Page 2

Chapter Two

“Is it haunted?” the woman in her too-loud polyester shirt and overly tight jeans asked, and Delia Dunne had to force herself not to roll her eyes.

Kinda can’t tell for sure until we’re inside, ran through her mind, although she kept the snarky words to herself. Snark generally didn’t help when you were dealing with antsy clients.

“Let’s go in and find out, shall we?” she replied, knowing she was over-compensating and now sounded way too perky.

But her client — Marti Fields, a recent divorcée who was parlaying some of her settlement into buying a new house — didn’t seem to notice anything off about her tone. “All right.”

Marti’s lack of enthusiasm was obvious…even though she was the one who’d been insistent on this quickie showing…but Delia pushed any doubts aside. After all, it was pretty normal to feel nervous about walking into a house that might or might not be haunted.

She already had the code to the lockbox, so she entered it, pulled out the keys, and then opened the front door. A waft of cool air drifted out to meet her, telling her that someone had forgotten to turn off the air conditioning. Wasteful, especially since temperatures on this early January day were floating around in the upper sixties and there wasn’t any need for the A/C. Either the house cleaners or the people who’d come in to clean the carpets had forgotten to shut it off.

Well, she’d turn it off once they were done here and then let her mother know, since it was her listing and she’d need to tell the cleaners to be more careful next time.

Delia was at the house in more of an adjunct capacity.

Technically, the state of Nevada didn’t require sellers or listing agents to disclose when someone had died on a property, but a lot of them did anyway, figuring it was better to be open about such things. And even when people tried to be tight-lipped, the information often got out there anyway, thanks to several websites where all you had to do was enter an address to discover whether there had been a death in a house.

In this particular case, the home was a cute one-story in Sunrise Manor where the previous owner’s troubled son had overdosed in the spare bedroom. She’d put the house on the market almost immediately following the funeral, telling Linda Dunne — Delia’s mother and the listing agent — that she couldn’t stay there another moment.

“I want to believe Troy has moved on,” the woman had said during a tearful meeting with mother and daughter agents. “But I keep hearing strange noises, and I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Privately, Delia thought the source of those noises was probably packrats or other rodents, since the house backed up to a golf course and the neighborhood was already known to have a critter problem, but she’d dutifully agreed to check it out. However, houses in that development were going like the proverbial hotcakes, and she hadn’t had a chance to come by and scope the place out on her own before Marti called the real estate office and asked for a showing.

Linda had explained the situation, but Marti was insistent, so Delia agreed to be the one to do the showing…and check for any ghosts who might have decided to take up residence in the modest Spanish-style home.

She had to admit that her first impression was of a place that was very neutral and didn’t have the slightest whiff of anything supernatural about it. Then again, a 1990s-vintage tract home in suburban Las Vegas was the sort of setting that didn’t exactly lend itself to the spooky or arcane.

“Everything seems fine so far,” she told Marti, who had followed her inside but was also hanging back, obviously ready to let Delia take the full force of any ghostly attacks that might occur. “Why don’t you take a look at the kitchen and the great room, and I’ll check out the bedrooms and bathrooms before you go back there?”

“That’s a very good idea,” Marti replied at once, clearly relieved. She had bleached hair with obvious roots and wore way too much mascara, but she had a friendly smile. “And maybe I’ll take a look at the backyard, too.”

In Delia’s opinion, there wasn’t much to look at — the previous owner hadn’t bothered with anything in terms of landscaping, so there were a couple of palm trees in desperate need of trimming, a bunch of gravel, and not much else — but possibly Marti wanted to see if there was enough room for a pool or something.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll be just down the hall if you need me.”

The other woman nodded but turned away almost at once, intent on taking a look at the amount of storage the kitchen offered. Delia thought that seemed like the perfect opportunity to head toward the bedrooms and make a quick assessment.

Even though she knew the overdose had happened in the larger of the two secondary bedrooms, she headed for the main suite anyway. Ghosts didn’t always stay in the exact spot where they’d died, and besides, this was her first chance to get a good look at the property. Although their mother-daughter team shared responsibilities equally and Delia often handled listings that didn’t have anything supernatural going on at all, Linda normally would have passed this one on to her daughter, thanks to the death that had occurred in the house. However, Delia had been out doing a showing when the owner of the Sunrise Manor house came in to get it listed, so her mother had taken care of the paperwork.

Not much to see in the master suite, that was for sure. As far as Delia could tell, the only thing really wrong with this place was that it was stuck in the late ’90s and desperately in need of an update. The white tile in the bath and beige carpet in the bedroom had probably been installed when the house was built, along with the garden tub that took up too much space in the bathroom and the cramped fiberglass shower surround that, while clean, had some stains that even the most dedicated scrubbing couldn’t get out.

Dutifully, she stood in the middle of the bedroom and closed her eyes, even as she held her hands at her sides, palms facing slightly upward. She couldn’t say exactly why, but that position always seemed to work best when she was trying to determine whether a house was inhabited by spirits who didn’t know it was time to move on.

Nothing at all here, though…at least, not in the main suite.

While she didn’t exactly sigh, she did allow herself a breath before she headed over to the secondary bedroom where the boy had died. He’d only been nineteen, and Delia wondered if someone who had so much life remaining might have left more psychic residue than a person who’d departed this plane after a long and happy existence.

Impossible to tell whether the boy had put his personal stamp on the small, square room when he lived here, because now it wasn’t much more than a white box with beige carpet. Once again, she paused in the middle of the space and allowed her mind to be still so she could see if she was able to pick up on any ripples in the energy of the bedroom, anything to show that he lingered here.

And…bupkis. Delia didn’t pretend to be infallible, but she’d been doing this for more than ten years now, ever since she was eighteen and had walked into a condo her mother was about to put on the market and had sensed the presence of something she couldn’t see, and she couldn’t feel a single thing in the house.

Which was good, right? If she couldn’t get even the slightest hint that the boy’s spirit remained in the home, then that meant he’d moved on and there was no reason in the world why Marti Fields couldn’t put in an offer, secure a short escrow since she was preapproved and had twenty percent to put down on the place, and start a new life in her new house.

Even though Delia doubted she’d sense anything, she went into the smallest bedroom as well, a spot barely ten feet by ten feet. She couldn’t imagine actually trying to fit a bed in there, but she supposed it would work fairly well as an office.

Just as she began to close her eyes and reach out for any ghostly vibes, a terrified shriek came from the kitchen, followed by the unmistakable grinding sound of the garbage disposal.

“Help! Help! ”

Delia bolted out of the bedroom and ran to the kitchen, where Marti’s head had been smashed against the counter by invisible hands — and it looked as if those same hands were trying to drag her into the sink, where the garbage disposal whirred away.

Holy shit.

She smashed the switch that activated the damn thing, but it kept going. So much for that idea.

Instead, she grabbed Marti by the shoulders and pulled her away from the sink. For just a moment, Delia could sense some kind of resistance, as if whatever had caught hold of the other woman had no intention of letting her go.

But then it disappeared, and she stumbled backward, sent off balance by the sudden release of pressure. Gasping, Marti put her hands on the Formica countertop and straightened before looking around her with wide, staring eyes, eyes made even paler and frantic by the black mascara that had been smudged all around them.

“You couldn’t pay me to live here!” she spluttered, and, hanging on to her purse’s shoulder strap as if it was some sort of lifeline, she ran from the room.

Seeming to sense she was gone, the garbage disposal abruptly shut off.

Delia planted her hands on her hips. She knew what she needed to do next…and wasn’t looking forward to it.

“The ghost attacked Ms. Fields?” her mother asked, sounding shocked, and Delia nodded as best she could with her iPhone wedged under one ear.

“Sure looked like it to me,” she replied, fishing around in her purse for what she privately thought of as her ghostly first aid kit.

Except in her particular case, it was more about getting ghosts to move on rather than fixing what was wrong with them. She wasn’t the ghost-whisperer, just someone with a real estate license who used her weird talent to sense spirits and then encourage them to try a new plane of existence so she could sell the property they’d been haunting.

Although she couldn’t see her mother right then, Delia had to believe she was shaking her head. “We’ve never had a ghost get violent like that.”

No, they hadn’t. Oh, sure, there had been spirits that knocked on the walls or turned the water on and off, or that picked up random objects and moved them from one room to another. In all those cases, though, it had felt much more as if the ghosts were just messing with people rather than trying to cause any real harm.

Whereas she was pretty sure the ghost in this house would have been just fine with turning Marti Fields’ face into hamburger.

Delia tried her best to banish that horrible image from her mind.

“It’s kind of unusual,” she said, fingers closing around what had used to be a purse-sized first aid kit and which now held the kind of small, white candles usually employed in those Swedish angel chimes people used to decorate at Christmas, a tiny vial of holy water, a chunk of palo santo wood for cleansing the air, and a small glass ashtray she’d stolen from Caesar’s Palace years earlier while still going through her rebellious stage. “And I think we lost the sale.”

Her mother released a breath. “Well, I’m not happy to hear that, but I suppose it’s understandable. Just get the place cleared as best you can, and we’ll have to hope the next showing has a better outcome. It’s a good thing that houses in Sunrise Manor are moving quickly right now — I’m sure we’ll find another buyer soon enough.”

From some people, that might have been optimism without any real foundation in reality. Coming from Linda Dunne, it was pretty much a certainty. Delia knew she might have been a little biased, but although Las Vegas boasted plenty of first-class real estate agents, she had yet to meet anyone who scrutinized the town’s sales trends and housing data the way her mother did.

“Oh, sure,” she said, then shifted her phone to her other ear, since it was starting to grind the backings of her multiple piercings into her skull. She’d gotten all those earrings back when she was the lead singer for Final Girl, the band she and some friends had played in during their senior year of high school and the first couple of years of college, and had never bothered to get rid of the rows of little garnet studs even though she dressed a lot more conservatively now that she was selling houses.

“But I have a showing at four,” her mother went on, “so I need to get out of the office. Are you going to be all right there by yourself?”

A very good question. The ghost didn’t seem to have directed any of its ire toward her so far, but Delia knew better than to allow herself a false sense of security. Spirits could be capricious.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just about to get everything set up, and then I’ll see if I can convince this guy that it’s time to move on to the next world.”

“I’ll call to check in after my showing,” her mother told her, and Delia allowed herself a small roll of her eyes since she knew Linda couldn’t see her.

Maybe one of these days, she’d realize her daughter was a grown woman of twenty-eight and had been doing this sort of thing for almost a decade.

“Okay,” she replied. “But I’ll probably be done by then.”

“Even better,” her mother said. “Because I just got another message about the Sunrise Manor house, so the sooner it’s cleaned up, the better.”

“It’ll be done before you know it,” Delia promised, and hoped she wasn’t blowing too much sunshine on the subject. While she’d sent dozens of spirits on by that point, she’d never encountered one as violent as the ghost that appeared to be inhabiting this house.

“Good luck!”

Her mother ended the call there, and Delia gratefully plucked the phone out from under her ear and tossed it into her purse. Then she reached in the inner pocket and pulled out the Zippo lighter she’d bought at a smoke shop years earlier before she kicked the clove cigarette habit she’d picked up while playing with her band, then lit the little stick of palo santo.

Cleansing light, cleansing energy, she thought. The smoke from the piece of sacred wood began to drift upward, and although she didn’t breathe it in, she still allowed herself to stand there and smell its acrid yet somehow also aromatic scent, knowing how much it helped to clear the air, so to speak.

Once she knew it was well and truly kindled, she set the piece of palo santo down on the ashtray and then lit a white chime candle and set it next to the piece of palo santo. She’d already rubbed the bottom of the candle with some sticky paste that would allow it to stand upright in the ashtray, since she didn’t want to have to carry around a candlestick in addition to all the other junk she already had in her ghost-banishing arsenal.

Something shimmered at the edge of her vision, and she turned to see the ghostly outline of a gawky male figure hovering in the air a few feet on the other side of the kitchen island where she’d set up the candle and palo santo.

It sent her an inquisitive look, and Delia did her best to smile.

“Hi, there,” she said. Most of the time, the ghosts she sensed never appeared at all, were only a whisper of a presence, but every once in a while, they materialized enough so she could see them. Clearly, this spirit was a strong one…but she already knew that. Otherwise, it would never have been able to manipulate matter in such a way that it could flip the switch for the garbage disposal, let alone force Marti Fields’ head into the sink.

However, it wasn’t making any threatening movements toward her, so Delia decided it was probably safe to proceed.

“Was this your house?” she asked, and the ghostly figure dipped its head. Sure, she’d already guessed that was the case, but she figured it would be easier to start with an innocuous question and proceed from there. One other time, she’d communicated with a spirit in the same way, with her doing all the talking and it only nodding or shaking its head, but the experience was still a little jarring.

And since this ghost seemed to understand what she was saying, she knew she needed to get to the bottom of its behavior…while at the same time convincing it that there was no reason for it to remain on this earthly plane any longer.

“Why did you do that to Marti?” she asked next, frankly curious. The attack had seemed deeply personal, but Delia knew the other woman had never set foot in the house before. A sudden thought prompted her to add, “Did she remind you of someone?”

The spirit faded in and out and then nodded again, even as it mimicked the motion of a person rocking a baby in their arms.

Oh, boy. They were moving into dangerous territory a lot more quickly than she’d anticipated.

“Did Marti remind you of your mother?”

Again, the spirit seemed to flicker, like an incandescent bulb that was about to breathe its last.

The lights in the kitchen flicked on and off, and the garbage disposal growled. Delia made herself hold her ground, even though she’d never encountered phenomena like this before and wasn’t sure what she should do next.

What she really wanted to do was grab her purse and bolt out the door, but professional pride made her stay where she was. No way was she going to run out of here like a scared little kindergartner.

“And you were angry with your mother for some reason?”

Before Delia could even begin to react, the spirit moved toward her with blinding speed.

Moved through her.

It went through her mind’s eye with a flash — a woman with unnaturally blonde hair that looked very similar to Marti’s drunkenly laughing with a man who helped her onto the sofa, where they kissed and fondled one another until she passed out.

The man…who looked like he was probably in his early forties, with thinning brown hair and a goatee…leaving the comatose woman on the couch so he could go down the hallway to the bedroom where her fourteen-year-old boy slept….

Delia closed her eyes, and the horrible visions abruptly ceased. But in that moment, she knew everything — how the boy had been abused and gathered the courage to go to his mother with his terrible secret…how she’d insisted he was lying.

How he’d buried his pain and his shame with drugs and alcohol, finally succumbing in that very same room only two days after his nineteenth birthday.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry no one listened to you.”

The spirit had reappeared by that point, and now floated in the air only a few feet away from her. He seemed more solid now, solid enough that she could see his eyes had been blue, almost the same clear, azure shade as the cool January skies outside.

“I believe you,” she said. “I saw what happened. But your mother isn’t here. She put the house on the market and moved out after what happened.”

The ghost’s mouth moved, forming a single word. Where?

“I don’t know,” Delia replied, even as she wondered whether she would have told him if she actually knew his mother’s current address. It had to be somewhere in the listing paperwork, but Linda was the one who’d set all that up.

Honestly, considering the way the woman had ignored her son’s pleas for help, she deserved to be haunted by his vengeful spirit for all eternity.

But Delia knew that wasn’t why she was here. No, she’d come to the house to ascertain whether there was a ghost at all — which there certainly was — and help it…help him …move on.

“She’s paying for what happened,” she said clearly. “Paying every day, knowing she should have listened and didn’t. And her blindness made her lose her only son. That’s her own hell, and she’s living in it. You, on the other hand — you told me your story. I see you, and I believe you. Now, though…now it’s time to let this place go. It’s time for you to go on to the next phase of your existence.”

The spirit cocked its head to one side, now looking confused.

“It’s okay,” Delia said, doing her best to sound confident and encouraging at the same time. “I’ve done this with lots of people. They get a little confused sometimes about where they need to go, but I know they go to a better place than this one.”

Well, that was what she wanted to tell herself. A self-described agnostic, she’d never believed in Heaven and Hell or any sort of biblical interpretation of the afterlife. Lots of reading on the subject — and talking to the mediums in town who were the real deal and not just fakes trying to bilk unsuspecting tourists out of their hard-earned dollars — told her that something waited on the other side, even if she couldn’t say for sure exactly what it might be.

A new life with new lessons to be learned, if the mediums were correct.

For a long moment, the spirit continued to float there, those blue eyes — the only thing about the apparition that had any real color — fixed on her face. However, Delia guessed something must have gotten through to it, because it lifted one hand, possibly in farewell, and then disappeared.

She continued to stand next to the island, though, partly because she’d had one or two instances where she thought a ghost had taken itself off, only to be startled when the phenomenon she was investigating started right back up again…and partly because she knew she still was a little off-balance from what the boy’s spirit had shown her.

Some things weren’t meant to be seen.

But after a minute or two passed, she realized it truly was gone.

Thank God.

Businesslike now, she snuffed the small white chime candle by lifting it and pressing the wick against the ashtray — a psychic had told her never to blow out candles used in rituals, since doing so would blow away any good juju she might have summoned — and turned on the water in the sink so she could safely douse the stick of palo santo.

“Peace be on this place,” she said simply. A while back, she’d started saying that after she was done cleaning a house, and although she didn’t know for sure whether it made any difference at all, she thought the words made a nice end cap for her rituals.

Just as she was returning her cleansing kit to her purse, her phone rang from somewhere inside. She scrabbled for it, fingers closing around the wallet case as the iPhone rang a third time.

“Delia Dunne, Dunne and Dunne Realty,” she said.

“Hello, Ms. Dunne.” It was a man’s voice, deep and friendly, although she didn’t think she’d ever heard it before. “A friend gave me your number. I heard that you handle certain…supernatural…problems?”

Well, she supposed that was one way of looking at it. No point in denying what he’d just said, not when her services were some of the Las Vegas real estate community’s worst-kept secrets.

“I do,” she said briskly. “Are you concerned about a particular property you’re interested in buying?”

“Not exactly,” the man replied. He hesitated, as if deciding how he should proceed, and then added, “Tell me — what do you know about demons?”