Katie was sitting in her car, parked at the curb of a street in town. She wasn’t even sure which one it was. She knew the basic directions to get where she was going in Port Cable but she hadn’t been here long enough to learn street names.
“Northern California’s not that much warmer, Mel. Remember?”
“Sure, sure. Hey, when are we going to get together and find two strong men to keep us warm?”
Katie’s throat clenched up for a moment. She’d had a man to keep her warm last night. In the morning light he’d disappeared, and in the afternoon he’d turned downright scary. She didn’t need a lover right now. She needed a friend.
“I’m on another job up here in a town named Port Cable.”
“The one you e-mailed to me?”
“No.” Katie shook her head even though she knew Mel couldn’t see her through the cellphone. “That one fell through. I found another one. It’s um, complicated.”
There was silence for several long seconds. “Complicated?” Mel repeated.
“Yes.”
“Like last time complicated?”
“Just like that.”
“Huh.” She said, her voice muffled as she shifted the phone from one ear to the other. “I’ll be on the next plane.”
“What? Mel, you don’t have to--”
“Hey, this is what girlfriends do for each other.” Katie could hear the smile in her voice. “Didn’t you run interference for me when I wanted to dump Dave but couldn’t say it to his face?”
“Yes, I did,” she remembered. “It’s the only time I’ve seen you turn into a chicken with a guy.”
“Hey, Dave was seriously cute. I just couldn’t tell him we were over because of that little problem.”
“What problem?”
“My clothes kept falling off whenever I got close to him!”
They laughed together at that like a couple of school girls. Mel had always had all the luck with guys. She was shorter than Katie and a little heavier, but in all the right places. She kept her light brown hair trimmed short rather than wear it long like Katie did hers. She was seriously cute and guys were drawn to her. Usually she didn’t take them up on their offers any more than Katie usually fell into bed with men she had just met. Some men were just kryptonite to girls. Like Dave had been for Mel.
Or like Bill was becoming for Katie.
Even knowing the way he had treated her at the Knox Estate she wanted to go back to him now and apologize and make it right. Only, she knew there was nothing to apologize for. Not on her part. She was just so drawn to Bill that she wanted to do something, anything to be back with him.
She bit down on her lip and tried to banish those thoughts to the back of her mind where they belonged.
“Katie?”
“Oh, sorry Mel. I was thinking about something.”
“This place has you rattled,” Mel asked, “doesn’t it?”
“A little. There was a murder here and...they just found the body today.”
“Ah.”
“Wait...what does that mean?”
“You’re thinking there’s ghosts.”
“In the house?” Katie almost denied it because she didn’t want to admit that possibility. Only, the cold spot in that room, and the tragic death of a girl that everyone thought had run away... “Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking.”
“I’ll be there in a few hours. Give me the address.”
“Thanks Mel. I knew I could count on you. I’m going to be staying at a motel, I think, until I know more. Let me give you that address. Oh, that reminds me! I need to call the contractor back and make sure they’re still willing to work on the house. They found the body. In a wall, if you can believe that!”
“Oh! You get into all the fun. Let me get a pen to write down the name of the motel. Then I’m on the first flight out.”
Katie gave her the name and address. That settled it, then. She would be spending the night in a motel.
“A room with two beds, please.”
The man working the desk at the White Oak Motel had the strong features and ruddy complexion of a Native American, and a very outgoing personality. He made Katie’s reservation with a smile and handed her the set of keys to the room in a tiny manilla envelope. “Enjoy your stay.”
There were vending machines out in front of the long building. Twenty rooms with ten on the bottom floor and ten more on the top. Katie’s room was number eight in the middle of the top floor. She stopped at those vending machines first to get bags of Cool Ranch Doritos and two cans of cola. Dinner, motel style.
Inside the room she dropped her food on one of the beds and sat down hard on the other. She couldn’t wait for Mel to get here. Taking out her cellphone she sent a quick text message. In room 8. Bring pizza, please.
Not that Doritos weren’t delicious, but she was getting hungrier just eating them. In a few minutes they were both gone. So was one of the cokes. She’d flipped through every channel on the television, twice, and found nothing of interest to watch. Settling on an old Adam Sandler movie she laid her head back against the pillow and closed her eyes.
It felt like only a few minutes before the knock on the door woke her up. The clock on the nightstand between the two beds told her it had been four hours. It was after eight o’clock at night. Her mouth was dry and tasted like flypaper. Her eyes took a moment to focus and then she realized it would be Mel knocking. “Mumph. Just a minute!”
She took the can of cola from the nightstand and chugged half of what was left. It jolted her awake and cut the taste out of her mouth, and then she was able to function as a human being again. Stretching, she got up and opened the door.
Mel smiled at her as she balanced the pizza box in one hand and held her suitcase in the other.
“Hey, chickie! Boy did the taxi guy love the extra tip for stopping at the pizza place! I couldn’t remember if you liked mushrooms on your pizza so of course I got one with everything on it. Let’s eat!”
They used washcloths from the bathroom as plates--and napkins--and talked while they ate. It was the best pizza that Katie thought she had ever tasted. After they had exhausted every other topic of conversation, Katie began to tell Mel about the house.
“I’d rather hear about this man you found.” Mel bit off the end of her fourth slice and chased it with her a drink from her own can of cola. “He sounds much more interesting.”
“I’m actually trying to forget him. If he shows up at the house again I’m going to have to tell him to leave. I can’t work--or live--with someone who treated me like that.”
“Then I’m glad you told the guy off. Even if he did sound absolutely dreamy.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it dreamy.”
“I would.” Mel waggled her eyebrows. “Come on, let a girl live vicariously through her friend, will you?”
“Let’s just concentrate on the house, all right?” Katie set her own unfinished third slice back in the box. “Either I’m going to finish this flip and move on to another town, or I’m going to give up and move on to another town. Either way I’m never going to see the guy again. I’m not going to get worked up over a man when there’s so much else to worry about.”
“Like the house,” Mel suggested.
“Right. Ike the house.”
“Like...is there ghosts there?”
Katie shivered in spite of herself. “I don’t know what to do about that, Mel. I can’t just walk through the house saying, here ghost, come on out now! I think I just need to find out as much about the death as I can to decide if I’ll be able to sell at a profit, or not. A death like this can artificially depress the sale price of a house for years. A decade or more in some cases. Remember that house in Amityville, New York? They were years and years trying to get someone to buy that place.”
“How will you find out anything else? You said there’s nothing online and the police weren’t giving you anything.”
“Well...almost nothing. There was one officer who
told me to look up the victim’s boyfriend. Miguel Sanchez.”
“Hmm. Shouldn’t be too many of those in town.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“But,” Mel said, finishing the crust of her pizza, “I might have a better idea. Let’s try looking for the ghost!”
“Mel! How am I supposed to do that? The last time we had a clairvoyant and a priest, remember? And the priest died!”
“Well, I didn’t pack a clairvoyant with me, but I have the next best thing!”
Rolling over on the bed she leaned over to her suitcase. Katie heard the zipper being undone, and then Mel was sitting up again with a flat brown board in her hand, printed with letters and numbers.
Katie stared at it. “You aren’t serious?”
“As a heart attack!”
“A Ouija board?”
“You know a better way to contact a ghost?”
“Well...clay pottery worked for Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze. Can’t we try that?”
“Katie,” Mel scolded. “That was a movie. This is real life. Come on, it’ll be fun!”
The magic eye at the top of the board stared back at Katie. She’d done séances in college, with her sorority sisters, but that usually involved sitting around in her bra and panties drinking beer and asking the stupid board who each of them was going to marry. The answers were never the same twice, and sometimes they were just plain ridiculous. No way was Katie ever going to be married to Justin Bieber!
“These things don’t work,” she told Mel. “I mean, they’re fun little toys, I guess, but they don’t actually connect you to the other side.”
“Oh, yes they do, Katie. I’ve seen them work. You just have to know how.”
“And you know how?”
Mel nodded, looking so serious that Katie almost wanted to laugh. Instead she blew out her breath. “Fine. We’ll do the stupid séance. I suppose you’re going to tell me that we have to do it at the house?”
“Of course. We can’t very well contact a ghost trapped in a house if we aren’t in the house where the ghost lives!”
Katie sighed. “You’re getting way too much enjoyment out of this.”
“Come on. My life in real estate sales is just plain boring. Let me have a little fun.”
A yawn swept over Katie that she couldn’t fight off. “We can do that tomorrow. We’ll try your little Ouija board thingee but if it doesn’t work you’ll help me find Miguel Sanchez, right?”
Mel nodded enthusiastically and eyed another piece of pizza. “Sure thing. Um. Are you going to eat any more?”
“Take it, it’s yours. When this is done I’ll treat you to a steak.”
“And some good wine, right?”
“Of course.” Katie yawned again, her eyes already starting to drift closed. She hadn’t brought anything from the Knox Estate with her but she still had a travel bag in the car so she at least had toothpaste for the morning. Everything else could wait until they got back to the house.
She was asleep before another second passed, trusting that Mel would turn out the lights.
Chapter 8
The hallway upstairs was quiet, until she took a step. Then the floorboards started their discordant symphony again.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
She stepped out of the master bedroom in her bare feet and pajamas. She didn’t remember falling asleep in the house. It was time to be awake now, that was all she knew. Time to take care of the house.
There was a lot of work to do, but sometimes you had to make a mess to make things better.
She got to the last bedroom in the hallway, and stopped.
Creak, cre--
The door was open again. Katie could see inside the room, see the ornately carved four-poster bed, see the dresser painted pink and white, the nice flower prints in the rug. It was a nice room for a young girl.
Emily Knox stood against the far wall. The wall that Katie remembered having the foul black stain. It was painted a pure white now, and Emily leaned against it, looking out her window.
Katie recognized her from the photo that Justina Knox had shown her. This couldn’t be real, she decided. It must be a dream. It had to be a dream.
So why couldn’t she wake up?
“He’ll be here soon,” Emily said. She drew back the curtain with her right hand, and that gold ring with its diamond flecks sparkled in the sunlight. “He’ll come driving up the driveway like he owns the place and expect me to... I can’t do it anymore. I won’t do it anymore. He does not own me.”
“What do you mean?” Katie asked, even though she knew this was a dream. “Emily, what’s wrong?”
The girl turned to Katie. Her lips were trembling. On her cheek was a livid purple bruise. Blood had dribbled out of one nostril.
She’d been beaten.
Staring Katie in her eyes, Emily took a deep breath. “I’m scared.”
Sudden light flared all around her and Katie flailed her arms and legs trying to get her balance. Something was holding her down. Something was pinning her arms and twisting itself up between her feet.
Just as she was about to cry for help she realized it was the blankets of her bed in the motel room. It had been a dream all along, just like she thought.
“Whoa there, Katie.” Mel helped her untangle herself. “You’re going to fall out of the bed!”
“Uh, thanks. I was having a bad dream. I think. It’s all jumbled up in my head and I guess I’m just worried about the house.”
“Then let’s get over there. I want to try out the Ouija board! Oh, do you think maybe we can stop for breakfast on the way? My treat. Business has been good this month!”
They stopped at the Meadowlark Café on the way, eating pancakes and bacon and coffee that probably wasn’t as fresh as the specials board promised it would be. They talked a little, and read the morning paper which was full of stories about the body discovered in the Knox Estate.
“They still aren’t identifying her as Emily Knox,” Mel pointed out. “Just says that workers hired to refurbish the house found a body while removing a section of wall.”
Katie grimaced at the memory. “They probably don’t want to taint whatever investigation they’re doing. If any. The Chief didn’t impress me very much. We’ll get to the Knox house by nine o’clock and we can see what’s going on then.”
The waitress came over to their table, refilling their water glasses from a pitcher in her hand. “Excuse me? Are you talking about the girl they found up there in the old Knox place? You’re that woman who bought it, aren’t you?”
Katie was instantly on her guard. Here it starts, she thought to herself. The locals are going to turn on the big bad businesswoman who wants to profit off their misery!
“That’s me,” she said out loud with a smile. “I’m sorry, me and my friend were just having a private breakfast together--”
“I don’t mean to intrude,” she said to them with a crooked smile. “I just wanted to know if you’d heard the gossip. Is it true that it was Emily Knox they found?”
“I don’t think I can say anything more than the police have said.” Katie finished the last of her bacon. She really just wanted to get out of here. “Do you have the check for us?”
“Sure, sure, but did you know Emily was pregnant with her boyfriend’s child when she went off to college all those years ago? Such a shame, a pretty girl like that fooling around with a boy and getting pregnant.” She tsked to herself as she wrote up their check by hand on a pad from her apron. “Kids will never learn, am I right?”
Katie mumbled some sort of response but she wasn’t paying attention to what she said. Emily was...pregnant? Did her mother know? Could Katie possibly find Justina again to ask her about it and if she did, would she be too upset to even talk about it?
“Well.” The waitress said after a long moment of silence. “You come back in when you know something more, okay? I’m Heather. Make sure you sit at one of my tables.”
Mel laid down
the money for the food and they collected themselves to head out to Katie’s car. “Nosy busybody,” Mel grumbled under her breath. “Is the whole town like this?”
“Just about,” Katie sad. “Since when don’t you like to gossip?”
“Since everyone else knows more than I do!”
It didn’t take them long to get to the Knox Estate. Katie held her breath as they got out of the car. She half expected Bill to be there waiting at the front door, with that smile that she fell for every time and that body that made her hands itch to touch. She had never been so happy to see a closed front door on a house in her whole entire life.
Bill wasn’t inside, either. Not in the living room, not in any part of the downstairs. She listened to the whole house, and there wasn’t a sound from anywhere upstairs. The floors creaked at the slightest movement anyone made, so they were alone.
She let out a sigh of relief. She hadn’t been this upset over a man in a very long time. She sort of hated what he was doing to her, but another part of her wanted to know if another turn with him in bed would be as good as it had been the first time around.
Then she thought of young Emily Knox, fooling around with her boyfriend and getting pregnant as Heather the waitress put it, running off and ruining her life. Not to attend college as everyone thought. Just out there on her own, and then returning to town to be murdered. Maybe the lesson that Katie could take away from that was stay away from one night stands. At least for now.
Mel whistled. “Nice place. Should rake you in big bucks once it’s finished, considering what you paid.”
“Think so? Even with the murder?”
Katie pointed to the big hole in the wall for emphasis.
Putting down her suitcase on the floor in the entrance hall, Mel shrugged. “You’ll disclose it just like you’re supposed to and people will know what they’re getting. Might even draw some attention from potential buyers. Especially if we can tell them we had the place cleansed!”
“I never knew you believed in this sort of stuff.”
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 17
