THE FIRST TIME LYNDIE AND Fred Hertrich visited their future vacation home, they had to abandon their car by the roadside, clamber over fallen trees, and wade through waist-high grass just to get to the front door. In the decade since the Easton, Maryland, home was last occupied, the basement had taken on several feet of water, causing the floorboards above to buckle and paint to droop from the walls in doleful sheets. “It looked like a haunted house,” Lyndie recalls with a shudder.
