she wore in finger waves, and a penchant for blue-and-green dresses. Arthur was a clean-cut guy, dark hair, a bright smile that belied his poor health.

Linda said her mother really didn’t know how sick he was until after they married. He was epileptic and diabetic, and often had bad insulin reactions that called for firefighters to come and administer oxygen, Linda recalled.

Arthur made floor cleaners for a living but was losing his eyesight years before they moved to the house on Orley. It was spick and span when they moved in, but soon filled up with clutter as her mother took in odds and ends from thrift stores. Bedbugs took up permanent residency, Linda said.

The family had a secret. After Arthur left for work in the morning through the front door, his friend “Bill” would come in the back door, Linda recalls. Everyone said he was there to give Lila guitar lessons.

But years later, when Linda was 11, she was snooping through her mother’s dresser drawers and found a letter from Bill that she says confirmed her mother was having an affair.

He was good to the children, Linda’s brother David recalled. Bill often took them to the cinema.

“He (Bill) was the only entertainment we had,” David said.

Many years later, David said he doesn’t who his biological father is. “Who would know for sure if he (Bill) was or he wasn’t? He’s not around.”

Lila’s relationship with Bill lasted more than 25 years. During that time, Lila gave birth to her third and fourth children, two little girls. The neighbours gossiped, Linda said, but if Lila’s husband Arthur suspected anything, he hid it well.

Linda said she doesn’t have any ill feelings about the affair. Bill brought her mom happiness and filled the home with music — country and western and the blues, she said.

But it came to an end. After one of the two little girls had a daughter of her own at 16, Lila helped raise the baby and called it quits with Bill.

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Things unravelled for the family. Arthur lost his sight in the early ’70s and needed to use a cane. For a while, he went to work without the cane and pretended to see, Linda said, but eventually his bosses caught on and fired him. He died of diabetic complications in 1983.

Linda said her mother was never very affectionate with her dad. And as for Bill, “I don’t think she loved him that much either,” she said. “I don’t see my mother loving anybody, to tell you the truth . . . I think in a lot of ways she was bitter.”

Lila’s hoarding worsened. She bickered with the neighbours, usually over their shared driveway. In her twilight years, she lived in the rundown house with David and a daughter, sleeping on a mattress with springs that poked through, Linda said.

Lila and the house deteriorated to the point that Linda put her in a nursing home where she died last April at age 91.

Linda thinks of the life of the house this way: its walls tell her mother’s story. “Anybody that’s had a sad life, a bitter life, I think it reflects in your home. You can see that it wasn’t taken care of.

“I thought I might write a book one day, and I would just call it 21 Orley.”