“Thanks. You want to stay down here?”
Oh God, did she ever. It thumped again, and she moved a little closer to him warily. “Um. Will you think less of me if I do?”
He chuckled. “Not at all. Just call the police if I’m not back in twenty.”
Emily glared at him. “That’s not funny.” The lights flickered as if to agree with her. Ugh. Emily squeezed closer to him and closed her eyes. “Are you sure you want to go?”
“It’ll be fine.” He pried her away from him and tapped her cheek so she’d open her eyes. When she did, he gave her one of those bad-boy winks. “Don’t worry.”
“Easy for you to say.” He didn’t live here, after all.
But he was already climbing the stairs. “Be right back.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and watched as he disappeared around the bend. She heard the attic door open and sucked in a breath, waiting. Waiting for him to say that yes, he saw a ghost, or no, there was nothing and she was still crazy.
“Shit.”
Emily felt like her throat was closing. “What is it? What do you see?”
“I see shit.” He laughed, and relief flooded through her at the sound. He didn’t seem worried or frightened at all. In fact, he sounded pleased. “Who did you say you had coming over here to check for ghosts?”
She frowned up at the staircase. “A few of the officers. Sometimes Hank, sometimes Old Charley. Mostly Old Charley. Why?”
“Because I think I know what your ghost problem is. Want to come up?”
Buoyed by his ease, she went up the narrow staircase after him. He stood just in the entryway of the attic, the bulb hanging from the ceiling on overhead, and the mag-lite in hand. And he was smiling. He looked over at her and waved her forward. “Come on. You’re going to want to see this.”
“Am I?” she asked skeptically. “Because I’m pretty sure whatever it is, it isn’t good.”
“Well, in the scheme of things, it’s not ideal, but it’s not the worst,” he said, and offered her his hand.
Emily put her fingers in his and let him lead her into the attic. The room was too shadowy for her liking, the ceiling tall and gabled overhead, raw beams of wood creating even more shadows. Tufts of insulation were everywhere, like snowy piles of pink cotton. It covered the floor of the attic and bunched up along the sides in mounds dotted with smaller, darker spots of dirt.
“See,” he said, giving her hand a comforting squeeze. “No ghosts.”
With someone at her side, she had to admit that things seemed a lot more benign. “It…doesn’t look so bad.”
“I’m surprised no one has noticed this before. You ever had a pest guy come out?”
“No, why? Do I have bees?”
With his free hand, he pointed at one of the brown spots of dirt. “You see that? That’s shit.”
“It’s what?” She asked, horrified. She pulled her hand free of his and grabbed the mag-lite from him, then shone it on one of the spots. Sure enough, now that she had a second look at it with a brighter light than the yellow bulb that hung down from the ceiling, it did look like a big nasty turd. “What the hell? What is pooping in my attic?”
“Unless you have a ghost with incontinence issues, my guess is possums.”
“Possums?”
“Yep, and it looks like a lot of them.”
“Possums,” she repeated. That was…too simple an explanation. Surely it was more than that.
“You ever had any weird smells you couldn’t figure out?”
She started to shake her head, then gasped. “When…when we first moved in, there was this god-awful smell like dead things. Braden kept saying it was the ghosts telling us about their presence.”
“It was probably a dead possum in the walls somewhere.”
“In the walls?” Her voice rose a bit. “You’re kidding, right?” She’d heard noises in the walls once or twice, but she’d never guessed…and Braden had always filled her head with stories of spirits attempting to send them a message…
God, either she was a huge idiot, or Braden was. Or both.
“I’m guessing there’s a few of them in the walls,” he said, tapping one of the beams overhead with his hand. “Especially in these old houses. I’ve seen it before. That’s why when I saw the droppings, I figured that’s what’s making your ghost noises. Never seen a ghost in an old house, but I have seen lots of rodents.”
“And that’s possum poop,” she asked. “You’re sure of it.”
“Pretty sure. If you’ve got a stick, we could always go poking around in some of these tufts to see where they’ve buried themselves. They bite, though. And some carry rabies.”