Chapter 3
Chapter Three
The more she researched Alba Sanchez, though, the more Delia wondered if she might be dealing with something much more than a simple haunting.
Oh, the woman had definitely passed away last fall…in November, just as Aaron had said…but Delia still found a few mentions online about her that sent up more than one red flag.
The supernatural kind of flag, anyway.
It sounded as if Alba had been something of a curandera, or herbalist, who used folk remedies from her native Mexico to help others in the family, as well as many others in the Laughlin area who weren’t satisfied with the options offered by the more traditional medical community.
She delivered babies and sat with people at their sickbeds, and more than one person claimed they’d been miraculously cured of cancer or MS or some other autoimmune disease thanks to the medicine she’d provided.
Not so long ago, Delia might have thought this was all a load of crap, just the placebo effect working in overdrive.
Now, though, after realizing that demons…
and angels…and all sorts of other supernatural entities and powers were very real, she knew her mind was much more open to the possibility that there was a lot more in heaven and earth than she’d ever imagined.
Which meant she had to allow the idea that Aaron’s grandmother had possessed some sort of magical healing gifts.
However, some other items Delia had found — such as mentions of Alba organizing potlucks and fundraisers at her local church, St. John the Baptist — made it sound as if she’d also been very devout.
Had Alba ever experienced some dissonance in trying to reconcile her strict Catholic beliefs with the powers she’d apparently possessed?
Hard to say. Then again, Delia would have thought that someone so obviously religious wouldn’t have any trouble moving on. After all, Alba must surely have believed in Heaven, and if she’d spent a good part of her life helping people, then she should have had an express ticket to the pearly gates.
Delia had been doing most of her research on her computer at the office, since she had just enough appointments booked that Monday that she wouldn’t be allowed the luxury of working from home.
In fact, she hadn’t gotten as far as she would have liked with her investigation into Alba Sanchez, since between writing up an offer for a home she’d shown the previous Friday and fielding phone calls, her free time had been fairly limited.
In fact, Delia had to turn away from the computer once again to answer the phone, only this time, it was welcome news.
The loan on Caleb’s house had been fully funded, and that meant the title company would be sending the cashier’s check by courier later this afternoon.
That was pretty much what she’d told him was going to happen, but still, until the money was physically in his hands, she knew she’d still find herself worrying whether something catastrophic was going to happen at the last minute to prevent him from getting his payout.
She was just about to call him and give him the good news — and tell him he should be able to swing by after three to pick up the check — when her phone rang.
Not a client, though.
Her friend Prudence.
Delia had asked Pru to look into Alba Sanchez as well, just because she knew that Pru’s private detective license made her a lot more efficient when it came to digging up information about people.
However, she was still a little surprised to hear from her friend, just because Pru generally preferred to text rather than call.
“What’s up?” Delia asked after she lifted the phone to her ear.
“Found some stuff,” Pru replied, sounding cheerful.
Then again, she was usually in her happy place when she got a chance to do some investigating that didn’t involve cheating spouses or insurance fraud, so her upbeat tone wasn’t too surprising.
“Like what?” Delia didn’t think Prudence could have found anything too incriminating…Alba Sanchez didn’t seem like the sort of person who would have too many buried bodies in her past…but you never knew.
“The house you think is haunted?”
“Yes?” Delia replied cautiously. She hoped Pru hadn’t discovered that the place was reputed to be a site for satanic rituals or something similarly messy. That would make it a lot harder to sell.
“Well, it’s one of the older homes in town. Sounds like the Sanchez family came to Laughlin in the 1940s to get jobs while Davis Dam was being built, but unlike a lot of other people, they stuck around afterward instead of moving on to the next project.”
Okay, so they’d been there for going on eighty years. That might not have sounded like much to people from the East Coast, where local history went back a lot further, but it was practically an epoch in Nevada time.
“I don’t know if the ghost has been around that long, though,” Delia replied, realizing how dubious she sounded. “No one ever mentioned any supernatural activity in the house until recently, so I really think the ghost is the woman who died there last fall.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the ghost,” Pru said.
“No, I just found it interesting that the Sanchezes have always owned the house. Since they’ve been in town so long, they’ve done pretty well for themselves — I guess Alba’s husband Carlo was Don Laughlin’s right-hand man in the 1980s and was involved in a lot of the casino development back then — but even though they bought a big house in Bullhead City across the river at around the same time, they always made sure someone in the family lived the original house that Carlo’s parents built.
It sounds like it was Carlo’s older sister’s home for a while.
She was there for around ten years and left it to her kids in her will, but they never actually lived in it.
And after Carlo passed away, Alba moved in. ”
On the surface, it didn’t sound so strange that she might want to live in the home her late husband’s family had built.
If Alba and Carlo had shared a more spacious house on the other side of the river…
Bullhead City, Arizona, was actually much bigger than Laughlin itself…
maybe Alba had decided it would be better to downsize rather than rattle around in a McMansion all by herself.
It wasn’t as if Delia hadn’t seen that same story repeat itself plenty of times over the years.
Living in a large home by yourself could be challenging as you got older, especially if you had any serious health issues to deal with.
And as for keeping the house in the family, well, Delia had seen that scenario play out plenty of times as well.
The older the generation, the more they wanted to cling to what might have been the house a father or grandfather had built.
It wasn’t until those properties got passed down to the kids or grandkids that they went on the market, mostly because the people who inherited them wanted the cash and didn’t want to deal with the complications and expense of a lengthy reno on an old house.
The only really surprising thing here was that Carlo’s nieces and nephews hadn’t sold the property outright when their mother died, rather than hang on to it so their aunt could move back to her original home during her final years.
“Any record of Alba buying the house back from her nieces and nephews?” Delia asked.
“Not that I could see. The property records are kind of muddy, to be honest. Carlo was definitely on the deed, but it looks like giving it to Lorena — Carlo’s older sister — was more of a handshake thing than anything else.”
Again, probably because they knew they weren’t going to sell the place or even rent it, so the legalities wouldn’t have seemed like that big a deal.
“What about Carlo and Lorena’s house in Bullhead City?” Delia asked next, and Pru replied right away.
“Oh, that one was much more cut and dried. Carlo left it to Aaron Sanchez’s father, Joseph, and he sold it about six months later. Made a chunk on it, too, since it was right on the river and was paid off. It went for a little over a million.”
That was a lot of money. The amount involved made Delia wonder why Aaron hadn’t asked his parents for a short-term loan, since — well, unless they’d immediately gone out and gambled it all away — they must have been sitting on a decent chunk of cash.
But it was very possible that he hadn’t wanted to let on how dire his financial circumstances actually were.
Taking a percentage of the sale of the old homestead was one thing, since he’d be providing the necessary expertise to make sure it went for top dollar.
Coming right out and having to admit that he’d lost his job with Keller Williams and that his supposed business partners…
or whatever Aegis Holdings had been to him…
had gone out of business might have been too big a blow to his pride.
No way of knowing why Aaron’s parents had decided to sell the place after it seemed the Sanchezes had worked damn hard to keep the old house in the family. It didn’t sound as if they needed the money.
Delia supposed she could have reached out to him and asked, but that sort of question felt awfully intrusive…and would also let Aaron know that she’d been doing some serious digging into the situation.
After all, she didn’t need to know all the ins and outs of his family dynamics. It was enough to know that they wanted to get rid of the place, and that it seemed to be haunted now when it hadn’t been before.
Oh, and also that Aaron’s grandmother appeared by all accounts to have been something of a witch, although Delia had a feeling that the clearly devout Alba Sanchez would have given them holy hell — pardon the expression — if anyone had dared to say such a thing to her face.
“I can keep poking around if you want,” Pru ventured, and Delia realized she’d waited just a little too long to respond to her friend’s comment.