by E M Kaplan
“How is this legal?” Josie asked, more to herself than them as she scanned the contract. She knew Billy Blake had hired Cookie Casteñada to sell his home, but who had hired her rival, Jessica Rubiak? Had someone purposely pit the two saleswoman gladiators against each other to sabotage the sale? This lease packet had to have more clues.
She kept flipping through the pages, pausing at the important headings in all caps.
DAMAGE TO PREMISES…
RIGHT OF INSPECTION…
HOLDOVER…
BINDING EFFECT…
Blah, blah, blah.
NOISE… PETS… BICYCLES…
Speaking of bikes, Marion had leaned his against the pergola wall. Had he ridden all the way out here in his cork wedges from downtown where she’d first run into him? Had he weathered that crazy, thunderous storm out here huddled in his sleeping bag? And was it still better than living in Oklahoma?
Probably.
She read the last page, expecting to see Billy Blake’s name on the line for the landlord. Maybe someone had acted on his behalf or forged his signature. DJ worked as his right-hand man at the restaurant. Maybe Billy had someone like that here at the house. He was a busy man and relatively wealthy. It would make sense if he had an assistant or even a lawyer take care of all of these details.
But it wasn’t Billy’s name on the last page of the lease. Instead, Josie saw another name.
Bunny Rogers.
#
Mary Clare’s mother had hired Marion to squat at the house. Did she want him here to discourage buyers? Josie didn’t think it was out of the goodness of the woman’s heart. After reading that transcript of her conversation with Skip, it was hard for Josie to picture her as kind and generous.
“But why?” Josie said again, frowning at the lease form.
Unless uptight Bunny Rogers was acting illegally as a landlord—highly unlikely based on what Josie knew about her character so far—that meant she was probably part-owner of this house. Had Mary Clare left her portion of the estate to her mother instead of her husband? Josie knew Texas was a communal property state thanks to some research from a previous case, which meant if spouses died or divorced, their property was divided evenly. But if Mary Clare had a will in which she left all of her belongings to her mother, Bunny Rogers would be joint owner of Billy’s home.
Or maybe Bunny Rogers’s name had been on the mortgage from the very beginning. A behemoth house like that required some serious financing behind it, possibly more than what Mary Clare was entitled to on her own. Billy Blake was a simple restaurateur, not a Vegas high roller. They would’ve needed a fat bank account behind a massive house like this. Looking up who had signed the note on the house would be easy—Josie could probably even access the public record of it from her phone, if she could actually get a signal in these limestone hills.
Marion scratched his beard. Skrich skrich skrich. “I don’t know why she hired me to stay here, honey. Sometimes your job in life is just to enjoy each day as it’s handed to you. All I can say is I’m living in the lap of luxury for the foreseeable future, and I’m loving it.”
“Oooh, my cousin is going to be so cheesed off. I need to call her,” Lizzie said, but Josie noticed she didn't immediately reach for her phone. Maybe prima who denies all knowledge of their midnight foray hadn’t earned Lizzie’s full respect and support after all. Or maybe Lizzie wasn’t fully convinced Marion wasn’t a ghost, though her ghost measuring device hung limply at her side for now.
Marion had stretched out on his chaise lounge, showing the scuffed bottoms of his sky-high heels, and crossed his smooth shaven showgirl flamingo-like legs with the spider webs of veins and bruises running up and down them. Josie would kill for a little length in the legs, some extra extension of the tibia and fibula. The guy had been gifted in that department. He raised his arms and cradled the back of his head with his hands, tufts of gray underarm hair jutting out by his string bikini top, and she had no idea where to begin assuming his gender even if she’d been forced to decide.
Lizzie squeaked in dismay and turned her face slightly to the side so she wasn’t looking directly at Marion’s fluffy pits. Nevertheless, Josie’s young friend collected herself enough to ask, “But what about those ghosts you mentioned hearing—can you see them, too?”
Marion sat up. “You can see them, too? Oh my lord, I thought I was the only one. Can hardly sleep at night with the racket. It’s like living on the streets. One eye always open.”
“What? Where?”
Lizzie’s device with the buttons and lights was back up at eye level. They all stared at it, but none of the indicators flashed. She whacked it with the palm of her hand and a row of them blinked on briefly, then turned dark.
“I’ve seen one of those before,” Marion exclaimed.
“You have?” Josie couldn’t imagine where he would have seen anything remotely like it. Was he a former mechanic? Maybe he’d worked in a lab at the university and had experience with…she didn’t know what…seismic instruments? She found herself, along with Lizzie, leaning closer to him as he lowered his voice.
“CIA listening device, right? Real retro, too. Nowadays they’re so small, they can get into your bloodstream with nanobots. First it was the fluoride mind control. That’s why I stopped brushing my teeth.” He paused to point at his gaping, toothless maw. “Now it’s microscopic technology invented by a 14 year old doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University. They inject it into you when you get the flu shot. That’s why I never get it. I’m off the grid, girls. You should think about it. It’s the only way to survive.”
“Survive what?” Lizzie asked.
“What about the ghosts?” Josie interrupted. She didn’t want to delve too far into Marion’s conspiracy theories or his psyche. They didn’t have all night, literally. It had already been late when they’d arrived here.
“All around us, every day. They won’t shut up with their woo-woo-woos. They’re here right now. Don’t you see them? Buzzing around like big mosquitos in bedsheets. Holes cut out for their eyes. They think they’re so clever when they look like amateur hour.” His face brightened up. “But I’ve seen JFK and Marilyn. They like to dance in the kitchen to old Benny Goodman tunes.”
Chapter 26
After Marion left for his Thursday night Bunco game—“bunch of reformed hippies in the neighborhood invite me over every week…not really my thing, but they make a kickin' sangria”—and told them to lock up on their way out, Josie was about ready to throw in the towel for the night. Lying her way into seeing Billy Blake’s house had not only been unethical, but disappointingly fruitless.
She’d wondered for a minute if the neighbors had known or ever heard anything from the Blake house. Interestingly, when Josie had asked Marion if any of the neighborhood women had known Mary Clare, he’d shrugged. “They never met her, but they sure are interested in sticking it to the neighborhood association.” With a neighborhood like this in which the nearest house was a quarter mile away through twisty roads, Mary Clare would have been extremely isolated by even more than the sheer size of her house. Kind of a sad state of affairs if she’d had troubles.
“Let’s just check upstairs before we go,” Lizzie said, sensing Josie’s thirst for adventure had been a bit deflated by Marion’s general kookiness.
“You’re right. We’re here. We came this far. We have to keep going. I want to hit every room if we can.” Josie needed to pull herself together and stay focused.
She paused in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs to take a quick look at her phone. It was 12:48 am. Her signal bars were still low and flickering, but her phone had managed to pick up one short text message from Drew. It said he was back at the hotel and was going to sleep, but that he wanted her to wake him up when she returned to let him know she was safe. Which made her feel conflictingly loved and incredibly guilty at the same time, but she couldn’t stop to have a case of the feels right now. She had work to do.
“Are you
coming?” Lizzie hissed down the stairs.
Josie jogged up the Errol Flynn steps with one hand on the wrought iron railing. The landing at the top was covered in a thick piled carpet, and as she stepped onto it, she was sucked into a cocoon of silence as if she’d stepped into a super lush library. Hallways led to the left and right. Ahead of her, a massive great room with a pool table overlooked the foyer. The flat screen TV mounted on the wall ahead of them had to have been at least six feet across, the size of a tall man. This part of the house, at least, was thoroughly modern, considering Billy didn’t live here. At least, according to what DJ had told her.
She didn’t get it. Who was decorating this place and keeping it up-to-date?
“Which way?” Lizzie asked her. She held her detector up as if it were her compass. She was a Ghostbusting Girl Scout, plus mascara.
Despite the weirdness of the situation, Josie was still creeped out by the size of the house and its tomblike silence. How many people living here would it take to breathe some life into this place? Maybe thirty-five kindergarteners with cymbals and snare drums. The last time she’d broken into a building of this size was her high school to extract revenge on a petty and vindictive teacher. She’d almost gotten caught and most likely expelled, but the gods of idiotic adolescents had been looking out for her that day…and pretty much ever since then, too.
“Maybe we could turn on the lights?” she asked. “I mean, the neighbors know Marion is here. They wouldn’t call the cops on us, I don’t think.”
“Nooo. You’ll ward off the spirits,” Lizzie hissed, handing her a second flashlight that she dug out of her bag.
Josie was sure her rampant skepticism had already done that. But whatever.
“Maybe we should split up. We’ll cover more ground faster.”
Josie had more than one reason for suggesting they divide and conquer the house. Searching through this amount of square footage was going to be a challenge if they wanted to get of here before dawn. Also, she was going to hit the first light switch she came across. She’d been weighing the pros and cons of sticking with her companion, but decided she’d had enough of stumbling around in the dark. And yeah, the semi-darkness was getting on her nerves in a way that might be making her on the verge of panic.
“I’ll take the left,” Lizzie said. “Another word for left is ‘sinister,’ and I like the sound of that.” She hitched her bag up on her shoulder and gave Josie an excited grin. It seemed Lizzie had gained her ghost hunting legs. She was ready to give it another try. After stumbling across Marion’s gaunt face in the dark, Josie wasn’t sure how much scarier the real thing could get.
“You go, girl.” Josie gave her a lame salute and took off in the opposite direction.
Down this part—the un-sinister side, or so she hoped—of the hallway, she could make out three doorways before the hallway ended. She tried the first handle in mild hopes that it might lead to a restroom. Though she’d spilled most of her root beer on the boombox in the hotel room, the rest of it had made its way through her. While it wasn’t urgent, she wasn’t opposed to finding a bathroom even if it had to occur in a possibly haunted mansion. An event to remember for sure, she thought, mentally rolling her eyes at herself.
She turned the heavy handle and pushed open the door, noting that it seemed as solid and stately as everything else in the house did, also adding to its tomblike silence. The door closed behind her, shutting out all sounds except the faint hum of air circulating through the house’s ducts. The heat was on, she assumed, but now that she thought about it, the entire house had seemed to be one steady temperature—unlike her small apartment in Boston, which ranged from tropical to frigid zones all in one tiny space.
Must be nice living in a constant state of 72 degrees. How much does it cost to heat and cool this mansion? Especially when no one is living here?
It didn’t make any sense.
As soon as the door closed behind her, she slapped the wall next to it until she found a switch. Searing brightness flooded the room and she squinted in shock, not only from the assault of the light, but from the attack of floral patterns. Big flowers. Little flowers. Tropical orchids. English country roses. Pink, pink, and more pink.
Her eyes watered as she counted the bedroom’s numerous and bold competing fabrics. One—the vertical striped pink mess on the walls. Two—the pink chintz of the bed comforter. Three—a circular dark pink area rug that covered a good part of the large room, its large blossoms gaping at her like multiplying monsters from the Little Shop of Horrors. Four—pink ceiling-to-floor sheers on the windows.
Holy heck. Someone bought out the pink section at the designer fabric store.
Another door stood across the room, and Josie hesitated a beat or two before making her way across the florid carpet to investigate. She guessed it was a closet, but she was scared to see the pink chaos sprawl into another room. However, if this had been a room that Mary Clare had lived in, Josie needed to see if any of her belongings were inside.
She opened the door and wasn’t half wrong. While it was a closet, it was also a bathroom. Also horribly pink. Ugh. She felt a little woozy.
For all the times Josie had been sick to her stomach, lying on her own bathroom floor, becoming intimately acquainted with the small black and white tiles on the floor and larger tiles on her walls, she had never been as grateful for their simplicity as she was now. Because, holy Pepto Bismol. And after this, she would need some.
Pink shower curtain. Pink countertop, toilet, and bathtub. Pink tiles on the floor and the walls—and pink rosettes inlaid throughout. A large picture mirror over the counter did nothing to alleviate the unrelenting pinkness. Josie felt like someone had shined a light inside her small intestine—a place she had never wanted to visit. Whose room was this? Either a demented little girl like the Willy Wonka kid or else a crazy old lady. Either one fit the bill.
The bathroom—which was the size of Josie’s bedroom at home—had an attached walk-in closet, but the shelves and floor were as empty as the pantry downstairs. The clothing rod didn’t even hold an empty hanger or two. Nothing. No personal effects anywhere, including the medicine cabinet, which Josie opened with the side of her pinky finger.
Her urge to leave this bathroom as quickly as possible had overruled her need to use it, so at that, Josie turned on her heel and made her way out, pausing to check the drawer of the bedside table and the space under the bed before she left. They were both also empty, which led her to believe the room had been intended either as a guest room for an extremely unfortunate guest…or perhaps a mother-in-law. She flipped off the light on her way out.
Back in the hall, Josie took a deep breath. Amazing how color and pattern could be just as oppressive as a physical force.
Because geeze, how could anyone stand to stay in there?
#
The next door yielded a restroom, bland compared to the last one she’d entered. Breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t pink, she used it quickly, opting to dry her hands on her shirt rather than leave DNA on the pristine white hand towel hanging on the rod by the sink. As she stood in the hall after closing the bathroom door behind her, she wondered how on earth Lizzie’s cousin was going to sell the house with the pink bed and bath. She’d have to re-do that whole mess or else negotiate a price with a fixing-up allowance including. Because, yuck. That tile and those fixtures…
Facing down the last door in the hallway, Josie braced herself for anything, not sure what to expect. This end of the corridor didn’t have a window at the end as she would have expected, so it was even creepier than the rest, but she braced herself and forged on.
Without Lizzie, she felt vulnerable—she had known she would. It wasn’t as if her new friend could offer much in the way of protection, but having a buddy and even Lizzie’s goofy “in like flint” thing helped ward off her quakes of anxiety. On her own, Josie felt a little…sweaty, which was definitely a sign of nerves in this perfectly climate-controlled monstrosity o
f a house.
She took a deep breath as she reached for the last door knob on this end of the hallway only to discover it was locked. She pressed her ear against the wood, feeling the cool grain of it on her cheek. Maybe it was a utility closet. She didn’t hear any water or loud air flow, though. Could this be an electricity…thing way up here? Seemed unlikely.
A shiver ran through her and she couldn’t tell if this end of the hall was actually colder or if she was just freaking out. Though it was darker here, she realized her eyes were open wide and she was blinking more rapidly, along with her elevated heart rate.
Okay, deep breath. I’m in Austin. This is Texas, not Arizona. I haven’t been dragged and left for dead out in the desert. I’m okay. Keep breathing.
Her lungs filled with the recirculated air of the house, not the sweet smell of creosote and mesquite where she’d had the incident that still affected her nerves. Was it her imagination or was this end of the hall also slightly more stale-smelling than the rest?
She tried the door handle again, as if this time it would magically open. Too bad she hadn’t brought her new lock picks with her, but she hadn’t thought they’d be necessary on vacation…or if they’d even get through airport security. She put her ear against the door one more time, frowning when she thought she heard a whisper of faint footsteps.
“Hey, you’ll never guess what I found,” Lizzie said at full volume directly into her exposed ear. She fought a gasp of terror and had to blink a couple of times before the spots cleared from her vision.
“I found an elevator. Isn’t that the coolest thing ever? Can you even imagine having one in your house? If I had one, my grandmother could live upstairs with the rest of us instead of having to change the living room into a bedroom. That would be awesome. Then I could’ve had more friends over and hung out and grand-mamí could have more privacy.”
