Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Aaron wasn’t picking up his phone, though, and texts didn’t seem to be getting through, either.
However, Caleb refused to be discouraged.
“It sounds like the house is a digital sinkhole,” he said. “But I have the address. I say we just drive over there and see if he’s still around.”
“Okay,” Pru replied. They were still standing just behind Delia’s little SUV, and Prudence glanced back at it before adding, “What should we do with her car? Leave it here?”
“No, we’ll take it,” Caleb said. “It’s obvious she isn’t here, and all the signs say that vehicles will be towed if they’re left here after the park closes. Whatever’s going on with her, I doubt she wants her car to end up in an impound lot.”
“Caleb’s right,” Ty said. “You can drive Delia’s car, and I’ll ride with you. Caleb, you can lead us over to Aaron’s grandmother’s house.”
That sounded reasonable enough. True, he supposed Ty could have ridden with him, but it made sense for Prudence to have the protection of someone who wasn’t quite human, considering all the weirdness that seemed to be going on around here.
And if Ty had an ulterior motive for preferring to stick by Pru’s side, well, Caleb didn’t want to get in the man’s way.
He told them the address, adding, “It sounded like it’s just a few minutes from here.”
“What if Aaron isn’t there?” Pru asked.
“Then we’ll find a place to talk and regroup,” Caleb responded at once. “It’s not like there aren’t plenty of bars and restaurants in this town.”
That was for sure. Oh, not with the density you saw in Las Vegas, but still, he guessed they’d be able to find a quiet corner in a bar or lounge or something and plan what they should do next.
In the meantime, they needed to get over to the house that had once belonged to Aaron’s grandmother.
Just as Aaron had said, the place wasn’t very far. Incongruously, the property was set down in the middle of a bunch of RV parks, although Caleb guessed the house had been here first and the commercial properties had grown up around it.
And there, thank God, was a black BMW that had to be Aaron’s parked in front of the detached garage. Luckily, the driveway was long enough that all of their vehicles could easily fit, with Caleb parking his Range Rover next to the Beemer and Pru pulling up right behind him.
She and Ty got out of Delia’s SUV and then met up with Caleb so the three of them could head up the porch steps.
The house looked as if it was fairly large, probably at least two thousand square feet or more, but even from the outside, he could tell it needed a lot of work.
He spied wood rot along the porch ceiling and a couple of the pillars that held it up, and the brickwork needed to be repointed as well.
To be honest, he was kind of surprised that the place had sold at all, even though it had supposedly fallen out of escrow because of its resident ghost and not because of any physical issues with the house.
The other two hung behind a little so he could knock on the front door. A moment passed, and then another.
“Maybe he’s on the phone,” Pru suggested.
“Or upstairs,” Ty added.
Okay, the house was big, but it didn’t seem big enough to prevent anyone inside from hearing someone knocking on the door.
“Or maybe he realizes it’s us and doesn’t want to talk,” Caleb responded, which seemed a much more likely scenario to him. Call it jealousy if you want, but the guy had never struck him as someone with a whole lot of strength of character.
An assessment that some people might have found amusing, coming as it did from someone who could trace his lineage to a demon straight out of Hell, but whatever.
“Maybe he’s not even here,” Prudence said, and Caleb lifted an eyebrow. “What?” she shot back. “Delia left her car behind, so maybe Aaron did, too. For all we know, those weird angel Watcher things are disappearing people.”
“That’s not what they do,” Ty told her.
“Oh, right…they just watch. My bad.”
Rather than look offended at her retort, an amused light danced in Ty’s clear blue eyes. “It’s possible Aaron was ‘disappeared,’ as you put it,” he said. “But it wouldn’t have been angels who did such a thing.”
“Let me see if the door’s open,” Caleb said, figuring it was time to put a stop to the bickering. He knew they were all on edge, but this wasn’t getting them anywhere.
As soon as he laid his fingers on the latch, it gave way, and the door swung inward.
“Well, that answers that question.”
“I’m not sure we should be trespassing,” Pru told him, her tone now openly doubtful, but he only shrugged.
“Aaron knows we’re coming,” he said, which was only half a lie. The guy definitely knew he’d been headed down to Laughlin, although it wasn’t as if he’d given Caleb an invitation to go inside the house.
Both her well-arched brows lifted. However, Ty interceded, saying, “Caleb’s right. Also, I think we need to go in there.”
“Some angelic flash of insight?” Caleb asked dryly.
“Something like that.”
Even after he opened the door wide and stepped into the foyer, Pru hung back for a moment, clearly reluctant to do anything that might appear remotely illegal.
Although he was kind of hazy on how such things worked, he guessed that anyone with a P.I.
license needed to be squeaky clean or risk having their credentials revoked.
Well, he’d do whatever he had to in order to smooth out the consequences of their unlawful entry. At least he could claim there hadn’t been any “breaking” involved, not when the front door had been left unlocked.
But then she must have realized it was silly for her to have remained standing out on the porch when her two companions had already gone inside the house, because she released an exasperated breath and followed them in.
Caleb shut the door behind them. The house didn’t look all that different from some he’d seen back home in Greencastle — typical farmhouse with a staircase right in front of them, hugging one wall, and a dining room on one side and a fussy living room or front parlor on the other.
As far as he could tell, all the furniture seemed to be in place.
Had Aaron sold it along with the house? If that was the case, Caleb could see why the buyers would have wanted to back out. That stuff was butt ugly.
“Aaron?” he called out. “It’s Caleb and a couple of Delia’s friends. We didn’t find her at the park, so we thought we’d come by and see if you had anything else to tell us that might help us find her.”
Absolute silence. Pru had crossed her arms, seeming to signal that she was less than thrilled to be here, and he could see why. Even if you left out the part where they were totally trespassing, something in the house just felt wrong.
Was that the spirit of Aaron’s grandmother?
“The energy here is…odd,” Ty said, which felt like the understatement of the year.
“That’s for sure,” Pru replied. “I’ve been in a couple of Delia’s haunted houses over the years, and they were kind of creepy, but something about this place makes the hair on the back of my neck want to stand on end.”
“It’s definitely psychically charged,” Ty agreed. He looked away from them down the hall that appeared to bisect the ground floor of the house. “I need to look at the kitchen.”
Without waiting for them to respond, he headed down the hallway. Pru shot Caleb a helpless little glance and then followed their half-angel companion, giving Caleb no choice but to bring up the rear.
At least the wood floors underfoot were nice, although the kitchen itself was an ugly mishmash of nineties-vintage wood cabinets and some truly hideous imitation marble Formica on the countertops.
Pru looked around, a half smile on her lips. “I hope they were selling this place as a fixer-upper,” she remarked.
Ty didn’t seem to be paying any heed to her words, because he went straight to the cabinets to the left of the sink and opened one of the doors so he could peer inside. “I thought so,” he said after a moment. “I could sense it as soon as we entered the house.”
“Sense what?” Pru asked. She’d moved closer and had gone on her tiptoes to look inside the cupboard, but because she probably scraped five foot four on a good day, Caleb doubted she could see very much.
“Someone has carved a symbol of protection into the cabinet,” Ty replied. “Some call it a witch’s knot, but it’s actually a form of protection that wards off all evil, not merely those who use magic for evil ends.”
Once again, Pru’s hands planted on her hips. “So…what…we’re dealing with witches now, too?”
She looked less than thrilled by that prospect, and Caleb couldn’t blame her. Angels and demons were probably enough for one day.
Ty turned away from the cupboard, the amused expression back on his handsome features.
“I don’t think we need to worry about witches,” he said.
“There aren’t nearly as many as you might think, although I believe some would have called Aaron’s grandmother one.
She would have had powers of healing, and she is clearly one of those who used their powers to protect the river and its energy. ”
“How do you know all that?” Caleb asked. It seemed like kind of a lot to pick up from seeing a single symbol carved into a kitchen cupboard.
“Because we’ve known for a long time that there were those who guarded the power of the Colorado River,” Ty replied calmly.
“In fact, it helps to explain why Aaron Sanchez’s family would have kept this house for so long.
It was only when his grandmother passed and there was no clear heir to take on her responsibilities that the trouble began. ”
Caleb found himself frowning. “Like Aaron getting possessed by a demon?”