Home for the Haunting(47)

I was hoping to go in fresh.

Still, given what had happened in that house, there were bound to be some decidedly unhappy, tormented spirits within these walls. And at least one murderous one—not exactly the Dearly Departed Dad of the Year. I hoped Olivier was right—that the ghost of a violent murderer could not kill anyone anymore. He could scare the hell out of you, but he couldn’t physically attack.

All this speculation and fearmongering was foolish; I knew that. The only way to deal with ghosts was to be firm in one’s resolve and to understand that they can’t actually hurt you. Being in their presence is spooky and makes you feel off-kilter, but it’s not deadly. At least, I hoped so.

I paused on the front stoop of the Murder House, Inspector Crawford by my side.

“Hugh gave me the key,” she whispered, and held it out to me.

“No need to whisper,” I whispered in return.

“Then why are you whispering?”

I shrugged. “Peer pressure.”

On the blue door, surrounded by peeling paint, was the knocker that had caught my attention earlier: a hand holding a ball. I stared at it, thinking of what Rosie had said. I loved these things, but . . . something about it seemed sinister, just resting there up against the door, holding that ball.

“Hey,” I said to distract myself. “Now that we’re ghost-hunting buddies, may I call you Annette?”

She gave me a snide look but inclined her head slightly. “Sure; why not? But I think we should take it easy on the whole ‘ghost-hunting buddy’ thing. I’m still a skeptic.”

“And yet you’re here with me, and we’ve got a bag of ghost-busting equipment,” I wasn’t above rubbing it in a little.

“Fine. Whatever. But if you ever breathe a word of this to anyone, I will make you very sorry. Now, I’ll hold the EMF dealie. It’s cool-looking.”

“How do you even know about the EMF dealie?”

“I’ve been boning up. Watched a marathon of Ghoul Getters. Very informative.”

“I’ll bet.”

I unlocked the front door and pushed it in, allowing it to swing wide. It opened with a little puff of air, like a sepulcher. The slight creak of the door didn’t help any—it seemed to echo in the abandoned house, site of those long-ago murders.

It smelled rank. Musty, with the still, funereal air common to unopened and unloved homes.

Annette was rattled. So was I, but that wasn’t news for me. For this tough homicide inspector, however, it was something rather new.

But, as was my wont, I was immediately distracted by my other profession. In addition to being a ghost buster, I was a general contractor. The architecture immediately grabbed my attention. The lines of the house were beautiful: graceful, asymmetrical, and elongated in the Art Nouveau style. In home building, Art Nouveau was a subset of the Arts and Crafts movement, which was a reaction to the stiff, dark woods and overwrought decorations of the Victorian era. The Arts and Crafts movement ushered in an era of cleaner, more natural lines and, in the case of Art Nouveau, curving lines stylized from recurring motifs taken from the natural world, like lilies, irises, and reeds.

Unfortunately, the interior decoration wasn’t Art Nouveau in the least. It was as though we were stepping onto the set of an early-eighties television sitcom, one in which the cast had gone home for the evening, leaving stacks of newspapers and magazines spread out on the low brass-and-glass coffee table. I spied a People magazine circa February 1984. Silk ivy and ferns hung from butterfly hooks in the ceiling. Walls were painted ash mauve and dove gray and hunter green. They were colors from the early eighties, and I imagined that had Jean Lawrence not been gunned down by her husband, she might have redecorated soon to keep up with the times.

As Hugh had told me, it was a place frozen in time. Untouched, I presumed, since the murders. In fact, at the bottom of the stairs a patch of tile had been taken up, leaving only the subfloor, rough with chalky gray remnants of mortar. Crime scene cleaners often took out portions of floors or sections of walls that couldn’t be cleaned of blood. It looked as though someone couldn’t stand to see the results of violence that had seeped into the grout—and who could blame them?

“I can’t decide whether I feel more foolish or afraid.” Annette interrupted my little trip down architectural lane, and I realized I was supposed to be contemplating long-ago murders and contemporary ghosts, not architectural history.

“Welcome to my world,” I said, setting one steel-toed boot-clad foot inside, treading heavily on the inlaid mosaic tiles of the entryway.

Lights were on in the foyer, in the kitchen, and at the landing at the top of the stairs.