The Missing Dough(18)

“Was I?” I asked, but I knew all too well why I’d lowered my voice upon crossing the threshold.

There was something eerie about a house when its owner had recently died. Some folks believed that it was a lingering spirit, and though I couldn’t say for sure what I believed one way or the other, I knew that there could often be a presence felt in a place, almost as though something was holding on to a spot where it didn’t belong anymore. I would love to be able to say that I’d never personally been in the home of someone who had recently died, but unfortunately, I couldn’t make that claim. During past investigations, Maddy and I had searched quite a few houses, looking for clues about who might have wanted to kill their former owners, and the range of experiences we’d had did nothing to discourage that belief.

This was a first, though.

Sharon had passed away recently—peacefully, according to the reports we’d heard—but Grant had been another case entirely. Was it a mixed set of emotions we were going to experience here?

“Has much changed since you were here the last time?” I asked Maddy as I looked around. The house was decorated in a way that clearly was not to my own minimalist taste, with flowery wallpaper adorning the walls, shelves everywhere covered with teacups of all shapes and sizes, and furniture that looked as though it’d been there for several decades. For a moment I could almost taste the feeling of loss all around us. Man, oh, man, my imagination was running away with me. If I was being honest about it, there was little doubt in my mind that I was just creating these impressions myself, but that didn’t make them any easier to take.

“Should we search the upstairs?” I asked, hoping that the space had to be less stressful than where we were standing at the moment.

“It’s my best guess about where we’ll find Grant’s room,” she agreed.

The odd thing was that there was no evidence that he’d been living in the house at all. We checked every bedroom and the hall bathroom upstairs as well, but I didn’t see a single sign that Grant had been there in the past ten years. Even his boyhood bedroom was covered with a fine layer of dust. “Maddy, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Grant ever lived here after the two of you were married. Could your source on the Internet have been wrong?”

She frowned. “I’m not willing to give up yet. We still need to check the basement.”

“Would she make him live down there when all of these bedrooms are empty upstairs?” I asked.

“If he stayed there, it was most likely Grant’s choice,” Maddy said. “If he was living in the basement, he could delude himself into believing that he had a place of his own. I’m not sure he could live with the idea that he had to come home and live with his mother again. Come on. Let’s check it out.”

Maddy opened the basement door, and as she did, I could swear I felt a fleeting, cold burst of air escape. The impression lasted just an instant, but it felt real just the same. It was as though the upstairs was filled with Sharon’s spirit, while Grant’s ghost had stayed in the basement, where it belonged.

“I’m seriously losing my mind with all of this,” I said aloud, trying to break the spell this house seemed to hold over me.

“I don’t doubt it for one second, but why now in particular?” Maddy asked as we walked down the steps together.

“This place feels as though it’s haunted by two different ghosts,” I admitted to my sister. “Upstairs was warm and open, but this is downright hostile.”

Maddy chuckled a little. “Sharon was always complaining that the basement was a little drafty. As for the upstairs, it’s always been too warm for my taste.”

“So, you think I’m just imagining it?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Who knows what happens after we’re gone? Maybe neither one of them was ready to walk into the light.”

We were at the bottom of the stairs, and I had to look hard at the expression on Maddy’s face to see if she was making fun of me. There was no sign of amusement there, though, something that didn’t really comfort me.

I probably would have liked it better if I knew that she’d been teasing me.

Maddy flipped a light switch, and I could see that the downstairs was indeed some kind of subterranean apartment. It had been decorated sometime in the seventies, and no one had updated it since. The walls were painted a mustard brown, and the carpet was a lighter shade of yellow. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find black lights and disco balls hanging from the ceiling, but fortunately, we were spared that. Still, it was no place for a grown man to be living.