Chapter 4
Chapter Four
At least Caleb had finally relented. Or rather, she’d agreed to check in with him regularly while she was out of town, and even though Delia could tell he would much rather have accompanied her to Laughlin, he’d backed off enough to say that should work…
but if more than an hour passed and he didn’t hear from her, then he’d jump in his car and blaze a trail down there to find out what had happened.
She supposed she had to be content with that.
Before he’d left her office, she handed over printouts of some additional auction properties she thought might work well as flips, homes that weren’t priced too crazy and also didn’t need such extensive renovations that he couldn’t still make a decent profit on each of them.
He hadn’t looked too thrilled, but he hadn’t argued, either, and had told her he’d check them out. For all she knew, he’d do that before she even got on the road, since she had that one client at ten-thirty to handle and wasn’t sure whether she’d be able to leave the office before noon.
As it turned out, though, the house showings on Tuesday morning didn’t take as long as she’d expected, since her client fell in love with the first property and didn’t want to look at any others.
Because she’d been unexpectedly gifted some extra time, she texted Aaron to see if he could meet with her at one instead of three.
He replied that meeting earlier would be great — she had a feeling he wanted to get all this over with as quickly as possible — so she stopped at In-N-Out on her way out of town and grabbed an early lunch before heading down to Laughlin.
As she took a bite of her burger, though, she couldn’t quite help experiencing just the slightest twinge of guilt.
If she’d taken Caleb up on his offer to accompany her, they could have gotten these burgers together, and maybe added some candy or a couple of Little Debbies or something equally calorie-laden and unhealthy for the return trip to Las Vegas.
No, better for her to be doing this alone.
She hadn’t heard from him this morning, so she didn’t know whether he’d gone to look at the auction properties already or whether he’d put the errand off until later in the day, figuring she wouldn’t get back from her ghost-whispering mission until sometime after five or six at the very earliest.
If he was going to look at the houses after lunch, then at least she knew he’d be safely occupied for a while.
It was possible she shouldn’t even be looking at the situation that way — she’d known he was only trying to help when he offered to come along, and was doing his best to keep her safe — but she still didn’t like the hidden assumption that she couldn’t handle whatever was thrown at her.
As she’d told him yesterday, she’d been doing this kind of thing for a long time.
The drive wasn’t anything to write home about, just long stretches of dry desert and asphalt that shimmered from the heat and created multiple mirages on the highway ahead of her.
Since she’d gone this way plenty of times before, she’d known what to expect, and had her old school punk playlist queued up on her iPhone, X and the Circle Jerks and Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys and a bunch of others whose raucous tunes would effectively kill the silence inside her little Hyundai Kona.
That music had been the soundtrack for most of her high school and college years, and although she didn’t listen to it as much as she used to, she still liked to break it out when she knew she’d need something to fill up the monotony of a long drive — or to give her the energy for a task she disliked, such as cleaning out the fish tank at home.
She had a housekeeper who came by twice a month, but she would never expect Lupe to deal with that tank.
And as “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline” started to blare through the speakers, Delia couldn’t help smiling at herself.
She wondered what the eighteen-year-old version of herself, lead singer for Final Girl, the chick who wouldn’t take off her Doc Martens even in hundred-degree weather, would think of real estate agent Delia with her cleaning lady and her mortgage and her carefully renovated suburban home.
She’d probably think she was a total sellout.
Oh, well.
Off in the distance, the tall shapes of the casinos that clustered along the riverfront began to rise against the desert’s yellow expanse, and when she passed the turnoff for the Davis Dam, she knew she was getting close.
Onto Casino Drive, and then another turn onto L Street, moving past what felt like acres of trailer and RV parks.
So far, she hadn’t seen a single real house, and she wondered if her nav was pointing her in the wrong direction somehow.
But then she noted a cluster of cottonwoods and willows and a single driveway with a gate, and she realized that was where she was supposed to turn off.
At first, she couldn’t see anything of the house at all, but once she was past the trees that surrounded the property, she spied a white-painted two-story home with light blue shutters, kind of your standard American farmhouse in appearance and definitely incongruous amidst all the RVs and casinos that otherwise dominated the Laughlin landscape.
A black BMW was parked in front of a detached structure that Delia guessed was the garage. The car had to be Aaron’s, so it didn’t look as if the finance company had repo’d it yet.
Or maybe he’d borrowed some money from family to get his payments up to date. Either way, it wasn’t her business…and she wouldn’t ask.
She came to a stop next to the BMW and turned off her Hyundai’s engine, then got out.
Almost at once, a hot, dry wind tugged at her hair, even though she’d pulled it back into a ponytail.
Before she’d left work, she’d gone into the bathroom and changed out of her skirt, heels, and blouse into jeans and a sleeveless top and some sandals, an outfit she’d brought with her after she realized the day before that it would be better to be dressed practically for this mission.
Just in case.
Almost as soon as she’d gotten out of her little SUV, Aaron emerged onto the front porch of the house. He looked much better than he had yesterday, since it seemed as if he’d gotten a haircut and a decent night’s sleep in the interim.
“Hey, there,” he called. “Did you have any trouble finding the place?”
“No,” she said, then made her way along the little gravel path that wound its way to the door.
The grass surrounding the path was yellowed and in definite need of a watering, and again, she could tell that Aaron’s great-grandparents obviously hadn’t worried about fitting in with the desert landscape, not with that lawn and all the trees that surrounded the property.
“Although I’m starting to wonder if this is the only real house in Laughlin. ”
He grinned at her as she came up the porch steps. “No, there are real houses, but most of them are to the south of here, near the Colorado River bend. My family hung onto this place even though developers kept trying to buy them out.”
Delia could see why anyone who’d built the RV parks or the casinos would have wanted this plot of land, since it did sort of sit right in the middle of what was otherwise mostly commercial real estate.
Pru hadn’t mentioned anything about that, although Delia guessed all those offers — if they’d even happened — had been informal, verbal affairs and nothing that would have been put in the public record.
“I’m glad they did,” she said. “It’s always fun to come across these holdouts in the middle of boring suburbia or retail areas.
” She paused there and glanced around. The paint on the siding was fading, and she could see evidence of some wood rot on the porch columns, but those were easy fixes.
“If developers are so interested in this place, why not sell it to one of them rather than a private party? Then you wouldn’t even have to worry about whether it was haunted or not, since the developers would just bulldoze the house anyway. ”
Aaron didn’t quite wince, but she could tell he wasn’t too thrilled with her assessment of the situation.
“Not possible,” he said shortly. “I finally convinced my parents to sell the house — a lot of the family isn’t even in the area anymore, and there wouldn’t have been a lot of takers in the first place — but my father flat-out told me that selling to a developer was off the table.
It has to go to someone who’ll preserve the property. ”
If that was the case, then even leaving aside the haunted-or-not aspect of the situation, they were going to have a much harder time unloading the place. People wanted to live in real neighborhoods, not in a carve-out of a couple of acres in the middle of unending RV parks.
But Aaron probably knew that as well as she did, so Delia didn’t see any reason to bring it up.
“Okay,” she said. “Then I suppose we might as well go inside and check it out.”
He nodded, then turned around and opened the door to let her in.
Like a lot of houses of a similar vintage, it had a small foyer that had a staircase immediately facing the front door, with a formal dining room on one side and a sitting room on the other.
A blast of cool, damp air hit Delia’s face, telling her that the place only had a swamp cooler, not real A/C.
Another strike against the house.
But again, Aaron must have known that, too. Anyway, she wasn’t here to evaluate the home’s shortcomings and give an honest assessment of its current market value.
No, she was here to see if she could sense the ghost who apparently lingered in the house and figure out the best way to convince it that it needed to move on.