Chapter 3 #2
A dark gray Honda sedan traveling on the same side of the street as the house slowed its pace as it approached us where we stood on the neutral ground.
I wouldn’t have even noticed it except that its two occupants, a teenage girl and a woman who appeared old enough to be her mother, were looking at what I now considered to be my house.
They didn’t stop, but as soon as they were past the house the car sped up.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “You might have some competition.”
“Bring it on,” Cooper said. “I don’t think many buyers are as committed to renovation as I am.” He faced me. “And that’s just one of the reasons why I love this house. But best of all, I’d be really close to your cottage in the Marigny.”
“How did you know that?”
“I Googled it. I like the thought of you being nearby.”
“Oh. Okay.” I fumbled with the house keys to hide my acute awkwardness. I needed to dissect his implication, but I knew that deep analysis would wait until the wee hours of the morning as I lay awake with his words and their potential meaning haunting me like a little sheep refusing to be counted.
We climbed the porch steps and, after two tries, managed to unlock the door. Pushing it open, I said, “Ignore the furniture and décor. It has a sort of hoarding-grandma’s-garage vibe, but it’s all going away.”
Cooper followed me into the living room, the first in a single line of rooms leading to the rear of the home, a typical shotgun house.
“Just don’t do anything until I’ve made my decision,” he said.
“There might be a few pieces here and there that I’d want to…
” He stopped as his gaze fell on a cracked-leather footstool with what appeared to be real alligator feet, then traveled to the collection of taxidermied animal heads hanging on the walls.
“Never mind,” he said as he bent to examine a yellowed lace doily on the headrest of an overstuffed floral armchair.
Straightening, he looked at me with a grimace.
“Nothing that a match and lighter fluid can’t fix. ”
I suppressed a laugh. “To be fair, in one of the bedrooms there are a few larger antiques that are quite nice. Whatever you decide about the house, you can certainly make an offer for any of the furniture for your new home—assuming you don’t already have a houseful in storage somewhere.”
The stiff expression he’d worn in the car when he’d been talking about the scar on his chin settled on his face again.
He turned toward one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, where sunlight now spilled through its open louvers.
I’d removed the heavy draperies, since they seemed to be more dust and mothballs than velvet, and to allow natural light to illuminate the beautiful architectural details of the ceiling cornices and thick baseboards.
Cooper shoved his hands into his pockets and peered outside. “I sold everything when I moved. I wanted to make a clean break.”
Before I could ask him why, he tilted his head. “Do you smell perfume?”
I nodded, glad it wasn’t just me who’d noticed it. I wasn’t interested in a personal haunting, but I could probably handle a general one. Recent experiences had soured me on hangers-on who had something they wanted to tell only me.
He continued. “It reminds me of a perfume my grandmother wears—definitely not a scent you smell very much anymore.”
“True. I’m not sure who it belongs to, but I don’t get any negative vibes. In the interest of full disclosure, you might also hear the sound of small running feet. It’s apparently a little boy, according to Beau, but we don’t know who he is or why he’s here.”
“What about the perfume wearer? Any guesses as to who she might be?”
“It could be the woman who was murdered in the house. I think I read that her name was Sybil. She was in her sixties. That was over eight years ago, so it could be her. Her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter disappeared and have never been found, but I don’t think it would be any of them, since there’s no evidence that any of them are dead. ”
Cooper nodded as he slowly walked around the perimeter of the room, studying his surroundings. “So there weren’t any witnesses to Sybil’s murder?”
“Just a bird. Zeus. But Zeus hasn’t spoken a word since.”
Cooper looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Interesting.”
“Very,” I said. Turning to face the room, I imagined I was Melanie showing a house to a client.
“So, it’s a small house with a quirky yet iconic floor plan.
It’s what’s called a camelback shotgun because an upstairs room was added to the back of the house, with stairs leading from the kitchen.
The only bathroom is at the end of the house, on this floor, only accessible through the kitchen and bedrooms.”
“Not really made for today’s living, but it’s your job to convince me, right?”
Before I could reply, my phone buzzed. “It’s Jolene,” I said to Cooper. “Is it okay if I answer? It’s probably just to ask me what I want for dinner.”
“Sure. I’ll just keep exploring the house if that’s all right.”
I gave him a thumbs-up and answered the call.
“Good news!” Jolene’s cheerful voice sounded normal, making me hopeful that she’d recovered from her earlier funk.
“Yeah? Did we get that new sponsor—the bug control people?” Having bug control was as important as, if not more than, having a roof if you owned a house in New Orleans.
“I’m working on it, and I’m very close.”
As Jolene spoke, I walked toward the back of the house, to the larger bedroom, where I remembered seeing a few pieces of furniture that might be salvageable.
The room appeared to have been emptied of all personal items, presumably by the last owners, Honey Meggison and Joan Wenzel, widowed sisters in their mid-to-late sixties, and stepdaughters of the murdered woman found with the parrotlet Zeus in the house.
They had hung on to the house for eight years, never giving up hope that their half brother, Mark, along with his wife and child, would one day return—or be found.
A dark walnut bed with knobby spindles and a curved headboard but missing a mattress and bedding had been shoved against one wall, possibly to remove the rug whose shadow remained on the sun-bleached wooden floor.
I tried not to think of why the rug might be missing, my imagination going straight to the infamous unsolved murder.
Opposite the bed sat a marble-topped dressing table, its oval mirror speckled with age.
A narrow drawer sat above the kneehole, while two larger ones were located on each side of the opening, drawing my attention.
One by one, I slid them open to see what might have been left behind.
If everything hadn’t already been cleared out by either the police or the family, it was unlikely that anything left would have any value.
Still, I had to look—if only to tell the junk-collection company what to expect.
Jolene continued. “When I mentioned your address, they hung up on me. I called back until they finally answered, and they swore up and down that the call was accidentally dropped. Whatever. They’re working up a proposal and will e-mail it to me.
Apparently, none of the salespeople or technicians want to come out to give me a proper quote. That just grinds my grits.”
To be fair, my house did have a well-deserved reputation for being haunted.
But, thanks to Beau, all the spirits were gone now.
The UPS guy still did only drive-by deliveries, during which he slid packages out of the truck without coming to a complete stop, but at least the birds and insects had returned to my yard to sing their daily choruses.
“But in the meantime,” Jolene continued, “I’ve got something even better! I’ve found you a car!”
“A car?” My enthusiasm was several levels below hers. I pulled open the final drawer, empty except for a single pair of men’s white boxer shorts. I didn’t examine them closely enough to determine whether they were clean before slamming the drawer shut.
“You should be excited, Nola. You’ll have your own car, so you won’t have to beg people for rides. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy your company and I don’t mind driving you. It’s just, well…” She paused. “It’s Bubba.”
“Bubba? Has he finally gone to the junkyard in the sky?” I turned toward a chest of drawers and began opening each one.
Except for an impressive collection of mismatched socks, the drawers were stuffed with an odd assortment of household junk.
I’d make sure to mark the furniture “as is” when the estate sale happened so that deciding what to keep and what to give away wouldn’t be up to me.
My precarious early childhood had included living in a car for three months, so discarding anything that might be useful later was harder for me than for most.
“I won’t tell him you said that. Hopefully he’ll last another fifty years or so—assuming you’re not a frequent passenger.”
I approached a freestanding armoire, its sparse style and small size narrowing its approximate vintage down to the 1920s or ’30s.
An empty keyhole was set conspicuously in one of the two doors.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I pulled on the door’s teardrop-shaped knob, to no effect.
Frowning at the object, I then dug my fingertips into the edge of the door and tugged, my efforts rewarded by what sounded like the clinking of colliding wooden hangers and the thunk of a small, hard object falling to the bottom of the armoire.
Peering into the narrow opening between the doors, I didn’t see the brass bar that should have been there if the doors were locked.
This meant that the doors were merely stuck—not an unusual thing, considering that the doors were wooden and the house was in a humid climate that could rival that of the .