Home for the Haunting(50)

“Just a squeaky tread,” I said. “I can fix that, no problem.”

“We’re not here to renovate the place, but to find . . . ghosts. Or insight into the recent murder, at least.”

“I know that,” I said with a shrug, “Just saying.”

She was still looking over her shoulder, staying as close behind me as decency would allow. She held the EMF reader out like a gun in her left hand, and I noticed her right hovering over the butt of the gun in her waistband.

“Hate to tell you, Inspector, but guns don’t do much against ghosts.”

“I’m not quite sure what I’m afraid of yet. Ghosts or people. And in my experience, guns do pretty well against people.”

She had me there.

Upstairs, we peeked into the bedrooms, each more heartbreaking than the next. A teenage girl’s room with a grass green printed bedcover, wallpaper, stuffed animals, trophies, and school albums. A boy’s room all in shades of blue, a border of sailboats just under the crown molding. A large casement window led out of a dormer and onto the roof.

Was this the window Linda had led Hugh through on that night? I looked out and imagined what it must have been like to crawl out, escaping one’s father in the middle of the night.

I saw occasional flickers and flashes, but not like what I’d seen below with Jean.

To make conversation, I asked Annette about what the children—and others—had insinuated: this empty house was sometimes used as a stage for nefarious activity.

“So you’ve said that empty houses like this, even in a nice neighborhood, might be used for drug drops? How does that work?” I asked.

“They just need a safe place to stash stuff temporarily, where it won’t be found or disturbed. Happens all over the place.”

“This isn’t exactly a fancy neighborhood, but I’m surprised.”

“Don’t be. The foreclosure crisis has created a whole new crop of drop locations, even in the suburbs. The other day a friend of mine found a grow house in Blackhawk, of all places.”

“Seriously?” Blackhawk was a wildly self-conscious, expensive, elite gated community on the other side of the East Bay Hills. “Blackhawk. Huh. Who knew?”

“You should hear some of my stories. They’d melt your mind.”

I stopped my inspection of the bathroom and studied her.

“What?”

“Your vision of the world must be a little . . . twisted.”

She appeared to ponder that for a moment, sticking her chin out slightly. “I guess I’ll take that. What about you? You keep trying to fix up houses and end up finding corpses instead. That’s got to do wonders for your worldview.”

“I never really thought about it that way.”

“I’m just saying, that can’t add a lot to your mental health.”

“Touché.”

Bam bam bam . . . bam!

We both straightened, and our eyes met.

“Hugh would just walk in, right? We didn’t lock it, did we?”

I shook my head.

“Let’s . . . ignore it for now,” continued Annette. “Probably those kids you were talking about.”

“Okay. But I think we should go back down, anyway, since that’s where the murders occurred.”

The very moment I turned to go down the stairs, the overhead light went out.

An apparition appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

Was that Sidney himself? Holding out a gun?

But no, it wasn’t a gun, but a flashlight. Simone came up to join him and I realized it wasn’t Sidney at all; it was Hugh. Alive and breathing.

“What is it?” he said. “Do you see something?”

“Sorry,” I said, shaking it off as we descended the stairs. “For a second, I thought I was looking at your father’s ghost.”

He nodded gravely.

“He gets that a lot,” said Simone. “Linda thought the same thing when she was here that last . . . well, the last time we were here.” She sighed and explained: “Hugh sent Linda to one of the best rehab clinics in California, but her counselor said her addiction was her way of trying to deal with past trauma. We were getting her therapy, trying to address the root cause, but not surprisingly, she didn’t want to think about that night. We were hoping being in the house would help Linda to face the past, but when she saw Hugh standing here like this, she thought it was that night all over again. It was like PTSD. She panicked.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?” Hugh asked, looking into his wife’s face so intensely, it was as though he knew the truth was there somewhere, if only he could find it.

“I think Linda was a disturbed woman,” Simone said, placing her hand on his shoulder and returning his gaze. “You did everything you could for her, Hugh. You and Ray both. No one could have done more. This is all because of your father’s actions, no one else’s. Remember what the therapist said?”