Jennie Bentley - Spackled and Spooked

“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.”

“Not really,” Derek said, turning into the master bedroom. “It’s just a hatch in the ceiling with a makeshift ladder nailed to the wall. I guess they wanted it somewhere out of the way.”

He pulled open the door to the closet and stepped in. I stopped in the doorway and watched as he started up the short ladder on the far wall of the closet. After just two rungs he was able to push the piece of plywood covering the access off into the attic. Grabbing the edges of the hole with both hands, he boosted himself up through the hole. I smiled appreciatively at the display of muscles bunching under the sleeves of his blue T-shirt.

“You coming?” he asked from upstairs as he swung his jeans-clad legs up through the hole and into the attic. The next moment his face appeared in the opening. “I’ll pull.”

“Is there anything worth seeing up there?”

Derek looked around for a second. “Not much, no. A few old boxes over in the corner. Maybe some stuff whoever cleaned the place out seventeen years ago didn’t realize was here.”

“No super-duper sound system with spooky, ghostly sound effects?”

“Afraid not. Just the boxes. And some more dust and old insulation and stuff like that. C’mere, I’ll pull you up.” He extended a tanned arm down through the hatch.

“If there’s nothing there, I think I’ll pass. Go get the boxes and hand them to me, would you? We may as well look through them.”

Derek crawled away and reappeared a minute later with an old corrugated cardboard box. “It’s heavy,” he warned, lowering it through the opening, the muscles in his arms tensing.

“I’m stronger than I look,” I answered. And added an involuntary, “Ooof!” when the box dropped into my arms. My knees buckled, and I staggered out into the bedroom, groaning, while Derek disappeared from view to gather up another box, chuckling.

There were four boxes in all, and we opened them sitting cross-legged on the floor in the master bedroom. Derek slit the tape on the first with his trusty X-Acto knife, and a cloud of dust flew skyward as he pulled the flaps apart. I sneezed.

“Old books,” he said after a moment’s examination. “Paperbacks. Romance novels from the late ’80s and early ’90s, looks like.” He wielded the X-Acto knife again. “Same thing in this one. I think Melissa used to read these. Wonder if she still does. And how that makes Ray Stenham feel.” He smirked.

“Why would it make Ray feel anything at all?” I wanted to know. I mean, we all know that just because a woman enjoys a good romance novel now and again, it doesn’t mean that she’s unfulfilled in her own relationship, right?

“Hey, anyone who drives a Hummer that big must have something to prove, don’t you think?”

“I prefer not to think about Raymond Stenham in that way,” I said.

“Because he’s not as good-looking as me?”

“Because he’s my cousin. And because I’m involved with you and shouldn’t have a need to speculate about anyone else’s… um… tools.”

Derek chuckled but didn’t pursue the subject. “This one’s full of elementary school stuff,” he said, opening the third box. “Composition notebooks, projects, drawings. Peggy must have kept her kid’s school work.”

“Open the last one.” I pulled the fourth box toward me. “If there’s anything valuable anywhere, it must be there. Nothing in these others would fetch a fortune. A first edition pre-Plum Janet Evanovich romance might be worth a few bucks on eBay, but even if every book in the box is a first edition, and autographed, we’re only talking a few thousand dollars. And I doubt anyone would want Patrick’s drawing of A-is-for-Apple or the handprint turned-into-a-turkey he made for Thanksgiving the year he was four. Although Patrick himself might like them.”

“Sorry,” Derek answered, having ripped open the last box while I was expounding. “Nothing exciting here, either. More papers. Notes. Something that looks like a manuscript. Maybe Peggy had aspirations of becoming the next big thing in romance. It’s called Tied Up in Tartan .”

“Ooooh!” I reached out.

Derek grinned. “Scottish bondage, you think? You’re not going to read it, are you?” He held on to the handful of pages as I tugged.

“Why not? It’s ours. Came with the house, right? And if it has the potential to be a bestseller, why not get it published?”

“I doubt it’s that easy,” Derek said, but he relinquished the first few pages of the manuscript anyway. It was handwritten, the cursive childishly rounded.

Iain MacNiachail, his long reddish gold hair flowing in the breeze that blew in from the North Sea, carrying with it the smell of heather and gorse, clung to the ramparts of Dunaghdrumnich Castle…

I giggled.

“I’m going back to work,” Derek announced. “C’mon, Avery. You can read the rest tonight. Let’s not waste the daylight.” He reached down for me, and I took his hand and got to my feet.

“So there was no evidence of foul play up there? No sound system, no suspicious wires, nobody hiding in a corner with a foghorn ready to make ghostly noises?”

“Nothing,” Derek said, heading for the smaller bedroom with me behind.

“So if someone’s playing with us, they didn’t hide their equipment in the attic.”

“That’s right.”

“So maybe nobody’s playing tricks on us.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Derek said. I rolled my eyes at his back as we both trotted into the small bedroom and returned to work.

An hour or so later, there was a knock on the door. A peremptory rat-tat-tat , conveying brisk impatience. Derek arched his brows, took a better hold of the crowbar, and headed out of the bedroom. I jumped off my step stool and trailed after, spackling knife in hand.

We were halfway across the living room when the knock came again, followed by a yowl. I sped up and was next to Derek when he yanked open the door, a scowl on his face and crowbar at the ready.