Topaz Dreams

by Patricia Rice

  “Ghost House?” Kurt asked, rather than comment on the women.

  “Yeah, Sam says the ghost of the former owner lives there and keeps up the gardens. It’s pretty spooky how the yard seems to tend itself even though no one has lived there in a year. I figured the locals were doing it in the dearly-departed’s honor.” Walker sipped his coffee and studied Kurt over the brim.

  “Is it one of our houses? With the exception of the lodge grounds, we usually just plant drought tolerant landscaping and leave the yards alone. It costs too much to maintain anything else.” Kurt studied the menu the tall female with the beaded black braid handed him. He recognized the waitress from around town, but other than her name, he didn’t really know her.

  She and Monty entered into a discussion of the day’s specials. As mayor, his brother knew everyone. Kurt wondered if he should learn more names and faces. Managing the lodge had never been his long-term career goal, but he could handle it, and he didn’t know anyone else who understood the eccentricities of a family-owned resort. So, if he was never getting back to the city, it might behoove him to learn more about the town.

  But he wasn’t much of a people person. He placed his order without questioning the waitress. Only when Teddy and the kids entered did he look up.

  “Nah, we’re renting the place from the ghost’s heirs,” Walker answered his earlier question. “I’m even getting used to talking about ghosts. This place gets to you.”

  If he didn’t have to worry about yard maintenance, Kurt wasn’t interested in Walker’s domestic situation. He watched Teddy settle her niece and nephew on stools. He wondered if their hair was dyed too—and why.

  The tough-looking but diminutive transgender cook brought out plates she set in front of the kids without anyone ordering. Kurt was focused more on Teddy’s hair. That black simply didn’t suit her.

  “What would it take to have you investigate everyone who has rented the old Thompson place since Teddy’s parents moved out?” Kurt asked, unexpectedly. He’d been ready to dismiss the ridiculous notion that the place was haunted, but investigating wouldn’t hurt anything, and he thought Teddy might appreciate the gesture.

  Although he wasn’t entirely certain why he wanted her appreciation.

  “Including the Thompsons?” Walker asked in surprise.

  “Yeah, I think so. If it turns out that he illegally sold the place to the corporation, then I’d like to sue his pants off.” That was explanation enough to satisfy Walker.

  “Until you’re ready to file fraud charges, I can’t do anything on the sheriff’s dollar,” Walker warned. “I’ll have to employ my own investigators. They’re not cheap.” Walker owned a corporate investigation firm in LA.

  Kurt looked at Monty. Along with their mother, they constituted the property’s owners.

  Monty nodded agreement. “I think it will make the Lucys happy, and if we have some chance of getting our money back, why not?”

  “I doubt the result will justify the expense,” Walker warned. “Real estate prices were pretty low back then.”

  Samantha brought over their orders. “Teddy wants to know what it will cost to investigate previous tenants in her house.”

  “It’s not her house,” Kurt automatically responded. And then he realized he’d just agreed to spending more than the house was worth for the same information. Head-desk.

  Walker chuckled and Sam raised her eyebrows in inquiry. With a shrug, Kurt added, “Tell her we’ll add the investigation to our contract and see who ends up paying for it.”

  He would drive Xavier back around the bend with contract amendments like that one.

  As hoped, Teddy left the kids at the counter and came over to the booth. The sway of her hips called up musical refrains he hadn’t heard since college days, when he’d been shacking up with a music major and still thinking he would design houses. Bad, bad sign.

  “Thanks, I think,” she told him. “But it still doesn’t tell me how much money we’re talking. I’m not a bottomless vault.”

  “I’ll give you the friends and family discount,” Walker said, leaning back in the booth to look at her. “Give me a budget.”

  “What can you do for the forty-five hundred she’s going to lose when she moves out?” Kurt asked, trying to keep that barrier up.

  “We left our resident poltergeist flinging glasses,” Teddy said, expressionless. “I’m not about to be defeated by a frustrated ghost.”

  “I can find your Thompsons,” Walker said, answering her question. “Maybe locate the next few tenants. Depending on how easy that is, we can dig deeper if you ask. Well under forty-five hundred is probably a safe number. Unless you discover one of the tenants is a mass murderer, I don’t think investigating former tenants will help find a ghost though.”

  “I can send messages to my parents to ask about her cousins, but I don’t know when they’ll check e-mail or if they’ll have any answers. So yeah, go ahead, please,” Teddy said. “I’m just worried that Mom’s cousin may still be in the attic. If her husband sold our house without owning it, he’s not exactly good citizen material.”

  “Gruesome.” Monty munched his fries, leaving the financial dealings to Kurt, as usual.

  “I’m more interested in knowing why the attic was sealed off. There could be rodents up there gnawing through electric wires. I’ll call my carpenter and have him saw through the ceiling. It will be a mess. Are you sure you don’t want another place that would be less maintenance?” Kurt couldn’t very well look away from Teddy as they spoke, but watching the fire in her eyes was hard on his libido.

  He had to recall that he meant to tear down that place this winter, so they could start building in spring. With any luck, Teddy would be gone by then.

  “Harvey has already told me he can fix the fence if you can provide the posts. I’m not leaving.” She swung on her heel and marched off.

  Walker whistled. “Want me to investigate her too? My mother would call her a dragon lady who knows what she wants and goes after it.”

  The lady breathed fire, for certain, which perversely stirred his lust.

  “I already know who she is,” Kurt said, reaching for his water and wishing for a beer. “What I want to know is why she’s hiding up here.”

  The makers of magical swords couldn’t hide easily.

  After lunch, Teddy took the kids to Tullah’s thrift store, where anything anyone could want was available at far less than half the price. She found the perfect set of plastic dishes and glassware and bought the kids old-fashioned board games.

  “You have a gift for knowing what people need,” Teddy told Tullah in admiration as she paid for her purchases in cash.

  “E-Bay is my friend,” Tullah stated solemnly. “I have boots and a jacket arriving tomorrow you might want to look at, and I’m scouting children’s clothes as we speak. They don’t really dress in black all the time, do they?” She nodded at Goth One and Two pushing a wooden toy train.

  “We haven’t unpacked yet. What I really need is a laundromat. I suppose I have to go down the mountain for that?”

  “Or ask Kurt to use the lodge’s,” Tullah said in amusement. “You’ve got more action out of the man than anyone else has for as long as I’ve been here. But if you don’t want to tackle the Nulls, I have machines in back you can use. I like my inventory to be clean.”

  “Kurt doesn’t seem to be a bad sort, but he does seem to be exceptionally stressed. Maybe we should be nicer to him.” Teddy gathered up her purchases.

  “Wait until you meet his mother. I don’t think there is anything we can do to relieve his stress.”

  Teddy had a hard time believing a tough businessman like Kurt could be stressed by his mother, but she remembered a few offhand remarks about Mrs. Kennedy’s volatility. If she owned part of the family corporation, Teddy supposed confrontation was inevitable.

  After dragging the kids away from the toy train, depositing her purchases at the house, and letting the Prince out on a leash, Teddy
braved the grocery. She’d never cooked for kids before. Judging by their eating habits, she probably ought to cruise the frozen food aisle. It wasn’t as if she existed on more than salads and take-out.

  Pasquale’s Grocers wasn’t busy in the middle of a week day. Tourists in shorts bought snacks and pharmacy supplies. Those would be her potential customers, so she sized them up as she strolled the aisles. Teddy smiled at a few locals she’d seen in the café and almost relaxed at the normality of small town coziness. If Buttass showed up here, she’d know about it instantly. Not that he had any idea that the children were with her or where she might be or even care. Old One-Track Mind would still be hunting Syd.

  Letting Mia and Jeb tote their favorite cereals and snacks, Teddy carried her groceries down the street to her old home. She’d paint the door in the morning, she decided, then get busy having her inventory shipped up here.

  Oops, she’d need cable for internet, and there was just the person she could ask. Kurt was directing men carrying posts down the alley. The bastard already had her front door open. She might have to change the locks.

  Rather than yell at him, she went after what she wanted first. “Is cable installed?” she asked, shifting a sack to Kurt’s arms when he offered. “It should be part of the utilities.”

  He snorted. “What world do you live in that cable is included in rent?”

  “An expensive one,” she admitted.

  She frowned as they entered and she heard men talking on the floor above. “Permission to invade my property would be nice,” she admonished, heading back to the kitchen.

  “I’m not comfortable with you and the children living here until I’m assured it’s safe. A bad ceiling job could fall on your head. If the wiring in those speakers is faulty, the house could catch fire.” He deposited grocery sacks on the tile counter.

  Jeb sat down on the worn wood floor and opened his cereal box. Lying in a sun spot from the kitchen window—it faced west, making the kitchen too warm—Prince Hairy looked up eagerly at the rattle of plastic packaging. Teddy thought she ought to have a word with her sister about the care and feeding of children and animals.

  Focusing on tasks, she put her anger on simmer and the groceries in the refrigerator. She needed to clean and spray the cabinets before adding food to them. “We need to set a few boundaries here, Kennedy. I am an adult. Given my parents’ non-parental sensibilities, I have been taking care of myself pretty much most of my life. I do not need a caretaker at this late date.”

  “As long as this house is my responsibility, I have to take care of it and its occupants,” he retorted, washing out one of the new plastic glasses and pouring milk at Mia’s request. “What happened to the glasses you were using earlier?”

  “I told you, our resident specter took objection to them. Have you considered turning the town into a year-long spook house? You know, the way some places sell Christmas all year?” she asked sarcastically, taking the rest of the dishes from him and filling the sink with soapy water. “You could sell Halloween Hillvale.”

  He actually looked serious at her suggestion. “I’m afraid the road up here wouldn’t sustain sufficient traffic. I’m having enough difficulty convincing the highway department that it will sustain a residential development.”

  “A development?” she asked in incredulity, over the noise of saws cutting up her ceiling. “Unless you pay your employees extraordinarily well, who in their right mind would buy houses up here? There isn’t even a school! It must be a bear to get kids into Baskerville in winter.”

  “I’m thinking a vacation condo situation and a ski lift—short-term rentals.” He leaned against the counter and crossed his shirt-sleeved arms, but he couldn’t hide his passion for his plans. She regarded him skeptically as he continued. “The town would have high end boutiques like Vail. San Francisco is so densely packed these days, the rich will pay anything for a little space and quiet.”

  He was testing her, she sensed. This must be a touchy subject—with the Lucys? Yeah, she could see that. It was nice having this private enclave of weird people, but it definitely wasn’t profitable.

  “Speaking as a shop owner, I could work with rich customers,” she agreed, sounding out her plans for her new direction. She reached down to take the cereal box from Jeb before Prince Hairy ate tomorrow’s breakfast. She couldn’t send the kids upstairs with carpenters, or out in the yard with no fence. She cut up a plate of apples and led them to the table in the front room.

  Kurt miraculously retrieved the board games from where she’d dumped them and followed without being told. The man had some uses.

  “Hillvale could actually start charging a sales tax and cover improvements,” he said. “We could have parking fees to pay Walker’s salary, property taxes so we might have schools someday.”

  “People can have boutiques and schools anywhere,” she pointed out. “You just want them here because you own the land and want to make money. I have no objection to money, but I can make it anywhere. I cannot find what Hillvale offers anyplace else. You have yourself an existential dilemma.”

  “Nothing existential about it.” He raised his voice over the pounding of hammers. A cloud of plaster dust filtered down. “People hate change, but progress has to be made or we stagnate.”

  Mia apparently already knew how the board game worked. Ignoring the argument over her head, she bossily explained her version of the rules to Jeb, who was more interested in the plastic figures than rules.

  Teddy eased toward the steps, straining to see what was happening upstairs. The carpenters had covered the top of the stairs with plastic to catch the plaster, and she couldn’t see anything. “Are they safe up there? Will that plastic hold if someone falls?”

  Kurt stood in the doorway with her. His proximity wracked her already rattled nerves. Painful experience had trained her long ago not to use her Inner Monitor. That neglect had cost her dearly. After the unfortunate episode with her thieving ex, she was determined to learn the uses of her odd talent. Still, she only dared open herself for brief amounts of time. Should she open it just to test for the ghost? She didn’t think she could warn the carpenters from down here even if she knew the spirit meant to strike. Learning how and when to use her woo-woo ability was part of the process. This time, she opted for less painful ignorance.

  “There are different types of change,” she reminded Kurt. “You could fix up the town, hide quaint bungalows in the woods, even set up campgrounds. Poor people need a getaway as much as the rich.”

  “Would you be satisfied with the income from poor people?” he asked in scorn.

  Actually, that had been her intention for this shop. She didn’t have the chance to say so.

  The dog emitted an ear-piercing howl. Alarmed, the kids looked up from their board game.

  And plaster crashed into the plastic barrier, accompanied by an unearthly shriek, a cloud of dust, and screams of terror.

  Seven

  June 26: afternoon

  * * *

  Kurt practically flung Teddy backward and out of the way of precipitating plaster. Coughing, he covered his face with his sleeve and ran through his mental checklist of emergency procedures. With no cell coverage, he couldn’t call for help. He didn’t know if the shop had a land line. If it had been the lodge, his next step after calling 911 would be to send trained employees with emergency kits to see if his contractors were injured.

  With no employees to call on, it looked like it was on him to see what had happened. Leaving Teddy rushing the children outside and shouting for help in the street, Kurt held his sleeve over his nose to keep out the worst of the dust. He eased his way up the treads, stepping carefully around the torn plastic barrier. Remembering his last experience in this stairwell, he pressed his back to the wall—just in case. This was what happened if he left his orderly office—Hillvale was chaos.

  “Bud?” he called over the dog’s howls. “Bill?”

  “Here, boss,” a rough voice on the left answer
ed, coughing. “Sorry about the mess. The ladder fell.”

  Cursing from the second worker on the right didn’t sound as reassuring.

  “Bill?” Kurt tried to see into the dusty gloom above, but the electricity had gone off again, and sunlight didn’t reach this hall.

  “That effin’ ladder was pushed,” Bill growled from the vicinity of the bigger room on the left. “I damned near broke my tailbone.”

  “There was no one here to push it,” Bud called from the kids’ room. “You didn’t fix the crossbar tight.”

  Another stream of curses followed. Kurt didn’t bother following their obvious direction and conclusion. Or ask about unearthly shrieks. For all he knew, the damned dog could hit high notes. Peeling back the remaining plastic, he emerged on the second floor to survey the debris.

  From below, Walker shouted, “Need a hand? An ambulance? Or a dump truck?”

  “A ghostbuster?” Kurt suggested, finally locating Bud inside the kids’ room, past the fallen ladder. Thank all that was holy, the dog had stopped howling. “Can you stand or do we need to call for help?” He offered his hand.

  A heavy, big-bellied man, Bud accepted his aid and hauled himself up with a groan. He rubbed at the back of his head. “Whacked myself good but nothin’s broke that I can tell.”

  “He couldn’t tell if his head broke or not,” Bill called from the other side of the stairs, emerging from the thinning dust and rubbing his bruised posterior. “I’d better take him down to the doc.”

  “I recommend you both get looked at. Insurance covers it, and you’ll receive your full day’s wages.” Kurt leaned down to see Walker coming up. “You might want to haul these two down the mountain for a look-see.”

  “At this rate, you’ll need to set Brenda up with that office she wants. A nurse practitioner would be handy.” Walker emerged from the dust to study the damage.

  Teddy followed up right behind him. “I just sent the kids and dog with Amber. Mariah is fetching Brenda. A nurse will have a better idea if anyone needs the ER.” She studied the plaster dust, the fallen ladder, and glanced up at the ceiling overhead. “Looks like you’ve uncovered the attic stairs.”