Spackled and Spooked (7 page)

I shook my head. “He’s not. He’s actually a very nice guy. Much nicer than anyone else I’ve ever dated.” I kept my eye on the window but couldn’t see anyone.

“You did have some bad luck with the men you got involved with in your twenties,” mother agreed diplomatically. “And then of course there was Philippe. . . .”

“Don’t remind me.” Lying, cheating, philandering—and that was without counting how he’d made me totally subjugate my creativity to his in business. “Derek isn’t like that. He values my input. He may not agree with it all the time, but when I suggest something he doesn’t like, he tells me why it won’t work or why I shouldn’t do it, instead of just putting his foot down or trying to make me feel stupid.”

There didn’t seem to be anyone on the front porch. It had probably just been one of the cats walking across the wooden boards. I had noticed before how Jemmy, with his roughly twenty pounds, could make himself sound remarkably like a human. Nevertheless, I unfolded myself from the sofa and padded toward the front door on bare feet, extolling Derek’s virtues as I went.

“He’s talented, and intelligent, and has a great sense of humor, and he was confident enough to follow his dreams and walk away from a medical career to be a home renovator instead, even if it meant possibly upsetting his father and although it definitely meant that his wife would leave him, not that she was much of a loss; things were already pretty rocky. . . .”

I had to stop to take a breath, having talked myself into a semantic corner anyway. The outside light next to the door was lit, and I peered out, seeing nothing that shouldn’t be there. Carrying on, I said, “And he’s really good-looking, although not in a flashy way; you know, the way Philippe was . . .” My ex-boyfriend favored skin-tight leather pants and flowing poet-shirts open halfway down his tanned chest, while his replacement spends most of his time in threadbare jeans and soft, faded T-shirts that make me want to snuggle closer. “And although he likes it when I dress up and look nice, he doesn’t expect me to be perfect all the time, either. It’s very relaxing, actually.”

Away from the porch, down in the yard, a shadow moved. I leaned forward until my nose hit the glass in the carved front door. It was impossible to see who—or what—was there; the darkness distorted size and shape until all I was looking at was a slightly darker blackness, something sliding along the white pickets of the fence before slipping through the gate and out into the street. It might have been a cat or a dog, or maybe a raccoon or a fox. We see them occasionally. I let out a breath I wasn’t aware I’d been holding.

“Something wrong?” my mother asked.

I straightened up. “Nothing.” She was on the West Coast, clear across the country; there was nothing she could do about someone or something in my yard. Nothing except worry, and there was no point in that. Whoever or whatever was gone anyway.

“Oh,” mother said. “Well, I’m looking forward to meeting Derek. I don’t suppose you two have any plans to come out to California anytime soon?”

“None, I’m afraid. What about you? Any plans to come back east? There’s still a lot of Aunt Inga’s stuff sitting around for you to look through, just in case there’s something you’d like to have.”

I fully expected her to say she had no plans whatsoever of coming back to Waterfield, so I was surprised when she hesitated. “Between you and me, Avery, I’m trying to convince Noel to go to Maine for Christmas. I miss the snow, and being a native Californian, he’s never experienced a true New England winter. But it isn’t a done deal yet. I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

“I’ll put Derek on alert,” I said. Mother giggled, and we finished the conversation by making plans. It wasn’t until I was in bed, listening to the yowling complaints of Jemmy and Inky, who didn’t want to be locked in the utility room instead of stalking prey in the night outside, that I once again remembered the shadow in the yard. But by then I was so tired that all I had time to do was wonder who or what might have been sneaking around in Aunt Inga’s yard in the middle of the night, before I fell asleep.

4

“This,” Derek said the next morning, taking it out of my hand, “is a TT-500 romex connector, also known as a Tom Two Way.”

“A what?” It seemed a long name for the small, gray doohickey now lying in his palm.

“A connector that’s used to clamp an electrical wire to a junction box,” Derek explained. “Why do you ask?” He tossed it up in the air and caught it again.

“No reason, I guess. I found it in Aunt Inga’s yard this morning.”

Derek grinned. “No kidding. Only the one? I appreciate your bringing it to me, Avery, but they’re a dime a dozen, almost literally. I buy a hundred for less than twenty bucks, and there’re probably fifteen more of them floating around your house and yard right now.” He stuck it in his pocket anyway.

“So it’s yours?”

Derek looked at me for a moment. “Well, it’s not like it has my name on it or anything, but who else’s would it be?”

“No idea. I thought I saw something in the yard last night, so I hoped I’d found a clue, but I guess not.”

“Afraid not,” Derek said. “I must have dropped it this summer, while we were working on the house. Sorry, Tink.”

“No problem. It was probably just my imagination anyway. Or an animal.”

“You sure?” He looked around, brows knitted. There was nothing to see, however. No footprints, no broken branches, no conveniently dropped handkerchief with the prowler’s initials . . . not even a paw print or a hair ball. All I’d found during my early-morning search was the small Tom Two Way, and that had turned out to be a red herring.

“I’m sure,” I said firmly. “It was just my imagination. Or the Weimaraner from three doors down.”

“The ghost dog?”

I nodded. The Weimaraner is smoky gray with yellow eyes, and it does look ghostly. “Sometimes it gets out. And chases the cats. I’m sure that’s what it was. You ready to go?”

“As soon as I get the cats out of the laundry room,” Derek said and went to suit action to words.

That day, the footsteps came back twice.

In the morning, Derek and I were hard at work removing the kitchen cabinets. I had excused myself for a visit to the bathroom, and while I was there, I heard someone come down the hallway. Naturally I assumed it was Derek, and started talking to him through the door. When he didn’t respond, I raised my voice and heard him answer, faintly, from the kitchen. Since he couldn’t very well be in two places at once, obviously he wasn’t making the footsteps, which kept moving past the door even as we were calling to each other. However, he’d also been too far away to hear them, and by the time he arrived in the hallway, at a run and skid, the footsteps had reached the end of the hall and stopped. One funny thing: They were still muffled and soft, as if they were walking on carpet, while the hallway now had hardwood floors. But that’s the way it is with ghosts, I’ve heard: There’s a nun in England somewhere who supposedly walks a half a foot below the current floor of whatever it is she haunts. Ghosts walk where the floor was when they were walking on it.

In the middle of the afternoon, the footsteps came back, and this time we both heard them. By then, the kitchen cabinets were history, thrown in the Dumpster, and we were in the small bedroom across from the main bath. I was spackling holes in the walls and Derek was tearing out the makeshift shelves in the closet. When the footsteps started, we both froze, ears pricked. I stayed where I was, balanced on the step stool, my arm with the putty knife raised above my head. Derek, on the other hand, leapt for the hallway and stood there, hands on his hips and sandy eyebrows drawn into a scowl, while the footsteps essentially walked right through him and continued down the hall. He turned around to watch, not that there was anything to see.

“What did it feel like?” I asked when the footsteps had stopped and he came back into the room, chewing his bottom lip in what was either agitation or deep thought. “I’ve heard that encountering a ghost is like plunging into ice water.”

“You have, huh? Sorry, this didn’t feel like anything at all. I heard the steps walk toward me then walk away. I didn’t feel anything.”

“So you don’t think it’s a ghost?” I rubbed my arm with my free hand, to get rid of the goose pimples. Derek might not be cold, but I was.

“What happened to ‘there’s no such thing as ghosts’?” Derek asked.

“That was before I heard footsteps walking around in an empty house,” I answered.

“There are other explanations, you know.”

“Like what?”

“Somebody’s trying to scare us.”

“I thought about that.” I nodded. “Specifically, I thought about
you
trying to scare
me
.”

Derek rolled his eyes. “What are you suggesting? That I rigged a sound system and set it off by remote while I was away?”

“Or on a timer.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Derek said. “What would I gain by scaring you, Avery? If you refuse to come back to work, I’ll have to do everything by myself.”

He had a point. He had also brought up another one. “What would anyone else have to gain by scaring us both?”

“I’m not scared,” Derek said. I rolled my eyes.

“Of course not. Pardon me. I’m sure it would take a lot more than a few unexplainable footsteps in an empty house to scare
you
. You didn’t answer my question.”

“No idea,” Derek said cheerfully. “Maybe there’s a safe full of cash under the floorboards, and somebody’s looking for it? Maybe Mr. Murphy was a jewel thief and the Hope Diamond is hidden in the chimney? Maybe somebody else wanted to buy the house, and they’re upset that we got it instead, and now they’re trying to force us out so they can take over and renovate the house and make all the money?”

“If so, wouldn’t they have come to us with an offer already? What’s the good of getting rid of us if they can’t be assured of getting the house? For all they know, someone else is trying to buy it from us, and we’ll sell it to them instead. You’ve been in the crawlspace, so you should have been able to see if there was a safe under the floorboards anywhere. And if there is something valuable hidden in the house, why wait until now to start looking? They had seventeen years to find it while the house was just sitting here.”

“Fine,” Derek said sulkily. “What’s your suggestion?”

“I’m not sure. But it seems to me that either there’s a ghost walking down the hallway at five past two every afternoon, or someone is playing a joke on us.”

“Why would someone do that?”

“Because it’s fun to see us sweat?”

“Who’s sweating?” Derek asked. “And nobody’s here to see our reactions anyway. But if someone is doing it, there’ll be evidence somewhere. Wires, speakers, something like that. At the very least a tape recorder or something in the attic.”

“There’s an attic?” I glanced up at the ceiling. Considering how low the roof was, I hadn’t considered the possibility of more space up above.

Derek nodded. “I stuck my head up there when I first looked at the place. The entrance is in the master bedroom closet.”

He headed down the hallway, following the path the footsteps had taken. I trailed behind, looking around. The carpets were gone, so there was nowhere to hide a trip wire, and there were no suspicious holes in the walls or unexplained electrical thingamajigs, either. Just the stuff you’d expect to be there: switch plates and outlets for the electrical system, an old-fashioned phone jack or two, and the vents for the heat and air. “Funny place for an attic access.”